Star Trek: Discovery (2017) TV Show Review

 Hey everyone, happy Friday! I'm back with another TV show review. This week I'm taking a look at Star Trek: Discovery, the show that took the franchise off life support, and brought it back to our TV screens on a weekly basis, as the series finale dropped yesterday. As for spoilers, well, I'm going to try not to include them in this review, but I might have to include some in order to talk about certain characters, like Burnham, Tilly, and Saru. So, let's get into it.

When it first debuted on Sunday, September 24th, 2017, Star Trek: Discovery was an experiment. At that point Star Trek had been off the air for about 12 and a half years, and very little had come out to keep the franchise in the eyes of the general public, aside for three movies that had come out in 2009, 2013, and 2016 respectively, which took place in an alternate universe within the broader Star Trek Universe. But the TV show side of the franchise had ended back in 2005 when UPN and Paramount had canceled Star Trek: Enterprise unceremoniously. At the same time, television was shifting from the broadcast model that had been the standard since the 1950s, to streaming with Netflix rising to prominence with House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Marvel's Daredevil, Marvel's Jessica Jones, and Stranger Things being the most popular shows being produced. Cable television had also risen to prominence over the old network model thanks to shows like Game of Thrones.

With Star Trek being absent from any kind of television, outside of constant reruns of all five past live action TV series, for over a decade, the question on everyone's mind was: Could Star Trek be brought into the modern streaming model and be as successful as it had been on broadcast television from 1987 to 2005, or would it flop in the face of the change in pop culture, particularly with the rise of superhero TV shows and movies in the early 2010s? Leading up to the debut of Discovery in 2017, there was no guarantee that enough people would care enough for the show to be worth making, given that Star Trek tended to be a pretty expensive franchise when it came to the TV side of things. Especially because the movies were making less and less money at the box office as each one had come out.

While they had their problems, as any early seasons of a TV show has, I enjoyed the first two seasons of Discovery. They were well written, and even though I do prefer the more ensemble cast shows like TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Strange New Worlds, Discovery's approach by having more focus on three or four main characters, and then maintaining those same three or four characters in every season (unlike how Picard handled its rotating cast in all three seasons a few years later), worked pretty well. Except in the second season when they killed off a character that we were supposed to care about, but ended up not caring about because they didn't do anything with her except in the episode where she'd been killed.

Michael Burnham, played by the lovely Sonequa Martin Green, was one of my favourite characters in the entire show. She started off as the first officer of the U.S.S. Shenzhou, commanded by Captain Phillippa Georgiou, played by the amazing Michelle Yeoh. But after an encounter with the Klingon Empire that resulted in the destruction of the Shenzhou and the death of Georgiou, as well as a major war between the Federation and the Klingons, she was court martialed, stripped of rank, and sent to the U.S.S. Discovery, commanded by Captain Gabriel Lorca, to assist in the development of the top secret Spore Drive, which made Discovery an asset to Starfleet, as well as a major target for the Klingons, as well as other nefarious beings like Harry Mudd, played by Rainn Wilson.

What drew me to Burnham was that she wasn't perfect. Throughout the franchise's history, Star Trek always tended to focus on the perfect characters. The Picards, the Rikers, the Kirks, and the rest of Starfleet's heroic crews throughout the 23rd and 24th Centuries. Over the course of the series, Michael made mistakes and poor decisions, but she learned from those mistakes and grew as a character. Which was really refreshing because even on DS9, each character could only grow within the boundaries of who they were. Bashir was still Bashir, Quark was still Quark, Odo was still Odo etc. But with Michael and the rest of the characters on Discovery, they evolved and changed until they were very different people from where we met them in the show's third and fourth episodes. Which I appreciated.

My other favourite characters on Discovery, who are in every season, are Saru, played by Doug Jones, the man of a thousand faces though you rarely see his own face in a movie or on TV, Sylvia Tilly, played by Mary Wiseman, Dr. Hugh Culber, played by Wilson Cruz, and his husband, Paul Stamets, played by Anthony Rapp. Along with Michael, these characters formed the nucleus of the cast of the show and their development over the course of the show's five seasons were what kept me coming back to the show every season. I also enjoyed Keyla Detmer, played by Emily Coutts, and Joann Owosekun, played by Oyin Oladejo, and Adira Tal, played by Blu Del Barrio, and Cleveland Booker, played by David Ajala.

The first couple of seasons were rocky because the show was written by committee, and there was a committee of showrunners as well. Particularly after Bryan Fuller was fired as showrunner midway through production of season 1. But, once Michelle Paradise took over as the sole showrunner in season 3, in order to allow Alex Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman to produce other Star Trek shows, things really began to take off. Seasons 4 and 5 were the strongest seasons of the entire show. Unlike the other modern Star Trek shows, which all had ten episodes per season from the start, Discovery started off with fifteen episodes in season 1, 14 episodes in season 2, 13 episodes in seasons 3 and 4, and then 10 episodes in season 5. The first two seasons came out before the big streaming service boom of 2019 when Disney+, HBO Max, and DC Universe debuted (among others), and most streaming shows still had twelve to fifteen episodes per season. By the time Picard debuted in early 2020, shows were starting to have smaller episode counts per season, with The Mandalorian having only eight episodes per season. 

As I said in the beginning of this review, Discovery was an experiment and it was a huge success. It ushered in a new golden age of the franchise on TV, with Paramount experimenting with animation, something that hadn't been attempted with the franchise since the early, post-TOS, days in the '70s. Even though we still don't have a new Star Trek movie coming out anytime soon, except for the upcoming TV movie, Section 31, we've had a couple of years where there four or five shows on throughout the year. Which is both incredible and insane for a franchise like Star Trek. 

Overall, despite it's rocky start with the show being written by committee, I really enjoyed Discovery, and I'm going to miss it now that it's over. If you've never seen Star Trek: Discovery before, I implore you to give it a watch. It wasn't always great, but when it was great, it was REALLY great. It's on Paramount+, AND the first four seasons are available on both DVD and Blu-ray, so it's relatively easy to get your hands on it.

Alright my friends, that's it for me for this week. I'll be back next week with lots more blog posts. So until then have a great evening and a wonderful weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.