Maelwys wrote:Orville is definitely more TNG than Discovery is.
*nods*
That doesn't make Orville
good (though it's getting there), but it certainly feels like
Star Trek.
But Discovery is more TNG than DS9 is.
*tilts head quizzically*
This assertion is so far removed from my experience that I can't properly disagree with it; it's like it popped in from an entirely different universe and I'm not sure what to make of it. What leads you to this conclusion?
It's well-known that the genesis of DS9 was literally Berman & Piller trying to decide whether TNG stories could still work on a space station (and you can see that in plenty of episodes from "Playing God" to "Whispers" to "Armageddon Game"). Even when DS9 leans into its setting and characters to do something that TNG
couldn't do, it shares TNG's fundamental ethos, its plotting, its pacing, and its "feel" as a show. ("Progress" and "Duet" both hinge on the Bajoran setting, but you could imagine an alternate universe where they were Ensign Ro stories on the Ent-D.) Its bold experiments with serialization never departed from the basic episodic formula of prior
Trek: you get your big arcs (the "Call To Arms" - "Sacrifice of Angels" arc, for instance), but, within those arcs, you have discrete episodes with discrete stories that serve a genuine storytelling purpose beyond advancing the arc ("In The Cards," "Rocks and Shoals," "Sons and Daughters," and "Behind The Lines" could never be confused with one another.) DS9's genius, really, was in its balance between the episodic and the serial -- though it much infuriated Dominion War junkies when the writers took a couple weeks off the War to play baseball and stage a casino heist.
At DS9's
edgiest, it would deliberately and methodically deconstruct the utopia of TNG. (The Maquis arc, "In The Pale Moonlight," the War itself, etc.) This sure as heck set it off from TNG, but placed it very much in dialogue with it -- and, indeed, Ronald D. Moore would go on to start the new Battlestar Galactica, which was specifically conceived as a deconstruction of TNG (and more particularly of Voyager, TNG's lazy imitator.
Discovery doesn't even seem to be in dialogue with the rest of
Star Trek. Aside from excessive fanwank (namedropping, giving us characters like Sarek and Mudd who seem radically different from their canon versions, visiting the Mirror Universe, etc.) it simply doesn't make contact with
Trek's structure, pacing, writing, tropes, or core vision -- not even to deconstruct them. It's doing something entirely its own.
A good comparison would be
The Expanse.
The Expanse is a really good show, but it shares none of
Trek's DNA. Unlike virtually all televised American space sci-fi between 1969 and 2010,
The Expanse wasn't born as a spinoff, an imitation, a commentary, or even a deconstruction of
Star Trek. It came out of an entirely separate literary project that had its own rules, its own pace, its own vision, and its own overall "feel." It set goals based on that universe and accomplished them to magnificent effect. It's not in dialogue with
Star Trek, and I wouldn't want it to be.
Discovery feels much closer to
The Expanse to me than it does to
any of the other
Trek series.
Discovery's core problems, it seems to me, are that: (1) it's branded as
Star Trek but doesn't share any of the structural elements that make
Trek be
Trek, and (2) it really wants to be
The Expanse, but sucks at it.
All this comes with the caveat that I've only seen Season 1 and the first hour of Season 2. Now that the season's over, I'll be getting an All-Access one-month sub soon so I can catch up.
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