Discovery to end with Season 5

I agree with your sentiment but weren't both Bashir and O'Brien HWM?

I'm guessing he's giving Bashir a pass as Alexander Siddig is half Sudanese.

As for lower decks: Boimler, Shax, Ransom...

Although Shax is Bajoran, and Boimler is half Ribena :P

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I couldn’t give a fiddlers about the demographic makeup of my Trek cast. The whole lot could be Latina Lesbians for all I care and all I’d really care about are the characters and their writing. Discovery can tick off whatever boxes they want, and people can focus on race and gender all day long if they want, but at the end of the day I just want well written Trek, and Discovery failed in that.

The problem is not that there are not enough heterosexual white males. The problem is that it's a badly written bad show. If they lobbed in a few more white straight lads it would still be a badly written bad show.

We can certainly agree to disagree, and I do appriciate the civil discourse of this. I would certainly disagree that the variety of character race & gender matters at all when delivery or building a story. Character is key, and if a production can manage to create good, engaging personalites; then it really doesn't matter too much about the rest. Beckett Mariner was mentioned earier, who despite ticking off a number of "quota" points comes across as a well built character. The quota elements are there, but they are only an addition to an already fleshed out and bolted together personality.

Similarly, we don't obsess over Sisco being the "Black Captain". We see him as the occasional war-criminal who has a thing for baseball, cooking and beating the crap out of The Dominion with his Anti-Borg Revenge Ship. Janeway isn't the "Woman Captain", she's the Coffee-Addict Harry Kim Torturer with a flexable relationship with the Prime Directive. There's enough character in both that we don't pay any attention to gender or race. They are "Sisco" and "Janeway", and their writing made them so in our minds.

One thing I might advise you, or to anyone who puts too much truck into the race or gender of a show's cast is to try to not focus on that. I firmly believe that in the last decade that some production companies have gotten into the habit of "diversity hires" in the hope that everyone will focus on that and not on the quality of their work. They may hope to gleen unearned support from people who care about diversity in media, while at the same time gain an automatic defense to any critism by blaiming it on racism / sexism / homophobia. Even valid critiques could be dismissed on this basis since they can bank on actual racists creating enough noise to make this seem feasible.

What they may not want you to do, is to examine a show on its merits. Is it well written or not? Is it well produced / directed, or not? When that happens enough they might actually do a *good job* when they produce a show. This is all I ever hope for, and when I see it I appriciate even more, espeically these days.

Well that's just nightmare fuel right there. It's like she knows we don't like her and is charging up her *Doom Sphere* to smite us all!

Come to Quark's, Quark's is fun, come right now, don't walk run!

Back April 4th

How many episodes and are they being released weekly or all at once? Might just wait for them to be all out and binge it in 1 month rather than pay monthly for a drip feed.

Indeed, which is why I’ll likely not be watching this season either. I had not watched a full episode of DIS since the Season 3 finale. By then watching had devolved into a tedious chore which to be honest I was only doing at that stage to join in on the discussions here. But the enjoyment was gone, and that’s why it was enough for me to experience Season 4 second-hand from others.

I will do the same for Season 5, with the possible exception of the Finale. The finale watch is mostly to see if I am right in my theory that if I don’t watch the whole season, I could still grasp the finale’s plot. They have so far near always crammed all major elements of an arc into the last 15 - 30 mins of a season and I’m banking on them doing the same here.

I’m also curious of what kind of legacy they will hope to leave behind, and the finale will give us clues about that hope.

I wouldn't go as far as to say I hate watch it. It's disappointing in how it squandered itself, but if I truly hated it, or anything else, I wouldn't devote any time to it. I suppose as a Star Trek fan I'm foolishly naively optimistic that it'll 'come good'....and while it will likely disappoint in the end, there's no harm in seeing it through to the end either.

Likewise, I find the concept of hate-watching a complete waste of a person's time, and a bit baffling....but there IS a difference between that, and a person who watches a show in (futile) hope that it becomes a decent watch.

Difference is Picard was an about turn because the creators were aware that season 2 was pure shte and the fans agreed. Discovery won't pull off a "Picard" because the creators of Discovery and its fans don't think there is anything to fix or course to correct. The promos all show it's going to be full on Disco style for the final season.

And character development did not go "out the window" in Discovery because it was never in the building. I can't understand when people complain that it's just "Star Trek: Burnham" when they told us from the first day it was intentionally exactly that.

Pulling off a Picard S3 with this would require a masterclass of exceptional writing and directing. It’s not impossible, but it would require a writer who could create a solid story that could stand on its own seperate from the previous seasons of the show and build on what strengths they have.

Alas for them, S5 appears to mostly just be that generic fetch-quest they had originally planned to do with some small finale tweaks. A generic fetch-quest could still work, but it’s going to be weighed down with all of the failings Discovery already had and likely still has in Season 5. I’d love to be wrong…but I have a feeling that I’m not.

Re your first point, yeah, from that trailer it looks like business as usual.

Re your second point, I disagree. There was Lorca, T'Kuvma, and quite a few that could have all been richly developed if the will was there. Sadly, it wasn't.

I don't think that was what @Rawr meant. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the point was that to save the show from the disappointment of the previous seasons, would require a fundamental shift from within the writing team.

In terms of Picard and "pure bollix", Season 2 makes Season 3 look virtually Shakespearean by comparison. S3 came as a relief purely because it was at the very least watchable (personally I really enjoyed it, but I do hope we never see Picard again. It's done. No more please.)

Indeed, a shame they went the way they did. I'm not a Discovery apologist by any means, Season 2 was some of the worst TV I've ever seen....I just feel it didn't arrive on screens without potential. It definitely had potential, it just didn't have a skilled enough writing team to carry the show forward. It was reset after reset, galaxy saving season after galaxy saving season....lazy, uninspiring garbage a lot of the time.

You'd wonder what a mature TNG/DS9 level writing team could have done with the premise.

Why are you hoping for "improvement" from a show the creators don't think needs improving ?

People need to stop looking at it from their own bias as a show that needs "fixing". If you think it's sht just write it off because it ain't changing now.

You say it needs a "new take for people to give a damn" about the characters but Discovery fans already give a damn about them and don't want change. Get out of the bubble that is us old fogie 90s fans and accept Discovery has fans.

Very good. I can imagine a lot of very angry people exploding over this 🤣

My god but Doug Jones, in general and his Saru performance, deserved so much better than this tripe.

Am so, irrationally, happy that this stain is ending

They had to correct the mistake of making the protagonist a junior officer which meant bumping Saru aside somehow. They haven't had a clue what to do with him since.

Same with everyone really. They didn't know how to move Tilly on from "bright eyed fresher". Stamets just mopes around now that his unique selling point of spore guy is gone. Adira is the latest to lose all purpose.

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