Warning: spoilers ahead for “Star Trek: Discovery” season 5, episode 10
Here we are, six years, eight months and six days later, and, to paraphrase a well-known “Star Trek” alumnus, oh my God, the world has changed dramatically in that time. Just like “Star Trek”. You may remember that on November 2, 2015, news broke that CBS was going to reboot “Star Trek” in some way, giving producers about a year to put something together ahead of the series’ 50th anniversary. in September 2016. A perfect promotion opportunity.
Nicholas Meyer was initially attached to the project before being ousted. Then Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts were fired before Bryan Fuller left the project, ultimately leaving everything in the hands of Alex Kurtzman. And he’s taken a back seat in recent seasons, leaving showrunning duties to Michelle Paradise.
The first episode of the first season, titled “The Vulcan Hello”, aired on September 24, 2016 and showed huge potential. However, the idea of focusing the show not on the captain of the USS Discovery NCC-1031, but on the first officer, proved difficult to maintain. Therefore, over time, we got to where we are today: lost somewhere ridiculously far in time, where transporters have replaced stairs and you can just teleport onto new uniforms.
Related: “Star Trek:” History and Effect on Space Technology
Over the past seven and a half years, it has been a very mixed bag; there were inspired episodes, missed opportunities, truly bizarre stories, blatant plagiarism, and even a nod to Scooby-Doo. Despite some very good standalone episodes, the series has steadily declined in terms of quality of story writing. That’s not to say the performances were bad at all; in fact, “Discovery” boasts some of the best talent on television. What disappointed them all were ultimately the decisions made by the showrunner, or by the person who supervises the writing.
Despite a good start, it quickly became clear that, like “Star Wars” had a Skywalker problem, “Star Trek” suffered from a similar problem Business issue. He was unable to let go. For some ridiculous reason, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) had be related to Spock, and we had to actually bring up the USS Enterprise. It’s a lot less work to build on a deep story from existing characters than it is to write something new, you see. Maybe studio executives have even shorter attention spans than viewers?
Now, even though this gave rise to “Strange New Worlds” – which is easily NuTrek’s best so far – it would have been nice to have a show, still set less than three centuries in the future, with new characters and minimal reference to any other long-running “Star Trek” series. Kurtzman’s decision to throw the series 1,100 years into the future at the end of season two to “free it from the constraints of existing canon” was an effort to recover, but the damage had already been done.
Related: ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 5 Episode 9 Offers a Tense But Questionable Cliffhanger
However, the return of “Star Trek” to the small screen has had an undeniably positive effect on television science fiction. The fact that CBS All Access, later Paramount Plus, invested so heavily in it undoubtedly influenced Amazon in its decision to save “The Expanse” in August 2018. Additionally, in November 2017, Disney announced that it would bringing a live-action “Star Wars” to our humble television screens and, exactly two years later, we got “The Mandalorian.” And let’s not forget “The Orville”, also arrived on our screens in September 2017.
“Discovery” helped pave the way for a renaissance in television science fiction and for that we will be forever grateful, but… we won’t even be sad to say goodbye to Black Alerts, that damn impulse to spores, intelligent matter, excess. the bursts of flame, the detached nacelles, Georgiou’s smug sneers, Burnham’s Bottom Lip™ and those crazy people, cavernous turbolift spaces.
For the finale, however, we’re treated to a whopping 90-minute episode, written by Michelle Paradise, so you have an idea of what’s coming. And to be completely honest, this episode drags on. Paradise always favors super fluffy plots that leave you with a taste of cheesy overload, and we’ve never seen any evidence to suggest it has any scope beyond that. So that’s what you can expect, and that’s exactly what’s delivered: a cookie-cutter finale that’s mostly disappointing.
Malinne “Moll” Ravel (Eve Harlow) has become boring now, and subplot threads, like that of Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz), seem forced and hastily added. And in the end, you think this finale is like all the others we’ve seen in seasons three, four and now five. For the climax at the end of the series, couldn’t it have been something slightly different? Extremely unlikely with Paradise running this show. Also, what was Progenitor technology actually? A MacGuffin the size of a galaxy? Yes. Again.
Yes, there is a link to the “Short Trek” episode “Calypso”, but to make it a direct match, we see the USS Discovery being reverse engineered back to its former 23rd century state, with an “A” removed from the hull register and the warp nacelles reattached. Oh, and it turns out that Kovich (David Cronenberg) is Daniels, a temporal agent played by Matt Winston and first introduced in the “Enterprise” episode “Cold Front” S01, E11, with seven other appearances in the Very enjoyable temporal story thread. . So it’s nice.
The fact that Burnham became an admiral and now works for Starfleet Intelligence, along with everything else we just mentioned above, was absolutely and unquestionably added to help tie this episode, this series and these characters to the Section 31 TV movie made with Michelle Yeoh. Additionally, the same was done to help tie in with the new Starfleet Academy series which is obviously set in the 32nd century.
As she left to fulfill Discovery’s destiny with Zora, it might have been nice to see Burnham locate and gently scrub the small metal burr under the left armrest of the captain’s seat that Captain Georgiou had practically rubbed off, as was explained to Lieutenant Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman) in the episode “Su’Kal” (S03, E11) – but obviously no one thought about it.
The fifth and final season of “Star Trek: Discovery” and all other episodes of each “Star Trek” series – with the exception of “Star Trek: Prodigy” – are currently streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus in the United States, while that “Prodigy” has found a new home on Netflix.
Internationally, shows are available on Paramount Plus in Australia, Latin America, the United Kingdom and South Korea, as well as Pluto TV in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland on the Pluto TV Sci-Fi channel. They also stream on Paramount Plus in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In Canada, they are broadcast on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi channel and broadcast on Crave.