Announced on Thursday, Star Trek Discovery‘s upcoming 5th season, debuting now in 2024 will be it’s last. However, the online reaction by it’s rabid base of haters says more about them than it does the show’s quality.
On Thursday, Paramount Plus officially announced that Star Trek Discovery‘s upcoming 5th season will be it’s last. Originally slated for a release later this year with trailers already dropping (like 2022’s New York Comic Con for example), the last season will be pushed back to release early 2024.
Reaction online has been fairly positive for fans that stuck with the series through its’ early rocky start.
The haters that have always been there as Disco (that’s how I’ll be referring to it from here out) found it’s footing have re-emerged swiftly to pile on to the show’s cancellation.
It Didn’t Start Off Great
Look, I get it. The first season of Disco had some issues, it was uneven in the initial approach and felt like two seasons of a show rushed and combined into one. When you consider all the behind the scenes issues, like losing their show-runner Bryan Fuller, the reports of abuse from the replacements Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts towards the writing staff, and Alex Kurtzman taking over (with his own up and down track record of TV success), it’s no wonder that the first season suffered and the second had to carry the weight of those failures.
If we look back to Trek‘s own history, with the frequent issues cast members and the fanbase has had with Rick Berman’s tenure (for starters) or friction with Roddenberry and subsequent show-runners, this isn’t the first time that producers have caused a number of headaches that can be reflected in the on-screen quality. I don’t lay this out to say what makes it on-screen should necessarily be “forgiven” or that you need to suffer through bad writing, but the context does matter.
Since we’re considering context, we should also apply that to earlier series of Star Trek. As much as you may love 90s TNG-era Trek, we can’t sit here and say the first season is some sort of immaculate creation when it was being lampooned when it first aired. Take for example these early reactions of TNG‘s pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint” premiere, as laid out on the Trek subreddit:
Or this review from The New York Times back in 1987 (click the photo for the digital article scan and scanned text).
Or this article from Orlando Sentinel writer Greg Dawson (by way of the Salt Lake Tribune)
While these early articles recognized some areas of excellence that would eventually become the TNG we know and love today, there was a wide mixture of opinion. Even in this LA Times article in 1988 when TNG had become a hit, the writer recognized the fan turmoil from the previous years leading up to 1987.
If even the fandom’s darling series faced those issues (and there’s similar outrage for DS9, Voyager, etc), we don’t get to use the phrase “it’s not Trek” without seriously flirting with a documented history of fandom’s being inflexible (or outright ignorant).
It’s completely fine to watch Disco, not enjoy it, and decide you would prefer to watch the other Trek shows. I personally have tried to watch Star Trek Enterprise multiple times but it’s just not a series that has captured my attention compared to Voyager or DS9 for example. However, I can voice that dislike without being an ass or making overtures that someone liking that series discredits or devalues their ability to interact with the fandom.
This may seem like a wild concept, especially when the marketing departments and executives would love to tell you otherwise, but have you ever considered that every entry in a series doesn’t have to resonate with you? For example, I like Voyager and there some episodes I absolutely love (usually the time travel ones), but it’s not my favorite series. Janeway doesn’t always resonate for me, but she does for other people. I can respect that difference without the need to destroy or nitpick a series that wasn’t my favorite.
I have a hard time going back to rewatch Original Series episodes because of the production values or some episodes just flat out stink to me. However, if you were to ask my dad this same thing, some of the gags that I roll my eyes at would land really well for him.
My parents and me watched re-runs of TNG together about the time that DS9 started. As much as I loved TNG, I was excited for the new shiny series…my parents, not so much. Their biggest hangup was that Sisko wasn’t like Picard at all (they love Patrick Stewart in everything and literally just call him Picard regardless of which role he might be in) and it took them out of the experience. But they never said that DS9 was bad, it just wasn’t for them.
This is the type of nuance that’s missing from a lot of modern conversations, as if a series owes it to it’s fanbase to create the exact same type of show generation after generation. We are literally living in a golden edge of Trek: you can get your nostalgia fix with the Picard series and continue the stories of characters we thought were long laid to rest, a fan’s parody and comedic dream with the callbacks in Lower Decks, a return to classic Trek tropes within a modern refresh in Strange New Worlds, and finally a series in Discovery that gives you the action and spectacle of a Trek movie woven into it’s strong character building. (Also Kyle would kill me if I didn’t mention Prodigy, which is squarely aimed at the kid demographic but I haven’t seen it yet.)
I’m not confident or sure what impact my writing or others who have come to the defense of the show will have now or throughout history. Attempting to open fan’s minds up to different experiences that cater to “other” demographics has been an uphill battle the past decade to say the least. But I am comforted in the fact that no matter what detractors might say, Disco kickstarted this Renaissance and it did change some minds on the way. To that end, I’ll leave us with this Twitter thread that sums up my final thoughts perfectly…
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