Star Trek: Discovery is finally free to do whatever it wants

27.03.2024 - 17:55 / polygon.com

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that even among the greatest television shows in Star Trek history, most of them take two seasons to stop being kind of bad. Never has that been more true or more excruciating than in the case of Star Trek: Discovery.

Often it felt like what Discovery was really doing in its early seasons was discovering what didn’t work. Strong performances from a great cast? That works. A Klingon design that absolutely nobody liked? Definitely not. But despite the stumbles, Discovery season 1 had still averaged C’s and B’s with reviewers, and had built an audience and a subscriber base for Paramount Plus. On the strength of Disco’s first season, Paramount greenlit Star Treks Picard, Lower Decks, and Prodigy, three new shows covering a huge range of ages and nostalgic tastes. And spinning out of Disco’s second season, which introduced familiar, nostalgic characters and a brighter, more Star Trek-y tone, Paramount produced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, inarguably the best new addition to the franchise since 1996.

Star Trek: Discovery crawled so that the rest of modern Trek could run… and then it started to walk. The show’s third season saw the USS Discovery and crew in the place that should have been their starting blocks: the bleeding future edge of Star Trek’s timeline. Thanks to season 3’s groundwork, season 4 became the first time that Discovery had a status quo worth returning to. In its fifth and final season, Star Trek: Discovery is finally free — free in a way that a Star Trek TV series hasn’t been in 23 years.

Star Trek: The Next Generation is such an elder statesman of the television elite that it’s easy to forget that it was daring. The show’s triumph wasn’t just that it featured a new cast of characters, but also its audaciousness in imagining the future of the future — and making that future unmistakably different. The Original Series showed a racial and national cooperation that seemed fantastical in its time, with an alien crewmember to denote the next frontier of embracing the other. Next Generation saw that bet and raised it, installing a member of the Klingon species, the Federation’s once-feared imperialist rival state, as a respected officer on the bridge of Starfleet’s flagship.

Next Generation’s time period — one century after Kirk’s Enterprise — wasn’t a nominal choice, but a commitment to moving the story of Star Trek forward. From the show’s foundations, Gene Roddenberry and his collaborators, new and old, set a precedent that the Federation would evolve. Therefore, in accordance with the utopian themes of the franchise, old enemies would in time become friends. Next Generation embraced The Original Series’ nemeses and the rest of ’90s Trek saw that