Star Trek Discovery season five

11 views

Skip to first unread message

Kevin M.

unread,

Apr 13, 2024, 5:32:51 PM4/13/24

to tvor...@googlegroups.com

I’ve nicknamed the series “volume up volume down” because it feels like I’m adjusting the sound level every few minutes, as the show cannot resist hard transitions from subdued dialogue scenes to explosive action sequences.

It took me until the fifth season to really understand what most annoys me about the show. In the film “Tomorrow Never Dies”, James Bond discovers the dead body of one of the great loves of his life, aka Teri Hatcher, and is devastated. Moments later, he’s in a chase sequence driving his BMW from the back seat using a remote control touchpad on his phone. And he’s laughing and couldn’t be having a better day. Put mildly, Bond did not waste a lot of time grieving. It felt wrong and it made me wonder if that was a choice made by the actor, the writer, or the director. It made me believe that Bond just doesn’t give a sh*t. Or those in charge of the franchise don’t give a sh*t.

And that’s Discovery. The crew is tasked with hunting down the most dangerous Deus Ex Machina in all of history. If it falls into the wrong hands, the universe is doomed. But as the captain is flying around in her space suit chasing the bad guys as explosions and certain death await her, she’s having the time of her life. Or later when she’s on a Star Wars speeder bike clearly stolen from George Lucas’ garage, and a landslide is hurtling towards them threatening to take the lives of tens of thousands of villagers, she’s cracking jokes.

The characters are angry or on the verge of tears, then suddenly smiling annd laughing and whooping it up. In the future, nobody takes things too seriously.

So why should I care about their peril? Why should I get invested in the story or the characters when they clearly don’t? In their attempt to make Discovery a fun space adventure, they made it bipolar. The characters care about something only if doing so furthers the story. Emotions aren’t felt; they are contrived. Consequently, I end up hate-watching this series instead of watching it.