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Star Trek: Discovery (2017)
A heartless, hopeless, dour version of Trek that I dislike.
When you take Star Trek, a show ostensibly about affable geniuses working together for the betterment of everyone, and then try to turn it dark using played out modern TV tropes you end up with something messy and unlikable.
I am not sure if it is Kurtzman's writing, the awful first draft dialogue which is delivered poorly, the boring tropes that have been done to death but are being called revolutionary for Trek(?!), or the plain unlikable characters who we have to be told are geniuses rather than them showing it, but something about this show rubbed me the wrong way.
I think it could be Michael Burnham, who is one of the most unlikable protagonists in anything I have ever watched, never mind Star Trek. How she came to be a first officer on board any ship is a mystery to me but here we have to follow her from dour depressing scene to dour depressing scene looking into her dead eyes that convey nothing to the audience at all. And her decision making is hilarious.
Never before have I been so aware of a TV show being written backwards. It really shows. Sure, some of the effects are good, (but very very uneven) however the camera work is schizo to the point where it ruined the already rather poor scenes of what this show considers dialogue. I'd talk about character building and relationships but there isn't any. Burnham has supposedly served on the Shenzou for 7 years but the impression I got is the characters have known each other since the scene started.
And the Klingons. Oh god the Klingons. They have covered them so vehemently in prosthetics that they can no longer emote or speak properly. It is the very epitome of over designed and ruins what would otherwise be potentially interesting adversaries.
I could go on and on. I really could. I adore Star Trek, it has always been one of my favourite things. It isn't that this show isn't traditional Star Trek that bothers me. It just isn't very good. I can see what they were going for, but to do that you need an interesting main character and strong writing. The writing is laughable.
There is no heart here. No hope here. No levity here. No warmth here. It is dark to a fault and it feels like a bunch of CBS execs pushing a product rather than an organically created show.
And I am so sick of seeing people saying old Trek wouldn't work in 2017 or whatever excuses they try and use. Sure, perhaps you are right, but flipping to the other extreme is one of the strangest decisions I have ever seen. It hasn't worked.
And yes, I have seen episode 3, and no, I don't think the improvement was as significant as some people would have you believe.