Love-Hate Relationship with Star Trek Discovery (SPOILERS!)

[FlyingPenguin]

FAIR WARNING. SPOILERS!!!!! At least up to S02E09, and the Season 2 Short Treks.





I'm really enjoying season 2 so far (I'm 2 episodes behind on episode 9). Loved the flash-back to the original series "The Menagerie" in the last episode.

However, it keeps gnawing at me how much this show keeps breaking the original timeline. We're supposed to be in the original series timeline, not the new movies "Kelvin" timeline, and it's not supposed to be a reboot. Despite that, there seems to be a ridiculous abundance of technology that did not exist in Kirk's time (10 years after this show), and a lot that doesn't even exist in the Next Generation's time. That wouldn't be so bad except that they also go out of their way to give homage to old TOS style tech (the original phasers and communicators for instance).

I still like the show, but it does get annoying.

Some nitpicks:


HOLOGRAMS: There was no hologram technology until Deep Space Nine (it was installed on the Defiant and was experimental), and it was a really awful gimmick that thankfully wasn't used for long. There's a pretty lame excuse in the new series to explain that away - that it caused a systems crash on the Enterprise so they stopped using it until it was perfected 100 years later during DS9. REALLY? 100 years to perfect it despite that it works perfectly well on the Discovery and other ships and bases at this time. Hell, Michael Burnham uses a hologram to talk to her old boy friend on the Klingon home from Discovery. Seems to work pretty damn good. Seems like in Discovery's time, it's pretty ho-hum to have a hologram phone call from home.


CYBERNETIC ORGANISMS: There's cyborg on the crew of the Discovery named Airiam. She was apparently injured in a shuttle crash and was cybernetically augmented. She has a computer type memory and can upload and download vast amounts of data, and can even be hacked. Where the heck did this tech come from? There's never been any human-made cyborgs in any Star Trek series that I can recall, and we certainly didn't know enough about the brain in the TOS time frame to do this.


ANDROIDS: While Airiam isn't an android, Harry Mudd did make several androids of himself (in one of the Short Treks) that he used as part of a scheme. These androids were sophisticated enough to impersonate him and carry on a convincing conversation with people (it passed the touring test). Since this occurred BEFORE the TOS episode where Harry was stranded on a planet full of alien androids, we can assume it's not related to this. Also, a Starfleet officer is portrayed in this Short Trek as being exasperated that there are so many Harry Mudd androids he's got locked up in a cell. He knows they are androids, and apparently there's nothing really special about them, and Starfleet isn't interested in taking them apart to study them.

So in the Discovery universe there ARE androids despite the fact that the first time we ever see one (made by aliens) is in TOS, and the first one humans apparently ever make is Commander Data in STNG.


TRANSPORTER: In TOS these were still flaky and unreliable. You always had to beam to or from a transporter. You couldn't do "site-to-site" beaming (like from a planet directly to the bridge) until STNG. They're doing site-to-site beaming all the time on Discovery.


ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: We seem to have an AI that helps the Federation make important decisions, despite the fact that that the first AI mentioned the M5 computer in TOS.


TIME TRAVEL: Sigh. I always feel that a Star Trek series has jumped the shark when they start bringing in time travel. I am not happy to find that it seems that time travel is behind all the fun and games in this season. More over, the federation, was not even aware time travel was possible until an episode in TOS when the Enterprise went back to the 1960s by accident, and then went back again on purpose in another episode. (To be fair, the series "Enterprise" broke this rule already with that infuriating "Time War" that was the main story arc in the series). In Discovery, time rifts are seemingly no big deal.


SPORE DRIVE: Sigh again. I was really hoping the damn Spore Drive was something we'd left behind in season one.


ENGINEERING: There never seems to be more than 2 or 3 people in the engine room in Discovery. Sometimes it's just one person. It seems to be highly automated. Yet in TOS and STNG there's usually 6 - 10 people crawling around the engines, tweaking the dilithium chamber, adjusting the antimatter mix, polishing the chrome.


SHUTTLES: Discovery's shuttles seem to be WAY more sophisticated than TOS shuttles or even STNG shuttles. No shuttle ever had a transporter in either series, and TOS Shuttles didn't have Warp drives. It wasn't until larger "runabouts" were introduced in DS9 that they had transporters. Now I know a lot of the movies broke these two rules also, but I just find it incongruous that they went to the trouble of using the classic phasers and communicators, and yet we have these incredibly wiz-bang shuttles.