Thoughts on the SF Debris Reviews of “Star Trek: Discovery”

As I’ve said before, unlike for Voyager or Enterprise it wasn’t Chuck’s reviews of Discovery that got me to watch it. While his reviews didn’t make it sound worth watching, they also didn’t make it sound so terrible that I simply had to see if it was really that bad. No, it was a friend’s comments that it reminded him of Mass Effect that made me sit down and watch it when I had the opportunity. But it’s still worth looking at his reviews to see if we align or don’t align in our impressions of the show.

For the most part, we align. We both seem to agree that the biggest problem with Discovery is that it focuses on one main character, Michael, and that that character isn’t particularly interesting. Neither of us really hate her, but neither of us care about her either, which is what’s required if you’re going to have one main character that the story revolves around.

When it comes to the minor characters, we both seem to like Tilly, but we differ on the other character that we like. I like Saru, while he likes Lorca. And even there, I think I like Lorca more than he likes Saru, since he seems to spend most of the time he spends talking about Saru disparaging him, but not with the venom that you’d get for a, say, Neelix or, well, any character from Enterprise. So he doesn’t seem to hate him, but doesn’t seem to like the character either. Whereas for me, I don’t really mind Lorca but don’t see him as being as good a character as Chuck does, mostly because I don’t quite see the nuance in the character and that sort of character isn’t one that generally interests me anyway.

Chuck is just starting season 2, and it’ll be interesting to see what his reactions to that season is, as that’s the season that ultimately killed any interest I had in the show. Since I do follow his show, obviously, I’ll be watching to see if he hated it as much as I did or if he found any redeeming qualities in it.