New Star Trek hasn’t been great. A few bright spots like some episodes of Strange New Worlds and the feel-good fan service of Picard season 3 can’t outweigh the sheer awfulness elsewhere. One of the worst culprits is Star Trek: Discovery.
Very quickly, it collapsed into a pile of Millennial wailing, unprofessional quips and smug knowing looks exchanged across the bridge by crew members who should have very little to feel smug about. At times it was simply painful.
Apparently, it is, as usual, the fault of fandom and it has always been like this. Lead Sonequa Martin-Green recently appeared on a panel for TrekMovie, and she said they were comforted by a former Star Trek: The Next Generation cast member who told them it was always this way:
“Remember y’all in the beginning when we had a lot of criticism, and people [were] coming for us for a lot of reasons. It made sense. We always said we understood where they were coming from.
And we had so much respect because those criticisms were coming from a place of love and loyalty and intelligence and intellect and all of that… But we were like [makes pained expression] ‘We’ve got so many people to prove and to ourselves too.
So Jonathan Frakes – one of our favorite directors – really shepherded us and took us under his wing. He welcomed us as a proxy for the rest of the franchise. And he was like, ‘No, no, no. Welcome. This is how it goes. They hated us too.’
They used to get letters like, ‘We don’t need you… why are you trying to get in the way of our Kirk and Spock?’ He said it took [TNG] like three seasons for them to finally take hold of us.
I remember how we were so comforted by that. I’m still grateful for him to this day because he was really kind of like a Papa Big Brother for us in the beginning.”
Star Trek under executive producer Alex Kurtzman remains struggling. The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery starts on April 4th on Paramount+, and other platforms outside the US.
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