Divisiveness and Star Trek Discovery

I don’t need to tell you that America is a divided place right now.  Red states vs. blue states; anthem standers vs. kneelers; smooth peanut butter vs. chunky.  But it used to be there was something most of us could agree on, and that is that Star Trek is awesome.

But the Star Trek concept of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) is being strained by the response of fans to the latest incarnation in the Trek oeuvre, Star Trek Discovery.  CBS just announced that it was renewing the show for a second season, so the experiment of only making it available on a streaming platform instead of broadcast television must have worked.  But there is a civil war brewing about the show and the direction of Star Trek into the future.

I cannot comment on the quality of the show because I won’t sign up for CBS All Access just to watch a new Star Trek series.  I can go back and re-watch The Original Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine on Netflix if I want my Trek fix (sorry, Voyager was never my cup of tea), not to mention the movies (at least the good, even numbered ones).  I did watch the first episode that was broadcast, and I thought it was terrible.  Of course, it’s hard for me to make an informed decision because what they showed on CBS was not the first episode, but only the first half of the first two-part episode.  Note to CBS—if you say you are going to show the first episode on broadcast TV, then show the ENTIRE episode and don’t end on a cliffhanger and say, “to be continued” on part 2.

Metacritic gives Star Trek Discovery a respectable critical rating of 72 out of 100.  But then I checked the User Rating and saw it was a measly 4.5 out of 10, worse than mediocre.  Looking at the summary, it was what we in the statistics biz like to call a bimodal distribution—163 negative reviews vs. 82 positive reviews, with all the 10’s and 1’s averaging out to just under 5.  Very few people are on the fence.

I got the sense of the controversy looking at the comments on the AV Club review of the most recent episode.  In my history of reading reviews at AV Club I had never seen so many comments taking issue with the position taken by the reviewer, which pointed out the inconsistencies with the Star Trek universe and questioned the purpose of setting the series in the Star Trek universe then feeling the need to rebrand certain aspects (like largely rebooting the Klingons).  Comments on AV Club reviews sometimes have commenters pose slight disagreements with what other commenters have posted, but rarely have commenters taken the offensive to unilaterally disagree with the approach the reviewer took in critiquing the show itself.

The major reason for the split of opinion could be because we are now into the third generation of Star Trek fandom.  The First Age of Star Trek was the original show and the big screen movie version of Star Trek and its immediate sequels.  These stories were about Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and the rest, and were based on a unifyied concept.

The Second Age of Star Trek was the re-birth and rise of the television franchise, from The Next Generation through Enterprise.  These projects were one step removed from Gene Rodenberry’s original vision, but close enough to avoid any major issues with continuity.  Yes, Klingons now had forehead ridges, but the best explanation for that was contained in the Deep Space Nine episode Trials and Tribble-ations (as Worf explained, Klingons did not discuss the change with outsiders). 

The Third Age began with the movie franchise reboot, where Chris Pine reinterpreted the role of Kirk.  One of the clever things done to avoid the whole consistency “tar baby” was to make everything due to a temporal anomaly, so that the events that followed would NOT be consistent with the events of the original TV series.  This was taken to a somewhat tedious extreme by Star Trek Into Darkness, which (spoilers!) was essentially a remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan but with events slightly altered due to changes in the timeline.

So now there are two, maybe three, groups of fans: those loyal to the original Star Trek series and its characters (these people are pretty old at this point); those raised on The Next Generation and the subsequent TV series which tried hard to toe the corporate line; and those who came aboard with the recent movie reboot who see no reason to drag a 50 year old TV series into imposing limits on a new science fiction TV franchise.  Thus the split in opinion over how dedicated any new incarnation of Star Trek has to be to the details of what has come before.

I’ve written before that my theory for the decline in quality in the Star Trek franchise, starting with Voyager and the later seasons of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, was that they started hiring writers based on their knowledge of Star Trek trivia over having actual writing talent.  The first year of the original series featured scripts by noted science fiction authors like Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Frederic Brown and DC Fontana, mainly because in the mid-1960’s there were few science fiction writers working in television.  More recent writers developed episodes with major plot points based on nuances that were probably not-thought-out details about Klingon physiology or Ferengi psychology; namely, they were Star Trek insiders and not graduates of screenwriting classes.

So, we’ll have to agree to disagree.  I will continue to think that Star Trek Discovery is a major misfire, while I watch City on the Edge of Forever and Our Man Bashir on Netflix.  Trek fans younger than me will eat up Discovery and believe that Star Trek Beyond is the best Star Trek movie yet.  If the Federation and the Klingons can co-exist, I suppose the various schools of Trek fandom can learn to live together.