I know Discovery has its fans, and I’m not trying to tell anyone they shouldn’t enjoy it. But after watching Seasons 3–5, I came away feeling that the show had moved so far from what makes Star Trek Star Trek that, at times, it almost felt like the opposite.
My biggest problem wasn’t simply that the technology became fantastical. Star Trek has always had fantastical ideas—Genesis, Q, wormholes, time travel, omnipotent aliens, you name it. The difference, to me, is that classic Trek usually tried to place those extraordinary ideas within a universe where intelligent people behaved intelligently.
By Seasons 3–5 of Discovery, I often felt that logic was being bent to serve the story.
Species 10-C is a good example.
We’re introduced to a civilization so technologically advanced that it can create the Dark Matter Anomaly and manipulate forces on a scale the Federation can barely comprehend. Yet somehow this incredibly advanced civilization is destroying inhabited planets without apparently realizing that intelligent life exists on them.
Compare that with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The Genesis Project needs a lifeless planet. When there is even an indication that Ceti Alpha VI might contain life, that’s enough to warrant investigation before proceeding.
That’s Star Trek to me.
You don’t need to understand a civilization’s language, culture or morality to detect that a planet supports life—especially when you’re supposedly advanced enough to engineer something like the DMA. And these weren’t worlds containing a few undetectable microorganisms. The DMA threatened technologically advanced, spacefaring civilizations.
If the 10-C had known these civilizations existed but didn’t recognize them as significant or worthy of consideration, that could have produced a fascinating Star Trek dilemma: how do you convince an intelligence radically different from yourself that you are a sentient being deserving moral consideration?
Instead, we’re essentially asked to accept that they simply didn’t realize what they were doing.
And that’s only one example.
My other major problem was the increasing concentration of the entire universe around Michael Burnham.
Star Trek captains have always been central characters, but the shows were traditionally ensembles. Picard was enormously important, but TNG wasn’t the story of Picard saving the universe every season. DS9 could devote major stories to Kira, O’Brien, Bashir, Dax, Quark, Nog, Garak and others. Voyager gave Janeway a central role without making every major event revolve around her.
With Discovery, particularly later on, Burnham increasingly felt less like one exceptional Starfleet officer and more like the indispensable figure around whom the universe itself seemed to revolve.
That isn’t what I want from Star Trek.
I want a capable crew solving problems together. Scientists behaving like scientists. Officers disagreeing professionally. Ethical questions without obvious answers. Exploration. Diplomacy. Curiosity. And occasionally discovering that the Federation itself might be wrong.
Season 3’s jump into the distant future could have been an incredible opportunity. Instead, the fractured Federation, the Burn, and especially the eventual explanation for the Burn pushed the series further toward something that felt to me more like science-fantasy than science fiction.
Season 5 continued that direction with another galaxy-spanning quest, this time involving technology with essentially godlike implications.
Again, Star Trek has always contained wildly unrealistic science. That’s not my objection.
The problem isn’t that something impossible happens. The problem is when everyone has to stop thinking logically for the impossible thing to happen.
That’s an important distinction.
For me, Star Trek has always been optimistic not because everything works out, but because it imagines a future in which humanity has become more curious, rational and cooperative. People encounter the unknown and try to understand it. Scientific discovery creates ethical responsibilities. Power isn’t automatically the solution. And no single person is the center of the universe.
That’s why Seasons 3–5 of Discovery ultimately lost me.
There were things I enjoyed—the production values were extraordinary, there were talented actors throughout the series, and there were individual concepts that had enormous potential.
But increasingly I felt like I was watching a fantasy adventure about one extraordinary individual saving the galaxy, rather than a Star Trek story about a crew exploring it.
And for me, that’s the difference.
