Star Trek: Discovery - Season 4

The USS Discovery has been upgraded and integrated into the Starfleet of the 32nd Century. As the crew continue trying to adjust to life a thousand years into their future, they also face a new threat: a vast storm of energy, capable of destroying entire star systems. The Discovery crew try to discover the source of the storm and how to communicate with those who created it...if that is even possible.

Star Trek: Discovery is the show that has, for three seasons solid, given with one hand and taken away with the other. Exemplary casting, some great ideas and some great effects are constantly undercut by murky writing, chunky exposition, most character development taking place offscreen, and people constantly busting into tears for no immediately discernible reason, before the story nosedives towards its end into incoherence.

Season 3 saw a small but sustained uptick in quality. Pleasingly, Season 4 continues with that upward trajectory. We are presented with a huge, "proper SF" mystery which Discovery and her crew have to tackle through scientific research and careful deliberation, as well as diplomacy when the scale of the problem becomes clear. The result is a break with the tendency of the first three seasons to resort to firing phasers and solving problems with explosions. There are still some action beats, but these are more restrained and more Star Trek-y, for lack of a better term, than previously. Early episodes dealing with the mysterious artefact and attempts to penetrate or disable it recall Star Trek: The Motion Picture's dealings with the alien cloud V'Ger.

The show makes better use of its ensemble cast. Prior seasons had been very firmly "the Michael Burnham Show" but this season brings other characters to the fore. Saru gets a new role and a potential relationship, Tilly gets a new job (better-suited to her than her role last season), Stamets and Culber have much less intense issues to deal with, and Booker gets his own storyline separate from Michael's. Even the lesser-known bridge crew get a few more scenes in the sun this season, and more of a sense of Discovery as a community which has often been achingly missing in prior episodes.

As the season unfolds, it develops several simultaneously-developing storylines. Diplomatic relations with United Earth and Vulcan form key parts of the story, with entire episodes dedicated to overcoming diplomatic hurdles without so much as a phaser in sight. It's like watching a stronger 1989 episode of TNG all over again. There's also the attempts to find and then make contact with the aliens, which tap into the spirit of 2016 movie Arrival, and a subplot revolving around new character Dr. Ruon Tarka (a splendid performance by The Expanse's Shawn Doyle) who becomes something of an antagonist, but an unusually fleshed-out one. Discovery has struggled more than most shows in making a story arc justify a full season, but here they succeed, dividing the season nicely into beats in the larger story.

Even making Michael Captain works much better than expected. As a constantly mutinous and insubordinate officer, her character never really made sense. As a more cooperative and instead "nontraditional" captain, recalling the off-kilter inventiveness of Captain Kirk, the character suddenly comes to life in a way she didn't in prior seasons. It also helps that she's now only whispering about a tenth of her lines rather than half of them.

Problems still remain: murky and unclear CGI, some rather unlikely coincidences and plot contrivances, the show suddenly making a big deal of characters you don't really know anything about because they've never had much development, and some occasional leaps in plot logic. But these are constrained and indeed minor compared to the previous seasons.

Season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery (****) is easily the best season of the show to date, with an intriguing central storyline which unfolds in a compelling manner, with solid characterisation and a renewed dedication to Star Trek ideals that was lacking in the first few seasons. The show retains some of its earlier problems, but significantly moderated. It may have taken a long time, but Discovery is finally starting to realise its potential. The season is available now in the USA via Paramount+ and on various platforms in other countries.

Star Trek: Discovery - Season 3

The USS Discovery has been propelled forwards to the 32nd Century as part of a move to hide important technical data that threatens their timeline. Upon arrival they discover that the galaxy is in ruins, the result of a disaster known as "the Burn" which made dilithium inert and thus destroying every ship with an active warp core at the time. The Federation has fallen from more than 350 member civilisations to a bare handful, and is facing a threat from a competing alliance known as the Emerald Chain, which believes in money, slavery and advancement through struggle, concepts the Federation left behind a millennia earlier. As the crew of the Discovery try to settle into this bleak new world, they realise their Spore Drive gives them the ability to do what no-one else has done before: to discover the origin of the Burn and help restore the Federation to its former glory.

The first two seasons of Star Trek: Discovery were an exercise in frustration: superb actors, occasionally really good ideas and tremendous production values constantly being let down by spotty plotting, nonsensical scripts and character arcs that we are often told are happening but of which we see little to no evidence on-screen.

Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery is, unfortunately, more of the same, although it does emerge as probably the series' strongest season by a nose. It has a terrific setup, with the Discovery and its crew emerging into a genuine brave new world and having to find out what is going on, and some superb new production design, with the Federation and non-Federation starships of the 32nd Century being a battery of impressive, intriguing ideas, such as ships made of programmable matter which can switch size and shape in an instant which feel like they've come out of an Iain M. Banks novel.

Early episodes in the season include some of Discovery's best, bolstered by promising new additions to the cast such as David Ajala as Cleveland Booker and Blu del Barrio as Adira Tal. There's some genuinely interesting worldbuilding and it turns out that removing Discovery's previously grating tendency to contradict well-established Star Trek canon allows the show to breathe freer and more enjoyably. We even get some moments of genuine character development, such as Saru hosting a dinner for his bridge crew in which we get to see how what's happened has impacted on them. Such a scene would be de rigueur on an episode of The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine, but Discovery has so rarely bothered with such scenes that seeing one is genuinely surprising, and welcome.

By the latter half of the season, though, the show is starting to slip backwards to type. We get a lengthy new visit to the Mirror Universe which no-one asked for or wanted, and achieves little rather than making us remember that Michelle Yeoh's character is a mass, mass-murderer who still hasn't faced justice or redemption. The show then beams her off into her own spin-off series through the most contrived means possible. The three-part season finale is a morass of murky, confused CGI, confused character motivations that seem to contradict themselves from one scene to the next and wholly unearned praise and promotions. It does prove superior to the previous season finales though, particularly when the reason for the Burn is revealed not to be completely nonsensical and a few strong ideas are treated well (such as the notion of someone who's spent their entire life on the holodeck and doesn't understand what reality is).

The series does advance a few previous annoying tics and makes them even more grating: characters burst into tears several times an episode, often for no discernible reason; the audience is asked again to care about the departure of a regular bridge crewman despite that crewman receiving virtually no prior character development and mainly being a glorified extra (Commander Nhan what now?); some regular crewmembers vanish inexplicably mid-season without a trace (where did Lt. Nilsson go?); and some brand new crewmembers suddenly show up out of nowhere and are treated as if they've always been there (who is Lt. Ina and where did she come from?).

This season also features possibly the single most inexplicable shot in the 55-year history of the entire Star Trek franchise, when a battle takes place in a turbolift and it's revealed that the turbolifts are moving around some kind of weird, other-dimensional space which is considerably larger than the entirety of Discovery itself. Previous seasons had individual shots which were like this (including one on the Enterprise in Discovery Season 2) but they could be dismissed as one-off oddities, but this was a whole, extended action sequence taking place in this utterly surreal space. I have absolutely no idea what the hell was going on in this sequence or where it was taking place, since it clearly could not be on the ship (crewmen even point at a schematic of the turbolift system in the episode and it shows ordinary narrow tubes, as you'd expect).

An additional character oddity is Sonequa Martin-Green whispering half her lines for dramatic emphasis, something I don't remember her doing in previous seasons but now does continuously, which required constant volume adjustments because everyone else is speaking perfectly normally. As an acting choice that contradicts previous characterisation, this is the weirdest I've seen on television since Littlefinger started speaking with a Batman voice in Season 3 of Game of Thrones.

Against that, Season 3 of Discovery does a fair few things right. Doug Jones' spell as captain is superb, with him investing Saru with real feeling, warmth and a continuing sense of otherworldliness. He is easily the best actor and best character on the show, and the season's focus on him is a great choice. The accomplished Anthony Rapp also has much more to do with Stamets after a low-key second season. Despite the whispering issue, Martin-Green is at her best this season and is helped by Burnham having more of a discernible, actual character arc which makes a virtue of her previous terrible choices. The revisiting of old races like the Trill and the Romulan-Vulcan alliance is well-handled. Osyraa is the best enemy the show has thrown up so far, a relatively petty empire-building villain who has unexpected depths, and makes for a reasonable bad guy (especially when she turns out to have a few laudable qualities). The season also arguably achieves its goal of really putting the Federation against the wall and interrogating its values and finding that they still hold true. The weakened Federation rejecting a chance for peace that comes with too many caveats and concessions to a mass-murderer is a politically weak move but a morally strong one, and is laudable.

The result is, yet again, a season (***½) which has a lot of strengths which make the show watchable, and a lot of grating weaknesses. After three seasons Discovery should be a lot better than this, and it's a shame it isn't. It also doesn't help that Discovery has serious competition: The Mandalorian and The Expanse are comprehensively, across-the-board much better shows, and even Discovery's own animated spin-off, Lower Decks, is cleverer and has a lot better writing. But the show is at least showing signs of progress (albeit haltingly slowly) and getting better. The show airs on CBS All Access in the United States and Netflix in most overseas territories.

Star Trek: Discovery - Season 2

The Klingon War is over and the USS Discovery is poised to begin a new mission of discovery and exploration. But a fresh crisis erupts when unusually powerful signals are detected originating from distant parts of the galaxy. Captain Christopher Pike of the USS Enterprise takes command of the Discovery on a temporary assignment to investigate the source of the signals, taking the Discovery and her crew into some very strange places indeed.

The first season of Star Trek: Discovery was a mixed bag. It had utterly spectacular production values, a very solid cast and a willingness to do things differently to any Star Trek series that came before it. It also had muddled storytelling and characterisation, and sometimes overcame narrative roadblocks by simply blasting through them and damning logic, a similar approach to some modern episodes of Doctor Who (and, in its latter seasons, Game of Thrones). Discovery at its best was fun enough that you didn't care about the lack of coherence in the storytelling, but at its worst it was wince-inducingly contrived and trying to be dark for the sake of it. The fact that it was still the third-best opening season of a Star Trek show (after the original show and, arguably, Deep Space Nine) says rather more about how poor most first seasons of 1980s and 1990s series were then about Discovery in particular.

The second season is a moderate, but only a moderate, improvement. It has a much more charismatic and interesting captain in the form of Pike, played with absolutely stellar conviction by Anson Mount (who is probably thanking his lucky stars that Inhumans was cancelled). Mount plays Pike as a captain with sound judgement, ready to take risks but not crazy ones, and who absolutely trusts his crew rather than second-guessing them all the time. Ethan Peck also joins the cast as a younger version of Mr. Spock, a more rigid one suppressing his human side than the character we know from the original franchise. Peck's performance is excellent, overcoming the usual "Spock problem" of having to unleash lots of exposition and technobabble through his dramatic presence. He is probably a better Spock than Zachary Quinto (as solid as he was in the neo-Trek movies), and a fine heir to Leonard Nimoy.

The second season also dials back on the Klingon storyline, only touching base with it in a few episodes, and instead focuses on a fresh mystery, a scientific conundrum which our heroes have to solve through investigation and exploration, concepts much truer to the Star Trek mythos.

Cumulatively, these changes are all for the better. The show feels more like Star Trek, the cast is working better together and we get more of an exploration of the side and background characters, making the cast feel more cohesive as a team.

However, the show still manages to sabotage itself. The plotting and main story arc is still muddled and somewhat confusing, and the writers prefer to blast through under-developed plot points in a blaze of technobabble and hoping for the best. This isn't exactly new to Star Trek (the same problem bogged down Voyager for almost its entire run) but it feels more egregious in the modern TV age. Characterisation for the regulars is mixed, with Michael Burnham still feeling a little too under-developed as our key protagonist but the scripts getting into the motivations and psyches of characters like Stamets and Saru in a more interesting fashion. Tilly, a highlight of Season 1, does feel a little too readily used as comic relief and like an over-indulged child in several episodes, which is a disservice to both the character and actress.

The plotting problems culminate at the end of the season in two episodes which feel contrived at best, with the writers more interested in resolving fan questions about canon rather than organically developing a logical conclusion to this story arc. It's not helped that the final big space battle is a confusing mess of beams and explosions that even Michael Bay would find nonsensical.

The second season of Star Trek: Discovery (***½) is therefore a bit variable in quality: outstanding sets (especially the recreation of the Enterprise bridge), actors and effects, but confused storytelling, continuity and characterisation. The way the story falls out does make sense (even if the route there doesn't always) and it does leave the series with a very interesting new setup to explore in Season 3, but it does feel a little frustrating that show still isn't hitting the high points of the shows that came before it, or even those of the other big space opera series on the air, The Expanse, which is comprehensively owning space at the moment. Discovery is available to watch on CBS All Access in the United States and Netflix in much of the rest of the world.

Star Trek: Discovery - Season 1.5

The Federation-Klingon War continues to rage, with the Federation gaining some victories thanks to the USS Discovery's spore-based quantum teleportation drive. Unfortunately, the last jump has carried the Discovery way beyond where anyone has gone before...into another universe.

Star Trek: Discovery had a rocky start, with a prequel two-part story before we even got to meet most of the show's actual recurring cast and the ship itself. The show's tone has been all over the place, whilst the writing has frequently let down the excellent actors that the show has assembled. The second part of the season - which consists of six episodes compared to the first chunk's nine - solves some of these problems. This batch of episodes is much faster-paced, more consistent in quality and delivers some very solid payoff to the mysteries set up at the start of the season, if several of those revelations were predictable months in advance.

Again, Discovery benefits from its very solid cast. Jason Isaacs, James Frain, Sonequa Martin-Green, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman and Shazad Latif all continue to deliver stand-out performances, bringing real depth to their characters and performances even when the scripts occasionally falter. Wiseman and Latif in particular benefit from the back run of episodes, with Tilly channelling her youth and enthusiasm in some very unexpected directions and becoming a far more impressive character as a result. Latif's Ash Tyler gets put through the emotional winger and although there are some holes in the way his story developers, the actor never gives less than 100%.

The show continues to be one of the best-looking on television, with sets to die for and some very accomplished action scenes. The CGI and space scenes continue to disappoint, however. Discovery has gone for a very stylised and colourful look (Nebulas! Everywhere!) to its space scenes which are arty but also not very good at getting across the staging and geography of its space battles. The clean lines of the previous series where you could tell what the hell was going on are sadly missed at this point. Starship designs also continue to disappoint: the Klingon ships, which seem to be a hodge-podge of ideas thrown together with little regard for logic or design philosophy, are particularly poor.

In terms of story, a large chunk of this back run of episodes takes place in the Mirror Universe, Star Trek's go-to place when it wants to do morally unambiguous action stories (because everyone in the Mirror Universe is All Evil, All the Time). Discovery's use of the Mirror Universe is effective - avoiding creeping tone of camp that crept in during Deep Space Nine's frequent excursions there - if a bit overdrawn at four episodes, even if these did allow the reappearance of Michelle Yeoh as the evil Philippa Georgiou, whom Yeoh plays with scenery-destroying relish. Still, it gives the series a much-needed dramatic focus.

The show's final stretch feels badly compromised by earlier decisions. Putting both L'Rell and Voq on Discovery and killing off every other Klingon character of note means we have no real stake in the Klingon side of the conflict, especially once L'Rell and Voq both realised that the Federation is absolutely totes awesome after spending five minutes hanging out with them (the "assimilation" threat of the Federation from earlier in the season feels appropriate at this moment). The decision to retire the teleportation device, reinstate Burnham and end the war with a literal deus ex machina (at least from the Klingon POV) also makes it feel like Discovery is giving us easy, pat answers to large, complex problems. The final shot of the season is also very cool, along with the choice of theme music, but it also feels like the show should perhaps have tried standing on its own two feet for a while before playing this card.

Ultimately, the second half of Star Trek: Discovery's first season (***½) is watchable and enjoyable, with a very strong cast (easily the strongest assembled since Deep Space Nine a full quarter of a century ago) and some really interesting ideas being explored. It's a also still a bit muddled in its storytelling, confused in its canonical status and veers inconsistently from setting up complex, morally murky situations to delivering pat, easy answers. But it remains the finest opening season of a Star Trek show since DS9 (if not the original series) and provides a solid foundation for the second season to build on. Star Trek: Discovery can be watched on CBS All Access in the USA, SPACE in Canada and Netflix in most of the rest of the world.

Star Trek: Discovery - Season 1.0

Stardate 1207.3: 11 May, 2256. The USS Shenzhou stumbles across an immense, ancient Klingon ship. The confrontation ends in violence and the outbreak of full-scale war between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire. Disgraced Starfleet officer Michael Burnham is forcibly recruited into the crew of the experimental USS Discovery, a cutting-edge research ship which may have found a weapon to use against the Klingons...if it doesn't destroy the ship first.

Being the first new Star Trek show in twelve years, and being the first in a third generation of shows for the franchise (after the original show and the Rick Berman/24th Century era), it's unsurprising that Discovery has come under a lot of scrutiny. The show has been dogged by controversy, first for airing in the United States on a paid streaming service without much other compelling content and then for egregiously redesigning the Klingons for no readily apparent reason. In the midst of delays to shooting and broadcast, showrunner Bryan Fuller left and there was a shake-up in the creative team behind the scenes.

Bearing in mind the chaos behind the scenes, Star Trek: Discovery's first season (or half-season) ends up being a relatively entertaining and fresh spin on the franchise. It's not the triumphant, high-quality return that fans were hoping for and the show is dogged by minor issues, but given the quality of most of the Trek first seasons (such as The Next Generation's terrible first few episodes and DS9's okay-but-slightly-dull opening hours), Discovery does not fare too badly at all.

First up, the show is visually spectacular. It has, hands down, the best sets of any Trek show to date and the production value and design of them is highly impressive (even if the rooms are a bit big for such a small ship, but okay). The quality of the CGI is remarkable, more than worthy of comparison with big-budget feature films, although it can be a bit murky and underlit. The new ship designs are a mix of the impressive and underwhelming, but they get the job done. This is the most expensive Star Trek show ever and every penny of that gets put on screen.

Cast-wise, there's little to complain about. Sonequa Martin-Green makes for an interesting protagonist, playing Michael Burnham - a human raised by Vulcans - with a good mix of emotional repression and intelligence, which sometimes results in her making bad decisions. A common complaint is that Burnham is not as immediately likeable as previous Trek protagonists, which may be true but she's certainly more human and more relateable. The season arc, which has Burnham disgraced by a bad call in the first episode and then learning from it, is reasonably successful (if obvious).

Jason Isaacs (Harry Potter, The Death of Stalin) plays Captain Lorca, a decidedly murky figure who is prepared to take risks and break regulations to get things done. He's not quite as far removed from previous Trek captains as some seem to think - under a similar wartime situation, Sisko broke the regulations on a fairly high number of occasions and Janeway threw the rulebook away after a while - but it's surprisingly to see a morally conflicted protagonist in the captain's chair from very early in the season. Lorca feels more like one of those slightly dodgy Star Trek admirals or captains who showed up from time to time (like Pressman or Leyton) for a single episode, we've just got him here for the whole season which allows for better character development. Isaacs is a charismatic and skilled actor who portrays Lorca as a damaged person who sometimes loses sight of the greater values and morals of Starfleet in his quest for victory.

Anthony Rapp plays Lt. Paul Stamets, a brilliant scientist with some interpersonal relationship issues who is frustrated with his role in the war. Rapp gives Stamets a certain nervous energy and arrogance which works really well and makes him sympathetic even when he's being insufferable. Doug Jones is also phenomenally good as Discovery's first officer, Saru, giving him a genuinely strange, alien quality that previous Star Trek protagonists have not quite managed. He's this show's take on Data or Spock and in that regard works very well.

The rest of the cast is very good, although they feel comparatively under-developed: a couple of recognisable actors are cast in apparently major roles just to get killed off for shock value, which feels a bit weird. Mary Wiseman gives Cadet Tilly a lot of energy and charisma, but after a couple of promising episodes she isn't given much to do (and an intriguing early suggestion that Tilly has special needs, which would be a first for the franchise, seems to have been dropped and forgotten about pretty quickly). Shazad Latif as a PTSD-suffering security officer is also very promising, if a late addition to the team. Less successful are the Klingon actors: they may be very good, but they are hamstrung by awkward prosthetics and having to speak almost all their lines in Klingon, which some are much better at than others. Of the recurring characters, Rainn Wilson also impresses as a younger version of classic Trek villain Harry Mudd.

In terms of writing and the quality of the episodes, Discovery is certainly never less than watchable, but in the early going struggles to find its tone and identity. The show has been criticised for being "dark and gritty", which is not really appropriate for the Star Trek franchise. It isn't really, certainly not compared to say the Battlestar Galactica reboot or even the darker moments of Deep Space Nine, and some episodes are downright goofy. We've had mysterious alien energy beings, characters being "weirdly affected" by space phenomena, hints at parallel universes and timelines, space battles resolved with a barrage of photon torpedoes and some really bizarre plot ideas (interdimensional tardigrades powering instantaneous FTL jumps?!) that would be at home in any previous incarnation of Star Trek. The show does have something of a darker tone - something that does feel incompatible with the more humourous moments - but it's certainly not gone full grimdark on us. The Federation is at war with the Klingons, as it was widely believed it was in this timeframe, resulting in the normal Starfleet mission of exploration and contact being suspended in favour of trying to achieve a military victory and a peace treaty, so clearly the show is not going to be as relaxed and cheery as perhaps other series could afford to be.

The result is a show that is giving us something we haven't seen before - a war story in the Star Trek universe from the perspective of a ship on the front line (DS9's Dominion War was mostly depicted from a space station far from the action). It's a bold choice and one that mostly works, with the interesting choice of giving us both sides of the struggle. Several episodes focus on the Klingon side of the conflict, particularly how an idealistic crusade was begun by a visionary martyr and continued by his underestimated subordinate before being supplanted by a grasping politician. It's a nice idea which would work a lot better if the new Klingon makeup allowed the actors to emote, and if, as mentioned before, they weren't being forced to speak all of their dialogue in Klingon (a nice idea that soon becomes irritating as it slows the action to a crawl). But it's certainly different.

Criticisms have been made of the show regarding its status as a prequel to the original series. Discovery ostensibly takes place in the original (or "Prime") timeline shared by all previous Star Trek shows (and which J.J. Abrams' movies have deviated from) but it's also a visual and aesthetic reboot, with new ship designs, the new and decidedly unsuccessful look for the Klingons and a blatantly higher level of technology than is strictly era-appropriate, complete with lots of holograms. However, clunky button interfaces and classic-ish designs for phasers, communicators and tricorders do at least nod at the right timeframe. As it stands, the show fits into existing canon a little awkwardly but not quite as badly as some commentators suggest. One clever writing moment even explains Sarek's fury with Spock in the original series a lot better and the musings on ethical behaviour, codes of conduct and the unfolding of a bloody war between the Federation and Klingons do feel like they're setting up the original series in a reasonably effective manner. There's still a lot of work to do here, but previews of later episodes do suggest that he show will continue to dovetail towards the original series in other aspects of design.

Star Trek: Discovery's first half-season (***½) gets off to a reasonable start, despite some clunky writing, a terrible new design for the Klingons (which needs to be amended stat) and some awkward continuity issues. But as the season continues, the show gains confidence and starts leaning on the canon and its excellent cast to deliver more effective and interesting stories. It's certainly not the franchise at its best, but these are comfortably the best opening nine episodes of any Star Trek series to date.

Star Trek: Discovery's first nine episodes are available to view now on CBS All Access in the United States and Netflix in most of the rest of the world. The show will return for six episodes in January 2018.