Star Trek: Discovery.... what happened?

I'm caught up on #StarTrekDiscovery now. This is what I think of it as the resident die hard Discovery fan. I love the show and have been living and breathing it for years. I didn't choose Stamets as a username by accident. But my feelings are pretty mixed.

I was very excited for this season with it being the final season. Maybe that excitement played into it, but I've been left severely conflicted about what I've been watching. Parts of it I love just as much as I've loved any Discovery that has come before but there are other things that the show has done this season that are so egregious that I've had to pause the episode and let my frustration fade before continuing. Almost every single problem I have is with the writing of this season, however, and none of it with the acting or direction. But that being said here are the things that I liked about the season.

• The visuals for this season, whether that's visual effects or cinemetography, are top tier. Truly stunning. It feels like Star Wars in the Trek universe. Giant sweeping vistas with massive beauty and incredible detail. Watching it on a new TV that is a hell of a lot more detailed than the one I watched Season 1 - 4 on is giving me an insane appreciation for it all too.

• The character growth for most characters (see negative points down below) has been absolutely amazing. Saru and T'Rina are a great example of this, Hugh Culber even more so. Adira they're missing the landing on a little for me but I still love what they're doing with them.

• New officers! Part of me is a little worried they're just being introduced for the sake of fodder but I also just love seeing so many new faces and getting to learn bits about them.

• The fan service for this season is really wonderful. They keep going after the greatest hits and I am all the way here for it.

• People are getting a chance to act the absolute fuck out of their scenes and it's amazing. Tilly has always chewed the scenery, and Stamets to an extent, but now they're both just going non-stop. Wilson Cruz (especially during Jinaal) has been smashing it out of the fucking park. Callum Keith Rennie has also been an absolute delight to see romping around.

• They've been leaning more into moments where people have to work together and use science to overcome an obstacle and I have been enjoying that so much. Example is the episode where they go for the first clue. Burnham and Saru are running around trying not to die but the focus is on Tilly and Adira (and Rayner) figuring the shit out.

• The references.... I mean some are more obvious than most with the Breen being a good example of that. Wasn't really expecting them to pop up here beyond more than a reference like Rayner gave at the start. Other ones like Reno saying that she made a mean Seven of Limes is absolutely incredible. They keep dropping them in the background and I fuckin love it. The Badlands, Dominion War-era medicine, Progenitors, etc

• Everytime that the Crew has gone to a clue this season they've managed to solve it peacefully. Trill they empathed their way out, the ISS Enterprise they worked together to get out (with some grit in the works, sure), the Weather Tower they worked out peacefully. I love that so much.

• The 'Time Bug' was fucking awesomely hilarious. Not to mention getting to see some great moments.

• Burnham fighting Burnham was pretty amazing. I also didn't fully realize just how much of a massive difference there was in the personality of Burnham. Like just how... hard up and self hating she was at the start of Season 1. Sonequa is a fucking queen.

• The Saru reference on the ISS Enterprise plaque is pretty awesome. I also love that they just said fuck it and stole the flagship.

• The ISS Enterprise surviving makes me irrationally happy. As for it flying away, I hate to see it go but I love to watch it leave.

• Tilly episodes are the best episodes and the Whistlespeak episode is the best of those. God I love her so much.

• Still not enough Reno but love what we can get.

Now here comes the things I don't like. Again, I implore you to not just dismiss this outright. If you don't want to read I understand but don't just think I'm hating for the sake of hating. Saying what I'm about to say is heart breaking.

I'm going to list points to back up my claim here but this is the claim. The writers of this season have been underperforming at an astonishing level. There are so many badly written moments that the entire episodes will hinge on that it's been the primary reason I have been having a hard time to watch it. They have been failing to write characters in accordance with the path they've already taken, have been failing to stick to the rules of what they previously establish, and have characters make so many wildly illogical decisions that I have had a hard time following what's going on.

• They have never explained what a Red Directive actually is. They just said it in a super important tone and we had to learn through context that it was above Vance. Kovich didn't even specify that until much later.

• Characters have access to information they shouldn't have OR lose access to information they should have. A good example is Book in the first episode. It's far too convenient that Book just happens to know Fred and happens to know the best path that Moll and L'ak are going to take. It's made even more so when he is intimately familiar with the geological features of the surrounding area. Remember, in Season 3 Book was jumped far away from where he was. Burnham gave him a bunch of dilithium and said he was starting over in a new place. So either Book knows about a region he shouldn't have been able to even get to due to the whole courier-dilithium leash thing we saw under Osyraa or he's been traveling very far and wide and getting crazy familiar with the whole galaxy.

• Technology is being introduced and then forgotten about. The Pathfinder drive is said to be better than the Spore Drive. The Spore Drive was shuttered because of a singular setback with Tarka and Book. Yet the Pathfinder drive has never shown up in the season so far. The Discovery has been relied on for literally every major moment. It has to constantly jump from each point. If the Pathfinder drive is so amazing that it was chosen over the Spore Drive then why has it never shown up and why has it had no involvement in the season? Why is it outperformed by thousand year old technology? And if it is able to be outperformed, why in the fuck did you decide to shutter the program? They even use it as a threat when the Breen Primarch is aboard Fed HQ. "We have a Spore Drive and can be gone in seconds." So you decide to go with an alternative that has to be shelved the second there's an emergency?

• The rules of technology are being set and then almost immediately broken. In Episode 1 we see Rayners ship get a tractor beam on Moll and L'aks vessel while at warp. They were clearly as fast as Moll and L'aks ship. Rayner says that if he had a Pathfinder drive he'd be able to haul them out of warp. In Episode 5 we see an emergency warp pod from a ship that has been sitting empty for 800 years take off at warp. The Discovery loses it. Moll and L'aks ship was using current tech but that warp pod would have been capable of Warp 5 at the maximum. A warp factor that is so slow it had to be reinvented in the future. So that's, what, Warp 3 or something? Why wasn't the Discovery able to follow it and grab it out of warp, exactly? Why was that sent off to someone else? Why would a huge alert have to be put out for this ancient pod that doesn't even have cloaking tech? And if you have Book able to track them so easily in the first episode then why wouldn't you use his courier expertise again here in this moment to try and figure out where they might go? This is the equivalent of a toddler running away from an adult on a bike. It makes absolutely no sense from an in-universe perspective.

• Characters behave how the moment needs them to, not how they would actually act. The person most guilty of this is Rayner. As Nickie (my best friend) described him, he's a narrative bandaid. He acts however the story needs him to in that moment. He'll be nice and then an asshole for no reason and very little explanation is given as to it. More over, his behavior doesn't make sense in world. If he's so gruff and hostile that he's telling off the President of the Federation to her face then he wouldn't have had the ability to ever get to that point in his career to be demoted. Nothing about his behavior says "Captain". But he's not the only one guilty of it.

• Burnham. For the majority of this season she has been acting perfectly fine and as we would expect after Season 4. But there is a moment in the first episode that is so jaw dropping that I've had a hard time rooting for her throughout the rest of the season. She knew what tech Moll and L'ak had access to and was heading towards and still threatened to withhold info from Kovich unless she was personally read in. No part of that scene said she was worried about the greater good. She kept talking about reading her in and hiding things from her and that she needs or wants or deserves to know but... does she? She disobeyed direct orders and threatened to let the bad guys get an even bigger head start. Now in the real world you can say that's bad writing. But in that universe... how do you explain that? After everything she went through since Battle of the Binary Stars she decides to do the same thing again? To argue with her superior officer to a stalemate and put her own personal opinions and views in front of the duty of the delta? It was a genuinely horrifying moment. I cannot imagine any other Captain doing that and honestly I can't even really see Burnham doing that. Why she did that in that moment severely bothers me.

• Owo, Detmer, Adira, Grey... they've all been basically relegated to the background. Adira only exists at the moment to feel shame for letting the Time Bug on board (as has been said in multiple episodes), Grey showed up for what might have been just a glorified cameo, Detmer and Owo are apparently off flying the ISS Enterprise back to Fed HQ for storage which is mindboggling. You're on a Red Directive which, I assume, is important as all hell and you're sending the two bridge officers you have most familiarity with off on what might as well be a vacation? She even says that they deserve it and stuff. Like yeah, they do, but I mean.... it feels like there are really weirdly placed priorities here.

• This one is completely personal but during the time bug episode they pop onto Discovery in the future when it's all fucked up. Zora is on the bridge, on her own, playing music. How many of us thought that was going to be a Calypso tie in or reference, exactly? I got wildly excited only to be supremely let down. Sidenote though but during that Time Bug episode they open the bridge and they see a Breen ship sitting next to a destroyed Fed HQ. Burnham says later that the massive destroyer that shows up for L'ak is the same as the one they saw in the future. No... they're not? The one in the future was a fraction of the size. They made it pretty clear with the camera framing of that episode that the Breen Dreadnought eclipses Fed HQ and everything else around it. In the future shot it's just a ship.

• Another Time Bug thing but Stamets was popping through time too. What was he doing when they were in the future? He makes no mention of that and neither does Zora.

• Hiding Rayners frustration with the Breen for this long just backed up the feeling that Rayner is a narrative bandaid for me. That seems like a pretty huge thing to be a driving force of the character but it's not mentioned until the 3rd last episode of the season?

• Characters are just stupid. This sort of ties back into characters not having info they should. Ignoring the fact that I'm 90% sure we've seen (even in Discovery) forcefields that allow specific people through and block others, security around Moll and L'ak in sickbay were worthless. They were not prepared at all. But that isn't even my real issue with the scene. Moll escapes and runs off. She has some implanted cloaking tech. Feels like you should probably scan for shit like this but okay. It evaded scans. So she is hiding on the ship and runs off. Obviously the best decision is to find a way off the ship. So go look for schematics. This is a thought process so simple we have literally seen it spelled out in Star Trek before yet not a singular security officer thought about this? Nhan didn't? On top of that, Zora knows that there's someone moving on board with no biometric data. We also know she feels the ship and the sensor data as her body. We also know that shes aware of every tiny damn thing that happens and that there are holocameras or whatever on the ship so they can visually look around. She doesn't visually see Moll? More over, she doesn't flag access to ship schematics in this moment as being bizarre? The fact that Book is the only one to come up with this idea is staggering to me. Like him having the idea, makes total sense. Him being the ONLY ONE?

Summary: I've been really enjoying what I can get but it has been marred and scarred but such a cavalier writing attitude that I've actually become pretty depressed because of it. I've cried watching the show. Is that pathetic? Yes. But seeing characters make these choices and do these idiotic things after seeing so many seasons of awesomeness is crushing me. Knowing this is the final season is killing me. It feels like my favorite show of all time is going out with a confused whimper. I want to like this and love this but there are so many drastic problems with each episode that I would be here for hours listing them. I've been focusing on one or two examples for each of these things but there are so many examples for each that I am just thoroughly emotionally exhausted and feel completely betrayed by the showwriters.

PS: If they use the progenitor tech to revive L'ak I am going to lose my fucking mind. If Alex Kurtzman didn't learn from the insane backlash of Khans Special Blood, and the cheap out of Book being "Dead" for 5 seconds in Season 4... well idk. But it might make me genuinely pause at whether or not I ever watch something with him or Michelle Paradise being the show runner again.