“Let’s fly!” — Star Trek: Discovery Third Season Overview

I pretty much agree with this. I certainly agree that the season would’ve been better if Georgiou hadn’t been part of it. It was a waste of time to bring her to the future if the endgame was always to take her out of it again, and her arc was nothing more than a distraction and interruption of the more interesting stuff. I would’ve rather seen that time devoted to more development of the other characters and the new galactic landscape they find themselves in.

I would’ve liked it if we’d gotten to see more radical change in Federation cultures over the centuries since we last saw them. 800 years is a long time, and there should be some more profound changes than we’ve seen. The biggest change we got was Romulans and Vulcans uniting, but even that didn’t change them much culturally. Okay, the Andorians are bad guys now, but they kind of were at first in Enterprise, so it’s not a massive change. And the Trill, Orions, and particularly humans are pretty much the same. I’d love it if we found out next season that, as someone suggested a while back, the Klingons have become pacifistic spiritualists or something like that.

My biggest disappointment is still with the very sloppy, incoherent, fanciful visual effects. Gene Roddenberry always strove for at least the semblance of realism and plausibility. His successors have rarely tried that hard to live up to that standard, but I’ve never seen it violated as egregiously as in DSC’s visual effects, which not only make no physical sense but sometimes even contradict onscreen dialogue. The finale staging a whole action sequence in a “turboshaft” that was a gigantic, absurdly complicated high-tech rollercoaster bigger than the entire starship it was supposedly inside was the culmination of everything I dislike about DSC’s effects. Visual effects should support the story, avoid getting in its way, and facilitate the audience’s suspension of disbelief by depicting the unreal in a believable way (as far as the technology or budget allows). DSC’s visuals fail on every one of those levels, placing excess and indulgence over good visual or conceptual storytelling. In most respects, I think the show is on the right track now, but its FX are more on the wrong track than ever.

@24/ED: Wise move. The galaxy isn’t expanding over time; the universe is, moving galaxies further apart from one another. And it’s way too slow to make a difference in a paltry 8-9 centuries.

@26/ED: Andromeda as originally conceived was a rich hard science fiction universe of a sort that had probably never been depicted on TV before, the kind of science-savvy, plausible space opera that I usually write. Hard SF on television is vanishingly rare; the one other significant hard-SF space series I can think of on TV is The Expanse.

The thing that really won me over was the All Systems University Library website that’s archived here:

http://www.saveandromeda.com/allsystems/

You can see for yourself how rich the worldbuilding and backstory were. That site was online months before the show premiered, and the producers had an active online presence on the message boards, so I was part of a whole fan community that was built up online before the show even started. The series itself was kind of disappointing compared to the preliminary hype, but knowing what lay behind the limited stuff we saw onscreen helped keep me invested.

@30/Arlo: I think it depends on the context. As with all things, it’s not whether you use an idea that matters, but how you use it, whether it’s necessary and valuable to do it that way. If you want to tell a story about preventing a disaster or massive loss of life, it’s enough to do it on the level of one world or several; putting the fate of the entire Federation or galaxy or universe at stake is a gratuitous exaggeration.

But in the case of the Burn, the galactic scope was necessary. After all, it’s the far future where civilization has presumably spread galaxywide. If the Burn had only been local, it would’ve been easy enough to recover from it by trading with neighboring powers for their dilithium. So the only way the premise would work is if it were galaxywide.

Also, it’s not about preventing the disaster, but about coping with its long-term aftereffects. That’s not operatic at all. It’s far more nuanced. All the big, massive changes already happened generations ago; this season was about our characters learning about them and being affected by them. Burnham’s need to solve the mystery of the Burn wasn’t really essential for saving the Federation; it did happen to lead them to a whole new dilithium source, but that was by accident. Burnham said she didn’t think the Federation could really heal until the cause was understood, but that reasoning was vague; really, it was more just her personal need to understand it. If she hadn’t pursued that quest, it wouldn’t have led to the end of the galaxy; it would’ve just left the status quo pretty much intact. What she and the rest of the crew achieved over the season was not about averting Armageddon, but just about finding a way to make people’s lives better.

@32/roxana: “One wonders what the galaxy spanning threat will be in Season Four.”

There wasn’t a galaxy-spanning threat in season 3. Just the aftermath of a century-old galaxy-spanning disaster. That’s not a threat, that’s a setting. The only continuing threat this season was the Emerald Chain, and that was only an intermittent factor in the stories.

“There’s a theory going round that there won’t be a fourth season. Seems ratings haven’t been great.”

Did you get that from the YouTube conspiracy nuts who are always claiming everything’s been cancelled? Season 4 has been in production since November 2.

@40/Sunspear: “Same here, only it happened in the past. The huge all encompassing threat is still part of the season.”

As I already said, what matters isn’t simply whether a device is used, but how it’s used. The same ingredient can work totally differently in two different contexts. In season 2, the disaster was the immediate threat they were addressing directly; in season 3, the disaster was deep background that happened long ago, and they were dealing with its consequences on a local, cultural, and ultimately a deeply personal scale.

It’s like the difference between, say, Fail Safe, which is about trying to prevent an imminent nuclear war, and Roddenberry’s Genesis II, about trying to rebuild society a century and a half after a nuclear war. Or the difference between, say, an action story about a mother trying to save her son from being murdered in two hours and a drama about a mother who’s fallen into alcoholic despair since her son was murdered three years ago. They’re two totally different ways of dealing with the premise, because they’re approaching it from opposite ends and very different distances. They’re not equivalent at all.

“Maybe next season they can scale it back even more and have the stakes confined to a planet or singular solar system.”

The physical scale of a story is singularly irrelevant. That’s superficial. What matters is the character impact and the thematic substance. This season was mostly focused on individual characters; the larger galactic issues were just the backdrops for the character stories. The mystery of the Burn was a McGuffin that drove Burnham’s character arc and led to Saru bonding with Su’Kal and learning of his personal tragedy. The isolation of Earth and Trill was the background that drove Adira’s arc of coming to terms with having a Trill symbiont, and Gray’s arc of struggling to cope with being basically dead, and that in turn led to Stamets and Culber’s arc of adopting them as a surrogate child. (We need a non-gendered word for an adult offspring.)

@52/Jana: “I don’t agree that a story only has meaning if it affects a character we care about. One of my favourite Star Trek traits is that the characters themselves care about strangers, and thus make us care about strangers, too.”

But… that is a story about characters we care about. I never said it was limited to characters we previously cared about. My point all along has been that the stories focused on the individual 32nd-century people affected by the larger galactic story — Book, the miners in “Far from Home,” Adira and Gray, the Trill guardian, Vance, Ryn, etc. — culminating in the climactic arc that resolved the Burn narrative, not in some big impersonal story about an evil enemy trying to destroy everything, but in the most profoundly personal way imaginable, with the whole Burn being the manifestation of one boy’s unbearable grief.

That’s why this is better than the previous seasons’ galactic-scale threats. Because it wasn’t an imminent danger driving an action story, it was a backdrop for telling these character stories about the people and communities of the post-Burn era and how Discovery helped them.

“Turning a grand astropolitical event into the backdrop for a personal story may even trivialise the grand astropolitical event.”

I disagree. What trivializes it is failing to explore its consequences. Look at “The Changeling.” Nomad eradicated an entire star system with billions of people living in it, but that horrific tragedy was ignored — trivialized — because we never saw any of the Malurians affected by it. But Star Trek: The Manga gave us the story “Communications Breakdown,” which took us to the surface of the dead planet and let us see how the disaster affected one of the few surviving Malurians who’d been offworld at the time. That made the destruction of Maluria feel less trivial, because we actually saw its impact.

@55/krad: “all the onscreen evidence prior to Picard…”

Not all of it. This map from DSC season 1 put Klingon space in Beta:

As for the rest, you can’t reasonably expect dialogue to be geographically accurate and reliable. People use all sorts of shorthands and imprecise references. We call Europe “the West” even though nearly all of it is in the Eastern Hemisphere. We use “America” to refer solely to the United States instead of the entire North and South American continents. The Mideast is geographically part of Asia, but people who talk about “Asians” rarely intend to include Israelis or Syrians or Iranians in the category.

I think it takes away from the verisimilitude of a fictional universe if you demand that every single spoken word be interpreted as literally correct. Real people get things wrong all the time. They speak inaccurately, they make mistakes, they believe things that are wrong, they lie, etc. So I prefer to believe that fictional characters sometime misspeak and say incorrect or imprecise things, because that makes their world more believable.

@60/Gary: “Shorthand yes, but what people don’t do is say “Western Hemisphere” when they mean Eastern Hemisphere.”

I was not suggesting an exact analogy, because very few analogies are ever meant to be exact. My point was that people use inaccurate geographical references and shorthands in all sorts of ways.

““Beta Quadrant” has a precise meaning…”

Precision is relative. A quadrant of the galaxy is a quarter of a circle about 50,000 light years in radius. Per Star Trek Star Charts, the territory occupied by the Federation and its neighbors extends less than 500 light years to either side of the Alpha/Beta border. So calling the Klingons and Romulans Alpha Quadrant powers is off by less than 1 percent, which is more than enough precision for most purposes. It’s within rounding error, basically.

“People don’t misuse the precise terms except in error, usually down to ignorance”

It’s not ignorance, it’s synecdoche — using a part of a thing to refer to the greater whole (more precisely pars pro toto). This actually happens a lot in geography — “Bosnia” for Bosnia and Herzegovina, “Antigua” for Antigua and Barbados, “Trinidad” for Trinidad and Tobago, etc. Also things like referring to the Soviet Union as “Russia,” the United Kingdom as “Britain,” etc. It’s just a convenient shorthand. It’s easier to say fewer words, so you say “Alpha Quadrant” instead of “the local region straddling portions of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.”

“While I’m disagreeing, I’ll also add that the Burn was not exclusively used as a past event for setting up our stories this season, though I wish that were true. There were hints that it could happen again, and that possibility would forever prevent the Federation’s reformation.”

I never said “exclusively.” The fact that there were only hints of a renewed danger is my whole point — that it wasn’t the main purpose the concept served, in contrast to the threats that drove seasons 1 & 2.

You’re talking as though this has to be reduced to an all-or-nothing choice, that it should be entirely one thing and that any taint of another thing ruins it altogether. There’s nothing wrong with a concept serving more than one purpose at a time. It’s good for a story device to balance both personal and larger stakes, for one to resonate with the other. Especially if the larger stakes are there to help motivate and intensify the character drama. Sunspear explains that quite well in comment #62.

@63/cap-mjb: “It doesn’t help that The Star Trek Encyclopedia’s sole justification for placing the local powers in two different quadrants (which, judging by your comments, seems to have been revised by STO) was a throwaway line in The Wrath of Khan which could be interpreted several different ways.”

As I’ve been saying, the maps used by those reference books are based on the behind-the-scenes maps used by the TNG art department years before those books came out. I don’t think TWOK had anything to do with it, because they didn’t add the quadrants to the galaxy map until after TNG: “The Price” established the Greek-letter quadrant system we know today.

@70/Sunspear: Of course STO is official and licensed, and of course it’s as valid a tie-in as any other, but that doesn’t mean that the concepts it comes up with are canonical, any more than the elaborate continuity we built in the novels over the past couple of decades that got ignored and largely invalidated by Picard. A game has its own needs that require it to be unrealistic in certain ways (e.g. gigantic sets, characters respawning after death, the ability to carry impossible amounts of weapons and supplies), so one shouldn’t take its conceits too literally.

My point is not that STO’s map is “correct,” merely that it’s a variation on the maps that Rick Sternbach, Mike Okuda, Geoffrey Mandel, etc. developed over the years on TNG, DS9, and VGR and that Mandel and Doug Drexler elaborated upon in Star Trek Star Charts. It’s not something that STO’s creators pulled out of a hat. But it’s their own distinct version of that standard map, stylized and adjusted to function as a game board, so to speak.

@73/cap-mjb: “So it seems that line in TWOK was the reason for putting the quadrant boundary through the middle of explored space, even if they hadn’t come up with names for them when they first did it.”

Not quite. Before “The Price,” they didn’t use quadrants at all. Look at the early-TNG version of the galaxy map again — it simply doesn’t have quadrants, with or without names. The quadrant idea was introduced at the same time as the Greek-letter designations, in “The Price.” Yes, the word “quadrant” was used occasionally and inconsistently in dialogue before then, but the production staff’s map didn’t incorporate quadrants until then.

Despite what the Encyclopedia says, I doubt the TWOK thing was the exclusive reason they put the quadrant border where they did. If you look at the above early map, it marks the top of the map as 0 degrees and puts Earth on the 180-degree line pointing straight down. Given that map convention, if you wanted to divide that circle into quadrants, you’d naturally draw the dividing lines at 0-180 and 90-270, which would put one of the dividing lines right through the Sol system. So that’s just the simplest, most obvious way to modify the existing map to add quadrants. It also parallels the way the Prime Meridian passes through the Greenwich Observatory. Since Earth is the heart of the UFP in the same way that London was the heart of the British Empire, it stands to reason to use it as a coordinate origin in the same way.

“It’s a rather silly justification, which for years everyone ignored and just placed everything in the Alpha Quadrant.”

That’s because the original use of the concept, in both “The Price” and DS9, was with regard to wormholes that spanned opposite sides of the galaxy, so that one end of the wormhole was in the Alpha Quadrant and the other was in the Gamma Quadrant (or shifting between Gamma and Delta in the case of the Barzan wormhole). It’s really only a useful label on that scale, because a quadrant of the galactic disk is impractically large as a cartographic reference for most purposes (you wouldn’t give someone directions to your house by telling them it’s in the Western Hemisphere). But DS9 got into the habit of talking about Alpha vs. Gamma where wormhole-based stories were concerned, so when their storytelling expanded to encompass powers like the Klingons and Romulans, it was simpler to keep referring to everything on this side of the wormhole as “Alpha Quadrant” rather than confusing the audience by bringing Beta into it.

“ignoring the fact that if CBS were really sold on the idea that “Balance of Terror” is set in the Beta Quadrant then they would have insisted on it being changed”

Not really. A detail like that is too minor for CBS to make much of a fuss about. Since the characters in DS9 did use “Alpha Quadrant” for things technically meant to be in Beta, that imprecision itself has canonical precedent. Or it might just be something they missed in the review process. I haven’t read the book yet, but it seems unlikely that the name of the quadrant an event happened in would have any real story significance.

And as I keep saying, on a galactic scale, the entire Federation and its neighbors are so close to the Alpha/Beta border that the distinction between the two quadrants boils down to rounding error, so it’s an academic distinction that isn’t worth worrying about, any more than it’s worth worrying whether a given part of London is in the Eastern or Western Hemisphere. It’s such a trivial nitpick, so utterly irrelevant on the scale being discussed, that it hardly matters if someone gets it technically wrong.

@79/Sunspear: “Most of all, I like the relative sizes of the small blobs of Fed, Romulan, and Klingon space showing that they are nowhere near galactic level powers. They cover a small slice of the pie.”

As I said, though, that early TNG-era map shows them occupying a much, much larger swath of the galaxy than the final Star Charts map does. It has most of the UFP’s territory and the entire Klingon Empire in the Perseus Arm, while the current map has them and the Romulans just in a small part of the central Orion Arm, basically within that yellow dot in the image you posted.

It’s hard for the human mind to grasp just how immense the galaxy is. It contains something like 400 billion stars, after all. Even if only one percent of them had habitable worlds and the Federation visited a new world every day, it would take more than 10 million years to visit them all. So it’s unrealistic to expect any “galactic” power to occupy any sizeable percentage of the galaxy, no matter how advanced it is. It might be spread out fairly far, but would probably occupy only a fraction of the worlds in a given volume. Instead of drawing blobs and borders like on Earthbound maps, it’d be more realistic to show interstellar nations as interlaced branching networks of settled worlds and travel routes.

However, it would certainly be possible for a collective galaxy-wide civilization to exist — not a single power spreading that far, but a galaxy-wide network of communication, trade, and cultural exchange between different civilizations, like the nations of Earth today. There would simply be too many distinct civilizations for any one of them to be in direct or regular contact with every other one, but each one would be in contact with a range of civilizations that would be in contact with a range of other civilizations and so on and so on, encompassing the entire galaxy. That’s what I’d assume the state of the galaxy to have been before the Burn.

“In STV, they get to the center of the galaxy in hours at warp 7, which is pretty hilarious.”

According to Sulu’s dialogue, it takes 6.7 hours — but the action in the film runs continuously from that moment until their arrival, with no room for any sizeable breaks, so it’s actually more like 20 minutes.

But there are only three near-consecutive lines that refer to the center of the galaxy at all, so I just choose to ignore that bit and assume the “Great Barrier” was somewhere closer.

(As for Solo’s Kessel run comment, the script makes it clear that it was supposed to be nonsense, an indication that Solo didn’t know what he was talking about; a stage direction has Kenobi rolling his eyes at the ludicrous bluster, though that reaction was hard to see in the final edit of the scene.)