Is Disco Trek enough?

ADDING: For the record, now that season 1 is complete, I stand by this analysis.

NOTE: I write this just hours before the finale of Disco’s first season. It’s dicey to offer an overview before getting the complete story, but what the hell. I will happily revise and recant as needed.


There is an entire book to be written — more than one, probably — about how each iteration of Star Trek extends the vision of the original while correcting perceived shortcomings of previous versions. Discovery is certainly no different, but people are having a harder time seeing it as part of this pattern. That’s because it feels so different; by Star Trek standards, so dark. But what many seem to have forgotten is how very different TNG felt from TOS when it first appeared, and for exactly the opposite reason: It was maddeningly bright. I think it’s fair to cast Disco as the anti-TNG. And just as that series started at an extreme and eventually moved back toward the center, I’m sure Disco will, too.

When Roddenberry launched TNG, he made a rule: No conflict among the good guys. The results were obvious and immediate: bland, uninspired storytelling, as seen in what is now widely agreed to be its weak first couple of seasons. Roddenberry had reportedly developed a giant ego, what with the whole Great Bird of the Galaxy thing and the adoring fans and all; some say he misunderstood his own creation. I think that’s only partly true. Roddenberry was not wrong about people wanting to believe in a hopeful, optimistic future for humanity. But he was wrong about what his job was — not to create an actual future, but to create fiction that illustrates why such optimism matters. They’re actually not at all the same thing.

Utopias do not exist. They never have, and it’s probably safe to say they never will. For that reason, fictional utopias always smack of authorial arrogance. They proclaim for all to see, “Here’s a guy so full of himself that he thinks he’s got all the answers.” Perfection being impossible, all utopias read more like religious visions than practical blueprints, and TNG was no different. And of course, the more the author tries to portray a utopia, the more the cracks show. In TNG, female characters were reduced to embarrassing stereotypes (Tasha Yar and Deanna Troi). The way the corporate boardroom replaced the chain of command was cringe-inducingly naive. The show's idealistic vision of the perfect futuristic community meant that vulnerable civilians, including children, were schlepped into the cold vacuum of space to face all the hostile aliens, disasters, diseases, and other assorted threats of the unknown. In its simplicity, this utopian future was excruciatingly unconvincing. (Arguably, poor Wesley Crusher, the embodiment of everything that seemed juvenile about TNG, paid the price in fan hatred.)

And the jingoism. Good lord, the jingoism.

If we’re perfect and without conflict, then all the conflict has to come from elsewhere. All bad is without; most good is within. You can see the problem there. In TNG, Roddenberry’s secular, utopian vision inevitably and ironically starts to look exactly like what he’s railing against: cultural imperialsim and a sense of human supremacy (mitigated only slightly by the inclusion of aliens who are ultimately very much like us; Star Trek has always struggled with the fact that the Federation looks more like a human-led empire than a coalition of true equals).

What Roddenberry had forgotten — or more likely, never knew, but his TOS writers did — was that in storytelling, the negative space is crucial. There must be both yin and yang. Not only are we more keenly aware of what we perceive to be absent; we value it all the more for the lack of it. When crafting a tale designed to illustrate a moral compass, the tricky part is to give the audience enough positive input to make that compass clear, but enough negative input — space that has yet to be filled with the goodness we seek — to make us understand why it matters, and why the struggle to achieve it is worthwhile. TOS, for all its many flaws, did extraordinary things with that negative space. Its best stories demonstrated the heroes’ struggles to find the way forward without compromising their values, to battle their own demons and confront their own biases. Kirk is at first ready to kill Gorns and Hortas before realizing his error; Spock is forever tempted by the emotions he rejects; our heroes are shown to be not so different than Klingons through Organian eyes (or whatever Organians have). Not all endings are happy.

TNG started with no negative space — or more accurately, with all the negative space assigned to Them and all the positive space assigned to Us. Perfection is not a good look on the heroes of a supposedly progressive drama. (Aside: I think that it’s interesting how, in DS9, notable for being the first Trek sequel to commit to darker storytelling, Sisko is obsessed with baseball, a game weighted toward yin, its perfect form a no-hitter, in which what doesn’t happen is more important than what does. But I digress.)

Which brings us to Disco. In season 1, Disco is nearly all negative space, so much so that it’s disorienting. Burnham’s mutiny and the Battle at the Binary Stars set up a starting point of Star Trek values in near total collapse, and the culture aboard the Discovery is downright dystopian. We get the tiniest glimpse of positive space, and the moral compass that creates it, with Captain Georgiou, only to have it — and her — brutally cut down and eaten for breakfast (both metaphorically and, we eventually discover, literally).

Understandably, this was all too much for a lot of fans. I started the season as an avid defender of this choice because, frankly, I had so detested TNG’s flaws, and I welcomed a series that recognized them and was committed to doing it differently. Of course, there’s a danger in going too far in the other direction. If all that negative space — all that absence of morality — obscures the moral compass entirely, you enter nihilistic territory, the dark ’n edgy place of which contemporary storytellers are so fond. Everything is felt very viscerally in those kinds of stories because the threat level is always turned up to 11. But they’re grueling experiences precisely because they offer no hope of redemption and no promise of joy. The question is, did Disco wander too far into that territory? If so, those who say it’s not Star Trek are right.

I’d argue it didn’t. Those tiny glimpses of positive space, of Star Trek’s native moral imperative, are yanked away early in the story and then carefully, bit by bit, returned. There are acts that are clearly evil (including some that go for real shock value, like Tyler/Voq snapping Culber’s neck and Georgiou offering Burnham a ganglia “treat”), and there are acts that are ambiguous (nearly everything Lorca did, until his big reveal). But there is good, and we certainly know it when we see it. There is love (Stamets/Culber, Burnham/Tyler); there is joy (Burnham’s dance with Stamets); there is friendship (Tilly/Burnham); and there is growth (Captain Saru). And then there are the words in the title: Star Trek. When something has entered the cultural consciousness as much as Star Trek has, the name alone does an awful lot of heavy lifting. Invoke it, and you invoke half a century of storytelling that carries volumes of authority, for all its flaws. That accrual of meaning is why people revisit fictional universes and delight in creating new chapters there, both building up and chipping away at existing foundations. It’s not enough to expect the words “Star Trek” to constitute all of Disco’s positive space, but they carry an awful lot.

That said, I’m not sure the writers got the balance exactly right. As the season went on, I began to feel that they were rushing through the moments that should have provided clarity. For the sake of a breakneck pace and an overabundance of plot twists, they barreled through some story beats they should have paused on, and set up parallels that don’t seem to play out. The worst offender is the Lorca/Burnham parallel. Lorca’s arc bends from redemption to betrayal (having lost the Buran, he gets another chance with the Discovery, only to emerge as the ultimate traitor); Burnham’s, from betrayal to redemption (no explanation needed). But neither feels complete. I can’t help feeling that, at the end of it all, I don’t really understand why either character does what they do, so the significance of the parallel remains a mystery. (If the finale proves me wrong, I’ll be ecstatic.)

What’s more, too much of Disco’s self-awareness comes not from within the story, but from its creators talking about the story. What with the immediacy of the After Trek interviews and the extensive social media campaign, it’s been too easy to tell the audience what the creators are thinking rather than actually craft the story in a way that shows them. So when Harberts, Berg, Sullivan et al reassure us that they “get” Star Trek -- or Wilson Cruz assures us they haven't buried their gays -- you can’t help wondering if they themselves are not sure they’ve done enough to convince us in the story itself.

In however many years’ time, when Disco has aired its series finale, I’m going to revisit all this. Nowadays, the arc of serialized TV plots is long and designed for binging, and thank goodness for that. I’ll be very glad to find that the long game makes perfect sense of a first chapter that, for all its flaws, has hooked me.