I believe that after the first season Discovery is most easily legible as the epiphenomenon of professional jockeying within the entertainment industry. Some things in early episode plots might be misguided, but by season five it is only explicable as the fallout from production conflicts within Paramount.
I'm not saying it's *good* writing (or that the Doylean driver wasn't IP management concerns) but the Kovich reveal felt thematically consistent to me as reflecting the way in which Trek has become increasingly, although not uniformly, a story about individuals and
bloodlines rather than institutions and societies: almost as if his identity isn't as important thematically as the mementos in his office, a shrine to welcome Michael to rather than an anthropology museum.
A bigger example of this ---and why I think there's a thematic justification for having around somebody who has personally witnessed most of Trek history--- is _what_ Discovery (the ship) brought to the table in the future that made it re-energize the Federation. Yes, the spore drive was a huge asset, and it'd have been enough on its own, but they didn't find a practically diminished but competent Federation with skills and knowledge beyond them - they almost re-seeded a sort of "holy fire" that at least part of late Trek seems to want to only exist in on-screen named characters.
Perhaps I'm selling the 32nd c. Federation short: Discovery found good people doing their best in a bad situation. But they found no *peers,* no plucky hypercompetent motley crew facing the impossible on a weekly basis who just needed a tech break to win; if the show is saying that you can't have those without having a resource advantage or at least parity then it's going against Enterprise's particular goal, which was to show that your don't require that to boldly go. Here Voyager studied half of it: what if you have the tech advantage but not the Federation at your back? And the Discovery crew, despite centuries of a time gap, never really found itself at an overwhelming technological disadvantage - granted that many of those were bad centuries for research, but still they should have had at least one "first encounter with the Borg"-level traumatic moment of radical technological disadvantage.
I'm hypocritical here in that I cheered when I saw the old TNG crew back in Picard. But the message was almost that Starfleet had spent a generation without creating a single new Enterprise-level Federation-saving crew, which seems like a micro version of post-Burn/pre-Return of Discovery gap.
Like, they literally called the final PICARD episode "The Last Generation"! It's nuts!
Your comment also reminds me -- how meaningful is all of this supposed to be to Burnham? It's widely known that Captain Archer had a temporal fairy godmother? She's been reading up on all the old Enterprise-D missions? It's so inorganic.
I was (as you might recall) pretty irritated by the Daniels shenanigans. So many of these moves are 'empty' in a Wittgensteinian sense- revealing that one mysterious character was in fact another mysterious character did not actually provide any clarification about the nature or motives of either. Crewman Daniels the TIme Lord was now 200 years on the far side of his era, a place that seemed to have none of the Sufficient Advanced Technology Magic hinted at in Enterprise, and in which his nature as a time traveler was evidently deprecated- what does the job he has now have to do with the job he did then? Is there anything about the character of our mysterious Illuminati-esque Dr. Kovich that gels because he gave Captain Archer a few techno-trinkets a millennium ago?
No. The answer is no. What it does seem to point to is some sort of autonomous sense in the writer's room of what their job is that's distinct from what we would consider modern storytelling virtues. As I'm sure you've observed, it feels essentially religious- increasing the density of self reference seems to provide a sort of legitimacy. What happened to Daniels or what was under the helmets of the Breen would ordinarily be reckoned as only worth considering insofar as it actually provided cover for a novel storytelling idea- but in this media landscape those seem to be treated as inherently worth answering because it shows 'we didn't forget' or 'it all fits together.' In a setting with realistic pretensions, it's a near certainty that most characters will wander into the story, and then wander out, bound on separate courses- but if everyone is someone's unmentioned step-sibling or friends with the same time traveler, well then, good or bad, the prophecy is fulfilled, and to a certain mind 'goodness' is subsequently almost incidental.
I think mostly it substitutes an easy problem for a hard problem. 'What the hell are we gonna write this season' suddenly shrinks if replaced with 'what unanswered questions are tHe FanZ dying to have answered?' even if that fan is somewhat illusory (what, was someone gonna sign up for or cancel Paramount+ because we know what Breen look like?). Kovich could have been shored up as a permanent mystery by establishing other characters' discomfort with his presence, or explained with something genuinely novel about the politics or technology of the 32nd century. But just attaching him to Daniels shows they did their homework. It's the attendance points of franchise writing.
It really is weird that no one asks him, "So who are you? What's your role?" And no one resents his weird seemingly unfounded authority or ability to work outside the command chain. And that he's so busy with super important things that he can't bother to save Earth and Vulcan (NiVar), but he CAN take time out to play personal therapist to Dr. Culber....
I never watched Enterprise but knew the gist of it (ditto with the Short Trek) so I didn't think much of it either way; I'd prefer it not go answered, but didn't map on any of the stuff you've laid out here.
That said I did feel that the Calypso resolution here was a bizarre choice that, as you say, really exemplifies some of the peculiar, uninteresting motivations going into making this TV show. Well, actually the whole plot of the fifth season was this, to be fair, in opposition to the previous seasons which at least had sound ideas animating them, if not execution (well, s2 excepted).
I guess that stories that are so resolutely about meta-commentaries on not just genres and storytelling (an old hat) but about "canonical" placement in a franchise is really endemic to this current (declining?) age of media, but I've never cared for it, not even in Moffat/RTD Doctor Who, which I otherwise quite liked.
I think I know why you accidentally gave Daniels that promotion: Lieutenant Daniels is a character on a tv show, it’s just that he’s Lance Reddick in The Wire
I believe that after the first season Discovery is most easily legible as the epiphenomenon of professional jockeying within the entertainment industry. Some things in early episode plots might be misguided, but by season five it is only explicable as the fallout from production conflicts within Paramount.
I'm not saying it's *good* writing (or that the Doylean driver wasn't IP management concerns) but the Kovich reveal felt thematically consistent to me as reflecting the way in which Trek has become increasingly, although not uniformly, a story about individuals and
bloodlines rather than institutions and societies: almost as if his identity isn't as important thematically as the mementos in his office, a shrine to welcome Michael to rather than an anthropology museum.
A bigger example of this ---and why I think there's a thematic justification for having around somebody who has personally witnessed most of Trek history--- is _what_ Discovery (the ship) brought to the table in the future that made it re-energize the Federation. Yes, the spore drive was a huge asset, and it'd have been enough on its own, but they didn't find a practically diminished but competent Federation with skills and knowledge beyond them - they almost re-seeded a sort of "holy fire" that at least part of late Trek seems to want to only exist in on-screen named characters.
Perhaps I'm selling the 32nd c. Federation short: Discovery found good people doing their best in a bad situation. But they found no *peers,* no plucky hypercompetent motley crew facing the impossible on a weekly basis who just needed a tech break to win; if the show is saying that you can't have those without having a resource advantage or at least parity then it's going against Enterprise's particular goal, which was to show that your don't require that to boldly go. Here Voyager studied half of it: what if you have the tech advantage but not the Federation at your back? And the Discovery crew, despite centuries of a time gap, never really found itself at an overwhelming technological disadvantage - granted that many of those were bad centuries for research, but still they should have had at least one "first encounter with the Borg"-level traumatic moment of radical technological disadvantage.
I'm hypocritical here in that I cheered when I saw the old TNG crew back in Picard. But the message was almost that Starfleet had spent a generation without creating a single new Enterprise-level Federation-saving crew, which seems like a micro version of post-Burn/pre-Return of Discovery gap.
Like, they literally called the final PICARD episode "The Last Generation"! It's nuts!
Your comment also reminds me -- how meaningful is all of this supposed to be to Burnham? It's widely known that Captain Archer had a temporal fairy godmother? She's been reading up on all the old Enterprise-D missions? It's so inorganic.
I was (as you might recall) pretty irritated by the Daniels shenanigans. So many of these moves are 'empty' in a Wittgensteinian sense- revealing that one mysterious character was in fact another mysterious character did not actually provide any clarification about the nature or motives of either. Crewman Daniels the TIme Lord was now 200 years on the far side of his era, a place that seemed to have none of the Sufficient Advanced Technology Magic hinted at in Enterprise, and in which his nature as a time traveler was evidently deprecated- what does the job he has now have to do with the job he did then? Is there anything about the character of our mysterious Illuminati-esque Dr. Kovich that gels because he gave Captain Archer a few techno-trinkets a millennium ago?
No. The answer is no. What it does seem to point to is some sort of autonomous sense in the writer's room of what their job is that's distinct from what we would consider modern storytelling virtues. As I'm sure you've observed, it feels essentially religious- increasing the density of self reference seems to provide a sort of legitimacy. What happened to Daniels or what was under the helmets of the Breen would ordinarily be reckoned as only worth considering insofar as it actually provided cover for a novel storytelling idea- but in this media landscape those seem to be treated as inherently worth answering because it shows 'we didn't forget' or 'it all fits together.' In a setting with realistic pretensions, it's a near certainty that most characters will wander into the story, and then wander out, bound on separate courses- but if everyone is someone's unmentioned step-sibling or friends with the same time traveler, well then, good or bad, the prophecy is fulfilled, and to a certain mind 'goodness' is subsequently almost incidental.
I think mostly it substitutes an easy problem for a hard problem. 'What the hell are we gonna write this season' suddenly shrinks if replaced with 'what unanswered questions are tHe FanZ dying to have answered?' even if that fan is somewhat illusory (what, was someone gonna sign up for or cancel Paramount+ because we know what Breen look like?). Kovich could have been shored up as a permanent mystery by establishing other characters' discomfort with his presence, or explained with something genuinely novel about the politics or technology of the 32nd century. But just attaching him to Daniels shows they did their homework. It's the attendance points of franchise writing.
It really is weird that no one asks him, "So who are you? What's your role?" And no one resents his weird seemingly unfounded authority or ability to work outside the command chain. And that he's so busy with super important things that he can't bother to save Earth and Vulcan (NiVar), but he CAN take time out to play personal therapist to Dr. Culber....
Yeah, what exactly is he a doctor of, exactly? PhD in spooky hijinks.
I never watched Enterprise but knew the gist of it (ditto with the Short Trek) so I didn't think much of it either way; I'd prefer it not go answered, but didn't map on any of the stuff you've laid out here.
That said I did feel that the Calypso resolution here was a bizarre choice that, as you say, really exemplifies some of the peculiar, uninteresting motivations going into making this TV show. Well, actually the whole plot of the fifth season was this, to be fair, in opposition to the previous seasons which at least had sound ideas animating them, if not execution (well, s2 excepted).
I guess that stories that are so resolutely about meta-commentaries on not just genres and storytelling (an old hat) but about "canonical" placement in a franchise is really endemic to this current (declining?) age of media, but I've never cared for it, not even in Moffat/RTD Doctor Who, which I otherwise quite liked.
I think I know why you accidentally gave Daniels that promotion: Lieutenant Daniels is a character on a tv show, it’s just that he’s Lance Reddick in The Wire
OMG, that has to be it! Great catch! And apparently I was mentally promoting Enterprise's quality level as well!
I enjoyed seasons 1 and 2 of Discovery. I abandoned it part way through season 3, never to return. The polystyrene rocks of TOG held more interest.