Star Trek: Discovery (2017-2024) Review
-10/10
Sixty-five episodes across five seasons and seven years. The first Star Trek on television in twelve years, the show that was supposed to restart the franchise, with a streaming budget, a cast of working actors and half a century of established material to draw on. Everything anybody could want was handed to this production. Decades of history, decades of lore, a fan base that had waited twelve years and would have forgiven almost anything, and a network that wanted it to succeed badly enough to build a subscription service around it. What they made is bat shit. It’s incoherent, difficult to follow, structurally broken, and every one of the sixty-five hours rates a 1 or less. Several of them are below zero. None of that is because it was progressive. I want to be exact about this, because the lazy criticism has crowded out the real one. The problem is that the writers didn’t know what they were doing, and the production history shows why.
Nobody Was In Charge
The documented production history is the single best explanation for everything wrong with this show, and it’s worse than most people realize. Five people are credited as showrunner across five seasons. Bryan Fuller, Gretchen Berg, Aaron Harberts, Alex Kurtzman and Michelle Paradise. Three separate regimes ran the first three seasons.
Fuller created it and never saw it air. He was showrunner from February to roughly October 2016, left over creative differences with CBS and a commitment to American Gods, and people executing somebody else’s premise without his plan for it made the series that reached screens. Berg and Harberts took over for season one with Akiva Goldsman producing alongside them. Goldsman didn’t return after that season, having clashed with the writing staff. Nicholas Meyer, who wrote and directed The Wrath of Khan, was on the staff and wasn’t asked back for season two.
Berg and Harberts were then fired by CBS in June 2018, during production on season two. The reported grounds were a first episode that went significantly over budget and alleged abusive behavior toward the writing staff. Kurtzman took over and, in the language of the reporting, regrouped the writers mid-season.
Season two’s episode count was extended to fourteen to amortize the cost of the resulting delays. Paradise arrived for season three, and the show then changed its entire century and premise by jumping nine hundred years into the future.
So the writers didn’t know what they were doing because nobody was permitted to know for long enough. A creator who left, a producer who fought the room, two showrunners fired for going over budget and mistreating staff, a mid-season rebuild, and a setting change in year three. That’s a succession crisis with a title sequence.
Incoherence in a finished work is almost always an organizational fact instead of a talent problem. Five showrunners can’t produce one argument, because a plan is the thing a showrunner is for. Before concluding that writers are bad, find out how many of them there were and how long each lasted. A creator who leaves before broadcast leaves a premise without a thesis. Everybody afterward is interpreting a pitch instead of executing a design.
A setting change in season three is a confession. It means the premise you launched with couldn’t sustain the show and nobody could fix it in place.
A Pile of Shit From Front to Back
The show is broken in every structural dimension a television series has.
The plotting is incoherent. Season one starts a Klingon war with a mutiny, resolves it with a bomb inside a planet and a deal with a Mirror Universe dictator. Season two is a time-traveling artificial intelligence, a red angel and Spock’s childhood, ending with the entire ship fleeing to the far future to hide a data file. Seasons three through five are the ruins of the Federation, a galactic cataclysm caused by a grieving child, and a treasure hunt for an alien library.
None of that connects to any of the rest of it. Each season discards the previous one’s premise and several of its characters. That means seven years of television has no cumulative shape at all. It’s difficult to follow. That’s a strange thing to say about a show this simple underneath. The confusion isn’t complexity, it’s that consequences don’t persist, the show invents terminology per episode, and it restates the stakes instead of establishing them.
The dialogue is the worst in the franchise. Characters explain their feelings at each other in complete paragraphs, every conversation reaches for a speech, and nobody in five seasons says an ordinary sentence about an ordinary thing.
The scale is also wrong in a way that breaks the drama permanently. Every season finale is the end of all life, the fate of the galaxy, the survival of the Federation itself, and once everything is always at maximum there’s nothing left to escalate to and nothing at stake in any individual hour.
Add the spore drive, which lets the ship go anywhere instantly and which the show has to keep inventing reasons not to use, and the Burn, which destroys all warp travel because a child was sad. Those are premises somebody wrote down and nobody interrogated. The Burn makes me laugh whenever I think about it: a galaxy-wide catastrophe with the emotional logic of a tantrum, played by everybody involved with a completely straight face.
If every finale is the end of everything, nothing is at stake in any episode. Escalation requires somewhere left to go, and a work that opens at maximum has spent its only resource. The fix is smaller stakes earlier. A show that begins with a supply problem can end with a war. Discarding your premise every season means seven years produce no accumulated story. Each new setting resets the audience’s investment to zero and asks them to start again. Characters who explain their feelings in paragraphs are doing the writer’s work. Subtext isn’t decoration, it’s the mechanism by which a reader participates.
Michael Burnham Is the Entire Universe
Every season balances on one person and it’s the most destructive structural decision in the show. Michael Burnham starts the Klingon war through a mutiny in the first two episodes. She then wins it. She’s Spock’s previously unmentioned adoptive sister. She’s the Red Angel, or connected to the Red Angel. It’s her mother. She solves the Burn. She becomes captain. She saves the Federation. She finds the library.
Girl boss to the extreme is the phrase for it and the structure deserves the mockery. Every problem in the series originates with her and she delivers every solution, across five seasons and two centuries. That means nobody else on the ship has a reason to be aboard.
That’s what makes the supporting cast unwatchable, and it’s not the actors’ doing. Saru, Stamets, Tilly and Culber are given feelings instead of functions. They react to Burnham, worry about Burnham, and are told things by Burnham, and none of them ever solves anything the plot required solving.
Compare any functioning ensemble. Kirk decides between Spock and McCoy, who disagree. Starfleet overrules Sisko and Kira argues with him. The Enterprise-D has Riker running the ship because Picard won’t. Those are distributions of competence, and distribution makes an ensemble. The promotion is where it becomes indefensible. A convicted mutineer who started a war is given command of the ship, and the series treats this as inevitable and not as a thing requiring explanation, because by then the show has no mechanism for anybody else to be the answer.
Sonequa Martin-Green is a capable actor who was handed a character required to be the smartest, bravest, most important and most emotionally central person in every scene for five years. Nobody survives that assignment.
An ensemble is a distribution of competence. If one character generates every problem and supplies every solution, everybody else is scenery with dialogue, and the audience works that out within a season. The test is simple. Remove your protagonist from an episode. If the plot can’t proceed at all, you haven’t written a crew. A protagonist who’s the cause of the crisis and the solution to it isn’t an arc, it’s a loop. Nothing is learned because nothing was ever going to be resolved by anybody else.
Give somebody else the answer once per season, at minimum. It costs the protagonist nothing and it’s the only thing that makes the other characters exist.
Changing the Klingons Is the Dumbest Decision in Franchise History
They lost a large part of the audience in the first episode, and they did it with a decision that had no purpose, no defense and no upside.
The Klingons in this show are bald, grey or charcoal skinned, with ridges running from the brow over the entire skull, widened noses, sunken eyes and no hair or facial hair anywhere. They share almost nothing with four decades of established appearance.
Ask what problem that solved. Klingons had been a functioning design since 1979, with named characters, a developed culture, a constructed language and a warrior aesthetic that several hundred episodes had built up. The show threw all of it away in its opening scene, before the audience had been given a single reason to trust the production.
The stated rationale is thinner than the decision. Glenn Hetrick has explained that his team became fixated on a myth in which Kahless cuts off his hair and forges the first bat’leth from it, and decided from that story that Klingons should be bald. A discarded Robert Fletcher pre-production sketch from around 1979 was also produced afterward as justification.
So a single legend and an unused forty-year-old drawing were set against roughly four hundred episodes of canonical appearance. That’s a production deciding the established version was an obstacle, and I find the arrogance of it harder to forgive than the makeup itself. Somebody looked at a species four decades of writers and actors had built and decided one myth outranked all of their work.
The decision was Bryan Fuller’s instead of Alex Kurtzman’s.
It matters and is usually got wrong. Fuller mandated that the Klingons be bald, and then left the production before any of it aired. That means the person who made the single most damaging design call in franchise history wasn’t there for a day of the consequences.
The franchise had also already solved this exact problem, canonically, and the show ignored the solution. The Enterprise two-parter Affliction and Divergence explained the difference between smooth-headed and ridged Klingons through an Augment virus and Phlox’s antivirus, closing with Phlox observing that cranial reconstruction was about to become very popular. That’s a working in-universe explanation, produced by the previous series, and Discovery neither used it nor replaced it.
The practical cost is the one that ruins the performances. Classic Klingon makeup left the lower half of an actor’s face visible. This design covered all of it, and the dialogue was largely in subtitled Klingon delivered through dentures that slowed everybody down. Alan Sepinwall’s description of the premiere is the fair one: the Klingon scenes were a chore, with actors buried under makeup that limited their expressiveness. An hour of television whose antagonists can’t emote or speak at normal speed is an hour nobody can follow.
The best detail in the whole episode is an irony nobody planned. Hetrick and Neville Page were judges on Face Off, a competition where they routinely marked contestants down for building prosthetics that stopped performers from acting, and then they built exactly that.
This doesn’t reflect on the craft itself. That’s worth saying. Hetrick won a Primetime Emmy in 2019 for prosthetic makeup on this show, and the execution is accomplished. A well-made version of a wrong decision is still a wrong decision. And the production knew. Hair was added in season two to bridge the two designs, the Klingons then stopped appearing at all once the show jumped to the thirty-second century, and Strange New Worlds redesigned them back toward the traditional look and said nothing about it. Three separate retreats from one choice.
Never spend your audience’s goodwill in the first episode. This production altered the most recognizable species in its own franchise before it had earned a single minute of trust, and a large part of the audience left over it.
Established design is accumulated audience investment. Changing it costs you something real and has to buy something real. Check whether the problem you’re solving has already been solved. The previous series had explained Klingon appearance changes with an in-universe mechanism, and this one neither used it nor offered an alternative. A rationale that rests on one myth and a discarded sketch isn’t a rationale. If your justification arrives after the criticism, it was a preference.
Prosthetics that prevent a performance have failed regardless of how well they’re built. The designers here had spent years on television telling other people exactly that. When a production retreats from a decision three separate times, that’s the verdict. Hair added, species withdrawn, successor show reversing it.
It Is Not About Being Woke
The complaint above is structural and I want it kept separate from the argument that’s attached itself to this show, because that argument is wrong and it’s protected the production from real criticism.
A Black woman as lead isn’t a defect.
A gay couple among the regulars isn’t a defect. A non-binary character isn’t a defect. None of those decisions cost this show anything, and Star Trek has been doing exactly this since a Russian sat on the bridge in 1967 at the height of the Cold War.
The original series put Uhura on the bridge and Chekov beside her deliberately, and the franchise’s entire claim to significance rests on having done that early. Objecting to the same instinct in 2017 is objecting to Star Trek. What Discovery does wrong is craft. Incoherent plotting, five showrunners, no accumulated story, dialogue that states its subtext, escalation with nowhere to go, and a protagonist who has absorbed every other character’s function.
Those failures would be identical with any cast. Swap every actor and every identity and you’d still have a show that discarded its premise three times and couldn’t decide what century it was in.
The reason this distinction matters is practical. A production that can dismiss its critics as bigots doesn’t have to read the criticism, and this one spent seven years doing exactly that while the actual problems went unaddressed.
So the useful version of the objection is the one that can’t be deflected. This show is bad at writing, and the evidence is a documented succession of fired and departing showrunners instead of anybody’s opinion about casting.
Make your criticism the kind that can’t be dismissed. A structural argument about plotting and ensemble distribution survives any counter-attack, and a complaint about casting hands the other side the easy win. The lazy version also protects the target. A production that can categorize its critics doesn’t have to answer them.
Identify what would be unchanged if you altered the variable. Recast this show entirely and every problem in this review remains. That’s how you know what the problems are.
The Performances Do Not Work
Almost nobody in this show is any good in it, and the tone is why.
Discovery requires its cast to play at emotional maximum in nearly every scene. People are in tears constantly, deliver enormous statements about family and belonging, and speak in a hushed, weighted, significant tone that the show mistakes for gravity. Nobody can sustain that. An actor given a peak in every scene has no dynamic range left, and the performances flatten into a single intensity across five years.
Doug Jones is a physical performer buried under prosthetics and a character arc that changes his species’ fundamental nature to service a plot. Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz are given a relationship and almost no professional function. Mary Wiseman is asked to be anxious for five years. I feel sorry for all four of them. Watching capable actors stranded with nothing to play wears me down faster than the plotting does.
There’s exactly one thing in sixty-five hours that I liked, and it’s a scene instead of an episode. That tells you everything about the ratio. Paul Guilfoyle turns up in Terra Firma, the ninth and tenth episodes of the third season, as a man in a suit and a bowler hat sitting in a deck chair with a newspaper in the middle of a frozen planet, next to a door standing in open snow. He’s eventually revealed to be the Guardian of Forever.
The scene itself is lame. The reveal is telegraphed, the mechanics of what has just happened to Georgiou make no sense on inspection, and the scene exists to move a character toward a spinoff. I liked it anyway, for two reasons that have nothing to do with the writing.
The first is Guilfoyle. He played Jim Brass on CSI for fourteen seasons, which is covered elsewhere on this site, and he arrives here with the kind of unforced authority nobody else in this production has. He announces that he’s the Guardian of Forever in a booming voice and it works, because he doesn’t appear to be trying.
The second is what he is. The Guardian is from The City on the Edge of Forever, which is the best hour the original series made and which my review of that show covers, and it had been a four-billion-year-old glowing ring voiced by Bartell La Rue since 1967. Putting a personification of it in a deck chair is the one good idea anybody had here.
And that’s the case against the show in one scene. The only thing that works in five seasons is a guest actor in a sequence I’d otherwise call bad, and it works because of who he is and what he’s referring to instead of because of anything this production wrote.
That still doesn’t raise any episode above a 1. A good scene inside a broken hour doesn’t rescue the hour, and everything around Terra Firma is as incoherent as the rest of it.
There’s a final irony in it. The door Carl opens is what sends Georgiou off to set up the Section 31 film.
That arrived in 2025 at twenty-two percent with critics and is widely held to be the worst thing the franchise has released. The one moment I liked was the setup for the worst thing they made.
A performer who’s not trying will beat a room full of performers who are. Guilfoyle lands a line about being four billion years old by underplaying it, in a production where everybody else is at maximum. That contrast is the whole diagnosis. The tone was the problem. When the best thing in a work is an outside reference, the work hasn’t generated anything. The scene borrows its weight from 1967 and from another series entirely. Separate liking a moment from rating the hour. A scene can be the only thing you enjoyed and the episode can still be a 1, and collapsing the two is how reviews lose their credibility.
The Lore Was There and They Broke It
Fifty years of established material was the single biggest asset this production had and it’s treated as an obstacle throughout.
Burnham being Spock’s adoptive sister is the clearest example. It inserts a previously unmentioned sibling into the most documented family in the franchise, requires Sarek and Amanda to have concealed her for decades, and exists so the new lead can be attached to an old name. The Klingon redesign is the worst instance and has its own section above. A species with four decades of established appearance, language and culture was rebuilt from scratch in the opening scene, for no narrative reason, against an explanation the previous series had already supplied.
The spore drive is a technology that makes every ship in the franchise obsolete, invented a decade before the original series, and the show has to spend five seasons explaining why nobody ever used it again. A prequel that introduces something better than everything after it’s created a problem it can’t solve.
The season two solution is the admission. The entire ship and crew are sent nine hundred years into the future and classified out of history. That’s a plot device whose only function is to remove the show from the continuity it kept breaking. Think about what that means as a production decision. The show that was given the lore as an advantage concluded, in year two, that its best option was to leave the setting entirely and go somewhere with no established history at all. And the shows that followed it learned the lesson. Strange New Worlds took the one good thing Discovery produced, put it back in the original era, and made an episodic series that respects the material. That’s covered separately on this site.
Established material is an asset or an obstacle depending on whether you have something to say inside it. This production treated fifty years of history as a constraint to work around and then removed itself from it.
The sign is a retroactive relation. Making your new lead somebody’s secret sister is borrowing significance instead of building it.
Don’t introduce a capability that breaks everything downstream. A prequel that invents a better engine has to spend the rest of its life explaining the engine’s absence.
If your solution is to leave the setting, the setting was never the problem. You were.
Should you watch Star Trek: Discovery?
No. Not one hour of it. Fifty years of lore, a twelve-year wait, a subscription service built around it, and five showrunners who never had the same plan twice. A protagonist who causes every problem and solves every problem, an ensemble with nothing to do, dialogue that states its own subtext, and two good performances the production removed. A pile of shit from front to back, and none of it for the reasons people usually give.
That’s why no hour of this gets higher than a 1 from me, and why the worst of them sink below zero. Plenty of bad television gets a shrug from me. This gets anger, because a production was handed everything Star Trek had built and cared so little about it that it ran nine hundred years into the future to get away from it.
