Star Trek: Discovery

The first season was ok and had a promising start but it rapidly decayed into a sappy soap opera set in the Star Trek universe. The characters in the show and the plot have all the potential needed but the continuing agony of ongoing psychology sessions (they call them episodes) is making me reconsider my future and I'll need counselling, long into the future, for having watched this. Writing this is part of my exposure therapy after season 4 where my brain was set to stun. But seriously, so disappointed that the focus was on giving out life lessons and not writing good Star Trek stories. I get it that you can have positive messages in shows, not a bad thing, but this is just way too much, at the expense of a potentially good series.

In my personal unscientific rating scale 4=Forced myself to watch to the end but didn't really enjoy and won't watch it again.

First 2 seasons I thoroughly enjoyed. (Through all seasons the constant, intense, whispered dialogue drives me nuts.)

Now everyone on the ship needing to be acknowledged for their feelings and overly emotional sense of being completely overshadows any mission.

This should be called Star Trek: Self Discovery because it's more like an aggressive HR sensitivity training seminar than anything Star Trek.

If Star Trek is what you're looking for, this isn't it. If you want a sci-fi, poorly written soap opera, this is your jam.

There's about 15-20 minutes of each episode worth watching if you're interested their actual mission. Skip skip skip

This review now contains 600+ characters.

Where to begin...

For starters, it claims to be in line with the original series and its timeline yet nothing on display lines up with it or even visually resembles it. Instead it tries to replicate the look, feel, and energy of the JJ Abrams/Kelvin timeline movies(lens flares aplenty!) but it even fails at that.

The characters are mostly bland, stereotypical, and unlikeable.

It feels like everything that the original series tried to say has been thrown out the window to appeal to one-sided politics, Gene Roddenberry was trying to present hope and optimism for the future but here as far as Discovery is concerned the future is to be pretty but cold and uncaring.

As for the acting it ranges from good to okay mostly, very talented performers such as Jason Isaacs, Michelle Yeoh, Anson Mount, and Doug Jones all try their hardest but only in tiny glimpses are able to make the rough material work.

I would have to agree with other commenters that you are just better off with The Orville instead, far better Star Trek series.

80% Adolence Drama + 10% Extra Stupidity + 10% Star Trek = ST Discovery. Compared to ST TNG / PICARD / ST New Worlds this series unfortunately has all the ingredients of high school summer camp. The actors / actresses are great, it's the plot writers that seem to focus the topic with realistic actions. Current plots and individual interactions are predictable. Final Season starts with two large Federation ships with near a thousand crew members going to get ancient Romulan artifact in a pre-determined hostile environment only to transport only three Star Fleet crew members to confront two armed thieves. End Result = Mission Failed = Start of final season series plot. Good grief!!!

The show started out techno-clever with interesting character interactions.

Now all we have is a bunch of needy characters episode after episode. Even the computer is needy. It is exhausting.

I give it a 6 because I still have hope, but the writing is being sucked into a black hole of neediness.