Star Trek:Discovery Themes and Continuity

I recently finished watching Star Trek:Discovery, and I wanted to reflect on the series here. This post is going to talk about the series over all and how it fits in with other Trek. Then in a follow up post I’m going to talk about representation of marginalized people on Discovery. (I started out writing one long post but it was too disorganized and needed to be split up.) Since I last wrote about Star Trek R and I have finished watching original series (TOS) highlights and watched most of the first three seasons of Next Generation (TNG), skipping the really bad episodes (e.g. most of season one). At the end of season 3 of TNG we took a break to watch Discovery. I’m becoming a bit obsessed with all things Star Trek. I’ve been enjoying pondering questions like “what would one wager in post scarcity society?” and coming up with Watsonian solutions to Doylist problems.*

Before I get into spoilery bits, I want to say that I liked Discovery and that it did contain thematic elements that are important to making it feel like Star Trek to me. However, it did lack a lot of the quiet character moments that I enjoy in other Star Trek shows. I really wanted to be able to see Discovery as something that stood on its own, but the show was keen to remind me about how it linked to the franchise.

( spoilers )

*In the Sherlock Holmes stories Watson is the 1st person narrator and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is author. So a Watsonian approach uses only in universe stuff, whereas a Doylist approach acknowledges that the story is work of fiction created