Right, I said it’s “not bad,” hardly a ringing endorsement. It had some good ideas and concepts but it also has a lot of flaws, which is why it’s quite unfortunate that it’s the best Discovery ever managed.

Right? Put Lorca on the front of my list to round out all four seasons. The outsiders carry the cast.

My problem with season 4 wasn’t that it was slow, but that it was uninspired and by-the-numbers. I had worked out that the DMA was a “stepping on an anthill” situation by… episode 4, maybe? 5 at the latest. So then I got to watch one of the oldest tropes in sci-fi unfold for 8 more episodes, played completely straight. Yawn.

I’d rather watch the B-plot from S01E06 of Babylon 5 to experience that particular story again. That way I’d be done in an hour.

Yes, exactly. Season 1 knew what it wanted to be. When it was over, I remember thinking “alright, not bad, I’m excited to watch this show grow the beard.”

But it never did. In retrospect, Season 1 is the strongest season the show had to offer. Each subsequent season got a little worse as plots got more confusing, themes got more muddled, and no breakout characters emerged to carry the show through an abundance of narrative turmoil and worldbuilding strangeness. But above all else, seasons 3 and 4 are just boring. I don’t care about the crew or their mission. The most interesting characters are consistently the outsiders: Pike, Vance, Rillak. I’ll be watching season 5, but mostly out of a sense of obligation and morbid curiosity.

As much as I like SNW, it’s still not quite the show I’ve been waiting since 2005 for: seven curious officers on a ship called Enterprise set in the mid-25th century. I worry that SNW has robbed us of the opportunity to see the classic formula set in the immediate post-TNG era… even though that seems to be what season three of Picard was explicitly setting up.