![]() In essence, she is willing to trade the identifiable "stuff" of Star Trek to find her way back to the core of what that stuff represents. So the main conflict of the first episode finds Michael using the relic equipment of her time, the iconography of Starfleet, as a literal bargaining chip to rediscover the remains of the Federation and to find whether its ideals have survived the collapse of its recognizable shape. In the process, she learns of an event known as The Burn, where about 100 years ago, nearly all dilithium in the galaxy exploded at once, effectively wiping out every warp-capable ship in Starfleet and erasing the infrastructure of the Federation overnight. Separated from the Discovery, Michael relies on a reluctant Book to help her find a communication hub in this future 930 years removed from anything she’s known. ![]() The first episode finds Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) spit out on the other end of the wormhole she and the Discovery entered at the end of Season Two, forcing the damaged landing of another ship piloted by a mysterious smuggler known as Book (David Ajala). In essence, Discovery’s raison d’etre is now to ask “What is Star Trek?” Kurtzman and Paradise have transformed this show into a modern rumination on the meaning of legacy. I had hopes that the inclusion of new co-showrunner Michelle Paradise and the soft reboot premise of sending the crew of the Discovery into the far-flung future would finally rid the show of its nostalgia-baiting baggage, but I never anticipated how much of a reinvention the show would undergo. This preamble may not seem relevant to reviewing Discovery’s third season, but it’s necessary groundwork to lay in establishing that this season may be the most positive turnaround I’ve ever seen from a show that was testing my patience. Just look at young sexy Spock and remember that our series protagonist is only important because she’s related to the franchise’s most iconic character. Never mind consistently interesting characters, philosophical quandaries of living in a multicultural universe, or even explorations of strange new worlds. ![]() It was a season of television weighed down by the competing visions of fired showrunners and new creative lead Alex Kurtzman, a studio mandate to seed as many spin-off ideas as possible to maximize the number of Treks currently in production, and telling a story based on so much mystery box predestination that it spent more time teasing how it could eventually be a good show rather than being a good show in the moment. This seems to have been a fundamental misunderstanding in the creation of Star Trek: Discovery’s second season.
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