Star Trek Discovery Ep. 14 Review: I Need My Rage

Star Trek Discovery is a terribly written television show. This is not a commentary on the production, the visuals, even the overall story (although those all have major issues, as well). This is simply an acknowledgement that the mechanics of the show — the dialogue, the exposition, the characterization — are either non-existent or incoherent and self-contradictory. People seem to get upset when this gets pointed out, but search your feelings, you know it’s true. All of it.

The way the episodes unfold, the way information is doled out, the way the “characters” are portrayed is amateurish, at best. The producers explicitly wanted this show to stand toe-to-toe with Game of Thrones. In that respect, it’s a complete failure. Fifty-six million “social media impressions” aren’t that meaningful when half of that number comes from my twitter account.

Spoiler: they’re not positive tweets.

Twists for twists’ sake are not interesting. Characters changing motivations and disposition mid-episode is confusing. Tonal clashes between scenes are distracting. Telegraphed plot reveals are almost as bad as unearned plot reveals.

They keep saying there’s going to be a Season Two. Do CBS et al want to continue to pour over $100M into this show? We’ll see. If anything, I bet it comes back drastically scaled down. Which is actually a shame, since that will affect the visual production, and the non-23rd Century ships aside, the visuals aren’t the show’s problem. It would…