Should STD be held to a higher standard?

[Yukaphile]

The "give it time, let it grow" argument I keep hearing, people often refer to TNG. Let's just assume that's true and STD grows into a TNG style powerhouse of the 2010s or 2020s. Okay then. My question for debate is this. Should STD have been held to a higher standard when it was first conceived, given the massive changes they introduced that frankly felt like deviations from the previous lore? Stuff like giving the Klingons twin junk and turning them into Orks particularly stick out. My point being, why should we hold STD to a higher standard? Because when TNG started, there was only TOS, an animated series most people don't consider canon, and a handful of movies, and that's all. It had more room to maneuver. STD does not. It has the backdrop of not only TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, but all the movies from the TOS, TNG, and reboot era. That's a lot to sift through, way more than TNG would've had to handle back in 1987, and tbh, if TNG had been burdened with all that, given its atrocious start, I don't think it would have survived. Yet I do see lots of people who stay tuned thinking it will get better and giving it a free pass. My point is, because of that long history, why are we doing this? Should we hold STD to a higher standard?

Okay, not gonna participate here either. But please debate!

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

What does having more shows preceding the project have to do with anything?

[Makeshift Python]

I can sympathize not wanting to continue. I gave up on ENT after nine mind numbingly dull episodes. I haven’t felt that way about DISCO so far, and with how the second season has been a definite improvement, I probably won’t be abandoning it soon. It’s the first Trek show that I honestly look forward to seeing each week since the 90s.

[Yukaphile]

@BridgeConsoleMasher There's more lore you need to adhere to.

[MixedDrops]

I don't understand why you keep making threads about Discovery and constantly drop Discovery in half the things you post if you don't watch the show and don't plan on ever giving it a chance.

Anyway, even though many people use "Trek has always had bad first seasons" to defend Discovery, I personally don't like that defense, at all. Like BridgeConsoleMaster says, whether its Trek or not really shouldn't be relevant to the conversation. Shows should have good episodes from the get-go, or at least good concepts. To some degree I get the logic of "you need to let the writers settle into the show's tone and how the actors say the lines", but you should be able to tell whether concepts are sound behind any first-season awkwardness. I don't think it's unfair to judge a series by its first...maybe 3 or 4 episodes, I'd say. Now if someone I trust tells me later "it gets better", I'll be sure to give the show another chance. But I see no reason in giving a bad show more chances if it doesn't ever catch your interest over the course of an entire season. If we were only ever going to judge shows by their first few episodes though, we could easily dismiss shows like B5 or Farscape as being uninspired.

I didn't have that problem with Discovery myself. I thought season 1 clearly suffered from conflicting ideas, but had a handful of interesting ones and at least 3 or 4 episodes I'd solidly consider "good". Overall, I thought season 1 was just okay. There's actually some ideas they discarded from season 1 I would prefer they didn't, but that happens a lot.

I think Season 2 of Discovery is an improvement so far, but it still has a mix of good and bad episodes. I'm certainly enjoying it enough that I'm sure I'll place it above Enterprise at least. Not sure how I'd stack it against Voyager just yet, Voyager might have squandered a lot of potential and had an overall beige coloring to it, but it also had that gem every once in a while.

[Yukaphile]

Because I hear what others post, and hearing stuff like "they gave the Klingons twin junk in addition to turning them into Orks from Warhammer 40,000" doesn't fill me a lot of confidence when people keep gushing over how Season 2 is "improving."

[MixedDrops]

This just in, when you listen to people who hate the show, they say negative things about it.

That aside, the Klingons having twin junk is a shot that lasts, like, 5 seconds. Even ignoring that it's just one of those little continuity nods. You know, the ones you constantly complain about them screwing up?

Honestly if Season 1 had a problem with the Klingons, its that they barely showed them despite the fact that the Federation is at war with them. The Klingons and the related war had almost no presence in the show aside from showing up once or twice to shoot at the Discovery, so its hard to screw them up when they got so little screentime.

Unless you want to nitpick the makeup, I guess. I thought the makeup was done quite well myself.

[Makeshift Python]

I’m not sure why giving Klingons a two headed penis is such a deal breaker for anyone. It was one shot, yet you seem to be making a mountain out of a mole hill. So because of that, the show could NEVER get better?

Maybe you should just let go of this show, which you claim to no longer actually watch anyway.

[Yukaphile]

It's not a continuity nod, because I don't recall them EVER establishing that anywhere else. EVER.

[Yukaphile]

And it retroactively makes the Worf/Jadzia ship NOT WORK. Dax is like a human. We know because Ezri is with Bashir, thus... if you follow this logically to its end conclusion, doing that with Worf would literally kill any normal human or Trill woman.