Link8909 wrote: ↑Fri Jan 08, 2021 12:43 pmFor me personally season three is far better than Enterprises third season, simply because that season was 26 episodes of the characters being angry, bitter, and miserable, and just nonstop depression and hopelessness, Discovery has a lot more hopefulness to it and great characters that personally make me want to watch it more that Enterprise.
I agree that Discovery is more hopeful than Enterprise. However, I think Enterprise Season 3 was a better-crafted story for a few reasons.
Reason #1 - ENT S3 stuck to a concrete overall objective, while subtly working in optimistic ideals.
ENT S3 was about preventing a second Xindi attack on Earth; every action taken in the season - with the exception of North Star, mostly - was in pursuit of that objective.
Additionally, when the ENT crew did something bad, it was not heralded as a great success. It was treated with the disgust and solemnity it deserved. We didn't ever get a speech that Archer was right to commit piracy, because an Admiral's daughter is bitterly opposed to
numbers.*
With that said, as the end of ENT S3 came into focus, more and more the conversations shifted from use of force to diplomacy, peace-making, and finding common ground, while protection by way of preventing harm. This appeal to optimistic ideals, even in light of the horrors of the start of the Season to me is much more hopeful than the last episodes of Science-Commando Burnham waging all-out guerilla warfare, Tilly nearly doing the same and almost suffocating despite the presence of the Burnham Advanced Fastball Special, actual Space Druids, and a evil green woman who merely got a mention that she was capable of more than just being cartoonishly evil.
In the end, even with the wackiness that was the time-traveling space nazis, ENT realized the positive ideals. Peace was brokered between United Earth and the Xindi. The Sphere Builders weren't exterminated, but sent back to their home dimension. The Andorians, despite their "help" grew closer to humanity, and even the Vulcans and humanity warmed up a little bit. Soval was
genuinely concerned for Archer, and was visibly worried about him, even despite Archer being as batshit crazy as ever.
Reason #2 - ENT S3 stuck to a limited list of key plot points that were consistently observed throughout the season
Much like DISCO S3, ENT S3 also started with a serious fish-out-of-water moment: the entry into the Delphic Expanse, where the laws of physics are - in the professional terms used by astrophysicists - "totes fucked."
There were a few key points observed: the Expanse had spatial anomalies that seriously damaged any ships that entered, making it difficult to leave again. The damage to these ships led to desperate crews who had to survive by any means necessary, usually by plundering new arrivals. The Expanse was stronger near the core concentration of Spheres, and thus had worse effects there - distance led to fewer complications. The Expanse hindered subspace communications to the outside, so no one can really call for help/backup. Lastly, the Expanse and the Xindi aggression in general were architected by the Sphere Builders for their own ends.
DISCO S3 was unable to formulate such a series of points that were consistently observed.
Dilithium in the 32nd century is extremely rare because most of it detonated in The Burn, but enough exists to still power the Chain and Federation fleets. In addition to that, other transwarp technologies from centuries past still exist, but are seldom utilized. The detonation of dilithium caused the Federation to fragment for reasons relevant to each member world, but those reasons seldom have any actual impact on the story. The Chain exists as a union of Andorians and Orions who profit from the now disconnected Alpha and Beta Quadrants, but mostly take actions that exhuast the resources they're supposed to be hoarding, such as Osyraa's standing threat against Quayjon in the form of their ocean pest problem. Starfleet has become limited in reach and power, and thus more defensive in general due to limited resources (ditto for most worlds and organizations), yet can still commit massive forces to a pitched battle near Kaminar. Despite that, though, there's still starbases -sometimes with standard Federation gelato machines - that exist beyond the fringes of the limited protective bubble.
I could go on, but I frankly don't see the need to. The situation in DISCO S3 had great potential in the first episode - the list of plot points in that episode looked more like nice, focused ENT list, than the insanity at the end of the season. As more and more and more exceptions kept getting appended, it ruined the coherence of the story, and
DIRECTLY led to some of the plot holes that materialized at the end of the season.
Keeping to a set of principles is good for storytelling - it limits what the heroes and villains can do, so that no challenge or solution is unbelievable. DISCO S3 created a world with a permissive set of limits, that within four episodes it had all but demolished the limits of.
Reason #3: To the ENT writers, psychology mattered. To the DISCO writers, psychology is technobabble.
You might think I'm going to start in on the Detmer PTSD arc again. However, I've said plenty on that.
The start of DISCO S3 was an interesting case study in consequences - going 900 years into the future rightly had psychological consequences. However most of these consequences that require fellowship, counseling, and possibly even psychotherapy to overcome...were mostly handled in the course of two episodes, largely offscreen, and even then transparently existed to set up Detmer's C-plot. (Side note: as bad and disrespectful as her C-plot was, it was better than all her previous C-plots, which were nothing, so...yay?)
I bring all that up to point out a contrast with ENT S3. In ENT S3, the characters falling apart in a desperate and horrifying situation was inevitable. There's only so long that people can function well in high-stress situations, and it does inflict damage on even the most ordered minds - there's a reason T'Pol was getting high on Vulcan-zombie-smack, just to feel
pleasure. With that said, ENT S3's writers realized that the emotions that beings experience are both a cause of actions and challenges, and also the penalties and payoffs to those challenges.
Every time the ENT crew got a small lead to finding the Xindi base, the joy was
palpable, and at least to me felt good to watch. You saw these people who really wanted to be good, optimistic and hopeful...get to be that again, like a wilted flower getting a gentle spring rain.
The DISCO writers don't understand how emotions or psychology work. As previously noted, they clearly believe that PTSD is a syonym for being "really fucking scared", which isn't the case at all. The DISCO writers don't understand that the isolation that the crew experienced isn't permanently controllable with a
single ENT-worthy movie night. The DISCO writers don't understand that Burnham's background and training and even emotional makeup don't mesh with the decisions she made. The DISCO writers don't understand that Stamets shouldn't have instantly gotten over getting spaced by Michael.
I want to round this reason out with a bit of analysis. I'm being pretty technical with my "reasons" list. I have a series of points I'm trying to make. I believe this is how the DISCO writers are doing their writing, however those points lack precision, because the writers don't think things through. They know they want Tilly to be "the heart of the crew", but they don't write her other characteristics - she's good at being adorkable and smart, but little else. They know they want Michael to be "the Ace", but they don't write her other characteristics - she's good at kicking ass and being decisive, even or especially if it's a bad idea. They know they want the future to be a rough place, right up until it starts being too hard to write. Then they relax those rules, until they remember: oh right we needed that to limit what our characters can do!
Reason #4 - ENT S3 (and especially S4) were properly thought through.
While I have many of my own complaints about ENT, especially how grimdark it got at times to compete with other period programming, I rarely am able to say that anything in ENT S3 was useless (EDIT: Contrast that statement with ENT S1 and S2, which were the epitome of useless). Every episode either fleshed out a rule, set up a plot point for a future episode, expanded on a character (both villains and protagonists), revealed implications of certain rules, or improved a bond between characters. The two most useless things in ENT S3 for me were the entirety of North Star (which, was a break from the grimdark setting, and so was still indirectly useful), and the attempt to weld-up the Temporal Cold War (
fucking Berman & Braga...)
DISCO S3, much like Voyager, had a few plot points that went nowhere, or just didn't really pull their weight. Dilithium should've been rare and made every ship/fleet action be carefully considered. This never applied to the heroes or the villains. Alternatives to warp existed but weren't used. Book's empathic/telepathic talents were used to bail the story out of A) the first episode, B) the Quayjon episode, and C) the writers realizing, "Oh shit we spaced the guy who can use the DASH!" His
fantastic and potentially useful powers never had quite the impact on the story that, say, Adira existing had. The seed ship was a contrivance to allow the actress who left to go play Ahsoka Tano in The Mandalorian...to do just that.
DISCO S3 had a lot of story rot and waste that the viewer had to wade through to get to the point. ENT S3, despite the oppressiveness of its situations, got the viewer to the point as the first order of business, and used the details to add substance and detail to the world.
