juushika

I mostly don't disagree with the decision to go episodic/watchable, particularly by the time they got to DS9 and discovered ways to maintain consequence and overarching plot despite the episodic structure. When I did my DS9 late last year/early this year, that episodic nature really worked for me—there's a lot of tonal whiplash, but I needed that, I needed to be crying only every other-ish episode and sometimes to have humor too. If had been too serialized, I don't know if it would have been such effective escapism and catharsis. I think it might have just been exhausting.

So I'm partially content to relegate the Trek that Could Have Been to meta/fantheorizing, because angst is more enjoyable and less just exhausting when it's transformative or idealized or theoretical or summarized. But I think there's ways Discovery and/or tie-in novels and/or a theoretical non-episodic future-Trek could succeed, primarily by maintaining the idealization/good tropes/id-factor that makes the theorizing so enjoyable. The exhausting grim needs to have payoff and catharsis, and I feel like it needs to be a liberated Trek to achieve that: less subtext or "we can show a queer relationship because it's relegated to background and/or episodic," more explicit found family and complex vibrant interpersonal dynamics.

Which Disco ... isn't, yet; isn't any of those things, isn't firmly serialized or successfully hybrid or sufficiently explicit.

(Who could ever have anticipated that a drift back towards threaded comments/journal-style social media would allow my TL;DR to blossom into gigantic walls of text? No one! Ever! It's so surprising!)