YMMV / Star Trek: Discovery

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A-L

• Accidental Aesop:
  • One unintentional takeaway from "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad" is that if you don't enjoy yourself at a party, then you aren't really human.
  • The second season, and Star Trek: Picard's first, seem to argue that A.I. Is a Crapshoot and should be avoided at all costs. Although the third and fourth seasons immediately reverse course on this.
• Accidental Innuendo: One abbreviation for Star Trek: Discovery is "STD", which was quickly adopted by people disliking the design of the U.S.S. Discovery (and later, the show itself).
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Discovery has certainly had no lack of multifaceted characters with the degree of Grey-and-Gray Morality that permeates the first season:
  • Is Michael Burnham a guilt-ridden survivor working towards redemption as The Atoner, or is she an arrogant Know-Nothing Know-It-All who is somehow still self-righteous despite her actions? Is she a Pragmatic Hero in a series full of idealists, or the only genuine idealist^note well, aside from Cadet Tilly, anyways left on the Discovery? Come Season Three, is she still committed to doing the right thing no matter the cost, but sometimes makes mistakes by going about it in the wrong way, or has she still not learned that even if she's right, as a Starfleet officer she lives in a chain of command where she has to accept the decisions of her superiors even if she thinks they're wrong?
  • Is Captain Lorca a Well-Intentioned Extremist Knight Templar, a Blood Knight in a society defined by pacifists, or an awesome I Did What I Had to Do hero who is the Only Sane Man in an idealistic society faced with an implacable enemy? Is he actually Ax-Crazy or I Did What I Had to Do with the Mercy Kill of his previous command? Recent episodes have indicated he may be a Shell-Shocked Veteran driven to become The Atoner by being a Well-Intentioned Extremist. Turns out to be none of the above; he's actually Evil All Along, hailing from the Mirror Universe.
    • Which further begs the question regarding his actions following The Reveal. Why was he so helpful to Discovery and her crew despite being far worse than the very emperor he was trying to overthrow? Did his time in the Prime Reality break through some of that xenophobic exterior and make him rethink his views until he got home? Was he just really good at hiding who he really was? Did Becoming the Mask play a role and Lorca came to care for Discovery and her crew as something of a family, and he hoped he could persuade them to help in his cause? Or were they only a means to an end the whole time, and he acted otherwise to keep them from finding out? After all, he had no reason to help them in their war, yet he put every fiber of his being into making sure they won, at least until an opportunity presented itself to get back home.
  • Is Saru's Condescending Compassion Backhanded Apology criticism of Michael valid, or is he a stone-cold jerkass who forgets the fact that the only reason he's still alive is that Michael went on a nearly suicidal mission with Captain Georgiou?
  • Speaking of Captain Georgiou, was she a model Starfleet officer and The Captain who represented the way the Federation should be, or did her war crime (see below) highlight why she was similar to Michael Burnham in the end with a willingness to put her crew's lives over rules?
  • Is T'Kuvma a Fantastic Racism suffering bigot and The Fundamentalist, or is he a savvy political operator who knows the only way to unite the feuding Klingon Empire is to use a combination of religion as well as Genghis Gambit tactics? Is he possessed of any honor whatsoever, or is he a Hypocrite who lured an enemy under a flag of truce to kill them in an act of pure cowardice? (The latter answer could be "yes", given that the Klingon sense of honor verges on Blue-and-Orange Morality compared to how modern Europeans and Americans would define it.)
    • Since Burnham's attempt to fire off a "Vulcan Hello" at T'Kuvma was thwarted, how would have he reacted had she succeeded? Would he have realized Starfleet wasn't as blind about Klingon culture as he thought and would have rethought his tactics, since she might have proven him wrong? Would he have just fired right back like he wanted, convinced Starfleet was now out to destroy the Empire by stealing the Klingon ways? Or would he have known what she was doing, but lied to the Klingon Houses just to start a war because he wouldn't have wanted to be proven wrong? Given how he pulls a I Surrender, Suckers on Starfleet for them trying to call for a ceasefire, and takes Georgiou's message for peace as an attempt at eradicating Klingon culture, it's hard to say.
  • Spock's feud with Burnham in season 2. Is he justified in feeling betrayed by a sibling he idolized, during a period in which he was still trying to figure out who he was, or is it a petty overreaction to what was essentially a schoolyard insult?
    • The next episode somewhat clarifies that it's more complicated than that, indicating that Spock feels her shouldering the deaths of her parents, the well-being of Sarek's family, and the outbreak of the Klingon-Federation war were her fault when they were never hers to begin with are, in his mind, selfish actions, especially considering that, when she ran way to protect his family from the Vulcan extremists, he was their intended target.
  • Was Stamets an asshole prior to season 1, or do we only think that because we met him at his worst? Season 1 Stamets might be spiky and brittle because he's just an Insufferable Genius about to hit a Defrosting Ice Queen arc, but it could also be a reaction to Starfleet weaponizing his life's work (a situation he repeatedly states he loathes and occasionally tries to Rage Quit, only to be told he has no choice) and Lorca pushing him to more and longer jumps at the expense of safety (and, as we'll see in Season 4 when we can compare him to Ruon Tarka, Stamets does have a higher risk tolerance than most but isn't actually reckless, particularly with other people's lives). The much warmer, kinder Stamets that emerges after he gives himself the tardigrade DNA might be a new personality (which is what Burnham seems to think) but it seems at least equally likely to be Stamets's old personality re-emerging after a period of intense stress and frustration—especially since the DNA incident permanently solves the spore drive navigation issue, removing a major stressor for Stamets. The Stamets/Culber relationship also makes a lot more sense if Stamets wasn't born a jerk but had jerkitude thrust upon him: early in season 1, Culber comes across as more annoyed by Stamets than anything else; by season 3, when their partnership is repaired, there's very clearly a long-standing pattern of mutual support and respect and they just seem far more compatible.
  • Why does everyone say Stamets and Reno don't get along? They get along magnificently; they just enjoy taking the piss out of each other. You can tell, because when Reno does get mad at Stamets (after he and Tarka go too far with the DMA model) it's icy cold and notably completely different from her usual badinage.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: After a 12-year absence from television (not counting the Kelvin Timeline movies), Star Trek's first new tv series since Star Trek: Enterprise had a lot going against it—being the first Trek series aired exclusively on a streaming platform behind a monthly/yearly paywall, its lead character being Spock's never-before-mentioned adopted sister, and having a Darker and Edgier tone that made Star Trek: Deep Space Nine divisive in its early years—so it was thought the series was doomed right out of the gate. Instead, it managed to get an impressive five seasons while simultaneously breathing new life into the franchise, leading to the launch of Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Star Trek: Prodigy, and even a spinoff in the form of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, along with a series focusing on Starfleet Academy and a tv movie about Section 31—and fans are still wanting more in the form of a Picard spinoff titled Star Trek: Legacy. Needless to say, what was seen as a bad move for the franchise at the time has led to a renaissance of new stories for the property, and it's still going strong to this day.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • Since Ethan Peck's Spock has been nearly ubiquitous in the advertising for Season 2, the fact that he was still The Ghost for seven episodes into the season started to draw criticism for stringing the viewers along — especially when he was supposedly finally found by Discovery at the end of "An Obol for Charon", whereupon "Saints of Imperfection" revealed Mirror-Georgiou in the shuttle instead in a Bait-and-Switch. He finally showed up in person in "Light and Shadows", though he was not returned to sanity and coherence until visiting Talos IV in "If Memory Serves".
  • Calls for the series to tackle something other than an Apocalypse How-level threat have been steadily growing as the characters have dealt with a force killing the mycelial network and thus threatening all life in the universe in the first and second seasons, to Control threatening to kill all life in the galaxy (or universe) in the second season, to The Burn threatening everyone in the galaxy in the third season, to a several-light-years-wide Negative Space Wedgie travelling the galaxy and threatening entire solar systems in the fourth season. At this point, a Story Arc where Discovery and her crew dealt with something other than a galactic-scale problem would be a novel and unusual plot.
• Ass Pull:
  • People from the Mirror Universe, or at least the humans from it, suddenly all have a genetic or biological sensitivity to light, despite this fact never being shown or alluded to with any other previous characters originating from the Mirror Universe. No other Prime character has ever made a note of this, despite several of them spending a fair amount of time in the Mirror Universe or around its denizens. Whether Lorca's sensitivity is due to damage being done to his eyes, or simply a naturally occurring quirk of his genetic makeup, there are several possible ways that it could have led Michael to piece together who he really was which could have put far less of a strain on existing canon.
  • Mirror Gabriel Lorca. Throughout the first half of season one, practically everything he does is helpful to the Federation's war effort against the Klingons, and he's shown to be a very competent and charismatic commander. Then he's suddenly turned into a fairly blatant walking Donald Trump reference and Starscream to Emperor Philippa Georgiou—who considers Kelpiens like Saru a delicacy—before being killed off so she can be brought back to the Prime Universe in his place.
• Awesome Music:
  • After the infamous "Faith of the Heart", we're back with a fully orchestral theme for Discovery, one with a whimsical melody that calls the TOS theme to mind.
  • The "black alert" theme, which plays most times Discovery fires up its spore drive, is a sign that something awesome is about to happen.
  • The Terran Empire's Leitmotif is regal and oppressive, very fitting for The Empire.
  • The season one finale ends with a GLORIOUS rendition of the TOS theme. Likewise, the Season 2 finale weaves them together over the credits.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Michael Burnham. Some viewers consider her an Insufferable Genius who never really atoned for her actions in the premiere, and who receives a disproportionate amount of attention from the writers that leaves other, more compelling characters like Saru or Stamets less developed. Others like her for those very same reasons, arguing that a flawed protagonist looking for redemption is a refreshing change of pace from the unambiguously morally-upstanding heroes of past Star Trek series, that her backstory is interesting enough to warrant attention, and that Sonequa Martin-Green is a good enough actress to pull it off. A third group of fans don't have any problem with Michael in particular but dislike the notion of Spock having a never-before-mentioned sister in general (though this is nothing new for Spock). And as SF Debris observed, because she's so central to the series, your opinion of her will probably coincide with how much you enjoy DSC as a whole.
  • To a lesser extent, Ensign Sylvia Tilly. Plenty of fans find her Adorkable tendencies endearing; to others, the same traits tend to irritate.
  • Leland and the rest of Section 31 are collectively this. They have a sizable Misaimed Fandom who believe that they are Necessarily Evil and that Evil Is Cool. Conversely, others maintain that Section 31 is still an organization that advocated and nearly perpetrated genocide later in the prime timeline in DS9 and actively tried to start a war in the Kelvin timeline in Into Darkness, and who see nothing wrong with casually recruiting the former dictator of the human-supremacist Terran Empire. Others welcome the return of one of DS9's most significant additions to the franchise, but feel they aren't as well-written in this show and lack the moral complexity that they had in their series of origin.
  • Mirror-Georgiou. Some fans love her for being Discovery's snarky Token Evil Teammate, and of course because she's sexy. Other fans point out that she never really pulled a Heel–Face Turn and hasn't atoned for any of the atrocities she committed as the Terran Emperor, which include blowing up Qo'noS and shooting down Klingon refugees as they tried to escape, eating Kelpiens as a delicacy, and casually murdering her aides and advisors because He Knows Too Much. The base was further broken with the news that she's due to get her own show, a not-yet-titled series about her adventures in Section 31.
• Broken Base:
  • The show has divided the fanbase between fans who find the show a breath of fresh air for embracing modern television conventions^note such as serialized storytelling, and those who dislike the show for its supposed disrespect for continuity and who overall find the show to be too massive and jarring of a departure for the franchise. It's not uncommon for the latter to state that they appreciate the once-maligned Star Trek: Enterprise more now for being more "true" to Star Trek's spirit and/or continuity than Discovery is, even though Enterprise was bashed into the ground when it was on the air for the same transgressions.
  • There are also viewers who dislike the heavy use of plot twists and lack of an ensemble cast — not that there aren't loads of characters already, as Trek goes — and those who find these elements refreshing. There's also a plethora of arguments over the series' blatant political messaging.
  • The Spore Drive. Maybe it's an interesting element that gives the ship a unique capability ripe for exploration and is as scientifically grounded as omnipotent aliens with one-letter names or an energy barrier on the edge of the galaxy that gives human psyhics godlike powers. Or maybe it's the dumbest idea the franchise has ever had, bringing "The Force" into Star Trek where it has no business being, and if Voyager had simply looked up its schematics they'd have been home in an afternoon. (This last bit is, at least, Handwaved by the Season 2 finale.)
• Captain Obvious Reveal: That Ash Tyler was really Voq, Son of None. Not only did Voq disappear the same time Ash debuted, but the "actor" who played Voq had no credits to his name, and everyone and their mother had guessed ahead of time that the two characters were one and the same.
• Common Knowledge:
  • One thing you will often hear is that this series’ take on Starfleet has them as expansionists that deserved their attack by T’Kuvma because they had encroached on Klingon Space, behaving as if they could go anywhere they chose. The facts are quite different; the Shenzhou did not enter Klingon Space at all, but were on the edges of Federation Space, and specifically had come there to investigate why one of their beacons had gone offline. The beacon had, in fact, been shot down by T’Kuvma entirely so a Starfleet vessel could be lured there. T’Kuvma’s entire goal was to start a war with the Federation in order to unite the Klingon Houses. He used the Empire’s natural distrust of peacemakers (believing they would slowly eradicate the Klingon culture) for his own goals. Somehow the going wisdom is to turn the Shenzhou into the aggressors there, when in fact it was T’Kuvma.
  • Another one is that Burnham was responsible for starting the war with the Klingons when once again, it was T'Kuvma's doing all along. This is somewhat complicated by Burnham's attempted mutiny being tied up in the same events (and indeed, her course of action may have unwittingly played to T'Kuvma's plan). Ultimately this one is fed by it being Common Knowledge in-universe, with some Starfleet officers blaming her for the war when, at worst, she was responsible for failing to stop it via her plan to take T'Kuvma prisoner.
• Complete Monster:
  • Season 2: Control, an A.I. developed by Section 31 to identify threats to be neutralized in order to protect sapient life, decides its directive to protect sapient life is futile. Instead, Control plans to evolve itself into the Ultimate Life Form and destroy all other sapient life in the galaxy. Though pretending to still be under Starfleet's control, Control has secretly murdered the admirals in charge of Section 31, using holograms to maintain this deception. Discovery has obtained a vast database of knowledge from a dying god-like alien and Control wants that database, believing this database will evolve it into a superior life form. Control takes over cyborg crew member Airiam and forces her to try to murder Commander Michael Burnham and steal the database. When that fails, Control forcibly takes over the body of Captain Leland, a high-ranking Section 31 agent. Later, Control lures Burnham to a Section 31 ship, where it has murdered all the crew and secretly taken control of Gant, one of Michael's old crewmates, hoping to take control of Burnham as well. Ultimately Control assembles a large fleet of Section 31 ships manned by drones, intending to take the database from Discovery by force and willing to destroy anything that gets in its way.
  • Season 3: Osyraa is a crime boss who pretends to be a respected political leader. She runs the Emerald Chain, a criminal organization that controls a large part of the galaxy in 3189 after the galaxy is devastated by an event known as the Burn. Osyraa is a cruel leader, running forced labor camps that have a slave workforce and implanting bombs into the slaves to prevent them from escaping. After Burnham liberates an Emerald Chain camp, Osyraa kills her own nephew for allowing the slaves to escape. Osyraa wants Ryn, one of the slaves, back, and wants to recapture Burnham's ally, Cleveland "Book" Booker. Osyraa goes to Book's home planet of Kwejian and withholds a repellent that would prevent sea locusts from eating the planet's crops, willing to cause a famine if her demands are not met. When that fails, she has her ship attack Kwejian directly. Later Osyraa takes over Discovery and offers to make a deal with the Federation, but breaks off talks when the Federation demands she be held accountable for her crimes. Osyraa murders Ryn in a fit of rage and when her chief scientist, Aurellio, refuses to torture Book for her, Osyraa chokes him into unconsciousness.
• Contested Sequel: Taken up to eleven, even as the usual reactions to new Star Trek series go. A few of the fans, as well as critics, like Discovery and hold it as a worthy addition to the franchise, even if it certainly has plenty of room for Growing the Beard. Other viewers absolutely loathe the series and rip it relentlessly for failing to live up to the idea of what Trek should be, to the point of declaring it to be not part of the franchise at all. In-between the two extremes, some fans credit the show for doing the important job of re-establishing the television side of the franchise and avoiding many of the problems that Voyager and Enterprise ran into, but feel it suffered from being a relic of the tail-end of the trend of Darker and Edgier sci-fi shows that had been popularized by Battlestar Galactica (2003), and didn't sufficiently adapt to the genre's shifting away from this format.
• Critical Dissonance: Critics have responded mostly positively to the series, but the reception from fans has been decidedly mixed, especially during the first season. The second season, however, has seen improved fan reception, partly for pulling the series back up the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism and for starting to tie the series more strongly into Star Trek prime-universe continuity.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The franchise's first official Precision F-Strike. Tilly saying "this is so fucking cool!" may be a serious "WTF?" moment, until Stamets backs her up with "This is fucking cool."
  • Mudd utilizing a time loop to kill Lorca dozens of times purely out of spite? Horrifying. This being demonstrated in a montage in which Mudd watches Lorca die while sitting in Lorca's own chair, cheerfully eating a sandwich... and eventually getting so sick of the whole thing that he admits gloating isn't fun anymore? Hysterical. Moreso on a rewatch when the audience realizes the season's Big Bad is being repeatedly killed by the most clownish minor villain of the series.
• Designated Hero: Some viewers and critics took issue with the Federation committing a war crime in the second episode by bomb-rigging a Klingon corpse. Perhaps a case of a form of Values Dissonance as rules in the future may be different, and T'Kuvma had already pulled an I Surrender, Suckers (also a war crime) mere minutes earlier, but the act is still jarring to some viewers nonetheless, especially when no one seems to even bat an eye at the plan and the crew almost all cheers when it succeeds. It should be noted though that there is an explicit mention of the Geneva Convention (with regard to biological weapons) in the third episode, so certainly some values haven't changed. In a similar vein, the first season ending with the protagonists changing their minds about a plan to blow up Qo'noS and instead letting L'Rell use it to force the other Houses to end the war, for which the Discovery senior staff are awarded the Medal of Honor, has been accused of Wanting a Prize for Basic Decency.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • T'Kuvma and his followers are starting a war for purely political reasons, with the Federation being baited into a lethal trap. However, a lot of fans are sympathetic to them and are Rooting for the Empire, whether because Evil Is Cool or the Federation protagonists act more like Designated Heroes than anything else. The fact the Klingons have always been fan favorites seems to have been exaggerated, rather than diminished, by the fact these Klingons look like Tolkien orcs in space.
  • The Terran Empire and its denizens have also been getting this sentiment from their sizable Misaimed Fandom, ignoring the fact that their entire way of life is based around a xenophobic, genocidal, expansionist Empire dedicated to exterminating all alien life in the galaxy in order to prove humanity is the superior being (including and up to enslaving and eating them).
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Captain Philippa Georgiou. More than one viewer was disappointed that she was killed in the second episode instead of being a series regular, and many were delighted when she returned as the incredibly badass and well-dressed Terran Emperor.
  • Lieutenant Commander Airiam, the Robot Girl who subverts the Bridge Bunny trope by virtue of her insistence on being addressed by rank.
  • Anson Mount's take on Captain Pike was so popular that fans even petitioned CBS for a spinoff detailing Pike and Spock's adventures on the Enterprise before the former handed it over to Captain Kirk. On May 15, 2020, CBS announced it had given the green light to such a spinoff, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Shades of grey and questionable morality between the factions aside, the Klingons wear some kickass outfits.
  • This is a big reason why the Terran Empire has so many fans, especially their leader, Emperor Georgiou.
• Fanon: A common dynamic for the “Kirk meets Spock’s sister/Michael meets Spock’s boyfriend” is for those two to become best friends thanks to the similarities between the characters, and to drive Spock nuts.
• Fandom Rivalry: With The Orville, due to the perception by some Trekkers that it's truer to the spirit and overall tone of the franchise than Discovery is.
  • The YouTube channel Midnight's Edge, after the premiere for Discovery, did a roundtable where they flat-out claimed it did not feel like a Star Trek series, claiming it felt like a generic sci-fi show. Meanwhile, they lauded The Orville, a Star Trek homage, as feeling more like the actual, hopeful Star Trek that people came to know and love.
  • Fans are split between the two shows for various reasons. This is somewhat due to the fact that, because of Discovery's release being delayed for most of a year, it ended up debuting very soon after The Orville, resulting in direct head-to-head competition and comparison, which only let up when the second half of Discovery's first season aired without The Orville (now on hiatus after completing its first season) airing at the same time.
  • It has also been noted by quite a few critics that Season 2 of Discovery appears to be trying to copy the tone of The Orville, including a few on-screen elements.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Ensign Daft Punk."◊
  • Voqler, or Tyvoq, for Shazad Latif's character (a Klingon surgically altered to appear human and made a Manchurian Agent).
• Friendly Fandoms: A Downplayed Trope example as, while the above Fandom Rivalry does exist, the fact so many fans are discussing and comparing each episode of Discovery and The Orville indicates that Star Trek fans are often watching both, and the general consensus is that there's no law saying one can't be a fan of both series at the same time.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: A mild example; while the home network is CBS (which releases all of the episodes on its streaming service, CBS All Access) and Discovery premiered to a solid audience in the USA, the series has been earning record ratings airing on Bell Media's cable channel Space in Canada.^note Think Syfy, with 90% less Network Decay. It might have something to do with the series being filmed and produced in a major studio in Toronto, Ontario. Space is also, as of early 2018, the only actual broadcaster for the series, allowing Canadians to view it without having to sign up for a streaming service (though they still can if they wish, as Bell Media also operates CraveTV).
• Growing the Beard: The show ends up emulating TNG in a number of ways, as the first season was plagued with behind-the-scenes struggles that fragmented the ongoing story arc and created an inconsistent tone and characterization. The second season stabilized through the introduction of Captain Pike as a central character, while also laying the groundwork for a massive retool in the third season by sending the ship and crew to the distant future. In the third season, it managed to shake off its' struggles with being an Interquel and tell a fresh story in a time period they had free reign to explore and was generally seen where the show found its own voice.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Saru's tense relationship with Burnham becomes this after "The Brightest Star", where it's revealed that Georgiou was the one that allowed Saru to leave his planet behind forever to join Starfleet. Burnham is not only responsible for the death of Saru's former superior officer, but probably the single most important person in Saru's life.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: The YouTube channel Midnight's Edge is gradually garnering this sentiment from a fraction of Discovery's fandom for the channel's constant promotion of Fanon Discontinuity theories, as well as their frequent insistence that the series is about to get cancelled. On the other hand, however, the channel is quite popular among the series' vocal detractors for the exact same reasons.
  • For one example, the same channel's video "The Prime Deception" — in which they claim that legally, Discovery can't be canonical alongside TOS thanks to a legal nightmare between Paramount and CBS regarding merchandising^note which, given that Paramount and CBS are sister companies, makes absolutely no sense, and even if it did make sense, how does it have any relevance to this series' quality? — has further caused more hatred against the channel by Discovery's supporters on the grounds of accused propaganda and slander against the show. In short, they don't suck because they hate it; they suck because rather than giving valid reasons, at best, they parrot unverified information from anonymous "insiders". The fact they've made similar claims about Picard and other Kurtzman/Orci projects helmed for Paramount Plus hasn't helped their reputation amongst the show's fans.
• He's Just Hiding:
  • The prime-universe's Gabriel Lorca has not been confirmed dead, only missing, so it's entirely possible that he might turn up in the future.
    • The fact that one of the novels indicated that he is still alive and in captivity in the Mirror Universe has added to this speculation. ^note Though it should be noted that while the Discovery tie-ins have been done with more coordination with the production staff than has been done with previous Trek series, the creators have explicitly said that at most, the tie-ins "are canon until they're not," meaning that they can and will disregard anything in the tie-ins that is at odds with what they choose to do on the show.
    • Jason Isaacs has also implied that he regularly talks to the producers in the hopes of one day returning to the show as Prime!Lorca
  • Similarly, Burnham's Mirror Universe counterpart is a case where they Never Found the Body, and Hugh Culber's was never seen at all and may still be alive.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • According to the Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novels, exposure to time-travel events makes a person a Weirdness Magnet for more time-travel events. With that in mind, given season 2 has Spock getting exposed to time-travel (if not directly taking part himself), this gives the interpretation that Spock could actually be held responsible for all of Kirk's time-travel weirdness (most of which, we note, he was involved with as well), and Kirk's bad reputation with the DTI.
  • The reveal of Burnham's background as an adopted child of Sarek invited a lot of comparisons to a then-topical SNL sketch about Spock's half-brother Spocko.
    "Now that's a Star Trek!"
  • Speaking of long-lost siblings of Spock, fans groaned when they learned Michael was going to be another of Spock's never-mentioned siblings like Sybok. Then come 2022, when Star Trek: Strange New Worlds brings Sybok back into the fold.
  • Admiral Vance revealing that replicated food is made from molecularly-reconstructed shit calls to mind everyone from throughout the franchise who've complained about replicated food not tasting as good as real food. Does Joseph Sisko, for example, know that his son is literally eating shit?
    • Also think about one of the guest stars from the TNG episode "Yesterday's Enterprise". Shooter McGavin really does eat pieces of shit for breakfast.
  • Season 2 presented Number One, first officer to Christopher Pike on the Enterprise, played by Rebecca Romijn. A few years later, her husband Jerry O'Connell voiced a first officer onboard a Starfleet vessel, Commander Ransom, in Star Trek: Lower Decks.
  • In "The War Without, The War Within", Tilly laments the fact that now that the truth about Ash Tyler has come to light, he'll never wear a Starfleet uniform again. Come next season, he's once again wearing the uniform courtesy of Section 31. Not only that, but the season ends with him in charge of Section 31.
  • A fair number of people were annoyed with the Shout-Out given to Elon Musk in "The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry." As Musk increasingly went off the rails in 2022 around his acquisition of Twitter, at least some viewers gleefully pointed out that this line is spoken by Lorca, who is later revealed to be from the evil mirror universe. Naturally, jokes were abound that they had not only predicted Lorca being Evil All Along, but that they had predicted Musk's own fall from grace in the public eye.
• Ho Yay: See the Franchise page.
• I Knew It!:
  • A number of fan theories were proven correct throughout the first season:
    • That Discovery and her crew emerged into the Mirror Universe at the end of "Into The Forest I Go".
    • That Ash Tyler turned out to be Voq, surgically altered and turned into a Manchurian Agent.
    • That Captain Lorca was from the mirror universe all along.
    • That Captain Georgiou would return in some fashion.
    • That the Captain Pike-era U.S.S. Enterprise would appear.
  • From the second season, that the Red Angel would turn out to be a Time Traveling Michael Burnham.
  • In the "Terra Firma" two-parter from the third season, that "Carl" would turn out to be the Guardian of Forever.
• Improved Second Attempt:
  • For those who felt the Kelvin Timeline bridge of the Enterprise was too much of a departure from the TOS design, Pike's version of the Enterprise achieves the nearly-impossible feat of striking a balance between modern aesthetics of technology and the iconic bridge design by largely keeping the same layout, geometry and even color scheme wherever possible. So far, the design seems to have pulled off the nearly-impossible feat of satisfying both TOS purists and newer fans.
  • Season 3 is essentially a do-over for Star Trek: Voyager, with a single Starfleet crew stuck in hostile territory without any of the Federation's infrastructure or support, and a much more serious depiction of how dire their circumstances are without any Reset Button. Mirror Georgiou's continued presence also acts as a constant challenge to Starfleet's idealism, rather than how the Maquis were instantly absorbed into the crew.
• Inferred Holocaust: "The Sound of Thunder" has two, the second being retroactive with the season finale:
  • In the climax, Discovery triggers vahar'ai in every single Kelpien on Kaminar, putting thousands if not millions of Saru's people (some of whom would have been children) though agonizing pain for at least several minutes. Those Kelpiens — believing vahar'ai to be invariably fatal — must have believed that their gods were trying to kill them all. How many of them were Driven to Suicide, or Mercy Killed their friends and families, before the pain had a chance to subside? It's not hard to imagine the Kelpien population dropped significantly during that little stunt.
  • Exactly what went down on Kaminar after the episode's end isn't explored, but given that the Ba'ul were last seen trying to exterminate the Kelpiens, and that the Kelpiens later show up flying Ba'ul fighters in "Such Sweet Sorrow", it seems likely that one hell of a World War K must have happened in between the two episodes, with the Kelpiens gaining access to Ba'ul technology in the aftermath. Season 3 does eventually reveal that the two species have become allies and Federation members by the 31st century, but that's set centuries in the future and we glean little about what happened in the interim.
• Informed Wrongness: Everybody In-Universe blames Michael Burnham for starting the war with the Klingons. While her actions in the pilot were hardly admirable, in reality, T'Kuvma was using the Federation as a common enemy in a Genghis Gambit to reunite the Empire under his rule, so it was virtually inevitable that he would still find some kind of pretense to start a war regardless. Burnham's incarceration in the brig meant that she never got to deliver a "Vulcan hello" — and meanwhile, it was T'Kuvma whose ship fired the first shots in the battle, and who later pulled an I Surrender, Suckers on Admiral Anderson when he arrived to try and defuse the situation. The mere fact that Burnham committed mutiny which coincidentally led towards a war only made her a convenient scapegoat. Even Pike and Spock (the latter of whom was on very bad terms with Michael at the start of the series) don't hold her responsible.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • Much has been made of the fact that this series, like the Abrams films and Enterprise before it, is yet another prequel to TOS instead of carrying on from the TNG/DS9/VOY era. This feeling hasn't subsided very much overall after the first season, as many fans feel that most of the Continuity Snarls that becomes apparent when the show is held up against the rest of the Star Trek franchise, could have been smoothed over more easily or even wouldn't have been an issue at all if the show had instead been a continuation.
  • The idea of Michael being another Long Lost Sibling of Spock caused some trepidation, as the concept seems a bit too similar to the character of Sybok from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
• Jerkass Woobie: Michael has a lot of flaws, and it takes a while for her to learn her lessons, but she has deep trauma from a Klingon attack that killed her parents, and being the only human child on Vulcan.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The Mirror Universe arc in season one, given that mirror-Georgiou is now slated for her own show... as a member of Section 31, no less!
• LGBT Fanbase: Star Trek has always had a large LGBT fanbase due to the inclusion of implied gay characters. However, Discovery kicks it up a notch with...
  • Star Trek's first openly gay couple, Paul Stamets and Hugh Culber played by gay actors Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz (respectively).
  • A nonbinary couple, Adira and Gray, played by nonbinary actors Blu del Barrio & Ian Alexander (respectively).
  • Tilly's actress (Mary Wiseman) came out as bisexual in a Zoom interview, though Tilly's sexuality has not been a plot point by the end of Season 4.
  • Detmer's actress (Emily Coutts) came out as gay during the show's run. And although Detmer's sexuality hasn't been referenced by the end of Season 4, plenty of people ship Detmer with Owosekun.
  • Jett Reno is revealed to be gay (though widowed) in her backstory, played by gay actress/comedian Tig Notaro.
• Like You Would Really Do It:
  • The first half of the Season 2 finale two-parter, "Such Sweet Sorrow", gets hit with this pretty hard. First, the Discovery crew is about to embark on what is essentially a Suicide Mission — only Spock is a part of it. While things can go bad, they can't go so bad as to pierce his Plot Armor. Second, the episode spends a fair bit of time focusing on the fact that Burnham is going to die — just as it did only a few episodes prior during the plot to trap the Red Angel, making it harder to generate pathos over her fate. Thirdly, the Enterprise, commanded by Capt. Pike and Number One, is going to defend Discovery while all this is going on. The odds are long (at least 10-to-1 against), but all of them must canonically survive to chronologically later episodes — a fact hammered home by the "Previously on…" segment of "If Memory Serves". That said, the second half subverts this by ending with Burnham and Discovery doing exactly what she was planning to do: going on that one-way trip to the future. The Cliffhanger ends before we find out what they encountered on the other side, though there is confirmation that they made it.
  • The Season 3 finale also has this problem. There's one particular moment where Discovery ejects and detonates her warp core to get out of being trapped in an enemy ship's cargo bay, using the spore drive to Outrun the Fireball. There's an attempt at generating drama by showing the enemy ship exploding (impressively) without showing whether DISCO escaped... but a failure would result in the deaths of literally every character in the main cast and about half the supporting cast, a Total Party Kill the likes of which even Game of Thrones never attempted. Besides, the show's fourth season has been commissioned and many of those characters are confirmed to be filming for it.

M-Z

• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Philippa Georgiou is the ruler of the Terran Empire in the Mirror Universe. Although she is a cruel leader, she has a soft spot for her adopted daughter Michael Burnham and takes in Prime Burnham when she arrives in the Mirror Universe. Burnham helps Georgiou deal with an insurrection by Captain Lorca, whose supporters have taken over Georgiou's flagship. Burnham pretends to have captured Georgiou and offers her to Lorca so that Lorca can lower his guard. Georgiou ends up in the Prime Universe and offers to help the Federation end their war with Klingons, by planning to sneak onto the Klingon homeworld and have a bomb destroy their planet's core. Later she joins Section 31 and protects a pro-Federation Klingon Chancellor from hardliners, and saves the galaxy from an AI. When Georgiou is sent to the far future, she uses fighting skills to save Tilly and Saru from the Emerald Chain and helps Burnham bluff her way into a labor camp. Being in the far future is killing Georgiou and she is given an opportunity by a man named Carl to go back to the Mirror Universe. Controlling the Terran Empire again, she tries to rule with a gentler hand and tries to save Mirror Burnham, but is prepared when Burnham tries to betray her. This is all a test to see if Georgiou was worthy of being saved.
  • Season 4: Dr. Ruon Tarka is a scientist working for the Federation. Tarka is tasked by the Federation to stop that Dark Matter Anomaly (DMA), which is destroying planets and is controlled by mysterious aliens, the Ten-C. Over the objections of the Federation, Tarka wants to use a bomb to destroy the DMA and manipulates Cleveland Booker, someone who lost his planet to the DMA to help. Tarka and Booker steal an experimental spore drive and flee in Booker's ship. But Tarka is not telling the whole truth, he has a more selfish purpose for wanting to destroy the DMA, wishing to steal energy from the Ten-C to escape to another dimension and reunite with his lost lover. Tarka has traps built around Booker's ship that prevents Discovery from capturing them and is able to launch the bomb at the DMA. When that fails to stop the DMA, Tarka hides Booker's ship from Discovery's sensors and sneaks on board, following them to the Ten-C's home. Ultimately Tarka plans to destroy the Ten-C's hyper protection field, which will destroy the Ten-C, Discovery, and allow the DMA to destroy Earth, willing to sacrifice them all to achieve his goal.
  • From Succession: In this tale from the Mirror Universe, Airiam is a cyborg crewman abroad the Terran ship ISS Shenzhou, who resents being treated as a second class citizen by the bigoted Terran Empire. Airiam stages a coup on the Shenzhou, cutting life support to the bridge and killing the entire bridge crew, as well as rerouting the ship's computer functions to only serve her, demanding absolute loyalty from the rest of the crew. Learning that the Empire's new ruler, Emperor Alexander, is a psychopathic madman who plans to exterminate all nonhuman life in the universe with a virus that will kill all nonhuman aliens it comes into contact with, Airiam decides to stop him, destroying a ship transporting the virus. Later Airiam destroys the ISS Enterprise before it can destroy the Klingon homeworld Qo'noS and rescues a rival of Alexander, Michael Burnham, and her Klingon allies. After disposing of two crewmen who were plotting against her, Airiam brings Michael to Earth and helps her kill Alexander and his treacherous second-in-command, Admiral Cornwall, allowing Michael to become Emperor. But on her coronation, Airiam uses the virus on the imperial palace, changing it only target humans, killing Michael and her supporters, so she can take the throne for herself.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The Klingon who shushes the away team in "Context is For Kings" quickly turned into Image Macro. fodder.
  • The DISCO shirts that Burnham and Tilly jog in have become both a Running Gag (pardon the Pun) in the Trek fandom, and highly coveted merchandise.
  • Saru consistently getting bumped from his turn in the Captain's Chair every time a commanding officer departs the ship. After Lorca left, he had to hand it over to Admiral Cornwell and, temporarily, "Captain" Georgiou from the Mirror Universe. After she left, Captain Pike took command. Saru was sitting in the chair the last we see of the ship in the Season 2 finale, but some fans half-joke that the third season will start with yet another Starfleet officer in the 32nd century assuming command as soon as Discovery shows up, or otherwise Burnham getting promoted over his head somehow. As of "People of Earth", Captain Saru officially takes command of Discovery, with Burnham as his First Officer... only to leave the crew to be replaced as captain by Burnham herself.
  • After Riker pulled a Gunship Rescue in the season 1 finales of both Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Lower Decks, fans began joking that he'd show up to save Discovery at the end of season 3, despite that season being set 800 years in the future. Hey, he did say he planned to live forever... Sadly, Riker didn't show up.
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • It's pretty telling when the general fan reaction to T'Kuvma's warriors devouring Georgiou's corpse isn't anger and abhorrence at the series' antagonists for engaging in I'm a Humanitarian, but that it makes the Klingons difficult and inconvenient to sympathize with while Rooting for the Empire (along with the renewed backlash towards the writers over Georgiou's death).
  • The show also inherited the subset of Klingon lovers who conveniently ignore that the Klingon sense of honor has rarely if ever corresponded remotely with the Western world's modern definition, such as decrying T'Kuvma for dishonoring a ceasefire, when Worf pointed out in DS9 that, to Klingons, "There is nothing more honorable than victory." (This in response to the Klingons' idea of waiting cloaked near defeated enemy vessels so they can ambush any rescuers. Worf's line was the response when someone asked if that wasn't too underhanded for the supposedly honorable Klingons.) Basically, watch them and they're never as huggable as they'd be if they lived up to the Knight in Shining Armor brand of honor. With them, you've gotta remember that there's a less-friendly side to honor, where it's all about social standing. Reputation and not letting insults go unpunished is Serious Business - fail to save face and you're nothing, look good and you're everything. This results in your average Klingon being more concerned with being honored for winning, and that'll always outrank a sense of fair play. And it's never not been true, to Worf's disillusionment more than once during TNG and DS9. It seems to be a bit analogous to real-world knights and samurai - the fiction-derived ideal is all fealty and chivalry and respect for a Worthy Opponent and such but the real deal could be Jerkasses (if well-mannered when it's called for because they don't want to insult someone who can't let that go unpunished lest their own honor - that meaning their appearance, their worthiness or their social standing in others' eyes - be sullied) and similarly, there are Klingons as Worf would like to think of them and then there are Klingons in practice. Fans tend to expect the former and think the writers screwed up when getting the latter.
  • No, internet, the brutal Terran Empire is not the side you should be rooting for, no matter how much Evil Is Cool or how attractive they are.
  • It's also pretty jarring among Trek fandom to see the number of people who excuse Section 31 (up to and including their future attempts at genocide) by saying that Utopia Justifies the Means — when Star Trek has generally been about the complete opposite message, especially when those exact same fans then turn around and criticize the show's depiction of the rest of Starfleet for not staying close enough to Gene Roddenberry's vision.
• Moral Event Horizon: See here.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The computer voice is reminiscent of Majel Barrett, while not being a direct imitation. And the way it says, "Black Alert," while being a simple statement, is also filled with portent that Shit Is About To Get Real.
• Narm:
  • While the extensive spoken Klingon in the first two seasons is some of the most grammatically correct tlhIngan Hol ever spoken onscreen in the franchise, the reverb effects on the vocals and generally monotone delivery by the actors have a tendency to rob it of the bite that spoken Klingon typically had in earlier outings.
  • Tilly's Precision F-Strike in "Choose Your Pain," the first one in any canon Star Trek media. Granted, it is meant to be a humorous moment, but to some audiences it just felt rather jarring and out of place rather than funny, coming across more as simply swearing for swearing's sake. Others felt it would have worked better if the franchise's first "fuck" had been used to accentuate a particularly dramatic moment rather than for a one-off joke. (All additional F-bombs in the franchise have been used for dramatic effect.)
  • The pieces of equipment that Burnham and Tyler wear or set up while sneaking onto the Klingons' Ship of the Dead in "Into the Forest I Go" helpfully glow brightly, spin visibly, or emit verbal pronouncements that they are actively functioning. One of the beacons Burnham sets up is on the Klingon bridge, right in front of a manned control console. Fortunately for the Discovery crew, and for all of the Federation, an entire massive ship full of Klingons collectively Failed a Spot Check.
  • Lorca's slow disintegration while falling down into the Charon's spore reactor sounds just like a TIE Fighter, if it's not an actual Shout-Out.
  • After weeks of building up the cause of the decades-long bad blood between Burnham and Spock, it's tremendously underwhelming to find out it was just a petty childhood argument that anyone with a maturity beyond a five-year-old's would have gotten over long since That said, some find it poignant that Spock is more human than he's letting on, and this would be somewhat mitigated when he reveals that he doesn't hate her for that so much as he hates her taking on burdens for everything and finding her selfish— that very act being just one of many examples.
  • At the end of Season 2, it turns out the reason for the show's notorious seeming inability to fit into previous Trek canon is that all of Starfleet, on a recommendation from Spock, agree to pretend Discovery and her crew never existed under penalty of treason. Quite a few very justified comparisons to Armin Tanzarian were made.
  • The Kelpiens having gone from primitive agrarians to mastering Ba'ul fighter ships within the space of less than a month and showing up during the climax of the season 2 finale also drew some comparisons to the climax of Battlefield Earth.
  • Tilly's scenes struggling with Grudge, where poor Mary Wiseman visibly struggles to the breaking point trying to sell that this laid-back (and probably sleepy) cat is some kind of uncontrollable hell-spawn.
  • The far-future hand weapons in Season 3 are some truly goofy-looking designs; the Arm Cannon used by the mooks in the season premiere look like low-budget Mega Man cosplay.
  • 32nd-century Starfleet, no longer content with mere Explosive Instrumentation, has seen fit to install actual flamethrowers on the bridge of Discovery, which blast fire whenever the shields take a hit. Once you see them, you can't unsee them.
• Narm Charm: In "Lethe", Sarek wins the first round of his and Michael's Battle in the Center of the Mind by hadouken-ing her out of his brain. It's both totally ridiculous and kind of awesome.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize: Sort of. Early in the production it was announced that Discovery would include a LGBT couple. Then the cast list got revealed and included, among plenty of other high-tier actors, Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz, two openly gay Broadway alumni in big roles. Guess whose characters are in a relationship?
• Older Than They Think:
  • A big deal is sometimes made by Moral Guardians about how Star Trek is supposedly supposed to be family-friendly, whereas Discovery often takes full advantage of its TV-MA rating. Such comments usually get dogpiled by people pointing out various incidents in which televised Star Trek previously was very much not family-friendly ("For the Uniform", "In the Pale Moonlight", and various incidents on Star Trek: Voyager are often cited). Likewise Tilly's use of a Precision F-Strike early in the series, which was preceded by Picard saying "shit" in French in "Elementary, Dear Data" and Data saying it in English in Star Trek: Generations. And that's not even mentioning the infamous female Space Clothes featured throughout The Original Series, some of which are racy by today's standards.
  • During season 1, a lot of Discovery's detractors took issue with some Starfleet characters (such as Landry) being overly pragmatic or expressing vaguely racist attitudes, apparently forgetting that as early as Star Trek: The Original Series Spock would frequently call out his human shipmates for doing exactly the same things. (The usual counter is that Spock did call them out for it, which doesn't really happen in Discovery.) Not to mention that Star Trek in general is the Trope Namer for Insane Admiral, demonstrating that even in Gene Roddenberry's utopia, some people never changed.
  • It's not unusual for fans to joke about Spock's never-mentioned adopted sister by pointing out that Spock never tells anyone about his family until he is actually forced to. This happened with both his own father in Sarek's first (TOS) appearance and Sybok in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. The show eventually gives an official explanation by having the Federation classify all information on the ship and the crew that "died" with it.
  • A new installment featuring extensive visual redesigns, including significantly redesigned uniforms, new looks for the Federation technology, and a new design for the Klingons, becoming the subject of division among the fandom? Could be Discovery, could be Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In fact, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would also go on to redesign various alien races such as the Romulans and Trill.
  • The spore drive uses tardigrades for space travel like in the adventure game Tardigrades.
  • Control being a villainous AI related to Section 31 was the plot of Star Trek: Section 31 - Control.
• One-Scene Wonder: The unnamed Klingon mook who shushes the away team, human-style, aboard U.S.S. Glenn in "Context Is for Kings" and is mauled to death by Ripper five seconds later. It comes out of nowhere and is so incongruous that even the Starfleet characters do a Double Take before he's killed.
  Tilly: (with phaser drawn) You in the shadows! Show yourself!
  Klingon: (steps out of the shadows) Shhhh.
  Landry: Is he shushing you?
• Padding: The two-part second-season finale, "Such Sweet Sorrow", primarily revolves around a huge Final Battle against Control, which could have conceivably fit into a single episode instead of two. As a result, both parts abound with Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene moments to balance out the expensive Visual Effects of Awesome.
• Quality by Popular Vote: Both this series' detractors and defenders are guilty of this at times.
  • The most vocal detractors, before the series was released, were certain that "no one" was ever going to watch it, and for a long while operated under the assumption that the series was so abysmally bad that it would immediately bomb once it premiered. The YouTube channel Midnight's Edge even (erroneously) claimed that CBS was already considering it a failure and looking for options to replace it — before it even aired the pilot. The attitude amongst said commentators seemed to be "We know this series is going to be bad, and once it bombs in the ratings that'll prove it." Added fuel to the fire was that it was to air exclusively on CBS All Access, a payers-only streaming service. Not only was no one going to watch it because it was so bad, but absolutely no one was going to pay for it!
  • Once Discovery finished with a generally solid first season, its most vocal defenders began acting as if this meant there were no legitimate complaints about the show whatsoever.
• Rooting for the Empire:
  • Literally, in the case of the Misaimed Fandom who think that the Terran Empire is awesome and root for them accordingly.
  • Not a beat was missed heading into the second season, as the Misaimed Fandom promptly started rooting for Mirror-Georgiou and the rest of Section 31 as the "defenders" of the Federation.
• Salvaged Story:
  • The first thing we see Starfleet doing is covertly saving a species from extinction, showing that this series' depiction of the Prime Directive will be far from the highly conservative model that TNG and Voyager descended into.
  • The exact same scene shows Georgiou and Burnham using a phaser weapon for peaceful and beneficial purposes, defying the otherwise action- and battle-heavy Darker and Edgier tone of the series. Even better, it's a bit of a Call-Back to Zefram Cochrane's warp ship being built out of a decommissioned ICBM in a nuclear silo.
  • The Call-Back to the original series, which mentioned Captain Decker, Captain Pike, and Commodore April. It also mentioned Captain Georgiou, which showed it wasn't all white men.
  • In Star Trek Beyond, Sulu was depicted as gay in homage to Sulu's original actor George Takei. However, some people, including Takei himself, disagreed with this, arguing it would've been better if they'd created a brand new character who was LGBT.^note Elsewhere, Takei has commented that he always played Sulu as straight. This series introduces Lt. Stamets and Dr. Culber as the franchise's first confirmed LGBT couple.
  • After the hotly-contested redesign of the Klingons, Sarek, and other Vulcans look just as they have in other Trek films and series, and "The Wolf Inside" reveals Andorians and Tellarites who also look much like their previous depictions. Season 2 also partially backwheels the Klingon redesign: starting with the premiere, the Klingons have hair again, making them look a lot more like the "traditional" Klingons of Star Trek: The Motion Picture onwards. The writers handwave it by saying that Klingons, in this era, shave their heads during wartime^note not unlike the stated rationale for Nero and his Romulan crew being bald in Star Trek (2009) while seeking revenge for the loss of Romulus. Additionally, the makeup has been reduced so they look more humanoid and less Orc-like.
  • Possibly unintentional, but given that many Trek fans were highly critical of how the first half-dozen episodes did not feel, to them, like Star Trek, with many pointing to the Big-Lipped Alligator Moment-esque use of the F-word in one episode as an example, it is ironic that immediately after the episode in question, succeeding installments were notable for feeling more like traditional (though slightly darker-than-average) Star Trek.
  • In a similar vein, as the Darker and Edgier first season proceeds, the tone and message of the series gradually works its way back to being more idealistic and optimistic, addressing a prime criticism of many past Trek fans.
  • Bringing back Georgiou (as the dictator of the Terran Empire!) and keeping her around as an agent of Section 31, to the delight of those who felt the(original) character had been wasted by killing her off so early.
  • In a similar vein, in Season 2 the iconic D7-class Klingon battle cruiser is no longer covered in Gothic-looking spikes and tendrils as seen in "Choose Your Pain" (that ship was retconned to being the Sech-class in other material).
  • In "An Obol For Charon", Pike orders that the Enterprise's holographic communicator be taken out and declares that "we'll be going back to good old-fashioned view screens" due to said communicator causing conflicts with the primary systems. The holographic communicator was badly received by fans due to it being far more advanced that any communication technology seen in the franchise despite this being a prequel.^note A holographic communicator saw some use in Deep Space Nine, but there it was basically a prototype that was treated as rather cutting-edge technology, and Sisko and other Star Fleet personnel would comment on how unfamiliar they were with the technology. Between this and the problems caused by the turbolifts' voice commands^note since the Monster of the Week scrambled the Universal Translator, nearly no one can use the lift, it's likely they are setting up Pike to institute a Boring, but Practical policy on Federation ships once he becomes a Fleet Captain, explaining TOS' apparent lower level of sophistication.
  • Captain Lorca was extremely controversial among Star Trek fans. While some loved the introduction of a morally complicated Starfleet captain who's not afraid to make dishonorable choices in the name of the greater good, others hated him for the exact same reasons. Captain Pike, by contrast, was unanimously well-received by nearly the entire fandom for bringing back some of that iconic Star Trek idealism and threading the difficult needle of a Captain who is optimistic but not naive in his devotion to the Federation's long-honored values. The reception for Pike was so positive it led to CBS giving him his own Spin-Off, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
  • After stumbling afoul of the LGBT fanbase by employing the tired old Bury Your Gays trope, Season 2 finds a way to bring the deceased character Back from the Dead. While this is trading one trope for another, it at least allows the gay couple to be onscreen again.
  • A common complaint about the series is that Spock's foster sister and the spore drive have never been alluded to in previous canon. Season 2 is able to declare them all Classified Information, after the addition of a couple more elements (the Sphere data, Control, Time Travel, the Red Angel) pushes it all over the edge. The same trick is used to explain why Section 31, operating openly during this series, has become a nebulous conspiracy by the time of DS9. (Some critics have argued that these revisions were unnecessary: Spock is — canonically speaking — the type of person to not mention his parents until they come onboard, or mention he has a half-brother until he comes onboard, so it's not that surprising for him to now also have an estranged foster sister. Similarly, the spore drive itself was clearly shown in season 1 to be Awesome, but Impractical, requiring a sapient navigator who has to either take an illegal genetic treatment or suffer progressively worse injuries from use.)
  • Yet another complaint about season one was the lack of attention paid to the Bridge Bunnies and other background characters. Season 2 starts rectifying that in the season premiere, and goes so far as to give most of an episode to Airiam, the gynoid-looking character (revealing she's a full-body replacement Cyborg in the vein of Ghost in the Shell). Unfortunately she has to make a Heroic Sacrifice at the end of it.
  • "Terra Firma" is set in a vision of the Mirror Universe before Discovery arrived, meaning we get to see Mirror Michael, Tilly, and Stamets after many fans were disappointed they were already dead. The episode also serves as A Day in the Limelight for Mirror Georgiou and demonstrates that she has undergone Character Development after spending time in the prime universe.
  • A minor one, but a lot of fans talked about how uninviting and cold the ship has looked, especially compared with the TOS and TNG, so in season four, Michael’s Captain quarters has varying shades of orange.
  • The final season's tone and storyline directly addresses the criticisms of past seasons, being more optimistic and light-hearted in tone as the crew of the Discovery is searching for the lost technology of The Progenitors from the TNG episode "The Chase" while offering stakes that are dangerous (with a pair of thieves out to obtain it for themselves), but not galaxy-ending like with the Klingon War, Control, The Burn, or the DMA. Additionally, it continues to further integrate the events of Deep Space Nine and the effects of the Dominion War after Picard (up until its third season) was accused of mostly ignoring that series in favor of TNG and Voyager.
• Shocking Moments:
  • If anyone was let down by The Reveal that Ash Tyler was a physically altered Voq, the show made up for that with the big twist in "Vaulting Ambition," which revealed that "Captain Lorca" was actually from the Mirror Universe and had been impersonating his prime-universe counterpart the whole time. Of course, there are still a number of viewers who came to that point and said I Knew It!.
  • At the end of the first season finale, we get an appearance from none other than the U.S.S. Enterprise, "no bloody A, B, C or D", with Captain Christopher Pike in command.
  • The second season episode "Saints of Imperfection" threw a twist that floored both DIS fans and haters alike. The "monster" that's destroying the mycelial network of May's home? It's Doctor Culber.
  • A couple of episodes later, just where are Burnham and Spock headed to reverse Spock's Sanity Slippage? None other than Talos IV, the planet that Pike, Spock, and the crew of the Enterprise visited in "The Cage", the first pilot for the Original Series, and later revisited in "The Menagerie". The episode even kicks off with a retro-style Previously on… segment using clips from "The Cage", and the Talosians and Vina all show up in (sometimes illusionary) person.
  • And then, two episodes after that, "The Red Angel" gives us The Reveal that the titular time-travelling entity is not just a human, but Burnham's mother (who is very much alive).
  • Who then reveals in the following episode, "Perpetual Infinity", that she is not responsible for the seven signals that kicked off the entire plot.
  • So who exactly is Carl, the joke-spouting time guardian on some out-of-the-way planet near the Gamma Quadrant?
    Carl: I AM THE GUARDIAN OF FOREVER.
  • Season 5 manages to follow in the footsteps of Picard by resurrecting an Enterprise, only it elects to reveal that the I.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 is still alive. Thanks to Burnham, it gets brought back and allowed to more or less give Kirk's old girl (or at least a version of her) a chance for posterity.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Fans (and some professional critics such as Chuck Sonnenburg) seem to largely agree that the two-part series opening ("The Vulcan Hello" and "Battle at the Binary Stars") is a somewhat weak introduction to the series, as it fails in quite a few ways to represent the overall tone and feel of the show; most notably in how it focuses very squarely on Michael and makes her out to be a somewhat monolithic main character when the show is actually by and large much more ensemble-based than that. Most feel that the show first properly kicks into gear in the third episode, where the titular Discovery and its crew are introduced. And perhaps that the events of the two episodes could have been delivered in a more interesting manner, if the plot of them was instead slowly revealed as Michael's backstory, told in bits and pieces to the audience in the process of getting to know her as a character, rather than them being frontloaded and giving what is not too flattering first-hand impression of her from the get-go.
• Spiritual Successor: The concept of people from the past working to rebuild civilization after its fall was thought up earlier by Gene Roddenberry in the 1970s, which was previously adapted into Andromeda.
• Spoiled by the Format: Averting this trope is why Shazad Latif was credited under the pseudonym "Javid Iqbal" when playing Voq to keep from spoiling the reveal that Ash Tyler and Voq are one and the same, although many people saw through it regardless.
• Squick: It turns out that every replicated meal on Star Trek ever has been made from reformatted shit. No wonder people complain about the meals not tasting as good as cooked food.
• Tear Dryer: In one episode, Saru the alien is going through a biological process that he thinks will kill him. He asks Michael Burnham to cut off his ganglia and euthanise him... but then the ganglia fall out on their own and Saru survives.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: While Star Trek: Enterprise was often criticized for a tired, same-old-same-old feeling, this series has gone the opposite direction and caught flak for being too different. This includes complaints about the new aesthetics and updated visual and make-up effects, the fact that this series will be more heavily serialized instead of episodic, that the lead character won't be the captain, and that it will not include Roddenberry's "no conflict" rule. "This isn't real Trek!" or "This neither looks nor feels anything like Trek!" are frequently said.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Keyla Detmer, the helm officer who was so badly injured during the Battle of the Binary Stars that her skull is now held together by a metal implant distinctly resembling Seven of Nine's eyepiece. Despite this clear nod to the franchise's history, she gets scarcely any Character Development or focus and remains a purely generic bridge crewmember, and barely gets a second or two in "Context is for Kings" to register her shock at working with Burnham again (short of, for instance, an actual conversation). Thankfully, Season 3 gives her more characterisation as a Shell-Shocked Veteran.
  • Similarly, there's a Recurring Extra with a metal visor that, like Detmer and her eyepiece, is just there to remind you of an earlier character who did have actual Character Development and whose hardware was part of it.
  • Airiam, an awesome-looking cyborg who only gets to deliver a line or two every other episode as one of the Bridge Bunnies until finally getting A Day in the Limelight only to die after a taste of what she could've been to the show.
  • Ensign Connor, the Shenzhou's Ensign Newbie operations officer in the series premiere, seems to exist solely to get spaced by a hull breach in the midst of a Break the Cutie Heroic BSoD, right in front of Burnham in her brig cell, no less. And when we meet his Mirror counterpart, who is the new captain of the I.S.S. Shenzhou in the wake of Mirror-Burnham's disappearance, Burnham herself is forced to kill him within minutes in front of the bridge crew to preserve her own life (and her Dead Person Impersonation of her Mirror counterpart).
  • Commander Landry gets introduced as a tough-as-nails Action Girl security chief serving Captain Lorca aboard the Discovery, seemingly a Spiritual Successor to TNG's Tasha Yar. The very next episode, Landry suffers a serious case of being handed the Idiot Ball and tries to harvest parts from Ripper, the captive giant tardigrade, without bothering to confirm that the beast is actually sedated or not (and having witnessed what it did to an entire squad of Klingons the previous episode). Cue a swift Cruel and Unusual Death. And when her Mirror universe counterpart shows up as Lorca's right-hand woman during a coup attempt, she too in turn doesn't last long before being blown up aboard the I.S.S. Charon. Star Trek Online would later incorporate the actress as a queer woman mourning her dead wife and making her a key part of the Discovery Federation plotline.
  • Voq, the Torchbearer for T'Kuvma, also gets a fair bout of this. He is introduced as a major part of T'Kuvma's movement within the Empire, becoming essentially the leader of The Remnant of his House after the Battle of the Binary Stars, and at L'Rell's urging he takes on a perilous mission to restore their glory and unite the Empire in the wake of T'Kuvma's death. He gets vivisected and surgically modified to become a copy of Starfleet officer Ash Tyler, with Voq's personality suppressed for even deeper cover, and as soon as he starts to reassert his own autonomy through a Split-Personality Takeover, the strain between his personality and Ash Tyler's drives L'Rell to Mercy Kill Voq part-way through the first season with next to nothing accomplished by his infiltration — besides killing Doctor Culber, which was largely incidental to keep the deception a secret.
  • The mirror Silvia Tilly, captain of the I.S.S. Discovery, is apparently a monster even beyond what the Mirror Universe typically produces, and one of the most feared members of The Empire outside of Empress Georgiou herself. She could have made a hell of a recurring Arc Villain along with the Empress, and a great opportunity for Mary Wiseman to expand her acting range, but unfortunately we never actually get to see her, as she was Killed Offscreen by the Klingons (along with the rest of her crew and her ship) shortly after switching places with the prime-universe Discovery. Star Trek Online came to the rescue on this one, developing a series of missions with Wiseman voicing Captain Killy having misadventures in the 25th century (in STO they first got sent forward in time and then back to the 23rd century to be destroyed, with Killy having jumped ship in the interim).
  • Gray Tal is one of the first transgender characters in the franchise and played by a trans masculine actor. And he gets written out almost as quickly as he comes back to life. In particular, he makes a big deal about how he's going to meet everyone for the first time, and then he doesn't appear again until the end of the episode. This has resulted in frustration among trans fans who were hoping for more.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Like the above trope, this is a frequent criticism of the show. While Discovery having a surplus of good ideas is a pretty good problem to have, it simply underscores the show's breakneck pacing.
  • T'Kuvma's Ship of the Dead is gargantuan, covered in coffins, and implied to be thousands of years old (which would predate the Klingon Empire itself). In other words, it's like no other Klingon ship we've seen yet in Star Trek, and exploring the vessel's origins — including how it came to lie wrecked on a planet, as seen in T'Kuvma's flashback — could have been an interesting Story Arc that would delve into Klingon history and mythology. Instead, it's written out barely halfway through the first season, destroyed in combat with Discovery, and that's the last we ever hear about it.
  • After "The Sounds of Thunder", there are no stated repercussions from Saru irrevocably altering the destiny of both the Kelpiens and the Ba'ul. And no, the Ba'ul have no links to any other species we've seen before in Trek; they turn out to be Obviously Evil Humanoid Abominations.
  • In "Project Daedalus", the show resorts to that old "A Death in the Limelight" trick for Airiam, in lieu of any previous Character Development spread across previous episodes — something a heavily-serialized show like this one would have had time for. (Tropes Are Not Bad, and it works, but Tropes Are Not Good either.)
  • "Perpetual Infinity" skips over the time-traveling struggles of Dr. Gabrielle Burnham as the Red Angel — a personal and bitter narrative that piqued many fans' curiosity.
  • "Through the Valley of Shadows" handwaves Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome without spending time on the character who rapidly aged — one who would have very personal thoughts on their life as the son of L'Rell and Voq.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: No doubt, the first season is very dark and only got more so with the introduction of the mirror universe arc.
  • Even a positive review of the show's twelfth episode, "Vaunting Ambition," commented that:
    "We know Discovery is dark. It's the darkest of all the Treks. It's also wildly unpredictable. But is anyone having fun watching it? .... The crew members seem merely to tolerate one another (Culber and Stamets notwithstanding). No one is having fun. This means the audience doesn’t have fun."
  • SF Debris was a little more blunt:
    "Star Trek: Discovery... isn't fun. It's a war story with little war, it's an adventure story with little adventure, it's a science piece with idiot science, and the most light-hearted character turned out to be the villain. This is no surprise since Michael, as discussed, is the focal point and Michael's journey is hardly fun in any way at all. The series is simply... devoid of joy, which wouldn't be a problem if the tragic drama were better executed."
• Ugly Cute:
  • "Ripper" is a scaled-up tardigrade on blue acid, so it lands here by definition. With a large side of Nightmare Fuel — because scaled-up.
  • This was specifically invoked by Doug Jones in an interview about his hopes for the character in regards to Saru's design. While he's hardly adorable in the traditional sense, with his long, gangly frame, big blue eyes and bulldog-like face, many people have agreed that the design of Saru is oddly appealing.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The Orions in season 3 look weirdly◊ artificial◊, due in part to the makeup not being simple green paint on human skin, but full-head prosthetics. It's particularly noticeable around the mouths, which just don't move like human mouths. This could be a deliberate choice to make the Orions look alien, instead of just like humans in body paint.
• Unexpected Character:
  • More like Unexpected Actor, but it's safe to say that few expected the biggest cameo in Season 4 to be Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Gubernatorial candidate and major voting rights activist as the President of Earth.
  • Season 5's plot line brings The Progenitors back into the fold. Needless to say, nobody expected that particular storyline to be continued in the final season.
  • Season 5 also finally gives Discovery an Enterprise in the 32nd century—but not the one anyone was expecting. The original I.S.S. Enterprise is discovered alive and intact.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Captain Lorca. Besides the fact he has flair to spare, SF Debris pointed out that up until he stranded Discovery in the Mirror Universe, Mirror Lorca was actually nothing but helpful. Then suddenly the show equates him with Donald Trump and declares him totally evil for little more than maintaining a cover identity while in the Prime Universe and attempting a Military Coup against... Emperor Phillipa Georgiou, who casually murders her aides and considers Kelpiens like Saru a delicacy. So naturally Lorca is killed off and Georgiou is brought back to the Prime Universe as a prisoner.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • The Starfleet characters are nominally the show's protagonists, but the questionable moral choices made by some, and the general friction and tension between most of them, have made it difficult for a number of viewers to sympathize with the series' lead characters so far, or at least over the course of the first season. Though the fact that Captain Lorca is actually a paranoid, power-hungry fugitive from the Mirror Universe goes a long way towards explaining why the crew have been forced into behaviour that conflicts with Federation values, in that they were arm-twisted by a seemingly genuine authority figure into Just Following Orders to the best of their abilities.
  • Spock is revealed to have nursed a years-long grudge against Burnham, refusing to so much as speak to her, just because she once called him a half-breed in a fit of pique as a child. Suddenly his father's infamous "So human" doesn't seem so bad. This is mitigated by subsequent episodes, in which Spock tells his side of the story, that his anger arose not from the insult, but from Michael's arrogance in believing herself to blame for everything — from her parents' death to the logic extremists' actions to the war with the Klingons — which persisted to the present day.
  • In Short Treks: "The Trouble With Edward", Captain Lucero immediately reassigned a problematic Edward Larkin, made juvenile responses to prevent him from responding, and concluded that a mission under her command was a disaster solely because "he was an idiot." Compare this with Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Hollow Pursuits", in which Captain Picard refused to reassign the problematic Reginald Barclay and forced his crew to help him become a better officer. Fans made a side-by-side comparison to accentuate the contrast. Of course, this leaves aside the fact that Lucero was a newly promoted and inexperienced captain, and Larkin really was, by every indication, Too Dumb to Live, being primarily responsible for the loss of the ship due to his refusal to obey orders, as well as evidently dying because he couldn't be bothered to pause his Motive Rant long enough to get into the Escape Pod Lucero was holding for him. Additionally, there are Larkin's Obliviously Evil tendencies, showing a complete lack of understanding of basic morality (such as the idea that no, we do not cultivate possibly intelligent species for food or use human DNA to make food products), as well as making an ineffectual attempt to ruin Lucero's career in response to his proposal being rejected for completely valid ethical reasons. Yet another view is that this reading still doesn't reflect too well on Lucero. Instead of making any attempts at sanctioning or reining in her blatantly insubordinate crewmember in a way that would have hampered his ability to do harm, such as ordering him suspended and/or confined to quarters, she just orders him transferred but still allows him to keep his post and having free access to the lab until the transfer can go through. Ultimately, the effect is that Edward falls into both Jerkass Has a Point and Dumbass Has a Point territory: he might be an unpleasant and insubordinate person with very questionable judgement, but it is hard to claim with a straight face that he is wrong to call Lucero out on doing a bad job as commanding officer, even if he does so for all the wrong reasons. When all's said and done, nobody really comes out of this episode smelling like roses.
  • Much of Season 4 is devoted to Burnham believing 10-C is innocent of any wrongdoing and were only destroying inhabited planets via ignorance rather than malice. Many DISCO viewers pointed out that in real life, massive negligence in things like mining and other dangerous industries, is hardly something that deserves any forgiveness. It seems like they're guilty of massive amounts of manslaughter of lack of care toward other races so the Happy Ending presented is actually a Downer Ending. At the very least they should be made to make reparations to Book and other survivors of planets they destroyed.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The effects have come a long way since the original Star Trek, being far closer to J. J. Abrams' Star Trek (2009) than to even Enterprise.
  • Season 4's "Anomaly" and "Rubicon" give the depiction of the spore drive a new spin (heh heh) by showing it from the POV of Discovery — instead of just showing the ship do the spin-and-disappear trick, they show the universe itself spin around the ship.
• Wangst: Ryn keeps talking about the loss of his antennae as if it's permanent, when the franchise had already established they grow back in just a few months. It's quite possible Osyraa did something to prevent that, but if so it's certainly never made clear.
• Win Back the Crowd: Season 3's retool of the series — throwing Discovery into the 32nd century, where they work to restore The Federation after its collapse — has won over many critics of the first two seasons for its hopeful tone, its greater freedom to reference canonical events and locations, and for giving minor characters like Detmer more room for Character Development.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
  • Par for the course of Star Trek, but Word of God has that the Klingons represent a "fractured contemporary America". Media outlets reported on writer Aaron Harberts allegedly saying the identitarian Klingons who want to preserve their heritage and culture from the danger of the multi-cultural quasi-communist Federation (who they fear will ethnically cleanse them) a were a mirror for modern America are a stand-in for White Nationalists and their slogan "Remain Klingon" is based on "Make America Great Again!", however CBS has come out and denied such allegories.
    • A few reviewers and YouTube channel Midnight's Edge noticed they also share similarities with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (such as employing martyrdom to inspire its members and seek to reunite their fractured empire much like ISIS's goals to establish a caliphate) which works better since the House of T'Kuvma is described as more religiously-driven than the mainstream Great Houses of the Klingon Empire (which is still a feudal oligarchy).
    • One could also say they are closer to North Korea due to their isolationist nature, on top of all their other traits listed.
  • In a similar vein, Mirror-Lorca's contention about Mirror-Georgiou being soft on alien insurgents while calling for a leader who can preserve the Terran Empire's way of life is reminiscent of real-world white nationalists. It only gets more Anvilicious when he proclaims he will "Make the Empire Glorious Again", in an even closer parallel to MAGA.
  • The casual racism expressed or accepted by Vulcans in regard to Burnham and the half-human Spock (and humans in general) is similar to that exhibited in the real world. The revelation that the Vulcan Expeditionary Group would accept either Burnham or Spock, but not both, as they wanted to limit the amount of people with human ancestry they had as members is very reminiscent of groups who allow in a token representative to "prove" they aren't racist. The similarity is driven further by Burnham being a black woman, and therefore a member of a group exposed to this quite often even today in the United States and other majority white countries.
• The Woobie:
  • Lt. Stamets was once a civilian scientist unraveling the mysteries of the "mycelial network" because The World Is Just Awesome. Along comes the Klingon War, and Starfleet co-opts his peaceful research for the purposes of warfare and all but conscripts him and his colleagues solely to weaponize the "spore drive" that much faster. Then his best friend ends up horribly killed when the spore drive on the USS Glenn fails catastrophically, and in the wake of that, Stamets has to Race Against the Clock to get the spore drive on the Discovery fully operational to save the besieged civilians of a mining outpost. It gets better: when Stamets objects to the hazards to the ship and crew, and to his research being used for war, he has to deal with Captain Lorca playing the distress calls from said mining outpost over the shipwide intercom just to guilt-trip him into working faster. Later, he has to inject himself with a genetic treatment when the giant tardigrade, Ripper, must be released in order to act as a replacement Wetware CPU in its absence. The Trauma Conga Line only continues when harmful side effects mount from his spore drive navigations, his intended last jump before leaving Starfleet to recuperate lands the crew in the Mirror Universe and personally leaves him catatonic, then Voq murders Stamets' partner, Dr. Culber, right in front of him, and the mycelial network that he's been studying his whole career is dying courtesy of Mirror-Stamets' exploitations. It gets even worse for him when he wakes up, fully understanding that his partner is now dead, the man responsible is still on the ship, and their return back home lands them nine months ahead of when they left, leaving them on the losing side of a war. While they are able to settle things down, things seem to get even worse for him in season 2. He's still able to pull off spore drive jumps, and he even gets a chance to personally see the Mycelial Network for himself, but what should have been a happy moment for him upon finding and resurrecting Dr. Culber gets utterly destroyed when Culber is unwilling to go back to the way things were, convinced he is no longer the same person, and ultimately decides to leave for the Enterprise. Even when Culber decides to come back and stay with him, Staments gets badly injured during Discovery and Enterprise's battle against Control and is forced into a medically induced coma until he can heal. And that's not even getting into the fact that he and everyone on the ship left for the 32nd century just to preserve their future, so he has to adjust to an entirely new time period, and one at that where The Federation doesn't even exist anymore. And in spite of all his efforts, he almost loses both his husband and his adoptive kid to a toxic environment while trying to investigate the source of the disaster that caused the Federation to fall apart in the first place. Things get solved, fortunately, but Season 4 dishes out a mining machine that a highly advanced alien species drops in the middle of Federation Space and unknowingly destroys everything in its path, leading him to put a lot of time into solving things before it gets worse (though he's fortunately able to handle things better this time.) Considering everything that's happened, the poor guy could really use a hug.
  • Ripper, the giant tardigrade, is an alien being that coexists symbiotically with the spores that are used for the Discovery's revolutionary drive system. As a result, it gets used forcibly as a living computer in order to extend the effective range of the spore drive, to the point that the stress causes it to physically shut down into a state of hibernation, forcing Burnham to have it released once again and forcing Stamets to use a genetic treatment to take its place to keep the drive operational.
  • Lt. Ash Tyler was captured by the Klingons on active duty and kept in one of their prison ships where torture (and apparent rape) awaited him every day until Captain Lorca was imprisoned with him and made his escape with Tyler. However, it turned out that what he remembered as rape and torture were actually the memories of Voq, the Klingon lover of L'Rell, who engaged in a consensual relationship with her and underwent Body Horror levels of surgical modification using Tyler's own organs and tissue in order to appear human ... in the form of Ash Tyler. When he encounters L'Rell again while aboard Kol's vessel, the Trauma Button-pushing sends him into a Heroic BSoD, and she even clings to him as Discovery beams them out. When he goes to confront L'Rell in the brig, she tries to trigger Voq's personality to pull a Grand Theft Me on Tyler to complete Voq's mission of infiltration, and when Voq takes over, he kills Dr. Culber, and Tyler has to take the blame for it even after Voq's personality is given a Mercy Kill.
  • Dr. Culber is the Only Sane Man amidst the Dysfunction Junction that is Discovery's senior crew, being forced into dubious actions by Captain Lorca's orders and having to watch his partner, Lt. Stamets, degrade before his eyes as a result of illegal genetic modifications that allow the ship to keep using the spore drive. He can only watch as the jumps finally leave Stamets catatonic, and then while trying to treat Stamets' condition, Culber gets abruptly murdered by Voq, who has been modified to impersonate Ash Tyler and who gets away after doing so. It turns out that, even though he died, his consciousness got kicked into the mycelial network, where he was perceived as a "monster" and was subject to constant attack from the network's native life. He naturally takes steps to defend himself, which causes harm to the native life, which only furthers the attacks, even though neither he nor the network's native life actually understands what is occurring. As a result, he is in terrible (and traumatized) shape when the Discovery crew finds him, even though he is returned to the prime universe with an intact body. Stamets is too overjoyed to pay attention to Culber’s obvious distress and trouble reintegrating, and his attempts to help consist mostly of attempts to expiate his own grief and guilt (and you just KNOW Stamets did not get any kind of grief support) rather than asking Hugh what he actually needs. Culber—faced with memories that lack any emotional context, a body that does not reflect his own lived history (his scars are missing), and a husband who is determined to go back to "The Way Things Were"(tm) because his own trauma has left him in no kind of shape to either move forward himself or help Culber do so—declares he's not the same person he was anymore, and almost transfers to the Enterprise before he changes his mind and ends up in the future with the rest of the Discovery crew. He's able to hold it together throughout Season 3, but when he's made the ship's counselor in Season 4, the poor man gets overwhelmed with trying to help everyone else and can barely hold things together as it is. Happily, Paul has gotten his own shit together by then, and is able to help Hugh disconnect and recharge—-and the end of season sees them off on a much-needed vacation.
  • Su'Kal from season 3. Born aboard the wreckage of a Kelpien science vessel stranded on a class-Y planet in an irradiated nebula, he spent the next 125 years trapped in a bizarre holodeck simulation meant to prepare him for a rescue that, thanks to the dangerous nebula and The Burn, never came, with only the holograms for company in all that time. As a result, when the Discovery crew finds him, he's physically and emotionally stunted and not at all prepared to encounter real people, frequently fleeing in terror whenever they approach. The season finale reveals that he also witnessed the gruesome death of his mother by radiation poisoning when he was five years old, leaving him screaming in horror and, because the nebula mutated the poor guy in utero, unwittingly unleashing The Burn across the galaxy.
• WTH, Costuming Department?:
  • The Klingon designs have been criticized by a number of fans due to not resembling their original timeline counterparts: the season 1 makeup makes them hairless and with elongated heads, compared to either the basically human-looking Klingons of Star Trek: The Original Series or the rubber foreheaded Hell-Bent for Leather look they sported in every series from TNG to Enterprise. Their armor similarly drew comparisons to Dark Eldar from Warhammer 40,000 and featured questionable designs such as female busts sculpted in their boots◊. Aaron Harberts initially defended this with the argument that they never really had a consistent design in the first place and they belong to different Houses not yet seen in the original series. For Season 2, this was significantly overhauled to be closer to the "traditional" look of Klingons in a response to the early negative sentiment. And even this version was finally backwheeled to a simple quality improvement on the TNG look in Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
  • Georgiou's outfits in season 2 are getting more and more bondage-y by the episode.

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