Star Trek (this can't be right)

[Pat Mustard]

I can't decide whether Star Trek Discovery is worth $6 a month to watch.  Maybe if I binge watched it every few months, but I'm not much for binge watching.

To date, there's only around 20-something episodes (26?), with no release date yet for season 2.  It can be binged in a couple weeks or less.

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The way he talks about the Vulcans the first two seasons, it's almost like a Goebbels giving out about the Jews.  Everything that goes wrong, the Vulcans are at fault. A Vulcan ship shows up in the locality, they're spying on him.  T'pol makes a suggestion, "I'm not good enough, is that it?"  The Vulcans don't get there quick enough when he needs their help, they're trying to make him fail.  They offer help when he doesn't think he needs it, they're trying to show him up.

Watch the SFDebris Enterprise reviews (it's where the name Future Guy was invented for the temporal cold war enemy).

Yeah, one of Enterprise's greatest failings is in its characters.  For whatever reason, the writers thought that an inexperienced crew being the pathfinder vessel from earth meant that everyone should be a gibbering idiot (or worse).

Captain Archer, a young-ish and brash man with a chip on his shoulder to prove to the Vulcans that humans could hack it in space, dealing with his first command and all the pressures associated with everything is a pretty decent starting point.  Captain Archer, the whiny, paranoid, incompetent, racist?  Not so much.  And all of the other characters have similar flaws.

Trip - casual racist and Archer's partner in stupidity
T'pol - treats whatever the Vulcan Science Institute says as dogma
Reed - is supposed to be a continuation of Britain's naval tradition, is actually a small, petty man who whines as much as Archer (so much for that stiff upper lip)
Mayweather - grew up in space and had more experience with alien species than anyone else, hardly ever offers advice or does anything more useful than being Archer's chauffeur
Hoshi - can speak a million languages, a skill that's useful maybe a handful of times in 4 seasons... Has no other discernible attributes
Phlox - alien doctor whose polygamous society is mostly played up for laughs

It's just a ship of fools.  Mostly unlikable, utterly incompetent people who claim they're open-minded explorers, but at every turn demonstrate that they're just space rednecks gawkiing at and insulting everything that's different than them.  The episode "A Night In Sickbay" is probably the best example of everything wrong with the series, but a lot of its flaws just permeate everything, in smaller doses.

*I'm using racist as in outright aggression towards anything not human.

Hoshi actually had another characteristic. She was scared of everything!

Oh and the pilot encapsulates the sheer incompetence of Starfleet. Send your ship out on your organisation's maiden long term independent voyage and you can't even have the crew picked and trained up or the ship properly outfitted. If NASA did the same with Apollo 11 it'd have looked like one of the more whacky Kerbals fails.