Given that I'm playing catch-up, this is old news to anyone who has been watching Star Trek: Discovery. But the third season features a shake-up of the whole premise of the show that bears looking at.
Naturally, spoilers abound, so beware:
In the end of the second season, to escape Control, the Section 31's AI, without letting it access the data downloaded from the Sphere, and thus go full Skynet (though it looked like it was already getting close to that point) the Discovery was forced to jump through a wormhole to the 32nd Century.
Thus, Discovery's status as a prequel to the original series, set about a decade earlier and tied in deeply with 23rd century lore (such as the Romulans being unseen, the Klingons being a deadly adversary, and figures like Spock, Pike, and Sarek showing up) is no more. Because the data from the Sphere cannot be erased (it has its own means of preventing that) the trip to the 32nd Century is a one-way journey, and most of our cast chooses to go with (though we leave Ash Tyler behind).
However, the future we discover is a rather bleak one.
It would seem that, about 120 years ago, some cataclysmic event caused any ship with an active warp core to explode. This devastation caused interstellar civilization to crumble, and, most dishearteningly, it left Starfleet and the Federation as a pale shadow of what it once was.
I'm a few episodes in, but we see that in the intervening time, even its founding members have pulled out of the Federation. Earth is now back under the old United Earth government, and is found to be in a conflict with "aliens" that turn out to just be other humans from Titan (it was shocking for me to consider that things had devolved essentially to the conflicts between Earthers and Belters in The Expanse) while Vulcan has been renamed Ni'Var. While it's heartening to see that the Vulcans and Romulans have, in fact, undergone a reunification that was spearheaded by Spock back in the 24th Century, they too have left the Federation. The big bad in this era appears to be something called the Emerald Chain, an alliance between the Orions and Andorians. So, that's three of the founding Federation members who have quit and one of whom has become a new antagonist.
And I don't know how I feel about all of this.
Sequels are always a bit of a gamble, especially in high-stakes stories. While I think the trilogy had plenty of potential until Rise of Skywalker shat the bed, one of the most frustrating things about the Star Wars sequels is that everything that the heroes fought for in the original trilogy was ultimately lost - the New Republic, the rebirth of the Jedi Order, even Han and Leia's romance.
Star Trek is obviously a less centralized fictional universe, and less built around singular massive conflicts and singular foes (a show like Deep Space Nine could focus on the Dominion while Voyager got to ignore it completely). But I think one of the fundamental appeals of Star Trek as a franchise is this idea that ultimately, humanity is going to be in good shape going forward in the future. The shows have certainly introduced wrinkles in that - things like Section 31, or all manner of misguided evil admirals, and dire threats like the Borg - but seeing the Federation practically collapse is a hard thing to take.
In a sense, any story that takes place over extremely long periods of time does need to account for how seemingly eternal things can prove fleeting - the Dune series explores how the fundamental assumptions one has at one point might shift significantly over thousands of years.
"The Burn" creates dramatic tension for the show, but it also creates this sense of impending doom retroactively on all other Star Trek shows, which all take place in earlier time periods.
I guess my concern is more about regression than change. In some ways, this feels like it resets things to the vibe of Enterprise, which is of course set in the 22nd Century and explores Earth as a galactic newcomer rather than the proven force for good that it was by the time the original series takes place.
There's plenty more Discovery for me to watch, but I'm looking forward to a true renaissance of the Federation, and hope that the show doesn't wallow too long in its dark age.
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