Ok, so I don't know which of you nerds are watching this now or waiting to binge it, but season 2 is almost over. I'm still having trouble deciding where this fits into my hierarchy of Trek shows, and I'm almost considering it an entity unto itself, but I've really enjoyed a lot of the things they've done this season.
For those who haven't watched yet I will list only vague spoilers for now...
At the top of that list is Anson Mount's portrayal of Christopher Pike, who has shot up my rankings of personal favorite captains and maybe trails only Patrick Stewart as Picard. The TOS tie-ins they've done for Pike with the Talosians and his later accident were really well done. They've already said that Mount/Pike won't be back for season 3, and while I wouldn't be terribly excited about yet another prequel series if they decided to do a Pike spinoff (like they're doing with Georgiou/Michelle Yeoh), I'm kind of sad that Mount/Pike are done on-screen after this season.
They're going to introduce more technology that is more advanced than anything seen in any ST iteration ever, further polluting their own timeline.
I've largely come to terms with the fact that they are retconning newer tech into a pre-TOS show, mostly because by today's standards TOS looks like a piece of shit so why should they make Discovery, with a larger budget and better effects/set design, look like a piece of shit? However, throughout season 2 they've laid the groundwork for tidying up a few "advanced technology" bits by season's end, including the spore drive (increasingly plausible reasoning throughout the season) and the holographic communication system (somewhat less plausible, but whatever).
In a similar vein:
I'm curious to see how they depict the Enterprise internals (e.g. the bridge), given that Discovery's tech is equal to or better than the TNG/DS9 era. I doubt that they're going to make it look the way it looked in the 1960s, but even the show Enterprise, with better special effects available to them, still depicted relatively primitive technology on the Enterprise NX-01 (buttons to open doors, comm panels vs. comm badges, etc.).
We do eventually see the inside of the Enterprise, and their depiction of it is a modern, yet faithful, take on the original design. It's what the TOS Enterprise would have looked like if Gene Roddenberry were given a larger budget. And the exterior of the Enterprise, once they get around to showing "starship porn" of it, is goddamn gorgeous in this show.
I know that the Discovery and Enterprise coexist at this point in time, and I'm fine with them featuring it in the show since the ship will not yet have Kirk or his crew (except possibly Spock, who served under Pike). My hope was that later on (i.e. in a few seasons, if the show is still going) they resist the temptation to dredge up Kirk and the TOS crew again.
Even if you're waiting to binge the show, unless you've been living under a rock you know that Spock is indeed depicted in season 2. If you're going to dig Spock back up yet again then you have to do it right, so I was a little skeptical at first. It takes a while for it to really pay off but it's turned out really well, IMO.
And now for some predictions about the season finale which includes MAJOR SPOILERS:
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stop scrolling if you haven't watched yet
no really, stop scrolling
ok, here goes
1. I've seen some speculation that Control eventually becomes the Borg. While it does look like the plot breadcrumbs may be leading in that direction, Star Trek: First Contact establishes that the Borg existed at least 150 years before the events of Discovery (when Vulcans make first contact with Earth in 2063, the Borg are "still in the Delta Quadrant" a loooooong way from Federation space). I'm hoping we don't see them try to connect the dots without a really plausible explanation.
2. At first I thought that the Short Treks were fun little one-off shorts that weren't relevant to anything. But now they've incorporated "The Brightest Star" and "Runaway" into the season 2 plot, and I think they're gearing up to incorporate "Calypso". In "Calypso" the Discovery, without any explanation given, has been sitting abandoned in space for as much as a thousand years, and in that time its computer has developed its own consciousness and identity. By now in season 2 we've already seen that the Sphere data in Discovery's computers has evolved to protect itself (first by locking the data when the crew tries to delete it, and later by aborting the ship's auto-destruct on its own), so the crew is going to have to time-crystal-spore-jump Discovery into the future and abandon it there to protect the Sphere data from Control. Knowing that the show has already been renewed for a third season I find it hard to imagine that they'll air a show named Discovery about a ship named Discovery
without that ship, but if they pull it off I'm here for it.
3. As Enteprise and Discovery prepare to face the Control ships in battle, how did they have so many shuttlecraft? It's even more than
Voyager had in the Delta Quadrant!