Star Trek: Discovery - Season 3

★★★★☆

I liked season three of Discovery a lot better than season two. I think part of that was that it finally got to be its own Star Trek instead of trying to fill in the gaps between Enterprise and TOS. And it relies a lot less on the idiot ball, though I kept thinking they were very naive to simply assume the Federation still embodied the same ideals 700 years later.

Tonally, it amps up the Farscape: the madcap pace, the strange-to-the-heroes setting, and of course being the only ones with a rare travel tech that the ruthless villain wants. And it and adds a touch of Firefly: worlds are disconnected, with varying levels of technology, sometimes just scraping by.

Much as I missed Captain Pike, Saru really stepped up and continues to be one of my favorite characters. And while it’s still very much Michael Burnham’s show, the ensemble gets a lot more attention this season. The bridge crew finally feels like people and not just regular background characters.

As for the new characters: Adira manages to avoid the Wesley problem despite being a teenage genius, Book is so much more interesting than Ash, and Ossyra is an odd mix of ruthless and, well, casual. (There’s a great scene where she’s trying to psych out Tilly, and Tilly just throws everything back. It’s nothing she hasn’t already thought herself, and she’s learned from Mirror-Georgiou)

They did some really interesting things with the various ways familiar worlds adapted to the post-Burn galaxy (dilithium is scarce, the Burn destroyed most warp-capable ships, and no one knows if it will happen again), Discovery’s crew dealing with PTSD and overwhelming loss, and the importance of connection at every level from the minds in a Trill symbiosis to the worlds of a galaxy.

It would have been really weird to watch during 2020, when everything was still partially locked-down for the first year of Covid.