I have mixed feelings about Disco ending. I really dug the first season's look at a Federation at war, and following the person who arguably set that war in motion dealing with her culpability. Add to that a ship that is part weird science lab, part haunted house. And yeah, I could live with the Klingon redesign.
It was inventive, it took risks and broke some moulds — and not always successfully, mind you. But I stuck with it from the hopeful "First three seasons are for growing pains" Trek paradigm.
Then the show took some odd turns. Rather than focusing on the crew's adventures in space and science, season two constructed a cosmic conundrum around Burnham and her family. I was still on board for the characters, even bearded Spock no matter how shoehorned in he felt. The show's unapologetic optimism was still a big selling point, too.
With season three came the time jump into a future that absolutely does not feel like it's a thousand years ahead of the previous season. The jump in technology should be proportional to a Viking longboat rocking up to the ISS, but it felt like a step back. And at this point, the extended crew of the Discovery was thoroughly sidelined: Burnham's personal relationships took priority over everything else.
For one example: As great as Michelle Yeoh is, the show basically redeemed a murderous space despot because... she reminded Burnham of her Starfleet counterpart?! I'm going to stop you right there, Captain "This is Starfleet" — this is a person who kept rubbing in Saru's face how familiar she was with the taste of his species' flesh.
I'll keep watching Disco through to its end because I'm invested in the remaining characters, but this isn't the show I apprehensively fell in love with anymore. Its strengths are all but gone, its faults enhanced, and its commercial(?) failure seems to have convinced the Powers That Be that future Star Trek needs to be grounded in nostalgia for previous eras.
I will miss the first season's promise of new, daring Trek shows writ large, and as much as I liked Pike and his crew in season two, SNW leans too heavily and knowingly on the franchise's campier canon for my taste (I know I'm in a minority with that opinion, and I'm not here to argue for or against). With peak TV fading, I'm afraid we won't see anything as bold as TNG, DS9 — or early Discovery — again.
I think we have one obvious reason why season 1 was so solid: Bryan Fuller. He came to Trek with fresh ideas and thoughts about how to use them creatively in that setting. And he envisioned Disco as an anthology show that would focus on different eras each season, so the Burnham arc was one season, on to the next.
A lot clearly changed even before the show went into production, at which point he was out and Paramount probably reneged on doing new casting and design work for each new season. We'll probably never know what could have been, and perhaps an anthology show would have the same dip in interest as it moved on.
For what it's worth, the jump between seasons 2 and 3 did make that kind of radical change in setting that an anthology sets out to — but preserved the characters who had just fulfilled their mission to hide the sphere data, so there's a contradiction in terms. And more to the point, the writers didn't seem to know what to do with the characters once they made it to the future.
The evolution of Zora was an inspired idea (and literally cripped from Michael Chabon's Calypso) but only became a detached plot strand, and Detmer's PTSD was a gut punch only dealt with too superficially. So you're right, despite some character highlights season three was meandering and listless. The crew had a whole future to explore, but no mission.
Rebuilding the Federation should have filled that hole with direction (or at least directives) but there wasn't a lot of purpose to the space UN once it was restored. Maybe that dead water feels so frustrating because we're seeing its literal mirror image in the deterioration of diplomacy and parliaments on the news every day. When Disco gets political it doesn't mess around, but here it couldn't deliver a show of common purpose because it was barely coherent itself. But I digress.
[Edit: misleading preposition]
@halm @GuyFleegman I really wish I saw in S1 what you all seem too. To me it's a weirdly disjointed season:
Part 1: Introduction two parter, set up Burnham.
Part 2: Klingon War
Part 3: Mirror Universe
Part 4: Oops, forgot the Klingons! Wrap up.
I LOVED Lorca and his arc, that was very good. But the season itself doesn't hang together as a consistent serialised story, it feels like they were halfway through shooting and had to suddenly make 4 more episodes, and it shattered the story.
Right, I said it's "not bad," hardly a ringing endorsement. It had some good ideas and concepts but it also has a lot of flaws, which is why it's quite unfortunate that it's the best Discovery ever managed.