"We Didn't Know It Was The End": Jonathan Frakes On Directing Star Trek Discovery Series Finale

Was the show doing well at all? I appreciate that I might just be in my own little bubble, but I don't know a single person that loves this show. Some people like it, but it's always a milquetoast endorsement, like "It's not bad" or "It seems like a good scifi series but it feels like Star Trek fan fiction", etc.

I'm surprised they didn't at least strongly suspect it was the end.

Especially when compared to Strange New Worlds, which is an, imo, amazing Star Trek series.

I love it. But I keep it to myself because star trek online forums are pretty aggressive when you say you like it.
- What I saw was ok from a plot perspective (for me). So the whole premise was nice and to me it fit into Star Trek. But as I just complained in another comment: I couldn't cope with the amount of crying and the way they forced drama into the story.
  Burnham is raised by Vulcans which is used when it suits the plot (then she's extremely analytical and objective) but then suddenly turns into an emotional mess when they want to portray drama. That just feels .... off. Also the other officers. I should believe that these are the best of the Star Fleet, top of their class, trained for war but then they falter in the middle of a mission because their lover/friend/whatever gets hurt or dies? That just doesn't fit.
  Maybe I zoned that out from previous Star Trek (because it's been a while ...), but in my mind the characters there were a lot more stable and professional. They all had their individual quirks and mannerisms, but during missions they more or less got their shit together.
- Hey man you can't control what you like.
  I personally might have enjoyed it more if it hadn't been (seemingly) shoehorned into the Star Trek universe. I understand it's not a very subjective metric, but Discovery just didn't feel like Star Trek.
  It comes across as if someone producer got pitched a sci-fi series with the plot of Discovery and thought, "This is great! It would be even better if we slapped Star Trek all over it!"
- I like it as well, yet I didn't find a place in Trek forums until I left Reddit last month. So this is new territory for me. Take it in stride, there are other Discovery fans out there.
- Greetings fellow DSC fan. I like the show, too. Considering that Paramount+ kept it going for 5 seasons, a lot of other people watched it. While I'm a fan of the show, I don't think it's perfect, and I can respect other folks critiques of the show. But sometimes the vitriol generators go so long and strong, it can be difficult to separate the signal from the noise with DSC criticisms.
Available analytics have placed it at roughly the same level of demand as SNW - often slightly ahead, but close enough that I'd call it even.
- That's an interesting metric. Apparently the vitriol for Discovery is mostly contained to the internet.
  This comes as no shock at all.
I remember watching the first few episodes, but I got bored and started watching the Orville instead because it had more of a Star Trek spirit.
Millions of people watched it. It brought us the entire rest of everything in Star Trek now.
I love it.
First season was great. Second was good. Now it doesn’t have the same charm. Imo

Y'know, if I had a nickel for every time Jonathan Frakes was involved in a Star Trek episode that unexpectedly became the series finale, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

Does that include orville
- Orville has not been renewed or cancelled, officially, at this time, as far as anyone's aware?
- Oh no is Orville cancelled?
- Is that done?

There's a lot of "emotionally" in that article. Kinda fits the series that was over-filled with emotional crap. (tbf, I aborted watching somewhere in Season 3, so maybe that changed afterwards. But I doubt it.)

It did not ...
- yea, love it or hate it, Discovery did not really change its core vibe. I think I had hopes it would in season 3. Season 2 had already played with different vibes with Pike/Spock etc. And the idea for the premise of season 3 was so bold (and which I think is the best and most forward pushing premise of Trek since Next-Gen and DS9) that I figured something new was in stall. It seemed so at first ... but then wasn't really IMO.

From what I understand in television writing it was a constant struggle of "should we write a cliffhanger hoping it gets us renewed" to "we should have some closure in case we get cancelled", since many writers had no idea what would happen.

Has ending on a cliff-hanger ever worked to get a show renewed?
- ENT's trip to 1944 between seasons 3 and 4. Or in other words what must be the writer's "you made us make this temporal cold war cake and by koala we are gonna make you eat it" letter to the execs.
- It kinda did with Sense8, due to overwhelming fan support for at least completing the story. Netflix caved and they produced a movie to wrap it up.
- Depends on how you look at it.
  I don't think we know of a case where it convinced a studio executive, but then again we know very little about the reasons why some shows get renewed and some don't.
  We do know cases where ending on a cliffhanger helped drumm up enough fan engagement to reverse a cancellation (timeless on nbc is a recent(ish) example for that)
- Twin Peaks but it took a couple decades lol

I hope they did not go for the Holodeck Series Finale, where we kill a main character, again.

Too soon.
- It would cement Riker/Frake's finale curse. Season 2 TNG, Enterprise ... Discovery?
Or that Seasons 3 and 4 and 5 were a terrifyingly large Holodeck Program run by Tom Paris to see what would happen if the U.S.S. Discovery arrived in the 32nd century and that the U.S.S. Discovery was teleported back to the times of the Iconians?
These are the voyages, again.