Season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery is in full swing now, and the series suddenly feels like it's on solid ground. When Discovery debuted in 2017, some Trek fans like myself found it to be, frankly, a mess. Opting for a darker tone – complete with ratcheted-up violence and actual cussing – the first season sought to be a gritty war drama stuffed to the breaking point with harrowing revelations, sudden murders, and, most notably, an alteration (welcome or unwelcome, depending on who you ask) of the diplomatic and egalitarian philosophies that had marked most of Star Trek up to that point.

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Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 Photos 227 IMAGES

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Some fans enjoyed the 180-degree about-face for Star Trek, while others felt that Discovery was too different an animal to be considered alongside reliable favorites like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Having grown up on TNG, I have always been an acolyte of Captain Jean-Luc Picard (a Picardian perhaps?) and I am endlessly pleased to see DS9 having a proper renaissance these days; some hardcore fans even place DS9 at the top of the Trek canon now.But thinking back on TNG and DS9, one may find that, like Discovery, they too stumbled out of the gate. It takes no great deal of reflection to declare that neither show started with its best season. Indeed, in both cases, they didn't really find their feet and begin to fly until their third seasons. Both shows were intriguing – or at least novel – for their first two years, but they only began to truly find their way after that.Like Discovery, Star Trek: The Next Generation also began with a few weird conceits that were later abandoned. Watching TNG's premiere, “Encounter at Farpoint,” reveals several setups that never paid off. Riker and Troi, for instance, seemed able to communicate telepathically, and their relationship was, I think, meant to play an even more central role to the series than it did. Additionally, Next Generation spent a portion of its first season paying direct homage to The Original Series, repeating stories wholesale... and adding nothing. “The Naked Now” was a mere remake of “The Naked Time,” just adding the awkward fact that Data was somehow able to get drunk. “Where No One Has Gone Before” was a riff on “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” but TNG was still clearly shaking off its older influences and defining itself as a series.Season 2 of TNG was infamously produced during a writers' strike, and there were several episodes that openly suffered as a result. The finale of Season 2, “Shades of Gray,” is often considered the worst episode of the series, featuring a story wherein a comatose Riker had his brain injected with clips from old episodes in order to stay alive – and get one more episode out of the season.We're lucky TNG survived past Season 2, however. Once Season 3 began, everything finally began to settle, and Next Generation had finally earned the right and the clout to move onto deeper stories. The actors had had come to live in their characters, and the performances improved. Even the aesthetics and the tech was clearer, and the Enterprise-D began to feel more like a real machine. (A small detail: The uniforms also finally started to look better as the uncomfortable-looking collarless onesies were abandoned.) Now that we had a firm bedrock of ideas, and had worked out all the kinks, we could tackle harder and more ambitious material. Like Spock’s father Sarek's encroaching senility (as in “Sarek”). Or the show's best time travel episode, and maybe one of the best of the series, “Yesterday's Enterprise,” which redeemed the character of Tasha Yar, who had been wasted and then killed off in Season 1.Deep Space Nine, like Discovery, was trying something new with Star Trek, and it too stumbled a little at first. This was a Star Trek that took place largely outside of the Federation's purview where the humanitarian crises didn't have easy tech solutions and laws were different. It took DS9 about two full seasons before it began to explore its own premise properly, however. In those first couple of years, it was still beholden to a lot of old-school Trek tropes that didn't necessarily fit with what DS9 was to eventually become. As a result, we had bizarre episodes like “Move Along Home” where the crew was trapped inside a board game. Or that odd episode where Rumpelstiltskin paid them a visit (“If Wishes Were Horses”). Or the episode where Troi's mother spread love pheromones all over the station, causing everyone to fall in love randomly.By its third season, Deep Space picked up the pace. The stories become simultaneously more expansive – looking outward at the larger sociopolitical world it was set in – and more intimate, letting the characters look at their own passion and darkness. Like on TNG, the actors finally began to live in the characters, the uniforms codified, and the relationships were stable. It suddenly became a markedly more mature series, questioning the usefulness of Federation ideals in warlike scenarios, and using Trek to explore headier topics like genocide and faith.(Just to fill in the cognitive gaps: Voyager's first three seasons were, conversely, their strongest. Enterprise, meanwhile, was more Trek-like in its first two seasons, but far more innovative and expansive in its third and fourth.)Looking back over Season 1 of Discovery, I find a partially formed experiment. The show wanted to feel new and different, affecting an entirely new tone that was more akin to recent Star Wars than to classic Trek. One can admire Trek's need to evolve, and most can perhaps understand the impulse to make a decades-old franchise feel striking and new. But Discovery's soggy, depressive stories, paired with a general lack of philosophical and technological exploration had some audiences considering that Star Trek may be past its prime. Some fans were ready to wash – or perhaps already had washed – their hands of the entire endeavor.But with the new season, it looks like Discovery may be stabilizing. The actors seem to be more at home in their characters, especially now that they're not in 100% crisis mode in every single episode. Discovery's first season was not just thematically dark, but also physically dark; Captain Lorca had damaged, photosensitive eyes, forcing him to live in dimmed rooms. Lorca is gone, and the sets are seemingly brighter now. There has also been an effort to explain some of the seeming continuity errors from Season 1, like uniform inconsistencies and the location of the Enterprise during the Klingon war. Aesthetically, they've found a canny way to bridge the gap between the canonically iffy tech on the Discovery with the bold and boxy aesthetics of the 1966 series.It's important to remember, as we take the first few hopeful steps into the second season of Discovery, that even the two best Star Trek shows started weakly. Personally, I was no fan of Discovery's first season, but it's entirely possible that the show could turn around entirely. So far Season 2 is positioned as a massive course correction, and one that is welcome to Trek fans like me.The day may come – and perhaps even come soon – when fans who share my take on Discovery so far will be able to consider the first season merely as “the not-so-good one,” just as we did with TNG or DS9. Indeed, with the latter, we entertained them for two entire seasons apiece. If things continue apace for Discovery, we will be able to begin celebrating a series that – oh, how we hope! – will be a worthy addition to the Star Trek universe. This is, of course, a bold conjecture having only seen two episodes of the second season so far, but, given the patterns we have seen within the franchise as a whole, it could quite easily prove true. May the Prophets guide us.