Star Trek: Discovery Writers Knew Season 1 Had A Dark Problem
Even among Star Trek: Discovery’s greatest fans, it’s an open secret that season 1 was way too dark. This was a season that featured torture, betrayal, and cannibalism, all built around a war that ultimately killed 100 million Federation citizens. As it turns out, even the show’s writers knew the season was too dark, with writer/producer Erika Lippoldt admitting that she and the rest of the staff wanted “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” into the “one episode where it’s kind of crazy and fun…comedic stuff.”
Magic To Make The Sanest Man Go Mad
If you are not familiar with this Star Trek: Discovery episode, “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” was a season 1 bottle episode featuring the return of Rainn Wilson’s Harry Mudd.
He traps the ship in a time loop, giving him the perfect excuse to repeatedly kill Captain Lorca. Despite this very dark premise, Wilson (best known for playing Dwight Schrute in The Office) is a very comedic actor, and the episode ended up being the funniest of the entire season.
Room For Some Wackiness
Judging from Star Trek: Discovery writer Erika Lippoldt’s words, the show’s writers were keen to have at least one funny episode because the rest of season 1 was so dark.
She later said that they wanted to do something that was “like, sci-fi wacky,” and the desire to create an episode of “comedic stuff…kind of all got poured into that one episode.” The final result was an early adventure that was totally very different from both earlier and later episodes.
Lots Of Darkness
While Lippoldt didn’t specifically call out the other episodes, it’s easy to see why the Star Trek: Discovery writers would want to do something so different from the bleakness of season 1.
When the show first premiered, it put off many fans because the season focused almost entirely on a war between the Federation and the Klingons. The only real escape from this war narrative was an extended trip to the Mirror Universe, one which proved even more brutal in its own way than the conflict with the Klingons.
Brutality
Compared to most of Star Trek history, Discovery’s season 1 was notably brutal: the Klingon resort to horrific attacks, including bringing a cloaked ship into a starbase and then detonating its warp core, killing everyone inside. Such war crimes nearly destroyed the Federation, and we later discover that the Klingons managed to kill 100 million of its enemy’s citizens.
The smaller-scale violence was similarly shocking: Captain Georgiou’s dead corpse is eventually eaten by starving Klingons, and Ash Tyler (the Klingon turned human infiltrator) has traumatic flashback memories about being assaulted by his once and future lover.
The Comedic Break Was Appreciated
As if all that Star Trek: Discovery violence wasn’t bad enough, season 1 ended with the Federation authorizing a plan to destroy the Klingon homeworld, and while Burnham finds a more peaceful alternative, it’s kind of horrifying to see our heroes ready to support killing billions of people.
Frankly, if we had to write episode after episode of such dark episodes, we, too, would jump at the opportunity to write a more comedic adventure.
The sad truth is that if Discovery had been less dark from the beginning and had more of this comedy throughout the first season, the show would have had a stronger start. Instead, the show chose to lighten up only in later seasons, but many of its would-be fans had already been driven away by the bleakness and violence of season 1.
The franchise took too long to learn from Discovery’s mistakes, too, with Picard being a show that kept substituting gore for plot, arguably ruining the title character’s triumphant return.
