Star Trek Discovery and the Unfathomable Profundity of Stupidity
"He's dead, Jim."
Star Trek: Discovery is over. Somehow, some way, it ended, lurched to a stop, was euthanized, put out of its misery, executed by firing squad, shot out of an airlock by a vengeful Admiral Adama, kicked over a cliff into erupting lava by Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. You pick your metaphor.
It seems, almost, beyond belief. How could Star Trek: Discovery end?
A better question: how or when did Star Trek: Discovery begin? Did Star Trek: Discovery in fact take place? Jean Baudrillard, please answer your pager.
Here is a strong claim that I completely stand behind: watching Star Trek: Discovery for five (okay, four and a half) seasons has challenged me intellectually and personally as no other work of art has ever done before. It has tormented me, infuriated me, angered me, disgusted me, dispirited me, inspired me, filled me with joy and hatred and loathing and annoyance and, ultimately, love.
Let me start with a disclaimer. I am not someone who dislikes bad art; I am not someone who dislikes stupid art. I have long had a profound fondness for the unintentional humor and joyful creativity of many works of art that are, on the face of it, badly put together by artists in profoundly imperfect control of their artistic elements.
Discovery is different, though.
To explain how, let me offer a strong claim: it is nearly impossible to comprehend Star Trek: Discovery as a work of art, the result of human intelligence and creativity and intentionality, at all. Star Trek: Discovery is not a substance, not even an artificial substance-by-analogy, the work of a demiurge human or divine. It is not an essence unfolding teleologically through time; it is not a story, a narrative with a beginning and an end; it is not even an event, an assemblage of elements held together by loose networks of simultaneity and cause-and-effect; it is not even a Gnostic emanation, a failed attempt at conceptual realization birthing other abominations in turn. Star Trek: Discovery is, rather, most fittingly likened to the unintelligible forces of time and chance and matter themselves, contrary elements devouring one another in the dark, splitting and dividing without end in a chaos of Ovidian language, Plutarch's dark Typhon, Aristotle's potentiality awaiting act, the waters over which the spirit hovered before the beginning of creation.
It is, in other words, a really, really, really stupid television show.
As an obnoxious intellectual man, I have all my life believed strongly that intelligence--or rather, what intellectuals call intelligence, mental facility and speed in processing information and analysizing it and commenting on it and performing simple problem-solving tasks--is, in the grand scheme of things, not particularly important. Intellectuals are, by and large, self-deluding, self-aggrandizing bastards unable to see out of the boring detritus of their own minds and into the real world, even when it surrounds them and pounds them repeatedly into the metaphorical sand of reality like waves on a beach. In contrast, people colloquially described as stupid are usually prime exemplars of humanity, with their lack of internal preoccupations allowing them to simply accept and take stock of reality and respond to it in ways that are uniquely personal and so, by and large, both interesting and delightful, people adept at understanding and therefore intelligence in the true sense. In my experience, in this proper sense, stupid people are generally much more intelligent than smart people.
Nonetheless, stupidity is, as they say, said in many ways--and stupidity as a (relative) personal quality defined by intellectual receptivity and lack of speed in information-processing and verbal creation is quite distinct from stupidity in the sense of the total rational incoherency often found in intellectual objects and artifacts and beliefs. Human persons are always rational, even when they are unconscious, dreaming, or dead; receiving the world via the intellect is simply what they do. Concepts, ideas, and stories, however, are rational only by participation in human reason and its objects; and they can, to quite a large extent, fail to participate in that reason at all. Insofar as they fail to do so even minimally, they fail to exist.
Star Trek: Discovery is, in my limited experience, the work of art that most fails to participate in any form of human reason. Hence, it is, I would argue, impossible to analyze Star Trek: Discovery in any of the terms typically applied to human artifacts and narratives.
Because of this, I aim to discuss Star Trek: Discovery not in terms of a unified work of art, a narrative, a set of characters, a plot, a set of themes. I will discuss it, rather, precisely in terms of stupidity, incoherence, and the roots of these stupidities and incoherences in the world around us--first in the stupid, incoherent shadow world of pop-cultural trends, then in the broader, incoherent world of American society itself, and finally in the real world as it actually exists.
In the interests of fairness, it should be pointed out that Star Trek: Discovery's stupidity and incoherency is not, in fact, a bizarre, unique aberration in an otherwise pristine media landscape. In fact, the main note of popular culture in recent years has been precisely the same sense of fundamental incoherency found in a more extreme form in Discovery. Understanding where this incoherency comes from, is, I think, somewhat important for understanding where we are as a society, and for understanding how to prevent things from getting much, much worse.
For the very fact that Star Trek: Discovery exists at all, that it ever existed in even the most minimal sense, that it persisted, and that it ended tells us a great deal indeed about the world we live: and hopefully, what to do about it.
To sum up Star Trek: Discovery, the stupidest work of art I have ever seen, I will make use of the stupidest format I know of. Here, then, in listicle format, proceeding from the most obvious to the most profound, are Ten Ways in Which Star Trek Discovery Illuminates the Profundity of Stupidity.
1) Stupidity and Fantasy
Pop culture is always the weirdest form of culture; and it is so for very basic reasons having to do with its mass-media nature and the forces conscious and (mostly) unconscious that shape its creation. Some of these more impactful forces will be covered later in this post.
The most straightforward, and therefore by far the least stupid, is the role of art in general, and modern pop culture in particular, in generating and playing off human fantasy. I covered this in much more detail in my essay on Sofia Coppola's Priscilla, a brilliant work of art that both affirms and critiques human fantasy, its role in human development and relationships, its roots in fundamental human desire, and its manipulation by mass media. Priscilla is in this as in most other ways an exemplary work of art--but most American pop culture art naturally falls far short of these heights. It gives us, not the Elvis of Priscilla, the fantasy object seen as a real person impacted and impacting others, but the Elvis of American popular media: the unreal, manufactured, mass-produced image of what we are all imagined to want.
Do we want sex? Then here are some unreal de-personalized versions of persons, Bond Girls and Hot Guys and Jessica Simpson, that will become, for those who consume them, what sex is. Do we want power? Then here are some fantasy versions of politicians, the President of the United States flying a bomber against aliens, of rich people, Bruce Wayne brooding in a darkened penthouse, of smart people, Oppenheimer smoking a cigarette blandly next to a chalkboard. Community? Family? God? American pop cultures has facsimiles of them all, ready to capture and image and shape and define and ultimately replace every thing that could be desired by man.
Insofar as this vision of desire is infinite and indefinite, grounded not in human nature and personhood but in de-personalization, aimed at images rather than reality, it is necessarily incoherent and therefore stupid.
Star Trek: Discovery over the course of its run took this straightforward incoherency, the incoherency of disordered or deluded desire, and took it to levels of incoherence further than almost any I have seen.
The idea of Star Trek as an aspirational fantasy, inspiring people to live better, be progressive, join the military, reject organized religion, and/or study STEM, has been present since at least the 1970s and the beginnings of the Cult of Gene Roddenberry. In a broader sense, of course, it goes back to the very origins of Star Trek itself, which the former WW2 B-29 commander Gene Roddenberry conceived in part as a kind of fantasy version of command in a fantasy version of the WW2 American military. Instead of awkward, shy commander Roddenberry, you have dashing, womanizing Captain James T. Kirk, presiding not over a bomber crew but over the crew of a massive space-going vessel, a crew that adores and venerates him as a hero, contains his best friends in the world, and also happens to be chock-full of attractive women in mini-skirts. Still, as an actual television show, Star Trek traded less on this and more on typical science-fiction and character drama.
As with other boomer art, however, this personal-fantasy aspect loomed much larger for a generation of people whose youth was largely lived through mass media, rather than, say, the actual brutal lived reality of mass conscription; and this continued to grow larger and larger as the people who had watched it as children grew up and attended conventions and assumed their destinies as corporate executives, financiers, and/or Wal-Mart greeters; and it has grown more and more prominent as first Gen Xers and then Millennials have grown up and taken their place in society and/or failed to take their place in it.
For better or for worse, Star Trek has firmly become Nostalgia Art; but the odd thing about Nostalgia Art is that it is quite often not about the actual past, but rather about the aspirations one had in the past. Perhaps now I work as a Wal-Mart greeter; but I can remember when, as a child, I aspired to be a Space Scientist working on the USS Enterprise. Similarly, in the anxiety-laden Internet post-pandemic world, people seem to increasingly relate to art in more and more directly therapeutic and indeed analgesic ways--this is the art I use to feel better when I'm anxious, this is the art I use to fall asleep, this is the art I use to boost my ego. For these purpose, generic, non-conflictual fantasies about being a vague version of myself existing in a cooler place with friends succeeding at tasks seems to work best--and as such, art of this kind seems to be, at least relatively, on the rise.
Star Trek: Discovery has taken this basic principle farther than most, however, not by performing this task better, but mostly just by doing it more lazily and incoherently. Particularly since its third season, this is a show that has consistently striven to present as many different fantasy visions of different people types as possible while giving them the minimum amount of actual characterization possible. As many have noted, Discovery has leaned heavily into "representation," featured a dizzying variety of crewmembers with names and actors of appropriately diverse types, including Star Trek's first gay couple, its first trans character, its first non-binary character, its first cyborg character, and numerous crewmembers of different genders and races--but in general made these characters almost totally featureless and generic, giving them spotty, inconsistent and in many cases simply no character development or plots or narratives centered around them.
Hence, from this perspective, Star Trek: Discovery represents perhaps the furthest development yet in the idea of art as primarily about personal fantasy, overriding any idea of character or plot or narrative as such. For after all, telling a story about a character inherently means reducing their ability to be simply swapped out and treated as a fantasy stand-in for the viewer; as does giving a character specific features, flaws, conflicts, and/or crises. Even when Discovery has given its characters such things, it has generally done so in extraordinarily broad and generic fashion and always ended them with easy personal affirmation--resembling an after-school special or a PSA more than typical narrative art. In Season 5, for instance, our non-binary character feels anxious about taking on more responsibility, but then takes on more responsibility anyway, serves on the bridge, goes an away mission, and passes all tests all with flying colors and no noticeable issues or even momentary problems. Yippee.
Taken as a whole, then, Star Trek: Discovery has achieved its goal of offering people of all colors and conditions and sexual orientations and identities the fantasy of being a nonspecific person standing in the far background of a shot wearing a military uniform and presumably doing some kind of nonspecific science-based activity. And that is something to respect.
2) Stupidity and Being Cool
Star Trek: Discovery has gone through many different permutations in its five years, which is one of the things that makes it so difficult to talk about as a single work of art. The fixation on generic character fantasy, while present to some degree from the beginning, only really took off as a central focus with Discovery's third season.
Remarkably, though, an aspect of Discovery that was present throughout virtually every episode of all five seasons was its ludicrous sense of aesthetics, which was perennially dominated by an obsessive focus on what may be called "the rule of cool." Unfortunately, defining what makes something cool is arguably even harder than actually being cool.
So maybe it's just easier to list here. For Discovery, at least, cameras rotating around things was cool, as were cameras being upside down and then righting themselves, cameras following people as they fall, cameras swooping down on characters, cameras following characters' trajectories as they swoop through space in shuttlecraft or workbees or space suits, characters falling off of things, characters hanging from things, characters engaged in hand-to-hand combat in corridors, characters riding dirt bikes in deserts, dozens of tiny fighters and/or shuttlecraft swarming through space, laser blasts in space, laser blasts on planets, lots of plants growing at once, space mushrooms, characters standing around cavernous spaces, characters talking about how much they like science, women in black leather, men in black leather, ascots, holograms, teleportation, evil AI, the death of all life in the Galaxy, the destruction of planets, talking to animals, black goo, giant dragon monsters, people shooting spikes out of their heads, people with gelatinous heads, libraries, true love, the colors white, grey, and/or beige, and/or bridge windows. I'm forgetting quite a bit here.
To understand Discovery, though, you have to understand that the show was the first attempt to return Star Trek to television after more than ten years; and that during those ten years, Abrams' Star Trek films had made lots of money with his own patented brand of likeable characters running around doing physical comedy and exchanging quips in large, brightly-lit spaces with lots of lens flares.
And so, when Discovery came on the air, it did its best to imitate Abrams aesthetically in almost every way it could, from the addition of bridge windows to the presence of bright lights everywhere to a penchant for mano a mano action.
However, unfortunately, the content of Discovery, whether in its original grimdark phase or its later after-school special phase, rarely matched these aesthetics very well. Also, these aesthetics, remarkably, actually failed to match Abrams' rather simple methodology of making everything look bigger by moving the camera quickly, having people run through hallways, and shining flashlights into lenses. Where Abrams went wacky and kinetic, Discovery went CGI and absurdist.
To take only one rather extreme example, Abrams was widely criticized for the budget-saving decision in his first Star Trek film to use the real-world Budweiser plant to portray the Engineering section of the USS Enterprise. While the space certainly looked big and industrial enough, fans pointed out the obvious problems; it was too big to fit in the Enterprise, its technology was mechanical and primitive, it was unclear what all those pipes were doing in a starship. With Abrams' kinetic camerawork never letting us see very much at a time, though, the choice mostly achieved its purpose onscreen, portraying only the vaguest impression of size and engineering complexity. And then, of course, for the sequel Abrams responded to the criticism by shooting Engineering in a real-world CERN collider. All of this shows Abrams' actual strengths and weaknesses as a director pretty well.
Discovery equally wanted to show the inner workings of its ship as something vast and majestic and technical. However, it did this by beginning without explanation to feature shots of its turbolifts moving through a ludicrously vast and almost entirely empty CGI void made up of glowy blue lights, random metal shapes and objects resembling a futuristic cityscape (seen above), and containing hundreds upon hundreds of turbolift rails apparently leading nowhere. In the climactic episode of Season Three, our heroes engage in a massive fight scene in and around this interior space, ultimately kicking a villain into the void.
There is, quite simply, no way whatsoever to make sense of this aesthetic choice in any rational terms. Not only is this space vastly larger than the size of the ship it is apparently within, not only does it serve no apparent purpose within the interior of a starship, not only does it not even resemble the interior of a starship, but...well it doesn't even look like anything. Hell, it doesn't even feel large. It is a muddled CGI mess that lacks even a basic sense of spatiality.
Again, the comparison with Abrams is instructive. Abrams wanted to aesthetically gesture at the idea of large size and engineering reality. Hence, he filmed in a real, large space filled with real-world engineering things. In the process, he arguably violated the fictional rules of his universe, but achieved a particular aesthetic effect that served the broader purposes of the story he wanted to tell.
Discovery, though, simply thought that a giant empty CGI void with elevators and glowy lights in it seemed cool; and so stuck it in the middle of its starship.
Indeed, visually, the thing this giant void resembles most is the vast cosmic endospaces of the interior of V'Ger created by Douglas Trumbull for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. But again, the comparison is instructive in that the entire point of TMP's visions was the sense of vast size and endless space and mysterious interior being they evoked. Discovery's void doesn't even create a sense of large size; it has virtually no sense of coherent shape; and its strangeness evokes no sense of awe, but merely a sense of spatial confusion.
Ultimately, Discovery took the idea of aesthetic coolness to some kind of true logical extreme of absoluteness and total incoherency. It is impossible to give a reason this is cool. There is not even a coherent aesthetic, a coherent visual image, a coherent sense of space or size, even a coherent atmosphere involved. It simply is; and you must either accept it as cool, or else look away. You, and everything else about the universe and the story and characters, will in the end bend to submit to the one overriding imperative: you gotta be cool, man.
3) Stupidity and Creative Discomfort
Star Trek: Discovery started out as a show of ideas; and it never quite stopped being a show of ideas. This is a show that loves to have its characters stand around and talk about how cool something is, how difficult it is, how big it is, how important it is, how genius it is. It loves to show them doing science, improvising, creating new technologies and solutions out of nowhere and implementing them in the nick of time.
Unfortunately, pretty much all of its ideas suck; and pretty much all its solutions make no damn sense.
There is something in itself quite interesting and striking about this. It is difficult to think of a show that had such a poor track record coming up with concepts, nor of a show that was so desperately committed to continuing to come up with new concepts, and yet newer concepts, no matter what, until the bitter end.
The reason for the stupidity and incoherence of its concepts, however, was emphatically not simply the stupidity of the people involved in working on the show. I have seen interviews with many of them, and they seem like pleasant, intelligent people.
The main reason, I believe, why Discovery so thoroughly managed to faceplant in its own big ideas was the absence of what I might call, taking a page from literary critic Tom Simon, creative discomfort; or, to take a page from G.K. Chesterton, second thoughts. The writers of Star Trek: Discovery set themselves the task of coming up with ideas, big ideas, scientific ideas, spiritual ideas, profound ideas; then, they seemingly took the first ideas that popped into their heads, wrote them down, and called it a day.
Ideas, though, are not in fact magical fish swimming randomly through the ether and waiting to be caught by the first angler. They are, rather, nodes or references in the much larger relational reality of the intelligible cosmos, emerging by abstraction out of the coherent actuality of things. In other words, every reality, to make any damn sense, stands in a direct relationship both with all other ideas and with the real world of real entities we see around us.
As someone who has engaged in creative work for most of my life, I have personally found that the best way to come up with ideas is to reflect on the real world, its structures and relations and entities. When you reflect on the real world, you naturally generate ideas that attempt to capture the nature of things, the relations between one thing and another, perspectives on things by persons, relations of persons to each other, and so on. In this, obviously, no idea is or can be an absolute; every idea is related to every other idea, which is related to the real world. Being is, as it were, the source and summit of ideas--and without being rooted in and related to being, ideas become mere incoherent and meaningless images of nothing: or, in other words, stupid.
Not all the ideas contained within Star Trek: Discovery have been stupid; only most of them. Discovery started with the idea of "The Vulcan Hello," that the Vulcans after a disastrous first contact with the warrior species the Klingons had implemented a policy of always firing upon any Klingon ship they encountered. This was certainly an interesting idea, though one with many possibly consequences for the Star Trek universe as we knew it.
Within a few episodes, however, Discovery had gone on to re-center itself around the idea of "the spore drive," a 23rd century technology that allowed instantaneous travel to any point in the universe and indeed travel across universes. This technology was in turn rooted in the idea of "the mycelial network," a hidden dimension of space mushrooms extending throughout all points in time and space; in Season 2, these space mushrooms were revealed to be sentient. Also in Season 2, we were introduced to the idea of Control, a Starfleet Security AI that had suddenly become sentient; or rather, which had begun to become sentient, and which had heard of the existence of a treasure trove of data originating in a giant, sentient space sphere (that had been travelling through the universe for eons but had just died and given all its data to the crew of the Discovery), and thus was scheming to get that data and make itself sentient so it could destroy all life in the Galaxy. Also in Season 2, we were introduced to the idea of the Red Angel Suit, a spacesuit capable of both time travel and warp travel apparently invented and created by Michael Burnham's scientist mother and then recreated on the fly in a few hours by the Star Trek: Discovery crew. In Season 3, we were introduced to the idea of "the Burn," a freak catastrophe in which all dilithium in the Galaxy suddenly exploded. At the end of Season 3, we were introduced to the idea that the Burn was caused when an emotionally stunted alien who happened to have crash-landed on a planet composed entirely of dilithium got really upset. And so on and so forth.
These ideas all have one thing in common; that is, that none of them seem to have been reflected on in the service of making sure they fit together either with one another or with the broader sense of the fictional universe, let alone the real world itself. None of these "big ideas" have any obvious relationship with each other, or indeed with anything else. Each is, rather, a totally independent "cool concept," thrown off mostly for the heck of it before we got bored with that idea and moved on to the next one. Each, though, by its very nature has massive effects on the entire world and sense of reality of the show Discovery and the Star Trek Universe alike. And these effects and connections are, for the most part, never explored at all.
Establishing that the Star Trek multiverse is held together by a network of sentient mushrooms seems like something that could have used a few second thoughts. So is establishing that 23rd Starfleet accidentally created a Killer AI that nearly wiped out all life in the Galaxy. So is establishing that 23rd century Starfleet succeeded in creating a ship that could literally go anywhere in any universe instantaneously.
For Discovery, though, each idea was merely another cool gee wiz moment, equivalent to a giant interior void or to the feat of growing space mushrooms at an accelerated rate via satellites on an abandoned moon. The idea that its characters were smart never really landed because its characters were never given an opportunity to actually think in a recognizable human, let alone intelligent, way, to understand an idea, where it came from, and work out its implications. They merely pulled ideas out of the void, or responded to ideas from the void; then they fell off of things or got attacked by moth people.
To create a show of ideas, one must be able to experience some creative discomfort, to take some time to reflect on the place of a given idea in a larger web or network of related concepts fitting in some coherent way into being as we know it. Increasingly, though, pop culture is fixated on merely giving us ideas the way it gives us, say, McDonalds hamburgers or Laffy Taffy wrappers with jokes written on them: enjoy it, discard it, move on.
This is unfortunately, to a large extent how our society deals with both intellectual thought and reality. A "fact" is a "fact"--that is, an isolated, absolute, and totally incoherent product of human artifice. Some people make facts: other people receive them. And both are equally stupid.
4) Stupidity and Insecurity
Of course, the principal reason why Star Trek: Discovery is difficult to talk about is because of how constantly and totally it altered itself, in virtually every dimension, from beginning to end.
This is a show that, arguably, never really even began, that obsessively torpedoed all of its own plot points and character developments, again and again setting the table for a meal that never seemed to quite arrive. There is, quite simply, no way to tell the events of Star Trek: Discovery as a single narrative or a single story; it is even highly paradoxical to treat them as a series of events happening to the same set of people. Discovery reinvented itself with aplomb and vigor, over and over again, undercutting and denying its own past about as often as someone with one of those 50 First Dates style mental conditions. In the process it moved across about five or six distinct phases of pop culture, failing to make sense in terms of any of them.
For its first few episodes, Discovery was an intriguing but extremely dark thriller about Michael Burnham, a traumatized officer who just happened to be Spock's half-sister and whose hatred of Klingons led her to commit mutiny, lose her captain, ship, and rank, and start a war that the Federation was well on its way to losing--paralleled across the lines by T'Kuvma, a would-be Klingon Messiah, and his religious-nationalist followers, desperate to unite the Empire and "remain Klingon."
Then, suddenly, Star Trek: Discovery became an ensemble show about the crew of a ship that had a magical spore drive capable of instantly transporting them to any point in the universe. This ship and its crew, led by Jason Isaacs as the somewhat cynical Captain Lorca, and including Michael Burnham on a "second chance" rotation, did their best to occasionally fight Klingons and/or Harry Mudd with their magical spore drive while also getting into some romances and personal conflicts along the way. This version of the show, while arguably much stupider, was certainly more standard in Trek terms.
Then, suddenly, Star Trek: Discovery jumped to the mirror universe and revealed that its captain was actually a deranged psychopath mirror-universe Trump, killed him off, and returned in time to prevent the Federation from committing genocide against the Klingons through Michael Burnham giving an inspirational speech to an Admiral. With this the season ended.
In Season 2, we were introduced to a new show, a gentle ensemble led by the charming Captain Christopher Pike, together engaged in investigating a religious mystery, the signals of the mysterious "Red Angel," a powerful being capable of healing the sick and bringing peace to warring planets.
Suddenly, though, about halfway through the season, the show turned on a dime and introduced the evil Killer AI "Control" and its mission to achieve sentience and destroy all life in the universe. In turn, the "Red Angel" was suddenly revealed to be Michael Burnham's long-dead mother in a super space-suit that she had apparently invented herself and which was capable of travelling through time. In the show's last few episodes, the entire crew of Discovery suddenly elected to travel a thousand years into the future to prevent Control from gaining access to the information that would make it become sentient, designed and built a second Red Angel suit in five minutes, and put Michael Burnham inside it.
Season 3 saw the show abruptly (if briefly) become a Western-inspired outlaw show set in a lawless Galaxy without the Federation post-Burn, dominated by criminal enterprises and cowboy-esque "couriers" trading and searching for scarce dilithium. Michael Burnham became just such an outlaw courier, accompanied by her new love-interest, the empathic environmentalist cowboy Book.
Then, a few episodes in, the show discovered the future Federation after all and became a show about whether Michael Burnham was a good first officer and whether the Federation could successfully defeat the villainous Osyra and her evil Emerald Chain and discover that the Burn had been caused by an upset psychic child.
It turned out they could, and Michael Burnham became Captain of Discovery, in the process discovering an entire planet of dilithium that gave the Federation a new infinite supply and effectively reset the show's universe back to typical Star Trek fare. So Season 4, perhaps the show's most coherent single storyline, introduced a planet-destroying Dark Matter Anomaly ultimately revealed to be the work of an extra-Galactic "Species 10-C" who hadn't realized that they were killing people with their giant planet-destroying anomaly and when informed apologized and left.
Season 5 reinvented the show again as a treasure hunt in which the Discovery crew competed against the outlaw-lover combo Moll and Laak to find an ancient technology that created all life in the Galaxy. They found it, then promptly shoved it in a black hole to keep it safe. And so the show ended.
Why was Star Trek: Discovery so unstable in its basic plot and storytelling? While there are more external reasons that can be pointed to, most fundamental of all was a basic, pervasive insecurity found everywhere in the show, its basic identity, its characters, and its themes.
Discovery started out as a very weird idea indeed, but one that, properly nurtured, could have been great in its own way. However, Discovery could not simply be another weird idea; it had to be the show to resurrect Star Trek on the small screen after a more than ten year absence.
From behind-the-scenes interviews, it is clear that the cast and crew of Discovery were, for much of its run, extremely conscious of and sensitive to the criticism the show was receiving. And they responded to it in the way that insecure people generally do; by undercutting themselves, failing to commit fully to anything, always leaving escape clauses, and eventually by severing all ties and completely reinventing themselves--and then doing it again. Discovery went to college, died its hair pink, and joined a punk band--and then abruptly dropped out of college, got a bowl-cut, and started min-maxing a career in finance. Somewhere in there it met Space Hitler and turned her into a secret agent.
So the show took its own premise, and undercut it; and then undercut it again; and then got insecure about its next plot and abandoned it halfway through, and invented a cooler plot about Killer AIs; and then jettisoned its entire setting and moved a thousand years into the future; and then immediately jettisoned that setting as well and returned to a more Trekkian future; and then reinvented that too for good measure.
It is difficult to think of a single idea on Discovery that wasn't either heavily qualified or reinvented or undercut or simply contradicted at some point by itself--except, that is, the show's relentless commitment to coolness for its own sake.
But of course, insecure people are usually obsessed with being cool--and that insecure obsession with cool often leads to them doing really, really, really stupid things.
5) Stupidity and Collaboration
Still, once again, the difficulty of speaking about Discovery as a singular entity, even a singular stupid, insecure, entity, is that there simply was no consistent creative team working on Discovery for most of its run. Discovery was cursed with a rather excessive amount of behind-the-scenes drama, as the result of which it ended up having no writers in common between its first season and last.
Much of what really went on will have to wait for NDAs to expire in the coming decades. What is known is straightforward enough, though, and paints a picture of recurring, irreconcilable "creative differences" between the various creatives tasked with bringing Discovery to life.
The creative spark for Star Trek: Discovery was Bryan Fuller, a recurring writer on Star Trek: Voyager and in 2017 one of the hottest creatives in Hollywood, responsible for American Gods, Hannibal, and other respected and popular shows. CBS was desperate to revive Star Trek, and, by all accounts, Fuller came in with a whole bevy of creative ideas. And CBS bit, and greenlit his show.
Fuller's initial goal, apparently, was to create a Star Trek anthology show, featuring looks at different eras and storylines tied together only thematically. CBS, though, insisted on a more conventional single story; and so he took one of those ideas, a grimdark fable about Michael Burnham and the brutal start of the Klingon-Federation War before TOS, and set to work.
However, at this point...something happened. What exactly it is that happened may have to wait a decade or so for anyone to know, but suffice it to say that after a great deal of preproduction and design and story work, Fuller was fired before the first episode of Discovery even began filming. Around the same time, he was fired from all the other shows he was working on; and did not resurface for a number of years.
However, Discovery plowed gamely ahead, rewriting and reworking itself on the fly to try to extrapolate and undercut and finish the story concept that Fuller had started and somehow, someway making it to the end of the season. By the end of this season, a new pair of showrunners had been hired and established themselves, and they set out writing a very different Season 2, which apparently was set to focus on spiritual and religious issues and the new Captain Pike.
However, half-way through the production of Season Two, this set of creatives was abruptly fired. Complaints were aired in the press about poor behind-the-scenes behavior, but, again, the real reasoning may not be known for quite some time yet. The overall Star Trek executive, Alex Kurtzman, abruptly stepped in as showrunner, and the second half of Season 2 abruptly reinvented itself as a story about Killer AIs and time travel and then promptly gave up and decided to reinvent the show as a whole as something totally different.
For Seasons 3-5, Alex Kurtzman again stepped back, and a new showrunner, Michelle Paradise, stepped in, and this time remained in place. Certainly the show featured more continuity during those years; but given the amount of strange shifts in storytelling involved, it would not surprise if there was some behind-the-scenes weirdness here too.
Still, the fundamental, underlying reality behind all this chaos is simply the complex and difficult nature of creative collaboration. For anyone who has engaged in it, creative work is necessarily something that involves the whole of a person's self, including their most intimate thoughts and feelings. Working with someone else on a creative project thus requires a kind of intimacy, a kind of friendship, that is often not at all easy to come by. If all goes well, this collaboration can involve true cooperation, can help both parties, sharpen their skills, midwife their ideas, interrogate them, relate them, give precisely those "second thoughts" and provide precisely the kind of "creative discomfort" necessary for art to be good. If this collaboration goes badly, then you have a relationship that can be almost as painful, and almost as explosive, as a romantic breakup.
The children of such failed unions, alas, rarely do very well out in the world. For what happens when two selves, two minds collide, opposing each other, actively contradicting each other, striving with all their might so that one incompatible vision might dominate another, is stupidity in a far more profound sense than any single human person could ever originate.
This stupidity, this essential incoherence produced by creative conflict, is one of the most extreme, and one of the most awe-inspiring, things one can ever experience. And Discovery had it in spades, as few works of art I have seen.
6) Stupidity and Corporate Oligopoly
Of course, Discovery was far from the only creative work to display this kind of incoherency over the past ten years. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that this kind of openly clashing, contradictory, even malicious incoherence has to varying degrees been a distinctive and ubiquitous mark of popular culture as such during this time.
The reason for this clashing incoherency is not simply, however, the accidental clashes between particular creative minds and personalities--for the simple reason that creative minds have not been in charge of popular entertainment in Hollywood for quite some time. This is, after all, the new Studio Era of filmmaking, pioneered by Marvel Studios but eagerly adopted and imitated by virtually everyone else.
Movies and television-shows are made in America by capitalist, publicly-traded corporations; this, of course, has been true for quite some time. Since the first Studio Era, when the studio-runners were themselves creatives responsible for much of the actual work on their films, these corporations have been content, by and large, to take a relative back-seat to the actual labor of making movies and television shows. They provide the funding--they hire the creatives--they veto certain elements, give notes, kill particular projects or combine them or revive them. But in the end, the creative workers they have hired go off and make the movie.
In the new Studio Era, though, all this has changed. Now, Studios not only greenlight creative ideas: they come up with them. They not only hire creatives to make movies for them; they actively mandate and control virtually every aspect of production from story to writing to postproduction, often in the process overwriting or even firing the original creatives.
In theory, this model need not lead to any essential problems. Still, the fundamental tension baked into this system is that, with the exception of perhaps a few outliers, the ultimate ends and imperatives of corporate studios are not creative goals, but money. How or even whether one can adjust or alter or craft a creative project in order to ensure that it makes as much money as possible is a question as old as Hollywood itself. Yet certainly contemporary corporations have shown more confidence than almost any generation before them in their ability to do so.
Star Trek: Discovery was not greenlit because executives were so impressed with Bryan Fuller's brilliant idea of a Star Trek anthology series. It was greenlit because CBS, like everyone else c. 2017, was trying desperately to get in on the streaming bucks by imitating Netflix and creating their own subscription services. To get people to subscribe and stay subscribed to their new service CBS All-Access (later Paramount Plus) they needed new on-demand content, and lots of it; and for that, they needed a new Star Trek series, one that would be new and exciting and like the Abrams movies and continue indefinitely for as many years as possible. So they took Fuller's idea, and attempted to drastically reshape it into this new open-ended exciting Abrams-esque action Star Trek show--until it broke.
When Fuller's idea fell apart, it was still before a single shot had been filmed; and the natural thing from a creative aspect would have been to walk away and come up with a new idea. CBS, though, needed their new Star Trek show on CBS All-Access, and they needed it yesterday. So they hired new creatives and partially reworked it in process into something completely different.
When Discovery was poorly received, CBS again could have continued onwards with the story and setting they had, or else ended Discovery and tried again with a new idea--but they decided to keep going with the same show and sets and actors, but completely change the show into something more popular. Then they decided to do so again, keeping the same amortized sets and actors and characters. And then, despite the show's continuing creative criticism and lack of popularity, they kept it going for a few years more to anchor their streaming line-up.
And then, of course, the streaming bubble burst, and Paramount nearly went bankrupt, and then they simply cancelled it, story be damned.
Of all the Star Trek shows, none have suffered so thoroughly because of, or been so thoroughly dictated by, the changing realities of mass-media corporate economics. Netflix changed entertainment totally with its new model of subscription-service streaming, and made untold profits along the way; and so every media company rushed to do the same; and then the pandemic happened, and a writer's strike, and an actor's strike, and people abruptly realized they had no desire to pay for five subscription services with poor catalogs, and the entire market fell to pieces. And amid all this, Discovery and its poor cast and crew and creatives tumbled and spun, driven by every wind of studio fear and desire.
If it hasn't become clear by now, I do, in fact, have a certain amount of affection for Star Trek: Discovery; and a great deal of sympathy for its beleaguered cast, crew, and creatives, who by all accounts have been talented professionals doing their best under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Still, the nature of the corporate oligopoly under which we live is such that no one is ultimately responsible for the shape of economic events and pressures and therefore the creative projects crafted under its imperatives. No single studio executive--if any of them were involved all the way through the production of Discovery--consciously decided upon any of the fundamental aspects of Discovery. They merely followed economic and media trends, and shifted with them, and shifted again.
This behavior naturally leads to decision-making, and especially creative decision-making, that is necessarily and pervasively irrational--or in other words, really, really, really stupid.
7) Stupidity and Politics
One may note that in this discussion of Discovery, I have made no references to a "woke agenda" or any kind of conspiratorial efforts to force social and/or political beliefs on innocent youth via mass media. As the above summary indicates, this is certainly not the underlying intention behind virtually any of the show's features or creative choices. Even the show's fixation in later seasons on "representation" is, I think, far more indicative of a basically benevolent desire to service its audience with bland fantasy fulfillment than any coherent political or ideological stance.
Still, politics did play a role at various points in Discovery's production, though a much more subtle role than might be expected.
The fundamental problem with current trends in politics is emphatically not the proliferation of partisan propaganda aimed at converting neutral parties or opponents to one's side. In fact, such propaganda is vanishingly rare these days; and would be far more straightforward and coherent than most of what we see in popular art.
The real issue with current partisan political and cultural discourse is that it acts as a direct barrier for people in understanding the world, other persons, and themselves. This is for the most part deliberate and intrinsic to current mass-media political constructions, whereby to have a politics means to consume certain symbols that are by their inmost nature contradictory to symbols used by other groups.
American partisan mass-media politics thus naturally and necessarily make people stupid, in the sense that they make it impossible for them to understand the ideas underlying their own beliefs, the ideas of their opponents, and indeed themselves and their opponents as persons. Partisan affiliation is an exercise of belief, which is an exercise of reason, which is an exercise of human persons existing in communities and families. People can certainly use those commonalities to come to very different conclusions and so affiliate to very different groups; but if they begin, not with these basic commonalities, but with symbolic oppositions, they will never understand their own beliefs, let alone those of other persons.
Many of the minor stupidities of Star Trek: Discovery, like those of other contemporary art, can only be understood as reflections of the partisan fixations and oppositions of its creators. To begin with, from behind-the-scenes interviews, it is clear that the portrayal of the Klingons in Season 1 of Discovery was intended as an examination of the threat of Donald Trump and his followers. It is almost equally clear that this examination began and ended with absolutely no understanding or insight whatsoever into these groups or associated beliefs.
Hence, the Klingons were portrayed as grotesque, orc-like monsters obsessed with death and irrational religious belief whose overriding imperative was to "remain Klingon" and reject the impure diversity of the Federation--which of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the beliefs and preoccupations that animated Donald Trump or his followers. Worse, though, the show by its own admission had no real dramatic narrative way to make sense of or respond to even these random symbolic evils; other than having random action sequences in which actors vaporized said Klingons.
At a key point in Season One, a Federation Admiral (standing in rather directly for the writers of the show) desperately asks a Klingon fanatic to explain just what her beliefs even are again and therefore how her people's attempt to conquer the Federation can stop and this plotline finally be resolved. "It doesn't," the Klingon fanatic responds. And so, the Federation decides to commit genocide against the Klingons, but is stopped by an inspirational speech by Michael Burnham about how it is wrong to commit genocide--after which the Klingon lady fanatic seizes power and abruptly ends the war for no reasons anyone can explain, and the show moves on to something else.
This recurring problem--of the inability of the creatives behind Discovery to understand anything of any perspective contrary to 21st century upper-class urban progressivism--can be found in dozens of storylines throughout Discovery's run, from the planet of religious people who sacrifice children to a weather machine to the evil businesspeople and cowboys of the Emerald Chain who, it turns out, are best dealt with by blowing them all up with phasers and an exploding warp core.
For a show allegedly premised on an ideal of diversity and connection, it is remarkable that virtually every time the show encountered a substantially (as opposed to merely aesthetically) different culture that culture was portrayed extremely negatively, and that virtually every time the show portrayed a conflict with such a culture those conflicts were resolved with brutal violence. The large exceptions to this rule--Species 10-C and to a lesser extent the Romulans--were either dealt with offscreen, or else represented not so much a genuine contrary perspective as an abstract math puzzle. Otherwise, from the Klingons to the Breen to the Ba'ul, the show knew that the people with bad symbols were bad, and that while it might be wrong to genocide them, the only reasonable alternative was to either blow most of them to hell with phasers and/or wish them to the other side of the Galaxy and never think of them again.
While this corresponds roughly to how American urban progressives have actually dealt with difference historically, it nonetheless cannot help coming off rather unsatisfactorily onscreen. Discovery set up quite a lot of villains and potentially interesting cultures in its day, only to either abruptly blow them up, pretend they never existed, or have them join the Federation offscreen. And that, as they say, is that.
Perhaps the funniest single moment on the whole show was the end of Season 4 of Discovery, when we were abruptly introduced to the President of Earth, played by Stacey Abrams. One of the bolder choices taken by Discovery in Season Three was the decision to establish that Earth had left the Federation, and in the interim had become an isolationist, militarized, and rather xenophobic society. While Season 4 featured a recurring Earth General character, this conflict and the cultural differences involved were largely dispensed with as an actual onscreen presence. At the end of Season 4, however, we were abruptly introduced to President Stacey Abrams, who just as abruptly announced that there was "nothing to discuss": Earth was going to rejoin the Federation now! Today!
It's hard to think of a better summation of the politically-driven stupidity of the show.
To begin with, of course, Stacey Abrams is one of those mass-media political figures that, well, really is only a political figure on mass media. To date, she has served for a few years as a State Representative and then run two unsuccessful campaigns for Governor of Georgia; she currently holds no elected political office, nor did she when the episode aired. In the process, though, she has appeared on social media and podcasts and television frequently and been utilized by Internet progressives as a symbolic figure of inspiration and by Internet conservatives as a symbolic figure of hatred. I confess that I would not have recognized her if I had not read about the casting beforehand--and even so was only vaguely aware of who she was.
Here, though, is the rub; I genuinely do not think that the creatives of Discovery cast Stacey Abrams as the President of Earth either as conscious act of propaganda for her potential future electoral campaigns or as a conscious attempt to anger conservatives who view her with hatred. What is both funnier and infinitely more stupid, they simply were people who, as urban political progressives, viewed Stacey Abrams as a universally-beloved inspirational figure and thought it would be inspirational to cast her--whereas, of course, in reality the vast majority of their audience had absolutely no idea who she was, and a good proportion of those who did viewed her with dislike.
Stacey Abrams' casting, however, is only a footnote in the broader stupidity of the scene, which once again sweeps under the floor all difference and indeed even any potential of difference. Earth was a xenophobic isolationist state--but offscreen they elected Stacey Abrams as President, and thus are now Good. Now that they are Good, the entire complexity of integrating an independent government in with a broader Federation, the military and economic and political and cultural conflicts and complexities occasioned by almost a century of isolation and hostility, have simply ceased to exist--there is, simply, "nothing to discuss." Earth is Good; they are Like Us; therefore, they will join the Federation today. Yippee.
One could certainly describe this as politically partisan or woke or any number of other things. It is simpler, and more insightful, to just call it stupid.
8) Stupidity and Character
The best thing about Discovery, by a very wide margin, is its characters and the actors who play them. While universes and plotlines exploded in ruins around them, these actors--and the already-signed contracts with already-determined payscales--were the one thing maintaining continuity and the fiction of Discovery being a single show telling a single story.
While these characters and the accompanying actors vary, of course, in quality and effect, no discussion of Discovery would be complete without giving credit where credit is due to the stand-out performers: namely, Sonequa Martin-Green, who bore more of the burden of this show than any lead before her, who had to take her character through more contradictory plot arcs and character changes than any actor in any Star Trek show before her, and who handled it all with aplomb and grace. While she was sometimes criticized both for her theatrical acting style and her penchant for crying in character, both are in fact qualities that serve Star Trek leads well, and in fact generally served her show well. Captains should have both personality and authority; and Martin-Green had both. Likewise, Doug Jones as Saru gave us without a doubt the best "Spock-character" archetype since Odo, combining the most convincing full-body portrait of a truly alien alien ever executed with a steady, regal performance capable of modulating from extreme emotion to thoughtfulness and back again. He can hardly be praised sufficiently; and I hope he returns one day, in a better show.
Unfortunately, these characters and their accompanying actors are also the element of the show most thoroughly and frequently abused and squandered.
Michael Burnham started out as an interesting and compelling lead character; a traumatized junior officer filled with hatred of Klingons and guilt over her own actions. Unfortunately, within a few episodes she was a completely different character; and then again; and again; and again.
Discovery was originally conceived, in Fuller's most original stroke, as a show with one clear lead character--who would not be the Captain. While this format might have worked well for a dark anthology storyline chronicling the Klingon War, it did not end up working out particularly well for an ensemble Star Trek show about the crew of a ship with a magical mushroom drive in the 32nd century. By the end of its third season, the show finally gave up, and simply made Burnham the Captain; and never looked back.
Still, despite having jettisoned most of the original notes of Fuller's plot and formats, the show never lost its obsessive focus on Burham. The show has often been criticized for this focus to the near-total exclusion of screentime and characterization for any other character besides her-and these complaints are for the most part extremely justified. As stated above, the show featured a vast and rotating cast of bridge crewmembers who in any other Star Trek show would have gotten numerous stories dedicated to them and their backstory and characteristics. Apart from Saru and to a lesser degree Dr. Culbers, Book, and Adira, these characters received, in the end, essentially nothing, with even the occasional bits of characterization thrown out the window or contradicted or overwritten and then the characters themselves shuffled offscreen again and replaced by more faceless characters.
Still, this fixation on Michael Burnham could perhaps have still worked if the show had a clear vision of Burnham's character, her progression, and her growth. This, alas, was far from the case. Besides a penchant for emoting and action-hero skills, very little about Michael Burnham remained consistent across all five seasons. In Seasons 1-2 she is a trauma victim with tragic family backstory: in Season 3 she stops worrying or carrying about family stuff and trauma, and reinvents herself as a carefree maverick prone to breaking the chain of command to get the job done--Season 4 reinvents her as a caring commander and partner unwilling to accept defeat or let her officers die--then in its third-to-last episode, Discovery establishes that she is obsessed to the point of madness with duty and that her only fear is failure. I'm sure I'm forgetting some versions of the character.
Remarkably, after five seasons, the show covered less ground in defining its lead character than TOS did in its first six episodes. Hell, in some ways, it covered less ground than Star Trek in its second pilot, or even in the first scene of its second pilot. By the first time we've seen Kirk and Spock together in a scene, we've learned their basic personalities and basic conflicts with themselves and each other--and we proceed from there.
For this is the real issue with stupidity and incoherence in ideas and artifacts--that it proves incapable of grasping the depth and complexity and coherency of actual human personality. Human beings vary vastly across time in their reactions and actions, and can never wholly be predicted or comprehended; yet for all that, even or especially in their flaws and problems and issues, human beings are defined by rationality--down to their very core. As art grows more and more incoherent, it necessarily grows more and more inhuman.
9) Stupidity and Love
Still, let me end on a positive note, by offering the one thing about Star Trek: Discovery that even its stupidity and incoherence did not, in the end, destroy, which even these qualities, to a degree and at times, even helped to further.
I will confess my own journey on Discovery has been, as I said above, quite a painful and torturous one. I wanted to like the show desperately; I came to deeply hate it; and then, gradually, came around to appreciating it again, in its own way. Here is why.
It is painfully evident that many of the creatives behind Discovery did love Star Trek, its details, its setting, its (alleged) ideas; and, in the end, that they loved its characters too--well, at least Michael Burnham. More than this, throughout virtually all of the different variations of the show, it is clear that the creatives behind Discovery were in fact trying in some inchoate way to aim at understanding, at wisdom, and therefore at the good of their audience.
Starting in its first season and proceeding through its fifth, Discovery was a show where everyone cried a lot, where everyone had problems, but where nearly everyone solved those problems. It was replete with life lessons about connection, and community, and family, and diversity, and the goodness and blessedness of Starfleet and the Federation. Everything else about the show fluctuated and fell apart into incoherency; and even these life lessons were, alas, not particularly deep or particularly insightful. Multiple character arcs ended with someone deciding to talk to their therapist--or saying out loud to someone something they'd been thinking about saying for several episodes. Take a chance; trust other people; don't give up; we are all connected.
But still--this was something. At a certain point, more than halfway through its run, Star Trek: Discovery decided that it was a show about connection, about the need to let go and reach out to others--and while it didn't exactly succeed at being that, that is, at least, a worthy lesson, and a worthy goal. It usually made that point with all the ham-handed unsubtlety of a children's cartoon or an after-school special; it usually made it via plots that made no sense and characters that made no sense and seemed to shift in characteristics at random. But hell, it made the point.
And the simple reality is that sometimes, when making a non-stupid point, a dose of stupidity and incoherence can be, to a degree, helpful. Discovery lacked the subtlety to lay out its life-lessons subtlety; so it just said them out loud, directly and over and over again. For some people, though, that's the only way such life-lessons can be received. Discovery had no particular anthropology or ethics, no particular understanding of human culture or difference or purpose; but it did know that committing genocide is wrong, and doing the right thing is good, and that family and friendship and community are what make people happy. And hell, there are many works of art with very developed and subtle anthropologies and ethics that don't understand those obvious truths; and many people, no doubt, who would never have learned them apart from Discovery. Hallmark Cards may be stupid; but sometimes, for some people, they're more effective at communicating the truth than treatises on human nature.
Star Trek: Discovery is the stupidest and most incoherent work of art I have ever encountered; but it is not the most evil. And, ultimately, the malice of the human will bent on nothingness will always be infinitely more incoherent and nonsensical and in the proper sense stupid than the random chances of creative conflict and insecurity and oligopoly and politics that Discovery shows us. No one is saved for being smart, or damned for being stupid; but only for being good or evil. And this applies, mutatis mutandis, to works of art as well. Oppenheimer is, in a proper sense, much stupider than Discovery; and as our society grows more evil and more incoherent there will no doubt be worse and more evil art to come.
In a few years, I am sure I will look back nostalgically on the good-hearted, well-intentioned, insecure little show that couldn't, but that did its best to tell us all to love each other regardless.
In the end, Discovery ended in an almost pitch-perfect way, with a last-minute epilogue filmed after the show's cancellation and rather randomly tacked onto the ending of the Season Five finale. In it, Burnham is happily married to Book with a son who has just gotten his own captaincy in Starfleet; and then she takes the Discovery and its sentient AI Zora and randomly leaves it in open space to sit alone for a thousand years; and as she does so, she imagines a bunch of the show's characters hugging each other. And then we fade to black.
This is, in almost every way, perfect as a conclusion and summation to Discovery. The plot makes no sense and is also vaguely nasty--our hero is condemning a sentient being to a thousand years of loneliness, for no reason whatsoever other than a meta-textual desire to tie into the plotline of a Short Trek from several years ago that most people who watch the show have never seen. The characterization is simply absent--the characters hugging each other aren't even there, but are merely a fond imagination of Michael Burnham, and even in watching this reverie we are forced to remember that they are mostly ciphers about whom we know virtually nothing. Even more strikingly, the show doesn't take the time to tell us anything about where its characters are in the future--emphatically unlike past Trek shows, which loved to examine future lives in great detail. All Good Things gave us Cambridge Professor Data, Novelist Geordi, Embittered Careerist Riker, Ambassador Worf...Discovery gives us nothing on its characters, just as it always has, with the exception of Michael Burnham.
But hey, the show wants us to know that being married and having kids and joining Starfleet are all good things to do, that make people happy--and it wants us to know that Michael Burnham is happy, too. And that, at least, is not stupid.
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