Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
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Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
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Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
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Yeah, I guess my problem isn't knowing the destination, it's knowing that the destination is going to be pretty rough in ways that run counter to this show's general vibe. Which really is pretty similar to my broader frustrations with Discovery's "the distant future includes 120 years of horrific geopolitical strife where basically everything your heroes fought for falls apart". I really want to believe in the happy ending, you know? Even when the concept of an ending doesn't actually make real-world sense.
A lot of it does have happy endings, or at least not overtly tragic ones. Spock do goes thru it, but ends up in a very good and important place, and is deeply at peace with himself for decades after all this stuff wraps. We don't really see how Chapel wraps up, but she gets her MD and clearly stays in Starfleet, and so far as we can tell gets over Spock. And Pike gets "the illusion," of course, which is about as happy as any person could be, given his circumstances.
Trek isn't all happy events with clear closings; there were a lot of tragic endings in TOS, for example. Even TWOK is pretty much a tragedy, taken in isolation -- Kirk's hubris in deciding to exile Khan causes a lot of death and pain. Hell, even the resurrection of Spock comes at the loss of both the Enterprise and Kirk's only son.
As long as the pain and tough times have narrative and character meaning, I'm more than OK with them happening because we know so much about how things do work out. Trek reminds, on the whole, a positive and uplifting look at how we can live.
And of course we know Uhura's gonna turn out just fine.
Nothing ever ends, Adrian.