Alex Kurtzman answered a question about balancing what to keep from classic Star Trek with what new elements to bring in for Discovery:
First and foremost, the defining factor of Roddenberry’s vision is the optimistic view of the future. He envisioned a world where all species, all races came together to not only make our world better, but to make every world better. I think that is something that can never be lost in Trek. Once you lose that, you lose the essence of what Star Trek is.
That being said…we live in very different times. Every day we look at the news and it is hard. It is hard to see what we see. I think now more than ever Trek is needed as a reminder of what we can be and the best of who we can be. Star Trek has always been a mirror to the time it reflected and right now the idea that – the question is how do you preserve and protect what Starfleet is in the weight of challenge like war and the things that have to be done in war is a very interesting and dramatic problem. And it feels like a very topical one given the world where where we live now.
I keep coming back to this Kurtzman quote, been turning it over on idle moments since I came across it while posting that post. There's something about it that is incredibly fascinating to me as to how he sums his vision of the dramatic concept of this series.
And he's obviously way more successful than I am. Bobby Roberts is probably more successful than I am in any of this. But it seems like it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of not only Trek as a franchise (or really any series), but the history of the real world and also producing successful dramatic story. Even more than that his own notions of what Trek is supposed to be literally two seconds earlier.
I only have Kurtzman's Trek to go off of, but he comes off with desiring a fetishistic glamorization of war for its bad parts. "The things that have to be done in war." And in the other quote how the second season will bring with it from the war "the things that are left behind; the casualties, the things that have grown in Starfleet as a result of the war"
He says Roddenberry's vision is optimistic, which okay fine, but then he says "we live in very different times. Everyday we look at the news and it is hard." And it's like what in the holy fuck. Gene served in World War II even if most of it was in the US. The show came about literally a couple years after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the two superpowers to nearly annihilate each other. A President had just been assassinated. The Civil Rights Movement had passed its glory days and was entering into the reaction period of the later 1960s. And that nuclear annihilation was hanging over everything. Even if we just take something dominating the media zeitgeist like the position of minorities for example, in the United States, it's terrible and imperfect and yes, hard. But it's a far cry from the events happening in the 1960's in the United States. It's a far cry globally from where we were as humanity in the 1960's. Practically nowhere is it as hard as then.
And then he goes on to talk about how you preserve Trek's optimism in the face of a war; how it has to mirror the times. But it can't.
We aren't in a war now.
Not a real one.
Not like the one or the world everyone associated with old Trek lived through before they got to Trek. Nothing on that scale. Just take the main cast ffs: George Takei spent time as a kid in an internment camp, his Japanese relatives died in the Hiroshima bombing. Jimmy Doohan fought in and was seriously wounded during D-Day. DeForest Kelley barely avoided having to serve overseas being just young enough to get to serve in the US. Both Shatner and Nimoy came from Jewish families that fled Eastern Europe because of oppression/war. Nichelle Nichols was not only black but a woman. And that's the actors who for the most part all had fairly charmed lives to get to their positions (even Nichols family was well off enough that her dad was a mayor! A black mayor in the 1940s!) while the rest of the people doing the show had all kinds of experiences. Literally everyone involved came through the Depression. You're probably not going to find anyone to write for, let alone star in the show today who has those level of experiences. There's only so many Rob Riggles around who can fall into the industry right after being a deployed Marine and even he (and John Oliver's awesome wife) didn't see the war of the type we're talking about for the show.
"The things that have to be done in war." DS9 dealt with this, and in the only way possible, an endless tragedy for everyone. Everyone's morals and morale is broken, an entire species has nearly been wiped out and the show makes us feel for them despite them being the bad guys from day one (and despite their two representative characters for the end story arc being the most blatantly grey or worse characters on it), another race was targeted for deliberate genocide (let alone what the Federation was going to let happen in the Gamma Quadrant as a result from the Dominion collapsing), pretty much all the main characters relationships have been shattered during and by the war and personal sacrifices are made to the very end. The Romulans aren't friends now because of the war and don't stick around to celebrate. The Klingons are putting on a brave face, but as the show multiple times indicates they are finished as a power, maybe for generations, because of the war and their ways. (Their entire government was overthrown just recently in a conference room by their new Federation ambassador.)
There's no optimism and "a reminder of what we can be and the best of who we can be" in weighing the challenge of war and "the things that have to be done." There can't be. War is inherently a failure, a disaster. Especially an intergalactic one.
You have literally the universe given to you and you want to explore war? You'll never explore it even on the level of something like Homeland has done. You can't deal with the consequences like you claim other than to revel in the suffering of certain characters. Real war tears apart societies on a level you can never do on a show where you want to keep the main cast and keep the main premise well past it.
And again DS9 already did all this and pushed it to the brink of where it could go before we tumble over an event horizon of no return. The Federation was literally prepared to commit genocide and bring about the collapse of an entire civilization that had the potential to kill untold trillions because it could not fight the war indefinitely. (And they didn't even know what havoc Janeway was unleashing in the Delta Quadrant at the time.) An idea which, by the way, you'll recall was already less successfully attempted by two "bad" powers. And for all the wartime ethics "In A Pale Moonlight" toys around with which Garak rightly points out has been a line they've crossed many times in the past and Sisko knew he would be crossing from the start, in the end, Sisko risks literally everything, trillions upon trillions of lives, on Bashir successfully getting the cure from Sloane's mind AND Odo being able to convince the Founders to end the war in exchange. DS9 had to end because they couldn't cover the aftermath of what they DID do, especially on Cardassia, let alone wrestle with what they nearly did.
If your Trek is premised on exploring "the things that have to be done in a war" because we "live in very different times ... the news ... is hard" and your previous Trek films featured a faction of the Federation determined to be prepared for the next war (after untold billions died to a Romulan ship from a future alternate timeline) that is utterly ruthless and prepared to slaughter anyone to pursue this goal pre-emptively then I'm not sure how your Trek is going to ever be optimistic or about exploration or about really anything but just brutal terrible suffering for everyone in just crudely and clumsily handled ways.
You can't do a Trek Band of Brothers then follow those same people into charting nebula, visiting planets full of drugs that blast everybody in the face and meeting aliens who base their entire society around a gangster novel. Let alone stop in the middle of it to play some baseball with jerkass Vulcan crews. Wait.
