this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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Discovery should have been set in the future of the series. Then not only would the RIDICULOUSLY HUGE AMOUNT OF EMPTY SPACE in the ship would make more sense, the advanced tech would make more sense, and most importantly, they wouldn't need to retcon ANYTHING.
They just wanted to be able to use certain characters and wanted to be set before almost anything else. So they did the dumb thing and placed the advanced future ship in the past.
It's not like you can't make an early-timeline modern show without making a bunch of weird conflicts, retcons, and anachronisms. Strange New Worlds is great and sticks pretty well to the canon tech, styles, and sigh Klingon physical appearance as the original canon (or Next Gen canon for the Klingons) with slick modern production, design and writing. But they wanted an early-timeline show with advanced late-Trek tech, unique species designs, and muddled in with established characters. They wanted their cake and to eat it too. It isn't a bad show, but from the very beginning they wrote themselves into having to later recon the entire show out of the annals of Trek History or else all of the canon would make no sense.
i remember when Star Wars: The Clone Wars came out and they introduced Ahsoka. i wasn't online then so maybe people on message boards called that a retcon too, but to me and my kid friends it was obvious something happens to her taking her out of play by Revenge of the Sith. it was interesting and cool and gave the show a sense of tension, knowing when the bomb drops isn't a matter of if but when
that's essentially the same thing Discovery was doing introducing this ship and technology that's gone by TOS. you can argue whether or not it's good storytelling- i think both Clone Wars and Discovery didn't quite stick the landing in a few places despite loving the former and generally liking the latter- but none of that was retconning, just non-linear storytelling
It goes beyond just this ship and the tech that is isolated to it. They also establish events, organizations and technology that is used widely throughout the federation that they also have to shoehorn in a way to explain why it is never referenced or used again.
Like the holograms are really prevalent in long range communications. After the conflict with Control where the AI is able to impersonate an admiral with faked hologram imaging, they casually throw out a line about how they'll never use that tech anymore as it isn't trustworthy (and thus aligning with the established canon). Like not "we need to put in more safeguards", "we need to only accept orders through official verifiable channels", or "this tech should only be used for casual communication with family and friends", etc. Just "Welp that tech was cool, but fool me once! Never again! No holograms for you! Also, the existence of Control is also being buried and made illegal to talk about, so we can't even explain why this tech being used all over starfleet is being shut down completely and immediately." That is a purely nonsensical outcome that they wrote themselves into just becuase they wanted largely cosmetic tech earlier than it should have existed.
Yeah, it's easy to have a prequel character that doesn't show up in the original and have that make sense, but technology is much harder to explain away. You generally need some form of major societal collapse to explain why tech in a prequel isn't around anymore. So long as anyone knows how to make the tech, it will come back. Even someone just being aware that the tech existed can result in someone reinventing it.
This isn't too difficult to accomplish if the setting is before the information age to begin with, but it's much harder to justify if the internet or an equivalent is around. We lost the secret of how to make concrete for about a thousand years following the collapse of Rome. On the other hand, David Hahn built a nuclear reactor in his home with just books from the library. Those books are now available any time you want on that neat rectangle you keep in your pocket, and we know from experience that you can't really scrub anything from the internet, so they'll always be there so long as the internet still exists.
Somewhere out there on the Klingon portion (and probably the Romulan portion) of Trek's internet equivalent are detailed accounts of the USS Discovery, her crew, and her spore drive. The ship was operating completely in the open, after all. And since the Klingons never classified that info, it would be easily and readily available to anyone who can read Klingon or has access to a universal translator.
Yeah, I wasn't going to touch on the spore drive because they really seemed to be playing on the idea that it took the singular genius of Stamets to create it... except his genius wasn't singular. He had a research partner, Straal.
Yes, Straal died and Stamets went to the future, but whatever groundwork science existed for their research to even get off the ground still existed for other scientists to build on. And they started this research in a classified lab, sure, but surely others in the lab knew about it. And it only took 6 months after the technology was co-opted by Starfleet for the war effort to be fully functional in two separate ships, so they must have been pretty far along by the time they left the lab too. Two separate human scientists of about the same age who knew each other were able to found the groundwork from existing science and tech and work independently on developing the technology on two different ships... so the likelihood that they were just uniquely qualified and no one else could do it is extremely unlikely.
As you said, the spore drive was used openly and effectively in the war and the Klingons and others certainly knew about the capabilities of it, as well as some details of its nature. And even if the existing research and memory of the Discovery was successfully buried in the federation, the scientific knowledge it was based on was not. The scientific principles upon which the tech was built could be rediscovered eventually, especially if people had an idea of it's usefulness (putting it mildly).
Given the technology would literally be a paradigm shifting technology as much or moreso as warp technology was, there is absolutely no way that the tech wouldn't be pursued by someone... eventually... Yet 1000 years later, and Discovery is still uniquely capable of essentially teleportation in the entire galaxy, at at time when interstellar travel has become critically difficult. It's value is beyond priceless. Even the fact that future Starfleet isn't immediately using it to build more is mind boggling... or that the past starfleet didn't either for that matter..
They could have kept the knowledge of the spore tech even if they had to hide the existence of the Discovery. It was the ship itself that was the host of the Sphere data, not the spore tech. It stretches believability for sure that Starfleet didn't do what it could to preserve this technology which could see them extending their INSTANTANEOUS reach to the entire galaxy.
And if they were going to pretend it never existed for inexplicable reasons, they could have at least made the cover up believable by doing something like planting false scientific data around the technology, poisoning the well to prevent others from discovering it for a long time. But no, they just say "shhh" and it goes away for a millenia.
So was this technology just singularly impossible to recreate? Was it sheer dumb luck that it was created at all? Is it impossible to reverse engineer? Or did the writers just fail to think of a good way to explain why the tech never reoccurred in 1000 years? 🙄
keeping the spore drive secret from star trek universe seems very unusual , at some point they would find evidence of it in thier databaes in the future. in 1000years they shouldve have known about transwarp/slipstream and other various methods of transportation, why were they still in WARP TECH.
lets not forget the manchild kelpian with the scream(fans were calling the person) that caused the burn.
That's a bit of a stretch; he never got anywhere near criticality, nor did he build any control systems or mechanisms to get useful energy out of it. Some of the earliest nuclear reactors were called "atomic piles," but a pile of radioactive stuff is literally all that his was.
No, Discovery should have been a post-Dominion war show, and had nothing to do with a Spore drive, or Spock.
Discovery should have been an all holodeck show starting Moriarty as The Captain.
Also fuck you autocarrot like many a lonely pirate I will not use homosexualidad as a replacement for holodeck. Even though I still agree.
picard is that post-dominion show, but its almost as bad as discovery. remember they were suppose to have a borg alliance in season 2 and the romulan threat in season 1 and the mysterious rift, until they dropped it completely in the 3rd season. and the same thing happened at the end of Lower decks with the rift thing.
No, I mean like a normal show about a regular crew, over multiple seasons, not a fan service one-off that kind of touches on it, but that's not really the point. And Picard seasons 1 and 2 were shit. Season 2 was fucking awful, and I don't care about the rift. I want to know what happened to the universe I was invested in for 21 goddamn seasons.
3 is the worst thought. they couldve went somewhere with the alliance thing.
discovery was pretty much doomed from the start when they use spore drive as a "Secret" that violates the stark trek continuity.