When the show started, I was unimpressed. So unimpressed, in fact, that I took forever to finish watching the first season, and even longer to watch anything more. I just couldn't muster any enthusiasm for this awful Trek-in-name-only that had a couple of cool ideas, but no understanding of what Star Trek even was, much less how to create it. Much like the Abrams movies, it used the names and concepts of Trek to make a totally different kind of entertainment product. (In the movies' case, this was blockbuster action; in DSC's case, Netflix-type short-season drama, very modern and navel-gazey.) Like putting a cowboy hat on a beehive, labelling these things Star Trek was not enough to make them Star Trek, and it was just a bad idea all round.

So although I had said from the start that Five-Minute Discovery would happen, and I even made a couple of graphics and put fake subsite links on the front page fully intending to use them, I got nowhere with "5MDSC" for years. I was so down on the show I didn't even feel like making fun of it. But then something wonderful happened!

No wait, it was something even worse. Star Trek: Picard came along and taught me there were worse things Paramount could do than make bad Trek with mostly original characters. They could make bad Trek with characters I love. They could be smarter about it too. DSC is honestly sort of cute in its naivety; it's a pile of total nonsense that really thinks it's good, bless its heart. But PIC knew how to be genuinely promising. Every season had setup that could've led to greatness. And instead, almost every bit of decent story machinery was either abandoned or used "subversively". Nothing in DSC was actively hostile to the positive vision of Star Trek; DSC just didn't really get it. PIC got it and opposed it.

At some point along this road, I came to a very important realization. I reached it in self-defense, but I think it's true and valuable regardless. This is my epiphany: what I thought of as Star Trek ended in 2005 whether I like it or not. Insofar as "canon" means anything when we're talking about fiction, one canon ended there. (Several had ended before that, most notably in 1969, but this is the one I care about.) Hardly anyone involved in writing Trek before 2005 has been involved with it since. Nobody at Paramount has even tried to maintain the connection, which would've been easy to do by, say, giving Rick Berman some meaningless producer credit. They started from scratch -- and that means they have no more privileged status relative to the old canon than anyone else. They just get to look official because they own the trademark.

For me, there are only various people's high-budget fanfics now; there's no actual new Star Trek, and there was never going to be. It wouldn't have mattered if Paramount's projects had been great. They still would've had no meaningful connection to 1966-2005 Trek, even if I'd liked them, and even if they'd felt so similar that the disconnect had never occurred to me.

That was my realization. (Or, dare I say, my di-- no. No I don't dare say.)

I needed it almost immediately, because next came Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. For the first season, I was willing to tolerate its cartoonishly over-the-top reinvention of TOS characters because some of the stories were pretty good. The second season made me regret it. This show takes the TOS characters, ignores everything about them, and just writes whatever the hell it wants. (I honestly wonder if at some point in production, the writers asked themselves "What are the least likely things that could possibly have come before 'Amok Time'?" and wrote those things.) SNW is the crystallization of Paramount's new attitude toward Star Trek. Nobody's left from Gene's day. Nobody respects... anything, really. Not the old show, not their own show, not the audience, not even themselves.

All this is bad news for me and for Trek as a whole... but it's great news for Discovery! PIC and SNW have made me feel much better about this ridiculous show, which at least mostly breaks its own stuff. This goes especially for the later seasons, which left the TOS era behind in favour of a distant future era. The DSC future is incredibly boring, but at least they made it up themselves.

Moreover, I've found that my new detached attitude about the post-'05 Treks has allowed me to have some fun with DSC. I can laugh at it when it's being silly and I can enjoy the parts that are interesting or entertaining. There are some interpersonal relationships I like, and the show even has one actual honest-to-god Star Trek character, Saru, who's been a bright spot throughout. In turn, this ability to enjoy the show means I can enjoy writing fivers of it -- the best fivers always come from love, not hate. Maybe the biggest surprise for me was that Michael Burnham turned out to be a blast to write for in fivers! She can be the straight man, the jerk, the victim, or whatever a scene calls for, and it never feels wrong because the character was all over the map. She's getting all my best lines and I never saw it coming.

So with Discovery's five-year mission (which actually took seven for some reason) freshly concluded, I think it's finally time to dignify it with a proper subsite. So far there's nothing past Season 1, but I'm planning to do at least one fiver for each season over the next little while, and guest fivers are welcome. And of course, no new subsite is complete without an FAQ -- even if a couple of them strain the definition a bit.

The fake front-page link is finally real: Five-Minute Discovery is here. And it comes with a bit of new content (which is for kings) too!

• The subsite FAQ; and...
• The next S1 episode, Five-Minute "The Butcher's Knife Cares Not For the Lamb's Cry", a title you'll be pleased to hear I have not been re-typing every time.

Prodigy might get a subsite, though. That one's actually good!

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