In the fall of 2017, we received not one but two new Star Trek series. Well, one and a half. I’m speaking, of course, of Star Trek: Discovery and it’s underachieving, pot-smoking, distant cousin, The Orville.
What are these two series, and what exactly is their relationship to the established Star Trek corpus? To answer that, I will draw on Harold Bloom’s theory of poetry, arguing that all poetry is misreading of previous poems. However, some poems are “weak misreadings”, which merely replicate the previous poem, and others are “strong misreadings” in which the poet includes his own ideas. This distinction will help us understand where to place these two series.
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