Paramount+ Star Trek: Discovery - Official Thread (1 Viewer)

[Dave Scarpa]

I agree good best short trek of the lot , and a good realignment if Harry Mudd, Wilson wrote the ep and I think he gets Harry Mudd

 

[Carabimero]

Is Number One having a chicken sandwich?

Arby's does chicken right.

 

[Sam Favate]

This season 2 encounter with Pike - it takes place after The Cage, or before?

I think it's after The Cage, but before Kirk's time, obviously. I believe I read that the Talosians would make an appearance in Season 2.

 

[Carabimero]

Why is Pike commanding Discovery? It just seems like another one of those problems I wouldn't have if this wasn't set in the Prime Timeline...

This doesn't give me hope that season two will be more well-thought through than season one.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

The showrunners were fired for cause midway through production, that’s never inspiring either.

 

[joshEH]

Why is Pike commanding Discovery? It just seems like another one of those problems I wouldn't have if this wasn't set in the Prime Timeline...

This doesn't give me hope that season two will be more well-thought through than season one.

We've previously seen commanding officers of other starships (as well as command-level officers from other billets) getting assigned temporary field-command and replacing existing COs several times before in Trek -- Captain Jellico in TNG's "Chain of Command," Admiral Kirk over Captain Decker in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Jadzia Dax being given full command of the Defiant in early season six of DS9 (after Sisko gets reassigned to a desk-job in Admiral Ross's office at Starbase 375 due to the Dominion War), etc.

This is nothing we haven't seen previously established onscreen in Star Trek before, and keep in mind too that we're still in the year 2257, nearly seven years before Kirk takes command of the Enterprise, and there is a huge amount of time between this point and then where a senior officer like Pike could theoretically be placed on durational detached duty similar to how Jellico and other captains have also been reassigned in the franchise.

I'm absolutely certain that the reasons for Captain Pike's takeover of command aboard Discovery will be fully explained to us within the context of the storyline when the new episodes return here in a couple of weeks.

 

[Josh Dial]

We've previously seen commanding officers of other starships (as well as command-level officers from other billets) getting assigned temporary field-command and replacing existing COs several times before in Trek -- Captain Jellico in TNG's "Chain of Command," Admiral Kirk over Captain Decker in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Jadzia Dax being given full command of the Defiant in early season six of DS9 (after Sisko gets reassigned to a desk-job in Admiral Ross's office at Starbase 375 due to the Dominion War), etc.

This is nothing we haven't seen previously established onscreen in Star Trek before, and keep in mind too that we're still in the year 2257, nearly seven years before Kirk takes command of the Enterprise, and there is a huge amount of time between this point and then where a senior officer like Pike could theoretically be placed on durational detached duty similar to how Jellico and other captains have also been reassigned in the franchise.

I'm absolutely certain that the reasons for Captain Pike's takeover of command over Discovery will be fully explained to us within the context of the storyline when the new episodes return here in a couple of weeks.

Absolutely agree with Prime Universe Josh (or was it Mirror...). In fact, I would argue that Discovery is more thought out than the other Trek series--all of which ignore canon and retcon at will.

 

[johnnybear]

It was thirteen years before wasn't it? I was never happy with the producers setting ENT and DSC before TOS! That shows an arrogance to me that they don't really understand the series in any way or form and that you as the viewer HAVE TO ACCEPT what they say and that TOS is too dated for kids now anyway!
JB

 

[Nelson Au]

As Josh said, there’s going to be a reason for why Oike is taking command of the Discovery in the premiere. With Lorca gone and Goegiou off doing her thing, Starfleet must have wanted a season Captain in command for this mysterious mission.

I watched the last two Short Treks. I was beginning to think these would be one or two actor plays and focuses on that character. Which is what is happening, but these last two were nice to have more characters involved. And they sure appeared to spend some money on the sets and production design.

The Saru centric episode The Brightest Star was interesting to see Saru’s Home world and how he left to join Starfleet. The ending was unexpected. From Josh’s post above, I was expecting a connection to the deleted scene from the S1 finale. But it wasn’t.

The Harry Mudd Trek, The Escape Artist I was a little confounded by. The reveal was well done and explains what was going on. But I was feeling less satisfied because I kept thinking, Harry couldn’t have been to the I, Mudd planet yet. That’s assuming this episode takes place in the Discovery time period. One of the Mudd’s was wearing the outfit we see him wear in I, Mudd. So perhaps this is post I, Mudd during TOS and he found a way off the planet and is up to his usual schemes. If that’s the case, then it makes more sense.

 

[Bryan^H]

Why is Pike commanding Discovery? It just seems like another one of those problems I wouldn't have if this wasn't set in the Prime Timeline...

This doesn't give me hope that season two will be more well-thought through than season one.

Well, if you watch it let me know if it is any good. I trust you.

 

[joshEH]

The Harry Mudd Trek, The Escape Artist I was a little confounded by. The reveal was well done and explains what was going on. But I was feeling less satisfied because I kept thinking, Harry couldn’t have been to the I, Mudd planet yet. That’s assuming this episode takes place in the Discovery time period. One of the Mudd’s was wearing the outfit we see him wear in I, Mudd. So perhaps this is post I, Mudd during TOS and he found a way off the planet and is up to his usual schemes. If that’s the case, then it makes more sense.

From what's established in "I, Mudd," Harry encountered the android-planet after he escaped from prison and crashlanded there, but perhaps he already knew of its existence (as well as the robot-manufacturing capabilities of the planet) some years beforehand, which could tie both stories together. Or at the very least, I don't seem to recall it being explicitly mentioned in TOS that Mudd *didn't* know of the planet before his arrival there in 2268, just that he took control of its android-making facilities at some undetermined point before the episode.

Also, very interestingly, I just read an interview with Rainn Wilson (who directed the episode), where he mentioned that the director's and writer's intent was that the flashbacks weren’t events from the "real" human Mudd’s past, but actually were shared collective memories of other Mudd-androids just before they were taken to Starfleet.

It was thirteen years before wasn't it? I was never happy with the producers setting ENT and DSC before TOS! That shows an arrogance to me that they don't really understand the series in any way or form and that you as the viewer HAVE TO ACCEPT what they say and that TOS is too dated for kids now anyway!
JB

Again, I have absolutely no idea what you're trying to say here. How does wanting to produce a prequel of any type prove "arrogance"?

Also, the first season of DSC runs from May, 2256 through the fall of 2257 (counting the nine-month spore drive time-jump), and the official Okuda chronology has James T. Kirk taking command of the Enterprise circa 2264 or thereabouts, so it's about seven years' separation at the point where we're at in the timeline with DSC season two.

 

[joshEH]

This season 2 encounter with Pike - it takes place after The Cage, or before?

That’s a good question Josh. My first reaction was to say before because this is still 10 years before Kirks time. But then in thinking about it, the events in The Cage occur 15 years before the accident that left Pike crippled. So if I remember the chronology right, this is Pike after the events on Talos.

This is correct -- "The Cage" takes place in 2254, and the first episode of Discovery ("The Vulcan Hello") opens on May 11, 2256, and then we're now in late (fall or winter) 2257 as of the season two premiere episode, so over three years since Talos IV occurred (and still a bit over nine years prior to Pike's J-class training vessel accident, leading into TOS: "The Menagerie").

Also, to give everyone a "head's up" -- the next Discovery novel comes out on Tuesday, and focuses on Sylvia Tilly:

Despite being an inexperienced Starfleet cadet, Sylvia Tilly became essential to the U.S.S. Discovery finding its way back home from the Mirror Universe. But how did she find that courage? From where did she get that steel? Who nurtured that spark of brilliance? The Way to the Stars recounts for fans everywhere the untold story of Tilly’s past.

If the last three novels are anything to go by, this should be pretty great, plus Una McCormack's a fantastic author in her own right.

 

[Carabimero]

Well, if you watch it let me know if it is any good. I trust you.

I'm definitely going to watch it. But after all the promises that weren't kept last season by the writers, I'm snake bit. I'll let you know. I want it to knock my socks off. Maybe it will. But it just doesn't seem like there's any plan. Let's have her mutiny. Great! Wait, we can't do that longterm. OK, let's reset that and pardon her. Let's build up to the Klingon war. Wait. No. Let's tie that up in ten minutes and forget the war. OK. Hey. Here's an idea. Let's bring in the Enterprise out of left field to hook them for next season. The Enterprise, yeah! I have an idea. Let's make Pike the new captain!

And on and on and on. It all smacks of being terribly rushed and ill-considered.

 

[Josh Dial]

I'm definitely going to watch it. But after all the promises that weren't kept last season by the writers, I'm snake bit. I'll let you know. I want it to knock my socks off. Maybe it will. But it just doesn't seem like there's any plan. Let's have her mutiny. Great! Wait, we can't do that longterm. OK, let's reset that and pardon her. Let's build up to the Klingon war. Wait. No. Let's tie that up in ten minutes and forget the war. OK. Hey. Here's an idea. Let's bring in the Enterprise out of left field to hook them for next season. The Enterprise, yeah! I have an idea. Let's make Pike the new captain!

And on and on and on. It all smacks of being terribly rushed and ill-considered.

Hey let's introduce a new parasitic species that infiltrates the highest levels of Starfleet Command and tease a homing beacon telling the parasitic species where to find Earth (TNG: Conspiracy). Let's never speak of them again. Is Kirk's middle name Tiberius or does it start with the letter R (TOS:Where No Man Has Gone Before)? Remember the Federation/Cardassian War? No mention of it whatsoever until The Wounded (TNG). Is Bajor 3 hours away from DS9 or whatever distance/time needed for the plot?

Almost every plot development in TNG (especially) and DS9 (mostly in the first three seasons) can be summarized as "let us never speak of that again."

Frankly, Star Trek makes more internal sense if TOS is not considered canon.

 

[Carabimero]

Hey let's introduce a new parasitic species that infiltrates the highest levels of Starfleet Command and tease a homing beacon telling the parasitic species where to find Earth (TNG: Conspiracy). Let's never speak of them again. Is Kirk's middle name Tiberius or does it start with the letter R (TOS:Where No Man Has Gone Before)? Remember the Federation/Cardassian War? No mention of it whatsoever until The Wounded (TNG). Is Bajor 3 hours away from DS9 or whatever distance/time needed for the plot?

Almost every plot development in TNG (especially) and DS9 (mostly in the first three seasons) can be summarized as "let us never speak of that again."

It's apples and oranges. The production model is completely different. Discovery had no production deadline to produce fifteen episodes. Fifteen. They announced a date and then pushed that date back. They had all the time they needed to make a mere fifteen episodes. Not 26. Fifteen. And they couldn't get their house in order.

Frankly, Star Trek makes more internal sense if TOS is not considered canon.

This made me chuckle. Without TOS, there is no DISCOVERY. The irrationality that is DISCOVERY would work better in the JJverse, where there isn't much rationality to start with. The writing would still be terrible, but 70% of the other problems would disappear immediately.

 

[Josh Dial]

It's apples and oranges. The production model is completely different. Discovery had no production deadline to produce fifteen episodes. Fifteen. They announced a date and then pushed that date back. They had all the time they needed to make a mere fifteen episodes. Not 26. Fifteen. And they couldn't get their house in order.

TNG had six more seasons to play out the story thread introduced in Conspiracy. My examples (I've made others in this thread) are not "apples and oranges" to your canon issues with Discovery. My point is that Star Trek has--and has always had--the least rigid canon across all television/film franchises. Star Trek canon barely exists. Arguing Discovery is a weaker show because of canon issues and internal inconsistencies is willfully ignorant.

 

[joshEH]

I'm definitely going to watch it. But after all the promises that weren't kept last season by the writers, I'm snake bit. I'll let you know. I want it to knock my socks off. Maybe it will. But it just doesn't seem like there's any plan. Let's have her mutiny. Great! Wait, we can't do that longterm. OK, let's reset that and pardon her. Let's build up to the Klingon war. Wait. No. Let's tie that up in ten minutes and forget the war. OK. Hey. Here's an idea. Let's bring in the Enterprise out of left field to hook them for next season. The Enterprise, yeah! I have an idea. Let's make Pike the new captain!

And on and on and on. It all smacks of being terribly rushed and ill-considered.

First of all, they spent two whole entire episodes resolving the Klingon war ("The War Without, The War Within" and "Will You Take My Hand?") after the Discovery returned from the Mirror Universe in "What's Past is Prologue," which is a perfectly-lengthy stretch of episodes by Star Trek standards. That's the length of a feature film. It was hardly "ten minutes."

Secondly, as Alternate Mirror Kelvinverse Josh™ points out (I'm from the Prime Mirror Kelvinverse™, as opposed to Alternate Prime™), the entire Star Trek franchise has been contradicting itself onscreen for decades now.

Spock was a Vulcanian before he was a Vulcan. The Enterprise answered to UESPA before it suddenly became a Starfleet ship. Data used contractions routinely right up through the first half of the episode that abruptly established he didn't use them. Deanna Troi kissed a bearded Riker numerous times onscreen before suddenly claiming out of nowhere that she'd "never" kissed him with a beard. Virtually everything that TNG's "The Host" established about the Trill species was contradicted by DS9.

TOS: "The Alternative Factor" contradicts every other portrayal of antimatter and dilithium. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier contradicts later canonical series' portrayal of galactic travel-times. TNG spending its first two years showing us a peacetime Starfleet to which militarism was largely alien, then suddenly telling us the Federation had been at war with the Cardassians that whole time. Khan's followers were multiethnic until they became all-white; even Khan himself lost his "Indian" complexion in the second movie. The wormhole aliens having absolutely no idea who or what Sisko was in "Emissary," yet later turning out to have arranged his entire birth.

Heck, even first-season TNG's claim that holodecks were "new" was contradicted by Voyager when it established that Janeway had grown up as a child with the Flotter & Trevis holo-stories. And so on. The idea that the original universe was ever a consistent, uniform whole is a fantasy.

Again, this is what fans say *every time* a new Star Trek show premieres, going all the way back to TNG. It's not that the latest changes are greater than the old ones -- it's simply that we've had more time to get used to the old ones, to rationalize them and learn to live with them. It's part of how human memory works -- our brains build a narrative out of an often discordant past, organizing it into a more coherent picture, smoothing out the gaps and irregularities.

It's a quirk of neurology and psychology that affects how we perceive fiction, too. Old Trek has tons of inconsistencies and contradictions, but our minds smooth them out into an overall picture that we imagine as much more homogeneous than it actually is. So when something new comes along, we haven't yet had time to integrate it into our averaged-out model of the whole, so it feels more drastically different.

That's why fans always react this way to the newest changes. Every complaint I'm hearing about DSC is practically verbatim like the complaints we heard about ENT and the Kelvin timeline, and even some of the complaints I've read in old Starlog magazine lettercolumns about TMP and TWOK. The newest changes always seem more radical. Which is why it's important to keep an open mind and give yourself a chance to get used to them. It's simply that we've had more time to rationalize or gloss over the older contradictions, so the new ones suddenly somehow seem bigger to us.

 

[Nelson Au]

That is a good post Josh. You make very good points about human beings over time can organize and accept events or facts that are contradictory. Writers and producers will do what they need to do to tell their story.

I was going to say, I’m a glass half full person. I think a lot of us are old enough to remember the days before Star Trek came back as a film. So there was a time before we had all this. I’ve said this before, we are living in a world of riches if you’re a Star Trek fan. If some think I’m a fan who accepts anything with the Star Trek brand, good or bad without being critical, then people will call me that. I can pick and choose now with so much at hand. I can and do own every Star Trek TV show and film. This is nuts! There’s some I like a lot more then others. We have so many choices!

There’s been books and comics too which I don’t follow. It’s interesting those can be so different and get away with not being canon. But a film or TV show is held to a higher standard. I can see that and even Gene Roddenberry didn’t accept TAS as canon, but over time, it became canon.

The DSC team have a tough job. As Jack Ryan said, give the man a chance.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Speaking for myself, what bothers me about some of the canon changes in Discovery vs. other shows is the way that its done in Discovery vs. the other shows. It may be a matter of semantics, it may not matter to anyone but myself, but it's there and it's noticeable and it's unnecessarily distracting. My feelings on this were also influenced by my reaction to seeing the then-showrunners in person at the Star Trek Mission convention in 2016.

I find it much easier to forgive canon mistakes when it's a matter of something being introduced in a throwaway line or single story in one episode, and then expanded later on. Going to other me's example of the Trill (funnily enough, I just watched that TNG episode last week), here's why something like that doesn't bother me. In the TNG episode, the species was being introduced and at that time was likely not intended to ever appear again. When DS9 was created and it wad decided to explore the Trill as part of that, that overrode the previous canon, and that's fine. DS9 took place after TNG, so there's both a real world production answer and an in-universe answer for why things are different. The production answer is that they hadn't developed the idea at the time of TNG, but later did so during DS9. The in-universe answer can simply be that the Federation didn't know much about that species at the time, so information given in the episode was limited and accurate enough for the crew to do their job if not accurate enough to write the textbook on the species.

Or, to the example of Troi saying she never kissed a bearded Riker, I don't have a problem with that. I think it's clear when she says the line in Insurrection that she's never kissed a beared Riker in a romantic sense, because when they were romantic partners, he didn't have a beard. I don't think it's meant strictly literally and I never interpreted it that way. I always took the line as "You didn't have a beard when we were dating."

Khan lost his complexion? Well, he was living indoors for nearly twenty years without exposure to sunlight. Who wouldn't lose some of their complexion under those circumstances?

For the record, I have zero issues with the Kelvin timeline. I think that was one of those genius things that Abrams and his writers did in creating the new movie series. They came up with a canon reason for why they didn't have to be beholden to anything that came before, and found a way to do that without overwriting anything either. I also don't have an issue with the Kelvin Enterprise looking different than the TOS 1966 Enterprise; I simply accept that they're both meant to be the same ship, with the 2009 filmmakers having access to greater tools to better portray that ship than the 1966 showrunners were able to.

When Discovery contradicts something, though, it seems like they're making greater changes and often with less compelling reasons. When DS9 overwrites the TNG introduction of the Trill, they're adding to and changing a description of a race where previously we've seen one episode featuring just one example of that race. When Discovery contradicts something, they're often telling us not that one episode or one portion of an episode was clunky, but that entire seasons, series and films didn't happen as we remembered them.

I also believe that, to a certain extent, for Discovery to work, it does need to do its own thing and not be completely beholden to everything that came before it. But there's a way to do achieve that. The way to not be beholden to the past is to set your story in the future. By setting their story in Star Trek's past, and not even in any past era but in an era specifically between two shows we've already seen, they're signing up to make their show make sense in that context. And it often doesn't. Had they made their show a sequel, many of these canon issues would vanish instantly.

The storytelling choices often seem arrogant and motivated by a desire to be different for the sake of being different, rather than being true to the source material. I have to admit, fair or not, I was turned off by the way the showrunners treated the audience at the Star Trek convention appearance I saw them at. They were rude, hostile and dismissive of all questions, and worshipped completely at the altar of Bryan Fuller's personality cult. Many of the problems with Discovery are baked in from Fuller's wrongheaded approach, which was carried on by Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts. In what has to be some kind of record, all three were fired for cause; Fuller for repeatedly refusing to actually produce any episodes, and Berg and Harberts for being verbally and possibly physically abusive to the writing staff and other subordinates. I can't help but wonder if some of the conflict might have come from other writers on the staff trying to point out to Berg and Harberts that some of their narrative choices were not making sense, and Berg and Harberts not being able to handle any scrutiny or questioning whatsoever. That was certainly the impression they gave at the convention, where they received a friendly welcome from an excited crowd that had been predisposed to liking them, and where they blew it anyway.

But ultimately, my biggest issues with Season 1 of Discovery have more to do with the mirror universe diversion negating everything that I found interesting about the first half of the season. To me, the most interesting things about the first half of the show were Captain Lorca and Ash Tyler. Lorca was interesting because we've never seen a captain so damaged on Trek, at least, not one who still had such a vital position. It was fascinating to see a captain that didn't behave the way we expected a Star Trek captain to behave, and yet, who seemed to fit in with the world - the person he was seemed the result of the life he had led, and that seemed appropriate. It also posed some interesting moral dilemmas about whether Starfleet should have put such a person in command, and what it said about Starfleet leadership that they did. But all of that was negated by Lorca being an evil universe double who had simply tricked everyone in the prime universe into accepting him. All of that character work and potential, gone in an instant. Same with Ash: we had never really seen a Star Trek main character coping with extensive PTSD as a result of fighting in a Starfleet-sanctioned war. His storyline was enormously relevant and important, and I think it was a worthwhile addition for a show focused on war to examine the consequences of that war. But all of that was negated by making "Ash" a fake person that was just a disguise for a surgically altered Klingon. Ash wasn't suffering from PTSD; he was suffering from a memory wipe that wasn't working as advertised. These two choices robbed the characters of their agency, and robbed the show of important storytelling themes and plots. They traded long term character development and threw away two of the most interesting things that Trek had ever done with regular characters for the thrill of two quick nonsensical reveals.

More than any single canon issue, that kind of uninspired, consequence-free storytelling is what has me worried about the creative future of Discovery.

Ultimately, Star Trek Discovery still has potential, and the return of Star Trek to television is something to be celebrated and encouraged. But I sincerely hope that the writing choices are better this time around.

 

[joshEH]

That is a good post Josh. You make very good points about human beings over time can organize and accept events or facts that are contradictory. Writers and producers will do what they need to do to tell their story.

I was going to say, I’m a glass half full person. I think a lot of us are old enough to remember the days before Star Trek came back as a film. So there was a time before we had all this. I’ve said this before, we are living in a world of riches if you’re a Star Trek fan. If some think I’m a fan who accepts anything with the Star Trek brand, good or bad without being critical, then people will call me that. I can pick and choose now with so much at hand. I can and do own every Star Trek TV show and film. This is nuts! There’s some I like a lot more then others. We have so many choices!

Exactly, Nelson.

Canon is about broad strokes, not details. Any long-running series or franchise has contradictory assertions about various details. Was Dr. Watson wounded in the leg or shoulder? Is James Kirk's middle initial "R" or "T"? Does Saavik have green eyes or brown? Can Data use contractions, or can't he? Does Princess Leia remember her mother, or did her mother die in childbirth? The canon is the underlying conjectural "reality" that these stories portray, but the stories can differ in how they interpret that reality because they're told by different people, or because their creators reconsider their ideas.

Every story is always filtered through the teller's interpretation, so different stories about the same reality -- even when told by the same person at different times -- will always have inconsistencies among them. Generally, when a detail within a canon is reinterpreted, it's the later version that's assumed to take precedence. We accept that Data doesn't use contractions, even though he used them routinely in the first half of TNG season 1. We accept that the Enterprise is a Federation ship rather than an Earth ship, even though the Federation was never mentioned until the latter half of TOS season 1 (in "Arena"). We now accept that Bruce Wayne's butler is named Alfred Pennyworth, even though he was originally "Alfred Beagle," or possibly "Alfred Jarvis."

There’s been books and comics too which I don’t follow. It’s interesting those can be so different and get away with not being canon. But a film or TV show is held to a higher standard. I can see that and even Gene Roddenberry didn’t accept TAS as canon, but over time, it became canon.

Regarding The Animated Series, there is now no good reason to doubt its canon-status, and there hasn't been for decades. Nobody actually involved with the official productions has had any objection to its inclusion in canon for the past two decades, and really I doubt that anyone other than Richard Arnold ever had a problem with it in the first place.

It was a memo issued in Gene Roddenberry's name in 1989 (I question his authorship, because his physical and mental health were very poor at that point), and there were a couple of factors behind it. One was that Filmation had gone out of business, and the ownership of TAS was unresolved. It was the one part of the Trek franchise that Paramount (as the company was called at the time) didn't have full ownership of, so they weren't free to make full use of it. But that no longer applies. Paramount/CBS gained full ownership of TAS ages ago.

The other reason for the memo was Roddenberry's ego, pure and simple. He'd gotten very possessive and jealous about Star Trek by that point, and wanted to decanonize just about anything that he wasn't directly responsible for, including some of the later movies and even parts of TOS. Ironically, he'd been given full creative control over TAS, something he never had with any other incarnation; but he'd chosen to step back and entrust D.C. Fontana with the show instead.

Which made it totally hypocritical for him to devalue it just because Fontana (and Filmation's Lou Scheimer) had been in charge of it, instead of him. It occurred to me not long ago that this was only a couple of years after he'd gone out of his way to cheat Fontana and David Gerrold out of their right to co-creator credit for TNG, so maybe devaluing Fontana's other contributions was an extension of that. But all of that ceased to matter when Roddenberry died 27 years ago.

Heck, the "TAS ban" didn't even have any canonical weight in the brief period when it was in effect. TNG's "Unification" two-parter came out during the height of the "ban" period, but it freely referenced elements from "Yesteryear" right onscreen, for example.

Multiple canonical Trek productions have been freely referencing elements and ideas from TAS ever since, it's included in Memory Alpha and StarTrek.com it's on Netflix along with the other shows, and it's treated as an essentially-equal part of the canonical franchise everywhere now. DS9's writers and ENT's writers and the Bad Robot movie-writers have referenced elements from it. If a Discovery writer wanted to feature Arex or M'Ress or Carter Winston or whatever, absolutely nothing would stop them from doing that.