Commentary: ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Is Excellent ‘Terminator’

Some franchises, despite growing with every installment, still struggle to recreate the magic that made the series so strong to begin with. The Terminator is a great example of this. It built such an immense fan base from its first two films that it spawned numerous sequels, a television show, and other expanded media. But nothing truly caught the magic that allowed Terminator to become popular in the first place. Fortunately, the premise behind the idea is not an extremely complicated one. So it’s surprising to see a season of Star Trek: Discovery essentially recreate it within its own universe, thus delivering a Terminator story that would have been a worthy sequel.

Starring Sonequa Martin-Green, Season Two of Discovery positions a threat assessment system called Control as the main villain. It is an artificial intelligence that wipes out all sentient life in the galaxy in the future. In order for Control to reach full sentience, it has to merge with a large swath of digital data. Once that happens, there’s nothing stopping the terrible future. So the goal of the season is to prevent Control from acquiring it. But it attempts to thwart the Discovery crew’s efforts by sending agents back in time to ensure it can acquire the data for itself.

Obviously, this isn’t a Terminator sequel. But there were many elements shared between them. The way Control wants to wipe out all sentient life is similar to what Skynet accomplishes on Earth. Also, the AI sending agents back in time to ensure its survival is what the Terminator franchise is built on. Although there are a lot of similarities, Star Trek adopts the idea and makes it their own. So it’s hard to say that it’s not original. But with an evil AI system and super strong machine people as bad guys, it’s also hard not to imagine what it would have been like if Terminator had taken the specific plot for itself.

Star Trek Discovery is now streaming on Paramount+.