Star Trek: Discovery – The Complete Series Review: A great collection with a glaring flaw

Review: Star Trek: Discovery – The Complete Series on Blu-ray

If you want to own an important piece of Star Trek history, and are a fan of home media releases, the recently released Star Trek: Discovery – The Complete Series is a good place to start. After all, that’s essentially what you are getting by picking up all episodes of this landmark Star Trek series. Whether you like the show or not, Discovery helped birth all the Kurtzman-era Star Trek we currently enjoy. While the show certainly had its weaknesses, it also had enormous strengths, and all that and more is on display in this 21-disc collection.

Unless you own the individual season home media releases, including the recently released Star Trek: Discovery – The Final Season, this collection is the first time you can watch all of Michael Burnham’s adventures back-to-back unless you pay for Paramount+. In an age where shows don’t necessarily have a permanent place on streaming services, there’s something to be said for physically holding a series’ worth of content in your hands. That’s the main allure of The Complete Series.

What’s not alluring about this collection is its downright disrespectful lack of 4K goodness. Instead of offering all of Discovery in crisp 4K ultra-high-definition, this release is stuck at 1080p – the same resolution for every home media release for this show; you can’t watch Discovery in 4K to save your life.

CBS, pull up a chair. Let’s talk about this. You put untold millions of dollars of production value into Discovery, which at one point served not only as the flagship Star Trek show but also your streaming service’s tentpole production. It’s a beautiful show – the people you hired outdid themselves. We want… nay, need, to see this show in all 8.3 million pixels our TVs display. For god’s sake, the Discovery’s bridge is bigger than many houses and probably cost as much to build. Let us see the details! Your competitors release 4K discs. It’s hard to buy a TV these days that isn’t 4K. If you can fund a show that jumps people into the 32^nd century, surely you can jump yourselves into the 21^st century and keep up with home media formats.

Okay, thanks for letting us talk that out. We can finally move on to the acceptance part of the grieving process. 

Besides all five seasons of Discovery, The Complete Series features all previously released bonus features, which are often the draw for any home media release. Better yet, this collection features a never-before-released 57-minute series roundtable, as well as the specials The Art of Discovery: Production Design, and The Art of Discovery: Costumes. For those who enjoy uncovering details about a show through behind-the-scenes content, this bonus disc is a valuable addition to the collection.

As insightful as the series roundtable is with Sonequa Martin-Green, David Ajala, Doug Jones, Blu del Barrio, Wilson Cruz, and Alex Kurtzman, it would have been great if the roundtable was in person; as it is, these people joined each other remotely to talk about the show and reflect on Discovery’s legacy.

We’ll give CBS credit for one last thing: the price. This collection will set you back just $60 if you buy it on Amazon right now. That’s great value for 65 episodes of this excellent show – $0.92 per episode, and that’s not counting the bonus features and bonus disc. If you factor in the collection’s total running time – episodes and bonus features, totaling just shy of 55 hours – that equals $1.09 per hour of content. Not bad at all.

It’s strange: with The Complete Series offering such a good value proposition, CBS is making it hard to recommend buying Star Trek: Discovery – The Final Season, since that release – just one season of this show – is going for $35. If you don’t already have the other seasons’ home media releases and want to buy season five, why not spend just $25 for the rest of the show?

While we need to knock CBS hard for its continued lack of 4K home media television show releases, (except, for some reason, Strange New Worlds seasons one and two), The Complete Series does a good job justifying its existence. Although it is disappointing that the five Discovery-related Short Treks are not part of this release, which would have been a logical and excellent inclusion, fans of Discovery who prefer not to rely on streaming services should consider purchasing this collection.

You can buy Star Trek: Discovery: The Complete Series on Amazon now.

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