In light of the second season of Star Trek: Discovery being promoted on CBS All Access, I decided to review the series thus far. I have remained adamant in refusing to buy All Access myself, however I was able to temporarily access a friend’s account to binge the episodes. Of course the pilot episode was shown on broadcast and set up a dramatic and unusual premise where the heroine, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) put herself on the outside of Starfleet looking in, and the body of Season 1 details how she is nevertheless brought back into the fold. There were elements I liked about the series and some that I disliked. These were the things that I liked about Discovery:
Overall Quality. The production values and acting ability of the principals that I had noticed in the pilot episode remained high throughout Season 1, including such details as the prosthetics design on Saru (Doug Jones), an elongated alien with digitigrade legs. Of course it all hinges on the character of Burnham and the performance of Martin-Green, who has the potential to go in multiple directions and whose choices are critical and must be conveyed as such by the story.
I am not sure what to make of Cadet Tilly, (Mary Wiseman) Burnham’s Chatty Cathy bunkmate on the Discovery. On one hand, she is a welcome ray of sunshine in the setting, but by the same token, she threatens to pull the mood away from grim Military SF towards a comedy-drama series where Burnham is a young ambitious female professional and Tilly is her Funny Best Friend, only in space. It’s sort of like how Killing Eve is a series about a fun, fearless female protagonist who just happens to be a mercenary assassin, and Sandra Oh, instead of being the funny best friend of Meredith Grey, is the funny best friend who also happens to be the detective trying to bring the assassin to justice.
Science. One of the things that distinguishes Discovery from other Star Trek titles is that the USS Discovery is an experimental ship. That experimental technology creates a certain conflict between Discovery’s militaristic captain, Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) and the more pacifist crew, including the transferred Officer Saru and Paul Stamets, the engineer/science officer. When Stamets explains the concept behind the “spore drive” and a mycological communications network to Burnham, it’s a genuinely fascinating bit of speculative fiction in a direction that Star Trek doesn’t usually go (towards theoretical organic tech rather than electronics). The spore drive element also brought in the question of how theoretical technology is used for military purposes, and what the ethical consequences of such are. As dark as the story arc gets (see below), what keeps Burnham on the side of heroism is her commitment to reason things out and learn new things. Of course, a lot of this comes back to Martin-Green’s acting and her ability to sell the perspective of the audience’s point-of-view character. This show conveys a humanist sense of wonder and, well, discovery in a way that Star Trek media hasn’t in some time.
This was the cool stuff. What follows is my opinion of the elements I didn’t like.
(spoilers to follow)
It’s Too Dark. The appearance of Star Trek: Discovery on a pay channel, as opposed to CBS or another broadcast network, gives the producers freedom to make the presentation more “adult” in that they can use the F-word a couple times, or indirectly reveal that male Klingons urinate with two penises. But such elements aren’t the same thing as tone, and decisions made by characters in Discovery Season 1 make it darker than even Deep Space Nine, which was largely centered on espionage and moral intrigue.
In the first half of the season, Harry Mudd (played by Rainn Wilson, which is genius casting right there) ends up in the same Klingon prison as Captain Lorca, and turns out to be a cowardly. self-serving backstabber. Which is no surprise if you saw the original series. But a couple episodes later, Mudd shows up using an experimental time-travel device in repeated attempts to seize control of the Discovery. In the course of the episode, Mudd proves to be completely ruthless, killing Lorca multiple times over the course of his time jumps. Now, given the premise of the episode, the result was not permanent, but you still had a case where a lovable rogue type was recast as something more sinister.
In the same episode with Harry Mudd’s first appearance, the series introduces Lieutenant Tyler, a security officer and eventual love interest for Burnham. Tyler is a sympathetic character who has clearly suffered trauma (including sexual trauma) at the hands of the Klingons. But when he starts to suspect that there may have been more to it than that, he asks the ship’s doctor (Stamets’ love interest) to do advanced tests on his body and brain. Dr. Culber is disturbed by his initial findings, but by this point, Burnham is on an important mission and Tyler wants to be at her side. So even though Tyler requested the exams, when Culber demands that Tyler stay for deeper medical examination, Tyler snaps – and then snaps Culber’s neck.
Ironically, this effort to explore the moral quandaries of a grey universe falls apart when, late in the season, a spore drive accident sends the Discovery to the Mirror Universe, where doing evil actually is the prevalent social ethic, and everybody dresses like they’re on War Rocket Ajax. This only serves to undermine both settings: the Pulp melodrama of the alternate universe becomes simply cartoonish, while the situational ethics of the “Prime” universe pale in comparison to the naked fascism of the Terran Empire, and at the same time, fail to provide it the same moral contrast as the previous iterations of the Federation. Although at one point, Burnham observes that the stars in the Mirror Universe are actually dimmer, and a native observes that her people are more sensitive to bright light than “Prime” humans, which causes Burnham to make an important deduction about another character. But that physical element leads to my second point:
No, Seriously, It’s Too Dark. At this point, Trek fans expect the interior of Klingon ships to be dark, claustrophobic submarine holds, but it’s rather telling that the Klingon Ship of the Dead is a more spacious and well-lit set than the bridge of the Shenzhou or most of the interiors on Discovery.
The tone of the scenes is set by darkened bridges and window shots with a great deal of “lens flare” from the sunlight of a given solar system, which causes Discovery ship scenes to greatly resemble those of the last few Star Trek movies. Which leads to the question –
What Universe IS This, Anyway? Supposedly, this is again the “Prime” universe of the Original Series and original Star Trek cast, so called to distinguish it from the “Kelvin timeline” reboot of the J.J. Abrams films, which was specifically explained as a parallel universe. But the aforementioned aspects of tone and visual elements cause Discovery to resemble Abrams’ Trek much more than (say) Enterprise, which was likewise set before the Original Series.
The issue is complicated slightly by the fact that the spore drive has been shown to allow travel of parallel dimensions as well as space, so there’s no reason that the Discovery universe would actually turn out to be the “Prime” one. Especially since it still hasn’t been explained why the spore drive hasn’t become the standard propulsion system for Starfleet by the time of the Original Series, or why we hadn’t heard about it before now.
Anticlimax. The first season of Star Trek: Discovery set up multiple climaxes in the story arc, each less successful than the last. The fight with the Ship of the Dead led directly to the Mirror Universe jaunt, and when the crew returned home, the consequence of their absence led to yet another confrontation with the Klingons, which was not quite as satisfactory from a dramatic standpoint as the earlier defeat of the Klingon artifact battleship. Not only that, the last third of the season made the film version of The Return of the King look snappy (especially since the film version WAS the streamlined account compared to Tolkien’s novel).
So overall, I think that the acting and dialogue in Star Trek: Discovery are top-notch, but plotting leaves something to be desired, and while the overall story arc – basically, should the “good guys” adopt the tactics of the “bad guys” to survive? – has even more relevance now than it did a year ago, it gets to the point in a pretty roundabout way that almost undermines it.
(I didn’t even bring up the whole thing with making Klingons totally hairless. I’m still not on board with that.)
But, overall, I can now say that Discovery is better than The Orville. The Orville of course is the imitation Trek/Seth McFarlane vehicle that is on free TV and did debut at about the same time as Discovery, but has since proven to be just pleasantly mediocre. McFarlane’s series has a lot of potential, but often just falls flat. Discovery at least takes chances, and when it goes wrong, it isn’t because they failed in execution, it’s because they went forthrightly in a certain direction that just turned out to be the wrong one.