Star Trek Discovery — Blog

Sonequa Martin-Green is so good.

Doug Jones. I don’t think that it’s appreciated just how incredibly talented he is because almost every role he plays involves being under a layer of makeup, playing an alien or a monster. He is a master mime and when I think about some of the actors I have known and their studies of motion and breathing – and how I occasionally mocked such things on some level – Jones shows what an actor who studies behavior and motion is capable of. In Saru he’s doing an incredible job with a new creature and it’s remarkable to watch.

Michelle Yeoh! Michelle freaking Yeoh!

Anthony Rapp is so good and it’s great to see him get to play a role that lets him be dark and intense, to be dramatic and romantic, to be the hero and be an annoyance. To be the genius who isn’t so much humbled, but comes to understand how the rest of this team can help fulfill what he sees as his mission, his project.

It’s always good to see Jayne Brook working. Honestly, it’s been far too long since she had a major role and it’s nice to see her playing an Admiral and getting to sink her teeth into a role that shows what she can do. (Also, as an utterly shallow thought – she looks amazing).

I’m honestly still unsure about the inclusion of Sarek, but James Frain is good.

I had no idea who Mary Wiseman was before watching the show, but she is the heart of the show. She represents what Star Trek is and exemplifies these principles and ideals that the show celebrates. She is incredibly adept at both comedy and drama, and I’m not going to lie, I have a little crush. The only comparison I can think of is Allison Tolman, who came out of nowhere to star in the first season of Fargo

Centering the story on someone who is not the Captain is such a good idea that it’s surprising no one did it before.

The idea of telling the story of the Federation-Klingon war and the creation of the Neutral Zone is an interesting idea. It’s not really the story that the series is interested in telling, though.

Setting the series in the “past” of the Star Trek universe is an interesting idea but it brings up a lot of problems. It’s hard to go where no one has gone before without being anachronistic or changing the timeline or throwing continuity out the window (or at least, throwing it out the window now and then). Using characters that we’ve seen before but in contexts telling all new stories that don’t seem to fit is strange. It feels like fan fiction, and I don’t mean that to be derogatory, but there is a way in which fan service can hinder storytelling.

Discovery seems unsure of what it wants to be. It’s not all new. It’s not fan service. I think the show might actually make more sense to someone who doesn’t have years and decades of knowledge.

The series includes two things I honestly loathe and which constantly annoy me in science fiction – parallel universes and time travel.

I’ve never been a fan of the Mirror Universe. I mean Spock with a goatee is funny and a good meme (back before we used the word) but the universe doesn’t make much sense. It was featured in one episode of the original series. One. Hell, Harry Mudd played a bigger role in the original series. The fact that DS9 had multiple Mirror episodes is probably my least favorite thing about the series. The fact that Voyager didn’t have a Mirror episode is one of the better things I can say about the series. The way that Discovery used the Mirror universe was an interesting idea, maybe a great idea, but it feels odd. More clever than anything.

I miss the serialized nature of Star Trek shows. It would be nice to have an episode or two – or a few, even? – that are just adventures and investigations without each episode being a part of a massive uber plot.

The Terrans in the mirror universe are on the verge of destroying all life in the universe because of their energy source and how they are using it. If one believes in reality, it’s hard not to laugh a little, because of course, they’re talking about us.

Having said that, it’s one sentence in the entire season.

“We do not have the luxury of principle–” “That is ALL we have, Admiral.”

The last episode was meh.

Maybe the fact that the USS Enterprise shows up in the final minutes of the last episode will mean something in season 2. But as it’s presented, it’s not a cliffhanger, there’s nothing dramatic happening. It feels like they run out story and had to put some filler to pad out the last episode.

The theme underlying the first season is fundamentalism. In every episode, in every plot and subplot, it is about fundamentalists seeking to impose this idea of fascistic purity on their society, on the larger universe. It is not unique to any one species. In this universe it is the Klingons who go to war because others are an abomination, in the Mirror universe it is the Terrans. There are Vulcan fundamentalists. There are people who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. This doesn’t end when war begins, and it can infect people at war.

There’s a way in which the show was well made. In every way. And I also say this knowing that the first season of Star Trek shows are often mixed. (Hell, the first season of Next Generation was just bad). But there’s also a way that the show didn’t quite feel like Star Trek. The moral conundrums are too easily settled, the commentary is mostly nonexistent. But more to the point, the very fact that an organization and a group of people who signed up for exploration and science were turned into soldiers, their work being turned to make weapons of war, was far too easily glossed over.

This has always been one of the elements of Star Trek that people struggle with - the degree to which this is a military organization and the degree to which it is not. I can’t help but think about what it mean for an organization that for the most part has been about peaceful exploration for decades, generations – since the Romulan war – and suddenly forced to become a very different organization. For the people to lead very different lives. A war so bad that cadets are called up and sent to ships fighting on the front lines.

This is a war on a scale that most of the people alive today are unused to, but we never get that feeling watching the show. It’s one thing to complain that the show never conveys the scale of the war, but it is so isolated and insulated that the result is that it never quite captures just what’s happening. It’s one thing for a ship to be out in space, often days away from other Federation ships, as with other shows, and have this sense of isolation. I haven’t watched DS9 since it aired, but those last few seasons leading up to the finale were intense in a way that Discovery wasn’t – because they captured the brutality and costs of war. Discovery ends far too neatly, far too comfortably.

Just as I mentioned earlier that the people behind Discovery wanted the show to be straddling fan service and having known characters but not be shackled to continuity, I can’t help but think they struggled as far as other aspects of the show. Discovery wants to be a war story (or possible war stories?) but it doesn’t want to be a brutal, intense, gritty realistic kind of war story where people die and even if we win, we sacrifice a lot.

I am reminded of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, which Star Trek veteran Ronald D. Moore developed and how it tried to be brutal and real and topical. I think about The Orville, which is a show that so clearly loves Star Trek and what it means and is made by people who love Star Trek. I keep thinking about how Discovery had many options about what to do and how to approach it, and I don’t think it completely succeeded on its own terms.

What does it mean that so much of our contemporary pop culture is simply retreading familiar ground?

Star Trek Discovery has a lot of good ideas. It has a lot to like. But it is also impossible to love. It’s not bad at all. But I’m not sure that it’s Star Trek.

Which leads back to my concern about continuity. Because I do dislike it when it becomes more of a straight jacket. So I do understand and sympathize with the many producers who worry about what to do and how shows should connect and to what degree they should reference each other. Because there is part of me that feels that a good writer can craft something working within continuity. Every show and every episode has some limits on how to work, what characters can do, financial and technical limits. To a degree, continuity is something that we’ve invented in our own minds and turned into an almost boogeyman-like scale creature. Part of me think sthat making a show set in the past of a show means you’re agreeing to abide by certain rules just because that’s the decision that was made.

I do think back on what first attracted me to Star Trek, and it was the fact that it was meditative and commented on society, and that for all its flaws, it was able to have action and adventure, but those weren’t the moments that ultimately stayed with people. Those models were stunning. They still are. The effects, while not up to today’s standards, could be breathtaking. The creature designs were very good for TV. But what stayed with me were the characters and the stories. It was Kirk feeling old and finally confronting loss and failure in Wrath of Khan, Picard experiencing a whole other life and culture in Inner Light, the unsettlingly alien yet relatable Vulcans and Klingons and Ferengi (oh my). It was Data trying to understand what it means to be human. It was how after two of the best episodes of the series (The Best of Both Wolds), Next generations spent an episode (Family) where there was no action, no science fiction, just characters wrestling with family and their own emotions and the fallout of big events.

Of course if one asks any Star Trek fan, they’ll have a different answer for what “their” Star Trek is and what it means to them, but I fear that the show – like the recent films – has spent a lot less time considering what has always been at the heart of the show. Instead they replace it with something else, and it’s something that feels, well, much more generic. Discovery is a good show, but it’s soul, well, I’m uncertain it’s Star Trek.