We Come in Pieces — Star Trek Discovery First Season Overview

I do have my issues with DSC being a prequel, but if it had been set in a later era, without Sarek, then we would’ve lost “Lethe,” which to my mind is the finest episode of the series so far, if not the finest Trek episode in the past 20 or so years. The whole has its issues, but that one part was breathtaking.

Also, I like how well the Klingon situation meshes with what I’ve done in the Enterprise novels. I showed (building on the precedent hinted at by Michael Martin in the Romulan War books) that the Empire retreated into itself to deal with the internal strife between ridged and smooth Klingons, and between rival Great Houses jockeying to exploit the situation for their own power. So they would cease to be an active adversary to the Federation for some decades and would have various clashing factions within to deal with. I didn’t envision their future going exactly the way DSC showed it, but it dovetails quite nicely, if we assume that the more hopeful signs I left the Empire with at the end of Live by the Code didn’t pan out in the long term.

As for Lorca, I think all the people who say “Aww, he was such a nicely nuanced and morally ambiguous character until the Mirror Universe twist” are fooling themselves. As Keith says, Lorca was always a clear bastard from the start. He broke regulations to hijack Burnham for his crew. He tortured a sentient life form. He abandoned Mudd to the Klingons. He abandoned Cornwell to the Klingons. Even when he gave an encouraging speech to someone, even when he seemed like he was being a nice or idealistic guy, there was always an undercurrent that he was manipulating them for his own ends. The warning signs were always there. But we resisted accepting the truth, because we wanted to believe he was a more nuanced and redeemable figure, that there was a better explanation for his seemingly awful behavior. So a self-evident rat-bastard was able to make us trick ourselves into rationalizing away the obvious evidence of his rat-bastardness. And that’s why we elected him President of the United States. Oh, wait, I lost track of who I was talking about. ;)

@5/princessroxana: “I mean they went with a whole new look so why call them Klingons at all?”

Said a whole bunch of fans in 1979.

@26/defiant: Bryan Fuller talked about how he intended the storyline to show some event that was hinted at in TOS, that the reason for the setting would become evident once we saw that backstory established. Unless he was talking about the revelations regarding Sarek and Spock in “Lethe,” I suspect that may be something that fell by the wayside when he left the show.

@30/dja17: “Almost all the issues I had with the show would go away if only it had been set post-Nemesis. Everything from the tech to the uniforms to even the war with the Klingons would have made much more sense.”

None of those bother me much. The tech: TOS was just the best approximation of future tech they could manage in the ’60s, and they never wanted us to believe that future tech literally looked like it was made with 1960s hardware. So a more modern production offering a closer approximation of future technology is exactly what Gene Roddenberry would have wanted. I do think they went overboard with the cliched Star Wars-style midair holograms, but I just chalk it up to artistic license. As for story-relevant tech like the spore drive, Trek has a long history of introducing revolutionary propulsion systems and other technologies and then abandoning them. Where was transwarp drive in the TNG era? How come Starfleet never studied and replicated the interstellar transporters used by the Triskelions or the Kalandans, or the advanced android tech they worked on with Sargon and Thalassa? And ENT was guilty of this before DSC was — how come the near-instantaneous subspace vortex drive the Xindi used was never replicated by Starfleet, even with a century to study the principles?

The uniforms: How many times have Starfleet uniforms been redesigned and replaced over the decades? It’s kind of ridiculous how frequent it is. And the DSC uniforms are a lot better-looking than those drab turtlenecks from the pilots.

Plus, I don’t really see this Klingon war arc working in a post-NEM context. After all, it depended on the two sides not knowing each other very well, not understanding each other’s psychology and culture. It started because T’Kuvma believed the Federation was an intolerant, culturally imperialist power that wished to absorb and assimilate the Klingons, and generations of alliance and mutual tolerance in the 24th century would prove that wasn’t true. Granted, maybe it could’ve worked post-TUC, with an Empire weakened by the Praxis disaster and dependent on Federation help for rebuilding, with T’Kuvma being a nativist who felt that the Federation had gained too much power over the Klingons and needed to be driven out. But I’m not sure the Tyler arc would’ve worked there, because the Federation post-“Trouble With Tribbles” would be familiar with the existence of disguised Klingon agents and more aware of how to identify them.

@35/cecrow: “I think there’s no question they placed the setting in the 23rd century in hopes of reconciling both Nu and Classic Trek, potentially bringing the fans of both to the show: it predates and therefore belongs to the history of both sides of the split.”

No, not at all. The split happened in 2233, when Nero arrived in the opening scene of the 2009 movie. The Kelvin Timeline was born on the same day James T. Kirk was born, at least in Kelvin (since the attack might’ve caused him to be born a bit prematurely compared to Prime). Discovery is set in Prime 2256-7, contemporary with the time gap in the ’09 film between Kirk joining the Academy (2255) and the last two acts of the film (2258). Although Prime Kirk would be already graduated and serving on the Farragut at the time of DSC.

Also, of course, the Kelvin Enterprise was not launched until 2258, during the film, and obviously the Enterprise is already in service under Pike’s command as of DSC (which is, after all, set 2-3 years after “The Cage”).

@41/Jason: Yeah, that’s how we think of the Tellarites now, but only because later writers took Sarek’s line “Tellarites do not argue for reasons; they simply argue,” assumed it was literally true, and retconned it into a statement of cultural difference. As written at the time, without that subsequent contextualization, it was just race-baiting. The issue isn’t what’s “really” true in-universe, it’s how the writers of the various series have chosen to portray the Vulcan species. And going back to TOS, writers have never hesitated to portray Vulcans as jerks.

@75/soursavior: As MaGnUs points out, Star Trek Online is just one of several mutually inconsistent post-Nemesis continuities in the tie-ins, along with the Pocket novel continuity and a few IDW comics storyline like Hive. There’s also the new Modiphius Star Trek Adventures tabletop role-playing game — which, full disclosure, I’m writing some adventure campaigns for. It’s currently sticking to a time frame around 2371, circa Generations, the early contacts with the Dominion in DS9, and the start of Voyager, but like all other tie-in continuities, it’s free to do its own independent thing as long as it stays consistent with onscreen canon. But onscreen canon has no obligation to stay consistent with any single one of its various tie-in continuities; how would it choose?

More often with things like this, the canon is able to draw on bits and pieces from its various tie-ins if its creators so desire, irrespective of continuity — like how Marvel Comics drew the character of X-23/Laura Kinney from the X-Men Evolution animated series and the character of Phil Coulson from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or the way ’40s Superman comic books adopted the characters of Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, and Inspector Henderson from the radio series and the name Daily Planet from the daily newspaper comic strip. So if the creators of canon Trek wanted to, they could borrow a character from the novels and an alien species from the game, or whatever, but they’d create their own versions of those individual elements without bringing the rest of their continuities along with them. But that’s not really something the creators of canonical Trek have ever been in the habit of doing. The one time I can think of is when they built an episode around the Klingon Day of Honor, a concept created by Pocket editor John Ordover as a unifying theme for a novel crossover. There’s also the TNG episode “Where No One Has Gone Before,” loosely based on Diane Duane’s TOS novel The Wounded Sky, but that was something Duane and her co-writer Michael Reaves chose to submit to the show rather than something the show’s staff sought out, and the staff rewrote it so massively that it had only a vague resemblance to the novel.

@83/Sunspear: As I already said, Star Trek tie-ins have never had a single overarching continuity like the SW Expanded Universe, so it’s a completely invalid analogy. Most (but not all) of the Trek novels have one continuity, the MMORPG has another, the tabletop game has another, the comics have several others, etc. They all have to be consistent with canon, but canon couldn’t be consistent with more than one of them, so it doesn’t even try. (How could you fairly decide which one to canonize?)

@86/Sunspear: Star Trek is not Star Wars. They’ve always been very different. So what Star Wars did or didn’t do with its tie-ins is absolutely irrelevant to a discussion of Star Trek tie-ins. That’s my point.

Historically, Star Trek tie-ins have never been big on continuity. Each licensee did its own completely separate thing. And while each individual comics licensee tended to have continuity within its own ongoing series, most Trek novels published in the 20th century made no attempt at continuity with each other, except for sequels from the same author. The Pocket novels gradually developed a loose, optional continuity in the ’80s, but this was shut down when TNG came along and tie-ins were required for a while to have no continuity at all. (The DC comics at the time were able to continue telling ongoing stories, but they weren’t allowed to have original continuing characters or long-running storylines due to the rather draconian policies of the guy then in charge of approving the tie-ins.) Eventually, the Pocket novels were able to start doing interconnected or ongoing book series in the ’90s, but it wasn’t until the 2000s that a systematic continuity began to emerge among the majority of the novels, with even some of the comics occasionally tying into it. But even then, there were other novels that remained separate from that continuity, such as the “Shatnerverse” series and the 45th-anniversary Crucible trilogy. And most of the comics continued to do their own independent things, as did the various games.

@88/WTBA: In the episode where Tyler remembered that he was Voq, we saw some of the same flashback footage of his transformation, but we saw him looking in a reflective surface and seeing Voq’s face staring back at him, even though he saw himself as Tyler. So the fact that he appeared as Tyler in the flashbacks was symbolic, and a deliberate act of concealment on the show’s part. The memories we saw were actually things that happened to Voq, but because Voq had been programmed to think of himself as Tyler, he saw himself as Tyler in those memories.

So you’re right — those flashbacks were actually of Voq and L’Rell having consensual sex.

@94/MaGnUs: “a case could be made that if newTyler’s personality is a real person, as in it feels and has memories, etc, however constructed it is, then newTyler did not consent to having sex with L’Rell.”

I think it’s unclear. We learned, I think, that the flashback memory that Tyler had believed was of himself, Tyler, having coerced sex with L’Rell was actually one of Voq’s pre-transformation memories of consensual sex, with Tyler’s memory being distorted by his reprogramming. On the other hand, we know that the Tyler persona was imprisoned by L’Rell for at least a couple of weeks before his “rescue,” and he believed that L’Rell had kept him alive as a sexual plaything. It’s unclear whether that was just Tyler’s reprogrammed memory of Voq’s relationship with L’Rell, or if L’Rell actually did compel the Tyler persona to have sex with her. It’s unfortunate that the show left this so ambiguous.

@121/Sunspear: “Imagine increasingly contorted storytelling when MGeorgiou comes back and then Starfleet has to “classify” her missions again. Isn’t this a limitation?”

Well, the whole point of Section 31 is that everything they do is secret, so I don’t see the issue. Also, why are you assuming she’d be that central a part of the season? More likely she’d just be an occasional guest star again. I doubt they’d repeat the beat of putting her in command of Discovery, if that’s what you’re thinking. That seems a bit too conspicuous for them.

“but we’ve already seen Starfleet itself going genocidal. Don’t think this bodes well for our struggling wannabe utopia.”

We saw that with General Order 24 in “A Taste of Armageddon,” with Nechayev’s attitude vis-a-vis the Borg in “Descent,” and with the Founder virus in DS9. I’ll never understand why people think that’s somehow new to Star Trek. Hell, DSC’s whole “Federation ethics challenged by war” arc is just a rehash of the arc DS9 did two decades ago.

@125/Sunspear: “I’m talking about the writing methods by which they will have to hide her activities from the historical record.”

I just don’t see how that’s a problem if the fact that she’s operating in secret is built into the premise from the start. You seem to be assuming that they’d just write her doing big, public stuff and then try to sweep it under the rug after the fact, but that doesn’t make any sense. If they’re beginning with the understanding that she needs to operate in secret, then that will shape the stories they come up with for her in the first place. After all, when has Section 31 ever been shown to act openly in public? Why would you expect them to start now?

“Guess it goes back to my and others’ expectations of Federation ideals represented in a more optimistic, less dark series.”

I still don’t get why people think Discovery is darker than other Trek shows. Yes, it had characters doing dark things, but it also had the main characters standing up against those characters, speaking out for what was good and right, and ultimately winning through their commitment to their positive values. Yes, it had very bad things happen before the heroes won, but so did DS9; so did “The Best of Both Worlds”; so did several TOS episodes where entire civilizations were exterminated offscreen, like “Operation — Annihilate” and “The Changeling.” Discovery was considerably less dark than DS9, because there was no equivalent to “In the Pale Moonlight” with a lead character reluctantly accepting a moral compromise. The heroes repeatedly defied the pressure to make moral compromises and talked Starfleet out of making them, and the characters most willing to make compromises turned out to have been unambiguously evil all along. So it actually had a very black-and-white morality and repeatedly had good triumph over evil.

And Mirror Georgiou, the cannibalistic ex-empress of a racist, genocidal dictatorship, is pretty clearly in the “evil” camp, for all that Burnham believed she could see the potential for something better in her. So if she’s been recruited by Section 31, that makes it likely that Section 31 are going to be portrayed as the bad guys, just as they’ve always been. They’re going to be the antagonists that Discovery‘s crew are standing against, the voice of moral compromise contrasting against the Discovery crew’s purer ethics. They’ll probably be operating behind the scenes, subtly manipulating events, and Burnham, Saru, and the others will gradually discover what they’re up to and come into confrontation with them.

@127/Jana: The thing is, DSC gave the initial impression of being dark because the whole season was one long story, and stories always start out making things bad for the heroes before they get better. “The Changeling” opened with the extermination of 4 billion people offscreen — but ended with Kirk joking about what a doctor his genocidal “son” would’ve made. You have to judge the tone based on the whole story, not just its opening. And in the end, DSC’s first season turned out to be a pretty upbeat story that emphatically reaffirmed Star Trek‘s positive values, even if it did so somewhat clumsily. People thought that Lorca was a Starfleet officer going to morally gray areas, but it turned out he was just a mustache-twirling villain and the “grayness” he represented was pure black, to be rejected by the real Starfleet heroes. The moral compromises always turned out to be the actions of bad people, and the heroes triumphed by standing up for kindness and compassion and understanding. The only way the show was really “dark” was in its production design and cinematography, the pervasive use of literal low lighting.

@134/Jana: Just because the Section 31 thing was revealed first, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s the central thread of the season. A teaser isn’t meant to tell us everything. Heck, this wasn’t even a proper teaser. It’s a deleted scene that they decided to repurpose as a makeshift teaser at a convention. Since it was originally meant as a tag of sorts for the finale, I think it was mainly meant to tie off the loose thread about the black badges and to give a sense of where Georgiou would be going next. If it had been left in the episode as planned, it would’ve been alongside all the other setup stuff in the closing scenes, like the hint about the new captain and the cliffhanger with the Enterprise, and we would’ve seen more clearly that it was just one thread out of several.

@144/Redd: My point is, comic books are just the source for the subject matter of those movies, not the source for their filmmaking style. The style is that of action movies in general. It just happens that a lot of those movies these days are based on comic book characters and plotlines, but that doesn’t make them the same thing. Your generalization is unfair to comics.

@147/Jana: As I’ve said, I think the first season was very much about reaffirming optimism. Optimistic storytelling doesn’t mean everything is rosy and happy. It means that, no matter how dark and dismal things may seem at the start of the story, good people doing things the right way will still prevail in the end. And that’s exactly the arc of the first season. The cynics and the moral compromisers were always shown to be wrong or evil, and the people who stuck to Starfleet values and strove to find better, kinder solutions were the ones who saved the day.

Also, show staffs learn from experience, just like everyone else does. First seasons are where things get tried out and the staff discovers what works and what doesn’t. Second seasons are where they apply those lessons and try to do better. So first seasons are generally different from what follows, and are often the weakest season of a show. (Though not always. TNG and DS9 had weak first seasons compared to what followed, but ENT’s first season was much better than its second.)

Edited to add: Here’s an interview with the showrunners about where they’re going in season 2:

https://trekmovie.com/2018/03/26/star-trek-discovery-showrunners-reveal-season-2-theme-plans-for-burnham-airiam-and-more/

I’m not crazy about everything they hint at — I’m unsure about the whole “science vs. spirituality” angle — but it doesn’t sound like it’s wallowing in darkness or pessimism. A couple of choice quotes:

“We are not at war anymore. It is our hope we are going to be doing more away missions and a lot more exploration.”

“…I am excited to hear… that the fans are open to more scenes where things have “stopped down,” scenes where characters are checking in and where we are learning more about stuff, where the plot isn’t necessarily driving the whole thing. I am proud of all the turns, but I am glad to know people are interested in these quieter moments. Mix it up, have a more of a “slice of life” flavor.”

@157/roxana: Not totally forgotten. The war would explain why Kirk felt such animosity toward the Klingons in “Errand of Mercy,” and why the security guard at the start of “Friday’s Child” panicked and drew his weapon at the barest glimpse of a Klingon. That hostility had to be based on some past history of conflict. And it gives a backstory for the colony attack Chekov mentions in “Day of the Dove” (where his imaginary brother was supposedly killed — but nobody questions the reality of the attack itself). And if Kirk’s early Starfleet career took place during a war, it fits with his tendency to default to a military response until he later thinks it through and tries a more peaceful tack.

Otherwise, TOS took place on the frontier far beyond Federation territory, so there’s no reason the war’s impact on the Federation itself would’ve needed to come up much.

@163/Jana: “On a side note, TOS didn’t take place “far beyond Federation territory”. They visited starbases, known planets and Federation colonies a lot.”

Starbases were the equivalent of frontier forts in the Old West — outposts in the “wilderness” to support those explorers who went there, necessary precisely because they weren’t surrounded by a well-established civilization. And colonies, by definition, are beyond the home territory of a nation. They were the equivalent of frontier towns. The Federation heartworlds would’ve been the equivalent of the United States east of the Mississippi — New York, Washington, Boston, Cincinnati, Chicago, stuff like that. The sort of places you rarely saw in a Western, because its focus was on the frontier.

Really, it’s right there in the title narration: “Space: the final frontier.” The show was about voyages beyond the cozy, established borders of civilization. Yes, there was a Federation presence there, but it was still a considerable distance from the heartworlds. It occasionally visited worlds like Vulcan or had the ship on diplomatic missions between Federation worlds, but the primary goal of the show’s creators was to tell stories about expanding the frontier. This is something that was increasingly lost in the movies and TNG, as they focused more and more on Earth and the home territories of the UFP.

“My problem is that it diminishes the character of Kirk and the story told in “Errand of Mercy”. Kirk cares about the Organians in the beginning, and in the end he finds himself siding with Kor. If he starts out as an embittered old soldier who hates the Klingons for personal reasons, “Errand of Mercy” becomes a different, and IMO lesser, story.”

That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m just saying that it’s an overstatement to say that there’s nothing in TOS that reflects the existence of this war, because the established history of Federation-Klingon hostility in TOS can be explained by the war. I’m not saying anything about Kirk hating the Klingons for personal reasons — I’m talking about how he approaches situations as an officer, as a soldier. If he’s had direct experience of the Klingons as enemy combatants, that would explain the strength of his reaction to them as a threat — not on a personal level, but on a professional level, as an officer using his experience to assess a threat.

Keep in mind when TOS was made. It was written and produced by men who had served in WWII and Korea, and that informed how they wrote Starfleet characters. There’s a sense in the show that these officers’ experience includes combat, that it hasn’t been exclusively during peacetime. And every portrayal of the Klingons makes it pretty clear that there has been open conflict between them in the past, that they’ve had a history of military clashes, including things like Donatu V and the raid mentioned in “Day of the Dove.” We didn’t think it was anything as big or as recent as the war in Discovery, no, but there had to be something. The difference between what TOS suggested and what DSC revealed is merely one of degree, not of kind.

“As for TNG, I agree, but my solution is to ignore the later change.”

Except that’s impossible, because too much of the series that followed depended on the history of UFP-Cardassian conflict that “The Wounded” established. New continuity overwrites old, not the other way around. That’s why we have James T. Kirk instead of James R., Vulcans instead of Vulcanians, Starfleet instead of UESPA, Will Riker instead of Bill, emotionless Data instead of emotional Data.

^Yes, obviously the Cardassian situation can be explained. I addressed that discrepancy in The Buried Age over a decade ago. But that’s just the point. If such a major continuity error within a single show can be reconciled, then so can this one. It’s hardly the hugest continuity error in Trek history. The pretense that any of this stuff fits together has always required a liberal amount of squinting and pretending.