One of the hallmarks of Star Trek from the very beginning was to have at least one alien character who provides a non-human perspective on things. It started, naturally, with Spock on the original series, and also includes Worf on The Next Generation (and to a lesser extent, Troi and Data), Tuvok, Neelix, Kes, and Seven of Nine (and to a lesser extent, Torres) on Voyager, T’Pol on Enterprise, and more than half the cast of Deep Space Nine.
On Discovery, that role has gone to Saru, who has in one season vaulted himself into the upper echelons of great Trek characters. His compassion, his intellect, his unique perspective as a prey animal, all combine to make him a most compelling character.
So it’s just a pity that this focus on him doesn’t really work.
“The Brightest Star” gives us our first view of the Kelpien homeworld of Kaminar, as we meet Saru and his father and sister. His father is a priest who is in charge of the ritual whereby the Kelpiens sacrifice a certain number of themselves regularly to the Ba’ul.
It’s never explained who the Ba’ul are, or why they do this, or what they gain from it, or really anything. To be fair, that’s the point, but it’s still frustrating to never actually get those answers. Saru seeks those answers, only to be shot down by his father Aradar.
The Ba’ul device that appears and takes away the sacrifices is apparently very badly maintained, as a piece falls off it, and Aradar says that this happens sometimes. The pieces that fall off are to be disposed of and not examined in any way.
Saru, of course, won’t have any of that. He tells Aradar he’ll get rid of it, but he keeps it for himself. Eventually, he figures out how to turn it into a communications device, and sends out a signal. That signal is answered by Starfleet, and he meets in secret with a shuttlecraft piloted by Lieutenant Philippa Georgiou. Saru’s ability to manipulate Ba’ul technology makes him worthy of being contacted, but Starfleet can’t interfere with Kaminar generally because they haven’t achieved space travel. (They’re barely aware of the grander universe, thinking of it only in terms of it being where the Ba’ul come from.) So Georgiou makes him an offer: come with her to see the rest of the galaxy, leaving his homeworld behind forever, or stay on Kaminar with the heavens denied him.
The Saru we know from a season of Discovery, and from the short exposure to him here, can only make one decision. Saru’s scientific curiosity is as great as any Trek character this side of Data. He goes with Georgiou, leaving his father and sister and life behind.
This is the first of the Short Treks that fails in my opinion, and it does so on two levels. The first is that this is very much not a story that should be told in 10-15 minutes. Both “Runaway” and “Calypso” were perfectly designed for the short format. But “The Brightest Star” feels like the outline of a longer story, not a story in itself. We get no context for the Kelpiens’ life. We know nothing of the Ba’ul, nor of what actually happens to the sacrifices. There’s so much story left on the floor here because of the limitations of the timeframe. What else to the Kelpiens do besides farm? What form of government do they have? Are all of them doing what Saru’s village is doing? More to the point, how does the rest of the galaxy view what’s happening there? Georgiou knows that Saru manipulated Ba’ul technology, and she also mentions that her contacting Saru was a controversial and fraught decision in Starfleet. Why didn’t we see those arguments? Why isn’t Starfleet doing something about the Ba’ul’s enslavement of the Kelpiens? (Assuming it is enslavement—even that is not clear.)
The story of Saru’s background is one that requires a full one-hour episode at least. What we get here is maddeningly abbreviated.
And it also just isn’t very interesting, which is the second failure. Saru and his people have been described as prey animals, as a people who are regularly hunted, and who know when death is approaching. This fascinating notion is tossed aside for a bog-standard primitives-are-directed-by-beings-with-greater-technology that we’ve seen a thousand times before on Trek, from “The Apple” and “The Paradise Syndrome” on the original series to “Justice” and “Homeward” on TNG, none of which are episodes you want in your list of comps. Worse, it makes the Kelpiens out to be less alien than we originally thought, as their being “prey” is just to do what the folks on Eminiar and Vendikar did in “A Taste of Armageddon,” wander into oblivion when they’re told to and that’s it. That’s not being prey, that’s being enslaved. Nothing in what we see of Saru’s life here tracks with what we’ve been told about the character in “The Vulcan Hello” and “The Battle at the Binary Stars,” nor what we’ve seen particularly in “Choose Your Pain” and “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum.”
Because humans are (likely) the only sentient species on Earth and because we’re also at the top of the food chain, the notion of a sentient prey animal is something that is truly alien. It’s one of the things that appeals about Saru, and to see it abandoned here to turn the Kelpiens into generic “primitives” right out of mid-twentieth-century portrayals of Natives is disheartening to say the least. Worse, we get that most tired of clichés, the traditionalist father and the kind but not-understanding sister, played with complete blandness by Robert Verlaque and Hannah Spear.
Short Treks is a great concept, one that promises lots of nifty storytelling possibilities in the short format, from fascinating spotlights to character studies. But “The Brightest Star” fails that promise on every level. (Well, except acting. Doug Jones is still the best, and he makes even this misfire eminently watchable, and it’s never bad to see Michelle Yeoh in anything.)
Keith R.A. DeCandido first started writing about Star Trek for this site in 2011 (including rewatches of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and the original series, and reviews of most of the movies and each episode of Discovery and Short Treks), first started writing Trek fiction in 1999 (he’s written sixteen novels, thirteen novellas, seven short stories, six comic books, and one reference book, and also edited three anthologies), and been watching Star Trek since birth. His rewatch of live-action superhero movies appears every Friday here on Tor.com, and 2019 will see the publication of three new novels of his: Alien: Isolation (based on the videogame), Mermaid Precinct (latest in his fantasy/mystery series), and A Furnace Sealed (debuting a new urban fantasy series).
Actually humans were prey animals for most of our prehistory. A truly disturbing number of fossils show anthropicenes were leopard lunch.
“Because humans are (likely) the only sentient species on Earth”
Many scientists today would disagree with that assessment. Other great apes, whales and dolphins, elephants, octopus and squid, and even ravens, crows, and parrots have shown signs of sentience and/or sophisticated intelligence. Not long ago I read an article suggesting that the only thing keeping elephants from functioning on a level comparable to humans is that they haven’t yet invented a language and symbol system capable of preserving and communicating ideas between individuals and generations, and apparently there are actually some researchers trying to develop one for them.
And it should be kept in mind that Trek’s use of “sentient” as synonymous with “sapient” (thinking, intelligent) is inaccurate. Sentience is awareness of your existence and your experiences, the ability to perceive and feel and care what happens to you, and there’s evidence that cats, dogs, and other mammals and birds are at least as sentient as a human toddler.
Also, The Voyage Home canonically established humpback whales as a sentient/sapient species in the Trek universe, and the TNG Tech Manual posited the same for other whales and dolphins (a premise implicitly alluded to in “The Perfect Mate”).
And roxana‘s right, assuming she meant “prey animals.” Our hominin ancestors were probably sentient/sapient long before they evolved from herbivores into scavengers and finally into hunter-gatherers. And even once we invented tools and fire and domesticated canines, it was probably still a while before we reached the top of the “food chain,” rather than having to fight for survival and sometimes lose. (And let’s face it, up until modern medicine, wasn’t the top position in the food chain really held by disease pathogens? Germs have killed far more humans than any toothy predators have.)
I’m not talking about what’s canonically established on Trek, I’m talking about the perspective of the viewer watching the show in the early 21st century. Your average TV viewers think of themselves a) as the only sentient beings on the planet (or pretty close, anyhow) and b) as being at the top of the food chain. Therefore, our perception of Saru as viewers is that of something truly alien, and that’s worth digging into and exploring, and they flushed it away for a tired, uninteresting setup.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Prime Directive? Never heard of it
My nook keeps thinking it knows what I mean — and is usually wrong. Though some humans are very pretty animals.
The Kelpians just do not make sense, even by Star Trek’s standards. Sure, I’ll buy obligatory vegetarians, even them coming from cattle (hey, guess what one thing the Mirror Universe got right?), but you cannot get to be a sapient species by still being so skittish. They’d either have had a species wide heart attack or have chilled out and become normal. Sapient cattle with literal fear boners, no, that is neither capable of getting to global civilisation nor is it a species that could get through Starfleet training, First Kobayashi Maru scenario and they’d surrender in less than a second, or pass out just as quickly.
That conceit; that perpetually terrified and timid sapient cattle could not only be a spacefaring peoples, but have one of them manage to get to be a first officer on a Starfleet vessel? That was one of the big three things that turned me off STD right from the off (the magic mushroom travel, and the giant water bears were the other things in case anyone cares). The show, no matter how it tries to soft reboot around those, just can’t work until those are all booted.
Any human who’s hiked in mountain lion and grizzly bear country knows (or should) that we can go a bit lower on the food chain really quickly if we aren’t a little cautious. <insert grizzly bear scat smells like pepper spray joke here>
I think this is an excellent review, in that it mirrors what I took from this short. I was especially bothered by the whitewashing of Saru’s instinctive fears — other than being occasionally thrown into a volcano as a ritual sacrifice, there is nothing in this culture that smacks of them being prey. They live a pretty comfortable life, apparently, with ample food and a seemingly benign climate.
And Saru being able to turn an alien device into an interstellar beacon is ridiculous, given that he’s apparently been exposed to absolutely no technology at all previously. The convenient gadget is also communicating in his own language, although it’s a product of Ba’ul engineering. (I’m assuming it doesn’t really say “hello” in English, which would be even more ridiculous.)
@8/jefffrane: I haven’t seen the short, but if the Ba’ul have been cultivating the Kelpiens long enough, maybe they taught them their language in the first place. Slavers usually teach their slaves to speak their masters’ language rather than using their own, the easier to give them instructions, keep them from plotting secretly, and eradicate their independent cultural identity.
But the Kelpians aren’t slaves, they’d food (or so we are told), There’s no indication that the Ba’ul want anything from the planet except the Kelpians. That’s not taking the seaweed that is harvested, for example.
And just how much stuff can fall off of this beacon before it ceases to operate? Maybe it operates on a timer and isn’t actually beaming the Kelpians anywhere. Maybe it’s gone from being a transporter to being a disintegrator. Maybe there’s no longer a race known as the Ba’ul. The Kelpians have been sacrificing themselves to nobody, perhaps for centuries.
SyFy Wire has some information, clarification and vs I ground from the short’s writers: https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/writers-of-the-new-star-trek-short-explain-how-it-fits-into-official-trek-canon
So, basicly, when if these ever become available to watch in the UK, there’s no need to bother with this one… sweet.
Quite honestly, I enjoyed the episode, and had not thought about the points you make in your review while watching the episode, krad. You do have a point, but I still enjoyed the episode. Can we still reconcile the Kelpien’s “prey animal” origins with this episode, saying they did evolve from prey animals, but the Ba’ul “saved them” from their original predators generations ago, and put them in the situation we see in this episode? It still wouldn’t fix this completely.
We will be getting a Kelpien episode in S2 of DIS, and Saru’s sister will be in it, so we might get some answers.
@13/MaGnUs: Sounds to me like they’re domesticated prey animals, conditioned to be meekly led to slaughter, like cattle. I don’t see any trouble reconciling that.
Yes, that’s my take. It’s not unsalvageable, as krad seems to think
@6 random22 I’m curious how you feel about Niven’s Puppeteers?
Fun fact, the Kelpien language was created by Marc Okrand.
I finally saw this, and I thought it worked pretty well. I’m a sucker for a story about someone embracing science and curiosity in defiance of a passive surrender to tradition, although this one takes it to a rather literal extreme in that the Kelpiens are essentially tame cattle conditioned to march to slaughter. Maybe they’re not prey in the sense season 1 led us to think, but I felt there was an undercurrent of existential fear, a populace sullenly resigned to the knowledge that their lives could be arbitrarily cut short at any moment. Even the religion that supposedly exists to reconcile them to their fates doesn’t offer that much comfort, because it teaches explicitly that the Kelpiens are dying to sustain the Ba’ul, not to benefit their own people in any way, except through some vague, pious handwave about the “Great Balance.” Which is a pretty hypocritical definition of “Balance,” given that only one side seems to benefit from it.
Although I guess maybe the benefit to the Kelpiens is getting to live in a superficially peaceful community rather than being hunted in the wilds by the indigenous predators; since the village is basically their corral, I assume the Ba’ul ranchers put up fences to keep out the Kaminar equivalent of coyotes.
And yes, I’m aware that there’s a season 2 episode that upends what we thought we knew about the Kelpiens and the Ba’ul, but I’ll get around to that one later in the week. I’m just giving my thoughts about what was shown here.
It is somewhat implausible that Saru was somehow able to learn written English through the medium of a device that could only show a single 5-letter word at a time. I’m trying not to take that too literally. But it was really nice to get a brief glimpse of how a dialogue mediated by universal translator would really sound before we went back to the usual approach.
I guess my biggest disappointment was Saru’s sister, who was just kind of there. I was surprised when she finally spoke in her last scene with Saru; up to then, I was wondering if she was mute. Hopefully she’ll have a more substantial role in that later episode.
Yes, she has a larger role, if not that large.