The very first Star Trek character that Gene Roddenberry ever wrote was Captain Christopher Pike. As played by Jeffrey Hunter, Pike was a solid, stolid leader in the Hornblower mode, one who was world-weary and thinking about retiring in the flashbacks of “The Menagerie,” using footage from the unaired pilot “The Cage.” As played by Bruce Greenwood in the alternate timeline of the Bad Robot movies, Pike was a wise mentor, an understanding authority figure.
Anson Mount debuted his interpretation of Pike on the second season premiere of Star Trek: Discovery, and it’s a fascinating mix of Hunter and Greenwood, and a role that’s written with the knowledge that it takes place several years after “The Cage.” It’s also a delight, a welcome shot in the arm to the show which delivers its best episode yet.
Back when “Context is for Kings” came out, I was struck by the fact that the U.S.S. Discovery was a ship very well suited to a more standard Star Trek than the war tale we got in season one, as it’s a ship of science and exploration.
In “Brother” that’s front and center, both in the background, as Ensign Tilly allocates lab resources to the various science and engineering crews, and in the foreground as they use their scientific knowhow to rescue the crashed survivors of the U.S.S. Hiawatha, trapped in an asteroid that’s about to collide with a pulsar.
Pike has been transferred temporarily to Discovery from Enterprise in order to investigate seven simultaneous bursts of energy. Originally Enterprise was to investigate—but the bursts of energy also apparently did catastrophic damage to the larger vessel. The ship just returned from a five-year mission (ahem), and was apparently deliberately kept out of the war. They were too far from home to do any good, and they were in reserve in case of catastrophe. (If you want to know what the Enterprise was doing in detail, John Jackson Miller has a Discovery novel coming out in July called The Enterprise War which will provide that very story.) There’s an amusing conversation between Burnham and Pike where the latter quotes Spock’s problem with that particular directive, and you can almost hear Leonard Nimoy voicing the dialogue Pike quotes.
Spock himself, however, isn’t around. After the armistice, Spock took an extended leave of absence. He had more than enough leave time accumulated. Burnham is disappointed at not getting to see her foster brother, and we find out from flashbacks that the two of them didn’t always get along. (We know from “Yesteryear” and the 2009 movie that Spock’s childhood was pretty difficult in any event.) Sarek doesn’t seem to give a damn (which fits, as he and Spock were in the midst of their twenty-year-long snit, as established in “Journey to Babel“), and he buggers off on a mission of his own. (Burnham is also surprised to learn that Sarek knew that Amanda read Alice in Wonderland to her. Even Burnham knows that Sarek’s the worst father ever.)
The heart of the episode’s plot is the Hiawatha rescue. It does cost a life—Connolly, an Enterprise science officer, who I was just starting to like when he died from his own arrogance—but despite the risk of traversing a vicious gravity field and a ton of asteroidal debris, Pike, Burnham, and Commander Nhan (an Enterprise engineer) manage to get on board and they find survivors. An engineer, Commander Reno (played with delightful snark by Tig Notaro) has kept the crew alive after they crashed for ten months. She’s relieved that the war is over and even more grateful for the rescue.
But the soul of the episode is the crew trying to move past the events of season one. The damage Lorca did to the ship is seen particularly in how antsy the crew is around Pike at first, mistaking his friendlier command style with another iron fist in a velvet glove like they got from Lorca. (At the end of the episode, Pike complains about the lack of chairs in the ready room.) Stamets is still devastated by the loss of Culber, having accepted a transfer to the Vulcan Science Academy after this mission is done. Meanwhile, Tilly is taking to being an officer like a very talkative duck to water.
For Burnham, though, the big issue isn’t getting past the war or Lorca or Pike or any of that other stuff—it’s the possibility of being reunited with a foster brother she hasn’t spoken to in ages. And she believes it’s her own fault that that’s so. Even that is fallout from the war, though, as Pike says that the war affected everyone, including Spock.
And then Burnham goes onto Enterprise to Spock’s quarters, and finds a recording that changes everything.
Buy the Book
All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries
I’m curious to see how they continue to explore Spock’s childhood (if they will beyond what we got here), as I like the idea that he suffered nightmares, which seems only fitting given his unique status and how much he was bullied by other kids (again, see “Yesteryear” and the 2009 film). I also hope this will mean more of Mia Kirshner’s Amanda, as her compassionate portrayal of Spock’s Mom is one I really like, as she welcomes Burnham with open arms and tries to get her and Spock to be friends in the opening flashback. I find Kirshner’s Amanda to be far more compelling than either Jane Wyatt’s warmed-over 1950s housewife in “Journey to Babel” or Winona Ryder’s nowhere performance in the 2009 film.
The glue that holds this episode together, though, is Mount. His command style is casual, one that inspires loyalty. Pike is far more relaxed than he was in “The Cage” when he was drinking with Boyce and talking about getting away from it all, but the experience with the Talosians was meant to affect him deeply, and the Pike we see in “Brother” shows that it has. He’s rediscovered the joy of commanding a starship, one that had been beaten down by the battle on Rigel VIII that preceded “The Cage,” and which was responsible for the ennui Pike felt in that episode.
Best of all, though, is that when Discovery needs to bring a piece of the asteroid on board—having already failed to transport it because the transporter can’t get a lock on the exotic material it’s made out of—Pike makes a show of giving Saru command for that part of the mission, as that’s Discovery‘s true long-term assignment: scientific discovery. (It’s right there in the name and everything!)
Doug Jones gets short shrift in this episode—aside from a brief mention of Saru’s sister (introduced in the Short Treks episode “The Brightest Star“), the first officer doesn’t really get much to do. Although I did love his “really?” bit when his cilia raised during the rescue mission, because of course it did.
I really hope that the banter between Detmer and Owokusen is going to continue, as that was one of my favorite parts of the episode. In general, the bridge crew got more to do this time around, and that’s all to the good. I really hope the dedication to Discovery‘s original mission before it was subsumed by the war effort is going to continue. I really hope that we see more things like Reno’s using her engineering skills to keep her crewmates alive, and just in general moving back to a place of compassion. (Tellingly, Reno set a bunch of booby traps around the crashed ship in case any Klingons showed up.)
And I really hope they’re going somewhere interesting with Culber. Wilson Cruz has been elevated to an opening-credits regular, a surprising move for a character who’s dead. His appearance in “Brother” is limited to Stamets watching an old recording of him, and Stamets’s grieving is obviously going to remain a big part of his character. I doubt it will be enough to remove the bad taste of Culber’s murder from our collective mouths, but we’ll see.
Pike’s going to be in command for a while, and I’m really looking forward to it. Mount was a disaster in his last TV starring role as Black Bolt in ABC’s dreadful Inhumans series (Mount is tied with Finn Jones for Worst Primary Lead In An MCU Production), but his relaxed charm is suiting Discovery well. With the ugliness of war in the rear-view mirror, the show feels lighter, happier, more like a show about people who seek out new life and new civilizations and all that jazz. They have a mission that’s about that very thing, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s favorite moment of the episode was when Pike asked for roll call on the bridge. I loved that it was important to Pike to know everybody’s name.
Just a correction, I believe the actresses’ name is Kirshner, not Kershner
In fairness to Mount re: Inhumans – it was already going to be a monumental task to have a good performance of a character like Black Bolt who cannot speak (and who’s superpower is so catastrophically powerful that he really can’t ever use it).
Add to that the poor scripting, bad co-star acting and overall poor production quality, and the poor guy didn’t have a chance.
I’m rooting for him to do well as Pike.
I’m not a huge fan of Discovery in general (or one of the hugest detractors, I think it’s got some good ideas but is plagued by bad writing and a “gee wouldn’t it be cool if we did this twist” philosophy), so it kinda fell flat for me, I’m not too keen on what’s looking like the season (or early-season) plot.
One thing stood out as particularly odd, writing wise (I mean aside from one encounter with the ship sending it on a 5-hour collision course with a pulsar that apparently nobody cared was in the area before). When Pike tries to take command, Saru lays out the three conditions under which it might happen:
1) When an imminent threat is detected
2) When the lives of Federation citizens are in danger
3) Or when no other officers of equal or higher rank are present to mitigate this threat.
(It’s worded particularly odd, considering he specifically says it only applies during 3 contingencies, which should mean either 1 AND 2 AND 3 or 1 OR 2 OR 3, but considering ‘3’ starts with ‘Or’, and also refers to the ‘threat’ mention in 1, I think the only way to interpret this is 1 AND (2 OR 3)).
Anyway, asking which situation applies, Pike says, “All of them!” Dun-dun-dun, dramatic moment!
Except…
the situation is that the federation detected a signal, several simultaneous ones. That is, as far as I can tell, it. (Nobody at this point knew about the Hiyawatha). If the federation considers ‘detecting weird signals’ as automatically an Imminent Threat, then it is nothing like the Federation I know or want to follow the adventures of. Interesting, sure. Maybe something to be somewhat concerned about, particularly in the aftermath of a war. And something to investigate, absolutely. But I can’t see how it possibly qualifies either as an Imminent Threat, or Endangering Federation Citizens. It’s just a mystery. Practically every third episode of Star Trek begins with some tantalizing space mystery.
This is part of what I mean by ‘plagued by bad writing’. This line is completely superfluous to everything in the show. It’s obviously not (intrinsicly) a threat, and nobody calls Pike on it afterwards despite that, so really… Saru didn’t have to be given that line. They might as well have just said “As long as you have File C-16 filled out and digitally signed by an Admiral, then we’re all good.” It’s just stuck there to pad out time, and add a hint of forboding, which is fine, I guess, but, again, it looks like they didn’t even THINK about what they wrote, they just threw the line in there.
I liked seeing the background Starfleet officer in a wheelchair… good representation.
I believe Burnham is Spock’s adopted sister, not foster sister. Those are very different things.
I’m amused by the idea of something being front and centre in the background.
Of course, as soon as the four of them jumped in the pods, I knew Connolly was going to die. Most obvious place to make a dramatic death, and well, killing the actual redshirt would be too obvious.
zegmustprovebrains: Hey, sometimes mixed metaphors are fun, he says very lamely……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Is there any place online that provides Discovery episode scripts or reasonably-thorough summaries? (My go-to would be Memory Alpha, but whoever does their episode summaries seems to have taken a pass on DSC.)
Because I can’t watch this anymore. The extended podracing sequence, the magical disappearing spacesuits, the fancy and entirely unnecessary gravity-thing tech apparently left over from Michael Bay’s Transformers (and the continued presence of tactile drag-and-drop holograms, somehow encoded into an audio file) –it all made me want to throw something at my TV. The writing and character work continues to be top-notch, but the visual design, direction, and ridiculously bloated VFX budget are distractingly wrong and my brain hurts having watched it.
A repurposed escape pod (big enough to seat 4) would’ve been a better solution, and one befitting Starfleet ingenuity. The spacesuits were actual physical costumes, so I see no excuse why they needed the Stargate-mask deployment in the first place (other than to free the actors from having to carry helmets –or worse, keep most of their expensive heads hidden by helmets with the faceplates open). And does Discovery not have tractor beams anymore (or, hell, could Detmer not simply have matched velocities with the tumbling rock and let the ship’s artificial gravity do the work)?
“trapped in an asteroid that’s about to collide with a quasar.”
Nit: “pulsar”, not quasar, IIRC. Though this being Trek it’s probably enough to say “big space thing with gravity that’s drawing in the asteroid to its destruction on this timetable”. I guess Discovery’s shields are enough to keep out the neutron star’s rotating EM radiation beam, or it’s just staying out of the way.
(But at least it doesn’t put a quasar in the Milky Way. Not that I’d be surprised if a Trek show did that.)
[Edit: Thanks for fixing it, Keith!]
mschiffe: Thank you for that. The mistake has been fixed.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, whose mantra is “the Edit Post function is life!”
“Brother” does offer hope that the incredibly pretentious episode titles of Season One are no more.
I didn’t hate the S1 titles. (And it comes by it honestly as the descendant of the show with “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, and “City on the Edge of Forever”.) But FWIW the Short Treks also have short, simple, descriptive titles.
Gerry: I dunno, I really like pretentious titles. To keep it in Star Trek, I much preferred DS9‘s tendency toward titles like “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges” and “Looking for par’Mach in All the Wrong Places” to TNG‘s tendency toward “The _____” titles. If nothing else, I’m way more likely to remember which episode we’re talking about with DS9.
Of course, now we have an episode called “Brother” and an episode called “Brothers,” which gives us yet another set of homonymic titles (see also “Wink of an Eye” and “Blink of an Eye,” not to mention “First Contact” and First Contact).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Well…
I gotta say, this felt like watching, what was it?– oh yeah– Star Trek! And it had the whole thing about seeking out new life and all that noise. And this was really good, and so much fun, easily better than any episode in season 1. I was cautiously optimistic about going into season 2, and if Discovery keeps this up, we might have something.
But!
When I saw Wilson Cruz’s name in the opening credits, it was like the show saying, ” Remember when gentle medical man Hugh Culber was brutally murdered? Yeah, so that happened.” On that, they’d better be going somewhere.
@7. Ryan: Maybe Pike’s Enterprise had a policy of Blueshirting before Kirk instituted Redshirting… and since most crew members wear blue on Discovery… ruh roh.
The episode was really good and fun, but it still seems to have too much drama and action squeezed into one episode – at least for my taste. i know that many of the series had at least a few episodes like that, but this seems to be the standard here instead of being an exception.
My only disagreement is with the Inhumans bit. I thought Mount was the only good part lol.
Whatever happened to Short Treks? I never got around to watching these shorts, and was all set to go through those before beginning Season 2. But when I looked, they’d completely disappeared from CBS All Access as far as I could tell.
Boy was young Spock a jerk as a kid. Most parents would not have reacted well to what he did. He’d have been in the future equivalent of “time-out.” If he was that bratty at school, no wonder the other kids didn’t like him. Plus – the wig they used sucked. He looked like a baby Vulcan mock Davy Jones.
As for Sarek – I don’t think he was deliberately a bad father. First off, parents aren’t issued books on how to raise a kid when they have babies or adopt. Plus – he might have known what to do with a Vulcan kid (maybe not – but I like to forget Sybok existed – ugh), but not a half-Vulcan or a full human. I think he meant to do things for the best, but the kiddos don’t always react the way you want, and sometimes neither does society.
And Sarek is proud. He’d rather jump into Mt. Seleya than admit fault – even to himself. I think he’s in total denial about his emotions and to keep his own squelched or ignored, he comes down hard on the side of logic and non-expression of emotion, even for those entitled to have them.
BaselGill: I just checked the CBS app on my phone, and Short Treks is still there. When I’m at a computer again, I’ll check there……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Ahh, they hid it in the bonuses for season 2 rather than its own separate thing….
@5 John G Vaughnan — Michael specifically names Spock as her “foster brother” as she and Saru were on their way to the transporter room.
As someone who really enjoyed season 1, I think this was a big improvement. If they can keep this up, this is shaping up to be a fantastic season of Trek. I loved the interaction of the bridge crew and I’m hoping they keep giving them things to do. They were glorified extras last season. Also, Mount is perfection personified.
I was absolutely blown away by this episode. Anson Mount doesn’t exactly channel either Jeffrey Hunter or Bruce Greenwood, but damned if he doesn’t fall right between the two approaches. I liked how his character interacted with his new crew and how he prompted some of them Owosekun and Detmer, specifically, to behave in a more relaxed fashion than they did when Lorca was commanding.
I did find a few quibbles. Firstly, the idea that Pike stays on board to investigate the signals due to the damage to the Enterprise felt a little forced, especially since it seemed to get about one sentence worth of explanation. If it’s worth transferring Pike over, why doesn’t he bring his whole senior staff (which has experience with the signals) with him and let the Discovery crew go back to the Enterprise to haul it home? I know Pike brought the engineer and the science officer over, but I’d think that having more crew transfer over would make sense.
Also, the Enterprise damage must’ve been all internal, as there didn’t appear to be a scratch on her.
One thing I really liked was the fakeout in the transporter room in which we are expecting to see pointed ears on the science officer who healed over and see Connelly’s rounded, human ear come into focus.
Also, the voice recording of Spock really brought out that Ethan Peck sounds a LOT more like Nimoy than Zachary Quinto (whose performance in the role I greatly enjoyed) ever did.
Honestly, if the rest of this season matches up to this episode, we could be looking at the best season of Star Trek since the first season of the Original Series.
@twels: supposedly this season will explore Pike’s relationship with his Number One. You don’t hire Rebecca Romijn just to sideline her.
Btw, I’m surprised CBS isn’t putting Short Treks up on YouTube or someplace public access. It would be good marketing for the main series.
So…the ship that doesn’t look like what we know it looked like has had a major case of “something important broke,” eh? This could be good: “Uh, Captain Pike, sir? Ya know all those refits we put into your ship after the Rigel mission a couple years ago? Well…we’re gonna have to rip ’em all out and put her back the way she was.”
That could work.
Perhaps the “Something major went wrong” will be what leads to the crew complement being bumped up from 203 to 430. Interesting to note that they specifically say that all 203 crew members are aboard so they must have gotten a replacement for Spock before encountering Discovery. Also, why do they refer to a science officer as a singular position? Is there really just one science officer? They have a Chief Engineer so I’d imagine that a similar position would exist for the science division. Or is the old Enterprise so cramped that there’s only room for a single scientist on board?
A definite step into the light after the first season but still a few WTF moments. We know from previous shows that Vulcan is very close to Earth and that it can take just a matter of hours to get from one to the other. Why not have Discovery pick up it’s new captain on the way? They were heading in that direction already.
The first time the pulsar is mentioned, it’s like they’re only them becoming aware of it. “About to get dragged into A pulsar” or some such. A pulsar, by it’s very nature. would be known well before you arrive in the system.
Oh look, Star Trek gets dark matter wrong again. Quelle surprise. Also, asteroids don’t act like that. But, just like in the first season, they need a reason to keep the ship away from the action so we get this impossibly dense asteroid field.
Love Jet Reno although the surgery aspects are a little suspect. It would have made more sense to me if all the methods to keep the crew alive were technological in nature. Does Scotty also know brain surgery?
Tilly is still really annoying. Hopefully she’ll take Stamets advice to heart. Just don’t put Reno and Tilly in the same room or they’ll cancel each other out “Oh, what a relief. I thought we were all gonna die.”
Where does the flashback fit with Yesteryear? Was this before or after Spock’s decision to follow the Vulcan way? If before, where was Burnham during that episode? Was she off at boarding school? If after, Spock is being quite the emotional little prick. And Sarek and Amanda just let him act like that?
Speaking of Spock, why is it OK to let Burnham beam over to Enterprise and rifle through his quarters? They didn’t know his leave was related to the red flashes before she did so. She’s legally not related to him as she specifically calls him her foster brother, not adopted. Fostering is something that relates to the parents. You can call someone your foster sibling but that doesn’t have any legal force behind it where as it would with foster parents.
Also, we see again that if you don’t want to die, you listen to Burnham, always. Georgiou didn’t and look where it got her.
All in all, an improvement over S1 but we really didn’t get any actual story, just set-up. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes. But do we really need another “The entire galaxy is going to die” story?
p.s. – The shot of the turbolift network was also incredibly dumb and served no story purpose.
We have a Stamets named after a real person. Is Jet Reno a homage to Janet Reno?
Better than s1, but in particular they still have a problem with technobabble in the script, or with pressing the actors to deliver the technobabble correctly. In order of appearance:
The red signals appear “over 30,000 light years” and in sync. That means subspace sensors are involved, and subspace detection over that distance (a third of the galaxy’s diameter) seems excessive in this era. (Maybe the Argus Array is much older than TNG?) Given the speed with which Discovery reaches the first signal, either (a) it’s merely the closest, or (b) the script intended something like “30,000 cubic light years”.
Why would science officer Connolly say “the signals aren’t moons, planets, or any other kind of body”? Does he mean the signals don’t correspond to any body? As noted by 30/Kkozoriz, Starfleet’s astronomers should be aware of the pulsar’s proximity.
In the landing pods, Burnham has only “3000 feet” to rescue Pike. (a) Feet? Not a metric unit? And (b) only 3000? This isn’t a skydive, and they seem to be eating distance a lot faster than that. Was the scriptwriter working from a skydive-trope, what with “terminal velocity”? That has a specific meaning — the velocity through a fluid in which the gravitational force equals the drag — and although the asteroid has gravity and an atmosphere of some kind, it seems like a stretched usage.
Aboard Hiawatha, Burnham observes that “titanium snapped”. The usual Trek super-material is “tritanium”.
Continuity errors:
When Burnham and Saru are hiking to the transporter room to meet Pike, they’re in an exterior corridor in the delta-shaped secondary hull — but then they’re in a sequence of circular corridors.
When the first piece of asteroid debris hits Discovery, Detmer says the collision was “starboard”, but it was clearly on the centerline of the saucer.
Aside from that:
In Pike’s party, Nahn (the red-uniform female) is a Barzan, introduced in TNG’s “The Price”.
If Enterprise has suffered so many catastrophic failures, why are the warp nacelles still lit? (Likely answers: “otherwise we wouldn’t see the ship against the darkness of space” and “the CG guys weren’t privy to the script”.) And are cabin lights part of life support, which was working? If they’d been flickering, that would sell the crisis.
For the turbolift scene (with Linus the Saurian’s sneeze): what’s with the exterior view of the turboshaft? In a huge void filled with other shafts, conduits, and maintenance robots(?). This implies a large fraction of Discovery is just empty (maybe the inter-hull dorsal?).
The specialized landing pods, created for a mission to Kimtar — since Burnham tested them, either (a) they were invented on Shenzhou, or (b) it’s an adventure from s1 we haven’t seen. The whole descending-spinning platform and the launch tubes — what is this, Thunderbirds? Those tubes are seemingly much too long, given that the docking bay is already at the aft extremity of the secondary hull (we know they launched aft, because we saw the nacelles on each side).
The wrecked interior of Hiawatha looks like a disused warehouse — look closely and you can see rivets on the I-beams. This was a bad idea with the brewery-engine room in Star Trek (2009) and it’s a bad idea now.
The magical deployment of the “gravity simulator” is even more unconvincing than the Goa’uld-style “thruster suits”. It reaches the level of cartoons, as seen in He-Man (2002) or Invader ZIM or My Life as a Teenage Robot. This really, really does not seem like a capability Starfleet should have.
At the end, Enterprise is being towed by a pair of vessels which, although blurred, resemble the Ptolemy-class tug from the classic Franz Joseph Star Fleet Technical Manual.
I noticed Burnham claims to know an African story from 100,000 years ago. Not only is that twenty times older than any story we know, there’s some debate about whether people told stories that long ago.
Just to nitpick, we can’t really use Star Trek (2009) as an example of Spock’s bad childhood, since even at that point, that’s supposed to be a separate timeline.
The episode wasn’t perfect, but it was very good. I enjoyed the characterizations and the acting, the breathing of life into the bridge crew, and of course, my doses of Tilly and Stamets. I also loved the weird little Engineering/Sickbay combo Jet Reno had mounted. Reno is a nice blend of McCoy and Scotty.
Pike is warm, but also professional, and feels like a character written by Roddenberry, yet updated for the modern day. Peck’s log lines as Spock were nice, he sounds unique, but at the same time, seems to understand how to voice Spock (my son did think he sounded too little like Nimoy, even though I told him this is way before TOS, with a Spock that doesn’t have his emotions fully in check).
The cinematography and VFX are also beautiful, I’d love to see this on a screen larger than my 40 inch TV, yet smaller than a cinema’s. The episode had a good mix of Trek science/spirit and action. I did think the podracing scene, sorry, the pods racing through the asteroid field was a bit too blockbustery, a bit too Kelvinverse-y, and while it doesn’t ruin my enjoyment of the episode, it didn’t get better on the second viewing.
@25 – twels: The ear fake-out would have worked much better if the trailers didn’t show Spock coming on board not wearing his uniform, and all the promotional material and interviews didn’t tell us he was taking a leave of absence. Maybe you skipped all that stuff.
@32 – phillip_thorne: Good catch on Nahn’s species.
Re: 33/Gareth Wilson — The dating on that story is a head-scratcher, I agree. I can think of three reasons:
1. Sometime in the next 250 years, Terran archaeologists extend their knowledge backwards, possibly by meeting ancient alien xenologists. (The belabored explanation.)
2. Burnham records this statement after being transported 950 centuries into the future, more like the season-opener statements from Babylon 5 than Kirk’s log entries. –We still don’t know how Discovery ended up in the future, in the “Short Trek” ep “Calypso”. (The intriguing explanation.)
3. It’s placeholder dialogue that the writing staff forgot to edit. (“Action item: Somebody find a specific African myth about the origin of the Milky Way”.) (The depressingly incompetent explanation.)
4. In an upcoming episode, Burnham travels back in time 100,000 years and discovers that she is the original source of the story.
Yeah, there’s a few possible explanations. Points for picking the correct continent to have people 100,000 years ago, I suppose.
Maybe this has already been theorized by others previously but perhaps Burnham dies, and in a tragic (but hopefully heroic manner), prior to the events of TOS, and this is perhaps why Spock nor Sarek nor Amanda ever mention her from TOS on. That would make it fit with canon.
It would seem problematic from a real-world standpoint that the first-ever woman of color lead of a Star Trek series is killed off but I’m sure it would also be very dramatic and well-earned for the character.
GHiller: there is no issue of fitting Burnham with canon. Spock didn’t tell anyone that his father was Ambassador Sarek until he was standing right next to him on the Enterprise. He didn’t tell anyone he’d been engaged to be married since age seven until the night before the wedding. He didn’t tell anyone he had a half brother until he was standing right next to him on the Enterprise.
It would be more of an issue with canon if he had mentioned Burnham, is what I’m saying. An open book, Spock ain’t……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Or she doesn’t die tragically before TOS, and we pretend she was mentioned (*), or she wasn’t mentioned, same as Sybok, or Spock’s fiancee, etc.
* Like we pretend a lot of things between the over 25 seasons and 10+ Trek films make sense.
@41: Well, I guess. Haha. I suppose writers can continue to make up lots of new backstory for Spock and not conflict with canon because he was so close-lipped. Could make for plenty of great material to come if CBS sees fit to give Pike & Spock & crew their own spin-off series.
Another thing: The flashback to Michael’s arrival at Sarek’s household. “That’s a whole lot of wood for a Vulcan home,” I thought, “and a lot of trees outside.” This seems inconsistent with previous visits to Vulcan (TAS, the TOS and 2009 movies, ENT, etc.) and especially the novels, which give more of a “stone and adobe” feel; but (a) those were minimal glimpses, and even if Vulcan is mostly hot and arid it’s not Arrakis, (b) we already know DSC isn’t constraining itself by precedent, (c) there’s no reason Vulcan couldn’t import wood, and (d) maybe it only looks like wood.
The house was not a set; it was filmed on location at Integral House in Toronto (the relevant tweets are repeated in a preview of ep 202 at Trekcore).
The trees outside were red; that looks alien, maybe, unless you’re accustomed to maple trees in autumn or species with permanently red foliage, like Crimson King maple, Japanese maple, or Eastern redbud cultivar “Forest Pansy”.
The season premiere has been put up for free on YouTube for US viewers, as an attempt to entice people to subscribe for the season:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rvMqRrtmkY
Which makes it the only episode I’ll get to see anytime soon, until my income situation improves.
This was a pretty effective episode due to the character work. Pike was quite likeable — much closer to Greenwood’s portrayal than Hunter’s, though more playful than either. The interplay among the crew was effective, and it was great to see some focus on the bridge crew at last. The “roll call” scene was practically an admission that they gave the supporting crew short shrift last year. (And I’m glad to know at last how “Owosekun” is pronounced.) And the focus on exploration and adventure with a sense of joy at discovery was belatedly appropriate for a show named Discovery.
I still dislike the visual design of this show, though, the overly cluttered and busy and fanciful visual effects — the diametric opposite of the minimalist aesthetic that TOS consciously embraced. And the science is still not great. Nor are the tactics. When Discovery was caught in the debris field with its shields down, why not use phasers and tractor beams as point defense against the rocks rather than just letting them tear into the hull?
It did bug me that Pike said Spock understood that logic was just the beginning and not the end. That’s an understanding he shouldn’t reach until ST:TMP, 16 years after this.
@3/ghostly1: To your question of why these weird signals are such an urgent potential threat to investigate, I take it to be because of the enormous amount of energy and advanced technology it would require to generate seven precisely simultaneous signals spread clear across the galaxy, tens of thousands of parsecs apart. Any civilization capable of that is advanced beyond anything ever encountered before, and is wielding literally astronomical energies. To a society just recovering from a war for survival, that’s bound to be pretty alarming as long as their motives are unknown.
@9/Cybersnark: I don’t see why an audio file couldn’t have visual data encoded in it. Data is data — it’s all 1s and 0s, ultimately. It’s sort of the reverse of steganography, hiding a coded message inside certain pixels of a photograph. Or maybe it’s just like when you download a music album digitally and it comes with a graphics file of the album cover.
@16/Sunspear: The majority of Enterprise casualties in season 1 were actually in gold and blue shirts. The “redshirt” practice of killing off security guards like flies to create a contrived sense of danger was more a function of seasons 2 & 3. (And there’s no reason at all why the trope should apply to an engineer like Nhan, since “redshirt” is a synecdoche for security personnel and is not literally about the color of the shirt.)
@25/twels: “Also, the Enterprise damage must’ve been all internal, as there didn’t appear to be a scratch on her.”
Yes, as I recall, Pike said the ship suffered mysterious catastrophic system failures while attempting to investigate the anomalous signals. It wasn’t attacked or anything, it just broke down under some strange influence.
@33/Gareth: I took Burnham’s narration to mean that an African myth of more recent vintage claims to describe an event that happened a thousand centuries ago. Much like how the Book of Genesis, which was probably written no earlier than the 6th century BCE, purports to describe events from c. 4000 BCE.
@44/Phillip: I’m willing to excuse the details of Sarek’s house due to the availability of the location. What I appreciate is that it matches the family home from “Yesteryear” in that it has windows all around. Really, the visuals in DSC are such a radical departure from previous Trek that I think it’s best to focus on the broad strokes rather than the exact details.
@CLB: Yeah, my comment wasn’t serious. See John Scalzi’s Redshirts, or if you want something more literary, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Thanks for the link, also. We’re still out of house and home after the fire last Sept. Actually moving back in next week, so I was going to catch up with Discovery then, assuming Comcast has restored the cables, which… maybe.
After watching the episode, my quibbles are with the overdone, over-the-top special effects. The actors are acting against the void, with no idea of the ridiculous things being added later. The debris field shown would’ve pulverized the pods almost certainly. Processing power or flying ability wouldn’t matter. Would the chunks even be that jagged, or are they taking a page from Armageddon? Also, wouldn’t the field be expanding in a roughly spherical manner, rather than randomly pinging in every direction? Why is it so dense still? How many months since the ship crashed?
Also, the way the asteroid chunk was brought on board would seem like it should’ve killed the people just standing around in the bay! It’s far too large for the space. The SFX overwhelm that scene.
Otherwise, good start of the season. Like Pike. Like J(an)et Reno. Hope we see more of her and her ingenious solutions to engineering problems.
No to more mycelium nonsense, but no choice there. Guess we’ll see fungus ghosts in future. Maybe even a fungus Lorca.
Red angels and giving faith parity with science… questionable. But it’ll come down to the execution.
Liked the fortune referring to a cage when Pike read it.
@45 – Chris: TOS “consciously embraced” a minimalist aesthetic because they had no other choice. Now, we’ll never know how much of this they would have done if they had the technology, but we don’t now they wouldn’t have, either. Remember Roddenberry re-inventing the Klingon make-up for TMP when he had the resources.
Christopher: MaGnUs is correct, TOS consciously embraced a minimalist aesthetic because that’s all they could do on a budget with 1960s technology available. The Motion Picture showed pretty clearly that Roddenberry would’ve gone for less minimalist effects if he could’ve.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
While budget was certainly a factor in TOS’s use of minimalism, there’s a great article exploring how it was also a deliberate stylistic choice:
https://brightlightsfilm.com/wp-content/cache/all/minimalist-magic-the-star-trek-look/#.XE85LmlOn4Y
As for TMP, its look was more detailed, yes, but also clean, elegant, and precise. It was Art Deco, a style that’s detailed but sleek and streamlined. It wasn’t gratuitously cluttered and showy. That’s not just a matter of technology. There are other space shows right now, like Lost in Space and The Expanse, that have the same level of technology as Discovery but whose VFX design and aesthetics are far more streamlined and disciplined. DSC’s visual effects undermine the plausibility of the stories being told, because they’re just too conceptually and visually sloppy.
@45, I’m In love with Captain Pike, but damn this looks more like Star Wars than Star Trek and what’s with all these damn asteroids? And goody, more Sarek family dysfunction. No, not tempted to subscribe. Also Tilly makes me jittery.
Also:Michael really is superwoman isn’t she? What was the point of Collins? And Saru has a believably alien walk. Love the swaying hands.
@52/roxana: One review I read interpreted Collins as a satire of “mansplaining.” He literally got himself killed while he was lecturing a woman on her own area of expertise instead of listening to her.
Personally I think it would have been better to keep him around as a permanent irritant for Michael. Pike is obviously joining the Michael Burnham fan club, and isn’t it interesting that Spock will talk to Pike about his family?
Just a note: it’s Connolly, not Collins.
Oops. I wonder where the ‘Collins’ came from? Mr. Collins in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ perhaps?
I am definitely more hopeful for this season of Star Trek Discovery. And I’m half in love with Captain Pike as played by the ever-handsome Anson Mount – he must be so happy that “Inhumans” was cancelled, because that series about some of my favorite MARVEL characters was awful. He’s a breath of fresh air as Pike; no-nonsense, sensible, but with a refreshing bit of self-deprecation and irony.
I like Reno and hope we see more of her.
@45/CLB: overly cluttered and busy and fanciful visual effects — Yes, this. The visual design is a big negative of the show for me. Why does every scene have to be dark, or blue, or dark blue? Even on alien ships! And there’s always some display jumping around in the background, or the camera is twirling around for the entire scene. The constant distraction makes it hard to absorb myself in the characters.
@58/perihelion: You and I aren’t talking about the same thing at all. I was talking about the visual effects specifically, i.e. the CGI shots of ships and outer space and such.
Also, camera movement and lighting are not design, they’re cinematography.
-58
One of the few things I recall from an advertising class I took in college was the “always moving” technique used in commercials. “There should always be something moving on screen,” the instructor told us. And I think that’s Discovery’s greatest weakness. It is constantly trying to sell itself as something dynamic, like a commercial, with little room for the storytelling to breathe.
And yes, ease back on the blue!
Finally just watched this. (Me being a teacher, summer is my best time of the year to subscribe to CBS All Access for a month to catch up.)
One thing that I found a bit odd was that when Burnham asked Sarek how long it had been since he’d last seen Spock, Sarek responded with a rather vague and unspecific “it’s been years”. Not how many years exactly. Now, yes, Sarek is a Vulcan diplomat, not a scientist by profession. However, it would still seem to me to be more “Vulcan like” to have had him give an exact number of years just as Spock would have on the original series. The only reason I can see for not doing so would be that the writers didn’t want to box themselves in to any specific time frame for this episode.
@61/David Young: In the original series, Sarek did that too. “Isn’t it unusual for a Vulcan to retire at your age? After all, you’re only a hundred and two.” – “One hundred two point four three seven precisely, Doctor, measured in your years.”
The thing I loved most about this episode was the drop to Morse code to communicate with the Enterprise. The only way Pike could be understood was through beeps.
You think they did that on purpose?