One of my least favorite tropes of dramatic fiction in general and the Star Trek franchise in particular is the Redshirt Phenomenon. I’ve discussed this particular practice elsewhere on this site, but the short version is: It’s the laziest of lazy writing, showing that a situation is dangerous by killing a character, but that character barely qualifies as such, as it’s generally an extra or a person we barely know and don’t really care about.
“Project Daedalus” manages to embrace, invert, and reject the Redshirt Phenomenon all at the same time, and I honestly still haven’t figured out how I feel about it.
Normally this would be obvious, but I’m going to put in a SPOILER WARNING here because I’m going to talk about the very ending of the episode.
Seriously, I’m SPOILING THE ENDING!
Really!
Okay?
Good.
Here we go…
Lieutenant Commander Airiam sacrifices herself to save the ship at the very end of the episode, and this feels very much like redshirting, mostly because until this week, we didn’t know a damn thing about Airiam. Hell, this year, she’s played by a different actor (Hannah Cheeseman replacing Sara Mitich), and that barely even registered, because she’s been a non-entity. Until this week, we had no idea if she was a robot, cyborg, android, Borg, replicant, synthetic, plant, or what-the-hell-ever.
This second season of Discovery has generally done a good job of giving the secondary characters a bit more personality. It’s been slow, with bits and pieces, but barely enough to move the needle on turning these people from glorified extras into characters. Truly, the only ones who feel more fleshed out are Owosekun and Detmer; Bruce, Rhys and Airiam are still pretty much glorified extras.
Buy the Book
A Chain Across the Dawn
And this week we lose one of them. The good news is that we finally know what Airiam is: a human who was in a shuttle accident. Her husband lost his life in that same accident, but Airiam was saved by having much of her body replaced by cybernetic implants. We also learn that she has limited memory capacity but is capable of downloading and erasing selected memories to clear space.
This all would’ve great stuff to know before we lose the character. In a serialized drama like Discovery, there’s really no excuse for redshirting someone who’s been around a while. But it’s all a bit too-little-too-late, because while Airiam’s general presence all along makes her familiar, it’s not familiar enough for her death to have anywhere near the emotional resonance for the viewer that it has for the characters. Scripter Michelle Paradise (a co-executive producer of the show, who will be the new co-show-runner with Alex Kurtzman in season three) and director Jonathan Frakes (who does his usual excellent job, if getting a bit too cutesy with camera angles here and there) do the best they can to make the death meaningful, as does Cheeseman. But the effectiveness is sadly diluted. By trying to avoid one cliché, they indulged in another, by killing a character just as we get to know them or as they’re about to do something nice or about to get promoted or retire or some other damn thing.
They also inverted the trope, because I thought for sure that we were going to lose Nhan. Discovery’s track record for security chiefs is pretty lousy: first there was the spectacular incompetent promoted due to Lorca’s fondness for his counterpart in his own universe, then there was the guy who turned out to be a Klingon double agent. When Airiam rips off Nhan’s breathing apparatus, I thought for sure that we were going to lose her as well. In fact, Paradise and Frakes pulled a nice double-fake, as it sure looked like Nhan was dead, but then she managed to crawl to the airlock control and followed the order to open the airlock on Airiam that Burnham proved unable to follow.
I did like how that aspect was played. Burnham tried very hard to do whatever she could not to space her friend. The decision was not made lightly, not by Airiam who insisted on it as she was no longer in control of her body (and barely in control of her voice), not by Pike who very quietly gave Burnham the order to do it, and not by Burnham who could not bring herself to obey it. And it’s completely in character for Burnham to have difficulty with that, given that she had to stand there and watch her mentor die in front of her, an event that was sufficiently traumatic that it caused her to bring a despot over from the Mirror Universe because she looked just like that mentor. Not to mention sitting in a closet listening to her parents get killed by Klingons.
That was just the latest emotional beating Burnham took in this episode, as she and Spock hash things out in her quarters over a game of three-dimensional chess. We see that Burnham’s tragic flaw—her insistence on taking on all burdens to herself, whether she actually should or not—goes back to her childhood. Spock points out that the logic extremists targeting Sarek would not be ameliorated by Burnham’s departure, as Spock’s very existence is what put the bull’s eye on them.
Ethan Peck and Sonequa Martin-Green play the scene beautifully, as these two hurt each other in ways that only siblings can. What I especially like is that Peck plays Spock as calm but with the emotions brimming near the surface, while Martin-Green plays Burnham both the same and differently, as her emotional outbursts are much closer to the surface, but her calm is also greater. I also like that Peck’s anger and bitterness gets turned up a notch when the subject of Sarek comes up.
In the end, we find out that we’ve got that old Trek standby, the A.I. gone mad. Control, the computer that manages Section 31, apparently wants to be a real boy, and is trying to become sentient. It has also killed the four admirals we saw communicating with Leland and Georgiou last week and created artificial images of them for communications.
The approach to Section 31’s headquarters includes the latest crowning moment of awesome for Anson Mount’s Christopher Pike, as he lectures Admiral Cornwell (a welcome return from Jayne Brook, who joins Discovery in their fugitive state in order to stop one of the admirals from taking over Section 31 and the Federation, though it turns out to have been Control all along) on 31’s use of illegal technology to defend their base. Pike accuses her of keeping Enterprise out of the war because they knew Pike would object to things like defending 31’s HQ with mines, and Cornwell calmly retorts that they kept them out of the war so that if the Federation fell, the best of them would still be left standing.
(The more I see of this season, the more I want them to do a spinoff, or at least a miniseries, on the Enterprise with Mount, Peck, and Rebecca Romijn starring. This is something I would have decried as a pointless exercise in retro storytelling until recently, but Mount is so damn good that I want more of him captaining a ship, and we already know that he goes back to Enterprise eventually.)
Most of the emotional beats hit in this episode, from Pike’s frustration with 31’s corrupting of Federation ideals, to Cornwell’s trying to live up to those ideals (interesting to see given her call for genocide in “Will You Take My Hand?”), to Tilly’s impassioned plea for Airiam to remember who she is (Airiam’s memory of Detmer refusing to play kadis-kot with Airiam or Tilly anymore is a high point of the episode, and not just because it references a game first seen on Voyager), to Stamets reminding Spock that Burnham risked everything to save him and that she loves him, to Spock explaining his own difficulties indirectly by telling Stamets that Culber probably moved out of his and Stamets’s shared quarters because Culber is having difficulty processing his emotions.
And hey, look, Saru helped save the day! He figures out that Spock is innocent of murder and that the image they saw of one of the admirals was fake with science!
Airiam’s last words were an indication that Burnham was important to whatever the heck is going on this season, and also that they have to find Project Daedalus, thus at last justifying the episode’s title in its final moments.
While next week does appear to be dealing with that, we also see Airiam’s funeral. It’s still not as much as it should be, but I hope that Airiam’s death will continue to have an impact on the crew, even if it doesn’t affect the viewers as much as it should. Airiam was their crewmate, and I want to see them mourning her, not forgetting her existence the way most Star Trek characters treat people who make the tragic mistake of dying while not listed in the opening credits.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is at Emerald City Comic-Con in Seattle this weekend. Also at the con are Star Trek actors George Takei, Jason Isaacs, Rainn Wilson, and Sonequa Martin-Green. Keith will mostly be at Bard’s Tower (Booth 1121 on the show floor of Level 4 of the convention center) selling and signing his books, and he’ll also be doing panels on Star Wars on Saturday at 3pm and on Star Trek (including discussion of Discovery) on Sunday at 2.45pm.
Is that Nebula in the top picture??
Austin: no, that’s Lt. Commander Airiam.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad, I…was not expecting a literal response lol. It was a tongue-in-cheek comment. That was my first thought, though. Hopefully I’m not the only one who sees it!
Of course Burnham is key, she is the axis on which the universe turns.
Emotionally and character wise it was a great issue, but plot wise, there are a few issues I can’t quite resolve.
Airiam was infected with lets call it a virus from the future(?) squid ship from the time distortion when watching it scan the shuttle (the mechanics of that complicated a virus being transmitted via optics aside), that means we have a paradox loop. The squid thing had to be set up with the virus, know that a being like Airiam was onboard (they cannot be common) and know they would be watching over a one way connection. Which is a causative paradox because it means that already had to happen. When dealing with time travel you get that, but given that Control sits at the heart of federation systems wouldn’t it have made more sense (and been more in line with Keith’s point) to do it via her memory archive or similar? Because, if we assume a causative loop, the AI knows it failed in the past, so why bother other than to maintain the loop.
Next, does a converted prison with Blade Mines outside etc not have internal defenses? Again, this is an AI that clearly wants Airiam to succeed. There’s not some kind of auto-turret to take out Burhham?
Discovery’s strong point has been and continues to be the amazing characters and casting, but I am concerned story consitstency and basic plotting are beginning to fall away slightly.
Side note – Canonically there’s nothing that would keep Pike from staying (I am leaving the books out). In the shows Pike is only stated as a former captain of the enterprise, that Spock owes him a debt and that he and spock served together for 11 years. There’s no official note of a direct line from Pike to Kirk so the enterprise could have a captain inbetween for some years. As of this point in Discovery, the first two have been established and if Spock stays on Disco after this with Pike, the total timeline holds. Or alternately, Pike can stay on Discovery for a while and then when the ship is decommissioned (since we never hear of it again) or destroyed then return to Enterprise or become Fleet Captain.
I loved the glimpses we got in this episode of the women being coworkers and friends. I loved the going back-and-forth from giggling and chatting to side-by-side solving the problem in hand. It wonderfully illustrated how women often rely on each other in the workplace. It was so real.
Also, Tilly!
Calling it now. Burnham is the Red Angel. She showed up in Spock’s childhood cause family.
I loved the insight we got into the secondary cast this episode, but it falls flat. The acting was great, it was great seeing it finally. But the first time we see it is to make an attempt to have the loss of a background character be a gut punch?
We need to see this all along to bring up the secondary cast so that when something like this happens, we feel it. When Tasha died, we felt it. She had been fleshed out and made to care about her. Airiam was just one step above a no name character. The show has had roughly the duration an old season by this point. The writers should be able to make this more of the ensemble cast it should be and not just the Captain, Burnham, Saru, Stamets show.
I don’t think the spoiler warning helped, since the juxtaposition of the Airiam photo and the opening sentence about redshirts kind of spoiled it already. ;)
I have to wonder — if they can so completely rebuild someone injured in a shuttle crash, why the hell is Pike going to be stuck in a chair going “beep-beep” in a few years? Well, as I’ve suggested before, maybe the chair was just a temporary measure since the accident had been fairly recent, and maybe his specific kind of brain damage gave him some kind of aphasia that kept him from communicating. But ultimately it boils down to Gene Roddenberry in 1966 being far too pessimistic about medical advances.
@chris:
That’s a recurring theme I have given up on for this show. Besides a retcon of why Enterprise didn’t have any kind of apparently common holotech, theres just so much other random tech being displayed at a basic level that you have to wonder why its not in use 10 years later. Those blackout mines would have been kind of handy during the dominion war. Airiam’s cyber tech as you noted could have dealt with a lot of injuries (based on the fact she is on a line ship, it can’t be that uncommon or experimental). And there is still the giant issue of the spore drive.
As far as Pike though, from a pure storytelling standard the episode would have been far less impactful if he had been functional and able to communicate so I will let that ride for story purposes.
@@@@@ Jeff L.
“In the shows Pike is only stated as a former captain of the enterprise, that Spock owes him a debt and that he and spock served together for 11 years. There’s no official note of a direct line from Pike to Kirk so the enterprise could have a captain inbetween for some years.”
There is dialogue in “The Menagerie” that would seem to point to Kirk taking over the Enterprise directly from Pike:
MENDEZ: You ever met Chris Pike?
KIRK: When he was promoted to Fleet Captain.
MENDEZ: About your age. Big, handsome man, vital, active.
KIRK: I took over the Enterprise from him. Spock served with him for several years.
Of course, the “about your age” also makes this line suspect!
@10/Jeff L: I increasingly take refuge in Gene Roddenberry’s own recommended view that TOS was just an imperfect dramatization, a simulation of the 23rd century using 1960s methods, and that its portrayal of the future should be updated over time as technology and knowledge progress. He freely changed everything in ST:TMP and asked fans to believe this was a more accurate version of what TOS had only roughly portrayed.
And really, it’s inevitable in any franchise still purporting to tell stories in the same continuity 50 years later. We might as well ask why Tony Stark is no longer portrayed as getting his injuries in the Vietnam War, or why the current version of the Fantastic Four’s origin story no longer references trying to beat the Soviets into space. The broad essentials of the stories are still presumed to apply, but the more dated details are retconned away.
#7 That’s been my pet theory for some time now. From when we see enough of the red angel to know it was female shaped.
@11/Dan – That doesn’t preclude a longer stay on Discovery.
Given Disco now one year or so in started 10 years prior to Kirk/TOS lets make the assumption that we have about 6 years safely before Kirk gets the Enterprise from Pike give or take.
There’s nothing stopping Pike from staying aboard the Discovery for say 4 years then returning to Enterprise for any number of valid reasons, then becoming Fleet Captain and turning the chair over to Kirk. Lets assume the fairly standard 5 year arc for Discovery – that’s a good run. Pike leads the ship and at the end of Season whatever, Starfleet needs to form a task force/fleet/armada for some reason. Pike goes back to the fleet flagship enterprise and Saru (or Burnham, but I would prefer Saru) takes over discovery to join the battle/mission/whatever. Pike is now Fleet Captain and at the end of the mission turns the Enterprise over to Kirk and goes to SFHQ. Saru keeps the helm of discovery and heads off to do Science with First officer Burham and XO Tilly (or the other way around since Tilly is command track).
Perfectly good and workable scenario.
Lt. Commander Airiam is the Red Angel
@jeff L
That’s certainly true, I was mostly just contesting the part when you said “There’s no official note of a direct line from Pike to Kirk.”
I would love to see Pike stay with Discovery, but even better would be a spinoff series with him aboard the Enterprise. However, if the canonistas have a problem with how things have been on Discovery, I doubt they would go for a series set on the Enterprise that (visually) contradicts TOS. Of course, they seem to oppose anything new and different done anyway, so, maybe they should just go for it?
@14/Jeff L: But Spock had to serve under Pike for 11 years, 4 months, 5 days. Since “The Cage” is 13 years before “The Menagerie,” that makes it no more than c. 12 years before Kirk took command from Pike. So the amount of time that Pike can spend commanding a ship that Spock is not serving on cannot be more than a year. The only way Pike can stick around on Discovery is if Spock becomes a permanent crew member as well. And it’s hard to believe they’d do that.
@16/Dan Gunther: “I doubt they would go for a series set on the Enterprise that (visually) contradicts TOS.”
Why wouldn’t they? Visuals are just artistic choices. Fictional franchises redesign their visuals all the time. Star Trek has redesigned the Klingons half a dozen times, the Andorians and Tellarites several times, the Trill and Ktarians once each, etc. — as well as frequently redesigning the way warp drive or the transporter effect looks, or the appearance of future cities or planets. And of course it’s often cast significantly different-looking actors to play the same characters.
Besides, the DSC timeframe is still some 8 years before the second TOS pilot, so any fans worried about the design differences could just chalk them up to changes over time, the same excuse fandom has been using for the TOS/TMP differences for the past 40 years.
@17/Christopher L. Bennett
“Why wouldn’t they? Visuals are just artistic choices. Fictional franchises redesign their visuals all the time. Star Trek has redesigned the Klingons half a dozen times, the Andorians and Tellarites several times, the Trill and Ktarians once each, etc.”
You’re preaching to the choir here. Tell them that, not me. These are not rational people, and they hate on the show for all that stuff completely irrationally. I’ve kind of given up on paying attention to what they say anyway, and just enjoy the fact that we have amazing Trek back on television again.
@18/Dan Gunther: Oh, I see. When you said you doubted “they” would go for it, you mean the purist fans. I thought you meant the actual producers. Sorry.
I’m with GraphicEdit@15 — Airiam is my new pick for the Red Angel. In part this is because I hate the possibility that it’s Burnham, who has been the obvious choice for a while (up until it was shown that Red remembers the childhood death of Burnham as a part of her timeline, which I’d think would exclude Burnham from the possible suspects). But another reason is that I’d hate to see Airiam, a character who has radiated tantalizing, unexplored potential for a season and a half, cast aside like this. There has to be more to her story.
Spock’s difficulty with the Red mind-meld could be explained by Airiam’s cybernetic nature. And it’s certainly possible that in the timeline in which Control succeeds, Airiam survives their encounter, and is able to use the information from the sphere archives to upgrade her own abilities.
This is where my canon for the pilot fails me. Does it say Spock was a recent arrival among the crew? If not, he could have been onboard the Enterprise for a while prior to that which allows you to stretch the timeline quite a bit.
Also, and its a press but perfectly spock-like. He never said continuously. Technically the time on Disco might count (although its not an official assignment for obvious reasons).
And honestly, I could see them keeping Spock around for a season or two
Why wouldn’t Michael help Nhan once Airiam is safely behind locked doors? Even if she missed what happened to her in the fight, there are only three of them in the room, it’s not hard to keep track of everyone. And most importantly: why don’t they simply beam them up rather than let them fight?
Also, once again, the AI has to be evil. After Data, I was hoping they would let AI have complex motivations that make sense. Getting more complex algorithms makes sense; taking over the Federation is dubious, and destroying all life makes no sense whatsoever, as no matter how it was programmed, protecting life should top its directives (then again, I don’t think Airiam confirmed that part: Control might not have been what the Red Angel is trying to stop).
Spock should know what makes him him: logically, he’s the only person to be himself. The Red Angel just needs somebody to be at the right place at the right time to do the right thing. His background is uncommon enough to think he was chosen at random, but the fact he was chosen doesn’t mean only Spock could do it, but that he was the most likely to succeed. There’s no reason to think he has any particular role to play once he has transmitted the message in a way that is convincing (had it been a human, people might have been more likely to consider him to be mad). Of course, since they spend so much time discussing it, we know it will be relevant, but logical characters shouldn’t waste their time on a question where all they can do is pointless and baseless speculation.
@5: The way I understand it, Control sent enough defences to be credible, but not enough to destroy the ship. It had the advantage of keeping everyone occupied, letting Airiam free to exchange further communications.
@21/Jeff L: I guess it’s possible that Spock could’ve been there for a while before “The Cage” and could’ve not been serving under Pike for a while in the interim, but the more time you keep Pike on Discovery, the more you have to stretch the chronology and make excuses. I just don’t think that’s where the producers probably want to go. If they want to do more Pike, maybe it’ll be in a spinoff or some Short Treks segments or something.
The main question for me is why they did not beam Airiam into a holding cell on Discovery? They just beamed the team into a corridor maybe a few dozen feet away, Discovery was not under attack or anything. Instead of spacing her, why not just beam her or Burnham somewhere else?
Nothing wrong with a “Tonight someone dies, so lets watch Ensign Expendable beam down with three cast regulars and see who it is” redshirt death. It is part of Trek’s camp charm. Remove that and you’ve removed something vital from Trek’s DNA. This is my problem with DSC, it seems to begrudge being Trek and loathes that the roots of Trek are in slightly camp Space Opera. It wants to be 2003 BSG, but forgets that people were tired of that long before its run ended, and is trying to rip everything that made Trek be Trek out of Star Trek to get there. Where is the warmth, the charm, the corpse of Ensign Expendable whom we’ll have moved on from by the start of next week’s credits, or even the alien with a foam rubber forehead?
@5 It’s not a paradox loop (yet) because the original source of the virus is unclear. One possible explanation is that 500 years of autonomy in the time vortex allowed the probe’s automated systems to self-upgrade (similar to countless episodes of Trek with bootstrapping AI, including the recent Short Trek). When the probe’s body was destroyed, the AI (or a part of it) leaped into Airiam (it had originated from Disco, and also scanned Disco’s computer by that point, so it would probably know about Airiam. Being 500 years from the future, it would probably know security holes in Airiam’s cybernetics, or be able to exploit them.) That upgraded probe AI learned (or already knew) of the existence of Control, and began communicating with it from Discovery. Possibly the AI took over Control, or Control took over it (maybe they’re two entities working together, it doesn’t matter too much.) They developed a plan to bring the AI data to Control, and we see the rest play out. In this scenario, at no time in the future did the probe need to receive anything from its past self. Its main advantage could be as simple as 500 years of self-reflection.
Of course, I don’t expect that to be scripted into the show. They’re probably going to make a paradox.
@25: People didn’t get tired of BSG 2003 before the run ended because of the tone or militaristic aspect, they got fed up that the original realistic, “gritty” space opera had somehow transformed into mystic mumbo-jumbo based around deus ex machina and Ludditism. If the show had continued in that vein it would have been fine (as demonstrated when they briefly went back to that paradigm with the mutiny arc in the final season).
As happens so often with this series, at least for me, the story may be a bit iffy but the cast goes ahead and sells me on it anyway. I may not have much emotional investment in Airiam, but I have plenty in Pike, Burnham, and Tilly and my gut was plenty punched watching Airiam’s death affect them.
@25/random22: “the roots of Trek are in slightly camp Space Opera.”
Wow, that is just incredibly wrong. The roots of Star Trek are in prose science fiction and Forbidden Planet — the classy stuff that was the smarter alternative to camp space opera. Gene Roddenberry’s explicit intention in creating Star Trek was to get away from the campiness of shows like Lost in Space and bring the sophistication and realism of adult drama to a non-anthology science fiction television series for the first time. The shows that the TOS writers’ bible encouraged scriptwriters to emulate were classy adult dramas like Gunsmoke and Naked City, and the first three pages of the season-2 bible were a lecture about the need to strive for credibility and character naturalism if you wanted to write for the show. Camp was the diametric opposite of what they were aiming for. It was the SFTV default that they were trying to be the exception to.
It’s just that the standards of realism in TV writing have evolved over the past 50 years, so that even the most sincere, grounded dramas of the ’50s and ’60s look stagey or campy in some ways to modern eyes.
It would have been nice if they spent a bit more time on Airam’s back story before killing her off (if she is indeed dead). They could have explained why her cybernetic prosthetics don’t look like Federation technology. Perhaps she was a rich kid, and her family payed for off-world technology to fix her back up. This would also explain the discontinuity between her advanced tech and Pike’s Dalek-shaped wheel chair. Simply killing her off seems like the lazy way out of a corner they painted themselves into.
I don’t mind the AI gone bad plot. After all, Control is already programmed by S31 to push the envelope and get dirty. This isn’t a pure white snow AI.
I agree with KRAD. Why not shelve the other Trek projects (obviously keep Picard) and do a limited Pike Enterprise instead. Despite the grumpy nature of some of these fans, praise for Pike is pretty universal.
IndianaJoe presents an interesting way out of the why is Ariam turned into a cyborg which we’ve never seen before or after. What if it wasn’t done in the Federation? She was rescued by someone who wasn’t part of the federation who cyborged her. We already know from DS9 that the federation has bioethics other civilizations don’t. Well probably never know, and retrospectively that was a failure of season 1. We had a bunch of characters with absolutely no backstory, no exposition- nada. So when we get to having to redshirt one of them, it doesn’t have the same impact.
Also Chris, I know you said about 6 episodes back or do that David Mack’s section 31 novels weren’t at all related to this, but someone in the writing room is either parallel thinking or liberally borrowing from his work…
I have one question: is Tilly too prominent? I get her interacting on duty with Michael since they’re roommates (in a HUGE room) and Stamets since they work on the spire drive together, but she now seems to be thrown into everything, which would be fine if she was a senior lieutenant (like Spock is) but she’s been an ensign for a year I feel like she shouldn’t be as integral to the crew as she is
Tilly is perilously close to becoming the new Urkel.
@29: That’s being quite generous. Sure, Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to be classy science fiction and it frequently was in its first two seasons, but it certainly degenerated into campy, sub-Lost in Space camp in the third season (thanks Freddie!) and had moments like that in the first two years. They also had a certain look in the show so that even an excellent episode like Space Seed had rather campy and silly costumes, even by the standards of the 1960s.
@31/M: “Why not shelve the other Trek projects (obviously keep Picard) and do a limited Pike Enterprise instead.”
Why “instead?” They’re currently developing two or three additional live-action series and two animated series. They’re planning on a large, multi-series franchise. They wouldn’t have to cancel all of them in order to do a Pike series. They might not even need to cancel any of them, since there’s clearly room for the franchise to expand further — and since one or two of them are evidently meant to be limited series anyway, so there’d be room for something to replace them after they ended.
@32/MikeKelm: “Also Chris, I know you said about 6 episodes back or do that David Mack’s section 31 novels weren’t at all related to this, but someone in the writing room is either parallel thinking or liberally borrowing from his work…”
Probably, in the sense of picking up a few ideas and doing their own version of it. It’s pretty far from a direct adaptation, though I can see how they could be reconciled.
@34/Werthead: “Sure, Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to be classy science fiction and it frequently was in its first two seasons, but it certainly degenerated into campy, sub-Lost in Space camp in the third season (thanks Freddie!) and had moments like that in the first two years.”
But random22‘s comment was specifically about the roots of ST, i.e. the inspirations it was derived from, which is the other end of the discussion from what it became later on. A lot of people today mistakenly assume that Star Trek was intended to be in the exact same school of campy SFTV as contemporaries like Lost in Space, when in fact it was created with the express intent of not being like those shows. Roddenberry hated those shows and the way they dumbed down science fiction, and he wanted to prove that an SF show could be as adult and grounded as any cop show or medical drama or Western of the day.
“They also had a certain look in the show so that even an excellent episode like Space Seed had rather campy and silly costumes, even by the standards of the 1960s.”
You’re imposing modern standards. TOS looked amazing to ’60s audiences. Its production values surpassed anything else on SFTV of the day. And ’60s ideas of what future technology or fashion would look like did not seem as silly to audiences at the time as they do to us looking back decades later. In the same way that the real-world fashions that look great by the standards of one decade tend to be considered ridiculous by the next generation.
@CLB: ” if they can so completely rebuild someone injured in a shuttle crash, why the hell is Pike going to be stuck in a chair going “beep-beep” in a few years?”
You’re sooo close… just need a nudge…
@krad: would you feel better if Airiam turns out to be the Angel? I dropped her from the deadpool last week after Spock said the Angel was human, because as you said, we had no frickin’ idea what Airiam was. She went from possible cyborg, to possible alien, to whatever. Clearly production was making it up as they went along. The bridge crew was just set dressing in season one.
Yeah, she’s dead and there’s a funeral next week. But so was Spock and they shot his casket out a torpedo tube in The Wrath of Montalban. Then he got better.
So the pieces are starting to come together. Burnham’s parents are tied to Daedalus. The name suggests building wings, which leads to angel-looking exo-suits. “It’s all about Michael.” Michael’s parents supposedly killed by Leland. A Vulcan logic extremist leading S31. (Which begs the question: the LEs are basically racists, who don’t want humans in Vulcan society. Why would one of them join Starfleet and work with humans? Infiltration maybe?)
Possibility: Michael’s mom is still alive. Could be the Angel or guiding the Angel. She saves Burnham’s life and chooses Spock as her protector.
Random bits: Why didn’t they shoot at the mines to clear a path? They didn’t need to be close or even attempt to cross the minefield. Why didn’t they just beam Airiam to the brig or any confined area, either from the airlock or once she’d been spaced. Her death wasn’t strictly necessary. They didn’t even use the convenient excuse of a temporary tech malfunction so often employed in other Trek.
25. Yes, despite what Roddenberry intended, there’s definitely a camp appeal to the Original Series. I wish a lot of modern genre fiction wasn’t so afraid to go in that direction again. Presumably, they feel in order to get their serious themes across to the audience the tone must also be serious, sometimes to the point of being dour, but there’s quite a lot of evidence to the contrary it doesn’t have to be that way. Many a comedy has had food for thought amongst all the silliness.
Hopefully, this grimdark trend is nearing its end. For I see a golden age on the horizon, in which red shirts will die by the dozens in increasingly whacky ways! In which Godzilla will be allowed to dance again! And Superman and James Bond enjoy their work.
@@@@@ 33
An upgrade from being Girl-Neelix, I suppose.
@@@@@CLB. Look, you cannot claim in seriousness that a show which had Lurch from the Addams Family in a dress being clubbed over the head with a giant dildo, that in the same episode had Shatner strapped to a Merry-go-Round while three quarters naked, was not camp. Also, if you want go ahead and say Robbie the Robot replicating booze for a comedy redneck (which does prove that FP inspired Enterprise too, I guess) did not flirt with the realm of camp either, well I dunno what genre or shows you’ve been watching. Just because the camp was not at the same level as the camp from Adam West’s Batman show or the seasons of Lost in Space everybody fondly remembers, does not mean it didn’t have its feet firmly in the camp of camp.
While I would have liked to have seen a little more previous development on Airiam myself, I reject the notion that the impact of her death is lessened due to the lack thereof.
Lal? Edith Keeler? Tuvix? Sim? Amin Maritza? All done-in-one characters whose deaths had powerful emotional impact on the audience. In me, at least.
#38 I would argue that though the result was often campy, it was not from a desire to be campy – Batman, Lost In Space, – but from the limits of budget and imagination on the part of directors. Both Star Trek and Dr Who survived despite the camp not because of it and both were hobbled into camp by an imagination that out ran its budget.
If Star Trek had been as firmly in camp as you consider it to, I doubt we could have ended up with Blake’s 7 as a dark mirror to its original idealism.
I felt Airiam’s death through its impact on the characters I already know and love. Yes more background on her sooner would have made it better, but as it was it was well done. Frakes did a really good job with it.
@37/Hamburger: “Yes, despite what Roddenberry intended, there’s definitely a camp appeal to the Original Series.”
One more time: I’m not denying that it sometimes had campy results. But it is a mistake to confuse the results for the intentions. It is incorrect to assume that ST was meant to be campy. It was meant to be the first adult, serious SF drama that wasn’t an anthology. It didn’t always succeed in that ambition, but too many people today mistake their perceptions of it for the intentions of its creators.
After all, since it was the first SFTV show that tried to be adult and naturalistic, of course it didn’t succeed at that as well as the subsequent shows that built on its foundations and took things further. But just because it didn’t go as far in that direction as its successors does not mean that it wasn’t trying. This is true about many things in TOS. Its effects look cheesy today but for their day they were revolutionary, innovative, Emmy-nominated stuff that required the involvement of four or five of the top FX houses in Hollywood. Its gender values are quite sexist by today’s standards, but by ’60s standards it was pretty progressive and feminist. And so on. You have to consider it in the context of its time in order to understand it. Too many people today look at its similarities to other ’60s SF shows and overlook the ways in which it was profoundly different from any of the others. But to viewers at the time, and in the ’70s when I started watching, Star Trek was a unique creation, by far the smartest, most sophisticated, least childish, least campy SF show on the air. That’s why it became such a huge phenomenon. People have forgotten that today because there are so many other worthy franchises that have followed in its footsteps.
42. I understand all those things. Your repetition is not required, nor is your condescending tone. The difference here is you care about the original intentions, and that’s fine. I don’t. I’m seeing Star Trek for what it became and wish to see it capture some of that old campy charm again. Yes, I’ll say it again. Camp!
@43/Hamburger: It’s not about “caring,” it’s about factual accuracy. Random22 said that the roots of TOS were in camp, and that is objectively, provably incorrect. Basic facts are more fundamental than personal opinions. Opinions aren’t worth anything if they aren’t grounded in correct information, so we should start with an informed and accurate understanding of consensus reality before we start discussing our divergent opinions and tastes. If you want to talk about TOS having campy aspects, fine. I have no objection to that. I’m talking specifically about the claim that it was rooted in camp, which is objectively wrong. That’s a different subject.
44. Then your beef is with Random22. I said nothing about it being rooted in camp. I was only agreeing that it has its campy charm and wished to see it again. My first comment was concerned with modern sensibilities, the trend of grimdark, not what happened in the minds of those who created TOS. That is indeed another subject. I’m done here.
I will just say I had a very wet face when the credits rolled, so count me as one of those who was still profoundly affected by the death of Airiam. Yes, it would have been nice to have known about her for awhile, but, at least she has pretty much always been around rather than some random character introduced into this episode; that she was at least developed somewhat in this episode (rather than still getting no background development at all; and finally, the actors all did a hell of a job in selling. Therefore: gutpunch achieved
It’s very immature of Spock to make the glib response “not by blood” or “not biological” when the reference was made that he and Burnham are siblings. As if being genetically related is absolutely necessary to have a familial bond. That whole attitude is very dismissive of families that have adopted or foster members. Family is often the people we choose to have in our lives.
@krad: “We learn that she (Airiam) has limited memory capacity…” What I told from that scene was the Airiam has a huge memory capacity (as I tend to just associate with machines and advanced cybernetic creatures) but because she is basically always recording, she just deletes stuff that isn’t really all that important to free up some more space. So I didn’t take it like she runs out of memory space relatively fast. But perhaps I need to re-watch the scene to be sure.
@krad: “…Bruce, Rhys, and Airiam are still pretty much glorified extras.” Extras that at least got their SAG card for having lines on the show! That’s a big step up in the life of an actor from being just a regular extra. Honestly, I’m just jealous of them all and would kill to be an extra, glorified or not, on the series!
@krad: “It (Control) has also killed the four admirals we saw…last week.” Is it a question of whether Control had already killed those admirals prior to when we saw them conversing holographically with Leland and Georgiou? Meaning, were those admirals in fact purely holograms that were created by Control and deceiving those Section 31 operatives.
I read a review of this episode on another website and I agree with that reviewer in the disappointment of the revelation that it’s Control that is pulling the hand-strings of all of the evil machinations going on this season and so it hasn’t been generated by Section 31 after all. Therefore, it’s lazy writing that the writers are falling back on the age-old sci-fi trope of A.I. that computers have gotten too smart, and therefore eeeevil, and so Skynet wipes out humanity. Rather, the more intriguing adversary for our intrepid band of heroes would be facing off against Section 31 who operate in shades of grey and believe the ends justify the means.
Where is Jet Reno?!? We’re 9 episodes in and she’s only made 2 appearances. Likewise, it’s a shame we’ve only seen Number One briefly in only a single episode so far. But still, she’s off ship which is a good explanation for her absence but Reno is aboard Discovery. Just seems strange that she had a prominent introduction in the season premiere and then she’s nearly forgotten about.
What if the writers have no idea where the plot is going, and they are just lurking around forums like this one looking for ideas. Maybe we are the actual writers of this show. (by the way, plot twist, the Red Angel is Guinan)
Based on a recent rewatch of the first season of Lost in Space, I’d say that that show was actually the first attempt at a “grown up” sci-fi series. It was only in the later seasons that the camp component was dialed up.
@GHiller: That’s a good point about memory capacity. My PC has a 2TB capacity hard drive that’s only about 40% full. And I do regular file cleanups, get rid of junk files, run a decrapifier. Airiam is basically filing her memories, perhaps doing the equivalent of our short-term memory processing. Later, she fully downloads all her memory files and she seems to have room to upload all the data that the Sphere acquired over a 100,000 years on AIs. That has to be a lot. She’s already sent several large bursts (petabytes of data), so not sure why she has to carry the rest physically to Control.
Btw, I’m still holding out hope that “Calypso” will be utilized in the main season. Maybe Airiam’s full downloaded memories have something to do with Discovery‘s systems attaining sentience. Is Zora really Airiam?
Also, it was stated that the admirals have been dead for two weeks. We don’t know how much time has passed since last week’s episode. Spock has been around long enough to observe and give love advice to Stamets about Culber… but it’s likely less than two weeks.
Also also, I’m truly disappointed that they announced Number One’s casting as a big deal, then it turns into barely a cameo. Same with Reno. We’re supposed to assume she’s around, that this large level of activity from the crew all around, but it still feels unnatural and a bit claustrophobic. This is true of the show as a whole, though. It’s a small world. Except for the stakes. The stakes are always huge. It’s not “This AI enemy from the future destroys several planets.” It’s “It destroys ALL sentient life in the galaxy!” A bit lower stakes, or smaller arcs, next season would be good.
Part of the being commander is the ability to order crew to death / suicide missions (Deanna Troi in ST:TNG’s Thine Own Self) – sometimes you got to sacrifice someone to save others (“The need of many…”). Yet Burnham cannot press the button. No can do. Thank gods for Nhan! If I were Pike, I would not put her in any mission but keep her glued to the science officer’s desk or kitchen.
@50 “If I were Pike, I would not put her in any mission but keep her glued to the science officer’s desk…” – Fair point, though there’s a large difference between giving an order that will result in a crew member’s death and taking direct action to kill them.
“…or kitchen.” – Please explain.
@46/GHiller: I wonder if Reno is a casualty of the change in showrunners, which would’ve taken effect after about the fourth episode of the season, I think. Maybe Berg & Harberts had plans for Reno that Kurtzman decided to move away from when he took over.
@48/kkozoriz: “Based on a recent rewatch of the first season of Lost in Space, I’d say that that show was actually the first attempt at a “grown up” sci-fi series. It was only in the later seasons that the camp component was dialed up.”
No, because camp is not the same thing as children’s programming. On the contrary, camp is humor aimed at adult viewers who are able to recognize its irony and subtext. If you’re a child watching Batman ’66 or Lost in Space, you take it totally seriously as an adventure show (I certainly did). It’s only when you’re older that you’re able to see how it’s making fun of itself. There are lots of children’s shows that are not campy (e.g. Filmation’s Shazam and Isis, which were ultra-wholesome and earnest and not at all self-mocking, even though they were often unintentionally laughable), and lots of adult shows that are campy (e.g. The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a spy series that was co-created by Ian Fleming and full of gunplay and womanizing, but that took a turn toward extreme camp in its final two seasons).
Lost in Space was initially an adventure show that was played straight, yes, but one that was aimed at children. Lots of children’s adventure stories are played straight. Lost in Space was specifically based on The Swiss Family Robinson, which was originally an adventure novel written by a pastor to teach wholesome values to his children, and which spawned a pair of family-friendly film adaptations, including a Walt Disney adaptation in 1960s. It was meant to be a family-oriented adventure show about survival, suitable for all ages. The change from adventure to low comedy didn’t change its target age. Even at the start, it was aired at 7:30, the family viewing hour — the same time that other 1965-6 shows like The Flintstones and The Munsters aired. Viewers at the time certainly would not have seen it as equivalent to an adult drama of the era like Run for Your Life or I Spy or The Long Hot Summer (all 10 PM shows) — more in the vein of a lightweight action show like The Wild Wild West or Daniel Boone (which were also in the 7:30 time slot).
Shouldn’t it have been Tilly on the station at the end, refusing to flush her friend into space? Instead we get Michael, who barely seemed to know Airiam…
@53: Tilly is too junior of an officer to go on most away missions. Burnham is an experienced commander-rank officer and former first officer of a starship so right call on Burnham. Thematically it was also important to have Burnham faced with the dilemma of having to send Airiam to her death because earlier in the episode you had the rant by Spoke aimed at Burnham that her big flaw is unnecessarily burdening herself with others’ problems because she still harbors guilt at what she perceives is her fault for the death of her parents. That, plus, also being the indirect cause of the death of her former captain, would understandably create great emotional anguish in her at being ordered to have Airiam blown out into space. And we did see one memory of Airiam’s where Burnham gives her a broad smile so at the very least they were friendly, if not best friends the way Airiam is with Tilly or Detmer. I think it was enough that we got their heartfelt reactions back on the bridge.
But everything’s about Michael. It had to her.
@49: the stakes being so huge all the time are way over the top but that is consistent Star Trek-kian thing. We went from the big Klingon-Federation war of the first season of DSC where the Federation was losing to this where the whole galaxy is at stake. I guess the writers needed to top the first season! But they could have easily made the stakes simply the prevention of the destruction of Earth. It’s worked for about half of the Trek movies!
@krad: “The more I see of this season, the more I want them to do a spin-off…with Mount”. I originally wanted a spin-off with this version of the pre-Kirk Enterprise crew because the actors are hitting it out of the park, especially Mount, and because of the great characters obviously, and then there is just the potential for a lot of interesting backstory on these people to flesh out as they go about their adventures. But then I didn’t want a spin-off thinking about the very depressing event of Pike’s disfigurement which I saw as the conclusion to any spin-off about him. But now I’m back on with the idea of a spin-off again because after having re-watched “The Menagerie” two-parter recently, it occurred to me a good end point for a Pike spin-off would be where he triumphantly but bittersweetly hands over command to the Enterprise and Spock meets Kirk for the first time. And all of fandom can go into a tizzy speculating on what actor makes a Kirk cameo in the that spin-off’s series finale!
It would be nice to see the events fold out that led to Airiam being augmented. A Short Trek perhaps? I would have to imagine though that she had to consent to being augmented to such a degree because that is such a drastic reconstruction of someone and not everyone in a similar situation of being near death would want that. They’d prefer death. So it would be great to see if she did in fact give her consent to some radical augment experiment to save her, what in fact her motivation was. An obvious thing would be a child or children of her own but there was no evidence of that in her memories.
I see a lot of people commenting (whining) on why everything has to be about Michael – because it’s SMG’s freaking show! She is the star of the series no less than Patrick Stewart was to his or Avery Brooks on his and so on and so forth. Just because Michael isn’t the captain or the commander of a starbase doesn’t mean the stories shouldn’t revolve around her. The very design of this series to set it apart from prior iterations was to take the viewpoint of a junior officer and the arc is Michael’s path to redemption. So get used to it by now or just abandon ship, because we’re going to continue to see a lot more of “everything being about Michael.”
Yeah but every single episode wasn’t about Picard, which BTW was a great pity, and he wasn’t the hinge on which the universe turned. Actually I have no problem exploring Michael’s family drama or in this case her grief and guilt over eliminating a fellow officer. My problem is the way greater social and political and now theological issues invariably center on her.
@58: this being a heavily serialized show, unlike the stand-alone nature of pretty much every other Trek series, it’s hard for this particular series not to feature it’s star in every episode or tie her into whatever major arc is going on in that particular season. Besides, we’ve gotten plenty of B-stories, not to mention the Short Treks, which have greatly developed the supporting characters like Tilly and Saru.
@56/GHiller: “the stakes being so huge all the time are way over the top but that is consistent Star Trek-kian thing.”
Huh? I remember lots of Star Trek episodes where the stakes were the survival of the ship, or the landing party, or where nobody was in mortal danger.
“it occurred to me a good end point for a Pike spin-off would be where he triumphantly but bittersweetly hands over command to the Enterprise and Spock meets Kirk for the first time.”
I hope not. I’m really worried that they will throw in Kirk at some point, and that it will be Common Consciousness Kirk instead of TOS Kirk.
Please, Discovery writers, leave Kirk alone.
@GHiller: “I see a lot of people commenting (whining) on why everything has to be about Michael”
Don’t think I was complaining. But it is funny when the show itself contains the dialogue, “Everything is because of you.” Being the star of the show shouldn’t mean every single thread connects back to your character. That’s a bit much.
@60/JanaJansen: I said it was a “consistent thing”, not an all the time thing – some of my personal favorite episodes are ones where the stakes are very much personal like in “The Measure of a Man”. But it can’t be denied that on both seasons of Discovery and other Trek spin-offs, and in many of the movies, the stakes are the Earth or Federation of the known universe. Kirk even jokingly makes meta-reference to this at the end of Star Trek VI that once again he and his crew have saved the galaxy.
Regarding Discovery using Kirk, I say once they brought on Spock all bets are off. Whatever is good for business, i.e., more subscribers to CBS All Access is paramount to the showrunners. I wouldn’t be surprised to see further members of TOS gang to pop up along here and there during the run of Discovery.
@60 Jana: If.. if… they bring in a young Kirk, who would you cast in the role?
@52 – But Star Trek didn’t air after 9 pm when it started either. It’s timeslot was 8:30 to 9:30 on Thursdays. Still family viewing hour, at least for the first half of the episode. And when it was moved to 10 pm on Fridays, rating plummeted. A part of that would be due to the Friday slot but also, a lot of viewers were younger. Just look at how many times people have said that they stayed up late to watch Star Trek. And the premiere won it’s timeslot with a 40 share but that was mostly against reruns. The next episode dropped to a 29 share, The two after that dropped to 33rd in the ratings and the next two were 51st.
Star Trek never averaged higher than 52nd in the ratings over it’s three seasons, Lost in Space ranked 32, 35, 33 over it’s three seasons, actually going up a spot in the final season. Obviously someone more than just children were watching it.
In regards to this episode, it would have made more of an impact if we had known something more about Airiam instead of getting the infodump in the first few minutes of the episode that kills her off at the end. It’s like the writers decided at the las minute to kill her off and then realized that we don’t really know anything about her. Best friends with Tilley? Could have fooled me. Friends with Burnham? Since when? Did we ever see them exchange more than six words that weren’t work related? Suddenly, everyone is totally torn up over this character and it seems to come out of nowhere.
Oh goody, Starfleet isn’t the bad guys of Section 31 after all. It’s an evil AI. Well, that washes their hands clean of all of it. Well, except for the fact that it’s already existed for a hundred years and will continue for over a hundred more. It would have been a lot more dramatic and realistic if Section 31 was actually a group of people doing the wrong things for the right reasons, a slippery slope that even their fellow Starfleet comrades couldn’t see until it was well underway. But, it’s just a bad robot so they’re guilty of nothing other than following orders. Which isn’t an excuse by any means but it would have been nice to actually see some conflict based on real, human interactions.
Why does Burnham start out slamming the locked door with the phaser rife instead of shooting at it? Sure, she did that later but it’s like she forgot that a phaser rifle can be used as something other than a club. Ah, dramatic, gotcha.
It makes you wonder if Spock (and the rest?) are going to have be mindwiped or the big red reset button will be pushed at the end. I’ll have to watch it again but wasn’t Spock standing right there when Pike was talking about cloaking tech? Then why is he surprised by in just a few years later in Balance of Terror? The whole episode is based on the Enterprise encountering some tech that they’ve never encountered before and trying to figure out how to defeat it. Either it’s reset, mindwipe and then Starfleet purges all knowledge of cloaking tech and send ships off into the unknown without knowledge of an already known technology.
It’s interesting to see Admiral Genocide Cornwell talking about ethics, knowing full well what she almost accomplished last season.
The key issue for me is the ridiculously high stakes and how Burnham alone can save the day. A Starfleet officer messing up her first command and having to win back the respect of her colleagus as well as her self respect could have been a fascinating arc against a background of normal exploration. But that would have required much better writing than a big honking war of extermination.
@61, Sunspear, , I think GHiller meant me. I am whinging.
@65: I meant most people in general “whining” about Michael but yours was the most recent so it spurred me to comment. :)
People might not complain as much about Burnham if they ever bothered to do something substantial with the character besides connecting her to Sarek, Amanda, and Spock and their family issues. At least Sybok had his own philosophy.
As for a Pike series, why not? I mean, sure, a prequel where the lead is doomed to be horribly injured and placed in a machine that drastically alters his “voice” is a prequel with success written all over it. Right? Right…?
Connecting Burnham with the Sarek family was a cheap way of getting us to care about her. Not really working is it?
@67. Spike: I see what you did there… But Pike didn’t need a CPAP machine strapped to his face. Also, the original Pike walked on water… So Trek is the superior franchise, right?
Then again, this Pike couldn’t even use his voice in his last series…
@67/Spike: I confess I don’t understand the argument “A prequel wouldn’t work because we know the character has a tragic fate,” because, really, that describes every non-immortal character ever. Like Orson Welles said, the difference between a happy ending and a tragic one comes down to where you end your story. Pike’s injury was only a few weeks or months prior to “The Menagerie,” nearly a decade in Discovery‘s future, which is more than enough time for a complete TV series run.
And it’s not like it would be the first time we saw a prequel about a doomed or tragic character. Practically every pre-established character in the Star Wars prequel trilogy besides the droids was someone we’d already seen die in the original trilogy or who was stated to have died before it — Anakin Skywalker, Luke & Leia’s mother, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, Palpatine, even Owen and Beru. Not to mention that it asked us to accept Anakin as a hero despite knowing he’d become one of the most evil beings in the galaxy. Two different Syfy shows, Caprica and Krypton, have been prequels about entire worlds that were destroyed in the preceding narratives. Several direct-to-video films in the Japanese Kamen Rider franchise have been flashback stories about earlier adventures in the lives of characters who had died in the main series years before.
Indeed, I submit that’s one of the reasons for doing a prequel at all — to go back and explore a past that’s been lost, to find out the beginning or middle of a story we already know the end of.
It was a joke, Christopher. Chill, dude.
@68. Well, it ain’t working for me. Might be for other fans. Shrugs.
@69. Trek will always be the older sibling little Wars secretly envies. I mean, did you see how the Last Jedi was trying real hard to have social commentary in it? Hmm… reminds me of another space franchise… that can do it much better.
@68 It was a tactic used by so, so, so, so, sooooo many fanfic writers over the years. I honestly do not know what they were thinking. [Character]’s secret sister goes on their own adventure is such a cliche that it is a good way to get a fanfic mocked to death, never mind an actual show. If they can drop Burnham, Saru, and Tilly in the S3 soft reboot, then I’ll give the series another chance.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Stamets replaced with Jet Reno. Assuming she didn’t get blown out an airlock or something.
@Spike: That commentary was very awkwardly inserted. It was almost as bad as the chemistry-free, forced “romance” between Anakin and Amidala.
Then again, Trek had ST3: Spock Bangs Saavik to Survive Pon Farr.
@64/kkozoriz: Of course Star Trek was on early, but that’s because network execs had never seen an adult-oriented, non-anthology science fiction drama before and assumed that ST was family-oriented like all the other SF shows of the day. Not because those other shows were adult too.
@75. Yep, they’re usually best when they stay in their respective lanes.
I heard someone theorize that George Lucas was watching lots of Star Trek in the 90s while he was writing The Phantom Menace, to explain the infamous scene with the tricorder-like device and the midichlorians. Sounds about right to me.
And then Star Trek was guilty of mystical characters shooting energy from their hands. Looking at you, Deep Space 9!
@chris B/Some number back up there in the 20s..
You are correct, its a stretch the longer the show goes, depending on the time line of each season. A season could be a year in ‘real time’ or depending on the theme compressed into a few weeks. You could keep Pike in command for at least one season, possibly 2, depending on the framing, without overstretching (or at least far less overstretching than Trek has done in the past).
I think the intent was for Pike to be a one season Captain (I am still wondering if the net plan is a new Captain every season to see how the crew reacts differently or they just hadn’t found the secret sauce yet). Which goes to the above. Mount by all accounts is nailing the role (and I am super excited to see him at Shore Leave – rare for guests to get me that interested), so I can certainly see them stretching a little to keep him around for a while (and yes, possibly set up a spinoff).
@78 It does seem like Captain of the Discovery is like becoming Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor at Hogwarts, doesn’t it.
@76 – Surely they actually watched it before putting it on the air. It’s not like it was scheduled and the next day around the water cooler, all the NBC execs involved were going “What the heck was that on at 8L30 last night?”
So much of the mystique of Star Trek being this thing that TV just didn’t understand is so much bull that Rodenberry came up with. Yeah, it was a fairly adult show but it’s not like it was a “thing that has never been seen before”, except in the idea that the ship wasn’t a rocket or a saucer and things like that. If they’d seen a western that was it’s one little morality plays, they’d know exactly what it was. The only thing different was the setting, lasers (later phasers) instead of six shooters.
Didn’t Star Trek essentially follow the same trajectory as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea? Started out kind of serious in its first season but got more outlandish as it went along.
@81/mel: “Didn’t Star Trek essentially follow the same trajectory as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea? Started out kind of serious in its first season but got more outlandish as it went along.”
To some degree, yes, but not to the same extent. Basically where Trek ended up on the seriousness/credibility scale was about on a par with where most Irwin Allen shows started out.
@81 Janice Lester would beg to differ. If it hadn’t been for that meddling Spock…
My pet theory is that we’ll get a captain per season. So Lorca in S1, Pike in S2, some other captains TBD in upcoming seasons, ending with Burnham as the captain in the final season. That does something completely different with the series while also maintaining some continuity with Kirk/Picard/Sisko/Janeway/Archer.
@62/GHiller: “But it can’t be denied that on both seasons of Discovery and other Trek spin-offs, and in many of the movies, the stakes are the Earth or Federation of the known universe.”
That’s certainly true about the movies, and it’s one of the reasons why I prefer Star Trek on TV. But apparently serialised TV is even worse than movies in this respect. They only had big stakes in every other movie.
@63/Sunspear: “If.. if… they bring in a young Kirk, who would you cast in the role?”
Interesting question, but I can’t answer it, for two reasons. First, I’ve come to see how much Kirk owes to William Shatner, and I can’t quite see anyone else in the role; second, I watch very little US films and TV and don’t know many young actors. Some general thoughts: It should be someone who brings the “boy next door” quality, both in looks and behaviour. Someone who can radiate authority and warmth, sincerity, seriousness, and playfulness. But my greatest worry is that they will turn him into the arrogant, misogynistic rebel who never stops to think he has become in many people’s minds.
@77/Spike: “I heard someone theorize that George Lucas was watching lots of Star Trek in the 90s while he was writing The Phantom Menace, to explain the infamous scene with the tricorder-like device and the midichlorians.”
He also showed an actual parliament, and Anakin and Padme had talks about democracy in “Attack of the Clones”. I enjoyed that, which probably shows that I’m not made out to be a Star Wars fan.
“And then Star Trek was guilty of mystical characters shooting energy from their hands. Looking at you, Deep Space 9!”
Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner did that in 1966.
@80/kkozoriz: “If they’d seen a western that was it’s one little morality plays, they’d know exactly what it was. The only thing different was the setting, lasers (later phasers) instead of six shooters.”
One thing they couldn’t do in westerns was the Gulliver’s Travel-like usage of alien societies for social commentary. That was something of a hallmark of old-school Star Trek.
@85. Yes, but Mitchell and Dehner weren’t quite as firey and overtly evil as the Pah Wraiths. It was a bit much.
@62/GHiller: “But it can’t be denied that on both seasons of Discovery and other Trek spin-offs, and in many of the movies, the stakes are the Earth or Federation of the known universe.”
True, that was a well TOS rarely went to. The only time in TOS that there was ever a threat to the entire universe was in “The Alternative Factor.” The closest thing to a threat to the entire galaxy was the planned Kelvan invasion centuries in the future. And there was never a threat to Earth until ST:TMP, though it became a recurring trope in later movies.
Still, dangers to the whole universe are surprisingly rare in later canonical Trek as well, compared to other sci-fi franchises. Time-travel events that threaten to transform the known universe are fairly common, but when it comes to threats that could destroy the universe, all I can think of prior to Discovery is DS9’s “Playing God,” an iteration of the “baby universe threatening to expand into and destroy our own” trope. Threats to the galaxy as a whole are pretty rare as well. It was implied that the Q Civil War in “The Q and the Gray” would’ve devastated much of the galaxy if it had gone on for much longer, and in ENT season 3, the Sphere-Builders’ transformation of space would presumably have gradually engulfed the galaxy or beyond if it hadn’t been stopped.
So really, the “save the galaxy/universe” trope is quite rare in canonical Trek, although it shows up considerably more often in tie-in literature, particularly in ’80s novels. In Pocket’s very first original Trek novel, Vonda N. McIntyre’s The Entropy Effect, Professor Mordreaux’s time experiments were accelerating entropy and threatening to bring about the end of the universe in less than a century. Greg Bear’s sole Trek novel, Corona, involved a primordial entity seeking to restart the universe with a new Big Bang. In Diane Duane’s first Trek novel The Wounded Sky, the incursion of an alien universe threatened to destroy a huge portion of our universe, including our galaxy. The Romulans’ alteration to history in Della Van Hise’s Killing Time somehow destabilized the universe and threatened to destroy all life, though the book referred to it interchangeably as a threat to the galaxy and to the universe. The breakdown of the Guardian of Forever in A.C. Crispin’s Time For Yesterday threatened the end of the universe, as did the incursion of yet another newborn universe in Barbara Paul’s The Three-Minute Universe.
Big threats kind of lose their impact when they become a season staple don’t you think?
Giles: this could be the End of the World!
Scooby Gang: Again?
I find that there’s a point when a threat in a story becomes so large I stop caring about it. For whatever reason, I can more easily connect with a ship or maybe a planet being in danger than an entire solar system, galaxy, or the universe. It’s like the macro becomes the micro, if that makes sense. Like a joke exaggerated for maximum absurdity. The galaxy might as well be another marble in the Men in Black marble bag.
…Michael is the focus of the show because she’s the main character. Sisko was the Emissary of the Prophets with stakes just as high, during the Dominion War. Archer had to deal with high stakes during the Xindi threat. I don’t understand why with Burnham it’s different, why all the complaints. Because Burnham is not in command? Her character is still the lead…
…And Burnham takes a beating in this one. First from her brother, then with Airiam’s ( I hope I spelled that right) death. Spock, in brutal honesty, told Burnham that it’s illogical of her to think that everything that has gone wrong, every tragedy in her life, she could have prevented, as far back as somehow saving her parents from the Klingons as a small child. This, I think, is what Spock has been holding onto all these years, the source of frustration he has with Burnham that kept him from reconciling with her.
It was that line of thinking that led Michael to abandon Spock, at least from Spock’s perspective, and it continued into adulthood with the Klingon War, Georgiou’s death, all of which Michael thinks she could have prevented. This Red Angel business finally brought all this to the surface.
Now that the cat’s out of the bag, I hope Spock and Michael can find there way back to a healthy sibling relationship, whatever that may look like. I confess I have little experience in healthy sibling relationships myself, as I am not particularly close with any of my five siblings.
I wish we had actually spent the last season and a half, or at least this season, learning at least bits and pieces about Airiam, so we could grieve her properly along with the Discovery crew. As it is, the gut punch is seeing the crew lose someone who was clearly a friend. I’m glad Commander Nhan survives, as I was afraid we had lost her, too.
…And so the threat is an AI gone bad. Oh. I see. Well that is disappointing, but yeah…
@87: I was exaggerating when I got to “the known universe” part of my statement as somewhat in jest that the stakes on Star Trek can sometimes be rediculously huge, as if that is what the writers think that needs to be the case in order to get their audience to emotionally invest in the story. But another example of huge stakes is on TNG in “All Good Things” when the time anomaly 4 billion years ago prevents the formation of life in the Alpha Quadrant including Earth. Presumably the further back in time you go it would affect the whole galaxy and then the known universe!
Not sure if this was mentioned as the comments are quite long but one thing that bothered me about the writing of this episode is that Michael didnt seem to care about Nhan to check if she was ok, even when she got Airium in the airlock.
As a side note, a Pike series would be cool despite the Menagerie ending – too bad the series name Enterprise was already use for Bakula’s series
@62 – Don’t forget the “supernova” that Spock stopped with the red matter in the reboot. It was specifically said by Spock that it would destroy the galaxy. Although how dumping a substance that makes black holes into a black hole is on the path to madness and best not thought about too much.
…Also, as for a Pike series, yes please. Anson Mount as Pike is easily the best thing about this season. We know that Pike and Spock eventually go back to the Enterprise, so this is an oppurtunity to further flesh out those lost years. Come on, CBS, I would gladly shell out money for that.
@90. Dante: For me, it’s not that she’s the focus of the show. It’s the way the character is written, perhaps. No issue with SMG either, although she was more compelling on TWD.
Just look at Airiam’s line from the episode, “Everything is because of you.” That just sounds grandiose. Guess we’ll find out what that means exactly in next week’s episode “The Red Angel.”
Or consider Spock’s line from last episode. After we see his vision during which several planets are destroyed, I assumed it was the destruction of the Federation’s Founding worlds. But he says, “The final outcome of our current timeline… a future in which all sentient life in our galaxy has been eradicated.” That’s a quantum leap from what was shown. And it’s not necessary. It’s a huge galaxy, with many unknowns remaining. No need to make it all or nothing. And not all galaxy ending events need to come back to Burnham.
(Btw, the mismatch of special effects to dialogue has happened before and we get one here. We see planets go “BOOM” and Burnham thereafter says, “The barren planets.” Well no, they are now clouds of rock.)
Perhaps more nuanced writing can fix some of this. Or maybe treat it more as an ensemble show. This season has improved by fleshing out some of the other bridge crew. As someone mentioned, a new captain next season may keep the character dynamics interesting. Although I wouldn’t mind Pike sticking around, it doesn’t seem reasonable that he’d abandon the Enterprise after the conclusion of the Red Angel mission.
Michael as the absolute center of everything may be simply an artifact of the original Fuller design. Some of that design should have been abandoned already, like the spore drive. The more time passes, the more I think Fuller was trolling with that one.
@91/GHiller: “part of my statement as somewhat in jest that the stakes on Star Trek can sometimes be rediculously huge…”
Yes, but what I meant to convey is that Star Trek is less guilty of that than a lot of other sci-fi franchises. Look at Doctor Who under Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat, where practically every season finale for several years involved the entire universe being endangered or actually destroyed and then un-destroyed.
That’s why it was annoying when DSC season 1 threw in that unnecessary threat to the entire multiverse. Trek has usually shown more restraint than that.
As for “All Good Things…”, I guess that does basically qualify. But I tend to assume that the whole thing was just an illusion Q created for Picard, because I’ve never believed the alternate realities he creates are as real as he claims.
@92: As many others pointed out, it’s funny in a way that poor Nhan is neglected by Burnham and everyone back on Discovery watching events unfold, but practically, if you’re Burnham and trying to prevent Airiam from uploading the bio-Sphere data to Control which would lead to the prophesied event of all life in the galaxy being eradicated – I think stopping Airiam would be priority #1 at the expense of poor Nhan. But hey, Nhan survives and actually saves the day!
Agreed that a Pike series would be great. Yes, he ends up tragically disfigured although his ultimate fate is the “happy ending” back on Talos IV with Vina. However, a proper series ending for Pike could be the event of when he hands over command of the Enterprise to Kirk. Said series thus ends on an uplifting note.
Yes, “Enterprise” is already used as a series name but I think “Star Trek: The Final Frontier” also works because just like “Enterprise”, “The Final Frontier” is synonymous with “Star Trek”.
@91/GHiller: “But another example of huge stakes is on TNG in “All Good Things” when the time anomaly 4 billion years ago prevents the formation of life in the Alpha Quadrant including Earth.”
Oh yes. That was a neatly constructed episode, but I’ve never quite liked it, for exactly that reason.
@96/Christopher: “I tend to assume that the whole thing was just an illusion Q created for Picard, because I’ve never believed the alternate realities he creates are as real as he claims.”
Good retcon!
@93 I choose to believe that the Romulan supernova sat on a tehnobabble quantum anomaly of some kind, or it was going to emit those “Omega Particles” that VOY came up with. Obviously that is just my headcanon, but maybe the upcoming Picard series can fix it. It is going to have to be an epic fixfic of a show, really.
@97. Final Frontier is a good title. If only it hadn’t been wasted on the fifth movie!
@99. I hope the Picard series, which is rumored to have the title Star Trek: Destiny, will ignore the precise cause of the Romulan supernova and just deal with the fallout. Something something, the Empire is a mess, and go from there. I don’t think it needs to get bogged down in too much Trek 2009 silliness. But then, there is the Kurtzman connection…
@97, I like the idea of ending it with a handover to Kirk
Its too bad Discovery doesn’t do any cameos. Seth McFarlane must be stealing all of them. It would be great to have Shatner do a cameo in at least one in his lifetime but the issue is his age now does not jive with him dying in Genesis. Maybe a mirror Kirk or maybe he could play Tiberius Kirk or something.
Also would love to see T’Pol make a cameo – since Vulcans live long, it could be written in.
It’s true that Roddenberry intended Star Trek as a drama to be taken seriously. It’s also true that Roddenberry wasn’t the only producer working on Star Trek. An episode like “I, Mudd” pretty much meets the textbook definition of camp. I’d wager the producers and actors were aware of that at the time. It’s also true that Roddenberry objected to some of the sillier moments in the second season of TOS. If we look at the third season, I suppose the professor in this comments section would have us believe “Spock’s Brain” and “The Way to Eden” were intended to be serious, hard-hitting sci-fi drama. (Yes, the writer of “Eden” was trying to make a point, a show can be campy and also endeavor to make a point.)
Part of the format of Star Trek is to allow many modes, ranging from tragic drama to occasionally, tongue-in-cheek farce.
The professor has an idealized notion of Star Trek; he’s being selective in what evidence he cites so as to present his preferred variety of Star Trek as THE Star Trek.
@102/Midge Cronin: No, “I, Mudd” was comedy, not camp. The words are not interchangeable. Camp is a particular style of comedy, one that actively mocks and condescends to its own premise or genre by portraying it as intrinsically absurd, and often having the characters within it take that absurdity with ludicrous hyperseriousness, as in Batman ’66 and Airplane! In “I, Mudd,” the characters were in on the joke, and indeed were actively using comedy as a weapon. It wasn’t a story where the writers were making fun of the characters and their reality, but one where the characters found themselves in a situation where they had a plausible reason for knowingly embracing absurdity.
As for “Spock’s Brain,” yes, that was pretty campy. But let me make clear once again: I am not generalizing about what ST actually was. I am speaking about its origins and inspirations, what it was and was not intended to be. It is well-documented that Roddenberry meant it to be an exception to the SFTV of the time, not merely more of the same. The templates he encouraged his writers to follow were the classiest adult dramas of the age, and he spoke scornfully of the rest of ’60s SFTV (aside from The Twilight Zone and maybe The Outer Limits) as the sort of thing that Trek’s writers should avoid. Like Rod Serling before him, he aspired to use science fiction as a vehicle for intelligent, meaningful storytelling with a message. At its best, ST was far, far beyond the quality of any of its non-anthology contemporaries, and at its worst, it was comparable to the better seasons of Irwin Allen’s ouevre. That’s why Trek became such an enduring phenomenon — because it was absolutely not just more of the same lowbrow crap. Because it strove to be something far smarter and deeper, and it usually succeeded.
I don’t know what you’re talking about with “the professor.” I’m not speaking of an abstract ideal. I’m speaking of my lived experience growing up watching SFTV in the ’70s and reruns of ’60s shows. Until the late ’80s, Star Trek was just about the only really intelligent, classy science fiction show in a sea of schlock. That was so much a constant in my childhood and early adulthood that it still surprises me to see how completely differently the current generation sees it. It’s great that there are so many other worthy SF franchises coexisting now, but it’s sad that people today can’t experience how extraordinary Star Trek was in my youth.
@100: I don’t see why a TV/streaming series couldn’t be titled “The Final Frontier”. After all, “Star Trek: First Contact” reused an episode name. Why can’t it work in reverse?
@104/GHiller: “After all, “Star Trek: First Contact” reused an episode name.”
So did Nemesis, though that was a Voyager episode.
@99 – Or the people that are writing Star Trek don’t know or don’t care about making the science even slightly believable. Much like all the overly dense asteroid fields. Discovery started out with one that was so dense, even a shuttle couldn’t get through it. Of course, how the Klingon ship got in there or was going to get out was left as an exercise to the viewer.
@103/Christopher: I thought that “Spock’s Brain” was supposed to be serious, it just didn’t work.
My teenage daughters took TOS seriously when I showed it to them four years ago . But then, I live in Germany, where the younger generation hasn’t even heard of Star Trek, so they didn’t have any preconceived notions about it. My older daughter literally said: “Why doesn’t anybody know this? This is much better than Star Wars!” Then she went off and discovered Doctor Who.
@107. Jana: I have a high school friend who was often overly analytical and serious. He tried to be funny, but his puns were terrible. He started watching TOS with his two girls in their early teens and they loved Spock. One day they turned to him and said, “Daddy, you are Spock!”
They also watched Sliders and had crushes on Jerry O’Connell, but that’s a different story.
@108/Sunspear: Lovely story! Did he feel flattered?
@104. Sure they could reuse Final Frontier, though TNG had the advantage of reusing a title from something that was good. ;-)
@111: But that was my kinda my original point – use the name for something that might actually turn out good. ;o)
@111/GHiller: They could call it “Strange New Worlds”. Then they might feel obliged to actually visit some.
@109. Jana: Yes, he was beaming when he told me. But didn’t quite get why I was chuckling…
@112/Jana: That’s a good contender for a series name too!
@107/Jana: It’s hard to say about “Spock’s Brain.” Basically, camp is a parody of inept things that take themselves too seriously, so it can be hard to tell the difference between something that’s like that unintentionally and something that does it on purpose.
This episode was alright, and that’s all. Yes, they gave us something to care about Airiam, but it still wasn’t enough. I wish the actress and the character had had more to do during the season, this feels like they only decided to do this when writing the previous episode, and then crammed her background and personality into this episode in a rush.
The little tidbits of memories, including that kadis-kot conversation, are wonderfully scripted, acted, and directed, but as you say, krad, they’re too little too late. I do admit that the other characters’ reactions to her death were well-acted, so it had more impact than a standard redshirt.
On another note, they’re really leaning into “S31’s Control is an evil AI”, I wonder how David Mack feels about this…
@30 – IndianaJoe: Obviously, the complete disconnect between Pike’s chair and Airiam’s implants (replacements?) is something you have to handwave due to the 50 years that have gone by. But, the extreme sofistication of Airiam’s cybernetic technology not being used in later years might be explained by saying that they found out they were too easy to hack, and made people too vulnerable.
@46 – GHiller: I’m pretty sure Tilly said Airiam needs to delete stuff.
@47 – IndianaJoe: Except the season was written and filmed months ago.
@49 – Sunspear: Zora might not be Airiam, but she might be a descendant, so to speak.
@51 – Zodda: I think that “or kitchen” was pretty clear… :|
@52 – Chris: Reno might be a casualty stemming from the change in showrunners, yes. I do hope that the current showrunners notice that part of the audience liked her, and maybe consider using her in season 3. On the other hand, as much as I like Reno (Tig Notaro’s deadpan delivery is great, and she is all around a good addition to the cast for several reasons), maybe they felt that the “quirky wonder worker” spot in the cast is already filld by Tilly, even if their quirks and wonder-solving skills/ways are different.
@73 – random22: Sure, they’ll drop the star of the show and two of the most well-received characters, including their best actor (Doug Jones). Hah.
@85 – Jana: I enjoye those things about the prequels, and I’m a big Star Wars fan. I’m also not alone in that among SW fans.
I loved this episode – albeit not quite as much as last week. For me, the death of Airiam hit about as hard as losing Chekov or Nurse Chapel during Season 2 of TOS would’ve been.
I know a lot of people have stated that more time with Airiam would’ve made the death hit harder, but to me, Airiam’s demise was every bit as hard-hitting as Sito Jaxa from “The Lower Decks” was.
I know it’s starting to feel a little redundant to praise Anson Mount, but that moment where he realizes the horror of the order he’s about to give (killing Airiam to save the ship) and then gives it anyway is a master class in what I call “small moment” acting. We see it wash over him in less than a second.
I liked that Nhan survived as we finally learned more about her species – and what the “headgear” was for.
I was torn about Spock’s scenes. The argument with Michael was a strange one. I really didn’t feel like the violent outburst at the end was all that well-earned, though I did like the fact that it was the mention of Sarek that started that ball rolling. On the other hand, the scenes with Stamets in Engineering/Sporeville were fantastic. Particularly the last one where Spock talks with Stamets about Culber.
As for Airiam herself, I was pleased that we saw her briefly in her off time and that she was “one of the girls” despite her notable differences from them. Also kind of interesting that rank apparently isn’t an issue as Tilly’s an ensign, both Owosekun and Detmer are lieutenants (if memory serves), Airiam is a Lt. Commander and Burnham is a full commander. That said, wouldn’t Airiam’s processing power have made HER the ideal one to hook up to the spore drive rather than Stamets?
Also (and we will likely never get an answer about this) how much of Airiam was left after that shuttle crash? Obviously her brain (more or less), but did she have any organs? Were her limbs entirely cybernetic?
I’m on record on Twitter, and I’ll say it here, that I think the Red Angel is Edith Keeler. {Jonathan}
@117 – twels: In The Ready Room, Hannah Cheesman said Airiam was 67% human.
@118. Jonathan: Well, at least you didn’t pick a male character…
Edith Keeler because the Red Angel brings about a fascist future? The odds are so long on this one it amounts to winning the lottery odds. It’s not in any context so far established by Discovery. It has no connection to Burnham…
@120: I still am of the belief that it’s somehow a time traveling crippled Pike in an exo-skeleton.
@121: twels: Spock said “she” after his mind-meld with her.
I will laugh if the Red Angel turns out to be Jet Reno. All this time she’s been in one of Discovery’s labs building the flux capacitating exosuit. Patent pending.
@118: Bwahahahaha! That would be hilarious! A lot of viewers not too well-versed in TOS would go “Who?!?” (in the same voice as Djimon Hounsou from Guardians of the Galaxy) if the reveal was of Edith Keeler. It’s just as likely to be Tasha Yar.
@120: I’m pretty certain @118 is joking.
@123: I like that idea! Jet Reno opens up the faceplate of her exosuit as she saves the Discovery crew and says in her trademark deadpan delivery, “What? You’re not disappointed are you?”
@124. GHiller: Probably. I avoid the Twit machine like the plague, so dunno. Lotta people on other forums seem to be in a tizzy to “call it.” A fair number of them still absolutely sure it’s a male. Guess it may become a meme if it hits critical mass.
Anyway, I just saw a news item reporting that Anson Mount and Rebecca Romijn are leaving the show at the end of the season. Shocking, no? (Umm, no.)
@126: Not surprising but no reason why those actors couldn’t return in some way in the near future such as in their own spin-off.
As much as I like these actors/characters though, such a series would be yet another prequel that would possibly run concurrently with prequels Discovery and the announced Section 31 series. It would be nice if we returned to post-Nemesis events AND it was a starship-based series. Therefore, in my mind and as much as I’m looking forward to Patrick Stewart’s show, I don’t believe that counts.
The Picard show doesn’t count? Sheesh, some people are hard to please!
DS9 wasn’t a starship-based series and it turned out pretty well.
And Picard’s show might still be ship-based; it just doesn’t sound like it’ll be a Starfleet crew…
@129: To be fair, DS9 turned out pretty well after the Defiant showed up and gave them the ability to tell starship-based tales. Just sayin’ …
@128: I love Patrick Stewart/Picard and I can’t wait for the show, but no, it doesn’t count. Lol
@129: I love DS9 as well but I’m just favoring a starship-based show unless another compelling station-based series can be conceived of.
@131: touché!
Nothing against space stations, but I prefer ship based tales too, and it seems DS9 came to realize the need for them as well. After all, it is Star Trek. It’s the ultimate road trip!
I just think that we should welcome Star Trek trying new, risky things rather than just rehashing familiar, cozy formulas. After all, exploring the strange and new is literally in its mission statement.
Tell that to the makers of Discovery and the people greenlighting things like Section 31: Extreme Trekkin. None of that is what I’d call risky. All pretty standard network TV stuff — now with 10% more profanity!
@135/Spike: I have far, far less sympathy for people who condemn a show that hasn’t even been made yet than I have for people who want cozy familiarity.
@51: a better choice of words instead of kitchen is lower decks. Although in ST:E they did have cooks.
What I liked about the death of Ariel is that they didn’t choose to find some deux ex machina way out of it. And part of what makes a hero is accepting reality and making the best choice available.
Like Q said, “It’s not safe out here.” If you’re not prepared to make a choice like that, you don’t belong in Starfleet.
I also liked Spock’s “playing to lose” at Chess. It is an example of what is sometimes called the difference between being logical and being reasonable: logic alone being committed to a particular frame or context, reasonableness being able to step outside that frame to serve a higher purpose.
I wouldn’t count myself among the haters, because people are free to like what they like. But it hasn’t been until the previous episode, and this one, that Discovery has begun to feel like Star Trek to me, instead of some other show that was just calling itself Star Trek.
This was a good one. I do wish we’d gotten more fleshing out of the supporting characters before this, but the opening act did a good job of establishing Airiam and the “lower decks” rapport of her and her crewmates. I agree it would’ve made her loss hit harder if she’d been a more significant character before now, but heck, in the days of previous Trek series, it was commonplace to fit a guest character’s entire arc within a single episode. The fact that I regret not getting to see more of Airiam and her relationships just shows that the episode was successful in making me care.
I forgot to say in my comments on the previous episode that one thing I like about the portrayal of Spock here is that they’re being true to what a snide, condescending jerk he could be when he wanted to. His digs at his sister (aka his Burnham burns) are very reminiscent of his digs at Dr. McCoy a decade or so later, which is kind of nice, because it means he must’ve seen McCoy like a brother. But there’s also a deeper well of childhood baggage and pain that’s very sibling-like. What was intriguing in the chess scene here was how Spock was actually trying to browbeat Burnham into forgiving herself. It sounded like he was just attacking her, but if you really listened, he was trying to convince her that she wasn’t to blame for her parents’ death and didn’t need to keep punishing herself for failing to save them. He was trying to help her and hurt her at the same time. (And as bitter as Michael was, she still followed Spock’s example from the chess game with her strategy to defeat the mines by confounding their logical expectations.)
Nice getting to see an interaction between Spock and Stamets too, although that last bit with Spock making an observation about Culber kind of came out of nowhere. I do hope there’s a Spock-Tilly scene coming up somewhere, because that could be wild.
Every time I try to decide what to say about the Section 31 plotline, I usually just want to repeat my annoyance that it’s being treated as an official division of Starfleet rather than a secret conspiracy. But I guess that, technically, there isn’t anything in canon that explicitly precludes that being the case in the 23rd century; it’s just that the books assumed it was. Anyway, the whole mine sequence seemed pretty silly; blade mines? There are far more plausible ways to damage a starship. And the logic leaps by which the crew figured out that Control was seeking sentience and planning to exterminate all life were pretty tenuous.
Anyway, I’m starting to like Nhan, and I hope she sticks around as permanent security chief. Nobody spoil me.
Good analysis, Chris.
Turns out there was no big Spock-Tilly scene after all. Aww.
He saw her coming and ran!
@142 – Tilly – Oh Lt. Spock! I’m so glad to meet you! Michael talks about you all the time. And I love your ears and../”
Spock <Pinch>
Sadly, Chris.
With all of Airiams memories downloaded to Discovery in order to make space for the AI stuff, could they not bring the character back transferring said memories into a new body/device/person?! Sounds far-fetched, but they already brought back a character who was believed dead, thus aiming for a kind of theme, in case this should really come trough. Which I doubt now that I write it. But it would be the first thing coming to mind, no?