Throughout the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, there was some obvious tension between the show that Bryan Fuller originally envisioned, and the one that was actually developed by his successors, Gretchen J. Berg & Aaron Harberts, after he and the show parted ways.
This was not always a smooth process, and Berg & Harberts seemed determined in season two to correct many of the issues with season one.
But then Berg & Harberts and the show parted ways, and their successors were faced with a similar dilemma.
One of the interesting tropes that’s coming out of Discovery is that, while the captain isn’t the main character on the show, it’s dealing quite aggressively with the notion that the captain sets the tone for the ship.
We’ve had three different people in command of the U.S.S. Discovery over two seasons, and each has set a very specific tone. For much of season one it was Gabriel Lorca—or, more accurately, Lorca’s evil twin Skippy, bringing some Terran Empire-inspired awfulness. His Discovery was grim and dark and unpleasant, not aided by the fact that they were fighting a war.
Once Lorca’s mendacity was uncovered, Saru was made acting captain, and Discovery became what it was described as when we first saw it in “Context is for Kings“: a vessel of science and exploration.
Probably the best illustration of the difference between the two is that on Lorca’s ship, nobody would sit with Burnham in the mess hall, but on Saru’s ship, people moved to sit with Tyler/Voq. Instead of a predator, the ship was led by prey; instead of attacking, the leader was now one who accommodates.
Then this year we got a detour, as the ship was given a temporary captain in Christopher Pike, and he set a tone of his own. Right from jump, he wants to know everyone’s name. I said in my review of “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2” that Anson Mount’s performance has his emotions etched on his features, and that too set the tone for the series. This is a very emotional season, from small things like Tilly dealing with command training and Georgiou poking the crew with a stick to big things like Culber coming back from the dead, Airiam’s death, and Burnham’s reunion with her mother.
But while the character work has remained strong, the story is a bit of a mess. The season started out with a powerful angelic creature—actually called an angel—that rescued humans from destruction in the midst of World War III, that rescued Burnham as a child, that gave messages to Spock, and that sent seven signals. It seemed as if the show was going to deal with a powerful being that had some kind of divine background—or at least pretended to.
In the past when Trek has dealt with religion and spirituality, it’s always had a basis observable phenomena. The Greek gods were actually powerful aliens; so are the Bajoran Prophets. The Klingon Messiah is a historical figure—they’ve even got a blood sample!
This is the route they took eventually with the red angel, but it all feels uneven. We find out the red angel is, in fact, a time-distorted view of Gabrielle Burnham, wearing a suit designed decades earlier by Section 31. The ability of the suit to travel through time adequately explains how it’s been so many places, but it does very little to explain how Gabrielle accomplished her rather Herculean tasks—or, for that matter, how red angel version 2.0 (Burnham in the finale) was able to send the signals. The suit’s capabilities are basically “what the plot requires,” and there isn’t even an attempt to explain how one woman in a fancy suit can move an entire village across 51,000 light-years to another planet in “New Eden.”
In general, Section 31 is the worst kind of writers crutch, exactly the thing I feared it would become two decades ago when the organization was introduced. They’re a lazy boogeyman, here to allow our heroes to not be heroic and have cover for it, thus subverting the whole point of the franchise’s optimistic future. Plus, as I said about 31 back in my rewatch of “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges,” there are few things in this world less interesting than the all-powerful organization that can’t be stopped. Here, they have absurd amounts of technology (including a 24th-century combadge) and seem to be unstoppable in a manner that is most tiresome. And then it’s their AI that turns out to be the big bad, crowbarred into the plot to give them someone to fight.
But where the season falls down in terms of plot, it shines in two other ways. One is the characterization, which has always been what’s kept even the worst of Star Trek going. (As an example, it’s pretty much all that made the Bad Robot films bearable.) The bridge crew starts to get some depth, particularly the front-of-the-ship duo of Owosekun and Detmer. We get the magnificent addition of Tig Notaro’s Jett Reno, who sounds like most of the engineers I’ve met in real life, and whose acid commentary is welcome.
The most offensive feature of season one is reversed with some mycelial-network handwaving, as Culber is brought back from the dead. The transition back to the real world is not an easy one, and I wish they had devoted some more time to what he was dealing with. One informal therapy session with Admiral Cornwell seems inadequate. Still, Wilson Cruz and Anthony Rapp beautifully play the characters’ anguish, with Rapp in particular selling how helpless Stamets feels when he tries and fails to re-create their lives together after his return.
Having said that, the only truly missed opportunity was not doing more with Culber’s response to Tyler beyond the abortive mess-hall fight. Just in general, Tyler is one part of the season that sticks out like a sore thumb. His romance with Burnham is lifeless—Shazad Latif and Sonequa Martin-Green have no chemistry whatsoever—and aside from that mess-hall scene, we get no sense of how the rest of the crew feels about Culber’s murderer being assigned to the ship. This is mostly accomplished by keeping him away from the rest of the crew—Tyler’s interactions are all with Pike (who wasn’t on the ship last year), Georgiou (who sees him being a murderer as a feature, not a bug), Leland (ditto), and L’Rell (who was the one who sent him to commit that murder in the first place). And Burnham, but they spend all their time making sodden goo-goo eyes at each other.
Saru’s development is going to be particularly interesting to watch, especially since he’s the senior-most person left on the ship as it bounces into the future at the end of the season, which means we’re probably back to having the Kelpien in charge. But this season we also found out that his people aren’t prey animals permanently, it’s just their caterpillar stage, and their oppressors, the Ba’ul, killed them before they could become butterflies. But Saru is now more assertive, more aggressive, and less passive. It’s gonna be interesting to see how the analytical officer is going to deal with this new personality next season.
But the most fun this season was the embracing its prequelness. While the first season took stabs at it—particularly with the brilliant retcon in “Lethe” regarding what Sarek gave up to secure a spot for Spock at Vulcan Space School—this season embraced it wholeheartedly. The most glorious example, of course, was the “previously on” segment at the top of “If Memory Serves,” which was entirely footage from “The Cage,” with the episode itself serving as the first of two bridges between that failed pilot and the framing sequence of “The Menagerie.” But just in general, so much this season added texture to the events of both those original series episodes, from showing the depth of Pike and Spock’s comradeship to Pike learning of his fate on the cadet ship and still plowing ahead. (I would’ve liked this season’s events to have gone some way toward explaining why going to Talos IV was a death-penalty offense in “The Menagerie,” but it was not to be. A pity, as that was one of Gene Roddenberry’s stupider plot points, and it would’ve been nice to have it retconned into something sensible.)
It took bloody well long enough for Ethan Peck to show up in any meaningful capacity as Spock, but when he did, he was superb. The revelation that he was dyslexic was a masterstroke, as the notion that the smartest person in the Star Trek universe has a learning disability is one of the most Trekkish things ever, exactly the sort of hopeful, positive message that is a hallmark of Trek at its best. And in general, Peck beautifully channeled a character that two people have already put their marks on and made it his own while, like Zachary Quinto before him, paying tribute to Leonard Nimoy’s superlative inhabiting of the character.
I must also give mad props to Rebecca Romijn, giving us a great sequel to Majel Barrett as Number One. (Oh, and I was wrong in my review of the finale, Pike did refer to Number One as “Una” at one point, which was the first name that the team of Greg Cox, David Mack, and Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore gave her in the Legacies trilogy of Star Trek novels in 2016, that name being a tribute to another of our fellow Trek novelists, Una McCormack. No doubt it was provided by yet another Trek novelist, Kirsten Beyer, who is the executive story editor on Discovery. It joins Sulu and Uhura‘s first names as things established in tie-in fiction that made it to the screen.) Honestly, the main reason why I want to see at least a miniseries with Mount, Peck, and Romijn as Pike, Spock, and Number One is her—we know what happens to the first two, but Number One’s an open book, and the glances we got of her plainspoken, can-do, no-fucks-to-give attitude is making me eager for more. Much more.
Perhaps my biggest frustration with the first season of the show was that the brief glance we got of the U.S.S. Shenzhou in “The Vulcan Hello” and “Battle at the Binary Stars” was actually a much more interesting and compelling shipboard dynamic than the nastier one we got for the rest of the season with Burnham disgraced and working for a disguised villain. This season, we got Burnham back as a high-ranking officer, and it’s wonderful to see her in a stronger position. In particular her interactions with Saru and Pike and especially Spock are some of the high points of the season. (Pretty much every scene that Martin-Green and Peck had together was worth the price of admission for the whole season, which makes the lengthy half-season Spock-tease before we saw him all the more frustrating.)
That all pales in comparison to the amazing work she does across from the great Sonja Sohn as Gabrielle. The devastation, the emotional roller coaster that Burnham goes on, learning that her mother is still alive—and worse, doesn’t want to talk to her—the pain she feels, the open wound that her parents’ (seeming) death left her with that gets salt poured on it… It’s just a bravura job by Martin-Green.
Mount has been the breakout character, and plenty has already been written by me and others about how brilliant he’s been this season, made especially more impressive by how incredibly horrible he was as Black Bolt in The Inhumans. But Martin-Green is still the star of the show, and her journey is quite impressive, for all that it’s in a plot that only sometimes makes sense.
Michelle Paradise—who wrote “Project Daedalus” and cowrote the two–part finale—will be taking over as show-runner next season, and let’s hope she makes it all the way through. It will be nice to get a stable season of Discovery, especially since this one is jumping ahead well beyond where anyone has gone before.
And, hey, they went to all the trouble to build that Enterprise set. Seems like a waste of good money to not do more with Pike and the gang…
Keith R.A. DeCandido is at Awesome Con in Washington, D.C. this weekend. Look for him at Bard’s Tower, Booth 1311, alongside many fellow authors, among them Kevin J. Anderson, R.R. Virdi, Charles E. Gannon, D.J. Butler, Quincy J. Allen, and tons more. Also at the con are Trek actors Jonathan Frakes, Greg Grunberg, Jason Isaacs, Gates McFadden, Chris Sarandon, Wallace Shawn, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner, and Wil Wheaton.
Pike’s presence was perfect. A shame the finale included such blunders as agrarian Kelpians learning to fly spaceships in oh, a month or so.
I found this season more consistent than season 1 despite its plot swerve midway through. Season 1 often frustrated the hell out of me while also producing the brilliant “Lethe.” Season 2 had nothing that bothered me quite so much (aside from the consistently poor visual effects design favoring fanciful, undisciplined visual clutter over anything remotely grounded in physical reality or an accurate portrayal of what the dialogue says is happening), and it did occasionally reach nearly the same heights as “Lethe.” It helped that it did do excellent work with Pike and Spock as well as Burnham’s relationship with the Sarek family. I appreciated the attempts to flesh out the rest of the crew more, but they were inconsistent and intermittent; that still needs improving.
The storyline had a number of conceptual problems, though, resulting from the evident retooling of what was originally planned. While I get the sense that Berg & Harberts intended to take the storyline somewhere more religiously oriented than I’m comfortable with in Trek, at least it seemed that they were trying to tell a story about exploration and the human condition, something that actually lived up to the title of the show for a change. Replacing it with a story about preventing an evil computer from destroying the galaxy took things decisively away from that exploration narrative, and created plot holes they failed to address, mainly how the invention of a 23rd-century human scientist could have such godlike power. Moreover, though, it left us with a season that wasn’t really about much of anything. There was some terrific character work, to be sure, but no message beyond “Destroying all life is bad.” Even the moral questions that Section 31 stories usually address were barely touched on, while the moral questions about whether the entire Kelpien/Ba’ul relationship should be forcibly overthrown were not even acknowledged to exist, since the whole thing was reduced to merely a plot point to set up the finale. This is my problem with a lot of serial TV these days — the focus on setting up one startling plot twist after another has led to too many series whose writing is entirely about plot and character at the expense of theme.
I’ve been of two minds about DSC’s use of past Trek continuity. On the one hand, I feel it’s been far too dependent on rehashing past story and character points at the expense of original storytelling. But on the other hand, the most compelling and dramatically successful moments (aside from Burnham’s reunion with her mother) were the ones delving into the Sarek family dynamic in “Lethe” and “Light and Shadow,” and the opportunity to flesh out Pike was welcome too.
I do wonder how the show’s going to cope in season 3, though, because it appears that it will no longer be able to fall back on the past continuity it’s been so dependent on before. Who is Michael Burnham when she isn’t playing off of Sarek, Amanda, and Spock anymore? And will the writers really be able to tell stories about discovering new frontiers in space and time rather than falling back on another save-the-galaxy plot or somehow finding ways to rehash old continuity threads despite the new setting?
On Facebook, I was informed that I misspelled Aaron Harberts’s last name as “Harbarts.” It has been duly fixed. Yay, edit function!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Maybe you were thinking of Horn & Hardart automats?
The biggest risk that the show faces in Season 3 is becoming a Voyager redux. “Trapped” in the distant reaches of the Beta quadrant, a hundred years at 23rd century speeds from home, could end up hitting those isolation beats again. If we have to go through a season where they just search (in vain?) for time crystals to power their way home, only to decide that home is where your friends are so let’s just stay right here? I’m not sure that does it for me.
And depicting a future where the Federation has fallen and they need to bring back order to an aging empire isn’t exactly the optimistic future that I hope for. I don’t want to learn that everything Picard/Sisko/Janeway ever fought for will be turned to dust in a century or two. I want to image humans continuing to grow and learn.
I guess we’ll find out pretty quickly next year whether the future that Burnam and Co. find themselves in is one that the future federation has reached or if they will be Lost in Space. Fingers crossed.
@5/Joe: I don’t think “trying to get home” is going to be the dynamic. The whole reason they went to the future was because they had to remove the ship from their own time forever, and they committed to going with it. So they’re not going to try to get back. Plus it’s pretty obvious that the reason the producers decided on this plot twist in the first place was because they wanted to get away from the complications of doing a prequel and switch to doing a far-future sequel instead.
Not to mention that they still have spore drive, so they can get anywhere in the universe in seconds if they need to. The show needed to address why spore drive was never mentioned or used again in the 23rd or 24th century, and they’ve done that, but being in the far future removes that issue. For all we know, they’ll find that everyone uses spore drive in the 32nd century.
Wouldn’t it be horrible if Control rears its ugly head again in the S31 series?
My biggest disappointment this season was that it didn’t link with “Calypso.” It may be still be a signpost to be reached in season 3, or it may never connect. A Starfleet vessel with an evolved AI, this time a non-homicidal one, would be interesting.
There are enough seeds in the short to suggest the Federation (distorted into V’draysh) is still around. Craft is a human from a planet in conflict with a possibly corrupted Federation. If they stick to the timeline, this would be a further 50 years from Discovery‘s landing on Terralysium.
In any case, they’ve given themselves a lot of room in which to operate.
Funny, as a prequel, I thought it combined the worst inclinations of, say, Attack of the Clones and A Star Wars Solo Story.
Sure, we can imagine private Spock keeping details of his life private. That’s not the issue. The issue is the suddenly appearing, never-mentioned sibling gimmick is one of the hoariest soap opera cliches. If one deploys such a gimmick, there better be a payoff. And this is impossible in Discovery, because Burnham never comes to life as a character, no matter how many times she sobs in the second season. She has “enriched” the Nimoy incarnation of the character not one bit. Hence as a prequel, this is a failure.
@8/Koop Penworth: “The issue is the suddenly appearing, never-mentioned sibling gimmick is one of the hoariest soap opera cliches.”
Tell that to the writers of the TNG episodes that suddenly revealed Data’s brother, Picard’s brother, Worf’s secret brother, Yar’s sister, and Troi’s secret dead baby sister. Not to mention the various episodes and movies that suddenly revealed, let’s see, Spock’s fiancee, Kirk’s illegitimate son, Sulu’s daughter, Riker’s estranged father, Worf’s son, Data’s mother, etc.
I didn’t sign up for “future Trek,” so IF the jump is permanent, I’m disappointed.
Discovery has many flaws, including a Vulcan-raised character who cries every episode, or so it seems. However, I just let it flow and try to enjoy it without thinking about it too much.
I’d MUCH RATHER have a Pike/Spock series instead of *ugh* Section 31. I didn’t even like S31 in DS9. No insult to Yeoh as Georgiou, but S31 just doesn’t do it for me.
Not all keen on a darker Picard series. I can’t really say I’m a huge TNG fan. Picard was OK, Data the best, O’Brien pretty cool but the rest were rubbish. But – there are a lot of TNGers who grew up on it and loved it, so I’ll just have to deal.
But I still want a Pike series. And less crying from Burnham. I do like Burnham, but I’d like to see a bit more emotional control.
I’m hoping very much that this isn’t Voyager-like. I watched VOY dutifully, but I think the only character I genuinely liked was Neelix. Disco – for all its faults, has moved into 3rd place behind TOS like this:
TOS
DS9 (right behind it).
.
.
.
Disco (a bit further back0
.
.
TNG/ENT
.
.
.
.
.
.
Voyager.
@9/CLB: The difference relative to Trek precedent is, whenever a previously-unmentioned family member was revealed, it was either a very minor point (“when did Sulu find time to have a family?”), or the subject of a single episode, or grew organically into a series of episodes (Data, Worf). For DSC, conversely, Burnham being part of the Sarek clan (*) is the driving force for a large part of two seasons, arguably to the detriment of other themes that we expect from the Trek brand.
(*) More generally, Burnham’s family issues. Misplaced-mentor issues with M-Georgiou, survivor guilt, awkward reunion with birth-mom, etc. Interestingly, her birth-father was killed and didn’t get word one from Gabrielle or Michael. “On any of your trips, did you try to save Dad?”
@10/tbonz: “Discovery has many flaws, including a Vulcan-raised character who cries every episode, or so it seems.”
Raised on Vulcan but then spending 7 years on the Shenzhou learning from Georgiou that it was okay to embrace her emotions. Weird how people forget that part.
Where was it said that the Picard series was going to be “darker”? I’ve heard some conjectures to that effect, but no actual information suggesting it. All we actually know is that it’s got a very different focus and tone from either TNG or Discovery. Some people are guessing it’s going to be like Logan because Patrick Stewart was in that too, which is pretty random, considering that DS9 had little in common with A Man Called Hawk and Enterprise had practically nothing in common with Quantum Leap.
@11/Phillip Thorne: I have already expressed my opinion in comment #2 that the new insights Burnham’s story afforded into the established Sarek family dynamic were the most compelling and dramatically satisfying parts of the show, meshing brilliantly with established canon and enriching it with new information at the same time. So you should be able to recognize that an argument predicated on that being a weakness of the show is not going to convince me.
As shaky as it was, I’m glad they made the jump in the end. Maybe now Burnham can finally become her own character who isn’t defined by familial connections to BIG iconic elements, like Star Trek’s First Family and its most notorious secret organization. She doesn’t need to be of such EPIC importance across the board to be important to us. Characters can be connected to ordinary folks, you know, whether it’s a fiance with a dog or a father who owns a restaurant.
I mean, imagine if the writers had done this sort of thing on TNG. Picard’s parents, oh, they were really members of the Q who decided to have a mortal child, and that’s why the Q are so interested in him. And Picard’s brother, oh, he’s secretly working for Starfleet and is developing nanites to counterattack the Borg threat and those grapes are really nanite incubators. One shocking twist after another!
@13/Spike: This is my problem with modern serial TV. It tends to focus too heavily on the core characters dealing with their personal problems and relationships instead of helping others, and the need to have continual surprises and plot twists when dealing continuously with the same group of characters and entities tends to promote narratives built around conspiracies and deep dark secrets. It does get kind of insular. I would like to see a return to something more episodic, a season driven by the crew discovering and settling into their new place and time, evolving in response to it rather than being the center of everything.
I’m probably he minority here, but I found this season in many ways worse that S1. In the first season, many elements stroke me as highly obnoxious, from the terrible social conditions on Discovery and the sympathy towards a psychopathic murderous dictator to the genocide attempted by the Federation. The writing was bad and permanently tried to glorify Burnham by unearned character moments (her monologues and the speech at the end being prime witness). But at least there was a story (“We have to win a war”) that made some sense, though I did not find it particularly interesting.
In S2, I don’t even know what it was about; apparently, it is about a crew of highly trained people who desperately try to delete a file for 5 episodes, including a failed attempt to destroy the ship the data is hosted on. In the end, 200+ people go to the future because that turns out to be easier than reformatting a hard disk.
We see Seven Signal on a galactic map, which set all the plot in motion, as Pike explicitly claims in “Brothers” they pose a danger (it’s never explained why he thinks so). In fact, it turns out nobody has seen them at that point because everyone’s surprised about their locations later, though unexplainably everyone knows there should be seven of them. The mystery solved is not the mystery as posed, but the characters don’t notice the discrepancy and, even more enigmatically, the reviewers don’t care.
Really, that is “The Alternative Factor” stretched into 14 episodes, and I don’t remember krad being merciful on that drivel (a word I learnt from his TOS reviews, btw). But DIS still gets happy reviews because of the flashy CGI (which mostly contribute nothing to the story) and celebrated character moments that feel empty at their core because they don’t flow from anything established before.
For example, we get the most cynical Red Shirt death ever, with a character who had been present in 22 episodes with a one-digit total count of dialogue lines (all in professional context). Yet, in her death episode, she retroactively made into a warm-hearted person and friend to everyone. People mourn about the loss of a person whom they never cared to talk to a single line privately before, in 22 episodes? Realistically, losing a handkerchief should be a worse tragedy.
DIS is all about guts and feeling and sentiment and living in the moment, and nothing about “cerebral”, as a perhaps now-dead Paramount representative famously stated half a century ago. It’s the fast food of the Star Trek universe. Instead of forcing the audience to think a problem from several sides, DIS shows nonsensical action that does not connect to the story (if there were any), but exists for its own sake. Take the probe incident near Kaminar: Who sucked the probe into the future? It was neither the Red Angel (whose time-travelling only spans weeks) nor Control (who has no access to time-travel). It happened because the writers needed it to happen as a setup for the death of Airiam, and to fulfill their spectacle quota.
Yes, it was a hell of a ride, but a ride that leads to nowhere and exists only for the sake of itself. Yet, when I travel, I want to arrive at an interesting spot, and DIS denied me that satisfaction. Had I not smelled the foul stench of “make up as you go” around mid-season, I’d feel as cheated at the end as I felt with “X-Files” twenty years ago (becoming wiser over time, I avoided “Lost”)
@15/Luthien: “We see Seven Signal on a galactic map, which set all the plot in motion, as Pike explicitly claims in “Brothers” they pose a danger (it’s never explained why he thinks so).”
Actually it is. He says that the last time an unknown signal was detected across the galaxy, it started a war (as seen in episode 1 of the series). Also, creating multiple simultaneous signals over such vast distances would require enormous power and advancement, which was potentially dangerous if you didn’t know their agenda. Since Starfleet was still recovering from a war, it’s natural they’d be on the defensive and concerned about the potential risk.
“In fact, it turns out nobody has seen them at that point because everyone’s surprised about their locations later, though unexplainably everyone knows there should be seven of them.”
No, they saw seven signals but they couldn’t pin down their exact locations, except for the first one. Keep in mind that knowing what direction a signal in space is coming from doesn’t automatically tell you its distance, so it could be anywhere along a line in that direction. You’d need to detect a second occurrence of the signal from a different angle in order to triangulate its location. So that actually made sense, although they blew it at the end by not showing how the initial burst of seven simultaneous signals was created.
“Who sucked the probe into the future? It was neither the Red Angel (whose time-travelling only spans weeks) nor Control (who has no access to time-travel).”
It was the future version of Control that had gained sentience and was trying to help ensure that its past self gained sentience on schedule. It’s basically the same plot as The Terminator.
@15 Luthien, interesting point about the probe, but I thought that probe sent the transmission that eventually took over Airiam, suggesting it was a future Control that altered the probe and sent it back in time, Terminator-style, to ensure its own existence.
@CLB: “You’d need to detect a second occurrence of the signal from a different angle in order to triangulate its location.”
It’s OK to discuss this now?
No, you don’t need a second occurrence because these phantom signals, of visible light that magically breaks the speed of light, are witnessed across half the galaxy. The Klingons are aware of them, which suggests other cultures must be too. This gives enough parallax that triangulating them is trivial. They give up time crystals, but not information?
However, they don’t exist because nothing in the story caused them. Spock in psych facility actually works here, because in terms of these abandoned elements of the original script, he’s delusional. They are immaculately conceived by the writers. Maybe there was a more religious component to this originally. Maybe there were aliens of Q-level power running around.
Doesn’t matter. The entire spine of the season rests on these signals brought up every week. Then in the final episode, they fail to stick the landing.
Just to be clear, I liked the season overall, but if a viewer expects good science to be represented, this was in fantasy territory. The understanding of astronomy and astrophysics wasn’t even on a fifth grade level. Someone mentioned Lost in an earlier review and yes, the parallel is apt. The components of the mystery set up are simply abandoned in favor of emotional catharsis.
I should probably just give up on trying to make sense of all of the time travel shenanigans of this past season (like Captain Janeway, they give me headaches). But an important question lingers in my mind. The whole point of Discovery leaping so far into the future (and I forget why it went to the particular year it did – was it so Burnham could find her mother?) was to keep the sphere data out of time and out of reach of Control. Spock states as such to the Starfleet Command officer in the finale as justification for sealing the records about Discovery and its super-tech. So if Discovery reaches its destination in the future and finds out (perhaps in what’s left of a Federation archive) that Control never reemerged after Control/Leland’s death which occurred right before their quantum leap, then shouldn’t the crew work on jumping back to the point in time when they originally left? Didn’t Kurtzman himself say that Control is over with now as a storyline? The series could still tie into “Calypso” by having the crew abandon the ship to keep it there with the sphere data just in case Control comes back of some other malevolent force. But it doesn’t seem like this will happen because the end of the finale implies that the crew never return from the future and this is a neat little bow-tie to why they’re never spoken of by Spock and anyone else post TOS-era.
Regarding the expense put into creating the new Enterprise set and might as well be put to use again – it could always just be redressed to serve as the bridge of any other Starfleet or alien ship, perhaps for the forthcoming Section 31 series. But yes, I too would like to see it actually utilized for further adventures by Pike/Spock/Una.
Not to mention the fact that when we first see the red bursts plotted, they’re point sources. So they must have had parallax measurements from the start, which makes sense since every ship, starbase and planet would have seen them.
And for visible light to be seen at that distance (ignoring the distance=time problem because the writers did), they would have sterilized any planets they appeared even remotely close to. These things were supernova bright, which is actually something that Po mentioned when she was charging the time crystal <ugh>.
Sadly as a fan who likes to promote the show and hates seeing it criticized I do agree with most of the negative criticisms in the comments. @15 makes a lot of good points. The season was convoluted, I did not like the section 31/control plot – I definitely felt it could have been more fluid. One reason people like The Orville (though I stopped watching) is because its more episodic and less serial (though it has a little serialization) and in some ways more true to TOS. Though I do think Fox should be paying CBS for the Star Trek ripoff
+1 on seeing more Pike/Num1 either in mini series, short treks or whatever
I dont think I will watch the S31 spinoff series, definitely Discovery did not peak my interest enough in the plot lines around S31, in fact they drove me a way
Surprised we didnt see any future in the finale – thought we would see them arrive. As others had mentioned setting up the show as another Voyager/Lost in Space is disappointing – I actually like the tie ins to old Trek without being to anal on canon, going back to Talos IV, Harry Mudd, The Mirror Universe, stories with Vulcan etc…. and can’t see many future plot lines without introducing totally new stuff
Oh and Lost was great for the ride, though ending too was a disappointment, Fringe was great with a decent ending. Highly recommend binge on Fringe for those who have not seen. I believe Akiva Goldman was involved with a lot of the episodes
Christopher: “Raised on Vulcan but then spending 7 years on the Shenzhou learning from Georgiou that it was okay to embrace her emotions. Weird how people forget that part.”
No, we didn’t. There is a difference though between “embracing” emotions and overdoing emotions. First she was all bottled up, now she’s overly emotional. I hope she finds more of a balance. She acts like she had no Vulcan upbringing at all, if her emotions are anything to go by. Does ANYONE other than Ash Tyler cry as much as she does? No.
@9/Christopher: “Tell that to the writers of the TNG episodes that suddenly revealed Data’s brother, Picard’s brother, Worf’s secret brother, Yar’s sister, and Troi’s secret dead baby sister. Not to mention the various episodes and movies that suddenly revealed, let’s see, Spock’s fiancee, Kirk’s illegitimate son, Sulu’s daughter, Riker’s estranged father, Worf’s son, Data’s mother, etc.”
That isn’t a refutation. I consider many of these examples bad storytelling choices, particularly Worf’s secret brother, Troi’s secret dead baby sister, Kirk’s son (I hope there is no such thing as “illegitimate” in the 23rd century), and Data’s mother.
@13/Spike: “I mean, imagine if the writers had done this sort of thing on TNG. Picard’s parents, oh, they were really members of the Q who decided to have a mortal child, and that’s why the Q are so interested in him. And Picard’s brother, oh, he’s secretly working for Starfleet and is developing nanites to counterattack the Borg threat and those grapes are really nanite incubators. One shocking twist after another!”
I totally agree, but hasn’t DS9 done something similar to Sisko and Bashir? In the end, there were almost no ordinary humans left in the main cast. I prefer fictional heroes to be ordinary people (well, kind and smart ordinary people) with ordinary backgrounds, but in a world full of superhero stories that’s probably a minority position.
@14/Christopher: “I would like to see a return to something more episodic, a season driven by the crew discovering and settling into their new place and time, evolving in response to it rather than being the center of everything.”
Me too.
@15/Lúthien: “In S2, I don’t even know what it was about; apparently, it is about a crew of highly trained people who desperately try to delete a file for 5 episodes, including a failed attempt to destroy the ship the data is hosted on. In the end, 200+ people go to the future because that turns out to be easier than reformatting a hard disk.”
Wonderful recap! Thank you for the laugh.
@22/tbonz: Must be because she’s a girl…
Lost was the most pointless thing I’ve ever watched.
@19/GHiller: “The whole point of Discovery leaping so far into the future (and I forget why it went to the particular year it did – was it so Burnham could find her mother?)”
Basically, yes. She sent them to the same date her mother was trapped in. Although presumably the destroyed future Gabrielle was in was erased, so she’d better hope that Gabrielle was sufficiently”unstuck in time” as to make the transition to the new timeline.
“So if Discovery reaches its destination in the future and finds out (perhaps in what’s left of a Federation archive) that Control never reemerged after Control/Leland’s death which occurred right before their quantum leap, then shouldn’t the crew work on jumping back to the point in time when they originally left?”
Of course not, because then that would negate the history they read about and erase that very certainty.
Besides, don’t forget the penultimate episode. Everyone in the crew had a choice whether or not to join Burnham in the future. They all could’ve decided to leave the ship if they were determined to live out their lives in the 23rd century. But they all made the informed, conscious decision to give up those lives in favor of a life in the distant future. They’ve already settled that question.
Not to mention that if the producers wanted the show to continue to be set in the 23rd century, they wouldn’t have done the time jump in the first place.
@22/tbonz: “No, we didn’t. There is a difference though between “embracing” emotions and overdoing emotions. First she was all bottled up, now she’s overly emotional.”
Speaking as someone who did try to bottle up my emotions Vulcan-style as a kid, I can assure you that’s exactly how it would be. The more you repress your emotions, the more intensely they burst out when you allow them to, or when you fail to keep them controlled. (Which is basically the idea behind pon farr. “Perhaps the price they pay for having no emotions the rest of the time.”)
And one thing I learned as a result of that childhood repression is that crying is healthy and nothing to be ashamed of.
@23/Jana: “That isn’t a refutation.”
No, but it’s an acknowlegment that Star Trek has always been imperfect. Countless times over the years, I’ve seen people criticize problems in the newest Trek as if it were the first installment ever to make such mistakes, as if all previous Trek had been flawless and infallible and the mistakes in the new version made it irredeemable. I’m just trying to keep things in perspective.
@24/Christopher: Okay.
Concerning Burnham’s emotional development, it would have been nice if there had been more flashbacks to her Vulcan years. I liked the ones in the first two episodes of the show and hoped they would become a regular feature, like in the 1970s Kung Fu TV series.
I’ve always assumed that McCoy was wrong about Pon Farr, because T’Pau said that they would see something that “comes down from the time of the beginning, without change”.
@25/Jana: But maybe the madness associated with pon farr is more intense now than it was in the past. T’Pau is referring to the marriage ritual as a whole, not specifically to the madness.
@26/Christopher: Uh-oh, so perhaps they introduced the whole fight to the death, nasty weapons and all, at a time when the fighters were much more clear-headed than they are now? Interesting thought.
@23. It’s been some time since I last watched DS9. Bashir was revealed to be genetically enhanced, wasn’t he? But his parents were still fairly ordinary people, I seem to remember. They weren’t directly connected to Khan or anything.
Anyway, yes, I agree. Even when you have extraordinary people in Star Trek they’ve often come from ordinary backgrounds, and that helps ground them in some kind of “reality.” Kirk is the greatest space hero in the universe! He’s also from Iowa. And even when they come from extraordinary backgrounds, there is usually something else to ground them. Spock is the son of an ambassador and the best officer in the fleet! He also likes to play the lute.
Benjamin Sisko was the Emmissary of the Prophets and destined to save the Alpha Quadrant. Michael Burnham had to save the galaxy. Lead characters of color in Star Trek have giant crosses to bear. At least we got to see Sisko just be a dad and Starfleet officer for a few years; no such luck for Michael Burnham. We still don’t know who Michael Burnham is. Will Michael become a fully-realized person in season 3? I’m not even sure I want to find out; this season gave me such whiplash. I’m still trying (and failing) to make any sense of the plot of this season. I haven’t decided if I want to risk going through this all again, or even a variation of it, next year.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Star Trek is just not well-served by the serial format of modern television. There was no point in this season where the show could just stop, take a breath, maybe survey a planet or a planetary system or a nebula, and whilst they do that just do normal things, all the while this convoluted plot could still be a factor, something discussed in a briefing room scene, maybe. But no, gotta keep it moving, gotta jam-pack everything in to all the episodes, to the point where the seasonal plot makes almost no sense.
I’m thankful for the character moments, but in hindsight even those feel rushed, the most egregious case being Airiam ( hopefully I spelled that right). We needed more with Culber trying to sort things out; we needed more of Owosekun and Detmer just doing stuff, maybe just a conversation on the bridge or in the mess hall; and most of all, we needed more of Michael just being a regular person, as I was so glad at the start of the season she was Discovery‘s full-time science officer, and she could just do some science-ing without the galaxy being in peril. But again, nope, gotta keep it moving, we have a season-long story, and we’re gonna tell it, lead character development be damned.
I don’t know, this format of storytelling just doesn’t work for me in Trek.
@30/Dante: Well, there are degrees of serialization. Enterprise season 3 did a pretty good job with a storyline that was serialized over the season but still allowed room for episodic adventures within it. And really, the first half of this season did much the same — you had the asteroid rescue episode, then the lost Earth colony episode, then the Klingon politics episode, then the Saru-is-dying episode, then the mycelial network episode, then the Kaminar episode, and then a 2-part arc that still broke down into a Vulcan-centric episode and a Talos IV episode. There were arc elements throughout, but the episodic approach was still present, giving way to a stronger serialization in the last half-dozen episodes.
Maybe if the original plan for the Red Angel arc under Berg & Harberts was to uncover some kind of cosmic mystery, rather than the whole thing connected to Burnham’s family and Section 31 and a threat to the galaxy, then it could’ve remained more of an episodic quest, traveling from signal to signal and discovering something new in each place. But we may never know what the original plan was.
@31/Christopher: That’s still adventures within adventures, though, isn’t it? So no real downtime for the characters.
Allegorical or message tales also work better as standalone stories, IMO. Lighthearted fun episodes too. Having different tones for different episodes. All things Star Trek used to be really good at.
@32/Jana: No, there certainly is room in an arc like that to have some episodes that are less connected to the arc than others. As I said, ENT season 3 found a pretty good balance. It makes no sense to toss out blanket generalizations about entire categories of human endeavor. Naturally it depends on the way each specific example is carried out, with some working better than others.
Episodic and serial storytelling are not mutually exclusive. For most of the past 4 decades, the vast majority of TV shows have had a mix of both approaches, differing only in their ratio — for instance, ST:TNG was largely episodic with some recurring serial story arcs like the Klingon politics thread and the Borg narrative, while DS9 got gradually more serialized over time yet was still largely episodic. As with most things in life, the best approach is to find a healthy balance rather than going too far to either extreme.
@33/Christopher: “It makes no sense to toss out blanket generalizations about entire categories of human endeavor.”
Does that also apply to blanket generalisations about blanket generalisations?
Sorry, logician joke.
I liked the TNG approach best. I remember being surprised and delighted when guest characters started to come back. Except K’Ehleyr, because they killed her.
@34/Jana: As I sometimes say: All blanket generalizations are wrong, including this one.
That balance struck by DS9 and later Enterprise season 3 could certainly work even today. The Orville has proven that. I can only hope Discovery’s writers find that going forward, along with consistent showrunners, because boy howdy can you see the difference in the writing.
Wait, Kirk had a twin brother we were never told about ?!
@37/Beta: No, he had a secret, mad sister. No, wait, that was Dumbledore… or Sherlock Holmes?
@38/Janajansen,
I am shocked, shocked to see that someone shares my sense of humor!
#24 “Speaking as someone who did try to bottle up my emotions Vulcan-style as a kid, I can assure you that’s exactly how it would be. The more you repress your emotions, the more intensely they burst out when you allow them to, or when you fail to keep them controlled. (Which is basically the idea behind pon farr. “Perhaps the price they pay for having no emotions the rest of the time.”)
And one thing I learned as a result of that childhood repression is that crying is healthy and nothing to be ashamed of.”
Huh. I’ve never tried to “go Vulcan” because in my case, I know I’m emotional and I couldn’t lock them down totally. Sometimes I wish I could.
As for your second point, the stupid notion that “boys/men don’t cry” is rubbish. Why not? Males get hurt or sad and expressing that via tears is not taking one iota away from one’s male identity. As humans, I think we run into trouble if we try to totally repress emotions, however convenient that would be in life. And crying sometimes, is being human.
Having said that, a little more Spock would be nice.
We’ll see what happens with Burnham. After a while, it might well even out. Both Spock and Burnham had to learn to repress emotions. And we know Vulcans have them from episodes like Yesteryear and Journey to Babel when it’s revealed that Vulcan boys bullied Spock.
I am really annoyed that this poorly written show is garnering so much attention here on Tor. There are so many mistakes and wrong turns that this is probably the worst Star Trek ever. FYI, its nearest competitor would be Enterprise. I watched only the first 4 or 5 episodes of each season, and I have heard of some of what happened after, and all of it convinces me that this show is very poor. I could go into greater detail but this thread appears to be dead.
Still can’t fathom this future thing with so many cast members likely to be finished. L’Rell, Ash (though he or they will be in S31) , Sarek, Amanda, Sirrana and of course Harry Mudd will likely not appear again.
Georgiou was on Discovery, right? What about Po? Can’t remember .
Theories of “this universe” Lorca coming back and Cornwell being Lethe shot to sh!t
Less chances of tying into anything Trek we know, while the naysayers will be happy canon can’t be touched , I find that it makes the show more interesting when there are connections to other Trek
sargentcool: The last post before yours was only two days ago, so the thread isn’t dead by any means. Heck, people still sometimes comment on posts I made here up to eight years ago. So feel free to go into lots of detail. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@42. I expect there will still be connections to other Trek, but it probably won’t be as direct as it was in the first two seasons. Along with new species, we’ll likely see far-future versions of the Federation, the Romulans, Klingon, Borg, etc. Much in the way TNG jumped ahead in the timeline, only more extreme.
Doubtful they’ll completely remove themselves from established Trek.
And also Harry Mudd’s short trek may give him a way to time travel – if he has real time crystals
jmsnyc: Cornwell being Lethe was never a remotely credible or even sensible theory, so shooting that to shit isn’t really an issue…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@42/jmsnyc: “Still can’t fathom this future thing with so many cast members likely to be finished. L’Rell, Ash (though he or they will be in S31) , Sarek, Amanda, Sirrana and of course Harry Mudd will likely not appear again.”
Those are supporting characters. Plenty of TV shows these days have multiple supporting cast members that are major parts of a single season’s story arc and are then gone in the next season, with only the core cast remaining. That’s a natural part of the modern seasonal-arc model.
“Georgiou was on Discovery, right?”
As far as we know. The last time we saw her was a few moments before the ship went through the time warp. It’s theoretically possible that she could’ve beamed away just before then, but that’s speculating beyond the evidence.
“What about Po? Can’t remember .”
She was in one of the shuttlecraft, and remained behind.
“I find that it makes the show more interesting when there are connections to other Trek”
I’ve found the show far too dependent on continuity porn. Previous shows managed to have “connections” in a looser sense, sharing the same overall universe and species and history and so on, rather than constantly bringing back established characters and episode plots from a previous series. TNG did just fine jumping the timeline forward a century, and in 7 years it only did a handful of TOS-sequel episodes — “The Naked Now,” “Sarek,” “Unification,” “Relics” (plus the implicit McCoy cameo in “Encounter at Farpoint”). You can create a sense of continuity without constantly revisiting the familiar. I want Discovery to be free to make itself interesting, to make us care about its own characters and storylines on their own terms, rather than just in terms of how they relate to past continuity.
@45: As for Harry Mudd, remember, the season made it clear that just having a time crystal doesn’t give you time travel; you need to infuse it with supernova-level energy and employ hyper-advanced technology to apply it that way. A time crystal is not a time machine any more than a barrel of crude oil is a car.
47. ChristopherLBennett – Except Harry did travel back in time, not just once but numerous times. If Mudd is to be trusted, he killed Lorca at least 56 times.
43 – Krad: Thanks for your comment.
I said that the writing is very poor and I will give a quick example that really bothered me at the time. In fact, it was what made me decide to quit watching the first season. (I have also seen a few episodes of the second season.) It is the scene were Lorca has a visit from Admiral Cornwell, who is also his ex-girlfriend, who tells him that she is beginning to have doubts about his decisions and his mental health generally. After receiving this news, Lorca taps her on the knee and suggests they sleep together and she agrees. This is not the way people behave.
A more major problem is the entire story arc that starts the first season. Michael sees one Klingon, attacks without provocation, is injured, returns to the ship, leaps out of sick bay, confronts the captain, mutinies, and fires on the Klingons. This entire sequence is ridiculous.
This is followed by her being sentenced to prison and Capt. Lorca requesting her for his ship. For some reason the Starfleet Admiralty agrees to this. Again, this sequence is ridiculous.
Now, I know what is going on here. The writers are trying to come up with things that they hope will give the audience a thrill. Then, they fix whatever problems this creates by the simplest method possible whether it makes sense or not. I saw this throughout the first 6 episodes of the first season and the first 5 of the second. That they continued like this through the end of the second season can be seen in the final episode when everyone agrees not to talk about what has happened. Many fans were surprised by this but I think it was inevitable from the first. It is the easiest way to explain (some of) the many changes to Star Trek continuity they created.
Also, notice that when Discovery was thrown into the future it is not a mere 5 or 10 years but 900! Even at the end they want the thrills to keep coming.
@49, No, wrong. Michael does not attack, the Klingon attacks and she defends herself, resulting in the Klingon’s death. Michael identifies herself, and the Klingon goes to attack. Also, Michael does not fire on the Klingons; she gives the order to fire, but that order is belayed by Captain Georgiou after Georgiou regains consciousness. The Klingons fire first, starting the war. Rewatch the episode.
Second, Lorca did not request Michael from Starfleet, he put pieces into place to ensure she ended up on Discovery. For why, you should finish the first season. Lorca did get permission from Starfleet to keep Michael onboard, ostensibly for the war effort, which Lorca was given leeway from Command to fight his way.
I’d suggest finishing the seasons and then forming opinions. You’ve already watched most of both seasons.
@50 – The Klingon defends himself because she is on the Klingon ship without permission. How would Starfleet react if a Klingon was found secretly poking about on their hull? Well, the Klingons reacted as a Klingon would be expected to.
The space was disputed meaning that the Klingons felt they had the right to be there just as much as the Federation did. So, into a volatile situation, Starfleet decides to make the first move that would be taken as hostile.
As soon as Burnham’s boots touched the Klingon hull, Starfleet was trespassing.
As soon as Burnham killed the Klingon, T’Kumva had the provocation he needed for war as well as proof that “We come in peace” doesn’t always mean what it says.
@51, The whole reason the Klingon artifact was there at all was to draw the Federation into a conflict, one that would unite the Empire under T’Kuvma. The Klingons damaged a subspace relay to lure Starfleet to that location; that’s why the Shenzhou was there at all. The Klingon artifact was in Federation space, and was obscured from sensors. That was why Michael went to investigate it in the first place: an unknown, indetectable object at the edge of Federation space. T’Kuvma called the region “too close to Klingon territory”, but it was still Federation space.
The whole thing was a ruse to incite a war with the Federation; Burnham’s actions unfortunately, helped T’Kuvma’s plan, but the war was going to happen, Michael Burnham or not.
@50, You said, “No, wrong. Michael does not attack, the Klingon attacks and she defends herself, resulting in the Klingon’s death. Michael identifies herself, and the Klingon goes to attack. Also, Michael does not fire on the Klingons; she gives the order to fire, but that order is belayed by Captain Georgiou after Georgiou regains consciousness. The Klingons fire first, starting the war. Rewatch the episode.”
Honestly, I don’t remember it that way and I am loath to rewatch the episode, however, this does not materially change the point. Fighting a Klingon and then committing mutiny and trying to start a war is a ridiculous sequence.
You also said,”Second, Lorca did not request Michael from Starfleet, he put pieces into place to ensure she ended up on Discovery. For why, you should finish the first season. Lorca did get permission from Starfleet to keep Michael onboard, ostensibly for the war effort, which Lorca was given leeway from Command to fight his way.”
I’m sorry but what you are describing is just more of the bad writing I am complaining about. What I don’t like is the crude manipulation of plot and character just to give the audience a thrill.
@53 The intent of the mutiny was to avoid the war by showing the Klingons that the Federation isn’t just a bunch of pacifists to be pushed around.
I pretty much agree with everything you wrote, krad. Except for one thing, L’Rell didn’t send Voq murder Culber specifically, though I doubt she cries over it happening.
@21 – jmsnyc: “Binge On Fringe” is a good name for a Fringe re-watch podcast.
@54 Firing on the Klingons was with the intention of dissuading them from war (don’t ask me how). The mutiny was illegally seizing command.
@56/sargentcool: “Firing on the Klingons was with the intention of dissuading them from war (don’t ask me how).”
Isn’t it obvious? They’re a warrior culture — they respect strength. You have to show them you’re strong enough to be taken seriously before they’ll be willing to negotiate with you as an equal. It’s your basic mammalian dominance display — bare your claws/fangs to show you’re ready to fight, establish boundaries and your ability to enforce them, and then you can get along. Or, if you prefer, it’s like the trope where two macho guys start out getting into a fistfight and become fast friends out of respect for each other’s fighting prowess.
Interesting review and comments. I’m glad others are beefing about the writers insisting that Burnham bawl herself silly in almost every episode. I don’t care if she’s predisposed to it after being bottled up as a Vulcan for all those years or not. The point is, does she have to do it every episode? I mean, I know she’s pretty much the center of the universe these days, but does that job really entail nothing but angst and anguish? guess my main problem with this series is that it’s all way too consequential. I like character-driven series, not Marvel style pointless Boom Pow action and convoluted plot lines where the universe is in peril. Every damn episode. Give me a Lower Decks. Give me a Trouble with Tribbles. Hell, give me Profit and Lace Anything but this unrelenting mind-numbing exhausting mish-mash.
@57. ChristopherLBennett Hi. The reason why I said I couldn’t understand why firing on the Klingons would work is because it is inconsistent with Klingon behavior in prior series. I know that their psychology has changed over time but I’m unwilling to go that far without a more solid basis. Also, your argument about dominance behavior only applies to conflict between members of the same species.
58. fullyfunctional Hi. Burnham also has an ‘intensely worried’ expression that she seems to haul out a lot. It’s like she was silently chewing the scenery.
@58. A while ago I suggested a drinking game. Shots whenever Burnham looks all angsty and furrows her brow, and a double shot whenever she cries. Rehab for everyone!
@59/sargentcool: Trek “species” are fictional surrogates for humans, so we’re talking about a storytelling trope here. Dominance behavior in animals is a useful metaphor for explaining that trope; so is the myth of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, or Robin Hood and Little John. The principle that you have to prove your strength to a warrior before they’ll see you as an equal is commonplace in fiction, so I don’t get why people have trouble understanding its use in Discovery.
And who says it’s inconsistent with Klingon behavior in other Trek? I’d say it is pretty consistent with Enterprise, where the Klingons were scornful toward Archer when he tried to engage with them peacefully. And it doesn’t apply to TOS, because by that point the damage to UFP-Klingon relations has already been done. But what eventually earned the Klingons’ respect was the Enterprise-C sacrificing itself to defend Khitomer — proving the Federation’s strength and courage as well as their nobility.
@61/Christopher: Gilgamesh and Robin Hood are old stories. From a contemporary point of view, the characters in those encounters act like little boys. Also, they’re individuals, not groups that represent whole nations. It bothers me when Star Trek advocates such a schoolyard approach to diplomacy.
@62. Jana: just finished Dayton Ward’s TNG novel Available Light, in which Worf takes a stand alongside Picard saying, “You possess more honor than far too many Klingons I have known during my lifetime, wherever you lead I will follow.” Martok, for example, is honorable. Gowron not so much.
It’s a good encapsulation of the Klingon posture. The bluster may hide something else. They project honor as a default position, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to take it at face value. The Klingons present at the Binary Stars are religious zealots. For me anyway, that’s already an irrational position. Engaging with them according to some standard diplomatic assumption may not have been the right call.
Short review (for anyone interested): I’d give it a B. It’d make a serviceable episode of TNG, but it’s somewhat workmanlike. The salvage aliens are boring and their threat repetitive. The aliens in the refugee ship live in a giant version of a holodeck called the Haven, introducing an interesting idea. They have basically a more advanced transporter technology that maintains consciousness within a virtual world for potentially centuries, instead of just buffering it for a few minutes or seconds, then re-materializing the physical being.
In the tie-in continuity Picard is still a Captain (in a 50 year career?), while Riker is an admiral. Section 31 has just been exposed and a lot of complicit admirals are going down. Haven’t read the prior set-up novel where S31’s Control was called Uraei. Mentally, I kept changing that to Aeiou (and sometimes Y).
There’s some sloppiness in the attention to detail. One alien’s eyes go from white to yellow and back. The number of refugees goes from 60,000 to 500,00, then back. There’s a scene early on where Worf makes a point of having a Vulcan officer use his tricorder to decrypt an alien console. Thereafter it’s referred to twice as the Vulcan using his own tricorder. Nothing big, but needed a bit more editing.
I loved the character of T’ryssa Chen, who’s human/Vulcan. More of her please. Liked the use of a character who was a baby in TOS and becomes a long-lived admiral. Also the character presiding over Data’s fate as a sentient being is now Attorney General of the Federation. Not sure she’d conduct so many one-on-one interviews instead of a special prosecutor, or a larger staff, but this is dramatic licence, not realism. (Maybe a case could be made for the sensitive nature of the S31 case, but then they continually say how they want total transparency for the public.)
Don’t think I noticed the easter egg the author refers to in the acknowledgements.
@62/Jana: “Gilgamesh and Robin Hood are old stories.”
Gilgamesh is 4100 years old, Robin Hood 600 years old. The fact that the same dynamic persisted in human storytelling over 3500 years proves how ridiculous it is to think we’ve fundamentally changed in the past 600. Especially since there are plenty of far more recent stories that use the same dynamic, like any comic book story where two superheroes fight before teaming up, or any buddy-cop or martial-arts movie where the mismatched heroes fight before becoming friends.
“It bothers me when Star Trek advocates such a schoolyard approach to diplomacy.”
It’s not about advocacy, it’s about understanding how Klingons think and act. The Federation may not approve of the way the Klingons do things, but if they want to engage in diplomacy with them, they need to understand what they value and how to make a connection on their terms. “The Vulcan Hello” wasn’t saying that method was objectively or morally right, just that it’s what would work at earning the Klingons’ respect so that diplomacy could proceed. It would be ethnocentric to assume that approaching the Klingons in the human way or the Vulcan way would automatically win them over. Sarek was just saying what any anthropologist knows, that you have to understand how another culture thinks and engage with them on terms that are meaningful to them if you want to establish good relations with them.
@63/Sunspear: As the creator of T’Ryssa Chen, I’m glad she’s still popular with fans. I haven’t read Available Light yet, but Dayton’s done a good job in his earlier TNG novels with writing T’Ryssa in a way that I think is true to her character.
@CLB: I did not know that. Thank you, then.
Random thought about L’Rell. Establishing herself as the Mother figure to Klingon culture was a brilliant move. It’s akin to Elizabeth I creating the Virgin Queen image, not because she was literally a virgin, but because she was replacing the Virgin Mary to some extent in her people’s consciousness as an object of worship. Cate Blanchett’s transformation into the iconic queen (in Elizabeth (1998)) was framed as a religious ascension, literally iconography.
The Binary Star episode might’ve worked better as a one-off about the intricacies of diplomacy and other cultures. Remember the scene from early TNG where Wesley stands up to an obnoxious alien at the training base? Yeah, something like that.
But as presented the Klingons seemed fanatical under their leader and hellbent to start a war no matter what Starfleet did (because the showrunners were hellbent to have a war across the season), so the discussion about diplomacy and showing strength tends to lose impact. It’s all so muddled, this series.
In retrospect, how was Starfleet supposed to really earn their respect anyway? Threaten blowing up their homeworld with the help of an evil emperor from another dimension? Guys, it’s right there in the diplomacy manual. ;)
@67/Spike: I don’t think it’s muddled, I think it’s realistic. The two sides in a contact like this are only making, at best, educated guesses about each other’s motivations. They’re smart if they take past experience into account and plan their moves carefully, but there’s always the possibility that there’s an unknown factor they’re failing to consider.
I think the intent was that Sarek’s advice to Burnham was essentially right, that it would’ve normally been the right move for dealing with Klingons (if only she’d been listened to), but it was doomed to failure in this instance because T’Kuvma was hell-bent on starting a war to unite his people. And because of the juxtaposition of those things, Burnham got blamed for what happened. It was messy, yes, but that’s how life often works. Events don’t always unfold as neat morality plays.
@63/Sunspear: Interesting review, thank you.
“It’d make a serviceable episode […], but it’s somewhat workmanlike.”
I’d say that about every novel by Dayton Ward I’ve read. I’ve stopped reading books by him, David Mack, or Greg Cox, because I tend to find them dull.
@64/Christopher: “Gilgamesh is 4100 years old, Robin Hood 600 years old. The fact that the same dynamic persisted in human storytelling over 3500 years proves how ridiculous it is to think we’ve fundamentally changed in the past 600.”
But we have. Not in the past 600 years, but in the past 60 or so. We used to glorify war; we no longer do that. We used to beat our children; we no longer do that, either, at least where I live. Fights between grown men have become so rare that I’ve never seen one in my entire life. (My daughter, who has more of a nightlife than I ever had, tells me that they still happen occasionally; but they used to be much more frequent.) And it’s an ongoing process – fights between children used to be much more common when I was a child than they are now. (Again, I’m talking about Germany and some other European countries; I’m not qualified to talk about the rest of the world.)
“Especially since there are plenty of far more recent stories that use the same dynamic, like any comic book story where two superheroes fight before teaming up, or any buddy-cop or martial-arts movie where the mismatched heroes fight before becoming friends.”
I didn’t know that because I don’t watch these films. But it reinforces my prejudice about them.
On a different note, all these are encounters between individuals. How would this translate to starships? The Federation ship fires on the Klingon ship. The Klingon ship fires back. They get into a fight, both ships get damaged, a few minor crewmen die. Then the captains grin at each other and drink a prune juice together. Not my kind of story.
“Sarek was just saying what any anthropologist knows, that you have to understand how another culture thinks and engage with them on terms that are meaningful to them if you want to establish good relations with them.”
I actually agree with that, but it misses my point. I’ll say something now that I’ve seen you say more than once: I’m not criticising the characters, I’m criticising the writers. A writer can make up any kind of situation, and thus justify almost any kind of reaction by the characters. But by choosing to make up a specific situation, they make a specific philosophical point. Making up a situation where firing first is the right thing to do results in a very different Star Trek than the one I’m used to since the days of “Arena”. This worries me. Calling it a “Vulcan Hello” (instead of, say, a “Klingon Hello”) makes matters worse, because it attaches this kind of behaviour to the Vulcans and thus robs them of their traditional pacifism. This worries me too.
That said… I’m currently reading The Captain’s Oath, and I love the Agni storyline.
@69/Jana: “We used to glorify war; we no longer do that.”
Since when? There are still wars raging around the world, and there are many political leaders around the world who still glorify war (the current US “president” very much among them). And there have always been people who condemned the folly of war. If you think pacifism is an invention of the past 60 years, you haven’t studied your history.
“We used to beat our children; we no longer do that, either, at least where I live.”
Child abuse and child slavery are still rampant around the world. Don’t mistake your own cozy bubble for the global reality; that kind of willful denial of the existence of injustice is what allows it to thrive.
Besides, none of this is relevant to the discussion. I don’t know why you’re twisting this into some kind of polemic about what should be in the real world. I’m just saying that there are plenty of fictional precedents that make it possible to understand the plot point of “the Vulcan hello,” the idea that a warrior culture would respect fellow fighters. We’re talking about a story, so kindly get off your moralistic high horse. That is not the conversation we’re having here. You don’t have to approve of a plot point to understand the intent of it.
“Making up a situation where firing first is the right thing to do results in a very different Star Trek than the one I’m used to since the days of “Arena”.”
What about “This Side of Paradise,” where the only way to free people from the spores was to goad them into fighting each other? Or “Shore Leave,” where Kirk beating up his old bully was portrayed as a salutary and positive experience? Or “By Any Other Name,” where Kirk saved the day by goading Rojan into a jealous fistfight over a woman and thereby convinced him of his humanity? TOS was never simply pacifist.
@70/Christopher: I’m not saying that things are perfect. I’m saying that things are getting better. Beating children used to be a normal educational practice; now it’s illegal in many European countries. My “cosy bubble” isn’t the global reality, but it’s part of the global reality, so this is an improvement. Of course that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still work to do.
”That is not the conversation we’re having here.”
Then we’re not having the same conversation.
“TOS was never simply pacifist.”
I didn’t say it was. But none of the examples you give are equivalent to “firing first” or even to “two men beat each other up and then become friends because that’s what men do” (The fistfight in “By Any Other Name” is superficially similar but Kirk’s motivation is very different). If you don’t see the difference, I guess I can’t explain to you why “The Vulcan Hello” bothered me.
@57 – Chris: Not only is it obvious to anyone with basic knowledge of the Klingons beyond TOS, it is spelled out in dialogue in the DIS episode where it happens.
@69 – Jana: No fights between grown men? I am not going to presume to know more about Germany than you, but unless it’s the planet Vulcan, there are still certain parts of society where violence is very common. Of course, not in everyday middle-class proper society circles…
@72/MaGnUs: Fights between grown men do happen. I actually know of two fights between men I used to know in the 1990s, although I haven’t witnessed them (not all my friends are “middle-class proper society”). So they happen, but they’re much rarer than they used to be. That’s not just my experience; police statistics say the same thing. And I don’t think it’s a specifically German trend either.
@73/Jana: I still don’t see how trends among humanity apply to the subject of how to open relations with Klingons. It’s hardly a novelty for Star Trek to portray Klingons as a culture with warrior values.
@74/Christopher: They don’t. I got sidetracked.
@70 – “What about “This Side of Paradise,” where the only way to free people from the spores was to goad them into fighting each other? Or “Shore Leave,” where Kirk beating up his old bully was portrayed as a salutary and positive experience? Or “By Any Other Name,” where Kirk saved the day by goading Rojan into a jealous fistfight over a woman and thereby convinced him of his humanity? TOS was never simply pacifist.”
Or in A Taste of Armageddon where Kirk ordered Scotty to exterminate everyone on a planet because they were holding hostages (who shouldn’t have been there in the first place were it not for Federation arrogance)?
Or TNG’s Code of Honor where the Enterprise fired photon torpedos into the atmosphere for the same reason?
Or Justice where Wesley Crusher broke the law and Picard refused to acknowledge that the Edo had the right to enforce their law on their planet?
Or Balance of Terror where, due to Discovery, we find out that Starfleet didn’t bother to inform their captains that the Klingons had a workable invisibility cloak? Spock said such a thing was theoretical. So if one race had such a thing, it”s likely that others would as well. Heck, even Enterprise had an encounter with sensor blind tech. So a bunch of people died because Kirk went into a situation without proper knowledge. Not his fault but the fault of the higher ups.
I’m sure that there’s many more but the Federation still puffs out their chest and proclaims their moral superiority at every turn.
Acknowledging your faults and shortcomings is the first step towards ridding yourself of them.
@15/Luthien
It has nothing to with the flashy CGI.
The reason for the difference in attitude is simple: Panning The Alternative Factor doesn’t come with any additional emotional cost. It’s just a single episode that happened to suck. No biggie.
Giving Discovery the same objective treatment, on the other hand, would raise some seriously uncomfortable questions: If I admit that an entire season (or worse: the entire series) is total garbage, then how can I call myself a fan? If it’s so terrible, why am I even watching this sh*t?
So the excuses and rationalizations begin.
By the way, there are many people who would agree with you. It’s just that you won’t normally find them in the comment section of a Discovery article, because they aren’t watching this show. Because why would anybody want to endure a 14-hour long version of the Alternative Factor?
Kurtzman on the future varied projects in Trekland:
plan for more Treks
And here’s somebody in the comments snarking on that:
Zon: “Do you think “varied” includes stories about a starship exploring strange new worlds, encountering new life and civilizations? Or is it more likely to be a continual fight against one or two antagonist races (Klingons, Romulans, Borg, Kazon, Founders, etc…)?”
@78. I would hope that “varied” means we could have all the above. Maybe we could have a series that’s a serialized drama about established races, and we could have a series that’s more in the traditional episodic mold, exploring strange new worlds and so on, serving as a sort of “laboratory” to experiment with new races and new one-off ideas. And if any of those new ideas are a hit with fans, they could certainly use it as a springboard for even more Trek content. Spinoffs abound.
Two quick questions :
A little off topic but I figure the people here will have good answers:
Any ideas when the next short treks will be released? For that matter, guessing the Picard series will be released before s3 of Disco?
Also, thinking of giving Orville another shot. I gave up after the visit to Alara’s homeworld s2e3. I do think they should be paying CBS licensing fees though but that is another topic
jmsnyc: Neither Trek question has an answer yet, but given that Comic Con is this weekend, that should change soon….
— Keith R.A. DeCandido
Well, it seems like we be getting more AM(Pike), RR (Number One) and EP(Spock) via Short Treks!
@@@@@77. Jim Kirk III & @@@@@15/Luthien – I couldn’t agree more. I watched only 4 or 5 episodes of each season and then had to bail. You get the horrible feeling rather early on that this has gone sour and you lose interest and stop paying attention. Right now I can’t even remember what happened in the first episodes of season two at all.
As more of a sensitive kind of viewer (who likes to take his time with everything), what I´m constantly asking myself with this show is:
Why is so much happening? Why is it happening so fast? Why all this chaos and mess? Give me a slow, psychological build-up of a character arc for once, I´m 37, but I need my soul food, too. C´mon guys! Do we all need the breakneck speed of computer games?
Or is it just me repeating the old mantra already held up against New Hollywood, when they made their Indiana Jones’s and Star Wars’s, always ramping up tension, speed and effects? I was a fan.
But if the show-makers constantly ramp up all this stuff, where will it all end?
Watched the second season of this on DVD, which means for the first time in my life, I’m up to date with an ongoing Star Trek series. Bit of a weird feeling. (And Season 1 is currently airing on E4 over here. Meaning UK viewers can watch the series on television for free. There’s a twist.)
I enjoyed it, but it was a bit of a mess. Nothing really seemed to be thought through, from the fact Burngam’s still sharing quarters with Tilly onwards. That made sense when Tilly was a cadet and Burnham was a civilian specialist and they were both on temporary assignment. But why is someone who appears to be third-in-command of the ship sharing a room with a newly-commissioned junior officer? Did she take the last bed on board and was too polite to ask a lieutenant to give up a room?
And why so many commanders on board, to a degree that’s usually reserved for when they’re making movies and everyone’s clearly far too experienced and senior to still be doing the same jobs but we’re going to pretend it makes sense? Saru. Burnham. Stamets. Airiam. Nahn. Reno. Becomes even stranger when the Enterprise has a larger crew and apparently has two lieutenants below the captain. (Although Spock appeared to be called “commander” too once. Maybe he was feeling left out. So is Georgiou, a black ops agent posing as a former captain, which makes even less sense.)
Most of the plot nonsense has been discussed but I’ll say it again anyway: The seven signals. They make a big deal about them in the early episodes, then start talking about waiting for them to appear when they’ve already appeared, and then we never get an explanation for why they appeared in the first place. On a similar note, they make a big deal about trapping the Red Angel by putting Michael in danger because the Red Angel always turns up to save her, and it works, yet in the finale we find out it was Michael, not Gabriella, who was responsible for a good chunk of the rescues. So…it worked, but it shouldn’t have done? (A Gabriella who’s seen Michael dies multiple times would be more likely to just nip back and divert the timeline down a different path than turns up for a miraculous last second rescue.)
I have no idea what the villain of the piece was. On first viewing, I thought that the future AI that infected Airiam also infected Control and turned it down an extreme path. Okay, everyone still calls it Control, but everyone calls an animated corpse Leland, so they’re obviously using short-hand. I thought Burnham mentioned two different programmes joining during her conversation with Control-Gant. Reading comments on here and thinking, I’m guessing the idea was that Airiam was infected with a future version of Control who travelled back to counteract Gabriella’s attempts to change history, and present Control went rogue all on its own. That really wasn’t made clear, in my opinion, and I’m still not sure if it’s right.
Section 31. An organisation presented in both Enterprise and Deep Space 9 as an unaccountable autonomous agency whose existence is known to a few is suddenly presented as a recognised (if shady) division of Starfleet subject to the normal chain of command. Throughout the season, there was speculation this would be reconciled. It wasn’t. Far from becoming an underground rogue organisation, Section 31 has good old Tyler in charge planning to reform it. I guess that didn’t go well, at least in the long term.
Tyler suddenly being at L’Rell’s side on a Klingon ship went it was absolutely essential just a few episodes earlier that the Klingons think him dead was weird, but I guess the bridge crew are L’Rell’s most trusted people and will keep it to themselves?
I’m afraid I found the Prime Directive episode as dull and frustrating as they usually are, and it seemed to be more about Burnham learning to follow orders she thinks are stupid than anything else. Pike as an ultra-adherent to the Prime Directive was shot down by a reversal of “Dear Doctor” a few episodes later anyway. At the time, I predicted on here that the Kelpien/Ba’ul scenario would be revisited later. Instead… We’re assured that the Kelpiens’ lack of technology means they won’t be a threat to the Ba’ul and they’ll have time to learn to live in peace. Fast forward to the season finale and the Kelpiens turn up in Ba’ul ships. So either the Ba’ul quickly realised the Kelpiens aren’t that bad and taught them how to fly their ships, or Kaminar is littered with dead Ba’ul and the Kelpiens went all Kazon and stole their technology. It’s treated as a celebratory cavalry moment but it has a lot of potentially disturbing implications. And with Discovery in the future, we’re not going to get a follow-up unless Saru decides to Google what happened to his people.
The whole spore drive thing was a mess, with reasons for not using it again raised and then forgotten. It has a bad effect on Stamets…then it suddenly doesn’t. It’s against genetic engineering laws…but we’ll just forget about them. It causes damage to the lifeforms in the mycial network…but screw them, we’ll just carry on using it for the rest of the season anyway. Now it’s been sent into the future and forgotten about. How long will that one last?
Discovery going into the future was an exercise in single-mindedness. Even more daft than still going when Control was apparently destroyed, was still going when Control was on board and would have gone into the future with them! I guess Priority One is to move Judgement Day 950 years into the future, so no-one in their time can use the data and hopefully the future can take care of itself?
Recasting Airiam, killing her and then having the original actress as a new character who takes her place was utterly bizarre and feels like a plan to have her appear without make-up.
All of which sounds like I didn’t like it, but I did, mainly for the characters. I’ve defended prequel status in the past, but that was mostly on Enterprise. Discovery’s interquel status always had more cons than pros. It was too close in time frame to TOS for all these big events to never be mentioned (Kirk’s crew should be full of people who lost relatives in that Klingon war a decade ago). Introduce something new and people wonder why it’s never mentioned again. Use something established and people say it didn’t exist then. TOS did mostly concern Kirk encountering something for the first time, world-building from the ground up with very little existing elements for an immediate prequel to use. (They don’t even know what Romulans look like!) So moving into the future has definite possibilities and I’m interested to see where it goes.
@85/cap-mjb: “Section 31. An organisation presented in both Enterprise and Deep Space 9 as an unaccountable autonomous agency whose existence is known to a few is suddenly presented as a recognised (if shady) division of Starfleet subject to the normal chain of command. Throughout the season, there was speculation this would be reconciled. It wasn’t.”
I thought it was — S31 was being nominally dissolved, but continued as a secret underground group like it was in DS9.
As I’ve said before, having S31 act openly actually makes a bit more sense of the whole thing, because the idea that a massive conspiracy could go undiscovered for over 200 years is idiotic. Eventually things get found out. If it was known about in the 23rd century, then went underground and laid low for a while until it was “needed” again, that would make its secrecy in the 24th century somewhat more plausible, as long as you tiptoe around the bit where they never seemed to have heard of it at all, rather than considering it a long-defunct historical entity.
“Recasting Airiam, killing her and then having the original actress as a new character who takes her place was utterly bizarre and feels like a plan to have her appear without make-up.”
More likely, once they enlarged the character’s role, they decided they needed a more experienced (or more available?) actress, but gave the original actress a different part to compensate her.
“(Kirk’s crew should be full of people who lost relatives in that Klingon war a decade ago)”
How do we know it wasn’t? It would certainly explain why the crew’s attitude toward the Klingons was so atypically hateful and hostile. In “Errand of Mercy,” Kirk was so passionately resentful of the Klingons that he was almost as eager for a fight as Kor was. In “Friday’s Child,” a presumably trained security guard panicked and drew his weapon the moment he glimpsed a Klingon uniform. And though Chekov’s murdered brother Piotr in “Day of the Dove” turned out to be a delusion, it was one that the other characters found totally believable until they found out he was an only child, implying that such stories were not uncommon in their real experience. It seems to me that TOS always implied that the crew had firsthand experience with the Klingons as a bitter enemy and had personal reasons to hate them.
We also have Carol Marcus saying “Starfleet has kept the peace for a hundred years” when Starfleet courtmartialed Burnham for starting the war. Was that kept secret from the public? If so, it would be in keeping with the Federations penchant for covering things up this season.
Almost kill everyone on Qu’Onos? It’s a secret.
Sarak was involved in said attempted genocide? It’s a secret. Time travel? It’s a secret.
The whole thing about the signals? It’s a secret.
What happened to Discovery? It’s a secret.
Section 31 being taken over by it’s AI? It’s a secret.
There’s probably a few that I’m forgetting at this point. But the lesson seems to be, if you screw up, it’s best to cover it up so nobody finds out.
@86/CLB: “I thought it was — S31 was being nominally dissolved, but continued as a secret underground group like it was in DS9.”
The officer conducting the investigation says “We agree that the organisation requires a radical overhaul, and perhaps far more transparency.” That appears to be the exact opposite of making it more secret.
I would say that, despite Section 31 apparently being known to the rest of Starfleet (unlike in the 22nd and 24th centuries), it’s entirely possible that it’s not known to the general public and is a secret specialist division, a bit like the SAS used to be.
“It seems to me that TOS always implied that the crew had firsthand experience with the Klingons as a bitter enemy and had personal reasons to hate them.”
If you read/quote the rest of the sentence, you’ll know that’s not what I’m disputing. They talk about a war with the Romulans a century ago, there’s a crewman on board holding a personal grudge for the death of an ancestor in it, yet no-one directly mentions a war with the Klingons a decade ago or anyone that died in it. (Chekov’s brother was supposedly killed in a raid in peace-time, much like Burnham’s parents were.)
@87/kkozoriz: Lies and secrets, the modern utopia.
@88/cap-mjb: Trek is full of things that nobody mentioned but were later established to exist. That’s just the nature of any long-running series — over time, the past will get filled in as well as the future. Nobody mentioned the Federation or the Prime Directive for the first half of TOS season 1. Nobody mentioned the Cardassian war during the first 2-3 seasons of TNG when it was later retconned to have been happening. Nobody mentioned the Aenar during “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” even though blind telepaths would’ve been perfect for the Medusans’ experiment.
This is just how series fiction works. As long something wasn’t explicitly established as not existing, there’s room to squeeze it in. You just have to assume it didn’t come up.
@90/CLB: Yes, true enough. It’s strange, but by no means impossible to reconcile, and as you say it does flavour the back story of what we saw in TOS.
@85 & @86: In regards to Airiam being recast, I think a very plausible explanation is that the original actress was having a bad reaction to the extensive makeup/prosthetics, whether it be physical, psychological, or a combination of both.
Having wrapped season 2, there’s an aspect of Discovery that has been bothering me since the show began: plot structure. Sometimes it feels as if the show leans a little too much on the side of soap opera plotting.
Taking Ash Tyler as an example. He began season 1 as Voq, T’Kuvma’s loyal follower; then he lost his leader and attempted to seize power; failing that, he had extensive surgery, thus becoming Ash Tyler; then he was mindraped by L’Rell becoming fully conditioned as a sleeping Klingon agent, plus he conceived a child in the process; then he joined Discovery as Lorca’s number two and formed a relationship with Michael; then he betrayed them; then he found regret and fought to seek redemption, thus rejoining them; then he became a section 31 operative. Plus, he rejoins the Klingons whenever the plot demands it.
That’s an awful lot to happen to a single character over the span of 29 episodes. Maybe it’s just me who misses the slow character evolution from the DS9 era, but it feels too haphazard in terms of plot structure.
It’s not just him either. Michael Burnham is an emotional linchpin, both on a plot and character level. Every single event and every single character revolves around her.. Even someone like Sisko – who had to administer a major galactic war, no less – needed the entire 7 season run to go through the same amount of emotional beats that Burnham did in 29 episodes. Same with Kirk, Picard, Archer and Janeway.
Now, granted, the actors sell every minute of it, every dramatic moment feels rightfully earned. You can’t say the story doesn’t have stakes and payoff. It even lives up to the old Trek Roddenberryian ideals much of the time, especially in this second season. But it still feels like they threw a lot of disparate pieces together when conjuting up the season-long arcs.
Also, that season-ending denial montage was visibly forced in order to appease continuity hounds.
On the plus side, Discovery nails the Vulcans, especially this version of Spock. Peck is even better than Quinto, and his developing relationship with Burnham is worth the price of admission for both seasons.
Other than that, I have little complaint, other than the fact that Section 31 is a little too omnipresent this time around. I wonder if Tyler’s takeover will eventually result in the organization somehow burying itself so deep to the point of Starfleet officers forgetting about its existence. Then again, I think it’s safe to assume there are still officers in the DS9 era well aware of it, and that someone as naive as Bashir would last 6 seasons on DS9 without hearing about it.
Good write-up, Eduardo.
“Strange New Worlds” was announced today, starring Mount, Peck, and Romijn. So we get that Pike/Enterprise spin-off after all.
Kurtzman still involved? – sounds like more drek.
I remembered not caring for this season as much as the first one when it aired, and rewatching it for the first time, I’m reminded of why. Partly it’s down to the overarching plot, which is a lot less interesting when it finally gets going. While I didn’t actually dislike any of these fourteen episodes (though the finale comes close) I only really enjoyed one of the last six (The Red Angel). There were moments where the plot was only moved forward by leaps of logic that didn’t feel credible, and there were whole subplots that felt like they existed just to slow things down. It didn’t help that Control ended up being such a spectacularly unimaginative antagonist.
However, this rewatch reminded me of the other reason I didn’t care for this season as much, and it’s the same reason that I have a hard time enjoying The Wrath of Khan as much as many other fans do. Like that film, this season goes out of its way to “fix” things I didn’t think were broken about its predecessor: giving the Klingons hair and more familiar looking ships, throwing in lines of dialogue to explain the lack of hologram communication in TOS or why Discovery’s uniforms are different from the ones Kirk and company wore (or would do later), and spending the last ten minutes of the finale explaining why nobody in the 23rd century is allowed to mention Discovery or its spore drive ever again under penalty of torture…er…treason.
That being said, they did fix some things that were legitimately in need of fixing as well. The Klingons spoke English most of the time, and even when they didn’t, the actors did a better job delivering their lines. They highlighted members of the secondary cast a lot more than before, even if in one case it was just so we’d care slightly more about her when she died. They brought Culber back, which I didn’t think was strictly necessary, but I really enjoyed what they did with him afterwards. They brought up the Logic Extremists again, making their appearance in Lethe feel less out of the blue. And they took Discovery into the future, where it could begin to tell its own story.