Created by Bryan Fuller & Alex Kurtzman
Based on Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry
Starring Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Shazad Latif, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman, Jason Isaacs, Wilson Cruz, & Anson Mount
Season One of Star Trek Discovery was daring, inventive, and featured some of the most sophisticated and deep writing seen in any Star Trek series. Strong characterization combined with a powerful and ingenious plotline led to a series that was not Star Trek, but was rather Science Fiction.
Star Trek has always been cartoonish. Gene Roddenbury, the show’s creator, once described it was “Wagon Train to the Stars” and that’s what it was: a space oater.
Discovery broke that mold entirely. Enterprise wasn’t in evidence in the first season, which supposedly takes place 10 years before the old show (Star Date 66b7huthuthut). It was off on a five year mission to seek out new advertisers and boldly go where no western had gone before and totally missed the war with the Klingons.
The Klingons were reimagined as something much darker and more primal, a totally alien and inimically hostile species. None of this lot would be taking orders from Picard and getting beat up by Ferengi. They would not get drunk with Scotty, but they might eat him.
Sarak (James Frain) and Harry Mudd (Rainn Wilson) were the only characters from the old show. Sarak was still Sarak, but Mudd was now a charming, murderous sociopath, Donald Trump with brains & charisma. Very dangerous. Michael Burnham (Martin-Green), a human, was raised in the Vulcan culture by Sarek, and yes, that makes her Spock’s adopted sister.
Given how different Discovery was in tone from what went before, it seemed wise, thematically, to keep the old show at arm’s length. Season 1 managed that until the end, when Discovery gets a distress call from…Enterprise. Sigh.
We do get to meet Captain Pike (Anson Mount), who is given authority to seize command of Discovery from Acting Captain Saru, a Kelpian (Doug Jones, in a non-aquatic role). He arrives with three other crew members in old show attire (Michael nods at the jerseys and remarks dismissively, “Colorful”) including a science officer who is conspicuously not Spock. The officer, named Connolly, played by Sean Connolly Affleck, is white, condescending, paternalist, and gets blown to shit before the episode is out, a possible salute to the right wing online Nazis who called the diverse cast of STD “a white genocide”.
Spock, it seems, didn’t want to see dear sister. He had to meditate, or sharpen his ears, or something. There’s a flashback where rugrat Michael first meets rugrat Spock. It does not go well. Spock is already a passive-aggressive autistic, destined to annoy homespun doctors from Georgia. The show is determined to explore that relationship or lack thereof, which should be interesting since Spock never admits Michael exists in canon.
I’m hoping that Discovery will keep the old show at arm’s length. Why? Well, put it this way: I loved the old Batman TV show. I liked the Christopher Nolan movie trilogy. I wouldn’t try to combine the two, no matter how many characters and settings they shared. As I said, Discovery is science fiction in the Trek universe. It’s not the same as the shows that went before.
The first episode of season two had a few annoying moments. Real asteroid fields tend to have hundreds and thousands of kilometers between individual hunks of rock and aren’t difficult to navigate. Yes, they are less thrilling for chase scenes where spacecraft veer through wildly gyrating debris that is scant meters apart, but it’s good for video games, stupid for serious space drama.
And ensign Tilly, we all know you are intelligent, perky, open and scattered. But could you tone it down a bit? We’ll have to transfer you to The Orville if you don’t.
If it sounds like I didn’t like the first episode, I did, especially compared to the first season debut, which I considered such an awful train wreck that I nearly didn’t watch the subsequent episode. In fact, I watched the second solely to see if it could possibly be as bad as the first.
The thing was, in the first episode, Michael commits mutiny, and possible treason. She also triggers an interstellar war. She had good motives, but still…Star Trek has a maddening disregard for continuity, and I fully expected her to still be the science office in episode two, just as if nothing had happened. At which point I would have stopped watching altogether.
But in this series, actions have consequences, often season-spanning. Even epochal discoveries or inventions are handled in a way where the viewer doesn’t spend the rest of the season thinking, “Hey, wait, the garbage disposal unit created artificial intelligence. Shouldn’t we be hearing something about that? Did they at least promote it to roomba?”
The second episode addressed a lot of my first episode objections, and by the end of the fifteen episode I concluded this was the best Trek series I’ve seen.
So this year is off to a better start.
The acting and writing are solid, the direction sublime. The set designs were a thing of joy. It’s engrossing, sophisticated and intelligent. If they avoid the obvious pitfalls, it should be a great series.