After one postponement after another, Star Trek: Discovery finally premiered on September 24, with the first episode showing on the CBS broadcast network, and the second episode on CBS All-Access, the struggling streaming service that CBS owns. But I guess it’s safe to say that CBS All-Access struggles are now over, thanks to the multitude of people signing up just to see the second half of the saga that began on broadcast TV.
And speaking of that saga, Star Trek: Discovery takes place ten years before Captain Kirk takes off on his legendary journey. Yep, like Star Trek: Enterprise before it, Discovery is yet another prequel, another lame attempt to latch onto a popular version of Star Trek--the Kirk era--instead of taking off with a completely different version of it, like what Gene Roddenberry did with Star Trek: The Next Generation.
But I have to admit that, five minutes into the first episode, “The Vulcan Hello”, I was engrossed with the goings on. That’s mainly because of its lead actress, Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays the first officer of the starship Shenzhou. Despite a weak script that has her character, Michael Burham, behaving erratically, Martin-Green plays her part with such sympathy that it’s easy to ally yourself with her. The Shenzhou’s peaceful mission of exploration and fixing plumbing problems for aliens is interrupted when they are called to see why a relay station has mysteriously gone silent on the edge of Federation space.
When Burham suits up in astronaut gear, she discovers the presence of Klingons—and manages to kill one of them. As can be expected, the Klingons—usually not known for being the most mellowest and laid-back of Star Trek's aliens—don’t take too kindly to this situation, and tensions begin to rise to a boiling point. Soon, at the end of the first episode, Yeoh’s lone starship finds itself staring at a fleet of Klingon vessels, most of which don’t look anything like the Klingon ship design that we’ve seen in the original Star Trek series.
While I’m not happy with the bizarre new look of the Klingons (along with the redesign of their distinctive ships), I liked the storyline of how one Klingon commander seeks to unite the 24 warring factions into a cohesive empire--despite the fact that this completely ignores all previous storylines set up in ST: Enterprise. Unfortunately this great build up for a potential recurring series villain is ultimately wasted in the second episode, “Battle at the Binary Stars”.
But what a battle it is, though. The Shenzhou is joined by a fleet of Federation starships, and we’re treated to a spectacular display of combat. I have a bit of a nitpick here. In one shot they had Federation capital ships zooming around like one-man fighters, shooting lasers everywhere, and I almost started going “pew-pew-pew!” because it looked as if the CGI animators had forgotten this was Star Trek, not Star Wars. For really good Star Trek space battles, you can’t go wrong with the Dominion War battle scenes in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. They had many fantastic scenes of combat between large capital battleships that made them look and feel like the huge, deadly monsters they should be.
When Burham is sentenced to prison for life for her actions at the end of the second episode, it becomes clear that the first two shows of Discovery are the “back story” for what looks to be a redemption arc for the character. Star Trek: Discovery really doesn’t begin in earnest until the third episode, when we finally meet Jason Issacs as the captain of the Discovery, a ship that looks way too advanced than Kirk’s Enterprise. Burham is brought on board by specific request of Issac’s captain, and she’s treated as a pariah by the crew for what she did on the Shenzhou.
But thanks to the lazy writing, Burham’s actions on the Shenzhou seemed very bizarre and out of character for a human woman who was raised with the serene logic of Vulcans (she was raised by Spock’s father, no less, in another bit of storytelling that’s a bit too on the nose for me). It’s almost as if the writers decided just to gloss over the motivation concerning what Burham did just to set her up to be the hated underdog of the Discovery crew.
OK, whatever.
There’s a lot of explaining that’s needed to be done in the upcoming episodes. For instance, thanks to the annoying lens flare, I’m tempted to assume that this is a prequel series to the JJ Abrams series of Star Trek films (Abrams used lens flare in the first two films to literally blinding effect). That would explain why the technology looks so much more advanced than anything that TOS era Kirk had, like people communicating via life-sized holograms. But we’ve been reminded by the Trek powers that be that this series is taking place in the TOS timeline. So there really should be one hell of an explanation coming up.
Despite my problems with Discovery, I still enjoyed it. The series looks gorgeous, thanks to its high end production values and effects. And any series that has the remarkable Doug Jones (he played Abe Sapien in the first two Hellboy movies and will star in the upcoming The Shape of Water) in its cast is worth giving a shot. Besides, thanks to Martin-Green’s sturdy performance in spite of the wobbly scripts, I still want to see what happens next to our Ms. Burham. --SF
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