Post by Deleted on Feb 9, 2018 3:35:14 GMT
I run a Star Trek fansite, which amongst other things has episode reviews for every episode and movie. I had originally planned to add Discovery to the site, and wrote the following as my thoughts on the first two episodes.
I rapidly made the decision that I wasn't going to be able to spend a lot of time and effort on Discovery, what with... well, everything about it. So the below has just sat there for a long while on my hard drive.
I thought I'd dust them off and post them here, just so they're out there in the world. No idea if anybody is interested or not, but here they are.
So, here we go.
We open with an arty visual effects sequence which zooms out and out until it becomes the eye of an alien. One might take this as an indication that Discovery will be a show that puts a lot of effort into visuals. One would be right.
The alien is T’Kuvma, a Klingon. Only… it’s not a Klingon. It looks nothing like a Klingon, not remotely. Apparently, according to the producers, T’Kuvma and his people are some long separate offshoot of the Klingon species, and that’s why they look different. This makes no sense to me - Amish people don’t have tentacles, right?
As well as looking different, these Klingons look bad. They’re visually busy. It’s like whoever designed them thought that there needs to be as much detail as possible on both them and their clothing. It looks impressive, but in a ridiculous, silly, impractical way. My reaction is less “wow, this is amazing!” and more “wow, I can’t believe they spent that much effort and produced something that silly!"
T’Kuvma is convinced that the Federation is coming to destroy the Klingons. “They will coil around us,” he says, “and take all that we are.”
Why does he believe this? We’re never told. He just does. As seen in Enterprise, the Humans had a decent first contact with the Klingons. After that they had their run-ins, but they were as often good as bad. One could not really call the two species “enemies” at that point. And, we learn, the Klingons vanished into isolation just after Enterprise finished, and there has been little contact with them since. So why hostility? Apparently it’s just because Humans are peaceful and Klingons don’t like that. Okay...
He also believes that the “24 warring houses” must reunite in order to combat this threat. It’s worth mentioning at this point that these “Klingons" have huge, prominent teeth - worth mentioning because that means that every single Klingon actor has to kind of mumble their lines around these false dentures, which makes it sound like they can’t talk properly. Remember Worf? What a voice Michael Dorn has! Deep and booming and serious. Or how about that smooth but sligthly creepy voice that Gowron had? Now imagine them slurring and mumbling their way through their lines. That’s what the Discovery “Klingons” do, on every single line.
So, plot point one : T’Kuvma wants war with the Federation as a reason for the Klingon race to unite.
Next we cut to Captain Philippa Georgiou and her first officer, Michael Burnham, walking through the desert. A storm is approaching, and Georgiou asks Burnham how long it will take to arrive. “one hours, seventeen minutes, twenty two seconds,” Burnham says.
Okay. One : what the writers are obviously doing here is trying to give Burnham a “Vulcan” moment. We will learn later on that she was raised on Vulcan, and so they are trying to show that influence. But as a human, why would Burnham even have the mental capacity to make such calculations? I was always under the impression that Vulcans could do what they could do partly because of training, but also because they are basically intellectual giants compared to humans. But according to Discovery… apparently not.
And two : how can you possibly give a to-the-second estimate of when a storm will hit anyway? There isn't even such a thing as the moment it hits, storms are analogue, not digital! They arrive gradually!
Onward! Next we then learn their mission. A species on this planet is on the verge of extinction... because "the ambient radiation from a nearby meteor drilling accident dried out their water table."
Um.... what? What on earth is that even supposed to mean? I presume by “meteor drilling” they mean that there was some sort of asteroid mine near the planet. And an accident released radiation, which… got to the planet, somehow? And that… caused their water to dry up? Radiation can do many things. But it’s not really a desiccant. I have tried to come up with some kind of mental picture of what she’s talking about, and I just cannot.
“If we can get in and out without making contact,” Burnham adds, “we can steer clear of General Order One.”
General Order One is, in Trek lore, better known as The Prime Directive. No interference with alien cultures, essentially. Now what exactly that means is a long and complex subject, but Burnham has specifically laid out their intention - avoiding contact. And how does she plan to do that? Well… they’re going to walk through the middle of the alien’s territory, right through their breeding grounds, right under all their eggs, walk right up to their community well, and shoot a phaser down it.
Brilliant. How could you possibly fault a plan like this! As they walk through the eggs, an alien crawls past above. If it had looked down at them, that would have been a mission fail. But it didn’t, so that’s okay.
So they arrive at the well, shoot through the bedrock, and there’s water down there and it all bubbles up. Mission accomplished.
They set off back to their beam out point. But the storm arrives early. I’m sorry to have to say it, but this kind of makes Burnham look like an idiot. I guess that absurdly super precise estimate of the storm’s arrival was a case of her mouth writing cheques her brain couldn’t cash. So the impression we have now is that Burnham is indeed what I suggested… somebody with a Vulcan habit of expressing themselves, but without the intellectual capacity to back it up. This is not promising beginning for the character.
Now they hit a problem. With the storm arrived, their ship can’t detect them. Nor will their communicators work through the storm. Huh? This is, so far as we know, a perfectly normal storm. Since when do communicators and transporters not work through a storm?
So the Captain walks a big delta symbol into the ground. Now in this time period, the delta symbol they've stuck all over the place in this show was the logo of the USS Enterprise. And that’s all it was. So it is a mystery to me why the Captain makes it in the sand. Maybe she wishes she Captained the Enterprise? I know I’d rather be seeing what that ship and crew are up to instead of this one.
Anyway, although the storm has arrived and the sand is being blown all over the place, the Enterprise symbol doesn't get blown away. And although there is cloud cover and the ship's sensors aren't working through the storm, it sees the mark anyway and comes diving through the clouds to beam them up. And that’s obviously what this entire desert scene has been about. I’d bet good money that somebody had a thought that it would be a cool visual to have the ship swoop out of the clouds like that, and every single thing in this scene was written to get to that point, regardless of the plot logic. I wonder if somebody thought to ask "Why wouldn’t they just send a shuttle?” I bet they threw things at him for saying it.
I will note, and not for the last time, that “Starship comes out of clouds” is a very common visual in the JJ Abrams version of Star Trek. It featured in both of his Trek movies. But Discovery can’t be heavily influenced by Jaybrams Trek, right? I mean, it’s set in the Prime universe. They keep saying so.
So all we've had is the teaser, and already every single thing that has been said and done is utterly nonsensical, wrong, and completely lacking in logic.
Get used to that.
After the Westworld-inspired title sequence, we get a shot of Discovery in warp flight. They have taken the usual “streaking stars” effect and ramped it up to 11. Then ramped that up to 11 again. As with much of what we will see on Discovery it looks both expensive, and weird and overdone. Burnham’s log states that it is Sunday May 11th, 2256 - Stardate 1207.3. Yes, the 11th of May 2256 is indeed going to be a Sunday. Score one for the writers.
The ship has been sent to investigate a comm relay which has been damaged. They are’t sure if it was hit by weapons or an asteroid. I would have thought those two things would be extremely different, but what do I know. Burnham makes some comment about how the beauty of space makes her optimistic. It’s a nice line… but it’s really not delivered very well. In fact, as things progress we will see that neither one of the main characters turns in a very good performance. I’ll give Sonequa Martin-Green the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s because the show she’s on was known for having a rather troubled production. Her character is poorly written, who knows what kind of direction she got… I can see why she’s bad.
Michelle Yeoh is bad, but… honestly I’ve never seen a good performance from her. She seems to have a fan base, but for the life of me I can’t work out why.
We meet Saru, the science officer. His species see everything as a threat, we are told. He thinks the relay was hit on purpose. Burnham suggests that this was to get the attention of a Starfleet ship. Around this time you start to notice that Discovery is one of those shows that thinks it’s cool to constantly tilt the camera over. You know, like… um… the Adam West Batman series. And Battlefield Earth. Remember Battlefield Earth?
Ahem.
We also get some banter between the officers on the bridge. And wow. It’s obviously meant to be the kind of stuff TOS did all the time, but it really comes across as kind of forced and awkward. Maybe that’s the bad acting at work, maybe it’s just that the dialogue isn’t great again, maybe it’s just that we don’t know these people well, but it all just feels very strained.
Saru detects something, but is unable to resolve it. Burnham then literally shoves him out of the way to have a go herself. He then shoves her out of the way to get back to it.
Um… what? Banter is one thing, but can you imagine, say, Sulu shoving Spock out of the way of anything? Or Data shoving Riker out of the way? It’s just super-weird and comes across as really, really unprofessional. Especially given that, presumably, either one could have gone to any console on the bridge and called the data up.
There’s some sort of stealth effect around whatever it is, so they can’t tell much about it. They go and look through a good old fashioned telescope pointed out a window, which can. Huh? A common sensor carried by ships today is an EOD - an Electro-Optical Device. What’s that? It’s basically a digital camera with a huge zoom lens. Discovery would pretty much have to have something like this to be able to have visual displays at all… why wouldn’t they work? A digital camera pretty much does what your eye does, anything that interfered with it would likely interfere with your retina just as much.
But again, you can just hear the writers. “Hey, what if there was this like weird sensor thing, and they had to use somebody’s antique telescope! That would be a cool visual!”
So since shuttles aren’t manouverable enough to move through the ring of rocks the thing is hidden in, Burnham says she will fly out in a thruster suit. Saru objects, saying the radiation will shred her DNA inside 20 minutes. Burnham promises to do a simple flyby and be back in 19. Captain Georgiou agrees, and tells Saru to go with her. Makes sense, never send one person alone is a good safety rule. But both officers object, so Burnham goes alone.
Now, this is a small point, but it stuck out to me. How is it that the First Officer can apparently overrule the Captain on this? Okay, maybe that’s overly harsh. She doesn’t over-rule her… but she does change her mind. It just seems… odd. Again, imagine this scene :
Riker : “I volunteer Captain.”
Picard : “Very well. But take Worf with you.”
Riker : “But I don’t want to.”
Worf : “And I don’t want to go.”
Picard : “Okay then, go alone Commander Riker.”
It just feels weird and off, doesn’t it? You can’t quite picture Starfleet officers acting that way.
So Burnham goes out in a thruster suit, in a scene that is obviously influenced by Spock’s flight through V’Ger in Star Trek : The Motion Picture, but very much more so by Star Trek : Into Darkness. Another Jaybrams influence. Yay.
Now she very clearly said that she would just do a flyby, but in fact she was lying about that, and once there she lands on the thing and has a walk around. Its a ship, a Klingon ship. She doesn’t recognise it, which is at least understandable, because it looks absolutely nothing like a Klingon ship. It’s full of Klingons that look nothing like Klingons, too. It’s ridiculous and wrong, but at least there is symmetry.
A Klingon shows up wearing an absurdly over-designed space suit. I’m sorry, but these Klingon designs really are verging on comical at this point. You remember in the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie, when the Vogon ships were over Earth and the camera did jump pull-backs in time to the music? But then it just kept doing it and doing it and doing it, to the point where it was so absurd that it was funny? That’s what these Klingon designs are like. It’s like the designer sketched a design… then made designs to go on bits of that design… then made more designs to go on bits of that design… then made even more designs to go on bits of that design… until the whole thing is just so ridiculously overdone that you’re left laughing at it.
So the Klingon attacks Burnham, and she kills him and escapes.
Back to T’Kuvma, who is putting his friend’s body in a coffin. This is stuck to the hull of the ship. We will learn that that’s what this ship is - it’s a kind of holy temple which houses thousands of coffins on the hull. They act like armour of a sort, too. Funky. We see a Klingon funeral, then, complete with the death howl from TNG. Unlike TNG, they revere their dead rather than regarding it as “just a shell” to be disposed of. But different houses have different rituals, so fair enough.
Then we flash to Burnham as a kid on Vulcan. We learn that her parents were killed in a Klingon raid, which she is upset about. She hates Klingons because of this.
She’s rescued, suffering from bad radiation burns since, you know, she disobeyed orders and stayed out there too long. She then disobeys orders again, running out of medical and charging up to the bridge.
You know, this is going to be the main protagonist of the series. And so far, every single action we have seen her take as been unprofessional, disobedient to the point of mutinous, or just plain dumb. Are we supposed to be liking Michael Burnham? Are we supposed to admire her? Because so far, at least… I don’t, and I don’t see why anybody would or how anybody could.
So she warns Georgiou, who is a bit dubious, but declares a red alert. The Klingon ship decloaks.
Yes, you read that right. Up until STIII, we never saw Klingons with a cloaking device. It’s been widely taken that when Romulans started using Klingon designs in The Enterprise Incident, they had traded cloaking technology for those ships. But I guess not. Oops, there’s another bit of Star Trek thrown out the window. Oh well, plenty more where that came from.
So the Klingon ship decloaks. On board, T’Kuvma laments the death of their “torch bearer” and they discuss appointing another. They choose Voq, an albino Klingon. Normally there is a lot of animosity towards albinos, but he makes an impassioned speech about how committed he is, and to prove it he sticks his hand in a fire and leaves it there for a while. T’Kuvma approves, and he gets the job. If you have trouble with job interviews, now you know what to do in the next one.
Back on Shenzhou, Burnham walks in on a conversation between Captain Georgiou and an Admiral. The Admiral doesn’t seem too impressed with Burnham's actions so far, which is perfectly understandable; I’m liking him already. Burnham argues that the Klingons are hostile by nature, and the Admiral chides her - they have had only fleeting contact with the Klingons for the last century, how could she presume to know their nature? It’s a fair point. He orders Georgiou to hold position and do nothing unless provoked - every Starfleet ship within range is on the way and a fleet will be there in two hours. Again, reasonable. Starfleet Admirals have a long history of being incompetent or evil, so it’s nice to meet a sensible one for a change.
Burnham explains that Saru thinks they should just run away. His species are descended from a prey animal - in fact on his planet there are no such things as food chains, in which any given animal migh be a predator to one species and prey to another. Rather, every animal is one or the other - predator or prey. I’m not sure how that could work, really. One assumes there is a wide variation of size amongst the different species, as there is on Earth, right? And so there are going to be predators that, whilst large and dangerous to some prey animals, are small and tasty-treat-looking to other, larger predators, right? So why wouldn’t their equivalent of a cougar try to eat their equivalent of a cat?
Anyway, the upshot of this is that as a “prey” species, Saru’s species are basically cowards. So he pretty much always wants to be cautious, and always wants to run away. Shades of Larry Niven’s Puppeteers here, to be sure. Georgiou points out that with nearby Federation colonies and facilities, they can’t just leave a threat to do what it likes. Again, fair point. Besides, you’ve been ordered to do nothing and wait, so it’s really not relevant what Saru wants to do.
Suddenly the Klingon ship lights up super-bright, blinding the bridge crew. It blinds them because their bridge has a huge window, another feature imported from the Jaybrams-verse which this show is not supposed to be part of. Even with the filters on maximum the light is painfully bright. You know, it’s kind of impressive to see a show chose to have a big window on the bridge then go out of the way to demonstrate why that’s a really bad idea.
Of course they could simply tilt the ship a little, so that the forward bulk of the saucer was between the bridge and the Klingon ship. That would shade them from the light. But nobody seems to think of that.
An officer states that the brightness is 1 billion Lux. He actually says one billion lumens per square meter, but a lumen per square metre is what a Lux is. A billion of them is about ten thousand times brighter than the brightest direct sunlight, which is impressive.
There’s then a huge noise, which we are told is some kind of "electromagnetic subspace waveform”. Essentially, what this is is a beacon designed to signal the other Klingon houses to come see what’s going on.
Burnham leaves the bridge and contacts Sarek. We discover that the Klingons killed her parents, which explains why she has a grump on about them. The Klingon Empire has been in disarray for generations, Sarek says. Perhaps a new leader has emerged to unify them. Burnham assumes that this hypothetical leader wants a war to unify the Empire, and Sarek cautions her about letting her past drive her assumptions. She asks how the Vulcans have been able to coexist with the Klingons, and he says the solution is particular to the Vulcans, and may not work for a human ship. But the method turns out to be that the Vulcans began to fire on any Klingon ship they met, thus showing strength and earning respect. Why wouldn’t this work for humans? Burnham certainly seems to assume it would.
She goes out to convince Georgiou that what is needed right now is “a Vulcan Hello”. Georgiou refuses, on the basis that “Starfleet doesn’t fire first”. There’s also the fact that they’ve been ordered not to act unless provoked, but nobody seems to consider that a factor. Burnham makes a snotty comment about how logic should compel Georgiou to consider her success rate over the last seven years and therefore implement her plan without further argument. It really comes across as rather arrogant, especially coming from somebody who has demonstrated nothing but incompetence and disobedience thus far. When Burnham argues, Georgiou takes the argument to her ready room.
They argue the point there for a bit, neither really backing down much. Burnham stresses that firing is the only way to prevent loss of life… Georgiou’s life, specifically. It seems a little odd. Why would she assume that Georgiou would necessarily be one to die in a conflict with the Klingons? Hmmm. Neither one of them brings up the fact that they’ve been ordered to do nothing until backup arrives, which really makes the entire argument moot. It literally does not matter what Burnham wants to do, and it doesn’t even matter if Georgiou agrees with her. But they talk as if that’s simply not a consideration.
Burnham then apologises and says Georgiou is right… only to neck pinch her.
It’s long been a topic of debate amongst Trek fans as to whether the neck pinch is a species capability or just a martial arts move. Some think that the pinch is a form of telepathy - Vulcans touch the face to mind meld, goes the argument, because as touch telepaths they usually need contact for their telepathy to work. Touching the neck is a variation on this, essentially a telepathic blast that knocks a person out. Others argue that it’s a nerve pinch, hitting just the right nerves to knock a person out. if the latter, then any trained person could do it. The argument was resolved when Data neck-pinched XXXX in Unification, Part 2 - if Data can do it, surely any sufficiently trained person can.
So it makes sense that Burnham can do this. She goes out onto the bridge and tells the crew the Captain has changed her mind, and orders the weapons readied for firing. We know this is a tense moment, because the camera swoops around the bridge constantly, tilting all over the place as if the camera operator is having some kind of seizure.
As the crew respond, albeit dubiously, Georgiou emerges from her ready room with a phaser and tells Burnham to stand down.
You know, when I suggested that her failed attempt to predict the storm accurately indicated that Burnham had Vulcan mannerisms whilst lacking the capability to actually do them properly, I thought maybe I was being a little harsh. Yet here we are again… Burnham can do a Vulcan neck pinch, but her version of it incapacitates a person for… what, twenty seconds, maximum? They really do seem to want to sell Burnham as an incompetent Vulcan.
Anyway, Burnham yet again argues against Georgiou. “I’m trying to save you,” she insists. Again, it’s like she is doing this not because she thinks it’s the best solution, but because she thinks it will save Georgiou specifically. It’s an odd moment… until you realise that they writer is, in a rather ham-fisted way, trying to establish that Burnham is super protective of Georgiou, specifically. This will become important later.
At that point the beacon switches off and a bunch of “Klingon” ships arrive. Like the sarcophagus ship, none of these look anything like any Klingon ship ever. And like the sarcophagus ship, they are all comically over-designed.
They also warp in with the “instantaneous deceleration” effect from the Jaybrams verse. Because this series definitely isn’t set in that universe, but in the Prime one. That’s why they constantly throw similarities in our face. To establish that it’s different.
And that’s episode one of Discovery.
Last time, on Star Trek : Discovery… we met a protagonist who is deeply unlikeable, arrogant despite being stupid, who screws up every single thing she attempts to do, and winds up committing mutiny.
Now, follow us down the rabbit hole…
We open with a flashback to seven years ago, 2249. Sarek escorts Michael Burnham on board the USS Discovery. Michael acts very “Vulcan”… which is to say, she is extremely rude and disrespectful to her new Captain. I imagine the intention was to show us that she’s become a lot more human over the years. Presumably because of Georgiou’s influence, as a way of establishing that Michael really likes and respects Georgiou, which is why she was prepared to mutiny to save Georgiou’s life. In truth, to my eyes this scene just made Michael look like more of a jerk.
Okay, let’s get into an aspect of this that I find odd and inexplicable. Why is Sarek her adopted Vulcan daddy? There are those who reacted to this news by saying it’s impossible, ridiculous, etc. I don’t go quite so far as to say it’s impossible, but it is kind of ridiculous. For one thing, let’s talk Starfleet. In the Prime universe Spock had a very strained relationship with his father, for a very long time, because Sarek did not approve of Spock joining Starfleet. Doesn’t that seem kind of strange, now?
Let’s examine it. In 2249 Spock would have been nineteen years old. Which means he likely would have joined Starfleet last year - presuming that Vulcans are of age at 18, the same as Humans. So Sarek cut contact with Spock last year… and would basically not talk to him again until Journey to Babel, ten years or so from now… and took twenty years after that to admit that it was possible that he was wrong about opposing Spock's joining Starfleet. And yet that same man is nevertheless happy to take his daughter to her first ship, and to continue to provide her mentorship and advice over the following seven years. All whilst condemning his son for following in her footsteps.
Star Trek Discovery has turned Sarek into a hypocrite. And that’s the generous take on it, because if we want to make an assumption or two then it may be that Sarek is okay with Michael joining Starfleet and not Spock because Michael is a human, and Spock is not. So the uncharitable take on it is that Sarek is a bigot.
Great move, writers.
And the weird thing about all this is that there is absolutely no reason why this had to be Sarek. There’s nothing about Sarek that requires this to be him, and absolutely nothing about this character that requires it to be Sarek. They could have simply used a different Vulcan, and the whole issue goes away. But they didn’t, because… I have no idea.
Back in the present, we learn that 24 “Klingon” ships have arrived. At this point it’s probably redundant to point out that not one of these looks anything like any Klingon ship that we have ever seen before or will ever see again in Star Trek. But then those aren’t Klingons and this isn’t Star Trek, so in an odd way it’s appropriate.
Michael points out that there are 24 houses on the Klingon ruling council. She takes it as an indicator that somebody is attempting to unify their Empire. Georgiou responds by throwing her in the brig. I respond by doing a little happy dance now that the moron traitor is where she belongs.
On the Klingon ship the other leaders holo in to T’Kuvma’s ship. There may be 24 ships, but for whatever reason there are only seven holograms. Not sure why. Interestingly, all the leaders of the houses that we see look pretty much like T’Kuvma, with minor differences - that is to say, none of them look the slightest bit like Klingons. Which means that whoever claimed that T’Kuvma and his group looked different because they are some ancient sect of separatists who had nothing to do with other houses? That person was… being creative with his explanations, shall we say. Because it sounds so much more polite than “lying through his teeth”.
We are treated to an extended scene of the “Klingons" talking Klingon to one another, rendered hilarious by the fact that none of them can talk properly past their false teeth. In addition, every one of them sounds incredibly stilted, as if each word, or even each syllable, were being recited from a list, unconnected to all the others. There is no flow to it, no sense of a person speaking a sentence in a language. It’s a chore to listen to.
T’Kuvma brags at length about how he restored his sarcophagus ship when nobody else cared about it. Given that most Klingons don’t particularly revere their dead, treating the corpse as “an empty shell” to be disposed of, one wonders why this would impress any of the “Klingons” there. But apparently it does. One of them points out that there are outcasts on the ship, meaning the albino guy, and he joins in bragging about how great T’Kuvma is. Some of the “Klingons” ask to hear more.
He responds that humans are a threat to Klingon “purity”, wanting to drag them down into “the muck where the humans, vulcans, tellarites and filthy andorians mix”. I’m not quite sure what this is supposed to mean. The only thing I can guess at is that he thinks that the Federation wants to force the “Klingons” to join up and race mix with everyone else. But… well, it’s been a hundred years since the Federation and Klingons have had formal contact. They have fought occasional battles in that time - the last at Donatu V in 2242, some 14 years ago. And in all that time… has the Federation ever attempted to conquer the Klingon Empire? Has it ever tried to force the Klingon Empire to join the Federation? Not that I know of, and neither the episode nor T’Kuvma say anything back up his claim that it wants to.
A “Klingon” points out that one ship is no threat. T’Kuvma declares that more will come. Rather conveniently for him, at that moment a bunch of Starfleet ships arrive. Georgiou calls the Klingon ship and offers a peaceful solution. T’Kuvma angrily claims she doesn’t come in peace, but wants to destroy their individuality. Again, no evidence is offered as to why anybody would believe this. It literally comes across as T’Kuvma stating his opinion, and all the other “Klingons” just deciding he’s right for no particular reason.
So T’Kuvma opens fire, and the Federation fires back, and there’s a big battle.
Much has been made of the money spent on Discovery. Many have lauded the effects, calling them things like “movie quality”. Personally I both agree and disagree. I will certainly agree that the effects look expensive. As do the sets look expensive, and the uniforms and makeup and aliens look expensive. But looking expensive is not the same thing as looking any good.
Not to harp on the “Klingons”, but they are a case in point. I bet the “Klingon” makeup is far more expensive than the makeup used for real Klingons. Yet the thing about that makeup is that it left much of the face uncovered, which meant the actors could convey a wide range of emotions very easily. And I bet the extensive use of Klingon dialogue meant more rehearsal time, more planning, a slower pace of production, which drove up costs. And I bet the astonishingly high level of detail on the Klingon ships, props, and costumes meant they were expensive to produce.
Yet the end result is of actors whose costumes look ridiculous, who cannot display emotions through the layers of latex all over their faces, desperately struggling to issue lines in a language they don’t understand. Does it look expensive? Sure. Movie quality expensive. But it doesn’t look any good. In fact, it looks like crap. The money was utterly wasted.
The battle is the same way. They have clearly spent a lot of money on the CGI… but the execution of it is terrible.
First, there’s very little sense of what is actually going on in the battle. We generally get either a wide shot showing a bunch of ships firing, or we get a close up of a ship getting hit. But there’s no sense of the opponents maneuvering into place, seeking one another out, jockeying for position. It’s just a bunch of CGI ships all over the screen.
Then too, there is very little evidence that anybody is using shields. This is yet another Jaybrams influence on the show that isn’t set in the Jaybrams universe; there is mention of shields, there are reports of shields weakening or failing… but no actual visible evidence that shields exist at all. Why? Because shields stop ships from getting hit, and ships getting hit with explosions looks really cool… and if there’s one thing battles must be above all else in this kind of show, it’s cool.
And I’m all for that, I really am. But you can’t just throw cool CGI onto the screen and hope it will impress, no matter how much money you spend on it. Your battle has to tell a story, visually. And this one doesn't.
There’s also another visual issue, which is that the weapons used look largely unimpressive. If you look at the original series, phasers were treated as mighty, impressive weapons. Firing a phaser was no small thing; they were the “big guns” of a ship. The "phase cannon” on Discovery come across as rather less than that. The Jaybramsverse treated phasers as being like machine guns, not firing big impressive beams so much as shooting little pulses in a kind of “pew pew” manner. And that’s just how the Discovery battle works.
Is it expensive? Sure, I would imagine. Does it look technically impressive? As impressive as any bit of CGI I’ve seen. But does it look any good? Well, it sure didn’t look good to me. This battle occupies a huge portion of the episode, and it’s nonsensical. In fact it’s worse than that. It’s the worst thing a space battle can be. It’s boring.
As a minor aside, I suppose we should accept the use of “phase cannon” as a nice continuity nod to the NX-01 Enterprise. I feel uncharitable in pointing out that “Phase cannon”, along with “Photonic Torpedoes” typified the habit that Enterprise had of trying to imply that the technology was more primitive by having ship’s systems which acted in the exact same way that the Original Series equivalents did… but with ever so slightly different names for them. So yeah, it’s a nod to cannon. But it’s a nod to a bit of canon that didn’t make much sense in the first place.
A bridge officer reports that the shields are holding for now. Georgiou orders evasive action and the ship heels over to one side… whilst “Klingon” weapons smash into the hull, causing explosions all over the side of the ship. So much for those shields, I guess.
Down in the brig, Michael passes the time. The Shenzhou’s brig is immense, by the way. No idea why… maybe they have discipline problems on these ships? Was Burnham’s mutiny just one of many on the ship?
(Incidentally, there’s an episode of Star Trek in which Spock declares flat out that there has never been a mutiny on a Federation Starship. Discovery makes a huge effort to stick to canon, you know. We know this, because they never tire of telling us so.)
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. Burnham is locked behind a force field. The field has a weird kind of complicated pattern all over it, for some odd reason. Don’t suppose that matters either, it just looks odd.
The doors open and a wounded officer from the bridge stumbles in looking for medical. Apparently he’s concussed or something, and is rather dazed and confused about where he is. He tells Burnham she should be on the bridge, and she says she can’t help. “Why are we fighting,” he laments, “we’re Starfleet, we’re explorers, not soldiers.” Burnham urges him to get help for himself. Then the wall explodes and he tumbles off into space.
That all seemed a bit odd and pointless. I’m really not sure what the purpose of the scene was. I can only guess it was to humanise the situation… show us the cost of the conflict by having somebody die?
Or perhaps… one of the cool moments in the 2009 Star Trek movie was when somebody is running along a corridor during a battle. The ship is hit and the wall blows out, sending the hapless crewmember tumbling into space. We see weapons firing all over the place as they recede into the distance - and in a rare example of scientific accuracy, with no air the moment plays out in total silence. It’s an effective, eerie scene and was much praised when the film came out, including by me.
I can only guess that Discovery was trying to ape that moment, hoping it would be as well received? If so, it really doesn’t work anything like as well as the original. For one thing, we see ships going past making “pew pew” noises as they blast away, which removes the eerie silence aspect. Oh well.
Burnham is knocked out, and flashes back to the raid in which the Klingons killed her parents. She’s rescued by Sarek, who mind melds with her. She wakes to find the security area open to space, with only the forcefield around her holding the air in. Whoops! The computer reports that the field is going to fail soon. Double whoops!
And now something happens that is… well. Micheal has a vision of Sarek. Not an imagined one, either. He is projecting himself into her head telepathically.
Vulcans, up to now, have been touch telepaths. Meaning they have to touch a person to telepathically communicate with them. On rare occasions, it has been possible for a Vulcan to influence a person at a short distance - ten or fifteen feet, say - and implant a single suggestion in them, like “open the cell door” or “flip the communicator open and push that button.”
What Sarek is doing is projecting not just an idea, but full audio and video, in real time, over approximately one thousand light years. And not just projecting, either - he can also hear and see Burnham’s replies.
It’s a staggering increase in Vulcan telepathic power - literally millions of times greater than anything we’ve ever seen before. The excuse given is that it works because they melded once, and Surak gave Burnham a little bit of his katra. Um… okay. If that works for you, then fair enough.
You know, there’s a better way they could have played this. Rather than claim she is communing with the actual Sarek back home, why not say that what she is communicating with is the piece of his katra that he left in her head? Treat it as being like that “echo Guinan” left behind in the Nexus in Generations. Make this a kind of shadow-Sarek that she can talk to in moments of stress - and make it kind of like an angel on her shoulder, a conscience, a source of reassurance and support. That would make a hell of a lot more sense than giving Burnham the ability to make a psychic phone call to Sarek whenever they feel like it, right?
Anyway, Sarek gives her a little pep talk. “You can do better,” he says. Well he’s sure as hell right about that one. She could hardly have done any worse than she has so far.
Discovery takes more hits and goes out of control, drifting towards a nearby asteroid. At the last moment they are taken in tow by a tractor beam from the USS Europa - the Admiral’s ship, which has finally arrived. He calls the Klingons, hoping to end the shooting. T’Kuvma accepts the offer - in English, though still with the poor actor desperately trying to talk through his false teeth. But it’s a trap! A cloaked ship rams the Europa, and the Europa self destructs. It’s really not much of a bang for a warp core breach, but then they rarely are. Remember when Scotty confidently stated that a self destruct by the Enterprise would destroy V’Ger, a ship some sixty miles long? I miss those days.
The “Klingons” are winning the battle, albeit with losses. But the plan seems to be working, so T’Kuvma sends the rest of the houses home to Qo’NoS to declare what a badass he is, which they do. He then sends a message ragging on the Federation, telling them how awesome he is.
Down in the brig, Burnham convinces the computer to let her out of the field. Ethically it can’t keep her locked in a place where she will shortly die, so it complies and she jumps across the vacuum to a hatch and gets through. The scene from 2001 : A Space Odyssey, essentially.
T’Kuvma declares the battle won, since the Federation ships are dead or crippled. He sets about recovering the Klingon dead, declaring that he will stick them in coffins on his ship. Creepy, but okay.
Michael gets to the bridge. Astonishingly, Georgiou doesn't have security haul her away and lock her up but instead listens to her. Burnham says there’s a way to win the day - capture T’Kuvma. As things stand, he is a huge hero back home. If they kill him, that hero status will transform into martyr status, and he will be even more powerful in driving further conflict. But nothing destroys a Klingon’s honour like being captured alive, so if they can capture him then he will be completely discredited, and his whole campaign for war will fall apart.
It’s actually a decent plan. A clever idea, and exactly in line with what we know of the real Klingon race. Finally, some kudos here.
To execute it, they decide to beam a photon torpedo warhead out onto one of the Klingon dead bodies in space which T’Kuvma is collecting via tractor beam. He duly takes it inside his ship and it detonates, doing huge damage.
One is forced to wonder what would have happened if the explosion had killed T'Kuvma. He’s the one recovering the bodies, after all, and he has promised to prepare them with his own hands. So he’s likely to be right about where the warhead detonates. Mission fail, right there.
But… it doesn’t. Phew.
It is perhaps also worth mentioning that here and now, in the present day world, planting mines on the bodies of enemy soldiers so as to hurt those collecting them… is a war crime. A rather serious war crime. Both the Geneva and Hague conventions specifically forbid planting explosives on the bodies of the enemy dead.
You begin to wonder if perhaps T’Kuvma doesn’t have a point about the Federation after all.
So Georgiou and Burnham beam over to the “Klingon” ship and a fight ensues. Again, it comes across very much like the fight on the Romulan ship in the Jaybrams 2009 Star Trek. For a show that is allegedly set in the Prime timeline, Discovery does an awful lot of that. In fact, it hardly does anything else.
One wonders why they didn’t bring, say, half a dozen additional officers along with them. I really cannot imagine any answer to that.
So long story short, Gerogiou gets killed by T’Kuvma and so Burnham quite deliberately flips her phaser to kill and shoots him in the back, killing him. You know, the one thing she said herself that they must not do, only five minutes ago? The one thing that would most ensure that the war with the Klingons continued? So with all the total incompetence and stupidity that she has demonstrated, she now has this - an entire war to her name.
Remember, this is the protagonist. We’re supposed to like this person. We're supposed to root for her to succeed.
So she beams back, the Shenzhou is evacuated and left in space. We then see Burnham tried for mutiny and other charges. She pleads guilty. Hilariously the judges are all heavily backlit, leaving them visible to her only as silhouettes. It actually did make me laugh out loud when I saw it. It’s like Starfleet decided to have the creepiest, most Kafka-esque trial system they could think of.
When asked if she has anything to say, she laments that she will never be able to Captain a starship. She points out that she tried to protect her Captain and friend from the enemy, “and now I am the enemy”. Oddly, she doesn’t actually express any regret for what she did - only for the negative outcome that has resulted. And her primary complaint is how it has negatively affected her own career.
Remember : you are supposed to like this person.
So she is sentenced to life in prison, and that is the end of the second episode of Discovery.
What can one say about Discovery? It’s pretty. It’s expensive looking. It’s awful.
Most of what is done looks bad and wrong. It certainly doesn’t look or feel anything like Star Trek.
Critically, the protagonist of the series is an unlikeable, incompetent, disloyal, imbecile. We are expected to like her, but I cannot imagine why. Am I supposed to be rooting for her to get out of prison, to redeem herself? I’m not. Prison is exactly where she belongs. Only an idiot would want her on his ship, and only a organisation of idiots would allow it. If there were any justice in the world of Discovery, she would rot in prison for the rest of the series.
Another odd thing about all this is that the pilot episode was almost wholly unnecessary for the series. They spent two whole hours on this… and it’s just one character's back-story!
Burnham’s story is obviously going to parallel Tom Paris’s story in Voyager. He screwed up, got put in prison, Janeway got him out to help on a mission. For Tom Paris that story was told in about ten minutes of screen time over a couple of scenes - all of it either Janeway filling Tom in on what she wanted, or him telling Harry Kim his background. Imagine if Voyager had opened with a two hour depiction of his screw ups, before beginning episode three with Janeway coming to prison!
It’s a nonsensical choice. But then almost every choice made by the producers of Discovery has been nonsensical. From the casting, the design decisions, the story choices… all of it.
It’s terrible. It’s awful. I am continually baffled as to how anybody could like it. I just cannot understand why they would.
But there you go. This is Star Trek now, apparently.
I rapidly made the decision that I wasn't going to be able to spend a lot of time and effort on Discovery, what with... well, everything about it. So the below has just sat there for a long while on my hard drive.
I thought I'd dust them off and post them here, just so they're out there in the world. No idea if anybody is interested or not, but here they are.
So, here we go.
We open with an arty visual effects sequence which zooms out and out until it becomes the eye of an alien. One might take this as an indication that Discovery will be a show that puts a lot of effort into visuals. One would be right.
The alien is T’Kuvma, a Klingon. Only… it’s not a Klingon. It looks nothing like a Klingon, not remotely. Apparently, according to the producers, T’Kuvma and his people are some long separate offshoot of the Klingon species, and that’s why they look different. This makes no sense to me - Amish people don’t have tentacles, right?
As well as looking different, these Klingons look bad. They’re visually busy. It’s like whoever designed them thought that there needs to be as much detail as possible on both them and their clothing. It looks impressive, but in a ridiculous, silly, impractical way. My reaction is less “wow, this is amazing!” and more “wow, I can’t believe they spent that much effort and produced something that silly!"
T’Kuvma is convinced that the Federation is coming to destroy the Klingons. “They will coil around us,” he says, “and take all that we are.”
Why does he believe this? We’re never told. He just does. As seen in Enterprise, the Humans had a decent first contact with the Klingons. After that they had their run-ins, but they were as often good as bad. One could not really call the two species “enemies” at that point. And, we learn, the Klingons vanished into isolation just after Enterprise finished, and there has been little contact with them since. So why hostility? Apparently it’s just because Humans are peaceful and Klingons don’t like that. Okay...
He also believes that the “24 warring houses” must reunite in order to combat this threat. It’s worth mentioning at this point that these “Klingons" have huge, prominent teeth - worth mentioning because that means that every single Klingon actor has to kind of mumble their lines around these false dentures, which makes it sound like they can’t talk properly. Remember Worf? What a voice Michael Dorn has! Deep and booming and serious. Or how about that smooth but sligthly creepy voice that Gowron had? Now imagine them slurring and mumbling their way through their lines. That’s what the Discovery “Klingons” do, on every single line.
So, plot point one : T’Kuvma wants war with the Federation as a reason for the Klingon race to unite.
Next we cut to Captain Philippa Georgiou and her first officer, Michael Burnham, walking through the desert. A storm is approaching, and Georgiou asks Burnham how long it will take to arrive. “one hours, seventeen minutes, twenty two seconds,” Burnham says.
Okay. One : what the writers are obviously doing here is trying to give Burnham a “Vulcan” moment. We will learn later on that she was raised on Vulcan, and so they are trying to show that influence. But as a human, why would Burnham even have the mental capacity to make such calculations? I was always under the impression that Vulcans could do what they could do partly because of training, but also because they are basically intellectual giants compared to humans. But according to Discovery… apparently not.
And two : how can you possibly give a to-the-second estimate of when a storm will hit anyway? There isn't even such a thing as the moment it hits, storms are analogue, not digital! They arrive gradually!
Onward! Next we then learn their mission. A species on this planet is on the verge of extinction... because "the ambient radiation from a nearby meteor drilling accident dried out their water table."
Um.... what? What on earth is that even supposed to mean? I presume by “meteor drilling” they mean that there was some sort of asteroid mine near the planet. And an accident released radiation, which… got to the planet, somehow? And that… caused their water to dry up? Radiation can do many things. But it’s not really a desiccant. I have tried to come up with some kind of mental picture of what she’s talking about, and I just cannot.
“If we can get in and out without making contact,” Burnham adds, “we can steer clear of General Order One.”
General Order One is, in Trek lore, better known as The Prime Directive. No interference with alien cultures, essentially. Now what exactly that means is a long and complex subject, but Burnham has specifically laid out their intention - avoiding contact. And how does she plan to do that? Well… they’re going to walk through the middle of the alien’s territory, right through their breeding grounds, right under all their eggs, walk right up to their community well, and shoot a phaser down it.
Brilliant. How could you possibly fault a plan like this! As they walk through the eggs, an alien crawls past above. If it had looked down at them, that would have been a mission fail. But it didn’t, so that’s okay.
So they arrive at the well, shoot through the bedrock, and there’s water down there and it all bubbles up. Mission accomplished.
They set off back to their beam out point. But the storm arrives early. I’m sorry to have to say it, but this kind of makes Burnham look like an idiot. I guess that absurdly super precise estimate of the storm’s arrival was a case of her mouth writing cheques her brain couldn’t cash. So the impression we have now is that Burnham is indeed what I suggested… somebody with a Vulcan habit of expressing themselves, but without the intellectual capacity to back it up. This is not promising beginning for the character.
Now they hit a problem. With the storm arrived, their ship can’t detect them. Nor will their communicators work through the storm. Huh? This is, so far as we know, a perfectly normal storm. Since when do communicators and transporters not work through a storm?
So the Captain walks a big delta symbol into the ground. Now in this time period, the delta symbol they've stuck all over the place in this show was the logo of the USS Enterprise. And that’s all it was. So it is a mystery to me why the Captain makes it in the sand. Maybe she wishes she Captained the Enterprise? I know I’d rather be seeing what that ship and crew are up to instead of this one.
Anyway, although the storm has arrived and the sand is being blown all over the place, the Enterprise symbol doesn't get blown away. And although there is cloud cover and the ship's sensors aren't working through the storm, it sees the mark anyway and comes diving through the clouds to beam them up. And that’s obviously what this entire desert scene has been about. I’d bet good money that somebody had a thought that it would be a cool visual to have the ship swoop out of the clouds like that, and every single thing in this scene was written to get to that point, regardless of the plot logic. I wonder if somebody thought to ask "Why wouldn’t they just send a shuttle?” I bet they threw things at him for saying it.
I will note, and not for the last time, that “Starship comes out of clouds” is a very common visual in the JJ Abrams version of Star Trek. It featured in both of his Trek movies. But Discovery can’t be heavily influenced by Jaybrams Trek, right? I mean, it’s set in the Prime universe. They keep saying so.
So all we've had is the teaser, and already every single thing that has been said and done is utterly nonsensical, wrong, and completely lacking in logic.
Get used to that.
After the Westworld-inspired title sequence, we get a shot of Discovery in warp flight. They have taken the usual “streaking stars” effect and ramped it up to 11. Then ramped that up to 11 again. As with much of what we will see on Discovery it looks both expensive, and weird and overdone. Burnham’s log states that it is Sunday May 11th, 2256 - Stardate 1207.3. Yes, the 11th of May 2256 is indeed going to be a Sunday. Score one for the writers.
The ship has been sent to investigate a comm relay which has been damaged. They are’t sure if it was hit by weapons or an asteroid. I would have thought those two things would be extremely different, but what do I know. Burnham makes some comment about how the beauty of space makes her optimistic. It’s a nice line… but it’s really not delivered very well. In fact, as things progress we will see that neither one of the main characters turns in a very good performance. I’ll give Sonequa Martin-Green the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s because the show she’s on was known for having a rather troubled production. Her character is poorly written, who knows what kind of direction she got… I can see why she’s bad.
Michelle Yeoh is bad, but… honestly I’ve never seen a good performance from her. She seems to have a fan base, but for the life of me I can’t work out why.
We meet Saru, the science officer. His species see everything as a threat, we are told. He thinks the relay was hit on purpose. Burnham suggests that this was to get the attention of a Starfleet ship. Around this time you start to notice that Discovery is one of those shows that thinks it’s cool to constantly tilt the camera over. You know, like… um… the Adam West Batman series. And Battlefield Earth. Remember Battlefield Earth?
Ahem.
We also get some banter between the officers on the bridge. And wow. It’s obviously meant to be the kind of stuff TOS did all the time, but it really comes across as kind of forced and awkward. Maybe that’s the bad acting at work, maybe it’s just that the dialogue isn’t great again, maybe it’s just that we don’t know these people well, but it all just feels very strained.
Saru detects something, but is unable to resolve it. Burnham then literally shoves him out of the way to have a go herself. He then shoves her out of the way to get back to it.
Um… what? Banter is one thing, but can you imagine, say, Sulu shoving Spock out of the way of anything? Or Data shoving Riker out of the way? It’s just super-weird and comes across as really, really unprofessional. Especially given that, presumably, either one could have gone to any console on the bridge and called the data up.
There’s some sort of stealth effect around whatever it is, so they can’t tell much about it. They go and look through a good old fashioned telescope pointed out a window, which can. Huh? A common sensor carried by ships today is an EOD - an Electro-Optical Device. What’s that? It’s basically a digital camera with a huge zoom lens. Discovery would pretty much have to have something like this to be able to have visual displays at all… why wouldn’t they work? A digital camera pretty much does what your eye does, anything that interfered with it would likely interfere with your retina just as much.
But again, you can just hear the writers. “Hey, what if there was this like weird sensor thing, and they had to use somebody’s antique telescope! That would be a cool visual!”
So since shuttles aren’t manouverable enough to move through the ring of rocks the thing is hidden in, Burnham says she will fly out in a thruster suit. Saru objects, saying the radiation will shred her DNA inside 20 minutes. Burnham promises to do a simple flyby and be back in 19. Captain Georgiou agrees, and tells Saru to go with her. Makes sense, never send one person alone is a good safety rule. But both officers object, so Burnham goes alone.
Now, this is a small point, but it stuck out to me. How is it that the First Officer can apparently overrule the Captain on this? Okay, maybe that’s overly harsh. She doesn’t over-rule her… but she does change her mind. It just seems… odd. Again, imagine this scene :
Riker : “I volunteer Captain.”
Picard : “Very well. But take Worf with you.”
Riker : “But I don’t want to.”
Worf : “And I don’t want to go.”
Picard : “Okay then, go alone Commander Riker.”
It just feels weird and off, doesn’t it? You can’t quite picture Starfleet officers acting that way.
So Burnham goes out in a thruster suit, in a scene that is obviously influenced by Spock’s flight through V’Ger in Star Trek : The Motion Picture, but very much more so by Star Trek : Into Darkness. Another Jaybrams influence. Yay.
Now she very clearly said that she would just do a flyby, but in fact she was lying about that, and once there she lands on the thing and has a walk around. Its a ship, a Klingon ship. She doesn’t recognise it, which is at least understandable, because it looks absolutely nothing like a Klingon ship. It’s full of Klingons that look nothing like Klingons, too. It’s ridiculous and wrong, but at least there is symmetry.
A Klingon shows up wearing an absurdly over-designed space suit. I’m sorry, but these Klingon designs really are verging on comical at this point. You remember in the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie, when the Vogon ships were over Earth and the camera did jump pull-backs in time to the music? But then it just kept doing it and doing it and doing it, to the point where it was so absurd that it was funny? That’s what these Klingon designs are like. It’s like the designer sketched a design… then made designs to go on bits of that design… then made more designs to go on bits of that design… then made even more designs to go on bits of that design… until the whole thing is just so ridiculously overdone that you’re left laughing at it.
So the Klingon attacks Burnham, and she kills him and escapes.
Back to T’Kuvma, who is putting his friend’s body in a coffin. This is stuck to the hull of the ship. We will learn that that’s what this ship is - it’s a kind of holy temple which houses thousands of coffins on the hull. They act like armour of a sort, too. Funky. We see a Klingon funeral, then, complete with the death howl from TNG. Unlike TNG, they revere their dead rather than regarding it as “just a shell” to be disposed of. But different houses have different rituals, so fair enough.
Then we flash to Burnham as a kid on Vulcan. We learn that her parents were killed in a Klingon raid, which she is upset about. She hates Klingons because of this.
She’s rescued, suffering from bad radiation burns since, you know, she disobeyed orders and stayed out there too long. She then disobeys orders again, running out of medical and charging up to the bridge.
You know, this is going to be the main protagonist of the series. And so far, every single action we have seen her take as been unprofessional, disobedient to the point of mutinous, or just plain dumb. Are we supposed to be liking Michael Burnham? Are we supposed to admire her? Because so far, at least… I don’t, and I don’t see why anybody would or how anybody could.
So she warns Georgiou, who is a bit dubious, but declares a red alert. The Klingon ship decloaks.
Yes, you read that right. Up until STIII, we never saw Klingons with a cloaking device. It’s been widely taken that when Romulans started using Klingon designs in The Enterprise Incident, they had traded cloaking technology for those ships. But I guess not. Oops, there’s another bit of Star Trek thrown out the window. Oh well, plenty more where that came from.
So the Klingon ship decloaks. On board, T’Kuvma laments the death of their “torch bearer” and they discuss appointing another. They choose Voq, an albino Klingon. Normally there is a lot of animosity towards albinos, but he makes an impassioned speech about how committed he is, and to prove it he sticks his hand in a fire and leaves it there for a while. T’Kuvma approves, and he gets the job. If you have trouble with job interviews, now you know what to do in the next one.
Back on Shenzhou, Burnham walks in on a conversation between Captain Georgiou and an Admiral. The Admiral doesn’t seem too impressed with Burnham's actions so far, which is perfectly understandable; I’m liking him already. Burnham argues that the Klingons are hostile by nature, and the Admiral chides her - they have had only fleeting contact with the Klingons for the last century, how could she presume to know their nature? It’s a fair point. He orders Georgiou to hold position and do nothing unless provoked - every Starfleet ship within range is on the way and a fleet will be there in two hours. Again, reasonable. Starfleet Admirals have a long history of being incompetent or evil, so it’s nice to meet a sensible one for a change.
Burnham explains that Saru thinks they should just run away. His species are descended from a prey animal - in fact on his planet there are no such things as food chains, in which any given animal migh be a predator to one species and prey to another. Rather, every animal is one or the other - predator or prey. I’m not sure how that could work, really. One assumes there is a wide variation of size amongst the different species, as there is on Earth, right? And so there are going to be predators that, whilst large and dangerous to some prey animals, are small and tasty-treat-looking to other, larger predators, right? So why wouldn’t their equivalent of a cougar try to eat their equivalent of a cat?
Anyway, the upshot of this is that as a “prey” species, Saru’s species are basically cowards. So he pretty much always wants to be cautious, and always wants to run away. Shades of Larry Niven’s Puppeteers here, to be sure. Georgiou points out that with nearby Federation colonies and facilities, they can’t just leave a threat to do what it likes. Again, fair point. Besides, you’ve been ordered to do nothing and wait, so it’s really not relevant what Saru wants to do.
Suddenly the Klingon ship lights up super-bright, blinding the bridge crew. It blinds them because their bridge has a huge window, another feature imported from the Jaybrams-verse which this show is not supposed to be part of. Even with the filters on maximum the light is painfully bright. You know, it’s kind of impressive to see a show chose to have a big window on the bridge then go out of the way to demonstrate why that’s a really bad idea.
Of course they could simply tilt the ship a little, so that the forward bulk of the saucer was between the bridge and the Klingon ship. That would shade them from the light. But nobody seems to think of that.
An officer states that the brightness is 1 billion Lux. He actually says one billion lumens per square meter, but a lumen per square metre is what a Lux is. A billion of them is about ten thousand times brighter than the brightest direct sunlight, which is impressive.
There’s then a huge noise, which we are told is some kind of "electromagnetic subspace waveform”. Essentially, what this is is a beacon designed to signal the other Klingon houses to come see what’s going on.
Burnham leaves the bridge and contacts Sarek. We discover that the Klingons killed her parents, which explains why she has a grump on about them. The Klingon Empire has been in disarray for generations, Sarek says. Perhaps a new leader has emerged to unify them. Burnham assumes that this hypothetical leader wants a war to unify the Empire, and Sarek cautions her about letting her past drive her assumptions. She asks how the Vulcans have been able to coexist with the Klingons, and he says the solution is particular to the Vulcans, and may not work for a human ship. But the method turns out to be that the Vulcans began to fire on any Klingon ship they met, thus showing strength and earning respect. Why wouldn’t this work for humans? Burnham certainly seems to assume it would.
She goes out to convince Georgiou that what is needed right now is “a Vulcan Hello”. Georgiou refuses, on the basis that “Starfleet doesn’t fire first”. There’s also the fact that they’ve been ordered not to act unless provoked, but nobody seems to consider that a factor. Burnham makes a snotty comment about how logic should compel Georgiou to consider her success rate over the last seven years and therefore implement her plan without further argument. It really comes across as rather arrogant, especially coming from somebody who has demonstrated nothing but incompetence and disobedience thus far. When Burnham argues, Georgiou takes the argument to her ready room.
They argue the point there for a bit, neither really backing down much. Burnham stresses that firing is the only way to prevent loss of life… Georgiou’s life, specifically. It seems a little odd. Why would she assume that Georgiou would necessarily be one to die in a conflict with the Klingons? Hmmm. Neither one of them brings up the fact that they’ve been ordered to do nothing until backup arrives, which really makes the entire argument moot. It literally does not matter what Burnham wants to do, and it doesn’t even matter if Georgiou agrees with her. But they talk as if that’s simply not a consideration.
Burnham then apologises and says Georgiou is right… only to neck pinch her.
It’s long been a topic of debate amongst Trek fans as to whether the neck pinch is a species capability or just a martial arts move. Some think that the pinch is a form of telepathy - Vulcans touch the face to mind meld, goes the argument, because as touch telepaths they usually need contact for their telepathy to work. Touching the neck is a variation on this, essentially a telepathic blast that knocks a person out. Others argue that it’s a nerve pinch, hitting just the right nerves to knock a person out. if the latter, then any trained person could do it. The argument was resolved when Data neck-pinched XXXX in Unification, Part 2 - if Data can do it, surely any sufficiently trained person can.
So it makes sense that Burnham can do this. She goes out onto the bridge and tells the crew the Captain has changed her mind, and orders the weapons readied for firing. We know this is a tense moment, because the camera swoops around the bridge constantly, tilting all over the place as if the camera operator is having some kind of seizure.
As the crew respond, albeit dubiously, Georgiou emerges from her ready room with a phaser and tells Burnham to stand down.
You know, when I suggested that her failed attempt to predict the storm accurately indicated that Burnham had Vulcan mannerisms whilst lacking the capability to actually do them properly, I thought maybe I was being a little harsh. Yet here we are again… Burnham can do a Vulcan neck pinch, but her version of it incapacitates a person for… what, twenty seconds, maximum? They really do seem to want to sell Burnham as an incompetent Vulcan.
Anyway, Burnham yet again argues against Georgiou. “I’m trying to save you,” she insists. Again, it’s like she is doing this not because she thinks it’s the best solution, but because she thinks it will save Georgiou specifically. It’s an odd moment… until you realise that they writer is, in a rather ham-fisted way, trying to establish that Burnham is super protective of Georgiou, specifically. This will become important later.
At that point the beacon switches off and a bunch of “Klingon” ships arrive. Like the sarcophagus ship, none of these look anything like any Klingon ship ever. And like the sarcophagus ship, they are all comically over-designed.
They also warp in with the “instantaneous deceleration” effect from the Jaybrams verse. Because this series definitely isn’t set in that universe, but in the Prime one. That’s why they constantly throw similarities in our face. To establish that it’s different.
And that’s episode one of Discovery.
Last time, on Star Trek : Discovery… we met a protagonist who is deeply unlikeable, arrogant despite being stupid, who screws up every single thing she attempts to do, and winds up committing mutiny.
Now, follow us down the rabbit hole…
We open with a flashback to seven years ago, 2249. Sarek escorts Michael Burnham on board the USS Discovery. Michael acts very “Vulcan”… which is to say, she is extremely rude and disrespectful to her new Captain. I imagine the intention was to show us that she’s become a lot more human over the years. Presumably because of Georgiou’s influence, as a way of establishing that Michael really likes and respects Georgiou, which is why she was prepared to mutiny to save Georgiou’s life. In truth, to my eyes this scene just made Michael look like more of a jerk.
Okay, let’s get into an aspect of this that I find odd and inexplicable. Why is Sarek her adopted Vulcan daddy? There are those who reacted to this news by saying it’s impossible, ridiculous, etc. I don’t go quite so far as to say it’s impossible, but it is kind of ridiculous. For one thing, let’s talk Starfleet. In the Prime universe Spock had a very strained relationship with his father, for a very long time, because Sarek did not approve of Spock joining Starfleet. Doesn’t that seem kind of strange, now?
Let’s examine it. In 2249 Spock would have been nineteen years old. Which means he likely would have joined Starfleet last year - presuming that Vulcans are of age at 18, the same as Humans. So Sarek cut contact with Spock last year… and would basically not talk to him again until Journey to Babel, ten years or so from now… and took twenty years after that to admit that it was possible that he was wrong about opposing Spock's joining Starfleet. And yet that same man is nevertheless happy to take his daughter to her first ship, and to continue to provide her mentorship and advice over the following seven years. All whilst condemning his son for following in her footsteps.
Star Trek Discovery has turned Sarek into a hypocrite. And that’s the generous take on it, because if we want to make an assumption or two then it may be that Sarek is okay with Michael joining Starfleet and not Spock because Michael is a human, and Spock is not. So the uncharitable take on it is that Sarek is a bigot.
Great move, writers.
And the weird thing about all this is that there is absolutely no reason why this had to be Sarek. There’s nothing about Sarek that requires this to be him, and absolutely nothing about this character that requires it to be Sarek. They could have simply used a different Vulcan, and the whole issue goes away. But they didn’t, because… I have no idea.
Back in the present, we learn that 24 “Klingon” ships have arrived. At this point it’s probably redundant to point out that not one of these looks anything like any Klingon ship that we have ever seen before or will ever see again in Star Trek. But then those aren’t Klingons and this isn’t Star Trek, so in an odd way it’s appropriate.
Michael points out that there are 24 houses on the Klingon ruling council. She takes it as an indicator that somebody is attempting to unify their Empire. Georgiou responds by throwing her in the brig. I respond by doing a little happy dance now that the moron traitor is where she belongs.
On the Klingon ship the other leaders holo in to T’Kuvma’s ship. There may be 24 ships, but for whatever reason there are only seven holograms. Not sure why. Interestingly, all the leaders of the houses that we see look pretty much like T’Kuvma, with minor differences - that is to say, none of them look the slightest bit like Klingons. Which means that whoever claimed that T’Kuvma and his group looked different because they are some ancient sect of separatists who had nothing to do with other houses? That person was… being creative with his explanations, shall we say. Because it sounds so much more polite than “lying through his teeth”.
We are treated to an extended scene of the “Klingons" talking Klingon to one another, rendered hilarious by the fact that none of them can talk properly past their false teeth. In addition, every one of them sounds incredibly stilted, as if each word, or even each syllable, were being recited from a list, unconnected to all the others. There is no flow to it, no sense of a person speaking a sentence in a language. It’s a chore to listen to.
T’Kuvma brags at length about how he restored his sarcophagus ship when nobody else cared about it. Given that most Klingons don’t particularly revere their dead, treating the corpse as “an empty shell” to be disposed of, one wonders why this would impress any of the “Klingons” there. But apparently it does. One of them points out that there are outcasts on the ship, meaning the albino guy, and he joins in bragging about how great T’Kuvma is. Some of the “Klingons” ask to hear more.
He responds that humans are a threat to Klingon “purity”, wanting to drag them down into “the muck where the humans, vulcans, tellarites and filthy andorians mix”. I’m not quite sure what this is supposed to mean. The only thing I can guess at is that he thinks that the Federation wants to force the “Klingons” to join up and race mix with everyone else. But… well, it’s been a hundred years since the Federation and Klingons have had formal contact. They have fought occasional battles in that time - the last at Donatu V in 2242, some 14 years ago. And in all that time… has the Federation ever attempted to conquer the Klingon Empire? Has it ever tried to force the Klingon Empire to join the Federation? Not that I know of, and neither the episode nor T’Kuvma say anything back up his claim that it wants to.
A “Klingon” points out that one ship is no threat. T’Kuvma declares that more will come. Rather conveniently for him, at that moment a bunch of Starfleet ships arrive. Georgiou calls the Klingon ship and offers a peaceful solution. T’Kuvma angrily claims she doesn’t come in peace, but wants to destroy their individuality. Again, no evidence is offered as to why anybody would believe this. It literally comes across as T’Kuvma stating his opinion, and all the other “Klingons” just deciding he’s right for no particular reason.
So T’Kuvma opens fire, and the Federation fires back, and there’s a big battle.
Much has been made of the money spent on Discovery. Many have lauded the effects, calling them things like “movie quality”. Personally I both agree and disagree. I will certainly agree that the effects look expensive. As do the sets look expensive, and the uniforms and makeup and aliens look expensive. But looking expensive is not the same thing as looking any good.
Not to harp on the “Klingons”, but they are a case in point. I bet the “Klingon” makeup is far more expensive than the makeup used for real Klingons. Yet the thing about that makeup is that it left much of the face uncovered, which meant the actors could convey a wide range of emotions very easily. And I bet the extensive use of Klingon dialogue meant more rehearsal time, more planning, a slower pace of production, which drove up costs. And I bet the astonishingly high level of detail on the Klingon ships, props, and costumes meant they were expensive to produce.
Yet the end result is of actors whose costumes look ridiculous, who cannot display emotions through the layers of latex all over their faces, desperately struggling to issue lines in a language they don’t understand. Does it look expensive? Sure. Movie quality expensive. But it doesn’t look any good. In fact, it looks like crap. The money was utterly wasted.
The battle is the same way. They have clearly spent a lot of money on the CGI… but the execution of it is terrible.
First, there’s very little sense of what is actually going on in the battle. We generally get either a wide shot showing a bunch of ships firing, or we get a close up of a ship getting hit. But there’s no sense of the opponents maneuvering into place, seeking one another out, jockeying for position. It’s just a bunch of CGI ships all over the screen.
Then too, there is very little evidence that anybody is using shields. This is yet another Jaybrams influence on the show that isn’t set in the Jaybrams universe; there is mention of shields, there are reports of shields weakening or failing… but no actual visible evidence that shields exist at all. Why? Because shields stop ships from getting hit, and ships getting hit with explosions looks really cool… and if there’s one thing battles must be above all else in this kind of show, it’s cool.
And I’m all for that, I really am. But you can’t just throw cool CGI onto the screen and hope it will impress, no matter how much money you spend on it. Your battle has to tell a story, visually. And this one doesn't.
There’s also another visual issue, which is that the weapons used look largely unimpressive. If you look at the original series, phasers were treated as mighty, impressive weapons. Firing a phaser was no small thing; they were the “big guns” of a ship. The "phase cannon” on Discovery come across as rather less than that. The Jaybramsverse treated phasers as being like machine guns, not firing big impressive beams so much as shooting little pulses in a kind of “pew pew” manner. And that’s just how the Discovery battle works.
Is it expensive? Sure, I would imagine. Does it look technically impressive? As impressive as any bit of CGI I’ve seen. But does it look any good? Well, it sure didn’t look good to me. This battle occupies a huge portion of the episode, and it’s nonsensical. In fact it’s worse than that. It’s the worst thing a space battle can be. It’s boring.
As a minor aside, I suppose we should accept the use of “phase cannon” as a nice continuity nod to the NX-01 Enterprise. I feel uncharitable in pointing out that “Phase cannon”, along with “Photonic Torpedoes” typified the habit that Enterprise had of trying to imply that the technology was more primitive by having ship’s systems which acted in the exact same way that the Original Series equivalents did… but with ever so slightly different names for them. So yeah, it’s a nod to cannon. But it’s a nod to a bit of canon that didn’t make much sense in the first place.
A bridge officer reports that the shields are holding for now. Georgiou orders evasive action and the ship heels over to one side… whilst “Klingon” weapons smash into the hull, causing explosions all over the side of the ship. So much for those shields, I guess.
Down in the brig, Michael passes the time. The Shenzhou’s brig is immense, by the way. No idea why… maybe they have discipline problems on these ships? Was Burnham’s mutiny just one of many on the ship?
(Incidentally, there’s an episode of Star Trek in which Spock declares flat out that there has never been a mutiny on a Federation Starship. Discovery makes a huge effort to stick to canon, you know. We know this, because they never tire of telling us so.)
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. Burnham is locked behind a force field. The field has a weird kind of complicated pattern all over it, for some odd reason. Don’t suppose that matters either, it just looks odd.
The doors open and a wounded officer from the bridge stumbles in looking for medical. Apparently he’s concussed or something, and is rather dazed and confused about where he is. He tells Burnham she should be on the bridge, and she says she can’t help. “Why are we fighting,” he laments, “we’re Starfleet, we’re explorers, not soldiers.” Burnham urges him to get help for himself. Then the wall explodes and he tumbles off into space.
That all seemed a bit odd and pointless. I’m really not sure what the purpose of the scene was. I can only guess it was to humanise the situation… show us the cost of the conflict by having somebody die?
Or perhaps… one of the cool moments in the 2009 Star Trek movie was when somebody is running along a corridor during a battle. The ship is hit and the wall blows out, sending the hapless crewmember tumbling into space. We see weapons firing all over the place as they recede into the distance - and in a rare example of scientific accuracy, with no air the moment plays out in total silence. It’s an effective, eerie scene and was much praised when the film came out, including by me.
I can only guess that Discovery was trying to ape that moment, hoping it would be as well received? If so, it really doesn’t work anything like as well as the original. For one thing, we see ships going past making “pew pew” noises as they blast away, which removes the eerie silence aspect. Oh well.
Burnham is knocked out, and flashes back to the raid in which the Klingons killed her parents. She’s rescued by Sarek, who mind melds with her. She wakes to find the security area open to space, with only the forcefield around her holding the air in. Whoops! The computer reports that the field is going to fail soon. Double whoops!
And now something happens that is… well. Micheal has a vision of Sarek. Not an imagined one, either. He is projecting himself into her head telepathically.
Vulcans, up to now, have been touch telepaths. Meaning they have to touch a person to telepathically communicate with them. On rare occasions, it has been possible for a Vulcan to influence a person at a short distance - ten or fifteen feet, say - and implant a single suggestion in them, like “open the cell door” or “flip the communicator open and push that button.”
What Sarek is doing is projecting not just an idea, but full audio and video, in real time, over approximately one thousand light years. And not just projecting, either - he can also hear and see Burnham’s replies.
It’s a staggering increase in Vulcan telepathic power - literally millions of times greater than anything we’ve ever seen before. The excuse given is that it works because they melded once, and Surak gave Burnham a little bit of his katra. Um… okay. If that works for you, then fair enough.
You know, there’s a better way they could have played this. Rather than claim she is communing with the actual Sarek back home, why not say that what she is communicating with is the piece of his katra that he left in her head? Treat it as being like that “echo Guinan” left behind in the Nexus in Generations. Make this a kind of shadow-Sarek that she can talk to in moments of stress - and make it kind of like an angel on her shoulder, a conscience, a source of reassurance and support. That would make a hell of a lot more sense than giving Burnham the ability to make a psychic phone call to Sarek whenever they feel like it, right?
Anyway, Sarek gives her a little pep talk. “You can do better,” he says. Well he’s sure as hell right about that one. She could hardly have done any worse than she has so far.
Discovery takes more hits and goes out of control, drifting towards a nearby asteroid. At the last moment they are taken in tow by a tractor beam from the USS Europa - the Admiral’s ship, which has finally arrived. He calls the Klingons, hoping to end the shooting. T’Kuvma accepts the offer - in English, though still with the poor actor desperately trying to talk through his false teeth. But it’s a trap! A cloaked ship rams the Europa, and the Europa self destructs. It’s really not much of a bang for a warp core breach, but then they rarely are. Remember when Scotty confidently stated that a self destruct by the Enterprise would destroy V’Ger, a ship some sixty miles long? I miss those days.
The “Klingons” are winning the battle, albeit with losses. But the plan seems to be working, so T’Kuvma sends the rest of the houses home to Qo’NoS to declare what a badass he is, which they do. He then sends a message ragging on the Federation, telling them how awesome he is.
Down in the brig, Burnham convinces the computer to let her out of the field. Ethically it can’t keep her locked in a place where she will shortly die, so it complies and she jumps across the vacuum to a hatch and gets through. The scene from 2001 : A Space Odyssey, essentially.
T’Kuvma declares the battle won, since the Federation ships are dead or crippled. He sets about recovering the Klingon dead, declaring that he will stick them in coffins on his ship. Creepy, but okay.
Michael gets to the bridge. Astonishingly, Georgiou doesn't have security haul her away and lock her up but instead listens to her. Burnham says there’s a way to win the day - capture T’Kuvma. As things stand, he is a huge hero back home. If they kill him, that hero status will transform into martyr status, and he will be even more powerful in driving further conflict. But nothing destroys a Klingon’s honour like being captured alive, so if they can capture him then he will be completely discredited, and his whole campaign for war will fall apart.
It’s actually a decent plan. A clever idea, and exactly in line with what we know of the real Klingon race. Finally, some kudos here.
To execute it, they decide to beam a photon torpedo warhead out onto one of the Klingon dead bodies in space which T’Kuvma is collecting via tractor beam. He duly takes it inside his ship and it detonates, doing huge damage.
One is forced to wonder what would have happened if the explosion had killed T'Kuvma. He’s the one recovering the bodies, after all, and he has promised to prepare them with his own hands. So he’s likely to be right about where the warhead detonates. Mission fail, right there.
But… it doesn’t. Phew.
It is perhaps also worth mentioning that here and now, in the present day world, planting mines on the bodies of enemy soldiers so as to hurt those collecting them… is a war crime. A rather serious war crime. Both the Geneva and Hague conventions specifically forbid planting explosives on the bodies of the enemy dead.
You begin to wonder if perhaps T’Kuvma doesn’t have a point about the Federation after all.
So Georgiou and Burnham beam over to the “Klingon” ship and a fight ensues. Again, it comes across very much like the fight on the Romulan ship in the Jaybrams 2009 Star Trek. For a show that is allegedly set in the Prime timeline, Discovery does an awful lot of that. In fact, it hardly does anything else.
One wonders why they didn’t bring, say, half a dozen additional officers along with them. I really cannot imagine any answer to that.
So long story short, Gerogiou gets killed by T’Kuvma and so Burnham quite deliberately flips her phaser to kill and shoots him in the back, killing him. You know, the one thing she said herself that they must not do, only five minutes ago? The one thing that would most ensure that the war with the Klingons continued? So with all the total incompetence and stupidity that she has demonstrated, she now has this - an entire war to her name.
Remember, this is the protagonist. We’re supposed to like this person. We're supposed to root for her to succeed.
So she beams back, the Shenzhou is evacuated and left in space. We then see Burnham tried for mutiny and other charges. She pleads guilty. Hilariously the judges are all heavily backlit, leaving them visible to her only as silhouettes. It actually did make me laugh out loud when I saw it. It’s like Starfleet decided to have the creepiest, most Kafka-esque trial system they could think of.
When asked if she has anything to say, she laments that she will never be able to Captain a starship. She points out that she tried to protect her Captain and friend from the enemy, “and now I am the enemy”. Oddly, she doesn’t actually express any regret for what she did - only for the negative outcome that has resulted. And her primary complaint is how it has negatively affected her own career.
Remember : you are supposed to like this person.
So she is sentenced to life in prison, and that is the end of the second episode of Discovery.
What can one say about Discovery? It’s pretty. It’s expensive looking. It’s awful.
Most of what is done looks bad and wrong. It certainly doesn’t look or feel anything like Star Trek.
Critically, the protagonist of the series is an unlikeable, incompetent, disloyal, imbecile. We are expected to like her, but I cannot imagine why. Am I supposed to be rooting for her to get out of prison, to redeem herself? I’m not. Prison is exactly where she belongs. Only an idiot would want her on his ship, and only a organisation of idiots would allow it. If there were any justice in the world of Discovery, she would rot in prison for the rest of the series.
Another odd thing about all this is that the pilot episode was almost wholly unnecessary for the series. They spent two whole hours on this… and it’s just one character's back-story!
Burnham’s story is obviously going to parallel Tom Paris’s story in Voyager. He screwed up, got put in prison, Janeway got him out to help on a mission. For Tom Paris that story was told in about ten minutes of screen time over a couple of scenes - all of it either Janeway filling Tom in on what she wanted, or him telling Harry Kim his background. Imagine if Voyager had opened with a two hour depiction of his screw ups, before beginning episode three with Janeway coming to prison!
It’s a nonsensical choice. But then almost every choice made by the producers of Discovery has been nonsensical. From the casting, the design decisions, the story choices… all of it.
It’s terrible. It’s awful. I am continually baffled as to how anybody could like it. I just cannot understand why they would.
But there you go. This is Star Trek now, apparently.