Star Trek: Discovery season one review

    I decided to do a binge watch of Star Trek: Discovery with my wife and enjoyed watching the first two seasons. I actually started by reviewing every individual episode on my blog but removed those because I wasn't able to follow them up. My opinion on Discovery is mixed despite my fandom. There's episodes that I absolutely love, episodes I don't feel much for, and choices I don't agree with.

    Generally, I definitely think this is a Star Trek series worth sticking around for but it comes with quite a few caveats. They aren't going to be the ones like, "The Klingons look different" or "It doesn't look like the time period." I have my own complaints regarding that. However, I will have some criticisms. I hope you'll stick around to reading them. If not, just know that it has my endorsement but it's a 7 out of 10 rather than a 9 out of 10 like I'd hoped. That's the short version. The long version? Well, that'll take a bit.

Absolutely beautiful special effects.

    The premise is that it is a prequel to the original Star Trek series and takes place roughly ten years before the events of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" but after "The Cage." Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is the adopted daughter of Sarek and Amanda Grayson as well as foster sister to Spock. Having achieved Commander in Starfleet, she is the second-in-command of Captain Phillipa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) on the U.S.S Shenzou.

    The Klingons, under sinister cult leader T'Kuvma (Chris Obi), are restless and start a war that Michael is blamed for after a series of disastrous decisions. After serving a brief prison sentence for mutiny, Michael finds herself recruited as a work-release hire by charismatic but ruthless captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs) on the top-secret Starfleet vessel Discovery. They are possibly the Federation's last hope against a warrior race that grows stronger the longer the war goes on.

    I feel like this is a show that had some definite rewrites and struggles behind the sets because it feels like there were multiple visions of the show that contradict each other. As I understand it, that's exactly what happened. The Klingon War is a factor in the series but not nearly the focus of the series you'd find in, say, Deep Space Nine with the Dominion War or even Babylon Five. It's a background element that is resolved in the first season and almost feels like the most interesting elements of it (T'Kuvma and Voq) are written out early on.

"REMAIN KLINGON!"

    Indeed, the best episode of Season One "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad" has almost nothing to do with the Klingon War and is a standalone episode involving Harry Mudd (Rainn Wilson). I'm not going to complain about the visual continuity but I am a bit confused about the storytelling continuity. Harry Mudd is a pimp and a con artist in the Original Series but it's hard to believe Captain Kirk would let him go if he knew he was involved in terrorist acts against the Federation during a time of war.

    On the other hand, I have to say that I genuinely like the cast of characters. Ensign Tilly (Mary Wiseman) is one of my top ten favorite Star Trek characters period and maybe has cracked the top five. I very much enjoy Saru (Doug Jones) and the fact that he's an alien who gives us an insight into the idea of fear the same way Spock did with logic. Fear dominates Saru and it is something that he finds both beneficial as well as debilitating. Both Michelle Yeoh and Jason Isaacs elevate the material they deal with to the point you kind of wish they were headlining the show for the indefinite future.

Jason Isaacs is awesome here.

    I feel like the show missed an opportunity to interact with both T'Kuvma and the Terran Emperor since both are set up as the socially relevant radical ethnic nationalist leaders of their peoples. Cosmopolitanism is the heart of Star Trek as is the idea of embracing people of as many diverse backgrounds as possible. Having the heroes confront that head on and the appeal of such things would have made for an engaging set of episodes, IMHO. Why do they fear diversity and change so much and what is the best way to confront such fear?

    I feel like the show also missed an opportunity to develop many of the characters that it established. The Discovery bridge crew is visually interesting and I very much would have liked to have learned about them all. On the other hand, the fact we've got a fairly large crew this time around means that we aren't really skipping out anyone. Security Chief Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif) and Chief Engineer Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) make a pretty good impression. In a better late than never situation, Paul and Chief Medical Officer Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) are the first gay couple in Star Trek. Well, the first gay main characters period. If I had a complaint about the characters, its the fact that it kills quite a few that are quite interesting.

I heart Captain Killy.

    If I had to summarize Discovery's storytelling problems, it's that it feels like it jumps around too much and has one foot in serialized television while keeping its other in episodic. I feel like this series could have benefited from a stronger commitment to one or the other. I think it's to the series credit that I actually do like its episodic content and serialized episodes both. I would have happily watched a less special-effects heavy 26-episode series of them investigating new planets while exploring their characters.

    There's also a couple of more problems that I do feel addressing. I like the character of Michael Burnham but I feel like the show doesn't know who, precisely, Michael is. She's an extremely emotional person when she's not extremely stoic. She's an idealistic Federation officer when she's not throwing the rules to the side completely. She's incredibly pigheaded and bigoted against Klingons until she's not. Contradictions aren't necessarily a bad thing to do with a character but she feels a bit schizophrenic like Captain Janeway did at times. Her best moments are when she's acting off another, more coherent character like Phillipa, Saru, Sarek, Tilly, or Captain Lorca. Indeed, that's the irony that the star really works best when being a supporting character.

James gets Vulcans.

    Finally, there's another element that I feel distracts from my enjoyment of the series and that's the fact the science is nonsense. I don't mean in the usual Star Trek way of warp drive, space amoebas, and salt vampires. No, I mean you might as well say the ship is powered by rainbows and imagination. Nothing about the spore drive makes sense to fourth grade science, not the least being that space is not full of fungus (that requires atmospheres to grow as well as water--it also doesn't give you the power to teleport). I'm generally very "soft" in my sliding scale of soft versus hard science fiction but this goes beyond my limits--and is done with the utmost seriousness.

    Nevertheless, this is a series that has a lot going for it. The show is full of action, amazing special affects, and some surprisingly good character moments. James Frain's Sarek is a surprisingly solid piece of recasting. We actually get a few moments that add to the original series like why he felt such a sense of betrayal at Spock leaving the Vulcan Science Academy for Starfleet. His episode, "Lethe", is one that does a great job of showing both the ups as well as downsides of the Vulcan race. Its not surprising when a show works better on characterization that pew-pew or big special effects but this is definitely one that does.

The only starship powered by pizza.

    If I had to make a judgement, I'd say that while "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad" and "Lethe" are my favorite character episodes, the series mostly picks up in its second half. The Mirror Universe episodes are actually my favorite of that series. I never liked what Deep Space Nine did with the world-building and this take on them feels less sexist as well as just as goofy fun. I also loved how the Klingon War is ended in the grand finale as it shows the writers fully understood what Star Trek is about. 

    In conclusion, I recommend purchasing a month of CBS All Access and binge-watching buying the first season separately. It's not the best Star Trek but it isn't the worst by far. Disco just has a rocky footing and yet there's still plenty of good here. If nothing else, the solid actors on display here are able to compensate for a lot of the weaknesses in the storytelling. I'd rather have too much than too little.

7/10