TV Review: Star Trek Discovery

TV Review—Star Trek: Discovery

One of the dangers of trying to revive a beloved but dormant franchise is that you’ve got several million viewers ready to jump on even the slightest error or misstep of interpretation.  You have to be true to what made the previous incarnation great, but be able to innovate in order to reach a new audience.  It is what the creators of Star Trek: The Next Generation succeeded at.  It was what the creators of the new Doctor Who succeeded at. 

It is what the creators of Star Trek: Discovery failed at.

I can’t write off the series based on one episode, but one episode is all that is being provided before the show goes into “access mode” on CBS’ streaming platform.  Based on what I saw, I won’t be signing up.

Where does the show go wrong?  First, there is the inherent problem of setting a series using today’s filming technology ten years before the Original Series was set.  The sets, costumes, and make-up have to look better than they did when the Original Series was filmed in the 1960’s.  The most glaring example—Star Trek: Discovery has characters communicate with people far away by using holographic imagery.  Did Kirk ever use holograms to communicate with Star Fleet?  No, of course not.  So how do you explain Star Fleet having hologram technology ten years before the Original Series but not then?  Of course, the answer is because now we can film scenes using simulated holograms and we couldn’t in 1966, but that’s a meta answer that takes the viewer out of the experience.

Speaking of make-up, the creators of Discovery have decided to give the Klingons yet ANOTHER makeover.  Next Gen famously gave the Klingons a forehead ridge, a development wonderfully mocked in the DS9 episode Trials and Tribble-ations when digital technology was used to insert Commander Worf into footage from the Original Series episode The Trouble With Tribbles (when asked who Klingons used to look more human, Worf replied that it was something Klingons didn’t discuss). 

Klingons have been revamped, and so help me they look like Vogons from the BBC Production of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  They had a domed, turtle-like head and don’t look the least bit menacing, at least to me.  Their ship, which used to be the height of sparse, utilitarian design, has so many ornate carvings and elaborate moldings that it looks like a Orion brothel (or at least what I assume an Orion brothel looks like, since I don’t believe Trek has ever shown one).

There is also the age-old problem in Star Trek that they have to find ways for there to be problems despite futuristic technology.  The opening scenes show the Captain (Michelle Yeoh) and her First officer Michael Burnham (series lead actress Sonequa Martin-Green) trudging through a desert, and the Captain complains they are lost.  Lost?  My car has a GPS system, you’re telling me that a couple of hundred years in the future Star Fleet doesn’t?  Okay, maybe there is some “magnetic resonance” preventing GPS from working; the fact remains that they could have transported directly to where they were headed instead of risking getting lost in the desert.

What is the most important criterion upon which I will judge a TV show, or movie, or book?  How well does it solve the problems that it sets up?  The Original Series set up problems quickly, then let Kirk, Spock and McCoy wander around for 45 minutes before they reasoned out a solution.  The Next Gen usually had Picard, Riker, et al wonder what the problem was for 45 minutes, then when they realized what it was all Picard had to do was order Geordi to modulate the framistan to create a cascade effect on the whatzitz.  Not as interesting.

Unfortunately, I can’t evaluate how well Discovery solves the problems it presents because the first episode is a freakin’ cliffhanger!  Of all the cheap, manipulative ways to suck people in to signing up for CBS All Access, that’s the only way to find out how the plot of the pilot episode is resolved. 

Since that’s not possible, let me see how they resolve a smaller plot point.  Burnham flies off in an EVA suit to investigate a ship that sensors can’t discern.  Why the first officer and not a more, ahem, expendable crew member (*cough red shirt cough*)?  No idea.  She’s told that the radiation will kill her in 20 minutes, so she only has 19 minutes before she must be back.  She encounters a problem, the ship loses contact with her, and after the deadline her EVA suit reappears but the ship cannot establish remote control.  How is she saved?

We don’t know; they cut to commercial and then pick up with Burnham in sick bay being treated for radiation burns.  There is some hand waiving about how she was brought back on to the ship, but it is a deus ex machina conclusion to a relatively simple problem.  If she can’t be out for more than 20 minutes, then her suit’s computer should be giving her warnings when she needs to start heading back. 

There is also the problem that the ship’s third in command is an alien whose race is, apparently, cowardly by nature and is always recommending retreat.  I am all for affirmative action, but isn’t it a liability to have a command officer who will never engage in hostilities and will probably surrender to any ship they encounter that goes, “Boo!”?

I had low expectations for Discovery and they were NOT met.  The last two movies have been mediocre, and now an all-star assemblage of notables (Nicholas Meyer from The Wrath of Khan, Alex Kurtzman from the Star Trek movie, Bryan Fuller who wrote for Voyager and created the wonderful Pushing Daisies) has created this mess.  I am not subscribing to CBS All-Access; I think my time would be better spent re-watching Deep Space Nine on Netflix.