TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery - Season 1

I feel like when I sit down to discuss Star Trek: Discovery it begins with a heavy sigh. Like the worst sort of parent feedback, I'm disappointed. I consider myself a Star Trek fan, though not a fanatic. I enjoy it as genuinely good science fiction without learning Klingon or having seen every episode of every series. For those curious I have seen every episode the ST: The Next Generation, ST: Voyager, and (my favourite) ST: Deep Space 9, often many times. I've never watched the original series, and I watched a season or two of ST: Enterprise.

When Discovery was first announced I was very excited. The promise of a serialized Star Trek in the so-called Golden Age of Television seemed a recipe for a seriously powerful television. DS9 is my favourite of the series and a number of articles have come out, including by Max Temkin, talking about how DS9 foretold where TV was going to a certain degree. A grand narrative joined with a time screaming out for critical science fiction was an exciting promise.

Star Trek: Discovery failed to deliver that for me.

Be forewarned reader, the possibility for spoilers lies ahead.

Fundamentally I think Discovery suffers from weak, thin characters. I consider myself a close observer of the shows I watch. I gave Discover a real shot, but only a few episodes away from the conclusion of the season I was watching an episode and struggled to name the characters on the screen. A member of the cast shared a picture of the ship's crew and I struggled to name more than four of the characters of the fifteen people in the photo.

It's a damning statement. What made more recent Star Trek interesting were the characters by large measure. The fact that I am indifferent or ignorant to most of the cast is a problem. There were a handful I liked. I liked Saru and Tilly, Lorca and Admiral Cornwall, I thought they brought something to the table. Tilly was by far the most fun part of the show, but often felt like a Star Trek fan in the middle of a Star Trek show.

The show endured strong narrative swings that seemed to be justified for the sake of hard, dramatic swings. Big, universe changing events take place in the series but seem to have no consequence, not really. Or if it does, we don't witness it and the crew doesn't deal with it.

Deep Space 9 in its final seasons was a war series. The morality, cost, brutality and romanticism of war was on full display. Here, the pilot kicks off a war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire and it seemly has no impact on the characters. No one loses people. The death and destruction wrought is barely registered.

The show offered moral complexity and stripped it away. A late season twist reveals that our problematic, challenging characters are really just a product of the evil side of the universe. Instead of dealing with the reality of a semi-military organization at war we are told any discussion of means justifying ends, or ethics in war against a tenacious enemy we get a pulled punch.

I am not a person married to the canon. I thought the divergence was unnecessary and now we have a third major Star Trek timeline to deal with. The divergence feels like a flimsy excuse to make fan service without any attempt to respect the canon. A friend and I easily spun up half a dozen interesting ideas for Star Trek set after Voyager, but alas, we were not consulted. The show borrows icons from the franchise while paying no respect to its legacy. The series, so far, is devoid of interesting critiques of contemporary issues or explorations of humanity.

Michael Burnham is a weak, uninteresting lead. The way she is shoehorned into the canon feels ridiculous as Spock's adopted sister. Her semi-Vulcan personality and relationship with Sarek are dull and stifles the character and at the same time they do nothing to pay it off. Burnham's relationship with Ash Tyler is laughably bad and ends in a twist so predictable that the show sags in the middle because of it. The writers never invest time in fleshing out these characters and making them engaging. When they die or suffer the audience has little ability to connect with them.

The season concludes with a bizarre deus ex machina ending that seems to set everything to rights once again, utterly ignoring the consequences of several characters' actions and an entire war. A friend rightfully pointed out that season two could do that but I have my sincere doubts.

For positives the show is quite visually pleasing. Some of the characters are quite enjoyable. And that's about it. Like I said, a real disappointment. Discovery feels like a generic space action show with little ties to the franchise's roots while paying it lip service. On the other hand, many shows get off to rough starts and find their way later, but Discovery is lurching badly into the unknown when last seen.