Star Trek Discovery: The Good, the Bad, and the GEEEEEEET OUT!
I'm not a kid anymore. This means that I no longer like lapses in logic. Fantasy elements need to make sense, or it won't work. Especially in my Star Trek. I spent the latter half of the waiting period for Star Trek Discovery ragging on it. Here were my concerns:
1.) The show would focus too much on shiny graphics and space battles, and not enough on complex issues and characterization that literally make the show.
2.) The show would put all of their focus on clubbing people over the head with their "diversity" aspect (as if Star Trek never had that in their show before).
3.) They would change too much of the lore.
4.) CBS All-Access would hurt them.
Those were my concerns going into this. Let's see how it stacks up to what I actually saw with the Good, the Bad, and the GEEEEEEET OUT! in my first-ever blog review!
Before we begin, I would like to say that there are minor spoilers, so if that's something that bothers you, please stop reading, pay $6 for CBS Access, and watch it before you come here. Don't worry, I'll still be here!
The Good
As most of my current readers know, I live in Taiwan, which means I got lucky and I was able to watch Star Trek Discovery on Netflix instead of having to pay extra for their online service. That's nice, but it won't excuse the sin of having your main audience pay to watch your show (Americans are the largest demographic of Star Trek fans in the world). We'll get to that soon. In the first few seconds of the first episode, someone started speaking Klingon, and the subtitles were in Chinese for the benefit of my Taiwanese wife. However, I couldn't understand what was being said, so we agreed to switch the subtitles over to English so we could both understand. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they offered subtitles in Klingon. As a nerd, I was absolutely tickled by that, so in light of this neat little addition, I give Star Trek Discovery a few brownie points. It made a good impression on me in the first few seconds of watching the show, and its those little things that can sometimes make a difference--not this time, but it was still a nice gesture. Qa'Pla!
I noticed a lot of people complain that the technology was far more advanced than 24th Century tech and that it took them out of the scene by adding so many new things. I'm of the opinion that you have to update your stuff to make it look better or else you won't have an audience. It needs to look modern in order to sell, and I frankly enjoyed a few of those new little things. The information on the screen? Cool. It makes sense. It is an evolution of the viewscreen that's on par with what we currently imagine the future will look like instead of what people thought it would look like in the 1960's and 80's/90's. That actually doesn't bother me one bit, and I think most of it added to the enjoyment. I'm also a fan of the uniforms. While others pointed out that they look like discount Power Rangers, I found them to be a nice touch, which bridged the gap between Enterprise and The Original Series. The detail they put into a somewhat canon phaser and communicator was also a nice touch, but there's a "Bad" drawback that I'll save for later. In fact, on this point I have a few reservations about the new tech I saw in the first two episodes of Discovery.
I'm going off of what I saw and not really doing any Googling as part of a proof of concept in how I think storytelling should be done. I don't remember the name of the species Lt. Saru was. In fact, I don't even know if I got the name and rank right. There's a problem with this, which I'll get into later, but I thought the entire idea behind his species was awesome. On Earth, we have a food chain--a hierarchy of what creatures are eaten by which other creatures. On Saru's planet, there are two categories: Predator and Prey. Saru's species was prey for thousands of years, and with it, came the strong latter part of Fight or Flight responses. Not only was this a cool alien concept, it also helped to serve the story by revealing to the audience that the situation they were in was something a creature, whose species survived for thousands of years by sensing danger, sensed was very dangerous.
The Klingons (the threat of which we will get to later) actually had a cool new gadget! In the first episode, they created this giant flash of incredibly bright energy--essentially a starship flashbang. It knocked all sensors dead and, even on maximum brightness-filters, was almost-blindingly-bright. Such a cool idea, and I'm glad they put it in there. It added to the undeserved tension of the entire episode, and therefore is okay in my books as both a unique plot device and a cool little bit of lore that does not hurt the later lore in any way.
The Bad
Here's where things went a little... off-track. First and foremost, in the first 5 minutes we see two characters--two of three characters in the entire two episodes we watched whom we were asked to care about on an entire starship full of people--who were on an away mission in the middle of a desert planet. These two characters were the First Officer (the main character) and the Captain. I don't really remember their names, to be honest. And I didn't really care. Because the first 5 minutes of the show were one large exposition slog! A movie, game, or show is in very bad shape whenever you have to slide in pure exposition like they did in Star Trek Discovery. They covered it up terribly with their writing, too! They weren't even trying to hide that it was pure exposition in lieu of actual conversation. No two people ever go on a mission, and in the middle of that mission, explain who they are, their relationship to each other/how long you've known them, and why they are on said mission. It was poorly written in all senses of the words "poorly" and "written".
At this point, Starfleet has been established for quite a while--over 100 years, if the logic of the Klingons not being seen for over 100 years like the show says is accurate. So if that's the case, why is there a clear breach in Starfleet protocol where the Captain and First Officer are on an away mission, alone and without adequate resources to finish the mission? I'll bet it's for expositional purposes! And it surely was. Because of the exposition hurting my ears, I sort of tuned out and was explaining a few things to my wife, so I didn't get all of it. But from what I gathered, they were on this away mission to save a planet from being dried up because an "evil corporation cliche" was drying the planet up with their technology or something like that, setting the tone that these were the "good guys"--as if we didn't already know that. If you want a terrible setup for "We're the good guys" that's totally overused and stale, set your main characters up against big corporations. We'll go more into this later on, but I just wanted to put that little detail there.
While we were on the bridge of the Shenzhou, I was constantly annoyed by one thing, which seems to be a trend of newer Star Trek installments. Every few seconds, I kept saying, "Lens-flare... Lens-flare... Lens-flare" in true Ben Stein fashion. As most of you know, I'm a pretty big gaming fan. In all of my video games that I play, I turn off Bloom--essentially the lens-flare graphics in video games. Even if there isn't a method of turning Bloom off conventionally, I manually do it by going into the game's guts and physically removing that value that turns Bloom on. Why? Because it gets in the way of the game! I extend the exact same courtesy to shows and movies. I want to see more than half of your Apple Store/bridge, not get blinded by JJ Abrams' camera trick fettish! This is definitely an annoyance, but I will give some credit; the camera shots besides this were actually pretty good. In The Next Generation, I couldn't help but notice a few really bad camera shots, which I felt hurt the episode in some ways. Discovery didn't have any of those (other than the lens flares), so I think that I'm willing to ease up a little bit. But you're still on thin ice with the camera tricks, Discovery!
I'm fine with a human being raised by Vulcans. That's a neat idea, and I really liked that first flashback; it was one I felt was necessary to set the pace for the character and further cement the Vulcan education system like what was shown in previous iterations (it's a shame they didn't follow through with setting the pace for the character, though). So once again: I'm fine with a human being raised by Vulcans. What I am not fine with is Ambassador Sarek raising this poor girl, whose family was killed by Klingons (even though we haven't seen them in 100 years). There's something I'm even less fine with, which I'll get into later. But I think that this flimsy character-tether to bigger, better shows, was a major mistake. "Hello, fellow Star Trek fans! *does Vulcan hand gesture* Here's Ambassador Spock; you may now commence jizzing yourselves".
This is Spock's father. This is the man who had a rather intimate mind-meld with Captain Picard. Why have none of these three men ever mentioned this before? Especially if Sarek shared his Katra with her (oh, and we're not done with the Katra thing just yet)?! Yes, this show was made after The Original Series and The Next Generation. I don't care. Sarek raised this girl, who is supposedly going to be the savior of the Federation from the ancient Klingon threat. You'd think she would be worth at least one line of mentioning if that were the case. Furthermore, if she were raised by Vulcans, I'd like to see more "Vulcan" in this woman. More than some cheeky line where she comes off as obnoxious by giving an exact estimate it takes for some planetary effect to happen via mental math during that exposition slog I mentioned earlier. That doesn't make me think you're raised by Vulcans; that makes me think you're a showoff (another trait that is conveniently not Vulcan). Where it really mattered, the whole "raised by Vulcans" thing didn't really show itself, and that's a real shame.
At the end of the first episode, the First Officer gets sent to the brig, because, as someone raised as a logical Vulcan, she felt it was necessary to emotionally disobey the captain and assault her. Peace and long life, Commander. I find this to be the antithesis of what we were told to expect from this supposedly-logical character, and served only to move the plot along, as well as show off their brig, which I'll get to next. I had no real connection to these characters, so betraying her captain in the first episode had no emotional response from me other than saying, "YOU, STUPID, JELLYFISH." It didn't make me like this "main character" more. It made me hate her for doing something so emotionally stupid--something she had been trained to avoid. Overall, it was infuriating to see this and there's no excuse other than to move the plot along.
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| The picture on the right is the brig; sorry, it's the only picture I can find. |
The Master-Control Program called; he wants his Brig back. Seriously, look at this and honestly tell me to my face that it wasn't ripped right out of Tron. That, to me, is absolutely silly. It wasn't the only thing ripped from Tron, either. One of the Daft Punk members from the club in the new movie was a bridge officer! He got a bunch of screen time but no explanation (because he wasn't one of the three characters we were asked to care about). Why was he there? What was he doing? The subtitles said he was a robot, but he felt more like a human with a ridiculous-looking helmet than anything else!
Lets go back to the technology. I said I was mostly fine with it. Mostly. There are a few problems I have with it. My biggest gripe? Holograms. But before we get into that, I want to explain something to my readers, which is the difference between a retcon and a reboot. Reboots happen when you completely restart something, either because you didn't like the way it was going, or because it needed a fresh start--sometimes both. After Sam Raimi's "Spiderman 3", they rebooted the series with "The Amazing Spiderman", a movie that recreated its own universe, lore, and plot points. It was completely cut off from the other movies, with literally no ties other than the increasingly-annoying Stan Lee cameos that have to show up in every Marvel movie.
Spiderman movies are great examples of reboots. Retcons are different. They are changes that one makes to a current story to improve it. DC Comics are probably the prime example of retconning. Did you know that the DC Comic storyline, which started in the 1940's, has never been rebooted? Every time they want to start with a clean slate, they create an in-universe reason for it. The original retcon that started everything over was the Earth-Two plot device (fans of the Flash TV series may recognize this, which the writers used for inspiration in their own telling of the Flash's story). The most recent retcon device which led us to the New 52 Universe was Flashpoint, where Barry Allen becomes an idiot and goes back in time to save his mother from dying; the result of the events that happen afterward create the New 52 Universe, which is where everything is currently. All the other events in the previous universe must be canon because without them, the current universe would never happen. In other words, one giant chain of retcons. In fact, the stories of the DC Universe are one of the longest fictional stories ever told by mankind because of this! The Star Trek reboots directed by JJ Abrams are actually not reboots--they are retcons. While I'm not crazy about the new movies, I can appreciate this alternate universe because of their clever use of retcon devices, and I do like how they do tie it into actual events in the Prime universe. It was a creative approach to Star Trek, and while I may not really like the content in the show, it's still pretty neat.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... Some bits of technology, like the screen information, was a great idea and absolutely deserves to be there. Hologram communication technology is not one of those things. Why? Star Trek Nemesis. Like the movie, hate it (I personally liked it)... doesn't matter. The point is, this movie is canon, and with it, so is everything in it--including the hologram technology that was showcased in the film. This was a new technology near the end of the 24th Century, almost 150 years before Star Trek Discovery! There are unsaid rules to what you can retcon. If it's already been established later in the canon, you don't get to invent it literally generations before it's canonically been invented with no explanation whatsoever.
That is not a retcon; that is a complete rewrite. Star Trek has always been careful about what it can retcon. The Ferengi were a great example of a good retcon. When they were first introduced in the first season of Next Gen, they were a powerful race of ugly-looking goblin people whom no one had apparently physically met until the Enterprise came across them, yet also were somehow intimately familiar with their influence in the galaxy in the pilot episode of TNG. They were greedy, dangerous, and misogynistic. Later on in The Next Generation, and for a very large portion of Deep Space 9, the Ferengi were adapted to be less of a "powerful" race, and more geared towards commerce. Their greed was a cultural practice; they abided by The Rules of Acquisition, essentially the Ferengi greed Bible. Their misogynistic culture was further explored as a stark contrast to the Federation's values of equality, and helped those aspects shine in the Federation. The Ferengi were retconned to be less goblin and more their own thing, and it helped to develop the show down a more philosophical path. We got to see the species grow, we got to see a very different side of characters, and we got to feel like there were different opinions that people cared about, that it wasn't some Federation moral high ground that mattered. Like them, hate them--who cares? Because of the retcons to the rigid silhouette of the Ferengi, this species is now one of the most unique in science fiction, all thanks to a few well-placed retcons that updated the lore. Star Trek Discovery does the opposite. They rewrite a bunch of things because it's "art". Rules abided by other series in the franchise were completely ignored to bring us what was Discovery. "Holograms like this were made 150 years later? So what? Mine now." Don't be stupid, CBS. We fans are here. We are watching. We catch big mistakes like this. That, to me, was an egregious mistake, and it was almost in the GEEEEEEET OUT! section. However, that section is a special place in my review-hell, and it didn't quite qualify.
I'm also going to inject a quick little blurb here about the Transporters. What. The. Heck? Guys, that's not a transporter pad. H.G. Wells is upset that you stole his time machine. Transporter animations are cool. The pad is not. Fix it.
There were a lot of things in the first two episodes I was asked to remember and then they never touched on it again. I realize that you have significantly-fewer episodes to touch everything on, but if you want me to remember important bits of information, you need to spend more than 5 seconds on it. What was the name of Saru's race? I'm frankly more interested in it than the 20 minutes of pure Klingon dialogue we got. And herein lies another point: Star Trek is about exploring new worlds, new cultures, new ideas. "To explore strange, new worlds... to seek new life and civilizations... to boldly go where no one has gone before!" I realize that this is the two-part pilot, but literally none of that was in this show. We didn't explore any cultures. We didn't learn anything new. We didn't get any insights into some new aspects of Star Trek other than a quick 5 second exposition from Lt. Saru about his species--something I wanted them to spend more time on. Star Trek Discovery's biggest failing was that it was 50% exposition, 50% "pew-pew". There was no time for anything else, and I believe it suffered from that! Establishing the universe by exploring it is Star Trek's way. The movies suffered from this as well, but not as hard. Star Trek is less about action (though action scenes are always cool in-between), and more about the real issues that plague a galactic community of diverse races. Star Trek Discovery didn't have any of that. It was pure plot-progression that was rushed to get to the shiny CGI battles.
I see a lot of people praise the battle scenes. And while it was high-tech and I appreciate the updated graphics, the battle itself didn't really feel... deserved. The last really great battle in a Star Trek series was in DS9. Here, tensions between all the factions were at an all-time high. The stakes were building up with the Cardassian-Dominion alliance, and the lines were drawn with Deep Space 9 as center stage for the war on both sides of the conflict. Now that was deserved! The culmination of issues that pressed both sides over several seasons boiled down to one battle, one massive fight scene that deserved my attention, my care. It felt tense. It felt like it could go either way. Star Trek Discovery's battle between the Klingons and the Federation was rushed. It was there to advance the plot and so the Klingons could say that they mean business--nothing else. It didn't earn the battle that we ended up getting. I will say that the scene with the cloaked Klingon ship running into the Federation flagship was pretty great, and I fully admit that it adds character to these new Klingons. But beyond that, it was just shiny white noise and I frankly didn't pay as much attention to it as I was expected to.
My wife is new to Star Trek. We started with DS9 when it finally came to Netflix in Taiwan, and she loved it. We went on to watch Enterprise, Voyager, and are currently finishing up The Next Generation. There are two species Denise loves more than anything else in Star Trek: the Ferengi and the Klingons. This is mainly because there is so much detail that gets put into them. Going into Star Trek Discovery, my wife didn't know anything about it except a few things here and there I've mentioned in passing that I read online. We never really talked about it until we sat down and watched it the other night. That being said, about 15 minutes into the first episode, I heard her say, "Wait, these are Klingons?!"
Yes, dear... yes, they are. This represents yet another break in lore. Were the Klingons reclusive after Enterprise? Yes, and feasibly I can look past that. I can also look past the Klingon accent they were all using; I get how language can change in a short period of time. However, there are two things that do not make sense whatsoever because of already-established lore: Their faces, and their "old culture". We know their culture hasn't actually changed much in centuries. So why are they calling for old practices that were not established in Enterprise--the TV series that takes place before this? That makes no sense. Klingons in Enterprise were surprisingly similar to the Klingons in Next Generation, and the differences in The Original Series were very nicely-explained in the show. This also includes their faces. For those that don't know, the Klingons in The Original Series had faces that looked just like ours, and the only difference between them and us was that they looked like Puerto Ricans and they dressed in gold lame. In the Next Generation, the lore was retconned and the Klingons had forehead ridges. This was due to the show's improved makeup capability, and they decided that they wanted to show off the Klingons in a more alien fashion. Many people were outraged by this, but it ended up being better for the show as they were more-easily identifiable and it definitely gave it a more foreign feeling than before. Klingons are now recognizable by their forehead ridges, and are a beloved part of their lore. However, for years, many fans wondered how the change was explained in the universe. In Deep Space 9, there was an episode where characters of the crew accidentally get pulled back in time to an Original Series Episode (Trouble With Tribbbles), in an ingeniously engineered episode where the crew of Deep Space 9 were cropped into the old scenes. Here, they encounter a Klingon, and the DS9 crew slowly turn their heads to Worf and ask him, "lol wut?" His answer was, "We do not speak of it to outsiders." A funny little misdirection from the writers, who needed to push the retcon to the side in order to continue the episode. In Enterprise, they explain this problem, however. Klingons attempted to mess this genetic engineering (somewhat of a taboo in the Star Trek universe, thanks to an even on pre-Starfleet Earth called the Eugenics Wars), using human DNA as a large part of their experiments. Because of their genetic tampering, there was a massive unintended virus that threatened to destroy all of Klingon kind. If it weren't for Dr. Phlox (the Entperise's doctor), the Klingon race would be destroyed. However, his cure had a drawback: they would lose their cranial ridges for a few generations. Guess what? Star Trek Discovery fits well within that timespan. Klingons should have no cranial ridges whatsoever, not bigger, more dramatic ones! This is a clear tampering with already-established lore, and I do not like it one bit. And this is more than an outcry from fans like it was with the retcons placed in The Next Generation. They are very clearly rewriting history for the expressed benefit of this show that will likely not survive to see a second season. Bad, bad, bad...
GEEEEEEET OUT!
Where to begin... One of the first things I heard about from CBS on the actual details of the show, was about how diverse the show was going to be, with dozens of articles about actors and writers from the show "shutting down all the racists with this one sentence...". Look: Star Trek has always been about diversity. You cannot be a fan of the show and be a racist or a sexist at the same time--it's not possible. For each article I saw that was calling out the racists, I looked in the comments section and tried to find someone that said, "I will not a have a black woman as the main character!" Not a single person said anything remotely like that. Who were they calling out? If I had gone into this show knowing nothing about it, and I saw the Captain was an Asian woman and the first officer a black woman, I would have said, "Cool, this seems natural." I wouldn't have been up in arms about it like their advertising was expecting me to be. In fact, I'm certain a lot of people would feel the same way. So why? Why did you spend 80% of your advertising calling out racists and promoting diversity that, by default, is commonplace to Star Trek?
HMMMMMMM..... Oh, right. Political agendas. By Star Trek's very nature, there have to be some political points that get made. I'm not naive in that regard, and I understand that by its nature it tends to be a progressive show. But Star Trek has never made it a point to isolate their fans. Never, at any point, have they tried to make people feel bad about a position. Through their advertising, Star Trek Discovery went out of their way to isolate a large portion of their audience by accusing people of being racists and then freezing them over it. So far it hasn't reflected much in the show, and I sincerely hope that it doesn't--because the minute it imposes itself on someone's beliefs like their advertising is suggesting it will, I will stop watching and you will get no support from me. I am absolutely against the kind of storytelling that takes the creators' opinions and then clubs you like a seal with it over and over. That is not storytelling. That is propaganda.
I heard that the new Klingon overhaul was meant to be a representation of Trump Supporters. I don't know if that's true, and as of the current time of this writing I will not fault the show for that until I see real evidence of something so stupid. But I am giving a very clear warning to all entertainers who put their work to screen: DO NOT INJECT YOUR POLITICAL DOGMA INTO YOUR STORY. I will never stress that enough. I am of the very strong mind that PC =/= Good. Star Trek and other shows can be politically-correct and that's fine. The show has always posited the many different angles of an issue and debated them instead of telling you what to think--and art that is long lost to the SJW culture of the world. Political-correctness doesn't bother me; it's how its manifested. Making a change here and there to be more in line with the times is sometimes okay. Making Watson an Asian woman was a good move and I approve of the change to their story; it also was a reboot to the entire story, so any changes made there didn't really hurt my view of Sherlock Holmes either--not that an female Asian Watson would hurt my view anyway. What does bother me is that people go out of their way to make a political statement and it doesn't help the story one bit. Mass Effect Andromeda made this crucial mistake. I and many others like me did not like the characters. The crew you served with in that game were a chimeric amalgamation of a discount Mass Effect 1 crew and Tumblr. It did not work. It was the writers trying too hard to please everyone and their own political posturing. As a result, I didn't have any real connection with any character, and I was absolutely floored with how lackluster the rest of the story was. There were many other problems with Mass Effect Andromeda, and one day I perhaps will make another post about it. But Star Trek Discovery is suffering from the same problem here. They are gearing the entire story towards a political statement more than they are telling a good story. The second reason why you want to stay away from this is because not only does it make your story suck because you're putting more focus into message-sending than storytelling, but because the people who disagree with you get turned off. If you're a storyteller and you don't care about your audience, you will be an impoverished storyteller. I don't care that you don't like that portion of your crowd. Comedians understand that some joke material is not fit for their audience, lest they get booed off the stage--that actually happens a lot more than you think. It's not about your opinion. It's about the opinion of the whole, and if you inject your own view into an audience, where half are going to get pissed at you, it probably isn't a good idea! That's how shows get cancelled. That's how controversy comes into play, and the last thing America needs is more controversy--especially from a show that boasts unity and peace.
I don't know if you're intentionally putting Trump Supporters into a bad light or not. But if you are, I am warning you, CBS: you are playing a very dangerous game, and your show will suffer if that's the case. I'd say that if the show were painting Hillary Supporters in a bad light, too. Why would I say that? I'M NEUTRAL! I don't care about which color crayon is better like the rest of you idiots! I just want to watch my damn show without being told what my political beliefs should be! GEEEEEEET OUT WITH YOUR POLITICAL BS!
Never, ever, ever make your political beliefs the the main portion of your show. If you do, it is destined to fail.
Last point, and this one I think is a huge mistake: Sarek's Katra. For those who don't know, Vulcan Katra is essentially a part of the "spirit" or "soul" of a Vulcan that can become passed onto another person before death (and it doesn't have to be another Vulcan; Captain Archer was a vessel for an ancient Vulcan philosopher). In a way, you can compare this to Jor El in the Superman comic books and movies, where his memory literally lives on in Superman's Fortress of Solitude. What this equates to is a beautiful part of Vulcan culture. What this does not equate to is "space magic". Star Trek Discovery abused that lore by making it a two-way communicator from 1000 light years away. You know, in a time where it takes a long time for them to send subspace communications. In addition to Vulcan nerve-pinches, mind-melds, and emotional-suppression, Vulcans now have quantum-entanglement communication to add to their grab-bag of powers. All you have to do is share your Katra with someone else and you now have a connection with them no matter where you are in the universe. That seems like a logical purpose for them to have in their evolutionary process. I hope you'll detect my sarcasm there.
Final Verdict: 3.5/10
Oh, boy... this has been a rough one. I am sorry my first review couldn't be more positive, but I'm more sorry that Orville is more Star Trek than Star Trek is. We've waited 13 years for a new Star Trek show. We're already two episodes into that show, and I'm more worried than ever that I will not get to see classic Star Trek in a modern medium again. I give Star Trek Discovery in its current state, a generous but disappointing 3.5/10. Work harder on your storytelling, lore-building, and characterization; and less about your politics, shiny graphics, and exposition-slogging. There's a good way to do things, and there's a good way to ruin things. Guess which side of the fence you're on, CBS.
Thank you for choosing Taiwanese Takeout.
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