When Star Trek: Discovery debuted last Sunday night, I published a review of the first three episodes where I went out of my way to avoid spoilers, given that one had aired on CBS, one was only on CBS All Access, and one hadn’t aired anywhere yet. Now that all three are out there — at least to All Access subscribers — I wanted to get more specific, with full spoilers for all three episodes — coming up just as soon as I steal your drool…
So, as alluded to in that initial review, the first two episodes turn out to be an extended prologue for what Discovery actually is: infamous convicted mutineer Michael Burnham working as a low-level crewmember aboard the eponymous starship under the command of Jason Isaacs’ Gabriel Lorca, who is simultaneously trying to win the war with the Klingons and perfect an organic propulsion system that would put warp drive to shame.
To anyone who looked at the opening credits of the first two hours and saw Michelle Yeoh listed as a Special Guest Star, or who wondered how Lorca factored into the story given all the publicity about Isaacs, or who couldn’t help noticing that the ship Michael served on at first was not called Discovery, this is perhaps not surprising. (One critic at the screening I attended a couple of weeks ago asked me what spoilers I thought CBS was worried about when they embargoed reviews until after airing, saying he thought it was obvious Captain Georgiou was going to die.) Still, even if this was exactly the plan Bryan Fuller had before he left, the shift in characters and status quo so early feels jarring, and raises the question of why two episodes needed to be devoted to setting it up.
Those introductory hours have some of the show’s best setpieces — Georgiou and Michael creating a giant Starfleet emblem in the sand to serve as an SOS, Michael using the thruster suit to approach the Klingon beacon — I was happy for every minute we got to spend watching Yeoh play a starship captain, and it’s important to get some sense of both who Michael was before her career ended in disgrace, and how and why this war with the Klingons started. But my goodness is every single scene on T’Kuvma’s ship at last twice as long as it needs to be. As a fan of The Americans, Jane the Virgin, and other recent shows that have extended sequences in foreign languages, I’m not opposed to reading subtitles, but those shows benefit from actors who are able — through both talent and not being buried under several pounds of immobile makeup — to convey tons of emotional nuance with each line even if you have to read along with them, and they don’t turn the subtitled scenes into pure info dumps. Almost all of the Klingon stuff was literally monotonous: every line delivered in the same growl, with the same limited facial expression, reiterating the same two or three points about how much better their culture used to be. It was a relief when most of the Klingons featured in the third episode were dead Klingons, and I’m someone who had a bottomless appetite for all of Worf’s family and political drama back on Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.
“Context Is for Kings” had other advantages over its predecessors, even without Yeoh or the huge VFX budget of those earlier hours. For starters, much as I liked Sonequa Martin-Green as the chipper first officer version of Michael, this quiet, suspicious version who has had to do without rank or creature comforts(*) seems to play even more to her strengths, and also feels unlike any character the franchise has had in a lead role before. The Michael who served under Georgiou was a softer version of Spock; she still has all of that Vulcan knowledge and reserve, but she’s also made huge mistakes for which she’s been justly punished, and it’s made her into someone very different.
(*) Are we meant to assume she’s wearing her hair natural because she doesn’t have access to the same styling products she did as a free person? If so, one might wonder how humanity made it to the 23rd century without developing more permanent haircare products. Then again, Jean-Luc Picard is bald bald bald in the 24th, so it just might not be a Federation priority.
The focus on science, even in the midst of a war, also lets the new status quo feel a bit more like Star Trek. Deep Space Nine showed that a spinoff could devote a season or more to a war arc, but it also had a multi-year foundation of characters and world-building before we got there. The Discovery producers have boasted about bringing the franchise into a more serialized era of TV drama (which, again, DS9 already did two decades ago), but a purely serialized war arc at this stage would be very hard to pull off, and run the risk of turning into the same kind of structureless sludge a lot of other streaming dramas do. “Context Is for Kings” felt like both an episode of Star Trek(*) and an episode, period, and that was promising.
(*) Give or take the nightmarish image of what the Glenn crewmembers looked like after the accident, not to mention Michael saying “Shit” while facing down the monster. Then again, I’m not exactly racing to show my kids the two-parter where the Cardassians torture Picard.
By waiting until the third episode to introduce the Discovery crew, everyone but Michael and Doug Jones’ Saru start at a disadvantage. Lt. Stametz in particular is introduced as a guy who exists primarily to make Michael look smart; that kind of sneering dismissiveness doesn’t seem in need of an actor of Anthony Rapp’s caliber, though he gets a few nice moments later where he explains how his project got commandeered by Starfleet to begin with. Cadet Tilly is primarily comic relief so far, but also as the one member of the crew who seems interested in befriending Michael; I’m just hoping for some more clarity on what her special needs are beyond needing a different pillow and mattress. Is she meant to be on the autism spectrum? Just shy and quirky? Something else entirely?
Lorca, meanwhile, is designed to be a mysterious character, and we’ll have to see over time whether his agenda is really as pure as he presents to Michael, or if he’s keeping the monster aboard and doing other shady things for shady reasons. But Isaacs is among the best-suited actors around for playing in that gray area of motive and pragmatism.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend a lot of time watching the show Discovery was in its first two hours, despite liking several performances and a lot of the production choices. The show it seems to be now is one I’m much more enthusiastic about.
Some other thoughts, bouncing around all three episodes so far, since I didn’t do a spoiler post last week:
* There’s some sloppy plotting in the sequence aboard T’Kuvma’s ship. We know that phasers in this era can be used to stun — Lt. Landry mentions explicitly setting them to kill in the third episode — yet Michael winds up killing T’Kuvma in vengeance for her captain’s death, even though the whole point of their mission was to capture him and avoid making him a martyr. If the writers wanted him dead, there were other ways to accomplish it that didn’t seem to go so firmly against the character Michael had been established as to that point.
* Getting back to the organic propulsion, I’m assuming the creative team has a plan for explaining why Kirk, Sisko, Janeway, etc. won’t have access to it in the decades to come. (For that matter, will there be an episode where the holographic communications prove so problematic that Starfleet goes back to traditional TV-style monitors for a hundred years or more?)
* Conversely, I thought it was a nice touch that Georgiou had to look through an antique telescope to get a better look at the ship inside the scattering field. Trek is usually better when it focuses more on the characters than the tech.
* Also, how satisfying was it to see not only the original communicators (which inspired fliphone cell design), but to hear the ’60s Star Trek alert klaxon play when Georgiou goes to red alert?
* One more tech thought: cloaking devices were introduced in the original series as a Romulan invention, and one that fit their cultural profile more than that of the directly confrontational Klingons. It became even harder to justify during Next Generation, where the Klingons’ Bushido-like honor code seemed wholly at odds with the idea that their warships could all sneak up on opponents, open fire, then sneak away again. Here, we’re told that T’Kuvma invented the cloaking device on his own, and these Klingons are presented as nasty and ruthless enough that maybe they’re not bothered by the dishonor of it all?
* Which is the more quintessentially Bryan Fuller idea: a Klingon ship covered in coffins, or the concept of the universe having veins that a person or a starship can travel through? I’m gonna go coffins, but am open to arguments for the other side.
* The Klingon that Michael kills aboard the beacon is named Rejac, which deliberately sounds just like original series villain Redjac. Lots of other Easter Eggs/homages sprinkled throughout, like the secret grow lab in the Discovery evoking the Genesis cave from Wrath of Khan.
* James Frain’s performance as Sarek is deliberately softer than Mark Lenard’s, though you can perhaps ascribe some of that to him having a different relationship with his ward than with his biological son. Perhaps he is colder and more logical with Spock as a way to encourage his son to suppress the human half of his DNA and embrace Vulcan culture, where no such pressure exists with Michael. That he and Michael can communicate telepathically from across the galaxy feels like an easy plot device, but we’ll also see how much the show deploys it; he’s not even in the third episode.
* Michael talking her way around the ethical protocols while trapped in the damaged brig felt very much like Jim Kirk outsmarting computers and robots.
* Black Starfleet badges? What branch of service is that?
What did everybody else think?
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@uproxx.com. He discusses television weekly on the TV Avalanche podcast. His next book, Breaking Bad 101, is out 10/10 and available for preoder now.