To say Discovery has been ācontroversialā would be something of an understatement. From the very beginning the show sparked off considerable debate about itās quality, and the bevy of showrunner changes and resulting shifts in tone and plot choices just adds an extra layer of confusion. Many of the same groups and same people continue to have very similar arguments over what is clearly a completely different show in 2023 than it was in 2017. Personally Iāve become frustrated to the point of disinterest about where this show has gone, which makes it all the more exciting to go back and (re)discover something I thought I knew but had begun to really wonder about:
The very beginnings of Discovery are fucking excellent television.
Hereās why.
Early Discovery was actually planned out
To start with, the pacing and plotting of both the individual episodes and the overall arc of the season are excellent. In the moment, they are delightfully seamless: pacing is brisk but not rushed, traversing from one important thing to the next, with emotional moments given an appropriate amount of time to be registered and felt without feeling drawn out. Each episode has a clear beginning, middle, and end, with individual stakes that matter beyond simply advancing the season plot. Of course they consistently advance the overall season plot too (with the exception of Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad, which is āmerelyā a wonderfully executed standalone sci fi story that significantly develops three of our main characters). They do so not by dropping largely inconsequential teases and misdirection in alleged pursuit of a goal fated for resolution only in the finale, but via bite sized, meaningful changes to the circumstances our heroes find themselves in.
This demonstrates something which is clearly absent from the subsequent seasons, and even tossed away before the end of this one: detailed long term planning. Not only are we spared the bizare shifts in background information (is the Red Angel suit hyper advanced future tech, or something a research team banged out 20 years ago? Is the 32nd century Federation tiny, isolated, and largely ignored, or are they active galactic participants with genuine political clout?), but itās also critical for allowing the episodes to flow neatly together as a coherent story. Thereās been plenty of debate about if Star Trek should even be trying to tell these long-arc, binge-friendly seasonal stories, but clearly CBS wanted that. So why not do it right?
Early Discovery (mostly) makes sense
Every Star Trek show has had itās share of silly stuff. Obviously TOS was absolutely loaded with zany things that seem more in keeping with itās cardboard and hot glue aesthetics than the more serious tone subsequent shows attempted to set, but even the best of TNG era Trek had some whoppers mixed in. Where it has succeeded is by keeping most of the wacky missteps in relatively unimportant places, encapsulated by single episodes and devoid of larger consequence.
Then thereās the tech which every Starfleet ship is totally reliant on, most of which has only a fleeting connection to real world physics. The Mycelial Network blends right in: itās a pretty wild idea and most certainly is not real. Just like warp drive. And just like warp drive, it is at least based on something real. Ehh, close enough.
I have little desire to relitigate in depth the plausibility of S2/S3 Burnham being intimately connected to so many wildly disparate galaxy changing things, or how reasonable it is to have a emotionally distraught child trigger a galactic cataclysm that nobody could solve for over a century, but Iāll certainly contend that early Discoveryās WTF rate is more in line with TNG era Trek than itās more recent seasons have been. A low bar? Sure. But a relevant one.
Early Discovery did good job developing characters
By the end of those nine episodes, weāve had a reasonable detailed introduction to six main characters, and all of them have at least a little extra dimensionality to them, enough that they feel real and as presented, I do care what happens to them:
Burnham is our focusing lens for the story and certainly gets the most screen time, but sheās also far from the most important person on the ship. We know sheās a proficient officer, but also that she fucked up royally with massive repercussions in the opening acts of the show. That dichotomy lines up well with her odd mix of behaviors: conflicted about how much she deserves the second chance she was thrust into, yet supremely confident in her own abilities. Highly empathetic towards the Tardigrade, yet unhesitant and unapologetic in manipulating Saru into being a walking danger meter. Thereās clearly major unresolved trauma there, and Iād like to see this person develop more naturally from here. She should have her redemption, but sheāll need to earn it: not through one grand gesture of genocide refusal, but by demonstrating over time that she is dealing with her demons, and really has learned from the disaster at the binaries.
Speaking of the most important people on the ship, Stamets is chief among them. He has neither the desire nor the mentality to be a warrior, and yet he serves an irreplaceable and absolutely critical role in what has clearly become a ship of war. Heās a jerk when we first meet him, but his military necessitated chance to get close and personal with his research shows us a softer side, and likely changed him in ways that weāre just starting to see develop. Culber is still mostly one-note, but as a couple they play very well off each other.
Saru has a decidedly alien mentality for a military officer, but is clearly good at what he does. He is both thoughtful and candid about his past and present conflicts with Burnham, and his stint as acting captain in Choose Your Pain showed considerable growth. I want to see more of this guy learning to command (and I will get some, if less than Iād like).
Tilly is an absolute delight. She has her share of minor and harmless tics, babbling when sheās nervous and occasionally blurting things out when excited, and sheās vulnerable to getting flusteredā¦ but can still pull herself together and do what must be done. She shows an impressive level of emotional intelligence in her interactions with Burnham and Stamets, and she also has the awareness and confidence to identify what she wants in life, and fight for it. Thatās an incredibly endearing combination, and makes her the emotional heart of the show. Give me more, much more, of Burnham mentoring Tilly up to an eventual captaincy. Maybe Tilly could only reasonably work her way to full Lieutenant or Lieutenant Commander over the course of a seven season show, but that would be plenty: Iām not here to see four pips, Iām here to see believable growth in an already sympathetic character.
Lorca and Tyler Iāll be touching on later.
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Even the ultimately disposable characters got real development. Prime Georgeou is the most obvious example: dead after two episodes, and yet there is no question in a viewerās mind as to why sheās such a highly regarded captain, why Burnham is so affected by her loss, or why Saru feels so hurt to have been robbed of a chance to learn under her. But even the redshirts got a decent look.
Ensign Connor is just another guy at a console on board the Shenzhou. His ultimate fate is to have that console blow up in his face and then get shot into space, all of which happens in the showās opening two parter. And yet somehow, he gets more effective sympathetic characterization than any bridge crewer on Discovery, with the possible exception of Ariamās brazenly telegraphed pre-death sob story.
Amidst the preparation for Burnhamās spacewalk, a simple pre-chaos demonstration of what this starship and this crew look like executing relatively routine tasks, Connor is the one charged with coordinating between Burnham and the bridge. He does so in a delightfully charming manner:
Commander Burnham, this is Ensign Danby Connor. On behalf of Captain Georgiou and the entire crew of the U.S.S. Shenzhou, weād like to welcome you to flight 819 with non-stop service to the object of unknown origin. The temperature outside is a brisk minus-260 degrees Celsius. We are forecasting some mild debris, but anticipate a smooth ride.
Pleasant and humorous, maybe a little loose by modern military standards, but not unprofessional or disruptive. I already like this guy!
40 minutes later, weāre at war. Connorās console blows up in his face, and he staggers off to sickbay but gets lost, winding up outside Burnhamās cell. Delirious, he asks several jumbled questions, culminating in this:
Why are we fighting? Weāre Starfleet. Weāre explorers, not soldiers.
Itās a touch on the nose, perhaps, but Sam Vartholomeos sells it pretty well: genuine distress, from a man robbed of his filter by severe trauma. You canāt help but feel bad for the guy.
And then blam, heās sucked out into hard vacuum. Ouch.
Compare this to the the Bridge crew on Discovery come S3. Weāve had an awful lot of time to get to know Detmer, Owosekun, Rhys, Nillson, Bryce, etc, but itās somehow never happened. We know Rhys tried to kiss Tilly at the party in Magics, we know Detmer is proud of her piloting skills, Owo grew up in a non-believer luddite colony, and those last two seem to get along pretty well, but thatās basically it. As a result, when these characters are all tossed into an allegedly doomed circumstance in the season 3 finale, we have basically no emotional connection with them and only barely care about their sacrifice, or alternately their Deus Ex Machina salvation.
To give them some credit, the writers did make one real attempt to make people from these cardboard cutouts. The closing scene from 3x03 People of Earth features the above five plus Tilly going down to earth to see a tree on the Starfleet Academy grounds.
In theory, this seems like an appropriate scene and a decent way to give these guys a little characterization, but in practice it feels flat. The actors (with the exception of Wiseman, who actually moves around) seem like they donāt really know what to do, and just wind up either sitting or standing around awkwardly. Dialogue is brief, clipped, betraying nothing particularly personable. I admit I lack the expertise to tell if the problem is in the script, direction, or the actors themselves, but at least one of those things needed to change. Compared to Connorās lightning likability, this is a weak effort.
Early Discovery was willing to tackle difficult topics
There is a major missed opportunity in transition from early S1 to the subsequent efforts: the decision to handwave off or outright discard the tougher questions represented by Lorca and Tyler.
Lorca is presented as a military man through and through: a well studied pragmatist and a harsh but effective motivator, cognizant of the demands of war and willing to do what he judged best to protect his country. This is a kind of person Star Trek rarely attempts to portray, and even more rarely in a positive light. Iāve read quite a few accounts from people with military backgrounds who were quite fond of this character, finally shown a captain who thought the way theyād been trained to.
The idea that a nation of Chamberlainās might occasionally need a Churchill is hardly a novel one, and given the surprising popularity of Section 31, itās not exactly a controversial take even among Star Trek fans. But actually keeping character like Lorca around gives the freedom to poke and prod at the boundaries of where morality and military necessity overlap, and the show is under no obligation to present him as definitively good or definitively bad.
Even better, Lorca is an excellent avenue to explore trauma. Blindly grafting everything we see in these first nine episodes (except the MU jump itself, and Lorcaās bizare protectiveness of Burnham) onto the genuine article Lorca instead of his mustache twirling counterpart from the evil dimension, we get a nearly broken man defined by his pain, plagued by memory of the crew he not only lost, but felt duty bound to pull the plug on. He is desperate to keep himself in the big chair and doing what must be done to save the Federation from an existential threat, and willing to fall into a rabbit hole of deceptions to do it. How far can he keep that up? At what point would he break down? And can his efforts ever really be justified?
But that disappointment comes a cold second to Ash Tyler. Thereās hardly a surplus of honest, serious stories about male rape victims these days, which is a reason of itās own not to shy from examining this one. But the story we got of a POW who survived seven months in a Klingon prison by encouraging otherwise unwanted advances from his captor is uniquely horrifying, and the portrayal bears that out in full force. Tyler going into shock upon seeing LāRell again is evocative, and the flashbacks we see are horrific to the point that I found them genuinely uncomfortable. His dialogue with Burnham at the end of Into the Forest I Go is heart wrenching:
BURNHAM: I need to know something. You put on a facade. Like everything thatās happened to you just washes off. I actually envied that about you. But when you saw that Klingonā¦ Who is she to you?
TYLER: I think you already know.
BURNHAM: You were her prisoner.
TYLER: Yeah. Her nameās LāRell. Sheās the reason Iāve had nightmaresā¦ every night since Captain Lorca and I fled her ship. Sheās also the only reason Iām still alive. Two hundred and twenty-seven days. But it only took one to realize I wasnāt gonna make it out alive, not unless I made a choice.
BURNHAM: What did you do?
TYLER: I survived. Thatā¦ That Klingonā¦ was more than just my captor. She was my torturer. One who took a particularā¦ interest in me. And I saw a way out. A way to live past day one, day ten, day 20, day 97ā¦ I encouraged it. Her sick affections. Her obsession with me. Because if I hadnāt, Iād be dead, like all the others. And I got out. I get to keep living my life. But the thing isā¦ if none of that had happened, I wouldnāt be here. On this ship. With you. And that almost makes itā¦ worth it. Is that weird?
BURNHAM: No. Iām glad youāre here, too. You get to live your life, the way you deserve to. Not at warā¦ but at peace.
TYLER: I found peace. Right here.In the real world, these are not situations that resolve cleanly. There is a road ahead for a real Tyler, but itās a long and hard one, laden with complexities Iām unqualified to describe. Star Trek has a long history of touching on these sorts of issues, but by and large the resolutions amounted to a few words of wisdom before warping out of the system and moving on to next weekās quandary. Discovery as a genuinely serialized modern story was well positioned to buck that trend and really dig into these sorts of difficult topics, and the showās opening acts left them well positioned to do that. That this emotionally charged setup was crafted essentially by accident as cover to bust out two different varieties of villain in disguise is a tragedy all of itās own.
Those two are of course the most emotionally charged examples, but they certainly arenāt the only places where the show tackles some classically Trek plots. Chief among them is the Tardigrade, which in a mere three episodes plays the part of a monster, the surprising final piece in a wondrous machine, and a terrified victim whose suffering and very survival is weighed against the lives of the crew. Quite the slate of roles out of a guest star alien who doesnāt talk.
All in all, Discoveryās opening act was a well planned, well executed example of serialized storytelling which still embraced the kinds of moral choices and emotional struggles which have been a Star Trek staple since the beginning. Somehow, it manages to be closer to both classic Trek and to the prestige serialized shows that became so popular in the last 15 years (and were commonly requested before Discovery was ever on the drawing board) than any of the subsequent live action efforts weāve seen. It represents an approach to Star Trek that was cut off far too early, one that solves or avoids the most obnoxious pitfalls of the later seasons, and one I desperately wish we could have gotten more of.
undefined> It represents an approach to Star Trek that was cut off far too early, one that solves or avoids the most obnoxious pitfalls of the later seasons, and one I desperately wish we could have gotten more of.
Iāll comment on this most important concluding statement with agreement. Ultimately, Discovery tried to do something different and did it fairly well. Itās downfall was in not being willing to take that kind of storytelling and really lean into it. Fans started talking, loudly, about changes that were made and as a result later seasons of Discovery become far more tempered. The Discovery of season 1 could have ended Season 2 by sending Burnham and Discovery to the future and introducing a whole new cast of main players in a whole new context. Instead of that, they responded to the valid criticisms of the weaker supporting characters who donāt seem to have much to do and as a result the show took a much more emotional turn. They havenāt abandoned these long arcs, but theyāve tried to tell that story in a more familiar way and in my opinion this was always Discoveryās downfall.
In essence, Discovery followed the same arc as the Star Wars sequel trilogy. They swung for the fences on doing something wild and asking difficult questions that the franchise had taken for granted; and even if the answer they arrived at was affirming, there were too many loud nerds that couldnāt look past either the flaws that genuinely existed or their own shallow prejudices. Those nerds were loud enough and long enough that the studio walked it back to try to appease them and ended up with something much less interesting, which both alienated defenders of the early direction and could never appease the bad eggs whose criticisms werenāt in good faith, leaving something that only a few appreciated.
Yes! Iāve been thinking for a while that Discovery season 1 is the Last Jedi of Star Trek ā except of course that Star Trek started with that alienating move for its new era.
I mostly agree with you, but apparently Lorca and Tyler were planned that way from the get go (MU and Klingon). I thought it was a real lost opportunity to tell some new and interesting stories but it seems that was never going to happen because even the original show-runners planned them as shitty sci-fi trope surprises rather than how we assumed they were at face value.
I am on record as a defender of the Lorca reveal, though a recent rewatch really brought home to me the fact that they spent way too many episodes in the Mirror Universe and should have used at least some of that time to build up to the climax. I also believe that the reveal is meticulously planned out from the very start and is therefore integral whatās good about the earliest stretch. Either way, though, we agree that Discovery started out extremely strong and we also agree that itās a shame they never found their way back to that level of quality ā nor has any of the current Trek, as far as Iām concerned.
Itās clear that the Lorca reveal was planned out at some level, and there are mixed claims that Jason Isaacs wouldnāt have taken the role otherwise. But Iām not even convinced the Lorca reveal was part of whatever original version of the script they wound up using, and very skeptical that the whole thing would have fallen apart without it.
The overwhelming majority of what Lorca does, and what other people do in response to him, works just fine if taken straight up as a mix of extreme pragmatism and PTSD. The part that really goes out the window is his very strange ābring her back, or donāt come back at allā order to Tyler in Lethe. There needs to be some pressure on Tyler to add more stakes to the character conflict inside the shuttle, but I donāt think Lorcaās very strange command was necessary to create that.
For example, watching Lorca cold reading Cornwall makes for a compelling wrinkle on the second viewing, but I feel like my first watch read - that Lorca wasnāt cold reading, but otherwise has exactly the same motives in preventing an old friend from realizing that he isnāt really the same person after the loss of the Buran - is every bit as compelling on subsequent viewings. I donāt think the scene would be made any weaker if that was all there was to it, without this Lorca being a dimensional interloper. Frankly, Iāve been mentally treating it as if this was all there was to it, because I know going in Iām not going to bother with the MU stuff and I find misguided PTSD Lorca to be far more compelling.
The final episode of this sequence does start to unravel a little more than the others if you change where itās ultimately going, but thatās expected. I personally can take on faith that they could have progressed from there in a different direction which ultimately still worked very well with the setting and characters they had established.
Of course you can watch it and it mostly makes sense from a PTSD/pragmatism perspective ā thatās how they structured it so that it would reward rewatching.
Itās funny. It seems thereās an inversion with this compared to TNG era trek, where the first season is often a write off.
I agree with you and feel the same way about Picard S1. Something about how streaming era TV is run, at least with the particular mood and aspiration that Star Trek has, seems to benefit from the pre-production planning, and suffer under the loss of season to season production.
You know, I canāt argue with most of this. I think other than TAS, Discovery S1 is about the only Trek Iāve never rewatched. It doesnāt really fit in with the era itās meant to be set in, it brings back a lot of things I donāt really care for in Trek (Mirror Universe, Section 31, etc) but it mostly knows what it is and where itās going.
Season 2 might be, but Iām not sure. The Enterprise was revealed at the end of S1 of course and by golly it sure seems like Anson Mount hit the ground running as Pike.
I seriously wish the beginning of S3 had been Rod Roddenberry doing a soft reboot of Andromeda. Heās talked about how one of his ājobsā is taking his dadās ideas and pitching them as new shows, and I feel like Andromeda could have been an interesting direction for Star Trek to go. Iād love for more resolution on Calypso. Iād love more talk about how the shipās computer got taken over by an alien AI and theyāre just sort of letting it do its thing as a part of the crew. But at a certain point the show justā¦sortaā¦trailed off.
And despite liking that it felt like a soft Andromeda reboot, it simultaneously felt like they used the time shift to not deal with why Discovery looked nothing like any of the other ships of the era, and to ignore the āblack opsā nature of the ship.
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Maybe Iāll give Discovery a rewatch, but I lost interest once they went to the super distance future. I just didnāt care about the characters or the show to see what would happen.
Personally, I would love for new trek to just have proper set lighting.
