Discovery Discovered

It's finally here!  The new Star Trek!  How did it do?

Well I've had two episodes to consume and consider and there are some things I think are really great and there are some things that really just baffle me.  Here's your content spoiler warning: I discuss the first two episodes with the assumption that you've either seen them or don't care about me citing some very specific things about the show.

Let's dig in!

First of all, the intro is ... interesting.  I got bubbles of uncontrollable joy at the very beginning of it, but really nothing about the opening is enough to really hold my focus.  The artwork is of a very cool style, and is evocative of the human aspect of exploration a la Enterprise, as well as the technological developments on display because "Hey guys, look at these cool models we rendered!"  Maybe there's another point to that, but it's not very clear what it could be.  Especially when you feature a phaser pistol as one of the objects in the introduction, the first time any Star Trek has made overt reference to the already confused application of phasers in the wild frontier of space by a theoretically peaceful organization in an intro sequence.  Really lends credence to T'Kuvma's insistence in the show that the Federation lies when they say they come in peace.  Scope out the intro here if you haven't seen it yet:

But that's not really where the first episode starts.  The first episode starts with a cold open of a Klingon talking in Klingon with subtitles.  I hope you're tuned in and paying attention because if you're not you're about to miss some very important plot points.  Fortunately Klingon is a strange enough language to make you turn your head.  The Klingon design is, in and of itself, kind of cool.  But I do have some problems with it.

Scream at the Honorable Dead!  May they find triumph in Sto-Vo-Kor!

The skin tones are no longer consistent with anything we've seen from any Klingons ever.  This wasn't like a super big deal to me at first, since they also have cranial ridges and since they established pretty clearly that this takes place a scant 8 years before TOS, that these might be a fringe sect of Klingons whose biology is just a little different from the rest of the species.  Nope!  The whole lot of them have these skin tones (albino is apparently the new outcast color in Klingon society) that cover up completely any ethnicity that might belong to the actors beneath.  These are now wholly aliens, and totally outside the scope of where the species is supposed to be in the Prime timeline where Alex Kurtzman, Gretchen J. Berg, and Aaron Harberts insist the show takes place.

Chris Obi is black, but not that black.  Let us see this actor's beautiful skin!

We first see that this look is sported by more than just these evidently fringe fundamentalist followers of Kahless when they are successful in summoning the 24 houses of the Klingon Empire for this big ol' battle with the Federation that they want to start.  Because they're Klingons.  Well, okay, that checks out.  But we're losing important connections to the DS9 episode when Worf hastily informs his colleagues that Klingons do not talk about this time period because of the disgrace of not having cranial ridges, and the small arc in Enterprise where Phlox was kidnapped and forced to create an antidote for abused gene-enhancing that caused them to lose their cranial ridges in the first place.  Not to mention every appearance of Kor and Koloth in TOS (including the iconic original Trouble with Tribbles).

It's a good thing the computer tells us because that looks like some H.R. Giger shit.

I expected all of the tech to be updated to 2017 standards.  I'm fine with it.  It looks cool!  It's pretty and engaging and exactly what I want to see in Star Trek!  This doesn't bother me too much because they don't spend a whole lot of time in any of the other series focusing on why things were designed in the particular way that they were.  Although I was disappointed that absolutely zero of the Klingon ships resembled anything we'd seen from Klingon ships before - save, perhaps, for T'Kuvma's battleship which looked kind of like a big Gothic-style K'T'inga battle cruiser.

Neat!

After the cold open with the Klingons, we return to the now-familiar scene from Star Trek Into Darkness where Kirk and Bones are trying to save the natives from their planet by covertly violating the prime directive.  Wait... no, wait that's not Kirk and Bones.  That's Captain Georgiou and Commander Burnham.  And, yeah.  They're still doing the covert subversion of nature's course to save a species because sometimes complex ethical quandaries are for chumps.  Of course, they fail to be covert at the end and violate the prime directive.  Go figure.

Oh, wow!  Someone opened the well spring for my people!  Who do I thank?  Wait, what's that?

I hope nobody notices this giant spaceship in the sky above this wide open desert!

The entire scene is filled with clunky exposition dialogue that is important to set up the emotional impact of Captain Georgiou eventually kicking the bucket at the hands of T'Kuvma and in front of her friend of seven long years, Commander Burnham.  And Burnham makes it so painstakingly obvious that she's worried the Captain will die, there's pretty much no chance that she'll survive the encounter with T'Kuvma at all.

We KNOW!

Then there's this cool space walk, and Burnham fights a Klingon and we get to see the tall alien guy be a total wimp.  After fighting the Klingon, we are exposed to perhaps the most interesting tie to Star Trek lore yet: Michael Burnham is Spock's step sister.

And they really nailed that Vulcan hairstyle on young Michael Burnham!

I really like this addition to the Star Trek canon.  I don't really see it as interfering with anything because Sarek and Spock are both logical enough for the added complexity of having another person in their household to be essentially irrelevant to anything else that happened in Spock's or Sarek's life.  Even if that person is a human.  And the method by which Burnham became Sarek's ward is reminiscent of Worf's past, with his family being destroyed by a Romulan attack and being forced to be raised by humans.  But where Worf went on a journey to reclaim his Klingon heritage, Burnham is on a journey to reclaim her humanity.  It makes for a great combination of the logical Spock and the lovable Worf.  Good move.  We'll come back to where her arc looks like it's going to go a little later.

Aww, man, oh jeeze!  Look at all those... are those Klingon ships?

Ultimately they set up a very dramatic mutiny scene where Captain Georgiou becomes the first person to recover from a Vulcan nerve pinch in seconds in order to foil her first officer's plot of trying to preemptively strike the Klingons as a show of force.  The discussion of whether or not it was right to take that course of action is very short, and our heroine, Commander Burnham, is thrown in the brig.  Then the Klingons decide it's time to tear the Federation a new one.

It's a good thing we've got... shields?

Pretty sure that used to be the science station....

Oh man you've never seen this much space from inside a Federation starship!

The Klingons make a very dramatic move by booping the Admiral's ship after duping him into believing that the Klingons and Federation would have a cease fire.  Which is like... MONDO dishonorable.  Can't really see how you'd justify that.  So... is today a good day to die?  Because not one Klingon said it.  They sure did make sure to let us know they believed in racial superiority.  The Klingons then pulled out of the battle instead of finishing because... um... because I guess they felt like they won?  It did look a lot like Wolf 359 after they were done with the Federation.

Explosions!

Overall this was a really dramatic two episodes of Star Trek.  It lacks the episodic nature of all the previous series - which isn't in and of itself a bad thing.  But what we don't get in these episodes in any meaningful way is an exploration of social issues or philosophy.  The closest we get is some teased racial tension between the Klingons and their distaste for their one albino Klingon.  At the end of the second episode, Burnham is on court martial for mutinying against her captain.  This part I really didn't care for in its presentation.  Just not an artistic style I felt was appropriate to the organization.

Burnham is lit so we can see her face and expression, but the tribunal that is judging her is in complete darkness.  Since when has the Federation ever run this way?  Now the Federation has turned into a large, shadowy faceless government.  I don't like that.  It's not the Federation we've seen before and I think it was a poor choice made solely for the purpose of theatrics.  I think it's important to maintain a certain level of fidelity to the franchise, especially when your season trailer teases that you're going to give us an idea of how the Federation might have a seedy underbelly.

All in all I am not put off by Discovery.  But I am wary of it.  It hasn't grown its beard, and it's making it difficult for itself to do so by removing the episodic nature of its episodes.  I'm not thrilled about the life sentence Burnham received at the end of the second episode, and how it basically turns her into the next Tom Paris on board the Discovery later in the series.  But Sonequa Martin-Green is captivating and I want to see more of her.  I'll be coming back for more of this show.

Live long and prosper.