Here be SPOILERS for Star Trek Discovery up to series 1 episode 5!
At time of writing, we’re up to episode 5. I have to say, it’s living up to the hype - that it’s going places no other Trek show has been.
How? Two things:
First of all, it’s not following a ship (or a station) - it’s following a character. Just as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (of five) tells the story of a book by showing you its adventures as they concern humans, Star Trek Discovery is telling us the story of Michael Burnham as she causes conflict by interacting with ships, their captains, and their enemies.
Two: it doesn’t say ‘here are your bridge crew characters - now make stories about them’. It says ‘here’s a story and we’ll involve people as and when we need them’. For this reason, there’s no ‘episode as a vehicle for this character’ - apart from Michael, who, lest we forget, is who it’s all about.
I’m happy with these choices. I’m ecstatic that it’s breaking from tradition and going forward. When I first heard that CBS/Paramount were determined to keep going backwards in terms of the year it was set, I was pretty pissed off, to be honest. Star Trek is about moving forward, and that means you don’t write yourself into the past, a past before Kirk joins Starfleet, and box yourself in with what you can and can’t have because Kirk didn’t have it.
(As an aside - who else is waiting for the literal mirror-verse version of Stamets to bring about the end of spore-drive tech? When it’s discovered that it causes what I think is replication of the human spore-host as a mirror-version, Starfleet will have to abandon it - hence why Kirk doesn't have it. I’m so excited for this!)
However, this show has already been more progressive than its predecessors, and I’m happy about that. I’m also happy that these humans we have on this show are not the fully-formed, fully-balanced people of the 22nd or 23rd century. They’re in 2256 - 2 years before the events of the ‘The Cage’ - 11 years before Kirk takes command of the Enterprise. People are still humans - rough around the edges, living through a war with the klingons - a race they hardly know as they haven’t had to deal with for the past hundred years (since the time of Enterprise - around the 2120s). This is a hundred years before DS9's controversial episode ‘In The Pale Moonlight’ - and it shows. It’s commonplace for these people to do things they never would have considered had the situation not been one of dire need and absolute life or death. It’s people having to get on with it, without the benefit of a well-known and respected Federation behind them. The idea that the klingons think they know what will happen to them, their culture, their way of life - because they’ve seen other races ‘fall’ to the ‘assimilation’ of the Federation - feels very real and very current. Every generation gets the Star Trek they deserve - and we have one about identity, about preserving your own culture at any cost, about standing up and saying ‘nope - you can’t whitewash/airbrush me - this is who I am, deal with it - we exist and you can’t deny us’. That makes the klingons on the side of the current anti-Trump and anti-status quo section of our world population - they are sticking it to The Man, and that makes me happy. Of course, that makes Starfleet either The Man or very misunderstood. And I'm ok with that - it’s about the possibility of sides, after all. Picard would have looked at it both ways - Sisko would have asked Dax and she would have said she’s lived both ways. Kirk would have said it’s a risk to jump either way - but ‘risk is our business’ and to carefully decide if a side should even be chosen.
Basically, this is pure Star Trek that no-one wanted but everyone cried out for. Something new, something a little daring, something to challenge. And if Star Trek isn’t challenging people, it’s not doing it right.
This is not your mother’s sci-fi. This is born of new ways of telling stories, of modern TV styles, and new ways of engaging (pardon the bad link) with its audience. The Expanse, Killjoys, Dark Matter - they’ve all pushed the envelope - and personally I don’t think Star Trek will ever be as shamelessly celebratory of diversity as Killjoys. But that’s not the only reason for Star Trek - it’s also about discovery. Though it’s hard to do that going back in time, it is easy to do if you’re thinking in terms of exploring the human condition and how it changes under stress, under the threat of death for many millions of souls - because of something you decide at that moment. What makes you, you? What makes you act in defence of or against someone else? That’s what they’re exploring here, and that’s what I’m looking forward to seeing more of.
Lorca may have scuttled his own ship (the Buron) and taken all hands but himself with her, but he did it because the needs of those many crew members outweighed the needs of the one. People are railing about how he has no soul, but didn’t he do exactly what Vasquez and Gorman did in Aliens when surrounded by xenomorphs and no ammo? Didn’t Picard do the same to a crew member lying on the floor asking for his help in Star Trek: First Contact? Ask Miles O’Brien if he’d leave someone alive to be taken prisoner by the Cardassians. And as for leaving Mudd behind - he had already proven himself to be a spy and someone only able to look out for himself. And he did brag about being a survivor. To be honest, I would have left him too.
On that subject, it’s obvious Tyler is a spy for the klingons (he escaped physical harm for how long? And his klingon captor was taken down much too easily for anyone to believe) but that’s why Lorca’s taken him along, isn’t it? He probably smelt it a mile off and is going to try to play him at his own game. After all, if he has a spy on board sending messages to the enemy, all you do is follow the message.
Time will tell if any of my musings are correct, but then that’s the fun. For the first time since DS9, there’s Star Trek on telly. I wasn’t in the UK for Enterprise, but compared to DS9 and Discovery it was weak. The characters were wasted and some of the stories were recycled from DS9 anyway (the Enterprise episode ‘Oasis’ and the DS9 episode 'Shadowplay', anyone?).
For me personally, I’ve seen more Star Trek in the first five episodes of Discovery than a whole season of Enterprise. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not hating on Enterprise and we needed it to keep the TV versions of Star Trek ticking along. But it was all starting to get a little stale, and this new idea of following a person and not a ship is what I think Star Trek needed to keep up to date - so far in the past that’s still yet to come.
Your mileage may vary - but for me, it’s yipping along with all the right signs. Long may it continue.
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