Star Trek Discovery - A Late Review

 

Yes, I have come to this party late but then, CBS just released Star Trek – Discovery On Demand (Or I just happened to find it there). I wasn’t about to pay CBS a fee to watch a bunch of their programs that they wouldn’t broadcast over the air. Not when I have On Demand, and Amazon Prime, and HBOMAX (though it was just HBO Go then) and so much else that is now available.

I will say that the production values are amazing. The ship looks better than any of the other starships but what do you expect when comparing 1960s special effects standards with those today? It should be, dare I say it, light years ahead… and yes, I know that a light year is a measure of distance and not really time.

I also would like to note that there is an awful lot of wasted space on the ship. The hallways are so wide you could drive a truck down them when they don’t really need to be that wide. We have huge private rooms, or rooms set up for two crew members that are way too big. I’ll let this go by noting that you would need to carry a great deal into space to build the ship and that doesn’t account for the ability to fill it with oxygen for the crew to breathe. I would think that engineers in the future would have thought about all that.

I find the show difficult to watch and found myself viewing it in pieces. Watch for twenty minutes and then turn it off, only to come back hours or days later to finish watching it. That was the pattern through the 15 episodes that were available On Demand.

In the first episode, I was surprised to see Michael Burnham (was there a purpose of giving her a masculine name?) attack the captain and then commit an act of mutiny. These were major crimes and I could see no way to cover them up… which they didn’t do. We learn that she was tried and convicted and sent off into exile… well, prison.

But then the shuttle taking her and other prisoners away, is intercepted, and these criminals, are brought aboard the starship. While those others are soon forgotten, or locked away and eventually returned to the shuttle to complete their trip, Burnham is provided with an opportunity to serve on the ship in a much-reduced circumstance. Okay, I get that it was a plot of the captain that we learn about later, but I just can’t see the rest of the crew going along with this. Oh, there is some push back but not what I would expect.

It was at this point they lost me. Burnham had attacked her captain and was a mutineer. There really is no redemption for that. It doesn’t matter what else goes on, what she might do or how bright she supposedly is (though she couldn’t seem to understand that what she had done couldn’t be fixed), she was now a prisoner.

Overlooking that, we move into classic television. We have the “Groundhog Day” scenario where time is looped and they repeat the same sequence of events over and over. I think Stargate SG-1 handled it better with a touch of humor. Of course, the original film allowed for a growth of the character and wasn’t just a cheap device that pointed to the failure of imagination in this case.

And then there is the alternative universe in which the Federation becomes the fascist empire that ruthlessly advances its goals by slaughtering all those that get in the way. The original Star Trek did it better and it didn’t take multiple episodes to resolve the problem.

But all that just tells us that the captain who engineered the “rescue” of Burnham is, in reality (if that’s the right word), from that alternative universe who had attempted a coup to become the emperor. Yes, somewhat complicated, but it brings us back into our shared reality where the Klingons have won the war and the Federation, the good guys here, are attempting to hold things together so that they might turn the tables.

I might mention here that I was really annoyed by the Klingons who always spoke their own language so that we’re treated to subtitles. These sometimes flash on the screen so fast that you don’t have time to read them, but who really cares. I hated the guttural sounds that passed for their language and just muted the TV. Why listen to it when you’re not going to be able to understand the language and you have subtitles? (I suppose there are those who attempt to speak Klingon, but does the invented language follow rules of grammar or is it just English translated into Klingon by created Klingon words for the English ones?)

There are other annoyances too numerous to mention. All the leadership is female and all the white male characters are bad unless they belong to some marginalized community. Burnham is able to solve every problem with brilliant insights that always work and, in the end, she is reinstated at her former rank and returned to an important position on the starship.

Did everyone just forget that she had attacked her captain and that she had attempted to take over the ship in a mutiny because she believed she knew better than everyone else? I can see no reason that a military organization would ever allow her to serve again because if she did it once and the consequences were a short deviation in her career path, why wouldn’t she do it again? At best, they would have commuted her sentence and allowed her to return to civilian life… and more probably, they would have locked her up for a shorter period of time.

I am informed that the second season was an improvement, but I haven’t seen it because it hasn’t shown up On Demand or in another arena in which I can see it. Frankly, I really don’t care because this version of Star Trek has little or nothing to do with the vision of the original. It struck me as nothing more than an exercise in virtual signaling and the continued propaganda that white man bad, everyone else good.

I will note one other observation here. In the last several months I have seen a number of programs and movies in which the main characters are female, or African-American, or a member of some other victimized group. These programs were made years ago, and I now view them through this lens of 2021 as opposed to when they were made. At the time they were made, we did not see the story as a contrivance to advance a political or societal view, but as a story created to entertain us and if the characters were of a certain ethnicity, we didn’t care about that because we cared about the characters. In these latest endeavors, we see the pushing of an agenda. The whole program is lost in the moral message being pushed and this, I believe, is why the stories do not make sense or are filled with unrealistic situations or have plot holes that we are supposed to ignore.

In Star Trek Discovery, one of those is that in the end, as the Klingon home world is threatened with destruction, Burnham, again against orders, saves them because the Klingons agree to some sort of treaty (I think, I had lost interest long ago). My thought was that the very moment the Klingons had the opportunity to destroy the Federation, they would do so, regardless of the treaty and the circumstances that brought the universe to that point.

No, this version of Star Trek is not for me and if the other seasons are released into the non-streaming world or I have the opportunity to watch, I’ll give it a pass. I just don’t care anymore.