The first time I watched the Star Trek: Discovery premiere, I thought the show was a mess. I didn’t know who anybody was. I didn’t understand why we were focused on her, and why we weren’t focused on the captain, who by the way was played by the inimitable Michelle Yeoh, coming in as Captain Georgiou of the USS Shenzhou.

It took me until season 4 to figure out what I was doing wrong. I found myself looking at everything, and finally I had an aha moment. Star Trek: Discovery is its own thing, and I’d always been approaching it as classic Star Trek.

So, as promised, I’m starting my watch through over again with those new eyes. It begins with season 1, episodes 1 and 2, because that’s the way the series premiered. At the time you could watch the first episode for free, and then with CBS All Access, which later became Paramount+, you were able to watch the second. That makes it a two-episode premiere, “The Vulcan Hello” and “Battle at the Binary Stars,” and the two of them come together to form the beginning.

Watching it now, I enjoyed this show. It was amazing. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some issues. But I enjoyed it in a way I didn’t before.

It’s Michael Burnham’s Story, Period

The first thing I was able to get into my head was that this isn’t Star Trek the way I’ve always known it, and that’s okay. This was a new thing. We hadn’t seen Star Trek for years.

My normal default Star Trek brain says we’re going to be introduced to a cast, and there’s a crew, and everything else. Those elements are here, but they aren’t the focus. There’s no Captain Kirk. There’s no Mr. Spock. What there is, is a captain. Not captain, I’ve got to get used to that. What there is, is a Commander Burnham.

The reason we dive deep into her background is that Star Trek: Discovery is the story of Michael Burnham. Period. Everyone’s like, oh, she’s this, she’s that, she’s the other. It’s her story. She’d better be the star of the show.

The Klingons Are the First Shortcoming

The episode begins with a really interesting view of Klingons, and this is the first of what I’d call the shortcomings in a very rocky start.

In classic Trek, Klingons were a matter of costuming and makeup, basically just white actors in blackface. Then came the motion picture era, when we first saw Klingons again. I wanted to say it was Star Trek II or Star Trek III, but no, it was The Motion Picture, that’s right. They had ridges on their foreheads, and that went into The Next Generation and everything after.

So this was a radical departure for Klingons. It shocked me, and I still have issues with it.

I think the Klingon they’re speaking is amazing. The attention to detail in what they’re vocalizing, the way they’re saying certain words. I’m long since out of practice, but I used to be quite fluent in conversational Klingon. Those of you who have the Klingon dictionary know exactly what I’m talking about. Yeah, I geek out like that. I’m old school geek like that. So I loved a lot of what they were doing.

I didn’t like the ship designs. I would’ve liked to have seen the attention paid here, in the beginning, that later on gets paid in Strange New Worlds. The Klingon ships don’t seem to take any inspiration from the Klingon ships we know, even as a redesign or a reinvention of that same look. The Enterprise looks like the Enterprise. Ships of the line look like ships of the line. You get the sense that Federation ships are Federation ships. With the Klingons, that was a departure.

But again, I’m taking this as its own thing.

Saru, Sarek, and the DNA of Star Trek

The other character we’re introduced to is Saru. It’s a very different Saru than the one we come to see in later seasons, and that speaks to the evolution of the character. And of course, Doug Jones. Chef’s kiss. The guy’s brilliant, and he does such a wonderful job articulating.

You can see that early on someone had the vision to give the Burnham and Saru back and forth a very Spock and McCoy feel. I was okay with it. I get it. To me that’s all part of the DNA of Star Trek, and I love seeing it, because at the end of the day Star Trek is about diversity of ideas. People and aliens and whatever else, sure, but ideas. While we’re talking through this, there are no dumb ideas and there are no stupid concepts, because we’re facing the unknown. We’re facing what no person has ever experienced before. We’re going boldly, so to speak.

So I like that Burnham and Saru clearly have a dynamic from the beginning. That dynamic bleeds over and evolves, and we can actually follow the blueprint of that evolution.

You also get Burnham’s backstory, and in that backstory we meet Sarek. It’s a different Sarek than we’re used to, but I see the characteristics of the Sarek we know peppered in. They’re making it clear there will be a path to who these characters eventually become. It’s the same blueprint they later extend to Strange New Worlds: we’re seeing these characters before we ever knew them, so they evolve. They come from somewhere.

The Beacon and the Torchbearer

When they arrive at this object, it’s clearly cloaked in some way, shape or form, but not very well, because of the radiation. The captain wants to be the one to go out to it, but Burnham takes it on herself, and she goes manually, in a little EV suit.

By the way, that EV suit looks like a more evolved version of things we see later in the timeline. That’s okay. Star Trek: Discovery is a reboot of the universe through the filmmaking of today. TOS and The Next Generation were shot one way, and this is its own thing, so a lot has been evolved.

She finds out it’s a beacon. She isn’t sure what it is, and she describes it the best she can: “It’s difficult to tell if it was constructed or carved. The only word to effectively describe it is wow.”

Then she encounters her very first Klingon. He’s a guy in a suit, and later on you find out he’s called the Torchbearer. The computer is able to identify some very clear markings on the suit that show it to be of a noble house, one of the 24 houses in the Klingon Empire. The Klingon leading this charge is T’Kuvma, from the very beginning of the episode.

I don’t know yet what the Torchbearer means or what this beacon is for. I kind of see it as the equivalent of the fires of Gondor in Lord of the Rings. The beacons are lit, Gondor calls for aid, and Rohan will answer. This beacon, when lit, is supposed to call forth the houses to come together and unify the Klingon Empire once more.

As soon as the guy shows up, Burnham has to defend herself. He doesn’t want to hear anything about it. She ends up using her rockets to try to hit him, and she accidentally kills him with his own bat’leth. Or his own weapon, anyway. I don’t know if it was a mek’leth. Actually no, a mek’leth would be smaller. Whatever.

In killing him, she has inadvertently set off a series of events, because the other Klingons are here. They’re just cloaked. I can’t figure out yet if they’re trying to say T’Kuvma is the one who invented cloaking technology, or the one who negotiated for it, but at the end of the day he has it.

They manage to get Burnham back. She’s real close to the star that’s causing the radiation, which is going to unravel her DNA. They use the phrase unravel it like noodles. They transport her back, she wakes up three hours later being rejuvenated, and she realizes she has to tell them what she knows. This is Klingons. And as soon as she’s telling them, the Klingon ship shows up.

Holograms, and Progressing Past the Pajamas

This is where the hologram technology comes in, and it’s another thing that caused fans of the old series to freak out.

I did have an issue with them having hologram technology this early. But I’m more forgiving of things like this, because eventually you have to progress past full color pajamas. You get to Strange New Worlds, and Strange New Worlds is a wonderful evolution of the look that eventually becomes TOS.

We have to evolve the technology. We have to make things at least fit within a context. I don’t know that everything has to be quote unquote canonical, because how do you explain 1960s technology against the modernized version? It’s storytelling. It’s styling. So I’m able to roll with it, and I hope you can too, because the show has a lot of valuable things in it, especially now that I’m seeing it through the eyes of this being Burnham’s story.

You do see some other characters. Detmer is the only other one on the bridge that I recognize. So you have Detmer, you have Saru, and then of course Georgiou.

The Vulcan Hello, and the Mutiny That Hurt Me to My Core

The Admiral tells Georgiou that nobody is going to do anything. Nobody touches anything, nobody moves anything. “We are on our way. Europa and all fleet vessels within range will be at your coordinates in two hours. Hold your position. Do nothing absent provocation. Understood?” “Understood, Admiral.”

While this happens, Burnham decides to call Sarek. She asks him how the Vulcans faced the Klingons. He wants to know how she’s going to use the information, and he tells her not to get herself in trouble. Of course she gets herself in trouble.

When the Vulcans first encountered the Klingons, their ship was destroyed. The Vulcans learned from that mistake. From that moment forward they shot first, every single time, because respect is what bred the possibility of having a conversation. Klingons are a different culture. You can’t just walk in and say “we come in peace,” which is literally the phrase T’Kuvma is weaponizing against the Federation to get the Klingon houses together. You have to come at them with force. Come at them with a fist, and only then will they listen to peace.

That’s immediately what Burnham tells them they have to do. Georgiou is not about it.

And this hurt me to my core. Burnham decides she’s going to mutiny, and she Vulcan nerve pinches the captain.

Fans got upset by this too, because Leonard Nimoy had talked about how the invention of the nerve pinch came to be. It’s supposed to be that Vulcans can channel an energy. So everyone’s like, how can she channel an energy? You learn later, from Data in The Next Generation, that it’s a matter of a nerve cluster and how much pressure is applied. The point of a Vulcan nerve pinch is to generate enough pain, so fast, that your nervous system briefly shuts down. You hit your pain tolerance threshold, you reach that plateau, and that’s when people pass out. That’s how the nerve pinch works. It has nothing to do with energy, though that’s what Leonard Nimoy said out of universe. In universe, we know for a fact Data isn’t channeling any energy out of his hands when he does it.

So Burnham tries to do the very thing she said they had to do, and Georgiou comes out just in time, before they can fire on the Klingons. “Belay that order.” “Captain, please, I’m trying to save you.” “Stand down.”

More Klingon ships show up. T’Kuvma weaponizes them against the Federation. The Federation ships show up. And we roll right into the next episode.

Battle at the Binary Stars

It is an amazing fight. All the Federation ships are smaller than the Klingon ships by what feels like orders of magnitude. One of the Klingon ships leaves, the ones who want to listen to T’Kuvma stay, and they all follow him.

It goes badly. The Admiral shows up, T’Kuvma acts like he’s going to listen, and then he rams the Europa with the fraking Klingon ship and just literally slices through it. The Europa self-destructs to try to stop the Klingons, and they stop that one ship.

Burnham is in the brig, but the brig is damaged. She manages to convince the computer that ethical protocols require it to help her get out. Early Burnham is very Vulcan informed, because remember, she’d been raised by Vulcans from a young child. What else would she have but Vulcan affectations? Those mellow out as things move forward.

When she gets to the bridge, they’re trying their best to come up with a solution. Burnham’s is that they need to go get T’Kuvma, and get him without killing him. If you kill him, you make him a martyr. What you have to do is capture him and make him a symbol of defeat.

So Georgiou and Burnham go over. They face off against the albino Klingon, who will become important later, and T’Kuvma. T’Kuvma gets the upper hand, and he kills Georgiou.

Without thinking, Burnham takes her phaser, which is on stun, flips it to red, which sets it to kill, and shoots him in the back of the neck. His armor absorbs some of it, but she mortally wounds him. Before she can get to the body, Saru transports her out. “Burnham, if she’s deceased and you’re in danger, I have no choice.”

She’s heartbroken. And she has managed to cause the thing she wanted to avoid. At every stage, Burnham is making everything worse. To me this is a hero’s journey that’s beginning, and it’s beginning from the lowest possible point.

The episode ends with Burnham facing a court martial. She gets to say some final words, her rank is stripped from her, and she’s going to prison for the rest of her life.

The Verdict

The Star Trek: Discovery season 1 premiere, “The Vulcan Hello” and “Battle at the Binary Stars,” is a solid, solid 8 and a half out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

Revisiting these with new, fresh eyes, there was a lot of really good stuff. There was some stuff I had issues with as a fan: the Klingons, and some of the technology. But those aren’t insurmountable hurdles, and I’m okay with forgiving them, to a point.

I’m watching with these new eyes and I’m enjoying the show in a way that I didn’t before.

Are you excited for this rewatch? I know I am. Tell me what you thought of the premiere in the comments on the video above. My Star Trek: Discovery playlist on the channel has the season 5 reviews too, right through the finale.