I was part of the crowd poo-pooing Star Trek: Discovery in the beginning. I really was. And I was doing it sight unseen, based on reviews from certain people I do respect, before I’d watched a single episode of season one.
I shared those opinions for a little while, until the hate that was building up started to feel foolish. Foolish for me. I’m not telling you you’re foolish if you feel a certain way. You’re allowed to love anything you want to love, and you’re allowed to think something’s boring or something’s bad. You’re allowed to be any kind of fan you want to be. But so am I.
So this Trek Talk Tuesday is a look back at Discovery season one, now that there are four seasons to look back from. I get there by way of Star Trek: Picard, which just finished season two, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which premiered this week, because for me they’re all the same conversation. A lot of it has to do with where I was in my own head when Discovery showed up.
Picard Season 2, and the Cliff That Is Canon
Man, Star Trek: Picard season two is over, and I have feelings and I have thoughts about it.
I’ve heard a lot of hate about this season, and you’ve got to remember, I’m not that guy. I can see the problems people have, and I understand where the new Trek versus old Trek folks are coming from, because I have a very similar story.
I’ve enjoyed Picard immensely. Season one wasn’t bad, and it also wasn’t great. It did a lot of what it was trying to do and misstepped in some other places. Season two was more in line with what I thought season one was going to be, which is much more to do with space and storylines of that nature. And it all felt very familiar. The Star Trek time travel angle, having to go fix things, that’s not unfamiliar territory. Heck, there were episodes with the time agents, the temporal Starfleet so to speak, who were always talking about James T. Kirk: he was the worst, he always broke things.
So the first question a lot of folks were asking this season was, what about the episodes with Guinan in the past, what about the things that were already established? I don’t know that these things expressly break canon. When we dive off the cliff that is canon, that alone is a place where you have to sit back for a second.
For me it’s always been about moving the story forward. The last I’d seen was All Good Things and then the movies, so Nemesis was technically the last thing. Then you get the J.J. Abrams movies, the Kelvin universe, and there’s a connection from The Next Generation that goes back in time and informs that whole loop. Time travel plays a big part, and that’s really everybody trying to stay nice and clean with the storyline.
I’ve finally come to realize that nothing that comes out now is affecting my love of Star Trek, or my love of that style of storytelling. Nothing at all. I can always tell when things come around that I like. And the things that sometimes don’t work, that’s okay. Move on with life. It’s storytelling. I’m here for all of it, and I’m sort of a convert.
Victory Laps With Jean-Luc Picard
I think the series is taking the opportunity to take some victory laps with Jean-Luc Picard, and to give us some final storytelling beats with him. I didn’t hate them. I kind of liked them.
There were questions last week about whether they’d just completely wash away Where No One Has Gone Before, the Traveler episode from season one of The Next Generation, where he has the vision of his mom. But Picard gave it to us. He says there are times he’s envisioned seeing her, wanting to sit down and have a cup of tea with her as an old woman. It wrapped it with a bow in a way I was okay with. It gave it a nod, said it exists, was respectful, and moved on with life. I feel like that approach helps a lot when it comes to storytelling.
Where the argument sometimes falls a little flat is that these are established characters. I have an easier time with Discovery than I do accepting some parts of Picard, only because Picard’s stories are stories I knew. Even the stuff with Pike in Strange New Worlds doesn’t affect me much, because it all comes before what I know.
Mrs. Know-It-All and I talked about season three. (She’s getting her uniform too, by the way. I’ve ordered new uniforms, and I have a First Contact uniform coming. ADHD, I apologize.) I’m showing her more and more Star Trek, and the one thing she said was that she’d love to see where everybody is today. That’s really what she wants out of all this.
I feel like they’re trying to give Picard the moments he hasn’t had an opportunity to deal with. I think they kind of brushed away the Irumodic Syndrome concept that was laid out in All Good Things, though they paid it off a little with the brain stuff in season one. Turning him into robo Picard wasn’t my favorite move, because you lose stakes. You could’ve left that floating over his head: a futuristic neurological disorder that’s going to degrade his neural pathways, some future version of Alzheimer’s. That would’ve added tension to everything he’s doing, and you could’ve ended season three as the ending of that particular journey. Shying away from old age and dying, you dehumanize Picard a little bit. Then again, that doesn’t hold up too much, because here comes season two, and I thought there were many, many human moments in it.
I’m enjoying the ride. I’m enjoying seeing these classic characters I’ve loved for so long. I’m very much a friend of the show. Season one I loved overall because it gave us something new. Season two I’ve also loved. There were some big areas where I called them on the carpet, and it didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the show.
Everyone Is Onboarding Somewhere
When you hold something up as a paragon and then behave as if it can never change, first off, you’re right. It can’t be altered and it can’t be changed. If you don’t like what’s coming out, stop watching it. It’s okay. You don’t have to participate if it’s going to make you angry.
I understand the algorithms on social media are all about showing us the stuff we hate. I’m not about that. If you just want to hate it, hate it. But I don’t feel like it’s my job to poo-poo on other people’s parade. Film and television are both extraordinarily subjective mediums. What I got from Sliders as a TV show is something totally different from what everybody else got. My fan fiction was very different from everybody else’s, whether it was Sliders or Lost in Space or Star Trek.
So I get to enjoy Star Trek, and if nothing else I get to enjoy other people’s onboarding. My daughter had never seen anything except the J.J. Abrams movies, a little bit of Picard and Discovery, and now some Strange New Worlds. That gave me the opportunity to say, here’s T’Pring from Strange New Worlds, let me show you where that came from. We watched Amok Time, and next thing you know she’s asking me to watch some other classic episodes. It’s the same reason she enjoys The Orville. It’s the same reason she’s stopped while walking through the living room when I’m doing my rewatch of Next Generation episodes. I’ve already primed the pump for Deep Space Nine. I told her it’s amazing, especially when you get into the Dominion War.
Take Star Wars for a second. Regardless of how people feel about the prequels, those movies were an entire generation’s first exposure to Star Wars, and it didn’t stop that generation from discovering and enjoying the original series. The sequels are another generation’s Star Wars. Same thing with us. My Star Trek was The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager. I fell off at Enterprise. I’ve always enjoyed TOS and the original series films, and those weren’t my Star Trek per se.
Strange New Worlds, and “Space, the Final Frontier”
The Strange New Worlds series premiere was this week, and I’ve got to tell you, I have such feels.
When The Orville came out, a friend told me I had to watch it, that it was Star Trek like I hadn’t seen in a long time. Sure enough, Seth MacFarlane and them have got the vibe. Between the camera angles, the storytelling and how the music’s being underscored, it really feels like Next Generation. It’s episodic, but you get characters who are also evolving. For a minute in time, The Orville was my Star Trek fix. It clicked the minute I watched it. I’d been missing that style of episodic storytelling.
Then I started seeing Discovery, and at first Discovery was a non-starter for me. A no sell. I wasn’t down for it.
We were introduced to Pike in Discovery, and season two and on is when I was in. Season one I’m very critical of, because I didn’t understand where they wanted to go. I don’t care if everyone says they had no clue where they were going. I had no clue, you had no clue, and I’m not going to put words in anybody’s mouth, I don’t care what the interviews say. Seeing where it eventually went, now you get a picture that I like.
They introduced Pike and I was immediately on board. I liked how they represented him, and I liked how they represented Number One. I had issues with Spock early on, but as we progress I’m okay with more and more of what they’re doing with him, because I’m getting a new level of story. It feels like they’re finally going to fold that era into something I’m used to seeing.
There was nothing wrong with the old sets. They were gorgeous for the time and extraordinarily advanced. I heard it put this way recently in an interview, and I think it might’ve been either Akiva Goldsman or one of the other executive producers: this is Star Trek, but using today’s visual language, how we film today. I’ve got to agree. The sets are gorgeous, and the production design from the original series is in there. Anybody who says it isn’t just isn’t paying attention.
None of that means the Star Trek you love is gone or dead. Like I said on the very first Trek Talk Tuesday, my dad still has the Columbia House VHS tapes. I still have the original series digitally, all remastered, on my Amazon. You’ll always be able to see it. It’s not going anywhere.
I think the Enterprise is being treated faithfully. I think Pike’s love and adoration of the ship is completely on brand. I feel like they’re being very respectful to what came before and to what’s coming for Pike.
And who else got chills when Pike came on with “Space, the final frontier”? I was such a child. I told my wife, this is the first time we’re hearing these words since The Next Generation. Oh, and some movies, obviously. But in this format, in long-form storytelling, with the Enterprise and its ongoing five-year mission, it’s just wonderful.
The episode didn’t disappoint either. It felt like classic Star Trek storytelling the way it’s always been done, which is modular and episodic. It wasn’t rushed. I felt like you got everything you needed out of it, and I enjoyed the heck out of it. My review of the premiere is its own video on the channel.
The Season Trailer, and My Gorn Prediction
Right after the episode you get the “this season on Strange New Worlds” trailer. It starts with a red alert. Captain Pike gets called to the bridge, and you hear Spock saying, Captain Pike, we have a problem. I love that we’re jumping right in. I don’t think the clips are in episode order. I think it’s exactly what it seems like, an opportunity to show off what’s coming.
You see a really cool comet hitting a planet. I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be a simulation, because it looks a little sloppy at the moment, but I’m willing to bet it’s a VFX shot that’s just incomplete. Then we get our first shot of Uhura in a new getup. She’s got the classic black collar, but they make it look relevant, and I’m kind of digging the look. If this is the evolution of that particular outfit, I’m here for it. They make a couple of really good jokes too, and I was like, all right, all right, I get it. You’ve got to have some humor in this thing.
Then there’s a really intense moment between Number One and Pike. Clearly he’s told her what’s going down, and she tells him he can’t let his knowledge of the future affect how he is today. It’s the same through line he dealt with in the first episode. The episodes are episodic, but everyone’s traveling their own journey, so each character carries the lessons of the previous episode. People evolve. That’s very Star Trek.
Somebody starts attacking them, and you get your first look at what might end up being a season arc. I don’t know if they’re going to have one, but it’s possible. You can see an enemy who looks particularly powerful. They’ve also turned up the contrast. The premiere, while glossy, was also bright. This has more dramatic lighting going on, and I’m okay with that. Seeing the shadows really helps make the environment feel real, and that’s just from a TV production standpoint.
You get Spock giving what I guess must be a pep talk, and she calls him out on it: was that supposed to be a pep talk? Because not so much.
Then there’s a scene that looks like something straight out of a horror movie. Flashes, blood streaks in the snow, everyone in suits, and you see La’an, who already proved in the first episode that she knows how to put the math together. Fiction sometimes takes real-life trauma and tries to make it a superpower. One of the things I’ve seen done in the past is people who deal with abuse at home learning to visualize trouble and assess it very quickly. La’an is definitely someone who’s had to deal with trauma. Her family was captured by the Gorn, and she had to watch as they were either fed on alive or turned into breeding sacs, which sounds disgusting all by itself.
So I’m a firm believer: I think this season we’re going to get the Gorn, and I think we’re going to see them in a light we’ve never seen them in before. I am down. Show me modernized Gorn. If they can be faithful to the original and still do their own take on it, I’m here for it, because I feel like that may end up being a major villain or a major point of contention this season.
After that it’s Pike’s voiceover about seeking out the unknown, aliens and spaceships, and people dealing with stuff. There’s going to be an awful lot of self-reflection and character building in this, and I’m really enjoying that. There’s a clash that looks very Amok Time, I’m just saying. Chapel and Spock have a moment. A lot of Spock moments with people, but whatever. There’s a really dope shot of Uhura in what I’m assuming is her cadet uniform. I’m hoping it’s a dinner scene with her family or something. She gets some of the neatest outfits in this promo.
It ends with Pike: let’s get to work. I love his Pike. Anson Mount can do no wrong in my eyes right now. Not a bit of wrong. The man’s doing amazing work.
Every single Star Trek is someone’s first Star Trek. For somebody, the first captain of the Enterprise will be Chris Pike. Let’s go. I loved the misdirect with Kirk last week, too.
They’re Young, and They’re New to This
The other criticism I’ve been hearing is about how everybody’s being characterized. These are all young, new people. This is a new Chapel, a new Spock, a new Uhura, and I mean new as in themselves. They’re young and they’re new to this. You really can’t judge the character they’ll be in TOS by the character they are right now in Strange New Worlds. This is the beginning of those journeys. Everyone has something to learn on the way to becoming the characters you eventually know.
What I’m looking forward to is the transition. I believe you take Pike through three seasons, maybe more, and eventually you pass Strange New Worlds off to James T. Kirk, who we’re getting in season two. I don’t know in what capacity. I’d love to see him captain the Farragut or something along those lines. I think they’re going to tease us. Similar to what he did in Discovery, Pike’s going to go on a mission, they’re going to lend the Enterprise to James Kirk, and whether it’s a two-parter or one episode, you’re going to get a moment where he says, yeah, I could see myself coming back here. Something clever like that, because that’s what Star Trek does.
Discovery Season 1: Canon-Tilting Storytelling
I’ve been calling this next part my Discovery rant. It’s a retrospective, and I’m using that word on purpose, because recapping implies telling the entire story and I’m not going to do that. I’m going to live with you in that time frame instead.
The general arc of the story is actually pretty interesting. It starts with a two-parter, “The Vulcan Hello” and “Battle at the Binary Stars.” I had to stop and look that up, because I wanted to give you an accurate name.
Forget everything you know about the production stories. I’m not getting into Akiva Goldsman, or Paramount and CBS and Viacom and that whole merger and how all of it was going down at the time. A lot of chaos was happening. I don’t know enough to have that discussion intelligently, and I try not to talk about things I don’t know, because this is the Mr. Know-It-All channel.
The show was not introduced in a lot of good light. I know because I was one of the people doing it.
The first big criticism I saw out there is what I have on my outline as canon-tilting storytelling. My initial reaction, like a lot of other people’s, was: what’s going on, what’s all this stuff, what are you doing? First off, I wasn’t a fan of going backward anyway. I didn’t like Enterprise because it went backward and didn’t give me what I felt like I wanted out of the show. I didn’t really care about the origins of Starfleet at the time.
Then all of a sudden you get introduced to a whole bunch of big concepts. Burnham is Spock’s sister. What? Spock had a human sister? Okay, adopted sister. Sarek and her have some form of relationship, and everybody said Sarek wasn’t that kind of guy. But they walk you through it. You see holograms all over the place, when hologram technology wasn’t supposed to be invented yet. I know they’ve also done some retconning with replicators, when it’s been clearly established elsewhere that they didn’t have them.
Guess what? I don’t care. None of it takes me out of it. If it takes you out of it, that’s okay. You have a level of loyalty to some of those concepts. I have that loyalty too, but the storytelling is what I’m there for. Soap operas have done exactly this forever. They’ve altered storylines, altered threads, shifted things around, and at the end of the day you’re still getting the conversations and the stories and the ideas. They tweak them and you roll right through it. I call it the white space between the panels, which is an idea that comes from comic books. I’m okay with the magic happening that I didn’t see. This is the storyline, this is where we are, let’s go.
We do eventually get an explanation for all of it, but it doesn’t come until around season three. These things are classified. Big time classified. Section 31 back in the day classified. Such a huge failure on Starfleet’s part that they said, can we bury this information as deeply as humanly possible? I’m okay with that. I don’t think that concept is verboten.
The Far-Flung Future, Where No Canon Exists
The first half of the season is really about introducing Burnham and Lorca. You get some development for the rest of the cast too, but every character serves a specific purpose in the storyline overall, and the eventual goal is to get to the far-flung future.
Akiva Goldsman pointed something out in an interview. He said, don’t worry, eventually the storyline is going to take us to a place in the far-flung future where no canon has been established yet. One camp of people took that negatively. Oh, so you can’t write inside canon. You’re not a good writer. You’re not creative. It’s not all that. As a creator he simply wanted to establish his own area, come up with his own stuff, free of a lot of the baggage of the past. I’m okay with that wholesale, because I’m all about the forward momentum of the storyline. That’s what Star Trek has always been about for me.
So the story lays down that Burnham, on her first ship, the Shenzhou, with Captain Georgiou, suddenly finds a Klingon artifact.
I’m going to skip over the Klingons, because I’m not happy with how they’re represented. Don’t give me that Klingon nonsense. I don’t know if they’re ever going to fix them. It’s the one thing I hold onto, because when I was part of Starfleet, the international fan club, my persona was a Klingon. Klingons have a very, very sensitive spot in my heart, and I know a lot of the storyline behind them. I know everyone’s going to say, see, you do care about canon. Okay. We’re all allowed to live on our fences as we see fit.
Burnham begins what eventually becomes the Klingon war. We’ve heard about the Klingon war forever in Star Trek, and this is apparently supposed to be that event. A lot of the season deals with the repercussions.
Lorca, the Spore Drive, and High Sci-Fi
Lorca is a character fundamentally rooted in a specific goal: he wants to build a spore drive. The spore drive is an alternative to warp drive, and it uses a thing called the mycelial network. It’s all very sci-fi. It’s tardigrades. It’s Ant-Man and the Avengers traveling through quantum space. I’m discussing it loosely because they kind of hand wave it, so I’ve got no real choice. I’m not going to invent a reason why it makes sense. It’s a thing I understand in its most basic form. There’s a particular kind of person who can work with the tardigrade and move the ship through this network, and ultimately it’s about him developing this technology for Section 31.
That’s where we get black alert and the ship doing the spinny thing, and it’s the start of the journey Stamets goes on. You see a lot of arcs begin here, and having now seen season four, those arcs do eventually pay off. They all do.
I call the spore drive very high sci-fi because few shows try to go past FTL drive, hyperdrive, light folding, whatever you want to call it. This show decided to split off and say, what if there’s another method, one that crosses dimensions as well as space and time?
The Mirror Universe Curveball
They released the season in two halves, and the second half, what they call chapter two, lands in the mirror universe.
A whole gaggle of people said, what are we talking about, Kirk and them were the first ones ever to go to the mirror universe. You can say that, but Enterprise established otherwise, and this actually rides the coattails of it. It leans on a lot of what you found out in Enterprise, and those are some of my favorite episodes, which is why I was able to really ride with them on the concept.
For those of you who aren’t super familiar with Discovery season one, Captain Georgiou dies in the encounter with the Klingons in that first two-parter. The two-parter is really a prequel to the rest of the show. Burnham is put in jail, and she’s released on Lorca’s recommendation, because he wants her help working through some technology issues.
Then in the back half you find out Lorca is from the mirror universe. That was a huge curveball for me. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Especially because he’d perfected being nice. The one thing they always gave us was that the other universe people were super harsh. They’ve got the goatees, because evil, and the mustache twirling.
And you find out that Georgiou in the mirror universe is the Empress. That’s right, Empress Georgiou. Tilly is the captain of the ISS Discovery, which is awesome. Mirror Tilly is a scary woman. Watching our Tilly have to conform to that and be that, I took a ton of joy from it, because that actress is so much fun.
By the end of the season you get to a place of equilibrium, and that’s when they throw the last curveball. It’s a distress signal, it’s from the Enterprise, and it’s from Captain Pike. I sat up and paid attention then.
The Verdict
Star Trek: Discovery season 1 is a 7 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index, retrospectively.
I didn’t go episode by episode here, same idea as with Picard. I wanted to give you an overview. Depending on how the next episode of Strange New Worlds goes, I may very well dig a little deeper into season two.
I’ll be very straightforward: I was not a big fan of Discovery season one. I think my initial reaction would’ve been much lower. It would’ve been a 4 out of 10. Watching it again with the knowledge of where we eventually get, I give it a 7, because I see the story beats and the groundwork they’re laying that ultimately leads us to season four.
I’m a fan of Discovery now. I don’t know that I’m a hardcore fan, but they’ve won me over by doing some really cool stuff, and I’m down for it.
If you thought season one was a mess, this is your place to talk about it, because this is the one time I’m a hundred percent in agreement with you. There are a lot of messy things. Do they eventually get the threads in line and take us somewhere? Yes. Did it take a while to get there? Yes. And I only know this retroactively, because I watched the first season after it had ended. Call it the pandemic, and being really, really bored.
What did you think of Discovery season one, and where would you like to see Strange New Worlds go? Give me new stuff we never saw before. Tell me in the comments on the video above.
