To be honest, USS Discovery has always been one of those shows that I have a love and hate relationship with, mostly because the writing has often been really bad. The acting is stellar, and the casting is great, but sometimes the writing takes the inevitable “we don’t really have a solution for this, so we’re going to just fill it with psychobabble so we can get to the whiz bang stuff”. Or, “we’ll try to pull on heart strings by showcasing the one character who has nothing else to do but pull on our heart strings.”
Season Two kind of went a different direction because of the stellar casting of Anson Mount as Christopher Pike. And strangely enough, the writing wasn’t that bad either. Sure, there were moments of the same problems as before (“we don’t really have anywhere to go with this so we’re going to just avoid sharing actual information that normal people would ask so we can keep the audience in a state of confusion going forward” but aside from those moments, like the whole “strange stars in space” phenomenon, which was basically the premise of the whole second season, it was still pretty good.
To be honest, after the mid-point of Season One, the show became watchable again, regardless of its avoidable moments.
(spoilers ahead)
And then Season 3 came along. Season 2 left us with Discovery being thrown 1000 years into the future (a future that has only really been touched on narratively once through a Star Trek short called “Calypso” and a bit through some of the temporal war background of Star Trek: Enterprise when “Crewman” Daniels brought Archer to the 30th or so century.
Now, we were in completely uncharted territory. The closest to this we really got, aside from a few one-off moments throughout the rest of the franchise, like Star Trek: Picard or some of the “it could have happened” episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we’ve not seen much of the future of Star Trek’s future. Now, we were finally here (or there).
The first episode focused specifically on Commander Michael Burnham arriving in the 30th or so century and completely lost, spending the majority of her time teetering on whether or not she was gong to survive and whether or not she was going to figure out exactly when she arrived. We meet Book, a new recurring character and Sahid (I think was his name), an ambassador for a Federation that appears to have been more memory than prominent. Both of these new characters really do a great job of setting a scene for a dystopian future of the the far-off future, but still gives us a sense that there’s something still happening.
My only complaint on the first episode was more a feeling than an actual criticism, and that was that the premise for this future felt a lot like Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda where Dylan Hunt (the name that Roddenberry was originally planning for Captain Kirk’s character) wakes up from a wormhole accident and the Commonwealth (i.e., the Federation) has been wiped out, leaving him to have to rebuild it from scratch with the last starship (Andromeda). We kind of have the same scenario happening with Discovery, even though in the first episode, the Discovery has not made it to the 30th century yet, but because it’s the name of the show, we know it’s going to regardless. Even Book felt like Tier (not sure I have the spelling of his name correctly, but he was the Nietzschean outsider of that time who hooks up with Dylan Hunt, much like Book is now doing with Michael. And of course, Sahid represents the Federation, which is obviously what the cast is going to go about rebuilding to its former greatness.
Now, that criticism aside, the first episode was actually pretty good and strangely enough it had no members of the USS Discovery other than the commander herself, so it ended up being a fish out of water episode that tested how well the actress is able to show her acting chops. Further spoiler alert: She has them when the script doesn’t call for her to overact the scene.
But the one thing missing from the episode of Star Trek Discovery was, well, the USS Discovery.
The second episode is basically the response to that. And one of the more refreshing things they did with this episode was not focus 100 percent on Commander Burnham (Michael). And it made me realize how much of this series is based around this one woman saving the day, each and every episode so that every other character is basically Abbott to her Costello.
In Episode 2, the USS Discovery comes crashing out of the wormhole and literally crash lands in an ice landing that would make Deanna Troi seriously proud. And rather than, okay, we crash landed, so let’s all move on with the episode, they actually focused on the ramification of how impactful such a crash landing just might be.
This episode gave the secondary cast a chance to finally shine, so they weren’t just shadows of the main character’s actions. Saru, the former first officer made captain, BECOMES a captain here, showing that he’s not just a character filling a spot, but a person who has spent his career learning the things an officer learns that eventually leads him to have to lead when the time finally comes. There’s a brilliant moment where he and Ensign Tilly (a character that sometimes grates on my nerves as a sort of Wesley Crusher kid genius response to every dilemma) are on an away mission together. Saru chooses Tilly for numerous reasons, all of which make completely sense and really show actual thought behind the writers of this episode.
She’s scared, and he knows that, but in his strange paranoid all the time way, he shows how her fear actually comforts his own fear so that both of them benefit from being together. It’s a really touching scene.
The scene then moves to a futuristic western bar that we’ve seen hundreds of times in so many other stories, and of course, the martial arts fight whatever comes before her Georgiou shows up, meaning we’re going to have a “beat up bad guys” scene, so that happens as expected, but it leads to a brilliant display of Saru showing that they’re Starfleet, not a bunch of wandering thugs, and it becomes one of those few missing moments that Discovery is sometimes lacking at times.
Meanwhile, the crew is still on the USS Discovery trying to at least get the ship back up and running, and this is where we see some of the character development that the first two seasons was seriously lacking. And that was such a refreshing segment to experience.
And then there’s a huge attempt to get USS Discovery back up into the air again, and that’s when they are picked up by a tractor beam out of nowhere, and it’s one of those moments of “should be shoot while we have the drop on them, or should we answer their hail?” And Saru chooses the Starfleet way, leading them to finally come back into contact with Commander Burnham again.
It’s an episode well worth watching. So far, the third season is firing on all cylinders, and I hope it can continue doing so.
