About four months ago, I noticed the Detroit Public Library has Season 1 of Star Trek: Discovery on DVD. I checked it out, watched it all in the week allotted (they used to charge $1 per day for overdue DVDs), jotted down some impressions about it.
And that has been languishing in my drafts folder for so long that I’ve forgotten what I meant by some of my jottings. Scheduling these things in this Trump dumpster fire era is kind of tough.
I actually had this scheduled at some point, but then I think there was going to be some important congressional testimony on the day I had chosen, so this post would probably have been ignored completely.
Plus I wanted to avoid this thing where I forget about a scheduled post and then it publishes in an obviously incomplete state. I’ve neglected to mind this a couple of times.
Also, some things have changed, like that the Detroit Public Library no longer charges overdue fees. But I don’t think they have ever charged to check out DVDs (they used to charge for VHS tapes).
Theoretically, I would pay $10 a month for CBS All Access, even if it was just for Discovery and The Good Fight. But I can understand why some of you are vehemently opposed to paying anything for CBS All Access.
In practice, in my current situation, the $10 a month make CBS All Access a luxury I can’t afford right now. So I figured I can wait for Discovery to come out on DVD and the Library to add it to their holdings.
I used to have Netflix back when it was all about sending and receiving DVDs in the mail in those iconic red envelopes. There were no due dates. You could have three DVDs at a time and a queue of a thousand.
Some DVDs I would return the very next day, some I would hold on to for a month (two months in one case). But most DVDs I would hold on to for a few days.
Under that plan, I think I would have slogged through Discovery Season 1 Disc 1, then I probably would not have moved Disc 2 to the top of my queue.
But, because of the due date for the Library, and not wanting to pile up overdue fines, I watched Disc 1 as quickly as I could. I think I even skipped what I had already seen over the air (the first episode was broadcast last year so as to entice people to sign up for CBS All Access).
Before going further, the spoiler spiel. As usual with these Star Trek open threads, anything in the Star Trek series that have concluded production (original series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise) is fair game.
But for this open thread, anything in Discovery Season 1 may be freely mentioned. If you haven’t yet seen Season 1 and you think that knowing a few random details about it would completely obliterate your enjoyment, please stop reading here.
I do know a little bit about what happens in Season 2. In part, because it gets set up in the Season 1 finale, and in part because I don’t go out of my way to avoid spoilers. But let’s not go out of our way trying to spoil Season 2 for anyone, much less Season 3.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t rewatch what CBS aired. Near the end of that first episode, aboard the USS Shenzhou, Commander Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) does a Vulcan neck pinch on Captain Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) and goes to the bridge and orders the ship to fire on the Klingons.
The crew are unwilling to act against the captain’s earlier orders not to fire, unless the captain gives new orders. In my review at the time, I wrote off Burnham’s actions as insubordination. One of the commenters correctly pointed out that Burnham’s actions were more accurately described as mutiny.
I thought the writers would also write it off as insubordination. But in the next episode, Burnham is court-martialled and stripped of rank. Is this going to be Orange is the New Black in space? Actually, no. During a prisoner transfer, there is an emergency and the USS Discovery shows up to rescue the corrections officers and the prisoners.
Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs) seems to know a lot more about Burnham than he lets on. He wants Burnham to join the Discovery crew as an enlisted crewmember, and he pulls some strings to make it so.
As I was starting to watch Season 1, I was feeling very ambivalent about the show. There is too much spoken Klingon in the first few episodes. Well... maybe they’re trying to be more realistic.
After all, Klingons on a warbird wouldn’t be speaking English any more than Russian sailors aboard a Russian submarine (though there is at least one JAG episode where it was justified because English made a good common language for a Russian captain and an al-Qaeda terrorist).
I’m not one to pass up a movie just because it has subtitles. I’ve seen a few Korean movies, one of which ran in excess of two hours. And yet reading all those English subtitles for just a couple of minutes of spoken Klingon at a time in the first few episodes of Discovery was… annoying.
Maybe the problem I’m having here is with how the actors speak Klingon: like they are in class, trying to enunciate every word as clearly as possible for a good grade.
I don’t get the feeling that this is a language for everyday communication, for asking mundane things like “What time is it?” or “Do we have any sword polishing fluid?”
At times I also got the impression that they were treating the Klingon language the way actors on JAG or Homeland sometimes treat Arabic: as the language of violent jihad.
Towards the end of the season, there is the suggestion that maybe Klingons don’t have universal translators.
Though then again, Star Trek has been inconsistent about Klingon. It’s understandable. After all, what is the point of paying a linguist to invent a language if it’s all just going to get translated to spoken English anyway?
It is through the Klingons that Lorca meets Harry Mudd (Rainn Wilson), a character you might remember from the original series. But the difference between that Mudd (Roger C. Carmel) and this Mudd is kind of like the difference between a Batman villain in the 1960s and that same villain in the 1990s.
Though this new Mudd is somewhat funnier in the time loop episode, which might be the second best time loop episode in all of Star Trek, in my opinion.
What do you think of that spore drive? Spray some spores on a tardigrade, the ship spins around a little bit, then vanishes, and suddenly it appears somewhere else in the galaxy.
How come Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) never thinks about using spore drive to get Voyager home? She seems to think of everything else (in the Voyager episode “Inside Man” she says she discussed geodesic folds with her senior officers but found the risk of lethal injury to be prohibitive).
There is a gay couple in Discovery. It’s not an afterthought, but it’s not made into a big deal either. I think gay Star Trek fans will be pleased. Let me know in the comments.
Most of the end of Season 1 is concerned with the Mirror Universe. This might be getting into genuine spoiler territory. Though speaking only for myself, if I had known just a few tidbits about the Mirror Universe in Discovery, I would’ve been more interested in the show.
Discovery Season 3 is now under way. I haven’t seen Season 2 yet, probably won’t until it comes out on DVD/BluRay. But tonight I’ll probably be watching some of “All Star Trek” on the Heroes and Icons (H & I) digital TV channel.
Tonight’s All Star Trek line-up on H & I consists of the original series “The Man Trap,” Next Generation “Face of the Enemy,” Deep Space Nine “Tears of the Prophets” (I think this one is a “To Be Continued”), Voyager “Renaissance Man” and Enterprise “First Flight.”
The open thread question for this week is for those of you who’ve seen Discovery Season 1. How did you like it? Are you looking forward to Season 2?