TV Review | Star Trek: Discovery developed by Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman



With the success of JJ Abrams’ cinematic reboot of Star Trek, it felt inevitable that Gene Roddenberry’s creation would return to its small-screen roots sooner rather than later. And sure enough, in 2015 CBS announced that the centrepiece of its over-the-top streaming service would be Star Trek: Discovery - another prequel to the original series (“TOS”), but this time one that would revolve around a single, previously unexplored chapter of Federation history. With a much larger budget for far fewer episodes than previous shows, not to mention the scintillating look of Abrams’ movies to draw inspiration from, the prospect was tantalising for avid Trekkers and casual moviegoers alike.

My excitement for the series’ arrival would only be tempered by it being produced exclusively for a streaming service (CBS All Access in the US, and Netflix here in the UK) and, like Abrams’ movies, produced in unpardonable (and un-future-proof) 2K. Given that other premium shows the likes of Better Call Saul and Marvel’s Daredevil are available to stream on Netflix in 4K here in the UK, 1080p episodes - even when buoyed by HDR - are a real let down for a supposed state-of-the-art franchise. And as readers of this blog already know, whilst I respect streaming as a technological platform, I find most streaming services deeply flawed. They are focused on pushing quantity over quality, and a result people find themselves either having to perpetually subscribe to half a dozen different services in order to get something close to what they want or, worse, watching any old shit served up for them. I prefer to purchase the content that I actually want to watch either to stream from my media centre to my Apple TV (via the Computers app) or to watch on Ultra HD Blu-ray (I’m boycotting Apple TV 4K until such time as I can actually download my 4K iTunes purchases). But with no iTunes series pass or Blu-ray release on the horizon, Netflix finally had me snookered if I wanted to see Star Trek: Discovery within a year or so of its debut.

Yet my interest in the upcoming series couldn’t be kept down by such niggling practical concerns. Unlike many, I had persevered with tellyTrek right through to its peculiar death throes on an Enterprise-D holodeck back in 2005, and despite a few issues with its various series over the years - the weary first half of Enterprise and the utter absurdity of the fantastic Voyager premise’s execution, to name just a couple - I had remained a fan. And so as, drip by drip, information about the new series began to leak out - “It’s set in the Prime timeline!” / “The main character isn’t the captain!” / “The event is the Klingon War!” - my expectations began to swell. 

Then I watched it.

Those lofty expectations were twisted and subverted... in the most captivating of ways.

 

A franchise that had burned itself out through strict adherence to an outmoded episodic model, even when experiments like the ten-part Deep Space Nine (“DS9”) finale and Enterprise Season 3 had proved beyond doubt that Trek’s future is in serialised storytelling, had suddenly been reinvigorated. Good but still clearly TV-budget effects had been traded for full-blown, feature-film spectacle. Grit and nuance championed over predictability and procedure. Discovery is still palpably Star Trek, but with an edge all of its own. It takes camp ’60s Star Trek conceits and makes them brutal and horrifying, smashing the plot mechanics of “The Trouble with Tribbles”, for instance, into the tone of Game of Thrones, all the while infusing the material with Gene Roddenberry’s uncompromising sense of morality, if not quite his vision of a utopian future. Discovery’s wartime ethics are forged in fire, not already etched in stone, and its story is all the more engaging for it. Sonequa Martin-Green’s Michael Burnham goes through hell to get where we want her to go; she isn’t already there like the crew of Jim Kirk’s Enterprise. At times Discovery feels more like a prequel to its future self than it does to TOS, as its entire first season - not just its opening two-part prologue - shapes who its principal protagonists will become, rather than present them fully-formed in the style of every prior Star Trek TV show.

Perhaps most remarkable of all though is the show’s focus. Eschewing the done-to-death Trek trope of having the drama revolve around a crew’s most senior officers, Discovery takes its cue from the popular Next Generation (“TNG”) episode “Lower Decks”, vesting viewers’ emotions in Burnham; Anthony Rapp’s ostensibly cold but in fact warm and brilliant scientist, Stamets; his husband and, painfully at times, physician, Dr Culbert; as well as my own favourite, loveable cadet - and clearly future Discovery captain - Tilly. Mary Wiseman imbues the bumbling Starfleet hopeful with a feckless sense of wonder and optimism that screams Star Trek even when everyone else around her is permanently living under a black cloud.



However, this is not to suggest that Discovery doesn’t flesh out those at the top of the hierarchy; quite the opposite, in fact. From Jason Isaacs’ seemingly sinister and utterly beguiling Captain Lorca to Doug Jones’ inscrutable Saru, Discovery’s heavy hitters are every bit as well drawn as their counterparts below stairs. The difference is only one of emphasis - we know who our viewpoint characters are, what they care about, and what their motives are. Saru and Lorca keep us guessing well into the season’s final furlong, and the Kelpien first officer in particular delights as he triumphantly comes into his own when the season’s disparate plot threads finally converge. He might be a slow-burning character, but he’s one who’ll have you punching the air before the season ends.



The performances of the cast are outdone only by the quality of the writing, which in my view stands up against any seen in even the most respected of modern “event” series, though this is hardly surprising with literary Voyager showrunner Kirsten Beyer and Kelvin timeline / Transformers: Prime alumnus Alex Kurtzman helping to steer the writers’ room. I’m particularly impressed with the writers’ ability to paint in shades of grey. Discovery is a show without heroes and villains; its battle between good and evil is fought within its characters’ hearts, be they Klingon or human... or something else altogether. From Burnham and Voq to Lorca and Cornwell, everyone is struggling to balance their own needs in the moment against what they know to be right. Just like the finest Star Trek stories over the years, the first season of Discovery is a study in ethics, but its presentation is such that it feels completely original.

The show’s visuals are, without exception, absolutely stunning, while its breathtaking multi-channel soundtrack evokes everything from TOS’s spine-tingling opening chords to the guttural and utterly alien Klingon language of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (“TMP”) and beyond. The show’s 2:1 aspect ratio is infuriating, however, and to me smacks of pretension. Discovery isn’t a feature film; it’s produced for the express purpose of being watched at home on 16:9 TVs, and so to present it in anything other than 16:9 is to waste pixels and diminish the viewing experience.

Furthermore, as an expansion of the “Prime” Star Trek canon, which prior to Discovery comprised ten (well, ten and a bit, really) feature films and over five hundred hours’ worth of tellyTrek, Discovery is nothing if not divisive. Little things like having a Starfleet uniform closer to those seen on the NX-01 a century earlier, rather than those shown ten years hence on TOS, would be forgivable in isolation, but when considered as part of the messy whole become harder to ignore. With its spore drive and holo-comms, Discovery has technology ahead of even the Enterprise-E’s and Voyager’s, and most troublingly of all, the show completely reimagines the Klingon race. 

If ever there was a race that didn’t need taking back to the drawing board, it was the warriors of Q’onoS. Rather than tweak a successful and iconic look, Discovery unnecessarily reinvents the wheel, taking the race’s defining forehead ridges and getting rid of everything else: hair, beards, armour, those awesome boots; even their ships and technology, even their idiosyncratic culture, is given a page one rewrite. The depiction of Klingons in Discovery is more akin to a savage tribe than a noble warrior race, completely flying in the face of the showrunners’ publicly-declared goal to “humanise them”, as well as hundreds of episodes’ worth of lore. I think it’s fair to say that, beyond Spock and his Vulcan brethren, Klingons are the one race from Star Trek that the average person on the street would recognise - and they’d do so in their “classic” form as first seen in TMP and immortalised by TNG and DS9’s Mr Worf. When Russell T Davies resurrected Doctor Who, he knew better than to mess with the design of a Dalek. Bulk it up a bit, yeah; spray it bronze, fair dues; but otherwise remain true to the timeless design. Davies would have had to totally cover his Dalek with giant bumps, engorge its dome, replace its plunger with a satellite dish and redesign all of its ships and technology to fuck it up as royally as Discovery has its Klingons.



Of course, apologists argue that the Klingon look has never been consistent over the years; so much so, in fact, that in one of the thirtieth anniversary specials, Worf dryly makes a joke - insofar as he ever makes a joke - about it with Odo, Chief O’Brien and Ra’s al Ghul. Yet previous discrepancies in Klingon appearance had all been pleasingly - if not altogether convincingly - addressed within the fiction in a spellbinding Enterprise two-parter, the events of which Discovery retrospectively renders preposterous.

Fans of the redesign also contend that as make-up and prosthetics advance, showrunners are duty-bound to have the courage to present alien races as convincingly as they can. After all, the swarthy human-looking Klingons of the original series would look ludicrous in a show with the production standards of Discovery. I have some sympathy with this viewpoint, but it ends when I consider that “classic” Klingons, particularly if embellished a little for an HD production, would sit perfectly well with Discovery’s gloss-meets-grit aesthetic.



Those diplomatically seeking to unify this new show that they’ve fallen in love with with their cherished canon assert, their bunched fists haemorrhaging straw, that Discovery’s Klingons are an isolated sub-species of the race, which could explain not only their bizarre appearance but also their unfamiliar ships and tech. Now the show could have got away with allowing us to infer this, admittedly at the risk of perplexing new viewers, had the representatives of the twenty-four Klingon houses been comprised of some “classic” and human-looking Klingons too. As it is, Kurtzman is going to have to come up with something mind-bogglingly inventive to be able to reconcile the hirsute Klingons (which I gather we’re due to see in Discovery Season 2) with the first season’s sensory-organs-on-the-backs-of-their-head troupe. The only logical, semi-plausible option that I see is to have Discovery’s Klingon houses breed with TOS’s human-looking Klingons to (re)create the race’s “classic” look in time for TMP (though we really don’t need to see them actually going at it this time. I’m still having nightmares about L’Rell in the niff).

Ultimately Star Trek: Discovery lives or dies by how you look at it. As a new, fifteen-part serial produced for a modern audience, it is hard to see it as anything other than a resounding success. As a prequel charged with enriching a pre-existing universe, however, it fails in its duty. But if its first season has taught us anything, it’s that nobody and nothing is beyond redemption...

Star Trek: Discovery is available to stream in 1080p HDR on Netflix. A Season 1 Blu-ray steelbook is available to pre-order from Zavvi for £34.99. There is no word on an iTunes digital release as yet, but this is likely to be concurrent with the physical release.