To say Discovery has been “controversial” would be something of an understatement. From the very beginning the show sparked off considerable debate about it’s quality, and the bevy of showrunner changes and resulting shifts in tone and plot choices just adds an extra layer of confusion. Many of the same groups and same people continue to have very similar arguments over what is clearly a completely different show in 2023 than it was in 2017. Personally I’ve become frustrated to the point of disinterest about where this show has gone, which makes it all the more exciting to go back and (re)discover something I thought I knew but had begun to really wonder about:
The very beginnings of Discovery are fucking excellent television.
Here’s why.
Early Discovery was actually planned out
To start with, the pacing and plotting of both the individual episodes and the overall arc of the season are excellent. In the moment, they are delightfully seamless: pacing is brisk but not rushed, traversing from one important thing to the next, with emotional moments given an appropriate amount of time to be registered and felt without feeling drawn out. Each episode has a clear beginning, middle, and end, with individual stakes that matter beyond simply advancing the season plot. Of course they consistently advance the overall season plot too (with the exception of Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad, which is “merely” a wonderfully executed standalone sci fi story that significantly develops three of our main characters). They do so not by dropping largely inconsequential teases and misdirection in alleged pursuit of a goal fated for resolution only in the finale, but via bite sized, meaningful changes to the circumstances our heroes find themselves in.
This demonstrates something which is clearly absent from the subsequent seasons, and even tossed away before the end of this one: detailed long term planning. Not only are we spared the bizare shifts in background information (is the Red Angel suit hyper advanced future tech, or something a research team banged out 20 years ago? Is the 32nd century Federation tiny, isolated, and largely ignored, or are they active galactic participants with genuine political clout?), but it’s also critical for allowing the episodes to flow neatly together as a coherent story. There’s been plenty of debate about if Star Trek should even be trying to tell these long-arc, binge-friendly seasonal stories, but clearly CBS wanted that. So why not do it right?
Early Discovery (mostly) makes sense
Every Star Trek show has had it’s share of silly stuff. Obviously TOS was absolutely loaded with zany things that seem more in keeping with it’s cardboard and hot glue aesthetics than the more serious tone subsequent shows attempted to set, but even the best of TNG era Trek had some whoppers mixed in. Where it has succeeded is by keeping most of the wacky missteps in relatively unimportant places, encapsulated by single episodes and devoid of larger consequence.
Then there’s the tech which every Starfleet ship is totally reliant on, most of which has only a fleeting connection to real world physics. The Mycelial Network blends right in: it’s a pretty wild idea and most certainly is not real. Just like warp drive. And just like warp drive, it is at least based on something real. Ehh, close enough.
I have little desire to relitigate in depth the plausibility of S2/S3 Burnham being intimately connected to so many wildly disparate galaxy changing things, or how reasonable it is to have a emotionally distraught child trigger a galactic cataclysm that nobody could solve for over a century, but I’ll certainly contend that early Discovery’s WTF rate is more in line with TNG era Trek than it’s more recent seasons have been. A low bar? Sure. But a relevant one.
Early Discovery did good job developing characters
By the end of those nine episodes, we’ve had a reasonable detailed introduction to six main characters, and all of them have at least a little extra dimensionality to them, enough that they feel real and as presented, I do care what happens to them:
Burnham is our focusing lens for the story and certainly gets the most screen time, but she’s also far from the most important person on the ship. We know she’s a proficient officer, but also that she fucked up royally with massive repercussions in the opening acts of the show. That dichotomy lines up well with her odd mix of behaviors: conflicted about how much she deserves the second chance she was thrust into, yet supremely confident in her own abilities. Highly empathetic towards the Tardigrade, yet unhesitant and unapologetic in manipulating Saru into being a walking danger meter. There’s clearly major unresolved trauma there, and I’d like to see this person develop more naturally from here. She should have her redemption, but she’ll need to earn it: not through one grand gesture of genocide refusal, but by demonstrating over time that she is dealing with her demons, and really has learned from the disaster at the binaries.
Speaking of the most important people on the ship, Stamets is chief among them. He has neither the desire nor the mentality to be a warrior, and yet he serves an irreplaceable and absolutely critical role in what has clearly become a ship of war. He’s a jerk when we first meet him, but his military necessitated chance to get close and personal with his research shows us a softer side, and likely changed him in ways that we’re just starting to see develop. Culber is still mostly one-note, but as a couple they play very well off each other.
Saru has a decidedly alien mentality for a military officer, but is clearly good at what he does. He is both thoughtful and candid about his past and present conflicts with Burnham, and his stint as acting captain in Choose Your Pain showed considerable growth. I want to see more of this guy learning to command (and I will get some, if less than I’d like).
Tilly is an absolute delight. She has her share of minor and harmless tics, babbling when she’s nervous and occasionally blurting things out when excited, and she’s vulnerable to getting flustered… but can still pull herself together and do what must be done. She shows an impressive level of emotional intelligence in her interactions with Burnham and Stamets, and she also has the awareness and confidence to identify what she wants in life, and fight for it. That’s an incredibly endearing combination, and makes her the emotional heart of the show. Give me more, much more, of Burnham mentoring Tilly up to an eventual captaincy. Maybe Tilly could only reasonably work her way to full Lieutenant or Lieutenant Commander over the course of a seven season show, but that would be plenty: I’m not here to see four pips, I’m here to see believable growth in an already sympathetic character.
Lorca and Tyler I’ll be touching on later.
(Continued in the comments…)
(Continuing in the comments…)
Even the ultimately disposable characters got real development. Prime Georgeou is the most obvious example: dead after two episodes, and yet there is no question in a viewer’s mind as to why she’s such a highly regarded captain, why Burnham is so affected by her loss, or why Saru feels so hurt to have been robbed of a chance to learn under her. But even the redshirts got a decent look.
Ensign Connor is just another guy at a console on board the Shenzhou. His ultimate fate is to have that console blow up in his face and then get shot into space, all of which happens in the show’s opening two parter. And yet somehow, he gets more effective sympathetic characterization than any bridge crewer on Discovery, with the possible exception of Ariam’s brazenly telegraphed pre-death sob story.
Amidst the preparation for Burnham’s spacewalk, a simple pre-chaos demonstration of what this starship and this crew look like executing relatively routine tasks, Connor is the one charged with coordinating between Burnham and the bridge. He does so in a delightfully charming manner:
Pleasant and humorous, maybe a little loose by modern military standards, but not unprofessional or disruptive. I already like this guy!
40 minutes later, we’re at war. Connor’s console blows up in his face, and he staggers off to sickbay but gets lost, winding up outside Burnham’s cell. Delirious, he asks several jumbled questions, culminating in this:
It’s a touch on the nose, perhaps, but Sam Vartholomeos sells it pretty well: genuine distress, from a man robbed of his filter by severe trauma. You can’t help but feel bad for the guy.
And then blam, he’s sucked out into hard vacuum. Ouch.
Compare this to the the Bridge crew on Discovery come S3. We’ve had an awful lot of time to get to know Detmer, Owosekun, Rhys, Nillson, Bryce, etc, but it’s somehow never happened. We know Rhys tried to kiss Tilly at the party in Magics, we know Detmer is proud of her piloting skills, Owo grew up in a non-believer luddite colony, and those last two seem to get along pretty well, but that’s basically it. As a result, when these characters are all tossed into an allegedly doomed circumstance in the season 3 finale, we have basically no emotional connection with them and only barely care about their sacrifice, or alternately their Deus Ex Machina salvation.
To give them some credit, the writers did make one real attempt to make people from these cardboard cutouts. The closing scene from 3x03 People of Earth features the above five plus Tilly going down to earth to see a tree on the Starfleet Academy grounds.
In theory, this seems like an appropriate scene and a decent way to give these guys a little characterization, but in practice it feels flat. The actors (with the exception of Wiseman, who actually moves around) seem like they don’t really know what to do, and just wind up either sitting or standing around awkwardly. Dialogue is brief, clipped, betraying nothing particularly personable. I admit I lack the expertise to tell if the problem is in the script, direction, or the actors themselves, but at least one of those things needed to change. Compared to Connor’s lightning likability, this is a weak effort.
Early Discovery was willing to tackle difficult topics
There is a major missed opportunity in transition from early S1 to the subsequent efforts: the decision to handwave off or outright discard the tougher questions represented by Lorca and Tyler.
Lorca is presented as a military man through and through: a well studied pragmatist and a harsh but effective motivator, cognizant of the demands of war and willing to do what he judged best to protect his country. This is a kind of person Star Trek rarely attempts to portray, and even more rarely in a positive light. I’ve read quite a few accounts from people with military backgrounds who were quite fond of this character, finally shown a captain who thought the way they’d been trained to.
The idea that a nation of Chamberlain’s might occasionally need a Churchill is hardly a novel one, and given the surprising popularity of Section 31, it’s not exactly a controversial take even among Star Trek fans. But actually keeping character like Lorca around gives the freedom to poke and prod at the boundaries of where morality and military necessity overlap, and the show is under no obligation to present him as definitively good or definitively bad.
Even better, Lorca is an excellent avenue to explore trauma. Blindly grafting everything we see in these first nine episodes (except the MU jump itself, and Lorca’s bizare protectiveness of Burnham) onto the genuine article Lorca instead of his mustache twirling counterpart from the evil dimension, we get a nearly broken man defined by his pain, plagued by memory of the crew he not only lost, but felt duty bound to pull the plug on. He is desperate to keep himself in the big chair and doing what must be done to save the Federation from an existential threat, and willing to fall into a rabbit hole of deceptions to do it. How far can he keep that up? At what point would he break down? And can his efforts ever really be justified?
But that disappointment comes a cold second to Ash Tyler. There’s hardly a surplus of honest, serious stories about male rape victims these days, which is a reason of it’s own not to shy from examining this one. But the story we got of a POW who survived seven months in a Klingon prison by encouraging otherwise unwanted advances from his captor is uniquely horrifying, and the portrayal bears that out in full force. Tyler going into shock upon seeing L’Rell again is evocative, and the flashbacks we see are horrific to the point that I found them genuinely uncomfortable. His dialogue with Burnham at the end of Into the Forest I Go is heart wrenching:
In the real world, these are not situations that resolve cleanly. There is a road ahead for a real Tyler, but it’s a long and hard one, laden with complexities I’m unqualified to describe. Star Trek has a long history of touching on these sorts of issues, but by and large the resolutions amounted to a few words of wisdom before warping out of the system and moving on to next week’s quandary. Discovery as a genuinely serialized modern story was well positioned to buck that trend and really dig into these sorts of difficult topics, and the show’s opening acts left them well positioned to do that. That this emotionally charged setup was crafted essentially by accident as cover to bust out two different varieties of villain in disguise is a tragedy all of it’s own.
Those two are of course the most emotionally charged examples, but they certainly aren’t the only places where the show tackles some classically Trek plots. Chief among them is the Tardigrade, which in a mere three episodes plays the part of a monster, the surprising final piece in a wondrous machine, and a terrified victim whose suffering and very survival is weighed against the lives of the crew. Quite the slate of roles out of a guest star alien who doesn’t talk.
All in all, Discovery’s opening act was a well planned, well executed example of serialized storytelling which still embraced the kinds of moral choices and emotional struggles which have been a Star Trek staple since the beginning. Somehow, it manages to be closer to both classic Trek and to the prestige serialized shows that became so popular in the last 15 years (and were commonly requested before Discovery was ever on the drawing board) than any of the subsequent live action efforts we’ve seen. It represents an approach to Star Trek that was cut off far too early, one that solves or avoids the most obnoxious pitfalls of the later seasons, and one I desperately wish we could have gotten more of.
undefined> It represents an approach to Star Trek that was cut off far too early, one that solves or avoids the most obnoxious pitfalls of the later seasons, and one I desperately wish we could have gotten more of.
I’ll comment on this most important concluding statement with agreement. Ultimately, Discovery tried to do something different and did it fairly well. It’s downfall was in not being willing to take that kind of storytelling and really lean into it. Fans started talking, loudly, about changes that were made and as a result later seasons of Discovery become far more tempered. The Discovery of season 1 could have ended Season 2 by sending Burnham and Discovery to the future and introducing a whole new cast of main players in a whole new context. Instead of that, they responded to the valid criticisms of the weaker supporting characters who don’t seem to have much to do and as a result the show took a much more emotional turn. They haven’t abandoned these long arcs, but they’ve tried to tell that story in a more familiar way and in my opinion this was always Discovery’s downfall.
In essence, Discovery followed the same arc as the Star Wars sequel trilogy. They swung for the fences on doing something wild and asking difficult questions that the franchise had taken for granted; and even if the answer they arrived at was affirming, there were too many loud nerds that couldn’t look past either the flaws that genuinely existed or their own shallow prejudices. Those nerds were loud enough and long enough that the studio walked it back to try to appease them and ended up with something much less interesting, which both alienated defenders of the early direction and could never appease the bad eggs whose criticisms weren’t in good faith, leaving something that only a few appreciated.
Yes! I’ve been thinking for a while that Discovery season 1 is the Last Jedi of Star Trek – except of course that Star Trek started with that alienating move for its new era.
I mostly agree with you, but apparently Lorca and Tyler were planned that way from the get go (MU and Klingon). I thought it was a real lost opportunity to tell some new and interesting stories but it seems that was never going to happen because even the original show-runners planned them as shitty sci-fi trope surprises rather than how we assumed they were at face value.