You know, I can’t argue with most of this. I think other than TAS, Discovery S1 is about the only Trek I’ve never rewatched. It doesn’t really fit in with the era it’s meant to be set in, it brings back a lot of things I don’t really care for in Trek (Mirror Universe, Section 31, etc) but it mostly knows what it is and where it’s going.

Season 2 might be, but I’m not sure. The Enterprise was revealed at the end of S1 of course and by golly it sure seems like Anson Mount hit the ground running as Pike.

I seriously wish the beginning of S3 had been Rod Roddenberry doing a soft reboot of Andromeda. He’s talked about how one of his “jobs” is taking his dad’s ideas and pitching them as new shows, and I feel like Andromeda could have been an interesting direction for Star Trek to go. I’d love for more resolution on Calypso. I’d love more talk about how the ship’s computer got taken over by an alien AI and they’re just sort of letting it do its thing as a part of the crew. But at a certain point the show just…sorta…trailed off.

And despite liking that it felt like a soft Andromeda reboot, it simultaneously felt like they used the time shift to not deal with why Discovery looked nothing like any of the other ships of the era, and to ignore the “black ops” nature of the ship.

(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:

Commander Burnham, this is Ensign Danby Connor. On behalf of Captain Georgiou and the entire crew of the U.S.S. Shenzhou, we’d like to welcome you to flight 819 with non-stop service to the object of unknown origin. The temperature outside is a brisk minus-260 degrees Celsius. We are forecasting some mild debris, but anticipate a smooth ride.

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:

Why are we fighting? We’re Starfleet. We’re explorers, not soldiers.

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:

BURNHAM: I need to know something. You put on a facade. Like everything that’s happened to you just washes off. I actually envied that about you. But when you saw that Klingon… Who is she to you?
TYLER: I think you already know.
BURNHAM: You were her prisoner.
TYLER: Yeah. Her name’s L’Rell. She’s the reason I’ve had nightmares… every night since Captain Lorca and I fled her ship. She’s also the only reason I’m still alive. Two hundred and twenty-seven days. But it only took one to realize I wasn’t gonna make it out alive, not unless I made a choice.
BURNHAM: What did you do?
TYLER: I survived. That… That Klingon… was more than just my captor. She was my torturer. One who took a particular… interest in me. And I saw a way out. A way to live past day one, day ten, day 20, day 97… I encouraged it. Her sick affections. Her obsession with me. Because if I hadn’t, I’d be dead, like all the others. And I got out. I get to keep living my life. But the thing is… if none of that had happened, I wouldn’t be here. On this ship. With you. And that almost makes it… worth it. Is that weird?
BURNHAM: No. I’m glad you’re here, too. You get to live your life, the way you deserve to. Not at war… but at peace.
TYLER: I found peace. Right here.

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.