Ever since Star Trek Discovery debuted, I've had things to say. Since Tumblr is a great place for sparkle and flash, but a terrible place for saying things, I figured I'd transfer it all here. So for my inaugural posts on this blog, I'm assembling all my Disco thinky thoughts so far, going back to early casting announcements. Some is already unlikely or outright wrong, but it was fun while it lasted. (Spoilers, obviously, once we get that far.)
Pre-debut:
“So, if Discovery were to include a cameo, who should it be?" My answer: T’pol
“Her character makes the most sense, especially with the apparent heavy inclusion of Vulcans on the show. Having a small, intimate scene, between T’pol and Sarek would serve as a great ‘torch’ passing opportunity, while also rooting Discovery firmly into the timeline of Star Trek.
“T’pol recollecting about being on the first NX–01 and her experiences with living onboard would tie an emotional bow onto the ‘Enterprise‘ series and remind fans that this new show is, in fact, Star Trek.”
YES. Not to mention giving Enterprise the recognition and respect it deserves, instead of letting the execrable “These Are the Voyages” stand as the very last on-screen Enterprise ever. And Trip should be there, too, to canonically undo the travesty of his unfortunate demise as well.
So listen up, Discovery-making people: Do not fail, or there will be hell to pay. Sofa cushions will be thrown. Popcorn will be spilled. It will not be pretty. We Enterprise fans have been storing up a lot of rage for a really long time.
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I’ve been feeling glum ever since attending the Star Trek Mission New York Discovery panel, which took place in September, more than a month before it was announced Fuller was out. The tension at that panel was so thick you could cut it with a lirpa (Ha! Bet you thought I was going to say bat’leth!). Kirsten Beyer and Nicholas Meyer seemed to know little and/or be willing to say even less about the series. They looked about as comfortable talking about Discovery as Sean Spicer talking about Russia. Given that CBS was a major con sponsor, the audience was keyed up for a big Discovery rollout: sneak peeks, casting announcements, surprise guests, that kind of thing. Instead, we got a couple of nervous-looking writers who tried to convince us that an announcement about a comic-book tie-in was reeeeaaaallllyyy exciting. You could just tell that there was a giant disconnect between what CBS had intended when it agreed to plaster its name all over that con, and what little it actually said about Discovery at the con. Oh well. Worst case scenario, my Star Trek Discovery/CBS All Access lanyard could become a collector’s item.
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Dear Star Trek Discovery,
Make the story big, and when I say big, I mean in the sense of having moral and emotional weight, not just lots of action. But don’t make it an easy, black-and-white, good-vs-evil battle. Force the characters to work their way through the gray zone, where competing needs and values make it hard to choose the right course. Let there be doubt and questions, so that we have to ponder the story after we turn it off and ask ourselves, “What would we have done?” Make us feel the difficulty of the choices the characters confront and the effect those choices have on them. But in the end, make doing the right thing really matter. I mean, REALLY matter.
Make the characters small, and when I say small, I mean in the sense of individuality, not significance. Make them feel real. Make us invested in their choices and their fates. Don’t make them general types or caricatures. Make us believe that they have inner lives that define them more than their appearance or their job does. Make them imperfect. Give us protagonists who are not always right and antagonists who are not always wrong. Make us so wrapped up in them that we can’t stop thinking about them after we turn them off.
Make it every bit Star Trek, but better than any Star Trek we’ve ever seen. Incorporate all the best attributes of every previous version. The way TOS put fragile beings in a hostile environment and made them rely on each other to confront not just strange new worlds and new civilizations, but their own weaknesses and fears. The way TNG turned a starship into its own little world in space. The way DS9 gave us more nuanced characters and expanded the non-human point of view. The way VOY made the personal stakes high. The way ENT made the story arc bigger and the path less certain, forcing the characters into difficult choices that affected them personally. The way the Prime Universe questioned authority. But avoid the unevenness of TOS, the bland corporatism of TNG, the meandering of DS9, the shallowness of VOY, the prurient sensationalism of ENT, the blockbuster-action aesthetic of the Prime Universe.
Is that too much to ask?
Sincerely,
A lifelong Star Trek fan
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There’s a lot of interesting stuff here (Fuller was fired!), but what’s most important to me is this: “Since booking the role of Burnham, [Martin-Green] has plowed into the original series and Enterprise — the two shows that, in terms of timeline, bookend Discovery.” MY TWO FAVORITE STAR TREKS. Take my $6 a month. Please.
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After The Vulcan Hello and Battle at the Binary Stars:
About the very last think I expected to be saying after watching the first two hours of ST:DSC is that they seem to be revisiting Tom Paris’ redemption character arc. I mean, I’m interested. But boy was that unexpected.
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Maybe I’m just being insanely optimistic, but it seems like the DSC writers have been able to distill some of the best elements from the previous iterations of Star Trek and kind of purify and improve them. In my previous post I pointed out the Michael Burnham/Tom Paris parallel. Certainly the most original, intriguing thing about Voyager’s concept was the Maquis element – the characters, including Tom, who had acted against Federation policy and were seen as criminals, but who had done what they thought was the right thing, having to work alongside the Starfleet crew. Sure, in the end Voyager kind of threw all that away, but the Discovery writers clearly got it and wove it into their vision of Star Trek’s DNA.
One of my favorite things about Enterprise, especially in season 3 (the Xindi arc), is the way it repeatedly places the characters in a fundamental ethical dilemma: What do you do when doing the ethical thing could get you/your world killed, or doing the unethical thing could save you/your world? Exploring space and encountering wildly different beings with totally alien perspectives and unexpected abilities should not be easy, and a set of rules you made up before starting out would never be able to keep you safe (an idea that Roddenberry himself seemed to get when he made TOS and then forget when he made TNG). Obviously, the DSC writers get it.
There are two DS9 things that jump out at me. First, a character parallel: Saru/Odo, sensitive souls who are very good at their jobs, but who clearly have conflicts between their gentle natures and the harsh lives they lead, and who are trusted by those who know them but treated with suspicion by others (at least, I think that’s where Saru is headed).
Second, the centering of a culture’s spiritual beliefs. This is dicey, because one of Star Trek’s central conceits has always been the sense that religion is primitive, representing an impulse to worship that which we perceive to be powerful and mysterious. Bajoran religion is an interesting element, but it’s hard to be comfortable with the idea that Sisko is elevated to the status of prophet in their eyes simply because of his relationship with an advanced alien species. I’ll have to see how DSC plays out, but I think they’ve focused on the right thing: It’s not so much about what people believe, but how those beliefs are manipulated to create conflict. Klingon religion is being used by zealots with a will to power to unify a people and make war (oh, yeah, forgot to mention the obvious: Star Trek is always about contemporary problems). Still, as in all of Star Trek, the Federation’s multiculturalism will likely emerge as superior because it draws on each culture’s strengths, but at the same time, the spiritual, supernatural aspects of each culture is watered down by science, reason, and the concept that, if all beliefs are valid, none is the ultimate truth. It will be interesting to see whether DSC deals better with the spirituality conundrum.
As to TNG, a show that took an awfully long time to get past its initial bland corporatism, it seems DSC’s writers are building their entire first-season storyline on one of the things TNG did best: Klingon lore. The challenge of the prequel is to tell a story that the audience already knows the ending of, and to make it surprising while still comporting with established facts. (I never understood why so many people seem to hate prequels. I find them really satisfying when done well.) The story of how the Federation’s failure to understand a culture results in a terrible conflict we know they will eventually get past is such a good choice, I think. That, and the vague sense that these events will somehow force Starfleet and the Federation to refine their principles in a way that improves their diplomacy skills in the future. (Though it’s not like TNG ever convinced me that they had actually come up with some magic sauce beyond, “Put Picard and Troi in a board room with the aliens.”)
Of course, everything originates one way or another in TOS, so it’s hard to focus on one thing that DSC is especially deriving from there, but I’m going with making mistakes and learning from them. The fallibility of Kirk ‘n the gang is what made TOS so compelling (especially when confronted with an ethical dilemma). It’s amazing to me how pop culture casts Kirk as a cocky know-it-all, when in fact he was often wrong, or implementing an imperfect solution the consequences of which were not entirely good. One of my absolute favorite TOS episodes is Errand of Mercy, and it seems obvious to me that the same can be said of the DSC writers. If only there’d been some Organians at the Battle of the Binary Stars.
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From Somewhere Out on a Limb: I don’t think Lorca is the bad guy everyone’s expecting. He’s the only person who sees through the false narrative about Michael, and that must count for something.
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Also I think DSC is starting from a place of conflict and moral ambiguity so that we see these characters overcome serious obstacles in the process of coming together and eventually learning to trust, respect, and even like each other, so that when it happens it feels earned. Unless I’m wrong. But I’m not.
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After Context is for Kings:
After the first two episodes of DSC, I talked about bits and pieces of other Star Trek I felt the writers were revisiting in interesting ways. In episode three there’s the Stamets/David Marcus parallel. Both are scientists developing groundbreaking biotech who see Starfleet as a military force that’s more threat than ally, and who are horrified at the prospect of their life’s work being weaponized.
I feel really good about DSC so far, because I get the sense they love the same stuff in the ST universe I do – the bits where wisdom is hard won and people have to struggle not only against outside forces, but inner ones as well. Doesn’t make them bad people, but believable ones. I always felt TNG-era fans thought Star Trek was all about good guys in harmony, but TOS was far from. In the very first episode (though second pilot), Kirk strands his friend, Gary Mitchell, on a barren planet because Mitchell had developed powers that made him dangerous. It was about questionable responses to ethical dilemmas from day one. The McCoy/Spock dynamic veers repeatedly into some pretty strong heart/mind conflict. TOS was far from the bland, harmonious universe Roddenberry created for TNG, a place that always gave me the willies – like Landru was running it.
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A lot of people are reading Lorca as a bad guy, but so far I don’t see him that way. I think they’re playing with the Starfleet tension between military and diplomacy, which all my favorite versions of Star Trek did. The military always appears to be less ethical because of the violence, but in the end, both use methods that are ethically questionable in order to achieve some higher, hopefully morally just, goal – and I have the feeling that Lorca will turn out to be working for that goal. He’s the guy who’s willing to look like an asshole to get there. The other pole seems to be Saru, from a species accustomed to being actual prey. One would have to imagine that they are more likely to avoid conflict than confront it, given that they did not evolve to win in violent encounters. And Burnham, I suspect, will be the bridge between those two poles. But they’re not poles of good and evil. They’re poles of opposite approaches to conflict resolution. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if I’m right.
In the meantime, here are some interesting quotes from Jason Isaacs:
“Well, you know, he’s brought this woman on board to be a crewmember because he’s got to try and win a war slightly hamstrung. He’s on a science vessel with a of peacetime explorer crew, not people who are trying to fight. The rules of engagement such as they are—remember these are not the ones from the original series, this is 10 years before—the Federation directives are different, and they’re peacetime directives, but he’s fighting a ruthless and immoral—not amoral—enemy who will do anything they need to do and take any measure necessary.
"He’s fighting on behalf of an organization for whom that’s not true yet. They haven’t taken on board that they’re going to lose and everyone will die. He does understand that. He’s seen death on a large scale before. He takes her, he redirects her from the fate she was facing because he needs someone by his side who’s going to do what’s necessary, when it’s necessary and hopefully have loyalty to him because he’s the one that gave her a second chance. Although that’s questionable because Burnham is so guilt-stricken by what she’s done. Does he have a secret agenda? Yeah, to win the war. Unlike other captain’s before…he’s keeps a certain authoritative distance between him and the crew because he thinks that’s how they respond to best to the chain of command. He carries his own burden of things he’s done, things he hopes to do, doubts—his own insecurities and doubts….
“I didn’t sit in the chair. That was my first experience–I’m not going to sit in the chair. I’ve seen too many scenes with people sitting in the chair and we’re at war and there are missiles being fired. I went right down to the front by the screen and I looked up at it, and I engaged with it like the missiles were instruments in my orchestra. I stood and I conducted the war. That became a template for me for a number of episodes because I felt like he’s a very active guy. This guy doesn’t like to stand still, he likes to be doing stuff, he’d like to be fighting hand-to-hand.He’s frustrated by the ship, which is a science vessel, it has some weapons, it has some shields, but it’s not built for war. If I could will it forward, like The Flintstones, if I could give it an extra mile an hour by pushing it, I would do it. So I just stayed out of the chair for as long as I could and I finally had to sit in the chair because of a scene where it wasn’t really active, nothing much was happening, so they tend to sit down. I felt like I’d earned it.”
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It just struck me: Burnham’s “mutiny” was Kirk cheating on the Kobayashi Maru, only in real life, and they stopped her, so everybody died.
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After Attending the Disco Panel at NY Comic Con:
Feeling really positive about the future of Disco after today’s panel.
In response to a question about Disco being darker than other ST, Kurtzman said that it’s really not, but because it’s serialized, they can do long character arcs and deal with the emotional impact of events. He was emphatic that these characters aren’t starting out where they’re meant to end up, the implication being that we may find them in a dark place now, but that doesn’t mean they’re staying there. So I’m feeling really hopeful that the relationships that will be built over time will make us feel that much more invested in this group, because we’ll live through all the ups and downs as they become a stronger, more unified crew.
Also, I’m more convinced than ever that Lorca is not a bad guy per se, but he represents one particular approach to the challenges at hand. As I’ve been saying, he’s the military side of the Federation-Starfleet military/diplomacy/exploration dynamic. Jason Isaacs, asked to describe Lorca relative to other ST captains, said that all ST is meant to get people talking after the credits roll about what it means to be human, what’s right and what’s wrong, and what each of us would do if faced with these dilemmas, and Lorca represents one point of view in the discussion. This fits in so perfectly with, “Context is for kings. Universal law is for lackeys.” Lorca takes a stance of situational morality; there isn’t one answer that’s always right; an action that may be unjustified in a time of peace might be the only legitimate course in a time of war. He sees in Michael Burnham’s “mutiny” a similar approach, though Michael herself seems to be beating herself up an awful lot and does not feel good about her actions. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lorca gets Burnham to see her own actions in a more nuanced way.
Other random points:
- Mae Jemison moderated – how cool is that? She did a great job.
- There was this moment of uncomfortable silence when the first audience question, from someone in a mask, was, “Will you bring back Phillipa Georgieu?” – until she pulled off the mask and revealed she was Michelle Yeoh! The panel seemed genuinely surprised, and she joined them onstage. And Gretchen Berg said we’d be seeing more of Yeoh in the series!
- Sonequa Martin-Green is a sheer delight in every way.
- Anthony Rapp’s enthusiasm for the science of Trek is a sheer delight.
- Doug Jones in real life looks more like Saru than is entirely comfortable.
- Wilson Cruz should be bottled and sold as a mood elevator.
DSC Panel: We are ten years before the original series so we are proud to be the earliest part of the story.
Me: Your Enterprise erasure will not be tolerated.
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