While investigating problems with a sensor array, the first officer of the USS Shenzhou encounters Klingons…

We’re going to handle this opening episode slightly differently from normal on Sci-Fi Bulletin, with multiple reviews from different members of the team.

 

Before we even get to the opening credits, the show has delivered a subtitled, angry Klingon monologue and shown us two senior Starfleet officers doing their thing, subtly and discretely interfering to prevent a terrible fate befalling an alien species and then engaging in some creative problem-solving. This is a show that really wants to make sure you know two things from the get go: It’s Trek to its very bones, and it’s also backing those high-minded ideas with a serious budget.

The titles themselves are an exercise in just this fusion – a new sweeping, orchestral score bookended between some familiar signature notes, against interesting visuals combining VFX and hand-drawn artwork producing a pleasing effect.

I am not the world’s foremost Trek expert. I’ve seen all of the movies, and caught more than the odd episode of all of the various TV shows over the years. What struck me about Discovery in this opener was its accessibility. If you’ve only watched the JJ Abrams movies, you’ll find this easy enough to follow. If you’ve been watching Trek all your life, I feel like there’s plenty here for you too.

Interestingly, while the show really does seem to have gone out of its way to try and match its predecessors in many ways (check out the gloriously recreated – albeit updated – flip style communicators) in others it goes down a very different path. Klingons here are more alien than ever, with odd double nostrils and peculiar bulges and growths all over their faces, as well as more organic, primitive-looking clothes and almost baroque starships. It all works, because the Klingons here feel like I always imagined previous iterations wanted them to – an honour-driven, barbaric warrior culture, but who also have spaceships. As the show develops, it will be interesting to see how this dynamic continues, and what changes and what stays the same will, I suspect, become a main point of analysis among fans, if not so much critics.

In terms of the characters themselves, it feels like the show takes a lot for granted in how we will receive them, but damn it if the performances of the relevant actors don’t sell it marvellously. This is most pronounced with Michelle Yeoh’s Captain Georgiou and Sonequa Martin-Green’s First Officer Burnham. Georgiou is the seasoned veteran armed with an earned sense of confidence in her abilities, backed by a healthy amount of snark. Burnham is the ambitious First Officer always anxious to prove herself and with an uncanny ability to be right. I’m sure that commentary from certain circles will declare both characters to be ‘Mary-Sue’ in nature, but the truth is that both characters feel completely organic, and each makes occasional errors based on their own internal convictions overriding what they should know better. Their relationship is a delight to watch, and if Martin-Green’s Burnham is to be the main protagonist the marketing has led me to believe, then we are in for a treat.

Other characters mainly stay at the periphery, ceding the majority of limelight to the captain and her first officer, but nonetheless Doug Jones makes his likeable mark as Science Officer Saru, an alien with the singularly odd ability of ‘knowing when death is coming’.

Mainly, I was impressed by how many pitfalls this opening episode managed to comfortably avoid. There’s none of the shoot-first-ask-questions-later over-the-top action of Pine and co’s cinematic outings, no apparent need to mess with any of the established lore of Trek, nor any sense of being hidebound to it, and a genuinely interesting new take on Klingons that promises much. It feels very much like Star Trek should, without being a simple carbon copy of what has gone before. I for one very much look forward to seeing where it boldly goes next.

Verdict: Solid, well-acted and beautifully presented. This feels like the Star Trek show that fans deserve. A brilliant debut. 9/10

Greg D. Smith

I can’t imagine I’ll ever do this again, but a big thank you to Seth MacFarlane. Not for Ted or Family Guy, but for his Star Trek spoof The Orville, which shows what a bad Star Trek show could have looked like. Star Trek: Discovery is as far far away from the Star Treks of the 20th Century as it could be, and what a relief. If Star Trek was to re-establish itself as relevant for the Netflix generation (as opposed to the Next Generation) then it needed to have movie quality effects and production values without actually being like the Star Trek movies, and premiere A Vulcan Hello delivers in Bat’leths.

The new-look double-nostrilled Klingons are the least human they’ve ever been, ditching the pasty foreheads or Fu Manchu moustaches for some beaky noses and glamorous colours. They talk about the honour of houses in a very Game of Thrones manner, though no-one is asked to bend the knee… yet.

Sonequa Martin-Green is great as first officer Michael Burnham (it’s the future, so it’s now a gender-free name). She gets to deliver a fair bit of Treksplaining in her opening scene, firing photon torpedo dumps of info to get us up to speed. And when she’s sent to investigate a mysterious anomaly in a debris field she kicks off one hell of a conflict.

I don’t feel I really know the crew yet in this opening 45-minutes, but that’s OK, as all focus is really on Burnham. Science Officer Lt Saru (Hellboy’s Doug Jones under a tonne of make-up) manages to make an impression as a prissy alien Niles Crane, and he’s instantly likeable. And by having Spock’s father Sarek in the story it helps cement this new show’s place within the franchise’s canon.

Verdict: Those bemoaning ‘This doesn’t feel like Star Trek’ are cordially invited to view the hundreds of hours of back catalogue Trek on Netflix. I for one can’t wait to see how the cliffhanger is resolved in this fresh, action-packed new iteration. Hopefully the flashbacks will settle down a bit when the characters are well established, and even if this doesn’t prove to be the best in the season’s run, are you deluding yourself as to how good TNG’s Encounter at Farpoint, Voyager’s The Caretaker or Enterprise’s Broken Bow actually were as show openers? And yes, I’d certainly be stumping up the gold pressed Latinum for a CBS All Access pass if I was in the States, though I have no idea if that currency even exists yet. 8/10

Nick Joy

There’s this moment about a third of the way through the opening episode of Discovery. The ship has found an anomaly in the accretion disc of a binary star system. It’s definitely artificial, definitely hiding behind a scattering field. It might be dangerous.

So, of course, they go and poke it.

Commander Michael Burnham, played with the quiet authority that Sonequa Martin-Green brought to her work on The Walking Dead, spars with Science Officer Saru (the always excellent Doug Jones) about the best way to approach it. Captain Philippa Georgiou, Michelle Yeoh turning in brilliant work, verbally bangs her officer’s heads together and gets a plan out of them.

Burnham, alone in a thruster suit, will go take a look.

As she leave the ship, uncoupling her magnetic boots, a fellow bridge crew member jokingly gives her a pre-take off warning. Then, as she’s free of the ship the thrusters kick in and Michael Burnham becomes a human bullet. She gasps and whoops and then we cut to a wide shot.

The Shenzhou, tiny against the vastness of space. Burnham, tinier still, hurtling towards something weird.

It’s not one of the parts where I got a lump in my throat. Those were pretty much exclusively the opening credits and the four tone Star Trek motif that has given me goosebumps my whole life. But it was incredibly visual and emotionally powerful. Because that scene, that image, contains everything that brings me to Star Trek and holds me there. And it contains everything the show is risking.

This is a story about Starfleet before it was the Starfleet we know. The Prime Directive isn’t called that, old vessels with massive, power-hungry transporter rooms still patrol space and there’s a sense of benevolent complacency to the organization. It took me a while to figure out why;

The crew of the Shenzhou are living Starfleet’s ideal.

The episode explores what happens when ideals make contact with reality. And it’s not pretty.

An accidental first contact goes south. Someone gets dead. Burnham’s past becomes a millstone around her neck in the exact way we’ve seen her work for it not to be. She has to make an impossible, counter-intuitive decision and does so in a heartbeat.

And it doesn’t work.

This is where the rubber meets the road, where one of the most fundamentally good organizations in science fiction loses itself. Burnham’s long dark night of the soul is Starfleet’s own and that’s brave, necessary, compelling ground for the show to cover. The complex knot of emotion, logic, history and personal agenda on both sides of the nascent Klingon/Starfleet war here is one of the smartest things I’ve seen a TV show do in a very long time.

I have no idea if it will work. The bridge crew are, aside from Georgiou and Saru, anonymous blue shirts right now. The Klingons, repositioned here as interstellar Vikings, could very easily degenerate into the exact sort of chest-pounding right wing stereotype elements of the genre press have already decided they are. The show’s rumoured constant nods to its predecessors could sink any chance of it having a voice of its own.

But not yet.

Because this first episode sees Starfleet at their best, screaming across the stars to risk their lives because something interesting is nearby. The show will, undoubtedly, hit darker territory. But as long as it holds onto that joy, that sheer exuberant human spirit of exploration? I’m on board.

And you bet your ass I’d have paid for the cable service to see this. 9.5/10

Alasdair Stuart

It’s been twelve years since we’ve had weekly episodes of Star Trek on television – during my five years editing Star Trek Magazine, we had just two hours of new material in the entire time – so this opening episode of Star Trek: Discovery needed to impress. Not just because it’s a long time since Star Trek’s been around, not just because The Orville has certainly tugged at a lot of the same strings that the series (plural) did, but because in the US, if you wanted to watch episode 2, you have to subscribe to CBS’ new All Access channel (because, as has been admitted, chances are Star Trek probably wouldn’t last on network television in the current climate).

And, despite quite a few teething problems, it does. Sitting writing this, I want to click the button on Netflix to watch episode 2 and discover how the characters get out of the situation Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtman have left them in, but also just to find out more about them. The episode focused very heavily on Sonequa Martin-Green’s Michael Burnham, but there are a lot of other characters there who I hope we discover more about… and of course, we haven’t even met Jason Isaacs, or any of the crew of the Discovery yet.

Don’t be put off by the pre-credits sequence, which has the clunkiest of the dialogue infodumps: we need to know who these two women are, and the fact that they have to remind each other of their respective backgrounds and the length of time they’ve served together, and this is a fast, if inelegant, way of doing it. The credits are very different from anything we’ve had before on a Trek series, and work well. And then we get into the meat of the episode…

I suspect that the lengthy Klingon scenes, all done in subtitled Klingon, with its talk of houses and honour, may put some casual viewers off, but they were done very stylishly, and you certainly quickly get the sense that this is a culture whose central tenets are very different from the Federation. The sequence as Burnham investigates the Klingon ship was also done well, with plenty of nods to past Star Trek continuity (and we do need to just accept that things will look a bit different from the way that 2253 – three years earlier than this is set – was portrayed over 50 years ago!).

The emotional heart of the episode though is the relationship between Michelle Yeoh’s captain and Martin-Green’s Burnham, and you can tell how much things are damaged by the latter’s actions. Normally you’d expect a pilot to be laying the groundwork for a relationship rather than apparently severing it but we know that the focus of this show is Burnham rather than the captain (which doesn’t make me too confident of her chances… there’s some moderately heavy-handed foreshadowing in both the two women’s conversations, and Burnham’s interaction with Sarek).

Verdict: An intriguing start to the new series – and a pilot that I suspect won’t be representative of the show to come. 7/10

Paul Simpson