Thursday, January 18, 2018

To Blandly Go


Title: Star Trek Discovery
Created by: Bryan Fuller & Alex Kurtzman
Network: Netflix




After covering Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Bright, I figured I’d complete the holy trinity of nerd rage and watch Star Trek Discovery. I’ve made it halfway through the first season (Eps 1 through 9) so far, so here are the initial impressions:

It’s fine.

That’s probably the highest praise and most damning condemnation I can make.

It tries to feel fresh and different but doesn’t, since grimdark futures and fantasies are the norm these days, not the exception. It’s different from previous Star Treks yes, but it’s not in competition with them; it’s fighting for eyeball time against all the other grimdark shows out there. It isn’t witty or charming, far too dour and depressing for that. It isn’t particularly exciting either, lacking the kinetics of a Marvel superhero show or the murderous infighting of Game of Thrones.

It’s passable, neither the death of Star Trek nor the “fuck you” to the old fans that some claim. Best I can say is that it’s engagingly weird at times, and if there’s a way forward for the show maybe it will be to double-down on the wackiness.

To be fair, much of what seems to irritate the fans is, how can I put this tactfully, stupid fucking bullshit: The uniform insignia is the wrong shape, the Klingons’ heads are too bumpy, X and Y technology “shouldn’t exist yet.” The show is theoretically set 10 years before Kirk, Spock and McCoy donned their pastel-palette jerseys, yet it was produced 50-odd years after. You shouldn’t even have to say anything further than this; the conclusion should be bleedin’ obvious.

I religiously watched the originals and Next Generation--episodes like Inner Light and Darmok have a special place in my cold, wrinkled heart--so if there's a target audience for this prequel series it's me, and frankly my dears, I couldn't give a fuck about this kind of trivial minutiae.

More serious is the charge that Discovery has lost the essence of what made Star Trek interesting and unique, in favor of poorly-choreographed fight scenes and cheap CGI explosions.

Gone is old Trek’s tradition of commenting and moralizing on modern-day issues. Also missing is Trek’s faith in humanity, in the belief that we would one day overcome our prejudices and differences, and take to the stars in the spirit of curiosity, comradeship and understanding.

Such ambitions are problematic these days I guess, with Starfleet’s neoconservative mission to remake each civilization they encounter in their own peace-loving image seeming as insidious as the Borg, their lifeform-assimilating antagonists from The Next Generation. Less believable, too, with pan-human understanding in 2017-18 feeling further out of reach than ever.

Instead of issues then, the writing is refocused onto plot and people. Instead of one-and-done episodes where the writers hit the reset button and everything returns to normal at the end, we have season-long story lines, featuring troubled, morally ambiguous characters who solve their problems through poorly-choreographed fight scenes and cheap CGI explosions (and in one particularly risible example, shoddy CGI running).



Speaking of characters, there’s a narrower focus now: In place of an ensemble cast with swashbuckling Kirk or Shakespearian Picard as merely the first among equals, there’s a single main character, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), a human raised by emotionless, logic-loving Vulcans (and supposedly a heretofore unheard-of foster-sister to Spock, in a misguided attempt to tie this series back to the originals).

The supporting cast is made up of ruthless captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), slenderman-esque first officer Saru (Doug Jones), Burnham’s intensely irritating blabbermouth roommate Tilly (Mary Wiseman), bland security chief and love interest whose name I just had to Google because he's so uninteresting (it's Tyler, played by Shazad Latif), mad scientist-slash-chief engineer Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and his bland husband, Doctor somebody or other, sorry I never caught the name.

With these characters now the main focus, this show really lives or dies depending on how engaging and interesting they are. And so far, they aren’t very. Martin-Green does her best with Burnham, but the writers haven’t yet mastered the art of portraying a conflicted character, torn between her duty and humanity, so she seems simply unsympathetically inconsistent instead.

The rest of the crew is a mixed bunch. Lorca’s very un-Starfleet methodology suggests a hidden past, but he’s never in focus enough for this to generate momentum. Meanwhile, Tilly is in dire need of being transported straight out the airlock without a space suit, and Taylor ... Tyler ... whatshisface, whatever, musters all the personality and sex appeal of a goldfish.

The plot has fared better, with some trippy what-the-fuckery in the form of an experimental jump drive that runs on pan-dimensional magic mushrooms that require a biological host. The cinematography has also improved, the cameras no longer welded in place but getting right in the characters' faces, the spaceships no longer swanning about like sailing boats but diving, twisting and turning in combat.

I wish there was more of that, but all too often the show gives up on traditional Trekkie technobabble in favor of having people resolve their problems by punching things. Consider, for example, how they visualized the struggle between two telepaths as one tries to access the other's memories -- by having their astral avatars engage in an awkward Karate Kid chopfest. That is at least engagingly silly, but sadly the rest is dreary: people being tortured, stabbed, blown up or raped by grey-titted Klingons (yes, really).

They try to alleviate the darkness with humor at times, but it is utterly tone-deaf, as though the writers don’t realize the horror of what they’re showing on the screen. A shuttle pilot's tether cutting and setting them adrift to die in space is played for laughs. There’s an early “comedy” episode that involves a time-travelling criminal who repeatedly and gruesomely murders the crew over and over again, which jarringly ends with said criminal being led away by the ear by his fiancĂ©e and the moral “just be yourself and people will like you.” Ha ha, yes, so true, presumably unless you’re a brutal serial murderer who beams people into the freezing vacuum of space. You rascal, you.

In the end then, it feels like a clone of Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, or of the Expanse. There's nothing irretrievably wrong about what it's doing (apart from the dreary lack of humor)--Star Trek series often start slow before finding their feet--but if the show just apes the look and style of Star Trek without the heart, then why (aside from the obvious commercial reasons) brand it Star Trek at all?

So much has been changed, everything from the big themes--war and death instead of peace and discovery--to the little details--injecting spores instead of engaging the warp engines. With all those changes, it seems a shame nobody had the courage to try to make a completely original SciFi series. Instead, it's on with the reboots, adaptations, prequels and sequels.

I'll bear with it at least until the end of the season (the great advantage of Netflix: the "It's not costing me any extra so eh, might as well" factor), but it's always going to occupy a very different part of my head than old Trek did, and no part at all of my heart.

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