I hoped but I feared.  Then I watched and my fears were realized.  While Star Trek: Discovery looks beautiful I found the teasing first episode to be disappointing.  Not horrible just not good.  A friend of mine who also works in the industry had the perfect word that incapsulated all my problems with the show.

It’s lazy.

 

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The writing is lazy with terrible on the nose and obvious dialogue.  And because the dialogue is poor it leads to poor performances.  Michelle Yeoh is lovely, but Sonequa Martin-Green is put in a dreadful position with how she is written.  How can I support and root for a woman who takes such crazy actions against her beloved commanding officer?  Against everything that Star Trek was supposed to represent?

Yes the cast is diverse and we have two women in command and that’s cool, but not when they present one woman as a hysteric.  Burnham’s supposed to have been raised by Vulcans, but you’d never get that from her behavior.  And of course she is Sarek’s adopted daughter.  Another lazy choice.  Look, I love Sarek, but I didn’t need him in this show and it just felt like a cynical attempt to mollify the old fan base.

They have once again taken another step to make the Klingon’s even more alien.  While I can applaud that idea as a science fiction novelist the writer/producer thinks it was a terrible decision.  The actors look like the are doing battle with their costumes and their make up particularly those teeth.  The appliances make it almost impossible for them to emote, and for god’s sake fire up that universal translator.  The use of this guttural version of Klingon through the entire show became tedious as hell especially when our Klingon leader looked like he was just mouthing sounds that he had laboriously memorized but didn’t understand.

The direction was flat and dull.  Too much time was spent on pointless scenes.  Like that teaser which seemed designed only to provide a squee when the footprints form the Star Fleet logo.  I guess it was supposed to show the close relationship between the Captain and Number One, but first what they hell were both of them doing on a planet together with no one else along and in a clearly hostile environment.  I try not to be too literal with TV and movies that was an utter Oh Come On moment for me.  That and the damn torches on the Klingon ship.  Both knocked me right out of the show.  The long lead up to Michael Burnham’s spacesuit flight.

A reviewer for Ars Technica gave a breathless review calling the show gorgeous and fascinating.  As I read her review I thought she was straining to add meaning that simply wasn’t on the screen.  I wish I had seen the show she was watching, but I just didn’t.  As one of my bosses, Ira Behr taught me — “If it ain’t on the page it won’t be on the screen, and if it ain’t on the screen it ain’t there.”

When I was a little girl and the Enterprise flew across our TV screen (the first color television in our neighborhood.  All the neighbor kids came over to watch Star Trek at our house for that reason) I fell in love.  It was my dreams made manifest, but more than that I met people who became my family — Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Sulu.  Trek has always been about family despite differences in gender, race, species, national background.  This new show gave me no family.  It gave me a woman who had found to be the antithesis of what I think Trek represented, one weird alien who talked about cows and a terrific captain who is apparently going to die so we lose not only the only really interesting character, but a great actress.

Television is at its core about company.  We invite these people into our homes.  In the old days it used to be once a week.  Now we binge and spend hours at a time with them so they better be people with whom we wish to spend time, people we can like.  The only person I saw last night that I want to see again was Captain Philippa Georgiou and apparently I’m not going to get to.

I know I criticized bringing in Sarek as too much of a call back to the older shows, but there is one thing that I think was the show runners having amnesia about the old show.  Yes the costumes worn by the women of original Trek were sexist as hell, but this show is set ten years before Kirk and Spock.  So where are those uniforms?  Was the Federation aware of the need to outfit all crew members in sensible clothing, and then Trump became the president of the United Federation of Planets and suddenly we have micro mini-skirts?  I think you have to be very careful as you are picking and choosing among which bits of canon to use and which to ignore and this one again left me head scratching.  It might have been better to place this in JJ Abram’s alternate Trek universe to explain these odd differences.

The Arstechnica  review states “It’s not so much that the future feels darker in Discovery. The future just feels more realistically complicated. We’re not trying to make the galaxy a better place anymore, kids. We’re in the real world.”  If that’s what I had seen I might be plunking down money for CBS All Access, but I didn’t.  And I think CBS and the show runners missed the show that could have done that.  I have always wanted to see a Trek show about the people who don’t fit in, who chafe under Federation rule, but aren’t militant assholes like the Klingons and Romulans or flesh and blood creatures trying to turn into robots, the Vulcans, or crass capitalists like the Ferengi.  I want Harry Mudd.  I want the people living in the cracks, trying to make a buck, pull off a con, and try to avoid the judgmental eye of Star Fleet.  That’s the real world too and I think it would have been fun to write and more fun to watch.

Maybe someday Star Trek will get that broomstick out of its ass and we’ll have that show.