Context Is For Kings

DVD, Star Trek: Discovery S1 (Context Is For Kings)

I find myself in the strange position of not having so much to say on this one. We finally discover the USS Discovery, perhaps named for its discovery of a special new way of 'organic' propulsion, and we finally meet most of the main cast. But it was very much a setup, you could almost say a filler episode, or a bottle show as they used to be called, where everything takes place on the ship or the standing sets, notwithstanding that they take a trip to the USS Glenn, Discovery's sister ship (named for the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth, and seen in the 'Enterprise' opening credits?), for a spot of creeping down dark corridors. Usually this works wonders, I always love a good atmospheric creep around an abandoned spaceship, but for whatever reason there was very little atmosphere (beyond the one they were breathing). I don't see it as a good move to show the same kind of starship as the one you're introducing as your title vessel in the very episode in which you introduce it, it makes it seem less special, just one of many, who knows the number of these class created (for that matter we don't yet know its class within the series). I understand why they did it, hoping to set up some dramatic effect by showing what could happen if this new technology went wrong, but did they pull it off at the expense of the USS Discovery being something unique?

Whatever, the episode is treading water, the price of serialised TV where you have to introduce all the pieces before you can take them somewhere. Not that they don't go anywhere, and this must mark the first time we see a Federation ship go to warp when the shuttle heads off to explore the Glenn - we still get the stretch effect, but it's much quicker, with less time to enjoy the look of it, and we still have yet to see a starship's warp, I think, except for the internal view where, for some bizarre reason, the stars all bubble up instead of going straight. And the Discovery is yet another ship blighted with a window for a viewscreen! Another thing that bothered me, beyond the usual negative impression I have of things being far too advanced and technologically superior to ships even later than this era, was how negative all the characters were. This is Starfleet! 'DS9' is my favourite series and it began with a lot of animosity and negativity, growing into the best Trek series ever made, so it's possible things could turn around, but they had seven years in which to smooth things over, whereas we already know things are going to change by Season 2, so how many people will still be part of the crew is up in the air. Cadet Tilly is irritating. Lieutenant Stamets irritable. Captain Lorca plausible, but not as mysterious as he claims to hope he seems. Landry you can't trust if you've seen 'Battlestar Galactica' because Rekha Sharma played a bad'un in that, and she remains quite distant in this episode. It's good to see Saru again, and I still like his honest appraisals, even if he sees everything coloured with his native obsession with fear (I assume his 'hackles' were rising when the shuttle left as if he sensed danger was still aboard, which is how he views Michael).

Something I did like was Tilly drawing attention to Michael's name being uncommon for a female, something which sent out a discordant ripple as soon as the name was announced. I also liked seeing what appeared to be a Gorn skeleton in Lorca's House of Horrors or whatever that secret room is where he's collected a motley exhibition of alien life - was that a Cardassian vole on the desk? I'd love it if it were so, but we don't get a good view of the place. Sometimes not having a good view is a boon, however, as in the grisly, torn up remains of the Glenn's crew, our first example of the more gruesome potential for a streaming series, that look like something out of the Delphic Expanse. Maybe the same physics are being used as in that weird place? I didn't get many references to other Trek this time, though the Zee-Magnees prize mentioned by Lieutenant Stamets' doomed friend, rang a bell (it was awarded to Daystrom in 'TOS'). The first 'redshirt' gets killed on the mission. There are storage lockers on the wall like in the 24th Century series'. Burnham wears an almost 'TOS' gold uniform as prison garb, with what looked like the correct badge - I'd already seen this from images so it wasn't a surprise. I care about little details, though, and greatly appreciated the coloured disks sticking out of the consoles, one of which Stamets hands over to Burnham - it was like a cross between the single slab of coloured disk used in 'TOS,' but with an update to the visible circuitry of isolinear chips of the 'TNG' era. That's the perfect example of how to be true to a time period while also updating with more detail and texture. Why couldn't they do that for the rest of the ship, uniform, and tech?

Stamets is probably the grumpiest member of the crew, but they looked like a surly bunch the way they were staring at Burnham as the infamous mutineer, supposedly Starfleet's first ever, which seems unlikely! Her fellow criminals attacking was just the excuse for some violence in the manner of the bar fight in 'Star Trek XI.' But lest we forget, lack of acceptance was something seen before: even in the 24th Century Tom Paris gets a frosty reception upon accepting Janeway's assignment to Voyager. Now that I think about it, Burnham's position is very similar, with both convicted of a serious crime, both having expertise in a given field that the Captain of a new, experimental vessel wants for a specific mission. I enjoy spotting the parallels, I only hope this series can live up to such greatness as 'Voyager,' though any time there's a reference to that series I think of Kirsten Beyer's involvement. Who else would get a reference to a one-off Delta Quadrant world in? So far I don't see evidence of the kind of quality 'Voyager' had, and I'm surprised to say that I don't even like this series as much as 'Stargate Universe' so far, although if I think back I wasn't initially impressed with that series and it took a while for the characters to settle down and grow into likeable people you want to see each episode, so I'm still trying not to judge 'DSC' too harshly.

Take the Gorn skeleton, for example: it shows that they can do things that look right if they choose to, and if they ever did an actual Gorn it gives me hope they'd do it as it was in 'TOS,' at least in structure, unlike the elongated version spied in 'Enterprise' which was a sorry example of CGI. And deftly joining the dots: 'sorry example of CGI' is exactly what comes to mind when I think of the monster aboard the Glenn which has taken out a visiting Klingon party (what happened to their ship, that's what I want to know?). It reminded me of the awful creatures in 'Star Wars Episode VII' which chased Harrison Ford and pirates around a ship. At least they had the sense to cover it in darkness so you couldn't see it well, but that whole sequence just annoyed me. Landry cries for them to run, but why not try Phasers first? I still hate, hate, hate, haaaaaate the fact that Phasers fire tiny bolts, it's really a sorry state of affairs (though we do at least get one measly beam when Landry blasts through the door to escape, a small consolation), as it would have been so cool to see the room light up as multiple Phaser beams converged on the creature's hide. Momentarily it was fun to realise Burnham was crawling down a Jefferies Tube, but irritating that she burbles on to herself, quoting a passage from 'Alice in Wonderland' - not that it's bad to have literary references, I'll take that over more contemporary examples as John Lennon and The Beatles, something Trek just didn't do, it doesn't sit right, having the wrong tone, jarring. I didn't get why Tilly was so surprised to see a book, Captain Georgiou appeared to have shelves of them in her Ready Room, although they could be rare, I suppose.

So far the new propulsion doesn't quite make sense to me - is it some kind of transwarp, or opening of a wormhole? It was all a bit airy-fairy, not that I mind having to accept some made up tech as Trek was good at that, and it was pleasing to hear a bit of technobabble, something they tended to avoid in the Kelvin films. But what was the booth all about - I know there's time travel involved, but how would this booth take someone to different worlds like that (and I wanted to see those worlds they were spinning round, but it was almost blink and you miss them). Among the planets Lorca mentioned was Romulus, but he shouldn't know anything about what that place looks like or he'd know what Romulans look like! Only a minor inconsistency, but it stood out. But he also talks of Ilari, which, as I said before, is a Delta Quadrant world discovered by Voyager, so if he can go anywhere in the galaxy, why not Romulus as well? Andorians continue to be name-checked every episode (this time we hear of the moons of Andoria), and I'm looking forward to actually seeing them, a nice link to 'Enterprise' which was the only series to use them properly. I wondered if the obelisk we catch a glimpse of in this sequence was from the planet Kirk lives on in 'The Paradise Syndrome' - it's obviously meant to be one of the Preservers' asteroid deflectors, but it could be another planet.

Lorca's Ready Room was different. Featuring a cooing Tribble (now I really want to see the effect it has on a Klingon - one way of getting round them being altered to disguise themselves as human, was letting a Tribble near them, which will emit a worried chirping, how Arne Darvin was unmasked in 'The Trouble With Tribbles,' which could just turn out to be pertinent…), Lorca has a standing desk, making him seem more authoritative, which is at odds with his relaxed attitude - I found it bizarre both and First Officer Saru like snacks! Lorca has a bowl of fortune cookies, while Saru wanders the ship stuffing himself with blueberries from a glass bowl. It's not something to nitpick about or claim the integrity of Trek has suffered, I just found it weirdly informal. But there's a lot that's different about this particular ship, with the new, 'Black Alert' adding to the canon already established for Red Alert (danger, full readiness), Yellow Alert (caution, increased readiness), and Blue Alert (ship landing, from 'Voyager'). Not to mention the origins of it all, 'Tactical Alert' (originally designated jokingly 'Reed Alert' since Lieutenant Reed of 'Enterprise' first devised it). Will we ever see Green Alert? Purple? Orange? It was never actually explained what Black Alert meant except for weird stuff happening. I wonder if it ties in to Section 31 because they always wore black. As soon as they called attention to a guard's black Starfleet badge I thought 31 were on the agenda (especially as Bryan Fuller said they were going to be part of the season), but I can't imagine a member of 31 having a special badge. The whole point was that they were an invisible organisation no one knew about, so I hope they keep it that way and don't undermine the great stuff done in 'DS9.'

Good to see they aren't using Replicators, but have 'synthesisers,' which could be the same as the food slots, something never fully explained on 'TOS,' but clearly inferior to the later technology. Burnham gets a new uniform through the synthesiser, but it's not made clear how it works. Nice to see the canon being respected, while also having the ability to show things not seen visually in 'TOS,' like when the shuttlecraft comes through the forcefield to Discovery. I could have done with a shuttle closer to the look of the Galileo 7, but this is still a good few years prior to that series (six months after the events of the first two episodes), and we even get a heavily shortened spin round the Discovery in some small way paying tribute to 'The Motion Picture,' though sadly no one would have the patience for a proper regal flyby showing off the ship in all its glory nowadays, I suspect, not that any TV series really went in for that. The shuttlebay was big like 'TNG,' but also had the windows along the top which really gave it a 'TOS' feel. I still don't get all the mechanical augmentation of crewmembers, of which we see several, making them look almost Borg-like, including Keyla, one of the crew from Shenzhou. But the Engine Room gave the impression of being horizontal, which is true to the period, as both 'Enterprise' and 'TOS' featured that orientation.

There really isn't much else to say about the episode, it's one of those that doesn't have much story, the trouble with serials where you have to keep setting up to pay off rather than having a proper story and satisfaction at its resolution. I will say that I liked the principled nature displayed by Burnham, regretting her actions and wanting to live out her sentence. But Lorca was right, she does have much to offer so perhaps it's good for her to be co-opted onto the crew so she can help end what she started, a way for resolution and redemption, though it's obvious his motives aren't pure by the suspicious way he acts, especially with Landry. Again, nothing against him, but he didn't immediately impress me with his presence, nor the ship with its environment. I'm still hopeful there'll be some good episodes along the way, but my expectations aren't high based on what I've seen. It needs to do more than throw out references to other Trek to get me aboard, but I'm still open to seeing what they do across the season. All that's left is to say, 'Hello to Jason Isaacs!'

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