Choose Your Pain

DVD, Discovery S1 (Choose Your Pain)

Each episode has so far followed a pattern: that of being slightly worse than the preceding episode. It's an achievement of sorts, considering a Trek season used to start of really well, then dip a little, then gradually improve, but those were in the days when they had twenty-plus episodes in which to explore this world, and now we're down to a mere fifteen. Not that you'd know it, as it seems from the speed of the unravelling story that they think they're spooling it out over seven seasons! By which I mean that very little actually happens. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the rationale behind shorter seasons has tended to be that each episode will have more money and time spent on it, thus making it much better on an episode-by-episode basis, with no more 'filler' stories or redundant remakes of previous examples from other series' in the canon. Every episode was supposed to be vital and energising to suit the needs of modern audiences' short attention spans, the story rocketing along in serialised form without a pause for breath, or a rich examination of the pieces they're playing with on this particular game board. So what's happened with 'Discovery' if that's the case? Genuinely, each episode is less eventful than the last, with little characterisation, no exploration of the world or building on the period they're inhabiting. Stuff just happens. In this case, Captain Lorca is captured by the Klingons.

Somehow it was all so tame and tidy. This whole business of the Klingons allowing their prisoners to choose who gets a beating in order to keep them from bonding, didn't make sense. Who gets to choose, and why would anyone choose themselves? Now, I know why this capture happened, because I already know the spoilers to come later in the series, but if something's well acted and dramatic then it doesn't matter how many times you see it, or how much you know in advance, it will still make an impact. But here we have Lorca captured with no fanfare, presumably close to the Starbase (which, as you can now expect from their approach to the series, looks nothing like the facilities we saw in 'TOS'), at which he's attending a war council with his superior officers. He's thrown in a cell, all in order to meet a couple of new characters, is tortured, and then 'escapes.' If you've watched Trek then you'll have seen many such episodes, but where 'The Chute' from 'Voyager' showed the brutality and degrading nature of such a position, and 'Allegiance' from 'TNG' gave us the more thoughtful approach of not turning on fellow captors, but working together to solve a problem, or 'Hard Time' of 'DS9' addressed the psychological aspects of captivity, 'Choose Your Pain' has nothing to delve into, it's all surface. It's about setting up a future enemy, of preparing for a future plot twist, it's not satisfying in itself, it doesn't explore an issue, it is, like I said, just doing stuff with little to no immediate consequence. In other words it's basically filler!

This isn't completely fair. The B-story of Saru struggling with both Burnham's usual rebellious tendencies (because she knows best), and his own inadequacies in command, had the seeds for a meaningful development, but it's so spare and slight as to be a whisper of Trek quality on the outskirts of a honking stupidity that I'm beginning to see envelops the general mass of the series. I really do wonder how the young audience that hasn't had experience with Trek, or thinks it's boring, has latched onto this series, since I have to admit that I'm finding 'Discovery' a teensy bit boring. It's not even about comparisons with past Trek - 'Enterprise' had a lot of issues and things I didn't like about it, there were a fair few episodes that were as dull as this one, but it at least showed the promise of other Trek and we did get a number of great episodes, crucially, the opening salvo of Season 1. But then that was made by people that knew Trek back to front and the mistakes or flaws were more because they were trying to do something different without overturning the boat, or on the other extreme they were being too careful not to meddle with canon or continuity, and their own ennui with Trek as it stood was losing them their confidence and drive. This new team doesn't have that excuse. Like 'Enterprise,' they came out of the gate doing something new, but they went too far and they haven't even captured the vibrancy and excitement of that failed series.

I am in danger of prejudging this series before I've fully experienced it, as I keep saying in each review, and I am continually grateful for more Trek to discuss and examine, but how long should I go on trying to be amicable and accepting when I see so little of the spirit of Trek in evidence? So many of the aspects of Trek are missing: I've narrowed Trek down to why I'm still so drawn to it, even after twenty-five years of engaging with this universe, and it can be encapsulated by a theme of good people solving problems. You can see a sliver of that in this episode's moral difficulties in using a living creature to make their 'Displacement-Activated Spore Hub Drive' (to give it its full grand monicker), when they believe the process is damaging it. And we see Stamets being selfless enough to try an alternative by using himself in place of the creature when the necessity is imperative if they're going to rescue their Captain. But it's still lightweight, and we've already explored this issue in the preceding episode. Going over the same ground isn't the problem, but getting somewhere is. I think one of the main problems with the series so far is that they refuse to explore the world we're in. For a start they refuse to play by the rules of that world and the fact that they have touch screen consoles and bizarre technology that has neither the look nor feel of this period wouldn't bother me if the stories were gripping and I was becoming emotionally invested in the characters, but it's things like that that keep niggling at me and so I know that the story isn't papering over the historical inconsistencies.

Again I ask why you would choose a period of Trek history, then not bend over backwards to be true to it. Instead they have the same arrogant attitude as JJ Abrams and his team had when making the Kelvin films. It isn't just the aesthetic they've half-inched, it's the approach, all surface sheen with a few backhanded references to Trek history for the purists to get excited about. This series is at least putting a slightly more Trekkian spin on things than those films, but then they have more time to do so, and this may as well have been set in the Kelvin Timeline for all the relevance it has to pre-Kirk days. This time the references are myriad, though blink and miss them, the best being a list of Starfleet's finest Captains (Matthew Decker, Jonathan Archer, Robert April, Phillippa Georgiou and Christopher Pike), and while it is gratifying to see these names why couldn't we have seen images of them? When it comes to it, it's also a shameless narrowing of the world since there aren't any other names on that list that we don't know and surely in the century since Archer there would be other famed Captains? If a couple of unknowns were included that would expand the universe, allowing us to speculate on them and perhaps one day meet them or hear their story. It's also an arbitrary selection, as how could the computer know which to choose - is it popular opinion, a measure of their score ratings across all missions, or some other indefinable ranking system? In reality they're just choosing the names we know, and that's fine, but it's another example of how this series works (or not).

The Benzite's homeworld, Benzar, also scores a mention by Lorca in his appraisal of the Klingon advance, as well as the Ophiucus system (where Mudd was heading in 'TOS'), and if you look carefully at a star-map at one point you can see Rura Penthe, the famed Klingon prison planet, and Space Station K-7 as easily recognisable locations of yore. There are probably others, and they certainly know enough of the lore to throw in these references that only the hardcore will notice, but that's all they are. It's not like we're actually getting to see a Benzite or visit Benzar. In fact the series has been practically devoid of aliens. Sure, you have the Klingons, but it's not like we're getting to know them, and they still irritate me with their stupid dome-heads and no explanation of this bizarre look, or talk of other types of Klingon, and I'm wondering if it'll ever be addressed or just ignored. They're just lumbering cannon fodder (which they often were in the other series', don't get me wrong, but there were a number of great characters that stood out from that race), and you have to wonder with those ridiculous fat claw hands they have, how did they ever build anything, especially as precise and intricate as the torture device L'Rell thumbs over Lorca's face to keep his sensitive eyes open to the light (I really wanted his eye medication to be named as Retinax!)?

The Klingon ship that kidnaps Lorca is designated 'D-7' yet looks nothing like one. Okay, so you can barely make out its shape, but why go to the trouble of specifically categorising it as something we know, then not showing it in all its glory? And why would L'Rell take the time to learn languages when the Universal Translator handles all that, or are they positing it hasn't been invented yet? And what's with the ugly Klingon Disruptors that spits targets into green puffs of vapour? And why would people still use a stick to clean their teeth in the 23rd Century? It's a wasted opportunity and it only further irritates because this is the kind of thing you want: to see the things they're referencing, to go deeper into this period and this world, to justify why things look different to the way we think they should. To address the issues, to show they know what they're doing, to have fun with the playing pieces in the game, not just having them there for the sake of it! We still don't get time to grow attached to the guest cast, like Keyla, we still don't get any explanation or justification for the robot people or augmentation all around us on the Discovery, like Airiam in this episode, a robot woman who has a couple of lines and nothing else. We see vague shapes of alien crewmembers in the Mess, but we're not introduced to them, we're not even allowed to see them properly. They're just background flavour, except we're not allowed to taste. It's infuriating, and is the kind of thing we'd be allowed time to take in if the series was giving us a full-length season. Instead we have to make do with another 'TOS' character being brought in for no apparent reason, and like Sarek, Harcourt Fenton Mudd looks and sounds nothing like the great performance of Roger C. Carmel, the originator of the galaxy's most scurrilous scoundrel.

Again, forewarned is forearmed, and it was no secret they were bringing back old Harry (or bringing him forward since this is the earliest appearance of him in Trek history). As far as I'm aware, no one was clamouring for his return, and while he has the distinction for being one of the few characters in 'TOS' to appear in more than one episode, and he can be fun to deal with, he's not that interesting. And when you make him almost nothing like the huge, garrulous figure we know, you don't just diminish his ridiculous stature, but any hope of recreating a character as he was, negating the point of having him there at all. There's nothing about him that makes him necessary to be Mudd (as with Cumberbatch as Khan), he could have been any conman or rogue, but they foolishly assume that by appropriating the name it will draw in the half-fans, the casuals, who remember the name, but don't have a clear idea of who he was or what his purpose was. A sort of Lord of Misrule that came into the highly ordered, serious battleship of the original Enterprise under Kirk, and caused them a different kind of challenge. This one is just a common rogue without the jovial twinkle, and it doesn't matter how many times they throw in a reference to his wife, Stella, it doesn't make this version any more interesting.

If that wasn't enough to put me off, they also show how 'avant-garde' they are by throwing in some offensive expletives off the cuff with no necessity or purpose other than because they can. It was pointless for Tilly and Stamets (and Tyler), to be throwing out words like that except to make people sit up and see this Trek is different. It certainly is different, but not good different. It's unnecessary, and is hardly the kind of badge of honour the series should be aspiring to as the first Trek to use such words. It's not like it was a major thing, but the fact they threw it in there on what felt like a whim, was disappointing. Like I said, good Trek for me is good people solving problems, but I haven't seen many problems solved, nor many good people. I'm not saying they're bad people 'cuz they said naughty words, ummm… I'm just pointing out the juvenile approach taken by these writers in all directions. Again, if they were crafting an intelligent, compelling story I can forgive a lot of things, but the issues I have with the series are only magnified because I can't get onboard with the direction, approach and style of it all. Ironically, you can see from the episode's deleted scenes that some things that would have enhanced a Trek feeling, were cut from the episode, and yet they have the time to make episodes as long as they wish, so why chop Saru's Acting Captain's Log, or the door override he does to get into Engineering. Stuff like that is bread and butter for Trek and helps make it more comfortable and real. At least we hear that there are one hundred and thirty-four crew aboard Discovery, which I can't remember if we'd been told before, so even the crumbs of facts are something to hold onto.

I'm afraid I'm holding out less and less hope for not only this season, but for the multiple productions and projects coming from this current Trek stable. Because if this is how they wanted Trek to be then no doubt that style will extend to everything else they do. Whether the season will show any of the fingerprints of Trek royalty in Nicholas Meyer, Joe Menosky and others, I really don't know, but so far it seems the young guns are ruling the roost and not ruling it very effectively. An episode about Saru struggling with his own nature and his issues with Burnham sounds like a good idea, but when it's just thrown in amongst other things it doesn't work out so well. I don't even get a sense of progression or scale in the war, there's very little to grip onto, but those things that were in the first episode are still the only bright lights, namely Saru and Burnham. It's a shame the other characters are a good deal less likeable. And I have to ask: what was going on with that final shot of Stamets' reflection remaining in the mirror after he'd left the room? I know what it's referring to, but was it supposed to be taken literally, that there's a man in the mirror autonomous from Stamets? Or is it a metaphor, a little hint of what's coming? It's just bizarre. At the moment I'm choosing my pain, and that pain is to keep hoping that the series will improve, that there will be at least one good episode somewhere along the line, and that they won't just keep relying on limping the ongoing story along - is there even an ongoing story yet? So far it's 'war,' and the use of the spore drive, but it hasn't turned into anything. It's Star Trek, Jim, but not as we like it.

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