What's Past Is Prologue

DVD, Star Trek: Discovery S1 (What's Past Is Prologue)

Another duffer, this one, and one of the most boringly action-packed. Seriously, this is why I don't like modern comic book films, 'Star Wars' films, 'Dr. Who': cardboard characters running around doing boring action hero stunts, all visual spectacle and nothing to get the least bit excited about. Does it feel real? No, it's just a cartoon like the Kelvin films, and the more I see of this series, the less I like it and forget the very few that did draw me in. It was almost laughable to see the sub-'Matrix' fight in the grand throne room aboard Georgiou's palace ship, and I wondered if it was a 'tribute' to practically the same scene in 'The Last Jedi,' except that they came out around the same time, although I can imagine the producers seeing the film and saying to each other they have to get a scene like that into their new baby because it's so cool and everyone'll be blown away, dude! Mindless, heavily choreographed fight sequences that drag on for ages: just what I always felt Trek was missing, but no longer! Now we can sit back, turn off our brains and become absorbed into nothingness. I mean really, what was this episode actually about? Did anything of any importance happen? If it did, I missed it. Evil Lorca was revealed to be evil and mercilessly executed by ex-Empress Georgiou, who is saved by Burnham by somehow running along while she's being beamed (don't you need to stay in one place so they can get a lock on you?), and now this 'noble' woman has been brought into our universe because of Michael's pity for her.

That's not very Vulcan, is it? The logical thing would be to leave her behind to the 'mercy' of her own universe, a poetic justice for all the evil she's perpetuated, but I suppose it's because she looks like Burnham's Georgiou she just couldn't let her go, and feels that restoring her is like undoing her mistake. Except it really wasn't her mistake that killed Georgiou, it was the Captain's poor decision-making to beam onto T'Kuvma's vessel without a squad of security officers, just her and Burnham, with some vague idea of capturing the Klingon leader, but ending up having to kill him: Georgiou wasn't so wise. I knew that Mirror Georgiou would be making it back in some way because she's due to star in her own TV series (which says a lot about our society today that we want to make a Trek series starring the evil Emperor of the Mirror Universe whose main draw is her swordsmanship and martial arts skills!), and I wondered how she could ever be made sympathetic after murdering all those people on Harlak, not to mention countless unspeakable atrocities that are only hinted at. Perhaps there's still redemption for her to find, that is the Trek path, after all, but it's like saving Hitler and inviting him to take up a position in the United Nations because he reminds you of your old history teacher! Surely she should be put on trial for crimes against the galaxy, but no, I can't see that happening in this simplistic and crude take on Trek. Granted, I'm getting ahead of myself, there's still time for them to justify Burnham's actions and turn Georgiou good. I just don't have much confidence in these writers.

There was one glimmer of interest in the whole thing, and that was soon undermined: when Saru officially takes command, although even then he doesn't do it in the time-honoured fashion, but makes it some Communist act, saying it's 'our ship' now as if abrogating responsibility. Mind you, he's effectively followed Burnham's path of mutinying against his Captain, so they'll have more in common now, and maybe he was aware of the parallels, but it certainly didn't come through in the writing. It's hard to keep from spilling over into scorn and disgust long enough to say something positive about the episode, but when they spoke of the only way to save the mycelial network being to do whatever they had to do at the expense of their ability to get home, it represented the spirit of 'Voyager' and Starfleet's mandates in fine form. But it's immediately undercut by Saru's magic ability to 'sense the coming of death' again, and it's okay this time because he doesn't sense it and refuses to accept the no win scenario. It would have been so much truer to the Trek spirit for them to knowingly go into the operation expecting they were sacrificing themselves for the greater good of what I suppose is a living network of spores, and only during it to find an alternative at the last moment which means they won't be called on for the ultimate sacrifice after all. Instead, by being defiant at the no win scenario that is a favourite of Trek lore, it's a more selfish triumph and an inability to see the importance of that scenario which was about accepting defeat gracefully and without fear, coming to your end.

Saru is all about fear, however, so maybe it's his race's flaw that means he acts this way, except that it's set out to be a victory, the way it's presented, and was a simple solution to get them back into our universe again, safe and sound (if nine months into the future when the Klingons have won the war, which at least sets up the final two episodes to be different). I'm not sure how any of this isn't going to leak, or how ship's logs won't record the adventures of going into this Mirror Universe so that the USS Enterprise, which is alive and well at this time and out in space, never hears of it, nor the way Lorca ended up crossing the universes by being beamed away during an ion storm (was the Charon beaming him, and if not, where was he beaming to?), which is just how Kirk and his officers ended up in that place a few years later. It shows up the use of the MU as a pointless exercise in crowd-pleasing rather than truly coming up with original ideas. Ideas, don't forget, is what Trek has (until this century), been all about! The 'clever' twist of having the Captain of the ship actually be his Mirror counterpart hasn't been fulfilled more than a 'ha ha, fooled you,' mentality, it hasn't brought any great depth to the story, just as introducing a Holodeck earlier in the season had absolutely no bearing on the narrative at all. I'm not even clear why Lorca cared so much about Burnham, except that he was in cahoots with Mirror Michael (Gabriel and Michael working together - obviously some kind of angelic connotation there, but if Bryan Fuller planned it, those that took over were never able or interested to work it in to make you see it), so was it just a vague fondness that this was all about? Weak.

Another disappointment comes in Landry showing her grumpy face again. I was looking forward to this since I was expecting her to be deep in the Mirror Lorca's plot, and that the version we saw of her near the beginning of the season whom was killed so stupidly and needlessly to illustrate the idiocy of the military mind compared with Burnham's more enquiring and scientific one, was actually the Mirror Landry, which was why she was so close in Lorca's confidences. I was expecting our Landry to crop up and be a much kinder, compassionate, intelligent individual - you know, like a 'mirror image'? That's what the MU used to be all about. But no, apparently the objectionable Landry we knew must have been how she was in our universe, nasty, unflinching and stupid. At first, MU Landry did seem more rational and positive, and I was waiting for her to be the double switch: if Lorca was pretending to be our Lorca, then she was, I don't know, maybe Section 31, or something like that, who was aware of what he was doing and was keeping tabs on him, but she's been trapped in the MU, and now she could finally play her part in taking this imposter down, thereby helping Georgiou and Burnham escape. But no, there was not that level of depth to the story, simple as it was so that the average viewer could follow it and marvel at all the shooting and fighting. 'Cos that's what Trek is, right? You'd think so if all you ever saw of Trek were the Kelvin films and now this.

I think the only other positive I could bring to this episode is how the minor recurring characters were allowed more screen time: Airiam, Detmer, Rhys, Owosekun, Bryce, these characters that aren't really characters, just familiar faces with names attached, became a little more solid. Not much, it's true, but if it was a graph, the curve would be going upward. Let's hope this wasn't the peak of their engagement with the series, because they have been largely there as the computer voice, explaining what's going on, rather than being real people you could relate to. Garak, the Cardassian tailor, was in one episode of the first season of 'DS9' (coincidentally, sharing the similar title of 'Past Prologue'), and he had many times more to him in that first encounter than a season has given this little gaggle of Starfleeters, but then that's a sign of the times: with serialised storytelling it seems everyone, both main cast and recurring, are shortchanged. At least we did get a Captain's Log from Saru, which is something I've been clamouring for, though as with all the elements that go to make this feel like Trek, they're very stripped back as if it's almost too much trouble and doesn't fit with the makers' desire to concentrate on spectacle and plot rather than story and character. For instance, when Burnham makes contact with Discovery from inside a Jefferies Tube (not that they probably call them that in this series, I certainly don't recall hearing the term, they probably think it sounds too daft - maybe they're a little embarrassed about Trek in general which is why it so often feels like other franchises more than Trek?), she brings up a visual channel, when you'd think that would be the time to be on audio, and when Lorca speaks to her as she runs round the rabbit warren of corridors, she 'cleverly' makes it look like she's in one place by pulling out some wires (who knew it would be so simple!), and keeps moving so Landry doesn't find her. What about sensors?

The episode is another to avoid having a teaser, with just the convoluted recap of what's come before, and again, though it was around forty-one minutes long (the episode that is, not the recap!), it felt long, whereas many an 'Enterprise' episode of similar length simply flies by. It's because there's no meat to get your brain-teeth into, nothing substantial to enjoy. Oh, they occasionally throw in something like the 'sacrifice the ship for the spores' talk, or by making it clear that Burnham does not believe in destiny, but it's slim pickings. I quite liked the stuff about destiny because it's in direct opposition to the Kelvin films saying that the universe sorts things out so that that's why Kirk and his crew came together, like a fantastical 'Star Wars' destiny, it had to be that way, rather than individual people making their own decisions out of free will. Lorca, the bad guy, is all about destiny, believing he was going to kill Georgiou (incidentally: why? He became like another Khan figure, the way he rescues his 'people' from the agony booths to be their leader once more in a revolution against the Empress, but apart from wanting power, there didn't seem to be much motivation - strange how a Sixties TV show can still be so much deeper and more believable than the best money can buy nowadays. Hmmm, just a thought). But Lorca's destiny does not come to pass. Maybe the prosthetic head that we know was made for him during production was for this scene where he falls into the ship's energy ball, or whatever it was, as we see him disintegrate?

Burnham, on the other hand, believes what she does makes a difference, and thereby, logically, she's saying our actions have consequences and responsibilities, rather than it all being preordained: we play our part in the universe, rather than suggesting whatever bad thing we do, or happened to us, was 'destined' to be that way and we have no influence. So that was a bright spot amidst all the gloom and stupidity. It's sad they can't make an episode all about that and have to throw such scraps in to leaven the action and violence rather than being the focus of everything, but again, the times we live in… Unfortunately, the writers seem to believe that a modern audience can't cope with messages and is only there for visceral pleasures, not mental workout, so there has to be grand, overarching danger to keep attention spans agog. Now it's that the 'multiverse' will cease to exist if Lorca gets his hands on Mirror Stamets' undetermined weapon that will somehow devastate the mycelial network and spread a chain reaction across all existence - but surely, by the very nature of the multiverse theory, there would be countless variations of the universe where this was avoided, or where Stamets wasn't able to do this, or etcetera ad infinitum… It's funny one reason given for killing off familiar characters as writers like to do to keep viewers on edge (do we really want edge over comfort in these dark days? Was Trek not popular because of its escapism?), is to suggest that older TV was always so safe because you knew the main characters would always survive, and yet they bring us a story where the stakes are the entire multiverse(s), which we know are going to be fine. In one of those universes, somewhere many millions of lightyears away out of sight and time, there sits a version of me who's actually enjoying 'DSC' because the writers got it right and made an excellent modern series that was worthy of the name 'Star Trek.' But it ain't this universe.

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