Calypso

DVD, Short Treks (Calypso)

Extremely 'Dr. Who,' cringe-inducingly so, and that's such a shame. It's like the makers of modern Trek looked at what was popular in sci-fi in the last decade or so and thought, 'right, let's make it like that,' and I really don't like modern 'Who.' This one was entirely separate from 'DSC' continuity, which at least meant we didn't have to endure Ensign Tilly, and Burnham wasn't there to save the galaxy from itself. That's one good thing about this little story: as inconsequential and apparently pointless as it is, it does at least focus on the personal, rather than the galactic, scale. It's all about this guy called Craft, it's set almost a thousand years in the future, and I assume it's going to connect somehow to 'DSC' Season 3, since I think this guy is going to be in it. It was the 'Short Trek' that had the most positive feedback that I could see back when it came out between Seasons 1 and 2 of 'DSC,' and I was especially curious to see it due to it essentially being 'Celebrated Sci-Fi Author' Michael Chabon's audition for the post of show-runnner on 'Star Trek: Picard.' Whether that's genuinely the case or merely how it seemed, I don't know, he may have already been hired for the bigger job, but I'm sure if this hadn't gone down favourably they'd have found someone else.

I don't know how to extrapolate this tiny sliver of his work into how well 'Picard' will work (still having not seen that series since the DVD has yet to be released), but at least it wasn't plain bad like the first 'Short Trek' ('Runaway'), and its obnoxious combination of Tilly and her alien friend. Greedily, CBS refused to include this and the Mudd episodes on the 'DSC' Season 2 set, which would have made it a complete package, instead leaving it to 'Runaway' and 'The Brightest Star' to introduce DVD viewers to the… well, what can you call it? It's hardly a series, with a handful of sub-twenty minute episodes, but you can't really call it a miniseries either. A sub-series might be better as it can't be called the seventh Trek show (excluding 'Star Trek: The Animated Series,' though with the addition of new, modern animations maybe that has to be considered in the lineage now, even though it's not canon - things are so messed up now from the neat, tidy way everything used to be!). I wasn't sold on either of the previous episodes in this compilation sub-series, but they did have the advantage of being directly connected set-up for Season 2. I suppose this one gave us the concept of the USS Discovery's fate nine hundred and thirty years into the 23rd Century's future, which showed what would eventually happen to the canon-breaking (or at least canon-confusing), spore drive.

That's about the only thing we do get on what this means for wider 'DSC,' as it's a two-hander between a soldier of this future time and the AI of Discovery who rescues him, calling herself Zora. I don't know why we didn't get the usual computer voice, as that would have been a great twist for the voice artist who performs it to be able to speak normally instead of the more artificial cadence she normally has to have. Maybe they felt Julianne Grossman wasn't a good enough actress and only use her because of her computer-like vocal qualities, I don't know (I still wish the Shenzhou computer voice, Tasia Valenza, who performed that role across four episodes in the first season and was a 'TNG' guest star, could have been the fleet-wide standard!), and certainly the placing of the story suggests that anything that doesn't match up with 'DSC'-established continuity can be explained away by the passage of time and the computer tinkering with itself. At the same time we've seen that 'DSC' writers don't always even keep to their own established canon (let alone the deep history of Trek, one of the reasons it so often pushes me away), episode to episode, and there may be a case for that here, too…

Although the Discovery heads into this time period at the end of Season 2, the computer intelligence seen here implies it's been waiting at this location for the almost-one thousand years that it was abandoned. Now that could be a flaw in the computer's memory rather than the writers' inability to keep track of what they've previously said, or perhaps the crew programmed it to think it had been left for that long for some reason we don't know about. There are plenty of questions and solutions around that side of it. The same can be said for where all these door 'eyes' came from that appear to be above each opening on the ship so it can watch its guest and gives him a direction to talk to instead of just speaking to air. We've seen in Season 2 that the ship has countless tiny 'Star Wars' robot drones (ugh!), of various description so it would be easy for the ship to order them to construct such devices, which I don't remember ever seeing before in the series. The fact that it has Replicators that can instantly create uniforms, even though they didn't have that kind of technology in the time of 'TOS' (where they had a Quartermaster!), had already been established in Season 1 of 'DSC,' one of many irritating canon-breaks where you could see they so wanted this to have technology that was beyond even the 24th Century, even though they were 'stuck with' the 23rd Century setting. But I've gone on about the aesthetics and the failure of the exploration of this era many times in my reviews.

One outlandish tech that caused such controversy in Season 1 (so much so that they had Pike say he dislikes it, which is why it doesn't get used on the Enterprise), were the holograms, and actually they get used quite nicely here. Again, if there hadn't been any holo-controversy in the first place I wouldn't be complaining about it in this episode because the ship could have invented it if it had indeed been alone for a millennium, or other alien ships may have come into contact bringing such modern tech with them. So I didn't mind it so much in this setting and it was quite clever to see what I assume was an actual old film turned into a holographic, three-dimensional version of itself. Was that Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn? I wasn't sure and I didn't recognise the film, but that was good use of effects. I wasn't so keen on the actual Craft and Zora dance, not being invested in the characters after a mere few minutes, especially as it was typically melodramatic in the overly emotional tone of the characters, so out of kilter with Trek's rationality and sense of self control in general (as was!). Modern Trek is made for an entirely different audience than it was twenty or more years ago, one that embraces showing emotion all the time, having a dystopian future and generally not being professional, controlled and contained.

This wasn't going to change that, and is full of unearned sentimentality, but at the same time it's less unlikeable because these are two characters we don't know and it's a different setting. What I would say is that it doesn't bode well for 'DSC's extrapolation of 33rd Century humanity if they're like Craft, who is exactly the same as the 23rd Century characters, and whom I suspect will be exactly the same in the 24th Century, too - the big deal about Alex Kurtzman's 'menu' of Trek series' that he's bringing to fruition is that each is different in tone and style, possibly to make up for the fact that one Trek series used to be able to have a menu of different tones and styles within each season: they were called episodes! But because they 'can't' do episodic any more (except they apparently will be with the Pike and Spock spinoff, 'Strange New Worlds'), and each season has to be one, galactic story, this is the only option. And yet, beginning with 'DSC' (can't comment on 'Picard' or 'Lower Decks' as yet, both in the 24th Century), they seemed to go out of their way to make the era indistinguishable from any other - they were in the Kirk era, yet they wanted the tech of the Picard era, and not content with that, everything had to look more advanced even than that, so let's say the 25th Century-era as well!

Of course the people are all just like contemporary humans today rather than the stylised, more restrained versions or hierarchical militaristic types we saw in previous Trek eras. One of the great things about 'TNG' was that not only did it try to be different from 'TOS' by its setting, it also made the people different, and that continued through 'DS9' and 'Voyager.' Then they made 'Enterprise' in the 22nd Century just so they could have them be a bit more naturalistic and similar to 'people of today.' 'DSC' has continued that, but into another era that we already knew the look and feel of, but they've made all eras the same, losing Trek its impression of a realistic future history. When everything is the same and the limits are limitless then who cares when it's set? It doesn't matter, and then the characters don't matter and the situations they're in don't matter, and the whole construct falls apart. With this episode it looks like the 33rd Century is going to be treated just the same, and it makes me wonder: why bother? I should get back to 'Calypso,' however, as slight a tale as it is, and avoid the diversionary trips into raging against the lack of good leadership and sense that encompasses modern Trek. Perhaps there was no other way to have more Trek than this, but if so I'd have been happier without it, still dreaming about what it might have been like if Trek had come back…

At least with 'Short Treks' we get something the other series' refuse to do: just a simple little thing that helps to connect it to the Trek style of fifty years: showing the episode title! It's only a small detail, but a meaningful one to me. Although the episode is directed by an 'old hand' of 'DSC' it is very over-directed. I can't remember if this guy always spun the camera around like it was on a string, and was really into fancy moves and all that rather than concentrating on telling the story, but that's the approach he takes here. In one sense it can be forgiven because he's operating largely with one character on familiar sets, so there really isn't much story to grab hold of and maybe he felt it was necessary to stop viewers from being bored because younger ones can't cope unless there's visual tricks all the time? But Trek has done many good stories where one character is stuck in one location, ship or station - I think of 'Remember Me,' multiple episodes of 'DS9' where they had people wandering around the darkened Cardassian monstrosity, and the same with 'Voyager' ('Macrocosm' springs to mind). Even 'Enterprise' did it with 'Vanishing Point' and they were often an atypical series not being able to do the usual raft of Holodeck and Transporter malfunction episodes. Saying that, even 'TOS' had its episodes in that vein.

My point is, it is a Trek staple, and probably a staple of the genre, too. I'm not concerned that they weren't able to come up with something more engaging because I'm sure to a lot of people this was beautiful and touching. It's just that I don't find it to be so, because of the emotional manipulation to cover the inabilities of writers to come up with something worthwhile. Nothing against Chabon, but like the setting not suggesting 'DSC' Season 3 is going to be any more of an improvement on the failed Seasons 1 and 2, I don't see anything that makes me think he would be the ideal man to bring Jean-Luc Picard and the complex world of the end of the 24th Century back to life - especially as it was seemingly just a stepping stone for him to get his own creative endeavours made, when what we needed was someone like Manny Coto who had seen how 'Enterprise' had been handled, had come in humbly, but with aspirations to make it great, and did all in his power to do so. Actually, talking of which, is Mr. Coto available?

I would rank 'Calypso' just below 'The Brightest Star' since for all that episode's inconsistencies (why is Georgiou from years in the past wearing a 'modern' 'DSC' uniform?), it was at least part of the season, and while 'Short Treks' have the advantage of not needing to connect to anything, as an experimental ideas-based media, they also need to have a story that is more than paper-thin. I thought the angel tattoo on Craft's back might be connected to the Red Angel in some way, but then it's revealed it's actually a 'Cyclops Owl' from some planet (riiiiiiight, a Cyclops Owl, okay), so Mrs. Burnham didn't inspire him to get it after all. Probably for the best. I bought the DVD set of 'Short Treks' out of curiosity and a desire to support physical media, even though I suspected I was going to like the episodes as much as I had done the first two. For the sake of completeness they need to be watched, but I'm not going to go easy on them just because they're small.

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