To say Discovery has been “controversial” would be something of an understatement. From the very beginning the show sparked off considerable debate about it’s quality, and the bevy of showrunner changes and resulting shifts in tone and plot choices just adds an extra layer of confusion. Many of the same groups and same people continue to have very similar arguments over what is clearly a completely different show in 2023 than it was in 2017. Personally I’ve become frustrated to the point of disinterest about where this show has gone, which makes it all the more exciting to go back and (re)discover something I thought I knew but had begun to really wonder about:
The very beginnings of Discovery are fucking excellent television.
Here’s why.
Early Discovery was actually planned out
To start with, the pacing and plotting of both the individual episodes and the overall arc of the season are excellent. In the moment, they are delightfully seamless: pacing is brisk but not rushed, traversing from one important thing to the next, with emotional moments given an appropriate amount of time to be registered and felt without feeling drawn out. Each episode has a clear beginning, middle, and end, with individual stakes that matter beyond simply advancing the season plot. Of course they consistently advance the overall season plot too (with the exception of Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad, which is “merely” a wonderfully executed standalone sci fi story that significantly develops three of our main characters). They do so not by dropping largely inconsequential teases and misdirection in alleged pursuit of a goal fated for resolution only in the finale, but via bite sized, meaningful changes to the circumstances our heroes find themselves in.
This demonstrates something which is clearly absent from the subsequent seasons, and even tossed away before the end of this one: detailed long term planning. Not only are we spared the bizare shifts in background information (is the Red Angel suit hyper advanced future tech, or something a research team banged out 20 years ago? Is the 32nd century Federation tiny, isolated, and largely ignored, or are they active galactic participants with genuine political clout?), but it’s also critical for allowing the episodes to flow neatly together as a coherent story. There’s been plenty of debate about if Star Trek should even be trying to tell these long-arc, binge-friendly seasonal stories, but clearly CBS wanted that. So why not do it right?
Early Discovery (mostly) makes sense
Every Star Trek show has had it’s share of silly stuff. Obviously TOS was absolutely loaded with zany things that seem more in keeping with it’s cardboard and hot glue aesthetics than the more serious tone subsequent shows attempted to set, but even the best of TNG era Trek had some whoppers mixed in. Where it has succeeded is by keeping most of the wacky missteps in relatively unimportant places, encapsulated by single episodes and devoid of larger consequence.
Then there’s the tech which every Starfleet ship is totally reliant on, most of which has only a fleeting connection to real world physics. The Mycelial Network blends right in: it’s a pretty wild idea and most certainly is not real. Just like warp drive. And just like warp drive, it is at least based on something real. Ehh, close enough.
I have little desire to relitigate in depth the plausibility of S2/S3 Burnham being intimately connected to so many wildly disparate galaxy changing things, or how reasonable it is to have a emotionally distraught child trigger a galactic cataclysm that nobody could solve for over a century, but I’ll certainly contend that early Discovery’s WTF rate is more in line with TNG era Trek than it’s more recent seasons have been. A low bar? Sure. But a relevant one.
Early Discovery did good job developing characters
By the end of those nine episodes, we’ve had a reasonable detailed introduction to six main characters, and all of them have at least a little extra dimensionality to them, enough that they feel real and as presented, I do care what happens to them:
Burnham is our focusing lens for the story and certainly gets the most screen time, but she’s also far from the most important person on the ship. We know she’s a proficient officer, but also that she fucked up royally with massive repercussions in the opening acts of the show. That dichotomy lines up well with her odd mix of behaviors: conflicted about how much she deserves the second chance she was thrust into, yet supremely confident in her own abilities. Highly empathetic towards the Tardigrade, yet unhesitant and unapologetic in manipulating Saru into being a walking danger meter. There’s clearly major unresolved trauma there, and I’d like to see this person develop more naturally from here. She should have her redemption, but she’ll need to earn it: not through one grand gesture of genocide refusal, but by demonstrating over time that she is dealing with her demons, and really has learned from the disaster at the binaries.
Speaking of the most important people on the ship, Stamets is chief among them. He has neither the desire nor the mentality to be a warrior, and yet he serves an irreplaceable and absolutely critical role in what has clearly become a ship of war. He’s a jerk when we first meet him, but his military necessitated chance to get close and personal with his research shows us a softer side, and likely changed him in ways that we’re just starting to see develop. Culber is still mostly one-note, but as a couple they play very well off each other.
Saru has a decidedly alien mentality for a military officer, but is clearly good at what he does. He is both thoughtful and candid about his past and present conflicts with Burnham, and his stint as acting captain in Choose Your Pain showed considerable growth. I want to see more of this guy learning to command (and I will get some, if less than I’d like).
Tilly is an absolute delight. She has her share of minor and harmless tics, babbling when she’s nervous and occasionally blurting things out when excited, and she’s vulnerable to getting flustered… but can still pull herself together and do what must be done. She shows an impressive level of emotional intelligence in her interactions with Burnham and Stamets, and she also has the awareness and confidence to identify what she wants in life, and fight for it. That’s an incredibly endearing combination, and makes her the emotional heart of the show. Give me more, much more, of Burnham mentoring Tilly up to an eventual captaincy. Maybe Tilly could only reasonably work her way to full Lieutenant or Lieutenant Commander over the course of a seven season show, but that would be plenty: I’m not here to see four pips, I’m here to see believable growth in an already sympathetic character.
Lorca and Tyler I’ll be touching on later.
(Continued in the comments…)
It’s clear that the Lorca reveal was planned out at some level, and there are mixed claims that Jason Isaacs wouldn’t have taken the role otherwise. But I’m not even convinced the Lorca reveal was part of whatever original version of the script they wound up using, and very skeptical that the whole thing would have fallen apart without it.
The overwhelming majority of what Lorca does, and what other people do in response to him, works just fine if taken straight up as a mix of extreme pragmatism and PTSD. The part that really goes out the window is his very strange “bring her back, or don’t come back at all” order to Tyler in Lethe. There needs to be some pressure on Tyler to add more stakes to the character conflict inside the shuttle, but I don’t think Lorca’s very strange command was necessary to create that.
For example, watching Lorca cold reading Cornwall makes for a compelling wrinkle on the second viewing, but I feel like my first watch read - that Lorca wasn’t cold reading, but otherwise has exactly the same motives in preventing an old friend from realizing that he isn’t really the same person after the loss of the Buran - is every bit as compelling on subsequent viewings. I don’t think the scene would be made any weaker if that was all there was to it, without this Lorca being a dimensional interloper. Frankly, I’ve been mentally treating it as if this was all there was to it, because I know going in I’m not going to bother with the MU stuff and I find misguided PTSD Lorca to be far more compelling.
The final episode of this sequence does start to unravel a little more than the others if you change where it’s ultimately going, but that’s expected. I personally can take on faith that they could have progressed from there in a different direction which ultimately still worked very well with the setting and characters they had established.
Of course you can watch it and it mostly makes sense from a PTSD/pragmatism perspective – that’s how they structured it so that it would reward rewatching.