Star Trek: Discovery 1.1: Klingons and Hitchcock

Star Trek: Discovery debuted on CBS tonight.  Alas, it won't be there long - in fact, after this first episode, viewers will need to pay for CBS All-Access to continue watching this latest Star Trek series.

Which is a shame, because the first episode has a lot of promise.  It takes place a few years before the original Star Trek - aka Star Trek: TOS - and so far has at least one familiar character, Sarek (well-played by James Frain) whom we got to see, a little older, in TOS, and even older in some subsequent movies, etc.

Discovery also has a feisty #1 - Michael Burnham (a woman, well played with style and spunk by Sonequa Martin-Green), a human woman, to be more precise, who was raised by Vulcans.  She thus combines of the best of both species, for reasons different from Spock, but also governed by logic on top of emotions, but much more in play than Spock's.  In a decisive moment, she gives the Captain a Vulcan nerve pinch to knock her out, when she (the Captain) is not willing to listen to reason regarding an imminent Klingon threat.  That's what I meant by feisty.

And the Klingons are indeed a threat, emerging as the full-bodied danger we saw so well in TOS. But the Federation is not yet aware of this, so we're set in a tense Hitchcockian suspense rather than surprise mode.  (Hitchcock thought it was better movie-making to show people on a bus when we the viewers know a bomb is ticking away - suspense - than the surprise of a bomb shocking us with an out-of-the-blue explosion.)  We viewers in 2017 know what threats to humans the Klingons will soon pose, so Discovery is well positioned just on that verge.

Will I subscribe to All-Access so I can continue to watch this series?  My wife and I were tempted with The Good Fight, but decided that Netflix and Amazon Prime were enough great streaming to pay for. I'm a little more interested in this new Star Trek, but hey, we're still inveterate cheapskates, and we just paid plenty for great Paul McCartney tickets at the Nassau Coliseum.

So I can't tell you I'll see you next week here with another review - but, maybe, someday, if this new series shows up streaming somewhere else.  Or if someone in Hollywood picks up my novel below.


a different kind of space travel