Star Trek: Discovery 3: Fulfilling the Promise

Checking in with a review of Star Trek: Discovery season 3, which was on CBS All Access now Paramount+ nearly a year ago, but I just had a chance to binge-watch the past few days. 

The first 10 of its 13 episodes were a mix of good, ok, and very good.  The final three episodes were pure gold, with outstanding hand-to-hand combat, and some of the best personal stories and trials and tribulations in any Star Trek, of whatever vintage, on whatever kind of screen.

First, it was ingenuous to move the storyline in this season from before the start of Star Trek: The Original Series to further in the future than any other Star Trek narrative has been located.   I won't give away too much of the plot in this review, but I will say that although we've seen plenty of time travel in many a Star Trek season, the goal of Discovery in staying in this far future -- what it must do -- is original, unexpected, and sufficiently cosmic to motivate all the twists and turns and surprises in the story.

The continuing characters, especially Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Saru (Doug Jones), really come into their own.  And lots of memorable new characters this season, too.  My favorites were Booker (David Ajala), Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr), Osyraa (Janet Kidder), and Kovich (David Cronenberg -- yes!).   There was good integration of Vulcan and Romulus into the story, and a nice shout-out to "City on the Edge of Forever," with Paul Guilfoyle (CSI's Jim Brass) playing the Guardian of Forever.

I've come to realize -- and I may have said this is in an earlier review, but it's worth repeating -- that the Star Trek franchise is more than a superb one-of-a-kind series of television series and movies.  It's a blueprint for our future, a blueprint which is helping that future come into being, by being such a continuing inspiration.  Or, as I said my essay, The Missing Orientation, published late last year, "my lifelong commitment to doing what I could via writing and speaking to help lift our species off this planet was baked in for life by Star Trek in the mid-1960s."

The third season of Star Trek: Discovery amply continues that inspiration.  I'll be back here with a review of the fourth season, which will start on Paramount+ on November 18, and everything Star Trek that comes after.

See also Star Trek: Discovery 2: Tour de Force Story and Characters ... Discovering Star Trek: Discovery ... Star Trek: Picard: Non-Pareil

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