by Michael Isenberg.
CONTAINS SPOILERS
In his first appearance on Star Trek: Discovery, Capt. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) says, “Sometimes it's wise to keep our expectations low, Commander. That way we're never disappointed.” It’s a philosophy to which I’ve long subscribed. When we have low expectations, not only are we never disappointed, but we’re usually pleasantly surprised. Usually.
I had little interest in watching the series when it premiered. Audiences rated it significantly lower than critics did (it’s currently 42% vs. 83%) on Rotten Tomatoes, never a good sign. The buzz I was getting from people who had seen the early episodes was that it was “dreck” which, like so much of what comes out of Hollywood these days, puts more effort into being politically correct and diverse than into telling a good story. “STD” was one of the nicer things they called it. Above all, it just wasn’t Star Trek. If I wanted to see Star Trek, they said, go watch The Orville.
In short, Discovery didn’t seem worth the price of a subscription to CBS All Access.
But Picard did, so this January I finally signed up. I thought Picard started strong, but fell apart around episode seven—right when Riker and Troi showed up. In any case, having completed the series, I still had some time on my subscription, not to mention time on my hands thanks to the Apocalypse. So I gave Discovery a whirl.
It was crap.
To detail everything wrong with the series would take a lot more space than a blog entry, but to scratch surface at least, here are…
5. Mushroom Power. Putting the science in science fiction is an art. The technology has to be far enough beyond our present capability to capture the imagination, yet sufficiently rooted in existing scientific theory to be believable. The classic Star Trek warp drive is a beautiful example of doing it right. Faster than light travel is impossible in our current understanding of physics. But by grounding this fictional technology on warping space around the starship, a notion derived from the curved space-time of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the writers of the original series enabled the USS Enterprise to sail among the stars in a way that permitted the suspension of disbelief.
The USS Discovery runs on fungus.
The Season One captain, Gabriel Lorca, (Jason Isaacs) explains it in an early episode. “Mycelium spores,” he says. “Harmless. Harvested from the fungal species prototaxites stellaviatori, which we grow in our cultivation bay…Imagine a microscopic web that spans the entire cosmos. An intergalactic ecosystem. An infinite number of roads leading everywhere.”
Or as the inventor of the spore drive Lt. Stamets (Anthony Rapp; the character was named after real-life fungus scientist Paul Stamets) described it, the mycelium network is “the veins and muscles that hold our galaxy together.”
It might seem difficult to navigate a network of fungus spores that apparently exist in another dimension, but like they say on Pitch Meeting, super-easy, barely an inconvenience. Turns out a map is encoded in the DNA of tardigrades, those microscopic “water bears” that are all the rage, judging from their recent appearances on Family Guy, Ant Man and the Wasp, and now STD. So imagine the good fortune of the Discovery to come across a macroscopic tardigrade, roughly the size of a Sherman tank. Once they had that, it was a simple matter to inject some of its DNA into Lt. Stamets, so he could navigate the system.
Even the characters recognize how ridiculous this is. As Pike put it upon taking over as captain in Season Two, “If you're telling me that this ship can skip across the universe on a highway made of mushrooms, I kinda have to go on faith.”
4. Regular Science. Making futuristic science believable is only part of the job. A science fiction writer needs to get the regular science right as well. For obvious reasons, a disproportionate number of science nerds fill the audience, and they will notice if you get it wrong. Which suspends the suspension of disbelief.
Even the best of science fiction series slips up occasionally. The first time I ever watched Star Trek: TOS—it was the episode “Court Martial”—I suspected this series might be overrated when Kirk arranged a demonstration that involved amplifying the Enterprise’s audio sensors by a factor of “one to the fourth power.”
But I kept watching and eventually learned that this was just a rare miss where science was concerened. STD, in contrast routinely spits on science, tears it up, stomps on it with muddy shoes, and flushes it down the toilet. Stars are the wrong color for the type we’re told they are. Astronauts doing EVAs don’t follow the laws of motion. There seems to be no sense at all of the distances involved in space.
But perhaps most ridiculous of all is the Season 2 finale. The Discovery crew needs to open a wormhole to a point 950 years in the future. But they don’t know how to charge their “time crystal.” So they bring in a 17-year-old girl genius with an ice cream fetish to build a contraption that will get the job done. “I will need energy though,” she says. “Like Planck level.” Enough energy to “replicate the power of a supernova.” But that’s okay, because they have their magical spore drive, which, in addition to instantly transporting the ship instantaneously across the galaxy can also be used as a cell phone charger via “E equals m c squared stuff.” “I get to make a supernova!” Girl Genius exults. “Today rocks.”
Sigh. Where to start.
The writers seem to have no sense at all for the spectacular magnitude of power produced by a supernova. The phenomenon outshines all the other stars in the galaxy combined, putting out about 1038 watts. The Discovery crew needs it for around an hour, which works out to 3.6x1041 joules. The Planck energy, in contrast, is 2.0x109 joules. Not that much really—about the amount of energy the average American household consumes in two weeks. So Girl Genius is off by a factor of about 1032. That’s a one with 32 zeroes after it.
So how do you get that much energy by “E equals m c squared stuff?” If you were to convert the entire mass of a starship to energy, about 3 million metric tons, consuming every deck plate, every bulkhead, and every square centimeter of the hull with 100% efficiency, you’d still only get 3x1026 joules. You’d have to repeat that with a quadrillion more starships to get the 1041 joules you need. Ordinarily that much energy would completely obliterate any equipment you use to channel it—but I guess that’s not a problem when the equipment is designed by Girl Genius. Because diversity, or something.
I got to wondering whether Star Trek: Discovery even had science consultants. IMDB only has one listed—the geophysicist Mika McKinnon—and only for a single episode. Not this one. Rather it was the episode in which Captain Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) plants a “hydro bomb” in a volcano on the Klingon home world of Q’onoS. If detonated, the bomb would entirely destroy the planet. Which brings me to…
3. The Season One Finale. The arc of Season One involves a war between the Klingons and the United Federation of Planets. Heading into the season finale, the Klingons are on the verge of victory. They have destroyed most of the Federation military capability, and their invasion fleet has entered our solar system and is poised to attack Earth.
The plan to destroy Q’onoS is a Hail Mary pass to shock the Klingons into believing that the price of continuing is just too high. But in the end, the insufferable do-gooders of the Federation don’t have the cojones to go through with it. “That’s not who we are,” says the show’s central character, CDR Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), channeling one of President Obama’s most preachy and nauseating expressions. Instead they give the detonator to a Klingon prisoner, L’Rell (Mary Chieffo), and let her go. Using the threat of destroying Q’onos, she stages a coup, makes herself Klingon chancellor, and ends hostilities.
There is no way in hell that plan would ever work.
The first problem is L’Rell herself. She’s a Klingon idealist, a disciple of the visionary T'Kuvma (Chris Obi) who started the war in the first place. Regarding the Federation, he taught,
They are coming. Atom by atom... They will coil around us. And take all that we are... There is one way to confront this threat. By reuniting the twenty-four warring houses of our own Empire. We have forgotten the unforgettable. The last to unify our tribes—Kahless. Together under one creed, remain Klingon. That is why we light our beacon this day. To assemble our people. To lock arms against those whose fatal greeting is "We come in peace."
L’Rell is a True Believer. The notion that she would turn her back on the ideology she holds dear, right when victory is all but assured, staggers the imagination. In her own words, a mere episode earlier, “Klingons have tasted your blood. Conquer us, or we will never relent.” Do the writers have any insight at all into their own characters?
But suppose L’Rell really would have a change of heart and do a 180, thanks to some incompetently written character arc. The rest of the Klingon Empire would never go along with it and abandon a war in which so much blood had been spilled. She’s obviously bluffing about destroying Q’onoS and killing billions of her fellow Klingons. Her opponents would inevitably call her bluff. If they don’t just assassinate her.
2. The Season 2 Finale. The main villain of Season 2 is “Control,” a military strategy A.I. that went rogue and set out to destroy mankind. In the finale, after fourteen episodes, considerable loss of life—and did I mention reproducing the power of supernova?—the combined Discovery and Enterprise crews finally defeat Control. Seriously? Fourteen episodes? Pathetic amateurs! You know how long it took Kirk to destroy an evil computer? Ninety seconds.
1. The Red Angel. Much of Season 2 revolves around the mysterious “Red Angel,” a time traveler with advanced technology who keeps showing up in critical moments to help out Discovery and its crew, especially Cdr. Burnham. About two thirds of the way through the season, the Big Reveal comes, and Burnham learns the true identity of the temporal seraph. So after we sat through ten entire episodes, we finally learn that the Red Angel is…her mom.
Now where have I seen something like that before?
There's more, but I've used up today's allotted space. So stay tuned for my next installment: 5 More Reasons Star Trek: Discovery is a Total Dumpster Fire.
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Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com
Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): Alien Tower, imgflip.com, Twitter/@DFowlerDesigner, VPUniverse |
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