5 More Reasons Star Trek: Discovery is a Total Dumpster Fire

And the Two Characters who Totally Kick A$$.
By Michael Isenberg.

CONTAINS SPOILERS

In my previous post, I spelled out 5 reasons that Star Trek: Discovery is a total dumpster fire. Sadly, that is not enough to adequately show what a pathetic joke, what a sad excuse for a series STD really is. Here then are…

5 More Reasons Star Trek: Discovery is a Total Dumpster Fire

5. Plagiarizing The Original Series (TOS). Badly. STD takes place about ten years before Kirk and Spock set out on their five year mission in the original Star Trek, and so we run into numerous younger versions of TOS characters. Alas, they’re not the same people we know and love. Which is guaranteed to piss off fans of the original. Mr. Spock (Ethan Peck), so cool and rational in the original, believes himself to be insane and checks into an asylum. His father Sarek (James Frain), whose whole thing in the original was that he objected to his son serving in the human-led Starfleet, rather than the Vulcan Science Academy on their home planet, has now made it his mission in life to more closely integrate human and Vulcan institutions. The original Captain Pike was a rugged-looking, buck-stops-here kind of guy. There’s a key scene in the original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage” where the ship's doctor makes Pike a drink to get him talking, and Pike confesses how stressful it is to be the one who always has to make the life and death decisions. But he makes them anyway, despite the stress, and that’s what makes him an intriguing and heroic character. But the new and improved Chris Pike (Anson Mount) is spared any stress over decisions, thanks to his habit of almost always just doing whatever his crew suggests. He looks pretty in the uniform though. As for Harry Mudd, who was a comical character in the original, now he’s a psychopathic killer, despite being played by a talented comedian, Rainn Wilson.

I’m not sure if the problem is that the writers don’t understand these characters, or just don’t care. Either way, they want to have their cake and eat it to—to profit from the warm feelings that audiences have toward them (Spock and Pike feature prominently in Discovery’s advertising), without having to be faithful to what makes them tick. They remind me of the hack architects in The Fountainhead whose excuse for taking over the work of a better architect and ruining it is “We want to express our individuality too.”

4. Lens Flares. An aspect of recent Star Trek cinematography which is utterly moronic. Lens flares serve no purpose whatsoever. They don’t evoke any particular emotional response in the viewer other than annoyance. They make it look like the cameraman was a complete incompetent. The only reason they appear is because J.J. Abrams—noted killer of the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises—“fell in love with how it looked” and thought it would be “fun” to put 721 of them into the 2009 Star Trek movie reboot (someone counted). There are numerous Star Trek lens flare montages available on YouTube, but the one near the end of the Honest Trailers video has the absolutely best music.

The heinous practice has now carried over from movies to TV. Seriously. Just stop.

3. Ensign Tilly. There was a discipline and professionalism about the original Star Trek. Coming as it did during the Apollo era, it was a product of a time when serious-looking engineers in white shirts were glued to the monitors at Mission Control. The Enterprise crew spent years getting to where they were. They drilled for battle, and when they didn’t perform well enough, they drilled again. When on duty, they were focused on their tasks. Those who couldn’t hack it were immediately relieved from their stations, and someone else was standing by to step in. Sure, there was small talk on the bridge, but it was usually confined to the quiet moments, part of the pacing, the calm before the storm. And characters had personal crises, but these were integral to the plot, not a distraction while some necessary question of the episode be then to be considered. The chain of command was respected. There were exceptions, of course. Sometimes orders were disobeyed. But when they were, it was a big deal, not just another Friday. The offenders, especially when it was Spock, had thought things through and expected there to be consequences for their insubordination.

Then The Next Generation came along, put a child on the bridge, and installed a holodeck so that the crew could get in touch with their feelings before facing the enemy, and Star Trek was never the same again.

With Star Trek: Discovery, professionalism in the Federation continues its downward spiral (mirroring real life). And the poster child for lack of professionalism is without a doubt, the Wesley of the Discovery, Ens. Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman). A brilliant engineer, to be sure, Tilly is very young (she’s still a cadet when we first meet her), out of shape (despite that one time she was made to do some PT by Commander Burnham, the central character in the series, played by Sonequa Martin-Green), and possessed of a bubbly personality which no doubt made her the delight of her middle school, but is sadly out of place in the engineering section of a starship. She always enters a room talking, usually about something irrelevant, usually herself. She can’t even set up a date between her colleagues without digressing into the kind of guys she likes. She always tells us what she’s feeling. Which brings me to…

2. Feelings. Everybody tells us what they’re feeling all the time. Seriously, I lost count of the number of instances where crew members are in the middle of some life and death crisis, the clock is ticking, and they just stop to discuss their feelings and relationships, ignoring the increasingly desperate pleas over the PA system for them to report to the bridge. There’s that lack of professionalism again. One time they even stop in the middle of a ticking clock scenario to have a dance lesson while they talk about their feelings and relationships. C’mon guys—Harry Mudd is getting closer to take control of the ship with each passing minute. You might want to stop talking about your feelings and get on that.

Seriously though, I don’t like these people well enough to be that invested in their feelings, or who’s dating whom. Especially when they cram it down my throat like this.

Actually that’s not completely true. Some members of the crew I don’t know well enough to like or dislike. For example the cyborg Lt. Cdr. Airiam (Sara Mitch/Hannah Cheesman. Did anyone even notice they changed actresses midstream?). Sure she looked cool, but that was the extent of her character development. Mostly she was just sort of there. Until the episode “Project Daedalus,” in which she sacrifices herself to prevent an evil A.I. from getting access to a strategic database that is essential to its plans to destroy mankind. It’s a heroic and beautiful ending for the character. Or at least, it would have been if we knew anything about her. The attempt to cram in a back story for her in her final episode was too little, too late. The bond between character and viewer has to develop over time.

Part of the reason the supporting cast is so criminally underused is that the main character, Cdr. Burnham, sucks all the air out of the room. Which brings me to...

The Number One Reason Star Trek Discovery is a Total Dumpster Fire…Commander Michael Burnham. Cdr. Burnham is like a stereotype of a millennial, except that no real millennial quite comes up to her insufferable level of entitlement, virtue signaling, and general sense that, because she’s special, she’s above the rules made for lesser humans. Her range of emotions varies from indignant that someone isn’t bowing to her specialness to disappointment that they’re not as virtuous as she is. She's so special that she perpetually demands to be the One who saves the Discovery by getting assigned to the Away Team, piloting the thruster suit through that particularly dangerous asteroid field, and being told all the secrets. The last one, while common with entitled characters in movies and on TV, is a pet peeve of mine: anyone cleared to handle secrets in real life is trained to understand concepts like compartmentalization and need to know.

Cdr. Burnham thinks so highly of herself that in one episode, as the Klingons are about to capture the Discovery, with its cutting-edge war-winning mushroom drive, she seriously suggests offering them her instead.

In the pilot episode, which takes place on the USS Shenzhou, Cdr. Burnham and Capt. Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) have a dispute as to how to respond to the presence of Klingons in Federation Space. When Burnham doesn’t get her way, she physically attacks her commanding officer and attempts a mutiny. The mutiny is short-lived thanks to Georgiou’s quick recovery, and Burnham is court martialed and sentenced to life in prison at the end of Episode 2.

Of course you know what happens next. She beats the rap because of some bulls--t. Starfleet realizes that Burnham was right all along and far too special to allow her amazing skills to remain untapped during wartime. Her release is engineered by Capt. Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) who basically conscripts Burnham back into Starfleet. IMHO, he should have left her to rot in the slammer. Not only is her sentence richly deserved—mutiny is a pretty damn serious offense—but this dumpster fire of a series would have been extinguished after two episodes. It would have been a merciful ending to the thing.

*        *       *

Despite everything I’ve said, Star Trek: Discovery is not completely without merit. The settings and visuals have a realism to them that goes far beyond anything we’ve seen previously in a Star Trek series. There’s the occasional clever plot twist, and some of the minor characters seem intriguing. Or at least they would be if they could get out of Cdr. Burnham’s shadow. Lt. Detmer (Emily Coutts) stands out in this regard. And Rebecca Romijn admirably fills Majel Barret’s space boots as the hyper-competent “Number One” from the original Star Trek pilot. There are even a couple major characters worth mentioning. Which, as promised, brings me to…

The Two Characters who Totally Kick A$$

Captain Lorca and Captain Georgiou.

Despite their inexplicable attachment to Michael Burnham, they’re both consummate professionals and hardened warriors. They know their business, are able to make the tough decisions, and expect their subordinates to respect the chain of command.

Capt. Lorca’s familiarity with the service records of the people under his command is truly impressive, and he is so dedicated to his profession of warrior that it spills over to his hobby—he has a secret stash of not entirely legal weapons on board the Discovery.

As for Capt. Georgiou, it’s Michelle Yeoh. Need I say more?

They’re also the only two characters who have a halfway decent sense of humor. My favorite Lorca line: “I was just thinking about everyone who's ever said that victory felt empty when it was attained. What a bunch of idiots they were.” Well, that and the time he told Burnham, “You think I care what your preferences are?”

Georgiou doesn’t need quite so many words to make me laugh. During a fluffy bonding scene between two other characters over how special their mothers were, Georgiou merely rolls her eyes and says “Yech.” Hey, we were all thinking it.

But here’s the twist: they’re both imposters. The real Lorca and Georgiou are dead and they’ve been replaced by their doppelgangers from the evil parallel universe that first appeared in the TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror.”

When the only main characters I respect are, in the minds of the writers, supposed to be evil, I think that speaks for itself.

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): YouTube, CBS, Memory Alpha, TrekMovie.com, Vanity Fair, Tumblr, Twitter/@Zydebs, NCC 1031.com

5 Reasons Star Trek: Discovery is a Total Dumpster Fire

It's every bit as bad as you heard.
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.

Not always though. Every once in a while something comes along which is so goddamn awful that all the negative things we heard about it turn out to be true, and then some. Star Trek: Discovery is a case in point.

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 Reasons Star Trek: Discovery is a Total Dumpster Fire

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.

You heard right. The USS Discovery runs on the same power source as the Super Mario Brothers.

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.

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