Star Trek Discovery: Episode 4 – Review (for noobs)
- Adam Tye
- Oct 9, 2017
- 4 min read
The Butcher’s Knife cares not for the Lamb’s Cry
Energise! No seriously, someone please breathe life into this show, quickly.
★★
Read my review of Episodes 1,2 and 3 here.
Hooray everyone – the Klingons are back. Remember when I said they were my favourite part of the prologue? Boy, I’ve sure missed their stiff politics and decade-spanning line delivery. Huzzah.
Is there any point in recapping this episode? Did anything important really happen? The monster on the ship turns out not to be a monster and can help them teleport anywhere. Aside from that, Voq is marooned, but not before he gets his Klingon flirt on and I question who decided that this is how people want to spend forty minutes of their time.
Praise where praise is due, however: ST:D continues to stick to a vaguely episodic structure instead of diving right into Stranger Things territory and splitting a movie into eight one-hour chunks. Good move, ST:D – we don’t know who these characters are yet and an episode-by-episode approach to storytelling can help maximize the amount of characterization we can achieve in a relatively short amount of ti-
Wait, what’s that? It was still super boring and I still barely know about 80% of the cast. Well, that is a pickle.
Pickling up the pickle to ever pickling levels of pickle is my realisation that Michael Burnham is actually quite a rubbish main character. Vulcans are already pretty buttoned up in the emotion department, which means you need a deft writing hand to wring any empathy out of the audience towards them, but when you’ve got one that’s also bearing self-hatred and a general coldness towards others, there’s not really much of a window for me to climb through, here. It’s just additional reasoning as to why we needed the prologue, which makes me wonder all the harder whether or not most of this show is a good idea. Her next gradual step towards self-redemption kind of works on paper but is dramatically undone by how boring she is as a character, whilst the final telescope moment is undermined by the complete lack of shits I give about Michelle Yeoh’s character.
This alone offers a compelling enough case for why the show needs to jettison its interest in Burnham and start fleshing out the rest of the main cast, stat. Jason Isaacs character seems to be being painted in less vague terms and more ‘this guy will be war-obsessed and probably die’ terms which is…progress, I guess. But we’re running low on other reasons to care. Sylvia remains Discovery’s best chance for an appealing personality and I’m wondering why the show hasn’t given her at least a tiny bit more to do so far.
Oh and I have to at least mention the commander sent to assist Burnham in investigating the monster. I spied the character last week as potentially awful, but was surprised at how quickly that potential was fulfilled. She gets a super redundant death that serves not very much at all other than to artificially raise the stakes even though they didn’t need raising. I’m sort of glad the character won’t be sticking around, but it sucks that I have that reaction. I feel sorry for the actress – you make it all the way to a speaking role in Star Trek and then you’re given a crappy character that is killed off after two episodes.
As for the Klingons, I can’t even be bothered to talk about them. From now on, assume I hated them if I don’t bring them up.
Philosophy corner!
The episode does give us a glimpse of the kind of trajectory that the show as a whole might be taking. I’ve grimaced before at the emphasis on war in a Star Trek show, but at least now I’m getting more of a sense that this oxymoronic sensation might be something that ST:D is going to draw its central conflict from, rather than being the result of a total misunderstanding of Star Trek’s principles. The juxtaposition of the increasingly war-bent captain with the more peaceful, investigative approach of Burnham indicates the way the show is willing to place exploration over conflict. Still not clear idea on how Isaacs’ moral relativism might be squared with or against Spock’s Utilitarian viewpoint, though, for what it’s worth, my guess is that it will be treated as the redeeming element of the captain by the other characters. Even if this war vs. exploration framing will end up powering Discovery, I wonder whether the show has already committed a meta-cock up in having the format of the show be, so far, predominantly a conflict-ridden, sci-fi war-drama. If the show resolves this war plotline, will it transition to exploratory sci-fi more in the vein of TOS? Or will it have to generate a new conflict to focus on?
All this makes it seem as though Episode 4 reverses a lot of the goodwill that was built up by Episode 3, which I wouldn’t strictly agree with. But it certainly doesn’t capitalise upon that goodwill and by focusing on the weaker elements of the show so far, it showed how the troubles of the prologue aren’t entirely in the rear-view mirror. I’m sure the other elements will get their due as the episodes go by, but given the amount of heft already afforded to the show’s Burnham/Klingon fixation, I worry that Discovery has already settled on its primary focus and that any deviations will end up being too little, too late.
Other things:
I so wish this show had been exploratory instead of following the same format as every other drama. There's nothing this show is doing that some other show elsewhere is doing better and if I can reach this kind of conclusion having seen only one episode of TOS, then you can bet a decent chunk of others are going to notice as well.
This episode more than previously, the CG looked like it was getting strained a bit too far, to the point where some parts looked almost Firefly-esque. I appreciate the ambition and don't particularly care too much (I'm the guy that loves Doctor Who, remember?) but I wonder how close Discovery is to the point where its CG usage becomes garish.
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