“In a very real sense, we are all aliens on a strange planet. We spend most of our lives reaching out and trying to communicate. If during our whole lifetime, we could reach out and really communicate with just two people. We are all indeed very fortunate.”
– Gene Roddenberry
I should confess from the beginning that I am a very dedicated Star Trek fan. I’m not a Trekkie or a Trekker; I’m a fan. I have often allowed my fan status to cause me to embrace the franchise even when it wasn’t necessarily so good. As a young 15-year-old kid I attended the first 10:00 AM showing of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with a handful of friends on the opening day. We stayed through six showings and left sometime after midnight the following day, occupying the front row center and subsisting off the day’s more limited concession offerings. Basically candy, popcorn and soda. Little has changed except for the lack of responsibilities that would allow me to spend 14 hours watching a single film over and over again. I’m still reluctant to dismiss anything Star Trek, but that’s nearly what happened when I watched the first season of Star Trek: Discovery.
The series originally happened approximately a decade before James T. Kirk becomes captain of the Enterprise. That means the show exists in a world that should be somewhat familiar to me. It wasn’t. It’s hard to imagine that in just 10 years technology would take a significant step backward, and uniforms and ship designs would undergo such a drastic change. Oh, and that Starfleet Command would move from Paris to San Fran. But all of this is the work of Alex Kurtzman. And we all know that he has a superpower. He has the ability to take a beloved franchise and run it straight into the ground at warp speed. But why is he always messing with things that I love? His Dark Universe over at Universal destroyed the hopes of seeing so many of my favorite Universal classic monsters once again reunited on the big screen. Fortunately, he was fired from that task after the abysmal Tom Cruise The Mummy failed in every way a film could fail. Thanks for that, Alex. Now you won’t be happy until you kill Star Trek.
Eventually the series started to show some promise. Anson Mount joined as Captain Pike and teased what will be its own series Strange New Worlds, about to enter its third season. That’s where most of my Trek hopes are at the moment. It is a truly quality version of Star Trek. But there have been efforts to bring Discovery out of the continuity nightmare that it had been from the start. The technology just didn’t match, and there are so many things that would have gotten mentioned back in the days of Kirk and his gang. I think even Kurtzman eventually realized that he had painted himself and the franchise into such a corner that it was pretty much about to unravel. So in Season 2 the ship gets a bunch of information called the Sphere Data that it must somehow protect from falling into the wrong hands. Burnham (Martin-Green) comes up with the idea to send it all along with the ship into the future. By Season 3 she lands on a world 933 years into the future where she meets up with a new character named Book (Ajala). He’s something called a courier. In the future the Federation has broken up, and there is little organization. It’s a bit of a dark ages, because dilithium is rare. A century earlier an event called The Burn destroyed most of it along with most warp ships. It all just suddenly exploded, and that was a killing blow for Starfleet. The new fleet is run by Admiral Charles Vance, played by the more exciting recent regular, The Mummy’s Oded Fehr.
This was a great move for the series. It took them out of current Trek and gave them a place and story of their own. I find it far more interesting that we’re now exploring the Federation of the 30th century. This could have actually been a lot of fun. Oh, but for want of a nail…
Discovery has finally shot and aired its final season. There are 10 episodes, and they are now out on Blu-ray from CBS Home Entertainment as well as available on Paramount +. If you aren’t a streamer, this is your chance to bid a fond farewell or a good-riddance to Star Trek: Discovery.
The final season begins with the discovery of an 800-year-old Romulan ship and an interesting diary. The diary was left by a Romulan commander who once joined Captain Picard and his crew on a mysterious quest. The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode was called The Chase, and it’s found in the sixth season. This whole season of Discovery is a sequel, of sorts, to that episode. I watched it in preparation, and I’m not sure if it was necessary or not. I’m going to say it can’t hurt. So the entire season is a bit like the National Treasure films. They cross the galaxy looking for five clues that will lead them to the technology of the progenitors, a race who once seeded all other life in the galaxy, something Picard discovered back in his day. But now there are clues, and each episode tells the story of the ship searching for the clues and solving the riddle that each one presents. Holy Star Trek, Batman.
Of course, no quest is really worthwhile unless you’re in a race with someone else to get to the answer. It’s the old “can’t let this fall into the wrong hands”, and naturally that’s exactly what’s going to happen … for a time. In this case the bad guys are human Moll Revel, played by Eve Harlow, and La’k, a Breen, played by Elias Toufexis. They have an interesting love story that we get to see in flashbacks for an episode, and they are now running from the Breen. Now these are super bad guys who will rip through anyone and anything that gets in their way, including Discovery. The series makes them somewhat sympathetic, but they leave a lot of carnage in their wake.
The cast is too large to do any justice here. You can check back on our previous seasons of reviews to learn more about the characters. The season tries to play like a Star Trek Greatest Hits album. You’ll get a connection with the Mirror Universe, time bubbles, which offers us a chance to see that old first season crew one more time. There are familiar planets like Trill and Betazed, a version of Enterprise, wormholes, and let’s not forget that oldie but a goodie “have to fix an ancient device that the planet’s people think has to do with gods” and the like. Yeah, that one’s been played a few times, hasn’t it? We get to see that there are Data copies in the galaxy now with that same skin tone and glazed eyes. Everything but Brent Spiner himself.
All of this is not enough to salvage this show. I really haven’t liked it, and the Great Bird of the Galaxy knows how hard I tried. It starts with the main character. Sonequa-Martin-Green is a pretty good actress. She was great in The Walking Dead. But there just isn’t much she can do with the sheer arrogance of Burnham. The moral superiority she oozes in in the script, and she really had no choice. Even 1000 years in the future with incredible tech and smartest minds, she’s still smarter than all of them. She figures it all out before anyone else can even snap their fingers. It’s elitist, and it’s damn annoying. Roddenberry was great at bringing social messages to the series. He did it through metaphor and sheer example. Burnham preaches, and no one really likes to be preached to. I’m glad Discovery is finally over. I tried, guys. Just couldn’t do it. I look forward to more years of Strange New Worlds and other shows. I still have hope that even Kurtzman won’t totally screw this up.
You get all 10 episodes on four discs. There are features on the various production teams, on the characters and f/x and director Olatunde Osujanmi. There is the usual season wrap-up and a gag reel. All good things must come to an end. The same is true for the bad and the ugly. Decide for yourself where this one belongs. For me I’m glad it’s over. “Locking something away and moving on are two different things.”
