Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 31

What a mixed bag.

The first half of the season is mostly stand-alone episodes, vaguely linked by plot tokens in the form of faster-than-light signals from a winged being they dub the “red angel.” And those are the ones I liked best: Investigating a dark matter asteroid and finding the survivors of a ship thought lost during the war, with only one crew member responsive. Finding a small population of humans who were transplanted across the galaxy during World War III, and actually threading the line between interfering with a pre-warp culture and letting some of them know that yes, Earth survived and is thriving. Exploring what else lives in the ecosystem formed by the mycelial network*.

But after a while they start getting way too cavalier about changing the fates of entire planets without thinking the consequences through, doing things because the plot requires it, or because it would be more dramatic (regardless of whether it makes sense for the character to do it) and generally handing out idiot balls left and right.

Also: how big is Section 31, anyway?

Characterization

One of the things that gets better, though, is the Sarek/Amanda/Spock/Michael family relationship, both present-day and in flashbacks to Spock and Michael’s childhood on Vulcan. (And we get to see other biomes on Vulcan than just red-rock desert!) The season starts out with them dancing around some HORRIBLE SECRET™ of Michael’s, but once that’s out in the open (to the audience) and the two of them start having to work together, it’s interesting to watch them as they start dealing with their past and finally develop a rapport again.

Spock himself feels just a little bit off, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. Partly it’s the voice. (Same with Sarek, actually.) But I think it’s also because Ethan Peck isn’t as intense as Leonard Nimoy (or Zachary Quinto) when Spock is just being himself. Then again, he is recovering from trauma at that point, reevaluating how he wants to balance his human and Vulcan sides, and technically on vacation rather than active duty, so a bit of uncertainty makes sense. I haven’t picked up Strange New Worlds yet, but I’m curious to see how his portrayal carries over.

Captain Pike is an incredible contrast to Captain Lorca from season one, coming onto a ship where…let’s just say everyone starts out with trust issues. And they managed to keep Georgiou around, in a way that Michelle Yeoh is clearly having fun with.

It was nice to get to know the other crew some more. Saru is still my favorite of the
second-level main characters. Even the third-level characters get a little more attention this time through, though in one case it’s a bit of too little, too late. And while we don’t see a lot of her, Reno is a great addition to the cast as someone who just cuts through the BS and calls things as she sees them.

Finale

As for the finale… The first half is tedious and all the worst aspects of this season are on display, plus an annoying display of two-dimensional thinking (on the parts of the characters, the writers, and the visual effects team) in a four-dimensional story.

Though let me say, once you get to see inside the Enterprise, they’ve done a great job of updating the aesthetics of the sets and costumes so it looks high-tech to modern audiences and still looks like the same ship we saw in the original show.

The second half actually moves really well and is (mostly) a satisfying conclusion, though one of the major dramatic threads in the battle just doesn’t make sense (apparently their blast doors are really strong). But the epilogue goes way further than necessary in explaining away why we never heard of Spock’s sister or the spore drive before. All you need to say is that Spock never mentioned Michael on camera and no one is known to have ever found another giant space tardigrade. Done.

The weird thing about reviewing Discovery is that I feel like I need to avoid revealing spoilers. That’s not something I’m used to with Star Trek, but there are so many twists in the first season, and it’s a continuous story where the twists make a difference.

Essentially it’s Star Trek with the pacing of Farscape, then tightening the season to feature only the arc episodes. The first two episodes set the story in motion, and then it jumps forward to pick up with the Discovery itself and its mission. It’s almost frenetic, and things change drastically over the course of the show. Edited to add: The Klingon tomb ship interiors really remind me of Moya!

Season one is focused on the Federation-Klingon war, ten years before the original show, and while they do get into cool science-fiction ideas, they’re still seen through that lens. And they do pull some interesting variations on time loops, hive-mind planets, etc. Even the younger, more dangerous Harcourt Fenton Mudd is seen in the context of the war and how it impacts civilians.

It’s also very much built around Michael Burnham and her efforts to redeem herself for her part in the events of the first two episodes. (Sonequa Martin-Green is really good at showing the changes from cold-and-logical to depressed to slowly rebuilding herself as a whole person.) But it also means that we don’t get to know the other characters as well as we would in a more fully-ensemble show. (Saru is one of the stand-outs, and shows a lot of growth between his first and second stints as acting captain when Lorca is off-ship.)

The spore drive is way over-powered. But it’s also a really interesting idea with a lot of possibilities. They strike a balance by establishing limits on how it can be used, explaining why they don’t use it all the time, and why it hasn’t become standard transportation by the time of the original series.

The second half of the season takes a swerve and a deep dive into some other concepts from the original series…and throws several twists that ride the line between “whoa, that was set up better than I thought” and “that makes no sense whatsoever.” They work if you willfully ignore some of the implied logistics and just go with it.

Unfortunately the finale wraps things up way too…not easily, but too simply. It’s the kind of resolution that you can see how easily it would unravel.

Continuity Notes

I didn’t have a problem with Burnham being retroactively established as Spock’s foster sister. If anything, it makes more sense to me than Sybok in Star Trek V. So she never came up on camera before. Fine. And while the fact that she’s closer to Sarek than Spock seemed weird at first, there was already a years-long rift between Spock and his father, so this fits right in.

The Klingon redesign took some getting used to, but after a few episodes I kind of went with it. At some point it occurred to me that if you just put hair on them, they’d look a bit more like the movie/TNG Klingons. Which is kind of funny, because they end up doing that in season 2.

I read Quantum Night when it was new, back in early 2016. And while a key part of the premise doesn’t add up, I keep thinking back to it.

It links human cruelty, psychopathy, and mob behavior to the nature of consciousness and quantum entanglement, mostly focusing on the main characters but playing out against a global crisis brought on by a rising tide of xenophobia.

There’s an ultra-conservative US President who makes grandiose statements. A rising trend of anti-immigrant murders. A war launched by Putin.

Through all this, the main characters are investigating their own dark pasts, trying to figure out what caused them to change for the better… and ultimately, can we reboot humanity?

Spoilers (Concept)

The idea of consciousness being a 2-bit quantum state – 00=unconscious, 01=flocking behavior, 10=psychopath, 11=full consciousness with a conscience – is intriguing, and works for the sake of the story, but…

1. It seems to me that flocking mechanics can’t explain the wide range of human behavior, especially for 4/7 of the world’s population.
2. While “sheeple” isn’t used in the book (as far as I remember), it’s a premise that even the non-psychopaths of the world could use to justify treating people like animals, since, well, chances are they’re not really conscious people, right?

I read this when it was new, and I had a child in preschool. It was very good. And I never, ever want to read it again.

Not that I have a reason to. It’s already seared into my memory.

There’s a zombie outbreak in an elementary school, a cascading failure of one preventative measure after another, and it follows how one teacher manages to get some of her students out alive. At a terrible cost.

It’s an extended metaphor for school shootings, but years later, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools reopened with children entering the campus one at a time after a health screening (temperature checks, not blood tests), sanitizing everything…and then I saw a picture of a classroom with individual transparent barriers around each desk. And it’s worked about as well, though at least Covid doesn’t turn its victims into mindless killing machines. That’s what cable news and social media are for.

An enjoyable tale of first contact, colonialism, environmental stewardship, corporate greed vs. ethics, and most importantly, who counts as “people” – all wrapped up around a cute, inquisitive, furry species encountered by humans on what they thought was an uninhabited planet, threatening to upend the status of the humans’ established mining colony.

It’s a worthy classic: engaging aliens, big themes and a high-stakes struggle. But it’s also very clearly of its time (1962). Everyone smokes and drinks highballs (in space!), there’s only one woman of consequence, and it’s much heavier on plot than characterization, which is mostly flat. There’s a twist near the end that feels a bit like a deus ex machina because some of the most important work has been going on off-page. Though I imagine it wouldn’t have bothered me if I’d read it when I was ten instead of as an adult.

A Fuzzy Summary

It starts out simple: A grizzled space prospector encounters a creature he nicknames “Little Fuzzy,” and quickly comes to realize that his new friend is more than an animal. As the fuzzies explore his settlement, everyone from biologists and psychologists to sherrif’s deputies is captivated by their antics, and debating whether they really are a newly-discovered sapient species.

Just one problem: It’s a company planet, an established mining colony where the corporation has free reign…on the condition that the planet is uninhabited. If the fuzzies are animals, the company can keep exploiting the planet. If they’re people, the charter is revoked. And the company’s leaders will do anything up to and including genocide to stop that from happening. As long as they can manage the public relations.

What ensues is a struggle between honesty and psy-ops, a fight for public opinion, kidnappings, escapes, and finally a trial to determine the fate of a species and a world.

Notes