Star Trek: Discovery: Season 2 Review - Part 1

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I vaguely remember mentioning that I wasn't going to be reviewing Star Trek: Discovery's second season, but I went and did it anyway. I can't help myself.

Nothing's been going exactly as I planned to be honest. I decided to nick the format from my Doctor Who review marathon from last year and cover a whole season of episodes in a page of micro-reviews to save myself a lot of work. Unfortunately my brain didn't cooperate and hundreds of words came spilling out as usual, and I realised that if I put all the text I'd written into one long article it would be one long article.

So I've split the season up into four parts instead, which is still considerably less than the 15 it could've been. Well, 19 actually, as this first part features tiny reviews for the four tiny Short Treks that came out before the season began. I'm not sure if Short Treks is technically a separate series or not, but the episodes have a similar title sequence, they feature Discovery characters, two are set on the ship itself and they've all got the same style. So I'm including them.

I actually wrote these reviews up right after watching each episode, with no knowledge about what was going to happen next beyond what was in the trailers, so I can promise genuine confusion and wrong guesses. This also means there'll be SPOILERS for each episode, and the Trek that precedes them, but I won't be spoiling what happens next. Because at the time I didn't know.

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I don't give out review scores, except for when I do, so here's a helpful guide to understanding what the numbers mean:

10	Only cowards say '10 is perfection and can never be reached', so my scale ends at 9.
9	The best two or three episodes from a series' entire run get this.
8	A really good story that I really enjoyed.
7	This would've been my average score for Discovery's first season.
6	A solid episode dragged down by flaws (or a mediocre episode with some great scenes).
5	I kept watching, so it must have been doing something right, but I wasn't all that entertained.
4	I may have been sketching things on my notepad after a certain point, but I was listening to everything.
3	Either I wasn't interested enough to pay much attention or it was annoying me.
2	I turned it off, and I wish I'd done it sooner.
1	As bad as the worst episode of 60s Doctor Who.

Short Treks
1-01	Runaway	5
I was fairly interested in this for the first five minutes or so, but once Tilly got her universal translator activated and the mysterious invader turned out to be a regular super-genius alien teenager that was just acting feral for the sake of a twist I found it hard to stay interested. It wasn't a bad idea to deal with Tilly's issues with her mother by having her try to help someone who's a lot like herself, but nothing about this alien character made a damn bit of sense to me. She's the twin sister of her planet, who invented a device before her 18th birthday that Federation science wouldn't come up with until 30 years later, and she's also the queen of her world? And she was running away because... people were trying to kill her family maybe? Or perhaps it was because they wanted to use her device for evil? I lost track because my brain was spinning. Anyway Tilly beamed her into empty space at the end so she's dead now and I can forget she ever existed... until the inevitable main series episode that ties into this. If I was going to rank every Discovery story so far, this would be right down at the bottom and it wouldn't be close. The ship's looking good through the new anamorphic lenses though. It's funny how Doctor Who made the shift from 16:9 to 2:1 in its latest season, and now Discovery's moved from 2:1 to 2.40:1. Maybe I should've included a 4:3 image for comparison, as that one on the top left doesn't even look widescreen to me anymore. I think this is a good place for both series to stop though, as if this wideness war continues we'll eventually be watching a thin strip of colour running across the centre of the screen. Unfortunately the budget of these Short Treks is clearly a little bit less than the average episode, because they apparently couldn't afford actors for this story. For the most part it was just Tilly and Po, all alone in an empty extra-wide frame, and it was weird.
1-02	Calypso	5
A lot of people really like this one and I can see why, as it's well produced and well written, and makes a lot more sense than the previous story. It's still a bit empty, with only two characters, but that was the point this time. It wouldn't have worked with more people on the ship. The problem I had with it, is that I didn't care about the story. I don't think it's due to any flaw in the script, it's just not a premise that has a lot of appeal to me. Though it didn't help that I had zero investment in the characters as they were both brand new, with no Discovery actors making an appearance this time. Also, there were two mysteries in the episode: who is the mysterious castaway and what happened to Discovery's crew, and we got absolutely zero information about the most interesting one, which left it very unsatisfying for me. Plus I'm not keen on the implication that the Federation's fallen apart or turned evil in the last thousand years with the mention of the V'Draysh. I've seen around 400 episodes of Starfleet heroes trying to do the right thing and keep the Federation intact and on the right path; I don't need a bloody Short Trek to kick the sandcastle over. Though for the most part this didn't even feel like a Discovery story, or a Star Trek story at all. If it hadn't been shot on the Discovery sets it could've been an episode of The Outer Limits or some other sci-fi anthology series. The writer, Michael Chabon, is going on to work on the new Captain Picard series and I'm not sure I'm more or less hyped for it after this. The guy can definitely write, but I still don't know if he can write Star Trek.
1-03	The Brightest Star	5
The problem I had with The Brightest Star, is that it felt like someone took the flashback scenes from a regular episode and edited them together. It looked suspiciously expensive compared to the first two Short Treks, with all the location filming and characters in alien makeup and wasn't exactly a story in its own right. I mean it told the tale of how Saru lived in a primitive culture, decided he wanted no part of their traditional alien abduction ceremony, found an alien device and figured out a way to send a message to friendlier aliens to get picked up, but only barely. There was no drama in this story, no meat to it; they just filmed a synopsis. It did fill in some blanks about Saru's life before Starfleet, showing his family and his planet, but I came away even more confused about him. Season one gave me the impression that Kelpiens had very good reasons to be on edge all the time and one of Saru's special skills is his understanding of the behaviour of predators, but it seems they only have a single real threat on their planet and it's one they surrender to willingly. So they were biologically determined for one purpose, to sense the coming of death, but they never get to do it as they're told when it's coming! Also that Ba'ul monument on the beach is clearly the Preserver obelisk from The Paradise Syndrome turned upside down.
1-04	The Escape Artist	7
This one was so much better than the other three Short Treks! Well, to me anyway. I mean it wasn't great, and I could've done without the disco music, but it featured Harry Mudd at his most Muddlike and... well that was basically it really, but it was enough. It's called The Escape Artist and we already know that Mudd got off that Klingon prison ship somehow, so the story's set up to make us think that his escape is a foregone conclusion and leaves us to wonder how he's going to get out of his predicament. In fact it even shows us flashbacks to all the other times he's managed to escape bounty hunters, revealing how he's got a set of lines he likes to go through, smoothly switching gears and trying another approach when his current tactic isn't effective. Then by the end of the episode he still hasn't escaped... because he was never captured. The flashbacks were probably mostly bullshit as well, showing the other robots running through their limited set of preprogrammed responses just to keep the captor busy mostly. The whole thing was a con on the audience, by a comic relief villain who's more cunning than he seems. But it was genuinely funny, so I'll let him off. My one problem with it (aside from the disco music) is that it's a bit of a coincidence that Harry Mudd would come across a supply of robots duplicates here and then a completely unrelated group of them a few years later in I, Mudd. But I can't really complain about that when Captain Kirk ran across godlike beings, Earthlike planets and evil computers all the time. Plus multiple robot duplicates. Another thing in its favour is that it looked like the most expensive of the four stories, featuring more new characters and locations than Discovery itself managed in a typical episode of its first season. But it wouldn't have worked without good writing, and it's got me looking forward to the writer's upcoming animated comedy series: Star Trek: Lower Decks. So job done there. Maybe his new series will even feature Harry Mudd as a guest star! I kind of hope not, but only because I have a mental image of it being set in the Next Gen era and basically being an animated version of the Chief O'Brien At Work webcomic (I don't really want it to be that).

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NEXT TIME

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, the first half of Star Trek: Discovery's second season! Seven episodes in one article.

If you've got any thoughts on the first four Short Treks, then you can share them in the box below.