Spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery.
If The Orville leans a little to the silly side, Discovery leans a little too much to the dark side. In the first two episodes, we met a Captain, crew, ship, and villain that will soon be dust in the wind. Just as well, they all had names that were impossible to pronounce anyway.
On the whole, Star Trek Discovery is better than Enterprise, which is not too high a bar to jump. The show and its theme song hit a lot of familiar notes and bring up a lot of feelings of Ah, I miss the good old days. The special effects are stunning. The use of a few Original Star Trek sounds is more annoying than anything. The ship, like The Orville, is massive for no reason at all. The bridge needs a panning shot every time they showed it.
The crew was made up of all kinds of interesting people, one who appeared to be a robot of some sort, but we never got more than a passing look at any of them. We basically met three people, the Captain, a very tall alien, and our hero, a human raised by Vulcans.
Our hero is named Micheal, a bit of oddness that is never addressed, not even when she is introduced to new people. Of course, in a show chock full of odd names, a woman with a man’s name is small potatoes. There seems to be no reason why the Vulcans choose to raise a human child instead of handing her over to the next earth ship that happened by.
The show looks amazing, the writing is good so far, but like JJ Abrams’ movies, I’m not sure that it’s in any way Star Trek. The first two episodes are just setup for the rest of the season, so basically they are prequels. We see Klingons, of a sort, and they start a war, for no reason. There is a lot of reading of subtitles as the Klingons all speak Klingonese. The technology all belongs in a time beyond Star Trek The Next Generation, not ten years before Kirk and Spock.
Still, I do like it. I’ve always been one of those Nitchpicker type of fans who finds small flaws in all the episodes, but still loves a lot of them. Star Trek Discovery has a lot of promise. It just feels more like Battlestar Galatica than Star Trek.
