Star Trek: Discovery is Bad, and You Should Feel Bad

The first episode of Star Trek I can remember watching is The Balance of Terror, I was home sick from school and the episode played on the old channel DC20 in the middle of the day or late morning.  I'm pretty sure it aired at 10:00 am because that was when I turned on the television in my parents' bedroom after convincing myself that my mother wasn't going to suddenly decide she wasn't going to work that day.  This thought process is odd because I'm pretty sure my mom was working from home during this period, so maybe she had gone to the grocery store or something.  That's all irrelevant, but that's where my mind was while I was watching Star Trek as a child. 

As an adult, Star Trek fills a similar role as Doctor Who, a show that approaches challenges and meeting new species and people with hope and curiosity, even the Daleks and Klingons have been treated with empathy.  Not to get pedantic, but the opening sequence makes it pretty damn obvious:

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

To quote Captain Kirk, he of the flying leg kick, "We fight only when there's no choice."

After four episodes, my impression of Star Trek: Discovery's opening narration, if it had one, would be: "Victory by any means necessary. Also, fuck all the previously established storylines and precedent."  JJ Abrams can pull this off for his movies, opening up new adventures for the crew of the Enterprise, and allowing writers to work within the same universe while also exploring new ground.  The first new movie wasn't terrible, it was entertaining, but not great, much like Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home.  Star Trek Into Darkness was pretty bad, mostly because the villain had no build up within the story so we weren't invested in him or the threat he represented to the crew.  "Hi guys!  I'm Khan, even though we rebooted this movie series to allow us to make new movies we are reusing all of the old storylines!  Totally not a remake tho!"  However to try and shoehorn this sort of mentality into a universe that has previously always been about exploration, about empathy, and ever hopeful is a mistake.  Like taking away the Doctor's sonic screwdriver and replacing it with a .44 Space Magnum.

Star Trek: Discovery feels like someone at CBS wanted a sci-fi show, and all the execs would allow was Star Trek, and so the creators are begrudgingly working within that framework, while bending or breaking it as much as possible.  The two-part pilot was ham-fisted at best, and downright shitty at worst.  The main problems can be broken into two categories: the heroes and the villains.  The interactions between Michael Burnham and her captain were so forced and awkward, you would be forgiven if you thought they had been working together for 7 days, not 7 years.  Sure, Burnham was raised by Vulcans, and you might say that is why she was awkward around other humans, but if you watch Spock and Kirk for two minutes, you'd see that excuse as flimsy.  After 7 years together, those two characters knew almost nothing about each other, had no trust in each other's decisions, and couldn't communicate effectively in a crisis situation.  Essentially, this results from poor writing.

The villains of ST: Discovery are Klingons on the warpath.  Unfortunately, they're terrible, too.  Dispensing the established storylines of shows that the creators claim to be working within, the Klingons look like someone had described ST:TNG-era Klingons to a make-up artist who had never seen a Star Trek show over a bad Skype connection. This breaks with the continuity of ST: Enterprise and TOS.  These Klingons are much more savage than Klingons of any era.  I could have missed this, but I can't recall any Klingons eating the corpses of their enemies in The Next Generation, and I just finished watching that entire series only last week.  Their costumes, armor, ships, and space suits all look like they belong in a fantasy genre show, "let's just throw spikes on everything, that will show everyone how edgy and new these baddies are!"  Their entire outlook and costumes have been designed to make them out to be one-dimensional savages with whom there can be no negotiation.  That's a violation of Starfleet directive something or other: everyone deserves a chance.

Ultimately, all this boils down to a show that I might have watched an episode or two of on Netflix, but won't bother watching and certainly won't keep paying for a subscription to CBS All Access.  I watched these four episodes on CBS All Access which my lovely lady had signed up to watch the Emmys.  We have already cancelled the subscription.

If I want to watch a new Star Trek show, I'll watch The Orville.  Yeah, I said it, Seth MacFarlane's show is vastly better, with thoughtful writing, some funny jokes, some unfunny jokes, and they've stopped mentioning his character's divorce every five minutes.

An Assignment for the Amateur Photographers of L.A., of Whom I Know None

I was listening to NPR this morning while driving Lady Chemistry to work, in part because I like NPR most of the time, but also because our options are Jee-ZUHUS, country music, gawd, a cackling hyena's morning show, Jee-ZUHUS, what passes for hip-hop these days, Jee-ZUHUS, Jee-ZUHUS, and more Jee-ZUHUS.  Since we have no working radio at home, and can't stream radio without burning through our ridiculous cellular internet too fast, I can only listen to NPR in the car.  While I enjoy this, it tends to put Lady Chemistry to sleep.  This effect is not always beneficial.

Aside from the political reporting, the items which interested me were all in Space!, or Space! related.*  As we all know, everything is better in space, or better once related to Space!.  The space shuttle Endeavour is moving to the California Science Center, and will be cruising around posing for photographs, like the other shuttles have. The shuttle will be driven through the museum's neighboring urban areas at one mile per hour because the shuttle is both enormously big, and enormously fragile.  Or so the shuttle claims, I think this is just another shameless attention grab.  This trip will provide flickr and Instagram users ample opportunity to take all sorts of semi-artsy pictures of Endeavour passing Starbucks and McDonald's symbolizing two visions of American success, and probably also the opportunity to take all sorts of semi-artsy pictures of Endeavour passing empty stores and other available real estate symbolizing the end of the shuttle program and the twilight of America's economic hegemony.  Internets, hear my call!  People with photoshop skills, your assignments are in the mail.  Instagram users, start filtering your bad photos now!  flickr users, start doing whatever it is you do with those camera-thingies that don't make phone calls or send texts.  Get on this.

The other bit about space was slightly more musical, and just enough to make me smile.  NASA apparently shot some probes into near space to do some science, including recording the sounds made when charged particles impact our home's magnetic field.  If you can't listen to it where you are,*** imagine the sound of a spring evening in the boonies.  The peepers are chirping, a few crickets are peeping, and the raccoons haven't yet found your trash.

This bit reminded me of a previous thing I found on the internet, a live stream of sound derived from the information recorded by radio telescopes.  I haven't found the original website with the stream, which I listened to in 2008 or '09 on my brother's computer, and my craptacular internet won't let me stream this site either.  The music that results from the interpretation of radiation into audio is atmospheric.****  I have seen a lot of bands that come close to sounding like they are a planet, spinning in infinity and deflecting particles with a magnetic field, but nothing quite comes close.  Maybe a Phillip Glass score, if you were physically able to make through one.

* This post could also have been titled "The Less Ragey Post of the Two I Wrote in My Head While Driving, Because Politics."

** In a related note, every single time I tried to type shuttle in this post, I first typed shittle, including the one in this sentence.  I guess I remain unadjusted to this keyboard, or have fallen out of my habit of typing, or have some unconscious dislike of the shuttle program.  I just did it again, how odd.

*** I know no one reads this anymore, but I like to pretend, so play along.  You might even be wondering who is the intended audience of this note, if I don't believe I have any readers anymore.  In answer, I say-WHAT'S THAT OVER THERE! and then run away.

**** This is a bad pun for so many reasons.