National Post (National Edition)
Star Trek: Discovery isn’t the great space saga TV needs right now.
TV NEEDS A REALLY GREAT SPACE SAGA AND STAR TREK: DISCOVERY COMES CLOSE — BUT THE LONGING REMAINS
While gazillionaires compete to launch the best private rockets, a space adventure has been conspicuously absent from this golden era of TV.
Today’s Earthlings have our choice of lavishly produced shows about almost anything you can imagine, set in almost any time period, including a number of deeply dystopian stories about the future, where people are more likely to churn butter than travel at light speed.
Instead of outer space, TV has spent the past decade obsessing over the true self amid the tangle of technology. Westworld, Altered Carbon, Black Mirror, Legion, Mr. Robot, The Leftovers. Meanwhile, the idea of human (or human-ish) characters getting on a spaceship and going somewhere tangibly adventurous has become — what? Too childish? Too corporate? Or simply too ambitious?
Only lately, as the race to dominate streaming content continues, have the networks started looking up and out for an original, live-action space drama. For years, TV took its cue from old Flash Gordon serials, scratching its space and sci-fi itch on the cheap. With the Space Age came Lost in Space and Gene Roddenberry’s pure, primordial Star Trek, starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.
It’s been a long, lonely time since then. Syfy still delivers the occasional space-set series, but they usually lack a compelling reason to stick around. Originality is often a stumbling point, even in a genre that is particularly forgiving to both clichés and the derivative. What do we do in space, besides rebel against overlords? Or battle buglike creatures? Or succumb to terrifying alien infections? Who will save us, if not for the prison-sprung rogue and her gang of misfits in their rustbucket freighter?
The works of Ursula K. Le Guin, who died last month at 88, would be a fascinating and timely place to look, with stories about other planets and cultures seen through a feminist and sometimes gender-fluid perspective. Le Guin, like a lot of other authors, wound up regretting most attempts to adapt her work to the screen. She particularly loathed how Syfy turned her Earthsea trilogy into a mediocre 2004 miniseries. (Even so, she was reportedly game to try TV again as recently as 2017, selling the rights to one of her best novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, as a potential series.)
The further you search, the more it becomes clear: Television only ever had one space saga that truly felt at home in the medium.
Yes, all roads (and wormholes) eventually lead back to Roddenberry.
Star Trek: Discovery, Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman’s gripping and pleasingly clever revival of the brand, carries with it some unique burdens. Not only must it please fans, it also has to be a Star Trek that can compete in the peak-TV era. The nerve of it. The gall — moving network programming to a gated community. It made some of us wish Star Trek: Discovery would be a big dud.
And it seemed we might get our wish. With a list of producers and writers as long as a CVS receipt, Discovery premièred on the main network as a free sample with a hurried, confusing and poorly executed pilot episode that lacked Star Trek’s usual instincts for character and pace.
Without knowing that uncertainty and deceit would become Discovery’s prevailing themes, it was easy to sour on everything else about the glitzy new show. On top of that, Discovery seemed rinsed in a certain, ineffable CBSness in crucial matters such as dialogue and esthetic.
Discovery, which takes place a decade before the original Star Trek series, introduces us first to its complicated protagonist, an anti-hero named Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), a strident and cocky first officer aboard the USS Shenzou.
Orphaned as a child and raised by the Vulcan ambassador Sarek (James Frain), Burnham is urged by her mentor, Capt. Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), to reconcile her logic-driven personality with her human side.
The friendship between the two women seems to be the show’s anchor, except that, in an encounter with a dormant tribe of xenophobic Klingons, Burnham takes actions that start a war between the Federation and the Klingons, destroying the Shenzou and costing thousands of lives — including Georgiou’s. Sentenced to prison for treason, Burnham instead winds up as an ostracized temp on the USS Discovery.
To know much more than this, a viewer would have had to follow Star Trek: Discovery over its paywall, where, by the third episode (spoiler alerts, ahoy), it becomes a thoughtful and original addition to the Trek universe — and yes, worth subscribing to, long enough for a weekend’s binge.
The big secret aboard Discovery, it turns out, is a new kind of interstellar travel that chief engineer Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) has harnessed using teenytiny space fungi — yes, a spore drive — to transport a starship from one end of the galaxy to the other in a snap.
The ludicrousness of the concept pushes past Star Trek’s usual respect for plausible science, and the middle episodes drift briefly into the procedural-adventure style of the older shows, in which planets are visited, encounters are made, and time is desperately running out to mend some momentary, life-threatening crisis. If that’s the kind of Star Trek you pine for, then look no further than Seth MacFarlane’s uncharacteristically reverent and tonally baffling Fox dramedy, The Orville — essentially a throwback to Star Trek’s 1990s iterations.
The Orville’s antiseptic nostalgia trip only serves to make Discovery’s longer, grittier story arc look like a powerful step forward. Discovery’s characters grapple with very un-Federationlike behaviours: The ship is full of anger, doubt, duplicitous colleagues and innate fear.
Discovery often thrums and sizzles with TV’s modern moves — including a nod to our beloved, wait-what? adventures in inner space, when the ship accidentally spore-hops into an alternate universe. With their entire existence turned upside-down, Discovery’s crew must question and reaffirm Roddenberry’s central Star Trek values. And when they do, it’s a rather stirring moment for true believers.
And yet, as capable as it turned out to be, Star Trek: Discovery has only satisfied part of the deeper longing. It’s like staring up at the nighttime sky, wishing for a fantastic space drama among all the possibilities, and someone keeps pointing out the same point of light that is Star Trek.
Is that all there is? Are we really this alone?