‘STAR’ DATE
CBS All Access ‘Trek’ pulls no punches heading into Season 1 finale
IT can be difficult to live long and prosper on “Star Trek: Discovery.”
In the show’s first season — which ends Sunday night — two starship captains, as well as a lieutenant commander, were killed off. That’s left some fans to wonder if “Discovery” showrunners were willynilly about letting key characters bite the dust.
“I think audiences often feel when you kill a character it’s because you’re either out of ideas or you’re bored,” says executive producer Aaron Harberts. “Before we start writing, we know what the ending’s going to be. We have those major twists ready to go. We know how they’re going to fall in terms of pushing the story forward.”
In Episode 13, USS Discovery Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) — who in actuality was from the Terran empire, a hostile parallel universe, and was impersonating the real ship’s captain — was killed by Terran Emperor Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), so that he couldn’t stop Specialist Michael Burnham (Sonequa MartinGreen) from returning to the normal “prime” universe. His death triggered a scenario for Georgiou to take command of Discovery in the Federation’s last-ditch effort to win the war against the Klingons, whom she had previous experience defeating in the Terran world.
As Georgiou’s winnertake-all methods are the antithesis of Starfleet values, she will clash with Discovery crew members in the finale as she plots to escape from Federation control.
“She gets under everybody’s skin,” Yeoh says by phone from Seoul, South Korea, where she was attending the Winter Olympics. “But I feel that she’s not just ruthless for the sake of being ruthless. When you’re in the Terran world, you have to do what you need to do to survive and to stay the ruler.”
That means bloody battles, and Georgiou’s expertise in that area will be on full display Sunday in a particularly brutal scene where she uses her savage fighting skills on the captured Klingon L’Rell (Mary Chieffo) in the ship’s brig. “I joked with Michelle as we were working on the choreography and was like, ‘It’s such an honor to be beaten up by you,’ Chieffo says about working with Yeoh, who starred in the groundbreaking 2001 martial arts film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” (Says Yeoh of Chieffo, “She took it like a champion!”)
Georgiou’s methods raise questions about whether she is redeemable enough to fit into the prime universe — or whether she is destined to return to the Terran empire. “Ideas of forgiveness, salvation and redemption are hallmarks of Starfleet,” says Harberts. “As much as she doesn’t want to, she might end up on one of those roads.”
Redemption could also figure into what happens with Burnham’s love interest, Lt. Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif), whose memories and consciousness were implanted into Voq, a Klingon surgically altered to look like Tyler who tried to murder Burnham and killed Lt. Commander Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz). “Tyler makes a pretty big choice during the finale that makes sense for where he’s at,” says Harberts, who’s mum on Season 2 details but says Season 1’s journey sheds light — literally — on next season’s direction.
“This was a show about war and has been a dark, dark tunnel and you have to go through the darkness to get to the light,” he says. “‘Star Trek’ ultimately is a show about hope, optimism, peace ... It’s that spirit that we will be taking into Season 2.”