WHY WE LIKE IT: Cool effects and battle moves.
WHY WE DON'T: Why does no one listen to Burnham?
REVIEW: While I get too positive a vibe from Captain Georgiou to really be angry at her - at least in part on account of her being played by Michelle Yoeh - I nevertheless continue to find the mistrust directed at Michael Burnham baffling from a character point of view. (From a plot point of view, it's a contrived way to get us to the series proper.) She's the smartest person you've ever met, she's never led you astray, and even though she's in deep trouble, she's still laying down important info about the Klingons. So what do you do? Send her to the brig. Yes, it's proper military procedure, but Star Trek's got too many examples of going against the rulebook when required that it feels wrong to instead throw it at the one officer who seems to know what the heck is going on. Is Discovery the secret origin of the rise of maverick captains like Kirk in Starfleet?
Though there's lots of outer space action, the best part of the episode by far is Burnham cooling her heels in jail. A huge piece of the ship is shorn off, and she winds up only protected from airless space by the emergency force fields, then has to argue with the computer so it will let her out to make a daring jump through the void and into the pressurized corridor some meters away. If her impulsive human side got her intro trouble, her logical Vulcan side gets her out of it (but it's gonna flip again, just watch). We also get Connor (I liked him!) dying before her eyes when the deck is blown out, making it more personal than CG ship models going at it, and meanwhile, Georgiou and Saru reacting to the death sentence they believe they've accidentally pronounced on Burnham by sending her below. The sequence also reveals Sarek put his katra in her, and that it allows him to communicate with her telepathically across vast distances. It comes at a physical cost, but when you really need to give a pep talk, I guess... This is an odd choice. If having someone's katra let you access a part of their consciousness, an avatar not really connected to the original per se, then sure. It might have allowed Burnham to call on Sarek for intimate chats all across the series, a sort of ghost on her shoulder. Shows like Battlestar Galactica and Due South have pulled similar tricks. As true telepathy, it seems less believable. Not just as a matter of science, but of personal motivation.
This and the flashback to Burnham's first day aboard the Shenzhou make you believe they'll be part of the narrative fabric of the show, as a way to keep both Sarek and Georgiou involved. Arrow's island, so to speak. But spoiler, nope, that doesn't actually happen. It's a tease. I suppose we should be content with the scene we get here, well placed to show Michael's growth over seven years of service, from cold and mean to passionate about saving her mentor. In both time frames, she's "too confident" but "justified in her confidence". Better to see it than having Georgiou explain, as she does, why Sarek brought Burnham to her, surely a piece of dialog no human would ever utter about themselves. So finally, they let her back on the mission when everything is pretty much lost. The Starfleet ships are hiding or disabled, the Klingon fleet has left T'Kuvma (creator of the first cloak, it seems) alone to collect the fallen dead, and Saru comes up with a way to explode a torpedo on that one ship even though combat capability has been lost. It's all well handled fare. After that, success hinges on capturing and thus disgracing T'Kuvma lest he become a martyr to his cause, which is quite correct, but doomed to fail when the Klingon leader kills Georgiou, who at least got to showcase some of Yoeh's martial arts (it's still something to see a small older woman hold her own against a huge alien warrior), and Burnham, out of grief and rage, kills his with a phaser blast (told ya). THIS, more than anything, is her big mistake, and so, unending war. (And for her, unending guilt, and letting Starfleet give her a life sentence without opposition.)
As for the Klingons, I think I've decided that part of why I find their sequences difficult to get into is the font they've chosen to represent their speech. Those big capital letters make it harder and less natural to read, which goes hand in hand with their halting speech patterns. The linguist in me something enjoys catching pieces of recognizable vocabulary and syntax, but it all goes on way too long. Did I detect a bit of Klingon laid under the universal translator's English when T'Kuvma talks to Starfleet? That's a neat bit. Their motivations are a little less complex than I intimated from the first episode, simply shown not believing the Federation actually comes in peace, but the root cause is still there. Assimilation is a form of cultural warfare, especially if the assimilating culture is inimical to one's one. I do respect the mirroring at work between the human and Klingon heroes, the story turning to Voq just as does to Burnham when both their captains are gone. Both are outsiders, hated by their people, and yet must prevail in honor of their lost captains. Perhaps that's a way for me to overcome my disinterest in the Klingon side of things. We'll see how well it serves me going forward.
LESSON: Shooting first, no. Desecrating the bodies of dead soldiers, yes.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-High - Could use more officers with experience in cowboy diplomacy, but the episode is supported by some strong sequences for Burnham. By the end, I think we're definitely WITH her.
Comments
--De