Is 'Star Trek: Discovery' Any Good? Here's What Reviews Of The Premiere Have To Say
Last night, the first episode of "Star Trek: Discovery" premiered on CBS, followed by the second on the network's new streaming service CBS All Access. Fans in the US and Canada will have to sign up for the service to watch the rest of the first new "Trek" series in over a decade — should they? With a cast led by Sonequa Martin-Green ("The Walking Dead"), a shift towards serialized storytelling and a big Peak TV budget, does this "Star Trek" live up to the best of the old shows? Here's what reviewers have to say about the first few episodes:
In The Pilot We Meet The Crew Of The Shenzhou (Not The Discovery) And Some Fundamentalist Klingons
We begin on the USS Shenzhou, a vessel captained by Michelle Yeoh's Philippa Georgiou, soulful, patient mentor to Martin-Green's Michael Burnham. Scarred by personal tragedy, Burnham was brought up in Vulcan culture as the ward to a perfectly cast James Frain's Sarek, father of Spock (if such things matter to you, but utterly irrelevant to anything on the show thus far). Burnham has an interesting internal clash of nature and nurture, in that she's been raised to value and prioritize logic, but she's also a passionate explorer and a bit of an impetuous hot-head.
We frequently leave the Shenzhou to hang out with T'Kuvma (Chris Obi), an upstart Klingon warlord who seeks to unite his race against Starfleet. He declares a passionate need for self-preservation, and runs his campaign under the banner to "Remain Klingon." Oh yeah, he's a nationalist, convincing his followers that they've been victimized by peaceniks, declaring a shared identity based on opposition to multiculturalism. If this sounds sane, you probably voted for the guy who lost the popular vote, but Discovery's treatment of T'Kuvma trends mythic.
Think Of This Two-Parter As An Opening Movie
The first two chapters are also essentially a prologue; next Sunday's episode is the true pilot. You want to playfully jab our old pals at CBS – is this the programming strategy version of your parents asking how to get to Netflix from OnDemand? – but it's worth remembering that Star Trek's release patterns have always been messy.
It's clear, with references to ancient military strategy and Lewis Carroll, that it's trying to keep up with the high bar set by other prestige shows. But it's not quite there yet—specifically when Discovery tries to be funny, which only makes you realize how dry and dark the rest of the show is. Thankfully, things pick up speed in the action-heavy second episode, but it's not until the third episode, when the series reaches its presumed home of the U.S.S. Discovery, that it settles into a rhythm. And that rhythm has a lot of promise.
[Esquire]
You'll Be Left Wanting To Learn More About Sonequa Martin-Green's Burnham
Sonequa Martin-Green is Commander Michael Burnham, and she is a commanding presence, weary and excited, bemused and desperate, never less than fully engaged. There's a deadpan requirement to playing a Starfleet officer, the fussy senior-officer banter-feuds, the formal familiarity of a work-family where everyone has a rank. In early scenes on the U.S.S. Shenzhou, she's dismissive of fearful science officer Saru (Doug Jones), and she's in awe of her dashing Captain Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh).
The core mission of "Discovery" is to make viewers care about Burnham, and it succeeds in that regard. Martin-Green is charismatic and quietly forceful in the lead role, and her character is an outsider in many ways, which gives "Discovery's" writers a lot of interesting psychological territory to explore. Her professional relationships in the present and her personal bonds from the past are mostly fraught and complicated, and "Discovery's" handling of those aspects of her story may well determine whether it becomes must-see viewing or not.
[Variety]
Burnham isn't like any protagonist we've seen in Star Trek so far, and not only because she doesn't command a starship or space station. She's a far more rounded, human character than any of the previous captains, with some serious trauma from a Klingon attack in her youth that's left her predisposed to hate the warrior race. And while Star Trek has plumbed the "main character has demons" well in the past — most notably with Sisko in Deep Space Nine, and Picard in the later films, when it comes to the Borg — Burnham feels far more compelling for not being a flawless human being in other respects, as her series-protagonist predecessors were.
The Rest Of The Cast Includes Some Stand Outs (Some Of Whom You Won't Meet Til Next Week)
Lt. Saru (Doug Jones), the first Kelpien character in Star Trek, is a creation as vivid as Spock, Data or Worf, though more particular in his neuroses. His biologically incubated sensitivity to the approach of death makes him the closest thing Discovery has to a poster child, or poster creature.
[Vulture]
The third episode, meanwhile, will introduce a fair number of new cast members, with early standouts including Anthony Rapp as science officer Stamets and Mary Wiseman as a young cadet who offers the series some welcome comic relief. In addition, Jason Isaacs, as Captain Gabriel Lorca of the Discovery, isn't afraid to let a little weirdness drift into his performance, which matches nicely with the fact that fundamentally, a spark of general oddness is embedded in the show.
Viewers are told these people have been serving together for years, and it's believable. Their interactions feel far more natural and realistic than the sometimes stilted, formal scripts of Trek series past.
It Establishes Itself As A Lot Darker Than Most Old 'Star Trek,' In A Good Way
The opening moments of the episode reveal the Klingon ship (a refuge for 'Fundamentalist' Klingons) have ZERO interest in negotiation and in fact view Starfleet's civil ethos ("we come in peace") as a lie, buzzwords the Federation uses to mask their expansionist and fascist goals. A discourse between Klingon and The Federation will never work because it's this very discourse the Klingons object to most. This lends the pilot a deep sense of fatalism, a Greek Tragedy written literally in the stars, as noble characters take even nobler actions that are all totally doomed to fail.'
[Collider]
These shows have always showcased an underlying current of optimism, of faith in the ideal of unity triumphing over divisiveness in the name of greater knowledge — a faith essential to enabling these brave Starfleet ships to explore brave new worlds. While that optimism is actively present in "Discovery," it's also accompanied by a keen awareness that this optimism does not come easy. It has a price, at times a heavy one, and the characters here are at times in conflict about whether or not it's worth paying.
The starship is no longer a safe, utopian place. It can be dangerous—a place full of egos, divisive opinions, and betrayal. The circle of trust that always seemed implied on the bridge is gone. Everyone's motives can be questioned—especially after a twist in the first episode, which leaves Burnham as a pariah among the entire Starfleet. At one point, an officer under Captain Gabriel Lorca's command refers to his superior as a "warmonger." Lies and deceit are abound—something that unravels the idea of humanity that Roddenberry imagined many years ago. This isn't a bad thing, but it's darker, and a little more depressing than Trekkies might be used to.
[Esquire]
The Pilot Is Gorgeous, Particularly When In Space
CBS has put a ton of money into this thing to act as a launching pad for its All Access streaming service. And the money was worth it. Watching Burnham drift through space toward an ancient Klingon relic with a brilliant binary star in the background is something Star Trek fans have always imagined, but TV producers never quite had the technology to make a reality. The TV CGI technology and imagination have finally caught up with each other in time for Discovery's premiere.
[Esquire]
Splitting the difference between commercial slickness and graphic novel solemnity, this Trek offers PG-13 violence, audience-pandering exposition dumps, cliffhanger endings, Game of Thrones-style pomp, and a touch of Lost's mystery box plotting, but also poker-faced musings on quantum science, moral relativism, logic vs. instinct, race vs. culture, and the military's tendency to corrupt science in service of war.
[Vulture]
Much has been made of the fact that CBS invested heavily in "Star Trek: Discovery" to make sure it looked good, and in fact its effects are undoubtedly top tier — the cinematography truly striking, especially when the camera takes in the view outside. There are details that make this show sing, such as the fact that space is treated as a 360 degree environment, meaning that ships don't necessarily line up on a horizontal axis.
The Opening Does Have Some Rough Spots
There's room for pilots that don't immediately set out a template for the ongoing series, but I don't know that, with everything riding on it, this was the time for a "prequel" or "overture" pilot, one that doesn't introduce the show's title space vessel, most of its main characters or its core conflict other than "Klingons bad, everybody else good."
If anything, the first two episodes' biggest weakness is their tendency to stray into clunkiness at times. This is always a danger with pilots, where so much new information has to be conveyed to the viewer, and in particular a show of this nature has to pack not just character and story basics into its opening segments but also build out its world in a way that won't be off-putting to newcomers to Trek.
[IGN]
Martin-Green's performance is great in another way: She's covering up some very strange, rather hazy characterization. Burnham's got a tragic past, see, which we learn about all the time. She's also got a fan-service father: Ambassador Sarek, originally played by Mark Lenard, now by James Frain. There's some vague notion put forward that she's struggling with her human ancestry and her Vulcan upbringing.
Most Importantly: 'Discovery' Shows Serious Promise
If it capitalizes on the conflicts at its core, and if it embraces the ambiguity and complexity baked into its DNA, "Discovery" could provide viewers with the kind of character-driven, space-set sci-fi narrative that has long been missing from the television scene. It's early days yet, and the CBS All Access drama, which contains some wobbly elements, may let lapse into the usual array of alien-of-the-week formulas, but this voyage has potential.
[Variety]
The trick: Star Trek: Discovery, while commenting on today's pessimistic political landscape, never wallows in despair. It's characters still striving for the utopic ideals of Star Treks past.
[Collider]
The first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery are thrilling, moving, and frequently unexpected. Just as importantly, for everything questionable about the design, it still feels like Trek.
TL;DR
Star Trek: Discovery may seem philosophically removed from the optimism of Gene Roddenberry's initial creation, but the show still retains the Original Series spirit. Its thoughtful questioning and moral dilemmas within the framework of an adventure series. The answer may have changed but the question remains the same as it did all the way back in 1966: How do we make tomorrow better than today?
[Collider]
Watch The Trailer
Read our new 'Star Trek' installment of Digg's Fan Service series.