Star Trek is what taught me to be a geek. When my brother and I were pre-teens, our mother would tape the late night re-runs of "Star Trek: the Next Generation" (hereafter TNG) and we would binge-watch them all on Friday night in anticipation of watching the new episode that would be premiering on the following Saturday. As a result, I have seen every TNG episode at least five times (except "Code of Honor;" @$%$ "Code of Honor"). None of this should surprise anyone who knows me well enough to be reading this blog. I just want to make it clear what a big deal it was for me when I learned that there was going to be a new Star Trek show on "television" (scare quotes because, of course, you can't actually watch it on anything that anyone from the 1980s would recognize as a television), and I don't necessarily mean "big deal" in a good way. I am one of those who responded to the ad campaign for Abrams Trek 1 -- "this is not your father's Star Trek" -- with "but.... I liked my father's Star Trek." I like watching pedantic arguments about the political ramifications of abrogating the Treaty of Algeron. "Abrams Trek 2: Into Darkness," with it's poorly-motivated laser gun fights papered-over with shallow recreations of memes from "The Wrath of Khan," made me..... upset. Accordingly, my experience of the lead-up to "Star Trek: Discovery" went something like this:
1) "Bryan Fuller is making a new 'Star Trek' series! Alright! I loved 'Pushing Daisies'! I can't wait to see what he does with 'Star Trek'."
2) "Bryan Fuller is..... not making a new 'Star Trek' series, but someone else is using his ideas. Okay... I guess he probably is pretty busy with 'American Gods.' Sure...."
3) "They have cast Raine Wilson as Harry Mudd. They have cast anyone as Harry Mudd. No. No. No. No. No. No. Stop. Please, stop."
4) "The main character is a human raised on Vulcan by Sarek (Spock's father). Oh, for #$%@ sake! There are OTHER Vulcans, you know?"
Nevertheless, this evening I held my nose and watched the two-part pilot of "Star Trek: Discovery." These are my thoughts (recorded because, you know, I can). Is this where I'm supposed to say "spoiler alert?" I'm not recapping anything here, but I'm going to speak like you've seen the episodes.
That wasn't half bad. It actually felt like Star Trek. There were more laser guns and explosions than I'm used to, but I feel like I understood why everyone was shooting at each other, which is a marked improvement over more recent additions to the franchise. I am not totally sold, though, that the principal threat had to be Klingons, as opposed to a new alien species created specifically for "Discovery," or that this story should be happening in the past rather than the future (where "the past" means before Captain Kirk and "the future" means after Captains Picard, Sisko, and Janeway; the only way time should really be reckoned).
These are essentially same question. Klingons are the second most studied alien species in Star Trek behind Vulcans. We know a lot about Klingons. Nothing that was introduced in this pilot contradicts what we already know about Klingon culture (TNG introduced a very strong and reasonably defined Klingon spirituality), but I worry about how it interacts with what we know of Klingon history (disclaimer: I am a snob about my Star Trek; I refused to watch and thus know very little about "Enterprise", or, for that matter, "Voyager," so maybe everything I am about to say was addressed by where "Enterprise" left off; I know Klingons appeared in "Enterprise" somewhere). The Klingons of Captain Kirk's Star Trek were a well-established, stable society that interacted with the Federation much as the Soviet Union interacted with the United States at the time Captain Kirk was on television: a respectful adversary who would like to wipe them off the map if they could, but who acknowledges the political and military realities that make that proposition difficult. The first two hours of "Discovery" present us with a fractious Klingon society that is only just now banding together under the influence of an apparent religious revival. Furthermore, by the end of those two hours, a fairly bloody war has broken out between the Federation and the Klingons. Granted, it has been a long time since I saw "Errand of Mercy," but I never got the sense that Captain Kirk and company were less than a decade removed from a shooting war with the Klingons. Compare the collegial disdain shared between the Klingons and Captain Kirk's Federation with the racist vitriol directed towards Romulans (and, by extension, Spock, when the magic of view screen technology reveals that Vulcans and Romulans are somehow related) in "Balance of Terror," in which it is explicitly stated that only a generation has passed since an all-out Federation-Romulan war.
Finally, the chief exponent of the Klingon revival, a self-styled messiah named T'Kuva, appears to be very concerned with the sanctity of Klingon culture. This is an interesting idea in the Star Trek universe. "Deep Space Nine" started to deal with it, by which I mean that they mentioned it once when they had Commander Eddington, a Starfleet officer-turned-Maquis-terrorist/freedom fighter compare the Federation unfavorably to the Borg ("at least the Borg tell you they want to assimilate you"). The problem I have with dealing with this idea in "Discovery" is... why now? Why are the Klingons worried about cultural assimilation at this point in their history. As presented to us, it is not even obvious that Vulcans are fully integrated into the Federation at the time of "Discovery." Certainly no one is tossing around the idea of incorporating the Klingons into the Federation, yet.* Fast forward a few hundred years (into the post Picard/Sisko/Janeway future) and this story would be very timely and, I think, much more believable. TNG presented an alliance with the Klingons as the next logical step in our post Cold War progression towards a more perfect incarnation of Gene Roddenberry's vision. It's not obvious how many Klingons were happy with that (there were several episodes early in the series that pretty definitively made the case "not all of them"). Maybe a few decades later, as the Klingons became even more integrated into the Federation after their united victory in the Dominion War, there would be some in the (former) Klingon Empire eager to receive T'Kuva's gospel of Klingon "purity" (a good friend of mine actually pitched something very similar to this, set in the future, as his ideal "next Star Trek" story). Maybe I'm wrong and this will all make perfect sense once the show runs its course and we will see a seamless transition from ragtag religious revival to 1960s-style superpower. I hope I am wrong. I just don't want Star Trek to fall into the trap of thinking that all of our best stories are behind us and that the future is "solved."
PS I'm still upset that it's Sarek.
PPS I'm also still upset that it's going to be Harry Mudd.
PPPS They screwed up canon. The Klingons didn't invent the cloaking device. They got it from the Romulans in the alliance first referenced in "The Enterprise Incident" (though Klingon ships that could cloak really weren't a thing until Star Trek 3). There; I've said it.
* I do acknowledge that there can be other threats to cultural integrity besides explicit incorporation into something like the Federation, but if that is what is going on here, I need to be explicitly told that the Klingons lost a war, or experienced some major loss of territory, or somesuch. If this really just boils down to "Klingons preserve their culture by fighting because Klingon culture is about fighting" I'm going to be disappointed (but not surprised; Star Trek aliens are not the most fleshed-out societies on television; that's what Babylon 5 is for).
1) "Bryan Fuller is making a new 'Star Trek' series! Alright! I loved 'Pushing Daisies'! I can't wait to see what he does with 'Star Trek'."
2) "Bryan Fuller is..... not making a new 'Star Trek' series, but someone else is using his ideas. Okay... I guess he probably is pretty busy with 'American Gods.' Sure...."
3) "They have cast Raine Wilson as Harry Mudd. They have cast anyone as Harry Mudd. No. No. No. No. No. No. Stop. Please, stop."
4) "The main character is a human raised on Vulcan by Sarek (Spock's father). Oh, for #$%@ sake! There are OTHER Vulcans, you know?"
Nevertheless, this evening I held my nose and watched the two-part pilot of "Star Trek: Discovery." These are my thoughts (recorded because, you know, I can). Is this where I'm supposed to say "spoiler alert?" I'm not recapping anything here, but I'm going to speak like you've seen the episodes.
That wasn't half bad. It actually felt like Star Trek. There were more laser guns and explosions than I'm used to, but I feel like I understood why everyone was shooting at each other, which is a marked improvement over more recent additions to the franchise. I am not totally sold, though, that the principal threat had to be Klingons, as opposed to a new alien species created specifically for "Discovery," or that this story should be happening in the past rather than the future (where "the past" means before Captain Kirk and "the future" means after Captains Picard, Sisko, and Janeway; the only way time should really be reckoned).
These are essentially same question. Klingons are the second most studied alien species in Star Trek behind Vulcans. We know a lot about Klingons. Nothing that was introduced in this pilot contradicts what we already know about Klingon culture (TNG introduced a very strong and reasonably defined Klingon spirituality), but I worry about how it interacts with what we know of Klingon history (disclaimer: I am a snob about my Star Trek; I refused to watch and thus know very little about "Enterprise", or, for that matter, "Voyager," so maybe everything I am about to say was addressed by where "Enterprise" left off; I know Klingons appeared in "Enterprise" somewhere). The Klingons of Captain Kirk's Star Trek were a well-established, stable society that interacted with the Federation much as the Soviet Union interacted with the United States at the time Captain Kirk was on television: a respectful adversary who would like to wipe them off the map if they could, but who acknowledges the political and military realities that make that proposition difficult. The first two hours of "Discovery" present us with a fractious Klingon society that is only just now banding together under the influence of an apparent religious revival. Furthermore, by the end of those two hours, a fairly bloody war has broken out between the Federation and the Klingons. Granted, it has been a long time since I saw "Errand of Mercy," but I never got the sense that Captain Kirk and company were less than a decade removed from a shooting war with the Klingons. Compare the collegial disdain shared between the Klingons and Captain Kirk's Federation with the racist vitriol directed towards Romulans (and, by extension, Spock, when the magic of view screen technology reveals that Vulcans and Romulans are somehow related) in "Balance of Terror," in which it is explicitly stated that only a generation has passed since an all-out Federation-Romulan war.
Finally, the chief exponent of the Klingon revival, a self-styled messiah named T'Kuva, appears to be very concerned with the sanctity of Klingon culture. This is an interesting idea in the Star Trek universe. "Deep Space Nine" started to deal with it, by which I mean that they mentioned it once when they had Commander Eddington, a Starfleet officer-turned-Maquis-terrorist/freedom fighter compare the Federation unfavorably to the Borg ("at least the Borg tell you they want to assimilate you"). The problem I have with dealing with this idea in "Discovery" is... why now? Why are the Klingons worried about cultural assimilation at this point in their history. As presented to us, it is not even obvious that Vulcans are fully integrated into the Federation at the time of "Discovery." Certainly no one is tossing around the idea of incorporating the Klingons into the Federation, yet.* Fast forward a few hundred years (into the post Picard/Sisko/Janeway future) and this story would be very timely and, I think, much more believable. TNG presented an alliance with the Klingons as the next logical step in our post Cold War progression towards a more perfect incarnation of Gene Roddenberry's vision. It's not obvious how many Klingons were happy with that (there were several episodes early in the series that pretty definitively made the case "not all of them"). Maybe a few decades later, as the Klingons became even more integrated into the Federation after their united victory in the Dominion War, there would be some in the (former) Klingon Empire eager to receive T'Kuva's gospel of Klingon "purity" (a good friend of mine actually pitched something very similar to this, set in the future, as his ideal "next Star Trek" story). Maybe I'm wrong and this will all make perfect sense once the show runs its course and we will see a seamless transition from ragtag religious revival to 1960s-style superpower. I hope I am wrong. I just don't want Star Trek to fall into the trap of thinking that all of our best stories are behind us and that the future is "solved."
PS I'm still upset that it's Sarek.
PPS I'm also still upset that it's going to be Harry Mudd.
PPPS They screwed up canon. The Klingons didn't invent the cloaking device. They got it from the Romulans in the alliance first referenced in "The Enterprise Incident" (though Klingon ships that could cloak really weren't a thing until Star Trek 3). There; I've said it.
* I do acknowledge that there can be other threats to cultural integrity besides explicit incorporation into something like the Federation, but if that is what is going on here, I need to be explicitly told that the Klingons lost a war, or experienced some major loss of territory, or somesuch. If this really just boils down to "Klingons preserve their culture by fighting because Klingon culture is about fighting" I'm going to be disappointed (but not surprised; Star Trek aliens are not the most fleshed-out societies on television; that's what Babylon 5 is for).
