Barkley — So Glad You (Didn’t) Ask: A Column of Unsolicited Opinions — #15

Flash Review: Star Trek Discovery
“The Vulcan Hello” and “Battle at the Binary Stars”

By Chris M. Barkley: STAR TREK: Discovery, The Vulcan Hello and Battle at the Binary Stars, (4 out of 4 stars, 2017) with Sonequa Martin-Green (First Officer Michael Burnham), Doug Jones (Lieutenant Saru), Michelle Yeoh (Captain Philippa Georgiou) and James Frain (Ambassador Sarek). Created by Alex Kurtzman and Bryan Fuller, Story by Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman. Teleplay by Bryan Fuller and Akiva Goldsman. Directed by David Semel (The Vulcan Hello) and Adam Kane (Battle at the Binary Stars).

When a Starfleet monitor goes silent on the edge of Federation space, the USS Shenzhou, commanded by Captain Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) is sent to investigate. The situation becomes complicated when an inspection of the monitor shows deliberate damage and an unknown object in a nearby asteroid field is obscured from their sensors. The First Officer, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) performs a flyby of the object, which turns out to be a Klingon scout ship. The occupant attacks her without provocation, which in turn starts a cascading sequence of events that will bring the Federation and the Klingons to the brink of war…

I went into last night’s airing of Star Trek Discovery with very low expectations. While I was very familiar with the works of writer-producers Alex Kurtzman (Sleepy Hollow, Hawaii Five-O), Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies), Akiva Goldsman (Fringe) and director David Semel (House, Heroes), there was no guarantee any of them could crack and tame a vast franchise like Star Trek.

I have watched EVERY version of Star Trek over the past fifty plus years and I must say that I am far more excited by them than I was by the first three episodes of The Orville.

The first thing that I was impressed by was the way the dynamic was set between Commander Burnham and Captain Georgiou in the first sequence on the desert planet. Some complained that a captain and her XO on a long walk to perform a minor mission was about as unusual as those Kirk and Spock missions, I saw it as a chance for the show to set a tone with the main characters, which is clearly a master-apprentice situation.

With seven years of duty as a First Officer under her belt, I was beginning to think that the series was setting Burnham up to be the captain of her own vessel. But no, that rug got pulled out from underneath me right away when she’s nearly killed by a Klingon warrior and then nearly fried to death by radiation exposure. So I thought, hey, maybe she’s not ready for command after all.

By the time the third and fourth acts roll around, I was really in a tizzy; is Burnham actually thinking of doing something that very few characters have attempted in Star Trek… DID SHE ACTUALLY…Jose, Mary and Joseph! In the very first freaking episode? At the end of the second episode we find Burnham in a deep dark hole that is perfectly designed to tantalize viewers to come back for more.

After watching the pilot episode on Sunday, I immediately went to social media outlets to gauge the reactions of the fans. And, as I suspected people were polarized about nearly every single aspect of the show. Some of the more negative ones were:

  • It was too dark (both in the tone of the story and the lighting of the sets).
  • What, a war with the Klingons?  That’s not what I signed up for.
  • Michael Burnham is not very likeable. The focus should have been on Captain Georgiou.
  • It’s a production design in search of a story.
  • Hey, those weird-looking Klingons aren’t canon.
  • Lens flare? REALLY?
  • And the inevitable, I don’t wanna pay for Star Trek!

Well people, you’re going to have to face up to a few facts: we don’t live in 1966, 1987, 1993 or 2005 anymore. Things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse and that applies to television drama, too. The best dramas challenge their audiences in every way. And in the crowded state of television today, ST: Discovery is going be competing for the time and attention of audiences against dozens of streaming, cable and network shows.

Having said that, I still think that ST: Discovery has a chance to be one of the best versions of Star Trek yet AND one of the best shows on television, period.

I remember not being very impressed by a good majority of the first season episodes of the Next Generation. But I stuck with it and was rewarded on the fifteenth episode, “11001001” one of the best of that season.

Similarly, with Deep Space Nine (which had an exceptionally brilliant pilot, BTW), Voyager and Enterprise, I’ve heard all of the same cycle of complaints. Look, my advice to the naysayers is this: either give the show a chance to find its sea legs or find something else to watch. If you don’t want to watch on CBS All Access, you’ll just have to wait for the release of the DVDs some point next year.

To the people who don’t want to pay for Discovery, fine. But I’ll just point out that an All Access subscription costs just $5.99 a month or $9.99 without those pesky commercials. If you pay streaming or cable fees for Shameless, Game of Thrones and Homeland, this is no different than paying for that. True, CBS has only two original programs streaming at the moment (the other being the Good Wife spinoff, The Good Fight) but they do have several thousand episodes of shows to watch anytime. And it’s a relatively low-cost monthly subscription that won’t tie you to a long-term contract.

CBS has the rights to Star Trek and they are demanding money from fans in order to produce a quality show on this scale. But the question remaining is will Discovery turn out to be a great entry into the pantheon of Star Trek lore or a bust?

I’ll end on this note; if Discovery had been just a another clone of the Original Series or the Next Generation with a weekly meet and greet of alien species, problem stories and planetary intrigue, I would have been incredibly disappointed. All I can say is that I am suitably impressed by the pilot and it far exceeded my own meager expectations. I believe that these creators know what they’re doing and are building a credible and, dare I say it, fascinating storyline that I am more than eager to follow.

And I’m willing to pay for it; I subscribed to CBS All Access earlier today.

When the season ends, I’ll be back with a full review.

See you on the other side!

27 thoughts on “Barkley — So Glad You (Didn’t) Ask: A Column of Unsolicited Opinions — #15

  1. SPOILERS: I’ll assume anyone reading this thread already watched the pilot.

    Eric and I watched the pilot this evening. We won’t be watching more of this, most likely. The main reason is that the Michael Burnham character destroys suspension of disbelief. There’s simply no way someone with so much disrespect for authority and such poor judgment ever rose to the #2 position on a star ship.

    When she’s authorized to do “just a flyby” of the artifact, what does she do? She lands on it. The people back on the Shenzhou desperately need to know what it is, and yet she risks everything and violates orders to boot.

    Her assault on the captain is even more absurd. Her outburst on the bridge was bad enough–and the absurdity of that wasn’t helped by the captain making the same observation–but the notion that she’d assault her superior officer based on such a flimsy argument was way, way beyond anything I was ready to believe.

    This is what’s called “the idiot plot.” The one where the characters do something stupid beyond belief in order to set up the conflict and then the rest of the story is about cleaning up their mess. I don’t want to see how this character gets out of her self-caused predicament. Nothing could redeem her behavior up to this point. Nothing.

    It doesn’t help that Michelle Yeoh (who plays the Captain) apparently couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. Her dialogue is almost as wooden as any you’d expect to find in a high-school play.

    Previous shows have recovered from bad pilots, and we’ll see what people are saying about Discovery by the end of the season. Perhaps we’ll give it another chance. But right now it doesn’t look good.

  2. I quite liked Michael but it is hard to disagree with Greg’s point. She makes some bad, bad decisions. Also, while the idea of a human with Vulcan training sounds kind of SF cool…on reflection it actually sounds more like psychological abuse of a child…but then maybe its not so odd that she’d eventually have something of an emotional crisis…but then you’d think Star Fleet would have decent psychological evaluations to spot that long before an officer decides to assault their Captain.

  3. I think that Michael’s decisions were capable of making sense if her character and background had been coherently presented, but the problem was that the show jumped around her personality: first she’s a capable and well-rounded officer being considered for command, then we see the traumatised child, then she’s being quite impetuous as an officer, then we see her as the new star fleet officer being extremely Vulcan, then we see her mutiny….the elements to explain her were there, just not put together properly in the show.
    That said, she’s still a compelling character to me and I think the actor can pull the character off.

    (Also, Michelle Yeoh is not a bad actor, Greg, quite the opposite. Her character was very stoic and reserved – as perhaps a Captain would be – and she played it accordingly)

  4. INCONCEIVABLE!
    I watched the first episode, and gave it a passing grade.
    I ponied up for an all access monthly fee (now cancelled) to watch the second.
    (First time I ever paid to watch ST on TV.)
    I completely agree with Greg. In reacting on FB yesterday I said essentially the same thing – I simply can’t believe in this Star Fleet (though with this incident in his background, Kirk’s (original) disrespect for the rules is more understandable, as is Kirk’s (Kelvin) insubordination….something is very, very wrong with the Fleet’s training, psychological evaluation or both.

    There were hiccups right from the beginning: captain and first officer take a nice long trek through the desert – and then get beamed up in like two seconds. Why weren’t they just beamed right down to the well…why didn’t the Shenozou just fire at the well itself?

    Regarding paying for this:

    Chris. I don’t think it is the fee itself that is problematic; it is THIS fee, added to Netflix fee, Hulu fee, Amazon Prime fee and premium cable charges for HBO, Starz, etc.

    I estimate that comes to nearly 80 bucks per month. That’s disposable income a lot of fans just don’t have.

    What’s more, a lot of fans – including yourself – are grounded in the era of FREE radio and FREE television (even FREE cable, depending on where you are from).

    I suspect that many see this as fee creep and are drawing their line here. What’s next? A Marvel all access channel?

    Star Trek will now go on without me and, in a way, all access makes that easy, as I won’t be reminded as much that this thing exists.

  5. Chris. I don’t think it is the fee itself that is problematic; it is THIS fee, added to Netflix fee, Hulu fee, Amazon Prime fee and premium cable charges for HBO, Starz, etc.

    So true. Service fragmentation means you wind up nickle-and-diming your way to higher fees than before, and that is by design. Here in Canada I already pay more for these services (even when adjusted for the currency exchange) than Americans do, and it’s not like my dollar goes any farther than yours. (And I have a friend who works for CBS, and even he won’t pay for their streaming service; “incompetent” isn’t the word he used, but it means roughly the same thing and it’s more polite.)

  6. Let’s see–$6 a month to watch one show (with commercials) on CBS All Access (which I can only watch on my computer) vs. $10 a month to watch Netflix, which has far more programming than I’ll ever catch up on, no ads–and I can watch it in HD on the TV. What a choice!

    Ignoring that–the show was bad.
    The Burnham character was supposedly raised by the Vulcans and trained in their logic–and reacts emotionally in a was that endangers the ship.
    The Klingons lights their “beacon” and suddenly Sarek (and the other Klingons) can see it while he’s Skyping Burnham from 1000 light years away.
    The Klingon characters are wearing heaving rubber masks that take away any ability for the actors to indicate any emotions.
    The writing is just basically lazy.

    I might watch it if our library gets a DVD set of the first season sometime down the line. But that’s it.

  7. And I’m just going to throw this in there:

    What bizarre combination of skill and incompetence must one have, to nerve-pinch the Captain, have her wake up sixty seconds later, and not having done anything further to stall her?

    “Regular mutiny just isn’t rash and daring enough! Today, we’re playing Speed Mutiny!”

  8. I basically agree with what Greg said above, and will add this: the streaming service just would not work properly! It would drop out at every commercial, often freeze up or just spin it’s little blue wheel as it tried to load–why would I pay for that????

  9. Fragmentation is what will kill streaming services. I’m finding Netflix currently a good deal – there’s enough available that I don’t cancel each month. For those outside the US who got ST:Discovery on Netflix it was another reason to continue with a varied service along with the other shows I watch there. But the more finely sliced these services become the more the fee has to rest on a single show that you want to watch.

  10. I’m an old-school Trek fan. “Trekker” or “Trekkie” doesn’t really matter to me. And there were things in there that I liked. And there were things that had me shouting frustration at the scene. Some of them were production things, some were costume things, and some were script things.

    The uniforms bugged me. A lot. We’re only a few years before TOS. “The Cage” was in 2254 (per Memory Alpha). This was apparently set in 2256. And the uniforms don’t match the uniforms from “The Cage.” Not even close. Even setting aside the change to canon by way of uniform design, the uniforms weren’t good. Using metallic stripes to indicate branch is good in theory, but the command gold and the operations brass were too close to tell apart in the dark of the bridge. Rank insignia being integrated into the arrowhead is all well-and-good, but I couldn’t make it out much of the time. I was watching on a 50″ 4k TV. In 1989, I watched TNG on a 19″ static-filled TV and was able to determine ranks pretty quickly.

    I don’t mind the new look for Klingons. What I mind is that the actors weren’t able to emote effectively through thick makeup. And they sounded like they were talking through a mask. Not good.

    Sarek. Why did it have to be Sarek? It’s like CBS and its team believe that there is only one family on Vulcan with paying attention to. I’m okay with Michael having been raised by Vulcans, but it should have been another family. Remember what happened the last time Spock had a sibling added to his family? (Hint: It was Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and it was terrible)

    I miss Majel Barrett-Roddenberry’s voice. A lot. I realize that she was unavailable to do the computer’s voice for this by virtue of having passed a while back. Tasia Valenza is not a bad actress – or voiceover artist – but if you’re not going to be able to get MBR to do the voice, you should take it in a different direction completely. A male voice. An obviously synthetic voice. Something. Because MBR’s voice as the computer was iconic – and dates back to TOS.

    “Balance of Terror” made it pretty clear that cloaking devices were an unknown to the Federation. We saw “stealth technologies” on ENT, yes, but they weren’t as perfect as the (Romulan-designed) cloaking devices we saw from TOS on. The original artifact wasn’t cloaked, but that first Klingon ship sure was.

    It was a bit action-y for me. More accurately, it was Action –> Wooden infodump dialogue –> Action –> Wooden infodump dialogue. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

    The bridge was crazy-dark. It reminded me a bit of Star Trek Generations and how the transition from TV series to movie meant “Turn all the lights down.” I would need to wear steel-toed boots on this ship because I’d be stubbing my toes constantly. And my shins would be one continuous bruise that failed to heal. That darkness also made the lens flares extra-annoying.

    I don’t mind that the science guy (Saru) was a coward. That’s fine. But putting him as second officer strikes me as a bad idea on Starfleet’s part. Cowards should not be high enough in the chain of command that they are reasonably expected to actually take command of the ship. Because danger happens. Stick him in the Enlisted Pool. Or do what Starfleet seems to do with most Medical officers and make him part of the crew but not in the normal chain of command.

    I didn’t like Burnham. I didn’t dislike her, either, mind. But that kind of ambivalence towards your main character is not a good thing. She’s argumentative with everyone. The captain, the second officer, the medic – that we saw. She may have argued with others that we didn’t see, too. And argumentative is not the kind of trait Starfleet usually selects for. Strong-willed, yes, but she doesn’t seem to be able to take “no” for an answer. It’s not Martin-Green’s acting, either. I think that Martin-Green is a fantastic actress. It’s the character and her decision-making process that I dislike. Strongly. By the end of the second episode, I was grateful for her fate. I really hope that Episode 3 is better, or I’m going to be very irked.

    For a show called Star Trek: Discovery, they sure are taking their sweet time showing us the actual main cast and ship, aren’t they? Someone on Twitter joked that the first two episodes would be the pre-credits sequence on a TNG or DS9 episode, and I’m mostly inclined to agree with them. It means we can’t really judge the show, yet, because we’ve only see a couple of the main cast and we haven’t seen the ship, yet.

    The cliffhanger on Part One really really annoyed me. I realize that this show is going to be streaming-only other than the premiere episode. That’s fine. But if you’re going to be airing your premiere on regular TV, give people a complete enough story that they can decide if they like it or not. Giving Part One of a two-part episode is just crass.

    We subscribed, by the way. What’s another $6/month? We’re already paying Hulu and Netflix and Amazon Prime and our cable/internet bill and Funimation and Crunchyroll and the WWE Network.

  11. I agree with a lot of the storyline criticism — especially the Big Plot Turn where Burnham does something no officer, especially a Vulcan-trained one, should ever do — but overall my inner 12-year-old is quite happy. The show is gorgeous. I read that the budget was $6 million per episode, and they got their money’s worth.

    This is in stark contrast to my reactions to the last two Star Trek pilots: I watched the “Voyager” pilot and was content to rarely see it again after that; I watched half the “Enterprise” pilot, switched off, and stewed in my massive, massive disappointment, because the pre-show publicity had me drooling in anticipation. (I saw one later Enterprise episode. Even when bored in the hospital, it was painful to watch. 🙂 )

    I admire Michelle Yeoh so much. I hope the writers aren’t planning to destroy the Shenzou and all aboard her. We know something has to happen for Burnham to end up aboard the Discovery of the title.

    My wife is already a subscriber to CBS All Access because she had to watch “The Good Fight,” so it’s no biggie for us to continue for “Discovery”. The sad part is that our big TV is an ancient NTSC television, so we are going to have to stream “Discovery” on an iPad propped up on the coffee table.

    (What am I saying? Here in 0062, we don’t have television yet; we have bards who travel from village to village, singing songs of the fantastic future.)

  12. @Standback

    What bizarre combination of skill and incompetence must one have, to nerve-pinch the Captain, have her wake up sixty seconds later, and not having done anything further to stall her?

    And given that the Captain in question is played by Michelle Yeoh, I wonder how Michael Burnham ever managed to nerve-pinch her at all, Vulcan training or not.

    Given what I’ve heard and read, this doesn’t seem like the sort of Star Trek I used to like. I may watch this if it hits German TV, which is by no means sure, since one of the channels that used to broadcast Star Trek in the old days isn’t broadcasting any US shows anymore and the other has stopped broadcasting SF shows, because “science fiction is not a German topic”.

    Here in 2289, we are currently watching Star Trek: The Generation After the Next, which is brilliant, but unfortunately won’t start airing until 2287.

  13. The Klingons lights their “beacon” and suddenly Sarek (and the other Klingons) can see it while he’s Skyping Burnham from 1000 light years away.

    The Really Stupid Physics starts earlier than that. As I saw pointed out elsewhere, the object was 2000 km away. Mikey had 20 minutes to get there and back. Therefore, she needed to be traveling at 12,000 kph / 7,456 mph.

  14. I miss Majel Barrett-Roddenberry’s voice. A lot. I realize that she was unavailable to do the computer’s voice for this by virtue of having passed a while back.

    Except she recorded her voice phonetically for just such an eventuality – in fact, when I went looking for sources, the first hit was predicting they’d use it for Discovery.

    The Klingon characters are wearing heaving rubber masks that take away any ability for the actors to indicate any emotions.

    That was the first thing I wondered about when I saw the clips, and also when I caught reruns of one of the other shows. We can handle Klingons that look like us except for skin tone, honest!

  15. I continue to be of the opinion that as long as Star Trek insists on doing sequels and rehashes of previous stories, the franchise will struggle.

  16. I admire Michelle Yeoh so much. I hope the writers aren’t planning to destroy the Shenzou and all aboard her.

    Anu, n fvmnoyr senpgvba bs gur perj zhfg unir fheivirq, whqtvat sebz gur ahzore bs rfpncr cbqf yrnivat gur fuvc (vf gur fnhpre znqr hc bs nalguvat bgure guna rfpncr cbqf?) Bs pbhefr, Zvpuryyr Lrbu jnfa’g bar bs gurz, univat tbggra n xavsr guebhtu gur purfg gunaxf gb Xyvatba Gehzc. (ZDTN!)

  17. It’s on Netflix here, which is fine in terms of transmission quality, and I already subscribe.

    After the first two episodes, I’m giving it a solid ‘meh’ . The initial walk in the desert was actually not bad at all, setting up an interesting dynamic between first officer and captain. I wish there had been more of it.

    I just find it hard to care a lot about the whole Klingon / Federation conflict, stuffed with second rate CGI. Although the Klingons had their moments.

  18. A couple of decades ago there was a UK science thriller “Chimera”, riffing on genetic modification of apes to uplift their intelligence gone predictably and horrifically wrong. At the end of the first episode the continuity announcer announced “Chimera will be back next week with a new cast”. This was not an exaggeration. Discovery hasn’t quite done that.

  19. Here’s my take. SPOILERIFIC!

    (A) I will not judge ST:D based on this pilot.

    (B) I think there’s excellent call to assume ST:D should not be judged by the pilot. For example, judging by the pilot, the series basically has no cast.
    And, well, by the end of the pilot, I’m really seeing it as more of a prelude or prequel to the real thing.

    (C) I would be delighted to learn that calling it “Discovery” was a fakeout, and what we’re actually getting is Star Trek: Life Sentence in a Federation Prison.

    (C2) I would also accept the title Star Trek: Orange Is The New Redshirt.

    (D) The pilot flowed fine and was generally fun. There were a bunch of speed bumps that really bugged me as I watched, and in retrospect almost every element feels foolish and shallow to me.

    (E) This pilot commits the sin of “My characters don’t have much personality, but I have written an angst-ridden backstory about their traumatic childhood experiences.” Not just Burnham; practically all the characters.

    (F) The inevitable and all-important question: Does this feel like Star Trek?
    No. It doesn’t.
    There’s no ensemble; everything’s focused on one single character. There’s none of the classic-SF-short-story feel about it. The pilot doesn’t exactly endorse the whole “shoot first and trust no one” mindset. But it does portray the enemy as irrational, fanatical, impossible to reason with; and it goes to a lot of effort to undermine the benevolence and the hope in the Federation “we come in peace” approach.
    I think it’s still too early to judge; I don’t know where the series is headed yet. But I’m not really seeing anything that makes me go “ah, yes, that’s Star Trek.” Alas.

    (G) The Klingons bum me out.
    At least in this episode, they’re portrayed pretty much as “space orcs.” (Only, ::sigh::, blacker.) They’re the most boring kind of villain — violent fanatics obeying some vague prophecy (“Thou shalt do as the scriptwriter wills it”, I’m assuming).
    Their slow, ceremonial speech is really frustrating, and I feel like it only makes them more absurd and exaggerated.
    I do suspect we’ll see a wider range of Klingons — we’ve been promised 24 noble houses, which are also supposed to be different from one another. I just hope it’ll be “Ah, yes, this is a culture and we have characters who are not all cookie-cutter clones,” and not, say, “And this noble house genetically modifies their Klingon warriors to explode when they’re killed!”.

    (G2) Man, T’Kuvma and his mates really hate the Federation, after not having been in contact with them for one hundred years, huh?

    (H) On the other hand, it’s really nice to see a human character raised by Vulcans. It’s a concept that I personally adore (and played once in a PBEM campaign a couple decades back…). And, that’s the exact kind of cross-culture interactions you should see, when you’ve got a whole quadrant full of alien species!

    (H2) I only hope they manage to keep Burnham’s Vulcan side as something worthy of respect, and not go down the “Logic is emotional suppression, and always awful!” route. But I actually felt they did that pretty well here! Here’s hoping.

    (I) Who the heck goes on a mission deep into an enemy ship full of expert warriors, to capture their commander alive, and feels that the right number of people for this mission is TWO. Two people, one of whom is unstable and has just committed mutiny. Two.
    “We absolutely can’t allow this mission to fail! And it will be horrible if we kill him instead of taking him captive! Yeah, you know, I think the two of us can totally do that on our own!”
    wtf.

    (J) All in all, this feels like a prologue to the real thing, which we’ll only start meeting next week.
    On the one hand, it’s pretty cool to take a new approach, try a more complicated structure, focus on one lead character. To invest in creating interesting crew dynamics. To create a sense of potential for dramatic shifts in the status quo.
    On the other hand, I feel like these episodes were weak — very weak — in characterization. And that they make very few promises in terms of plot or style for the upcoming season. And so, really, either I’m missing what the premiere’s attempting to do, or the writing is so weak that they’re introducing the series with a unrelated, nonrepresentative prologue.
    I’m not really enthusiastic by this point, buuut, we’ll see what things look like next week.

  20. I continue to be of the opinion that as long as Star Trek insists on doing sequels and rehashes of previous stories, the franchise will struggle.

    Meh. I meant “prequels”. Not “sequels”.

    I blame the ravages of a sleep-deprived brain resulting from having a baby in the house.

  21. Good to see all these views.

    I’m with those who won’t be watching while behind a paywall. Too much already to see that’s free access (and other things in life away from any screen).

  22. (C) I would be delighted to learn that calling it “Discovery” was a fakeout, and what we’re actually getting is Star Trek: Life Sentence in a Federation Prison.

    Orange is the new Red Shirt.

    ETA: Should have kept reading the points before replying…

  23. I actually really enjoyed it. I went in figuring that so long as it was slightly better than Enterprise, I would be satisfied. I also knew that the klingons would be different so was prepared for it to not look like past star trek to a certain extent.

    I was born in 87 and was raised on Next Gen. It was a glorious day when my bedtime was raised to 9 pm which allowed me to stay up late enough to watch Voyager. Having recently watched every single episode of Deep Space Nine makes me inclined to give the show a chance and time to develop. The first season of Deep Space Nine was meh and then the show was so good in later seasons! It took the writers a while to figure out what to do with the characters but they did figure it out and there are so many, many great episodes.

    I’m just so excited about there being a Star Trek show on the air again that I’m willing to give it a lot of leeway and even pay for CBS Access. I went back and forth on paying for CBS Access for a while before deciding that I want them to count me as a viewer so it was worth it to pay the $7 a month.

    On a deeper level, I just really need a new Star Trek series right now. My husband and I finished our four-year project of watching all of Deep Space Nine the same day as the events in Charlottesville. I signed onto facebook to talk about how we had FINALLY FINISHED and saw off to the side in my newsfeed that there was a death toll in Charlottesville. I cannot tell you how quickly I wanted to go back to a world where humanity has learned to put aside its differences and explore space. I’m jazzed to have new stories about Star Fleet to tune into each week.

  24. The issue that I have with the paywall is how they are releasing the series. With Netflix, $10 buys me the entire season.

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