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Star Trek Discovery: Eps. 1/2 Review
The worst sin a piece of entertainment can commit is to be boring. For all its sweeping vistas and dutch-angled jump cuts, the premiere of Star Trek Discovery is, above all else, boring.
Everyone knows going in that this is a story about a single character, not a ship or crew like previous iterations of Star Trek. And that’s fine. I appreciate that they’re trying to not be stale. But in order for that to succeed the audience has to care about or at least understand the main character. For all of the scenes flooded with exposition, the audience does not understand Burnham, her motivations, her actions, or why she’s even in Starfleet in the first place. Perhaps that’s the point. But that’s a stupid decision if your show is pulling double-duty as a launchpad for CBS All-Access. CBS has made so many mistakes with regard to this show, I hesitate to even write them all out. Splitting a two-hour premiere episode in half and paywalling the second half is possibly their biggest mistake, though. At the end of the first hour, the audience has been told repeatedly that the main character is ready for her own command but she ends the episode committing mutiny so she can explicitly start a war. That’s called “bad screenwriting.” There’s no point of me going into the weird visual and aesthetic choices when the story itself is fundamentally broken.
