Star Trek: Discovery came back for Season Three, which just ended. But before dealing with that, I realized I never did a review of Season Two. Which is relevant because it not only sets up Season Three, but also an even more explicitly retro-Trek project with pre-logical Spock, Captain Pike and “Number One” in the soon-to-be-produced series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The fact that Strange New Worlds is a more logical version of retro-Trek than Discovery is one of the main lessons I took from watching Discovery Season 2.
Discovery Season 2 begins with the cliffhanger scene from the end of Season 1, where the ship came face-to-face with the USS Enterprise under Captain Pike. At this point, of course, Spock is already an officer on that ship, and Discovery established that Commander Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is Spock’s adoptive sister. The first few episodes of Season 2 tease dramatic reunions – Burnham with Spock, Burnham with Tyler, the Discovery with the Enterprise and Stamets with Culber – that do not immediately occur. As it turns out, the Enterprise’s Captain Pike is assigned to the Discovery while his ship is undergoing repairs and Discovery is still waiting for an official captain assignment, and Pike has to tell Burnham that Spock has gone missing. This sets off an investigation by Burnham that reveals her own childhood trauma and rift with Spock, not to mention the old Trek plot device of time travel.
And as we know, time travel becomes the primary focus of the season arc, as Pike’s mission ends up working backwards to learn why a “Red Angel” is appearing at pivotal events.
As good as individual elements of the Season 2 storyline were, the whole thing just brought the problems demonstrated by Discovery Season 1 to a head. I had already mentioned one of them. Rather than create new Vulcan characters as producers did with Enterprise, producers linked Burnham’s background to none other than Sarek and Spock, which meant that comparisons with the original material were inevitable, especially in Season 2 as they made Captain Pike a central character while somehow de-emphasizing Spock.
Going back to the old characters actually worked for the Abrams movies, because the cast was able to make characters that stood on their own as people in a parallel universe but were clearly intended to evoke the concepts of the originals. This was especially true with Chris Pine, who pulled off the amazing trick of creating a character who is quintessentially James T. Kirk without being a bad William Shatner impression. Because let’s face it, no one can do a bad William Shatner impression like Bill Shatner.
The producers of Discovery weren’t as lucky. I already said I didn’t find James Frain convincing as Sarek, even though I think he’s a good actor. However this season, I was pretty impressed by Mia Kershner as his wife Amanda. The major find of this season, though, was Anson Mount as Christopher Pike. That character had really appeared only in the pilot episode “The Cage”, played by Jeffrey Hunter. (They presented a heavily made up Sean Kenney to play the maimed Pike in ‘The Menagerie’, the flashback episode made out of The Cage, to help cover the fact that Hunter refused to reprise the role after deciding not to continue after the pilot.) I liked Hunter’s version of the character. He seemed to have an edge. In the scene where he’s talking to the ship’s doctor, one gets the impression he’s a nearly burned-out military vet who has seen some shit. And in the scenes where the Talosians are trying to tempt him, he seems like he would be just as happy to retire to a ranch and raise horses.
Like most of the Discovery actors playing Original Series people, Anson Mount doesn’t really come across like the original actor, other than being the leading-man type. But in this case it works. Mount is sort of like Chris Evans in the Captain America movies: He doesn’t even try to play anything other than the True-Blue Hero, and he doesn’t need to, cause he’s so good at it. And the fact that he is obliged to see his horrible future but chooses to suffer it anyway in order to save the timeline gives Pike a sort of tragic perspective that Hunter’s character didn’t have.
As for Spock, Ethan Peck is a good actor and a pleasant presence, but he is just as much not-Leonard Nimoy as Mount is not-Jeffrey Hunter, and in this case it doesn’t work as well, because Nimoy had so much more time to put his stamp on the character, and Peck doesn’t embody Spock nearly as well as Zachary Quinto. I’m also not quite sure why, but Discovery Season 2 made the decision to make Spock more of a device than a pivotal figure, as opposed to Pike or Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) or even Tyler. It doesn’t help that he’s very not “Spock-like” in this story arc, even if there is a reason for that.
This contrast between what we have now and what the characters were is of course going to be a factor when Strange New Worlds comes out, but there is at least an attempt to emulate old-school Trek with the Enterprise crew (and uniforms) that deliberately sets them apart from the design of Discovery, and that only serves to confirm the fundamental dilemma of calling this a Star Trek show. It’s not really much of a dilemma if you are one of those old-school, politically incorrect types that never did like Discovery, but it’s a problem if you actually do like it.
And a lot of what it comes down to is this:
You couldn’t have had a character like Michael Burnham as a star character in the time of original Trek. And that’s not because the producers were lacking for “diversity” or political correctness: The progressive tone of the original series is overstated, but it was real. The pilot episode did have Majel Barrett as the executive officer. The show did give us Uhuru and Sulu. The original series cast several non-white actors, including the great William Marshall as Dr. Richard Daystrom, one of the pivotal figures in Federation science. And of course, the breakout star was a not-leading-man casting, Jewish actor playing a half-human alien.
The problem rather, was that “political correctness” worked the other way back then, and the network executives fought Gene Roddenberry and his crew over a lot of their barrier-breaking ideas. They rejected the pilot episode character (Number One) played by Barrett and barely embraced Spock, so that Barrett got demoted to playing Dr. McCoy’s nurse and Spock ended up being both Science Officer and XO. I have no doubt that Roddenberry, DC Fontana or one of the other writers could have created a character like Burnham, but given what Nichelle Nichols has described in the stress of playing Uhuru, who was only a support character, it’s pretty much impossible that networks in that time would have cast a black woman as the star of an action show.
Then there’s the fact that unlike Enterprise, Discovery never even tried to establish internal continuity with pre-Kirk Trek, with sick bay tech more advanced than Dr. McCoy’s, and a ‘spore drive’ that was probably not imaginable in the ’60s. To say nothing of the fact that they changed the Klingon makeup yet again.
Now, maybe with modern attitudes we can show the characters that original Trek clearly indicated could exist elsewhere in the Federation (just as we can now create aliens like Saru now that Trek has an effects budget above four digits), but we’re still left with the point that for an unfortunate real-world reason, Michael Burnham could not have been a pivotal figure in the history of the Enterprise and the Federation before Kirk, and therefore in order to preserve the Federation from Control (and to preserve what’s left of continuity), the best way Tyler, Spock and Pike can honor her life is to pretend she never existed and never speak of her again.
The main attraction of Discovery – ‘what if we could do old-school Trek, but with diverse characters and addressing situations we couldn’t have mentioned in the 1960s?’ – was also the show’s main weakness, because there’s a whole bunch of reasons why the Original Series didn’t have these elements, and pretending that you can take a modern premise and put it in a ‘historical’ setting doesn’t work, for the same reason it wouldn’t work if you did a remake of The Scarlet Pimpernel scripted by David Mamet and directed by Quentin Tarantino. (Though I would pay good money to watch the result.)
It basically goes back to the point I’d made in my other two reviews: In going back to established material, you are inevitably dealing with continuity issues, and it defeats the purpose of saying that Discovery is in the Original Series period when it goes out of its way to NOT feel like it. Eventually the show painted itself into a corner where the only way to resolve the setting issue was to remove Discovery from the timeline altogether – which is just what they did.