Warps and all: has Star Trek Discovery been a voyage worth taking?

For decades, Star Trek TV shows have loved and lionised their Federation spacecraft. You can see it in that signature visual flourish, where the USS Enterprise – or Voyager, or Defiant – languidly comes about like a proud old galleon before stretching impossibly into the distance and vanishing into the star field.

The USS Discovery, headline star of the first new Star Trek TV series in 12 years, is no less central. Indeed, it has a one-of-a-kind “spore” drive that allows it to fold space and appear, essentially, anywhere else in the universe. Engage this drive and the Discovery’s saucer spins crazily like an 80s executive’s desk toy. The ship rips a hole in the cosmos, then abruptly reappears with a drunken bob. It seems like sci-fi skunkworks: effective, but certainly not pretty.

In previous Treks, such exotic tech may have popped up in the odd episode only to be quietly put beyond use by the time the credits rolled, so as not to alter the status quo. After the first nine episodes of Discovery, the gamechanging spore drive and its ambiguous costs have remained central to its story, a literal narrative engine. It feels of a piece with the show’s apparent mission: to boldly disrupt – and hopefully re-energise – all the Trek lore that has gone before.

Discovery pitched itself as an outlier from the outset by announcing that its main character would not be the captain or commander. Since it launched worldwide in September, it has deviated even further from any pre-existing Trek template. Peaceful exploration has been set aside to focus on an all-out war with the Klingons, recalling the stressful precariousness of the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Despite being set a decade before the era of Kirk, Spock and McCoy and their colour-coded uniforms, Discovery’s visual palette skews desaturated, shadowy and cold; an effort to make space scary again.

The sense of existential unease extends to the cast. By the end of the two-part opener, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), a human first officer with the exacting standards that come from being raised by Vulcans, has achieved the questionable distinction of being Starfleet’s first-ever mutineer. En route to space prison, she is murkily recruited by the Discovery’s cunning Captain Lorca (played with equal parts flint and flirt by Jason Isaacs), a nonconformist military thinker who schemes in a trophy room full of transgressive alien technology.

Fans raised on the utopian ideals of Gene Roddenberry’s original vision have not rushed to embrace Discovery’s pervasive aura of darkness and compromised morality. Neutrals may have been slightly put off by lofty episode titles such as The Butcher’s Knife Cares Not for the Lamb’s Cry. Even the title sequence – featuring animated blueprints of classic flip-phone Trek communicators and ray-gun phasers – has been divisive. (You can, of course, just skip the intro.)

Yet despite the sense that Discovery has been acting out a little too fiercely against its parentage – even dropping F-bombs for the first time in the franchise’s history – there has been plenty to enjoy. If previous TV series could feel repetitive in terms of how they were paced and shot (a consequence of being expected to produce 26 episodes a year), Discovery feels much more experimental and free-form, even if someone on the production team seems obsessed with floating a virtual camera through windows and force fields.

For what is essentially a prequel, there is a surprising sense that anything could happen. Would-be hijackers blast their way out of endangered space whales. Five episodes in, Clem Fandango from Toast of London – AKA Brit actor Shazad Latif – unexpectedly turns up as a series regular. Spock’s old man, Sarek, pioneers a new mind-meld-powered Skype. And, amid the epic space battles and ritualistic Klingon duels, there are moments of humour. Soon after revealing the crew’s workout gear comes emblazoned with “Disco” on the front, Discovery stages an actual, honest-to-God disco party, blasting Wyclef Jean across the alpha quadrant.

Perhaps the show has been forced to try new things because no other Trek series has launched against so much direct sci-fi competition. If you like starkly shot cosmic realpolitik featuring damaged characters with dodgy motives, there’s The Expanse. If you’re looking for a fizzy galactic war story with a badass female lead, there’s Killjoys. And if you’re looking for a series that slavishly mimics the look and philosophy of Star Trek: The Next Generation while also sending itself up, there’s Seth MacFarlane’s spoof The Orville, which has been renewed for a second season.

But it feels like it will be worth sticking with Discovery when it returns early next year, and not just because the first half of season one wrapped up with an audacious cliffhanger. We are still in the classic Trek era, and there may be Tribbles ahead.

Star Trek Discovery is on CBS All Access in the US and Netflix in the UK. Season one resumes on 7 January 2018

Source: www.theguardian.com