First an foremost, let me pause and give thanks to those who really love STD and support it wholeheartedly. In spirit, I really do want to be one of you, but I am still waiting--what seems like an interminable amount of time--for this series to deliver anything worthy in terms of story and/or sci-fi. I still hope for a real Star Trek vibe, but this is clearly secondary. I am comforted in knowing that even iconic ST, such as STNG had a pretty horrific first season, so maybe this is all growing pains... I
Sadly, I cannot rate this too highly. It gets 4 stars because it had some semblence of plot , but all the usual problems of this franchise are still here and, at least for me, they continue to drag things down.
The major problems:. I need a story that makes sense, characters that act rationally, and characters that I care about.
In writing the show, it seems clear that they decided a priori on a number of building blocks: the plot twists (and twists within the twists), a few (however implausable) science fictiony devices that would make STD stand out from all other Treks (things like the Micelial Drive*), some interesting departures from ST canon (new and 'improved' Klingons, saltier language, a snarkier, biting, and back stabbing 'tude in what is clearly not your grandfather's Federation), and some historical twists (e.g. Spock had a step sister...). They clearly spent a great deal of time lot on the look of the show and decided on way-cool-dark-apocolyptic-sci-fi-modern with gaudy costuming and CGI to knock your boots off. They probably even decided on some pivitol plot points they wanted to put in and which little Easter eggs to subtley implant into the show to pique faithful ST fans' interest (is that a Tribble in Lorca's office? Awesome, dude! LL&P!!!). Oh, yeah. And throw in fan favorites: like strand 'em in a Mirror universe. Can't go wrong with that one...
They over thunk it.
As they concentrated on all this minutia in their brainstorming meetings, they forgot that the most important thing of any TV show--Sci-fi or otherwise: Story Telling. Oh, yeah, and that understanding characters through their actions (not just through paragraphs of prose) is probably number two. (See Burnham's monologue at the beginning of this episode. Totally unnecessary if they could just have portrayed this with action. (Expository information since last episode could have been done in the form of a Captain's Log. Instead of just telling us that she has a moral confict, she could have briefly told us of what abhorrent things she had to preside over as captain in the mirror universe and ended the log with a comment that she is not sure how long she could do this anymore... kind of like Captain Kirk did in TOS Mirror Mirror. OMG.)
The writers probably do the best with Lorca. Sure, they talk too much about him being a badass but at least they show it too. In characters like Burnham, they build her up to be a super-human, uber competent, and capable of Vulcan super-logic but then show her doing so many rash and stupid things that negate all the hype...
They undermine their own story by plot twisting their plot twists. You know: Ash is Voq then Ash can't possibly be Voq then Ash is back to Voq. Or how about Stamets is dead. Nope he's coming back. Nuh-uh, he coded stone-cold dead (exeunt medical team). Waaait a dogone micelial minute, he may be back again. Surprise! (Err, possibly....)
Tonight we were even blessed by some Burnham sleight of hand, which would have been better if you could actually have SEEN a hint of it if you were looking for it. I reran the scene 3 times after I was done. It was possible she planted the chip with the punch, but they kept us at a bad angle and kept her left hand out of camera range. Really? Did they plan the plant or decide to add it later, after filming the scene. Lesseee, Burnham would never space someone willingly so she arranges that Ashvoq (Voqash?) gets saved in the end. (Another conundrum, because it's not clear when she would have had time to do this.) But that's not enough. Maybe she transfers important data with it. Sure, yeah. That's the ticket...
And you can only manipulate your audience so much: If you keep twisting your twists, your audience stops trusting anything about the narrative. Morever, in the whole process of the whole nonsense, the writers continue to get lost in their own inconsistencie, which they will have to eventually explain.
I am not the kind of person to watch After Trek. The idea that you need after-game commentary to understand what just happened, gawk like a fanboy at the stars, or convince yourself that it was all genius when it wasn't never sat well with me. But I did catch about six or seven minutes of After Trek, where one of the authors explained VoqAsh's transformation, pointing to a long tradition of Klingons transforming spies into alien races and implying that Arne Darvin was a good example of this in TOS. So, no big thing that, you know, they transformed Voq to Ash... just a regular old episode of Klingon Extreme Makeovers.... (see my last review for details.)
Okay. The Trouble With Tribbles debuted on 12/29/1967. Ummm... Klingons back then did not require major surgery to look human. Most of them just had had to shave the beard and change the uniform. DNA was discovered in the 1950s, but the idea that you might be able to send a cheek swab to FindMyFreakinLostRelatives.com and they could tell you your ancestry--70% Klingon (30% Antaak, 25% Daa'maq, 15% G'logh); 20% Vulcan; 10% Human--was science fiction itself. By now, we could conceive of scanners that could do this. Klingons, back then, also spoke perfect English and it is not clear that Darvin ever had a physical exam before joining the diplomatic core, as both the tribble and McCoy using the scanner (e.g. 'Heartbeats all wrong, body temperature is... Jim this man's a Klingon...') pretty easily figured out he wasn't human. And remember, too, that TTWT was a comedy, so it gets a little comedic license. STD is truning into a different kind of comedy, but it takes itself so seriously that, well, none of this makes any sense.
That said, even worse than watching a teleplay that keeps accumulating lousy elements of science fiction, is watching an extremely talented actor such as Shazad Latif, absolute NAIL the schizoid conflict and subseuqent Voqian melt down only to have everything fall flat as a pancake because NONE OF IT MAKES ANY SENSE.
To wit: I get Voq's rage, but why on earth would he just blow his cover when he could do far more damage by keeping it all inside and letting it all hang out later; he attacks himself, which even he has to explain to Burnham as to why later, because--dude--even Voq knows he's in a mirror universe. Because if Voq's purpose was to inflitrate the Federation to get critical information back to his Klingon brothers and sisters, he just totally screwed it up by revealing himself in that way. And even if he couldn't help himself when confronted with his dovish, Klingon Doppleganger, you'd think he'd get it together and back pedal everything once he was out of the situation. He knows he's supposed to be a spy, right?
And then, of course, there's a practical point here. Why trash your most likable and most human character (e.g. Ash) in this way. It is simply a writers mind-(insert STD F-bomb here) and was never really necessary for the plot, whatever that really is anyway, and is just the writers toying with their audience.
So, once again, the whole thing makes zero sense from Voq's point of view. Which brings us back to how the heck did Klingon technology not only did major cosmetic surgery but was also able to do a personality transplant (at least for a time) on AshVoq, because VoqAsh can't seem to hold it together long enough to hold off violence. Maybe live-then-dead/then-live/then-dead-again/then-maybe-live Stamets can help explain this one or maybe he can bring back AshVoq without the Voq (micelially) so we can have at least one servicable character for the rest of the series.... The biggest trajedy in all this is that the writers didn't give us enough time and expository material to actually CARE enough about Ash, so if he's done for it won't be enough of a loss for us as an audience.
Next on the reveal (at least according to internet hypotheses), is that Lorca is really Mirror-Lorca. Okay. Ummm... I think we all guessed that mirror-you-know-who was the Terran Empress, but this Lorca thing would open up a whole new can of worms. It would be far better (and simpler) if Lorca is really Our-Universe Lorca, but I think that mens that the writers will take the muddier approach. So I guess we will have a lot temporal anomoly nonsense to explain and figure out why Lorca needed the Micelial Network to get them to the Mirror universe in the first place when jumped parallel universes without it previously. The whole thing bends around on itself, circling back on itself like a one-sided Mobius strip. My guess is that they haven't thought this through all that well, and the 'answer' will be avoided or totally unsatisfying.
And THAT is the problem with this series... too much focus on building blocks and not enough on how they all come together into a STORY. If you have to watch the show a dozen times to figure out what happened or can only get joy 'catching' all the inside jokes, there is a major problem. Canon/no cannon. Pure Trek/basterdized Trek. Heck, good/bad Sci-fi (was anyone really interested in inconsistancies in the original Star Wars?)... No one would really care if they just delivered a coherent story with characters that we cared about.
(And no. No Spock with a beard, but we did get Sarek sporting a Van Dyke... will wonders never cease.)
*If you still think the micelial concept has any hope, go back and relisten to Tilly's uber techno babble explaining it to Saru this episode. Even for Star Trek technobabel this makes absolutely no sense...
6 out of 19 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
