Discuss Star Trek? On the internet? Ok...

Buckle up nerds, I just watched the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery and because this is the internet, I feel the need to register my feelings about it. If you want to go in fresh or find yourself confusing Star Wars with Star Trek, maybe skip this post, it's about to get nerdy.

The internet, as you know, is a global communications network used primary
to look at porn, trash other people's worldview and to discuss Star Trek.

Spoiler alert: Turns out Discovery is
actually a cooking show staring Neelix.

Still with me? Super. So Discovery. I liked, a lot. If you recall, (and you don't have to) I was worried when I read that CBS had placed an embargo on reviews and thought that maybe the show sucked and they didn't want bad buzz, but now I'm thinking that they didn't want spoilers to get out. I'm not going to go into spoilery stuff here, but I do want to give a heads up: if you're like an obsessed fan like me, you've probably formed a sense of what you think the show is going to be like based on the trailers, but be prepared to be wrong. In good ways, but wrong.

Sometimes our nit-picking is ridiculous,
and sometimes Benedict Cumberbatch is
grossly miscast as Khan...freaking Khan.

Anyway, on to the nerdtroversy. That's a word I made up, but I think it aptly describes the internet Trek nutty that was staged over the look of certain elements of Discovery. If you're unfamiliar with what I'm talking about, I'll give you the broad strokes. Trekkies (I can say it, they're my people) can sometimes fly off the handle when you mess with Star Trek canon. And fly off the handle they did. Discovery's sets, costumes, starships and Klingons look way different from what we were expecting. Gasp.

Maybe it's a high-tech, super-strong
alloy that just looks like particle
board, styrofoam and paint?

While Discovery is set just before TOS (acronym!*) the look of the ships, both interiors and exteriors look like an evolution of the recent Trek movies. Everything is touch screens and holograms and this has been the source of a lot of fan ire, since Kirk's U.S.S. Enterprise looks like a cheesy 1960's sci-fi set which, incidentally, it is. So the older ship has fancier technology. Sure, it doesn't make a lot of in-universe sense, but the reality is the designers on Discovery had a choice between pleasing a few ultra-fans with a loving recreation of the original show's look, or making something that doesn't look terrible. I think they made the right choice.

Speaking of design choices, holy shit do the Klingons look different. When I first saw the new look, the part of my brain responsible for head-canon immediately switched on. Maybe they're a different kind of Klingon, or mutant Klingons or space orcs but no, it's made clear fairly early on that this is what Klingons look like now. Deal.

Ball's in your court cosplayers. 

"Get a medic over here!
He's lost a lot of Pepto..."

Yup, it's a retcon. If it helps your head canon, just think of them as HD Klingons. In other interesting updates that only people with way too much time on their hands would notice, the Klingons have pink blood again. It's a small detail, and if this isn't interesting to you, congratulations, you're a reasonable person, but Klingon blood in most of Star Trek is red, but in order to get a PG rating for Star Trek: VI, the effects team made it purple/pink-ish. I think it helped sell them as aliens and I'm glad they brought it back, even if it will almost certainly incur the wrath of the internet.

Pictured: future people, doing
space things. What can I say?
I guess I'm just a word smith.

But whatever, these are all minor points. The show itself is off to a really good start. At about forty minutes apiece the first two episodes felt a little short, but I was left wanting to see more, which I suppose is the point. They centered around Sonequa Martin-Green's character and her conflict with her captain played by Michelle Yeoh. This focus on fewer characters was very different to Star Trek's traditional ensemble format, but feels more true-to-life, which can be difficult when your show is about future people doing space things.

He's sort of Spock with a little
Arnold J. Rimmer thrown in.

Also fun was the Spock/McCoy-ish banter between Martin-Green and Doug Jones, who plays this show's 'alien character who offers an outsider's view of humanity,' Saru. His species is a prey animal, so their deal is being naturally cautious...or maybe likable cowards. And while he's filling an obligatory role in any Star Trek thing (Spock, Data, Odo, Seven of Nine) he manages to be his own thing and his outsider's view makes sense. He's sort of there to say 'Holy shit a Klingon warship? Hey, how 'bout instead of poking at it, maybe we should just get out here and not die horribly.'

Oh, and did I mention that this was a Star Trek show featuring a strong female lead? Two in fact? Who interact with one another and talk about things other than a man? I'm not an expert here, but I think this show might pass the Bechtel test, something Star Trek hasn't always been the best at.

Full disclosure, while there was a radiation decontamination scene, but it was a
million times less awkward and weirdly sexual than the ones on Enterprise.

Hey, great job everybody, but seriously,
12 years between Star Trek shows?
That was just...unacceptable. 

As a nerd, Star Trek: Discovery's strong opening comes as a huge relief. After Star Trek: Insurrection's objective terribleness killed the TNG movies, and Enterprise's tepid recycling of old storylines got Star Trek kicked off TV, seemingly forever, it looked like our only hope of new Trek was the J.J. Abrams reboot series, which were really more like Star Trek-flavored popcorn movies. And while Discovery borrows from Abrams in terms of design (and lens flare), it omits the big-dumb action movie vibe and manages to feel like an update of Star Trek which, it's about goddamn time.


*Fun fact: There are official abbreviations for the various Stars Trek. TOS for The Original Series, TNG for The Next Generation. Discovery's official abbreviation is DIS, which, yeah, I'm glad they clarified that too, because by all rights it should be STD.

Above: an unrelated picture of Captain Kirk and one of the alien women
he made out with without bothering to find out if they were biologically
comparable. Does her species have acid for saliva? Or eat their mates
after sex? I don't know and neither does Kirk, but here we are...