Star Trek: Discovery is action-packed, dark and grungy – review

Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham in Star Trek: Discovery
Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham in Star Trek: Discovery

Ed Power  reviews the first two episodes of the rebooted space saga, as Star Trek returns to TV for the first time in 12 years [warning: contains spoilers!]

The shiny, optimistic future Star Trek portended for humanity is replaced with a dark and grungy vision as the venerable franchise returns to the small screen. In Star Trek: Discovery (Netflix) the tone is almost as murky as the shadows pooled in the vast creviced foreheads of the re-designed Klingon villains, their crenellated new look suggesting a party pack of Mars Bars squished into the pavement and left to fester overnight. 

Trek fans have had a difficult several years, with JJ Abrams’s cocksure movie adaptations fundamentally betraying the saga’s idealism and erudition. Discovery, it is a relief to report, isn’t quite a flaming disaster on the scale of Abrams’s notorious Star Trek Into Darkness, in which the universe was menaced by Benedict Cumberbatch’s eyebrows.

Nonetheless, the new series, starring The Walking Dead’s Sonequa Martin-Green as phlegmatic first officer Michael Burnham, is unapologetically gung-ho. How much of the vision of original show-runner Bryan Fuller – reportedly shown the door after creative differences with American network CBS – has trickled through is unclear. But there is little of the woozy inventiveness of his Hannibal and American Gods adaptations. 

Conspicuously absent, too, is the rigorous intelligence of the best Star Trek. Discovery is set 10 years before Captain Kirk and Mr Spock boldly went. But far from channelling the original Trek’s cheery swagger, the first two episodes quickly descend into an interminable stand-off between Klingon warlord T’Kuvma (Chris Obi) and the crew of the USS Senzhou, sternly captained by Michelle Yeoh’s Phillipa Georgiou. 

Michelle Yeoh as Captain Philippa Georgiou in Star Trek Discovery - Credit: CBS/Netflix
Michelle Yeoh as Captain Philippa Georgiou Credit: CBS/Netflix

Photon torpedoes are unleashed, shields damaged, b-list crew members sucked into the void. The heroes are nearly as indistinguishable as the Klingons with the exception of Lt Saru – a pockmarked extraterrestrial portrayed with sad wisdom by Doug Jones. Accompanying the explosions, meanwhile, is dialogue so hammy it could be hanging from a hook at a delicatessen ("all life is born from chaos and destruction", "when emotion brings us ghosts from the past only logic can bring us to the present"). 

Netflix will beam down new instalments each week and it’s unclear how accurately these curtain-raising dispatches reflect what is to follow. We haven’t yet been introduced to the eponymous Starship Discovery, or its captain Gabriel Lorca (Harry Potter’s Jason Issacs). Instead, the first two episodes (The Vulcan Hello and Battle at the Binary Stars) together constitute a self-contained TV movie, in which the renegade T’Kuvma seeks to unite his people against the squeaky clean Federation by ambushing the Senzhou and goading her into conflict. 

Jason Issacs as Captain Gabriel Lorca - Credit: CBS/Netflix
Jason Issacs as Captain Gabriel Lorca Credit: CBS/Netflix

The face-off is padded out with flashes back to Burnham’s origins as a human raised by the emotion-adverse Vulcans (she is the adopted sister of Spock, though he never thought to mention the fact). But character development ultimately takes a back-seat to whiz-bang action and Battle at the Binary Stars concludes with Captain Georgiou and Burnham embarking on a suicide mission to the Klingon flagship. 

The captain is killed, as is T’Kuvma. Burnham, however, survives and is hauled back to Starfleet to stand trial for mutiny (she earlier attempted to usurp Georgiou and launch a preemptive strike on the Klingons). The presumably imminent arrival of Captain Lorca and the Discovery may provide the crucial component this introductory double-punch lacks. For now, the new Star Trek feels less like a reboot than an attempt to turn sci-fi’s most cerebral property into a glum Star Wars clone. 

Star Trek before Discovery: what did the cast do next?