![]() At the end of the episode, he finally gets to do so, giving meaning to his years of waiting. At the outset, we see a man who is waiting to fulfil his duties as an officer of an institution so thoroughly destroyed that it has been reduced to a mere idea. That requires vigilance, something this opening episode shows us in moving closeup. In this, as in a few other ways, it seems to take its cues not from the voyages of Captain Cook (who inspired Gene Roddenberry to create the original Trek), but from modern sci-fi writers such as NK Jemisin, who are concerned with how societies can – or can’t – be built to survive hostile worlds. ![]() Now, Discovery promises to explore the idea of salvage – how to make the most of what we have, especially when we don’t have enough. It’s a Star Trek that takes place, for the first time, in a broken world where there is no benign bureaucracy that must be saved from space invaders, brightly coloured disasters or a few bad apples. The sadder-but-wiser show it has become mirrors the toll the past three years have taken on so many of us. I reviewed the programme when it began in 2017 I wasn’t a fan of the elongated story arcs or the heavy-handed politics. There are even signs that it may begin affording its characters the kind of quiet everyday business that will allow the audience to know them as people, rather than as entries in branching wikis of lore. The result is a far weirder and more eccentric show than Discovery has ever been – one character has a digital alarm parrot in lieu of a clock. The possibility of the network high-fiving itself over references to shows that have been over for decades seems blessedly remote. Her boring love interest is gone, her crewmates are awol (though some of them will turn up), and the future is filled with the sort of double-crosses, shootouts and ramshackle spaceships you associate with a Star War, rather than a Trek. Martin-Green is very funny, and she is, finally, our guide to the secrets of an unknown world. It is a more eccentric show than Discovery has ever been – one character has a digital alarm parrot ![]() The friction of the planet’s atmosphere seems to have burned away all the optimism that has always been the most basic atomic unit of Star Trek – when Michael arrives, she immediately stumbles across a piratical “courier” of contraband goods named Book (David Ajala in an enjoyable Han Solo mode) and learns that a huge cataclysm has essentially ended the peace enforced for so many centuries by the omnipresent Federation. Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) crash-lands on an unfamiliar world after leaping through a temporal wormhole at the end of Discovery’s second season, to defeat an evil artificial intelligence. So there are reasons to hope, which, incidentally, is also now the theme of the series. Season two had some behind-the-scenes drama: the showrunners left the series after complaints by staff that they were mistreated now the show is run by Alex Kurtzman and Discovery writers’ room veteran Michelle Paradise, who both wrote this first episode with Jenny Lumet, the author of, among other things, the screenplay to Jonathan Demme’s masterly Rachel Getting Married.
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