Lethe

*** (3 stars out of 5)

On a diplomatic mission to Cancri, Ambassador Sarek is attacked by his co-pilot: a Vulcan supremecist suicide bomber. It never rains but it pours... is something you never hear on planet Vulcan.

Specialist Michael Burnham is coaching Cadet Sylvia Tilly in the command skills of jogging and a balanced computer diet, and in return Tilly is coaching Michael in advanced theoretical boy kissing.

Boys such as Little Orphan Ash Tyler! Captain Lorca bonds with Ash over some laser tag. Quizzing the stressed torture survivor about his background, Lorca is mollified to hear he is from the normal human city of See’Attl. Lorca, popping every eye in the audience, immediately makes Lt Tyler his security chief. SECURITY? CHIEF???

Dying Sarek’s katra calls out to Michael for rescue & pulls her into his dream- his version of the events of Michael’s graduation day. The Vulcan Expeditionary Group (their minds as open as their arseholes) would only let ONE of Sarek’s weird kids join- so he chose Spock. Michael, top of her class, was forced into her Starfleet safety job. And it turned out great! Seven lonely years of moping up the command ranks followed by seven months moping in jail.

Does Captain Lorca’s ever increasing pile of odd choices seem like something that should maybe, just possibly, come under review? Well, Admiral Cornwell is his boss, and the words “come” and “under” ARE used when they pause to review his bedroom.

Cornwell discovers Lorca is quick to whip out his phaser & yes, he is happy to see her. He begs her not to take away his ship just because he's riddled with PTSD. But not to worry- he lies, stalls & schemes until she quite fortuitously is caught by the enemy while trying to finish Sarek’s task herself. Lorca rushes to her rescue... oh, no, not so much.

Michael is full of feelings & unlike Tilly she doesn’t "love feeling feelings". She goes to Ash Tyler for advice on being human. What a fine idea! He is THE SECURITY CHIEF!!!

Choose Your Pain

*** (3 stars out of 5)

Michael has a sense of empathy for Rippy the Gator, and who wouldn't? It was clearly a very discerning creature when it mauled Chief Landry. But now EVERY Starfleet ship has been ordered out to hunt these giant tardigrades to stuff into their mushroom engines. Discovery has had 3 weeks of success popping up out of a haze like Alice's Caterpillar and drowning the enemy in bong water.

Admiral Katrina Cornwell tells new fleet darling Captain Lorca he shouldn't have the mutineer on his crew, but she's not complaining very hard because Lorca is a dreamboat.

Dreamboat finds himself in a brutal Klingon prison. His cellmates are handsome Lt. Ash Tyler and Dwight Scrute, as an amazingly good Harry Mudd. Well, by GOOD, I mean a good performance. He picks who gets kicks & Mudd, plainly, never picks himself. The cynical civilian and his spider Stuart are squealing to the guards. But Ash is holding up handsomely, too, for a guy who's been captive 7 months. Lorca is suspicious, but not to worry- Ash is alive because he's been having human-on-pinecone relations with L'Rell the torturer.

Unsteady as Acting Captain, Saru asks for the most decorated Captains living & deceased, so a fanservice screen pops up. We’ve heard of EVERY one, they’re all human, and unless there’s a crammed page 2 of Q-Z you could count them on one hand. Nice diversity, Starfleet.

Oh, yeah, so, Tilly and Stamets drop the f-bomb. Amidst all this deadly serious joylessness, it was kind of a great moment! Not for kids. But I'd be more worried about the prison guards kicking a guy's fucking head in than whether your teens use curse words. This ain't your grandfather's Star Trek, old man!

Lorca is also an inspiration to your kids with his hints at Klingon anatomy, or the thrilling tale of how he blew up his entire crew on the USS Buran to save them from degradation at the clawed hands and doubled anatomy of the enemy, and was, obviously, rewarded with Discovery.

Overworked Tardy the Engine Bear squeezes itself out like a sponge & curls up. With 134 souls to protect, Saru insists on working it to death. Dr Culber tries to stick up for the possible sentient. I thought it goes: To seek out new life & stab them with needles until they aid our war effort.

Lorca & Ash make their escape, and in heroic Starfleet fashion they leave that wailing sellout Mudd behind to suffer as he swears revenge. Morally, it’s a garbage decision, but, hey, it's tactically very questionable too. Ash pummels L’Rell & Lorca melts her, uh, face, I guess you'd call it? Again, these are very ugly Klingons.

Not as ugly as the abomination they're calling the D7 battlecruiser now! You know, there are a lot of numbers and letters in the alphabet- call it the D4 and I wouldn't get to whine so much!

Paul Stamets saves the day with illegal eugenics to take Tardy’s place. So good news all around: Lorca & Ash are back aboard, and now we have a new action figure: Stigmata Stamets!

Saru mends fences with Michael, admitting his anger & jealousy of her mentorship. He orders her to save the tardigrade, so Tilly prays over it and they free it. Very laudable morally, & again, strategically bonkers.

While brushing their teeth, Dr Culber frets over his lover Stamets- neither notices that Paul's reflection is not behaving. Uh-oh!

The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry

** (2 stars out of 5)

We open on an electrically-blasted region of some twisted hellscape... wait, it's just an extreme close-up of a uniform synthesizer. Even getting DRESSED on Discovery is a nightmare!

If the episode has a theme, it's settling in. Mr. Saru is forced to admit that saying nice things about Michael and giving her blueberries along with the stink eye was slightly hypocritical last episode in that he didn't think she was going to be sticking around. She makes his threat ganglia wiggle in fear but in these desperate times we have to be friends with monsters. Captain Gabriel Lorca for example.

Apart from his dissection chamber and gung-ho security chief Landry who gets herself torn to shreds by literally poking the space bear, Lorca also motivates his scientists with the screams of the dying from the Klingon attack on Corvan 2. What a guy!

What's Lorca trying to motivate? Dr. Hugh Culber's BF Paul “I always wanted to converse with my mushrooms" Stamets is trying to finalize his life's work to allow a starship to bounce on spores like plumber Mario from one world to the next in an instant. Yes, really.

Only Michael Burnham, who's barely heard of spore drive technology, can recognize that the macroscopic tardigrade-like creature they found on the Glenn was less Shardik with a touch of Freddy Kruger and more Super Computer with a touch of Dune's Guild Navigator.

The upshot of which is we get our first shot of the USS Discovery twisting inside out like a Go-Bot!

So what are the "Klingons" up to, apart from winning the war for galactic supremacy? Well, starving. Torchbearer Voq has seemingly been trying to get his highly advanced Ship of The Dead to budge a single kellicam for SIX MONTHS, during which time they've eaten Captain Georgiou's corpse, if we can give them the benefit of the doubt, because they are hungry rather than for shock value for some unseen audience. Interstellar conquerors, everyone!

L’Rell flirts with Voq but then seems to sell her loyalty to Kol for a hamhock. Apparently, though, she has a better scheme in mind when told to kill Voq the son of none...

So, hooray for humans- the last handful of folks on Corvan 2 are saved and all it takes is imprisoning & tormenting the dancing bear.


“Keep your eyes & heart open always.” says Captain Georgiou's last will and testament. If this story were set in Trek's future, we might look back on the way Captain Janeway was appalled by Captain Ransom's very similar use of tossing living, thinking creatures into his engine to make it go faster. Fortunately, that ain't happened yet and nobody's learning nothing.

Context Is For Kings

**** (4 stars out of 5)

So I came out of the pilot stunned.  The performances are good, the effects are expensive and I can't fault anybody for taking risks and trying new things. (Well, new-ish to Star Trek, anyway. It is a little familiar if you've seen Starship Troopers or Battleglum Galacticglum.) I wanted comfort food and they gave me Very Uncomfortable food.

As we rejoin our hero the galactically infamous mutineer Michael Burnham she's starring in the pilot for Umber is The New Orange. It's been six months of war with over 8,000 Federation dead and so the pilot is actually called Everybody Blames Michael. Well, speaking of pilots, the prison shuttle pilot falls overboard somehow and the convicts are brought safely aboard the USS Discovery. Did they bother to save the pilot, too? No time to ask!

Your patience for two hours of dark lens-flared bridges and purple squashes barking nonsense in H.R. Giger's rumpus room while Star Trek-like ships play Star Wars has paid off- here's USS Discovery. If only the Disco weren't a bronzed novelty pizza cutter on a pie server...

Here meet again Keyla Detmer & Mr. Saru. They both have glares for Michael, but one has an injured face and one has a bowl of blueberries. Meet mysterious Captain Gabriel "Nobody Will Miss a Few Muggles" Lorca & his misfortune cookies. Meet chirpy Cadet Sylvia Tilley & her special needs. Meet Lt. Paul Stamets & his persnickety Sheldon Cooperness. Meet Security Chief Landry, she’s pretty cruel and oh, never mind, you won't have to meet her for long. Meet Lt. Commander Airiam, some kind of Bynar, Cyberoid Boomer, or Soong-type with the face flayed off. Yup, you won't remember their names but meet a bunch of science nerds forced to be soldiers.

But you'll have to meet them all in the dark because... Well, just because, damn it. There's a war on! Light's not cheap! The Klingons might see us! Who needs to see what they're doing? The Captain likes it dark! Yeah, his eyes are bad! Let's go with that.

Lorca can sort of make out where Michael Burnham is standing and tells her she has brought back hunger, need, and want. Seriously, are we blaming her for everything now?

Possibly we can blame her for the bizarre blood bath with strobe lights and pretzel-twisted corpses aboard their sister ship Event Horizon, uh, USS Glenn. Of course, it might be the unholy secretive drive experiments and six-limbed space bear. Fortunately, the survivors of the away team will be glad to know Captain Lorca brought the monster back to keep in his private skeleton closet/vivisection den.

The tone is set- it IS enthralling. It’s Star Trek as a nightmare. Nothing familiar, nothing comforting.
Find something to hold on to- this horror movie is 15 hours long.

Battle at the Binary Stars

**(2 stars out of 5)

It's 2256, but we're ignoring "The Cage" (2254) so all the ships look like nothing we've ever seen. Well, the Klingon fighters look a lot like the winged Black Lectroid ships from "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension", a movie I wish I was rewatching for the 10th time instead of this for the 3rd.

Seems T'Kuvma's "Pure Klingons" aren't inbred hicks with horrible deformities. We see several dozen arrive & they all look like jack o'lanterns that never got thrown out in November. Anyway, T'Kuvma was picked on as a kid, so he's tooling around in his daddy's ship spoiling for a rumble. He's also decided the melting pot of the Federation with all its peaceniks holding hands and dancing cheek to beak is not for him. Dude, you're made of lizard claws, pine cones, & spare rib shards and you haven't gone outside in 100 years. Wasn't nobody offering to mix with you.

On the other side of this vertiginous slide into Interstellar Race War is Michael, the protagonist I find compelling but very difficult to comprehend. Just as Worf wouldn't have spit on a dehydrated Romulan, Michael's tormented, undernourished emotional side just can't see a Klingon without blasting his ass. Even though she has JUST told everyone that making a martyr of T'kuvma is the WORST thing they could possibly do. In a trice, she destroys her captain, her career, & the galactic peace. Actually, maybe screwing everything up royally is relatable after all?

The Substitute Kirk & his presumably all European male crew on USS Europa die by the prow of an anachronistically cloaked "Klingon" ship, which is in turn disabled by a booby-trapped corpse. Since "Klingons" "traditionally" revere their dead bodies & helpfully line their hull with them for the first time ever.

Mutinous Michael Burnham is imprisoned for life by a Board of Shadowy Figures. Apparently Starfleet leadership is just 100% Section 31 now.

When I watched this I posted a script fragment to social media from 'The Tholian Web' set in 2268:

CHEKOV: Has there ever been a mutiny on a starship before?
SPOCK: Absolutely no record of such an occurrence, Ensign.

So I asked- Are we in a different dimension? Or is a certain first officer defending his foster sister with semantics? After a season, my internal jury is still out.

But I very much dug this phrase from Sarek, whether he's Prime or otherwise: "No matter your shame, gather your strength. Find a way to help those who need you."

Creators, if you'd only been willing to switch the digits around and call this 2562 I wouldn't have most of my continuity complaints! But then you'd have to do without your Sarek cameos. That logical, logical voice of reason who urged his daughter to shoot first. Kind of like the way I take stupid pot shots at a show I want very badly to succeed.

The Vulcan Hello

** 2 stars out of 5

Meet T'Kuvma, flashpoint of Internet troll rage. And so, Meet the Klingons. (Deploy heavy sighs.) Elaborate, baroque samurai lobster costumes, combined with trying to read subtitles printed across them and you'll be hard pressed not to make terrible cursing sounds too. The stilted, gargling speeches through big pointy teeth (for some reason also made slower & deeper by computers) will remind you you're losing hours of your life you'll never get back. And the new make-up. If you thought the 'Into Darkness' Klingons went too far with their piercings and weird contact lenses, let's see what further mutations have to offer. Pointy ears? Why not. Four nostrils? Watermelon size skulls & velociraptor claws? Yeah, that'll be off-putting. When the motive behind the changes is revealed around episode 9- believe me, it wasn't worth it. Since you insisted, there's a picture of one in the middle panel:

If you're just champing at the bit to make sweeping design changes, why not just call your new beast-men a new name, or call them an existing race we never saw? (Still a chance in season 2 to tell us these Klingons were Tzenkethi pretenders all along?)

And now, Minute Two. Remember how happy everyone was to learn during the much-beloved Star Trek V that Spock has a secret brother? Meet Michael Burnham- secret sister! She estimates storm arrival to the second but can't recognize what geometric pattern she's walking in. Her Starfleet calls somebody they haven't first contacted "Crepusculans", thank you very much. (Of course, the locals call humanoids "Stink Monkeys" so it evens out.)

Meet Captain Philippa "It's Hard to Believe You've Served Under Me For 7 Years" Georgiou. She's fun. Meet Saru "Give Forever Fishman a big hand to go with his big shoes" The Cowardly Celpian. Meet Keyla "Blink And You'll Miss Her" Detmer and the Cannon Fodders... uh, Shenzhou bridge crew. Meet a Klingon Torchbearer- a straw man with the worst bat'leth design in recorded history. Meet Voq & L'Rell- (the pale one and the girl one).

My niece points out what this oblivious cis male missed: in a crisis the captain and first officer each call white males to help them.

Their force ghost "fathers" (I still have a hard time swallowing the presence of holograms in this "prequel") give them opposite advice and start a fight between them. It's a good thing Vulcan logic can come to any conclusion. Meet Sarek, the Vulcan Ambassador whose horrible advice exacerbates Michael Burnham's mental breakdown.

Star Trek is back. Sorry.

STAR TREK BEYOND

**** (4 stars out of 5) 
Well, it was the 50th Anniversary- so it was time for a Fast and Furious Impossible Mission!

Having dropped Bruce Banner into a black hole and frozen Steven Strange in earlier tales to astonish, our rebooted young crew must now ride motorbikes at Heimdall's head!

It's 2263 and we're clearly bored & listless- Kirk's feeling old (he turned THIRTY, poor kid) & eyeing the exit while Spock & Uhura break up. Speaking of break-ups, poor Enterprise bites the dust yet again. Lured into a treacherous dark nebula as a take-out meal for the tormented Krall & his cronies, our stalwarts must struggle upward once more for the fate of the civilized worlds.

Kirk, Spock, McCoy & Scotty have the most to do, but that's always been the case. Carol Marcus and her underpants have wandered away, possibly wherever Gaila and her underpants got to. But that leaves some room for a hip new lady character whose underpants do not feature: one of Scotty's French Girls... Aliens or "Lassies" as they are known. She's named Feisty Jennifer Lawrence, or Jaylah for short. Jaylah has oodles of kicks and holographic tricks. Uhura came along but she has so little to say that the 13th Trek film becomes (ugh) the 7th one unable to pass the Bechdel test. Still, a technical pass in the diversity category as it turns out the Kelvin Sulu is gay space married while Prime Sulu was straight as a space arrow. Points for trying, and either way our Hikarus seem like good Demora daddies.

Yes, I loved it. But I have some questions. Was a wormhole accident how the Franklin ended up buried ass-backward in the top of a mountain? How did Krall get his well-equipped gang? Is he recruiting from the people he's stranded and sometimes eaten?  How did he earn any loyalty whatsoever? They're organized enough to bring down the Enterprise in minutes, but they kill several of their own team with their bee swarm strikes. Why do Edison's vampire buddies speak an alien language among themselves  if they hate aliens so much? They're old racists who absorb aliens & they look like what they eat... but why would they take alien names? 

What makes a Kelvin Pod different from a regular escape pod? Is it their N64 controllers?

O.K., the first warp 5 starship was the NX-01, so why, then, would the first ship capable of warp 4 be the NX-326? (Found my answer: registry is Nimoy's birthday.) Still so sad about Anton Yelchin and Leonard Nimoy.

I literally just read the Wikipedia entry and I have no earthly idea what Krall's doomsday device is called. The Abernathy? Like cinematic Galactus & Parallax it's some kind of ill-defined evil cloud. Anyway, it probably got all the explanation it deserved, but it was still no explanation.

Finally, it's not a question, but the saucer flipping seems wildly, goofily impossible. Kirk, Chekov & hot-on-their-heels Kalara make a vertical slide yet she ends up standing out in the open just watching that massive saucepan lid crash down on her while they somehow scuttle off unscathed?

Nerd Do Well brings a fun, fast-paced, & even sometimes moving script, the arrival at Yorktown starbase is phenomenal- especially with the superb score, and the USS Franklin might be the last good-looking ship we see from Star Trek (sorry, spoilers).

The teeny, terrified Teenaxi who eschews pants, Keenser's acid sneezes, and Ensign Syl's hidey-hole head are adorable- how could Krall hate aliens so much when they're clearly the best thing about outer space? As my wee granny used to say "Ye cannae break a stick in a bundle." Especially if your stick bundle is also your own hair.

Evidently it didn't score high enough financially, but it's still a darn fine film. With time, my affection for "Into Darkness" has waned, so I would've only given that one 3 stars if I was reviewing it today, but Beyond does hold up. 

I had a great time- my friend Kirk took me to this one as a birthday gift after a long, crummy day at work, then shortly afterward my wife Trish won me a free copy from @Joshrimer on twitter. My friends are the best in the galaxy.