Here are a few observations on the first two before I watch tonight's ep. I always find it complicated to review things because I'm worried about stealing from the fiver, but what the heck -- I have no idea how long it'll take to finish that.
I was pleasantly surprised at first that I'd
enjoyed the ep enough to make up for a lot of qualms. This was basically my experience with Into Darkness, so (to borrow my Facebook phrasing) I figured DSC was shaping up to be a six-and-a-half-hour Abrams movie. That seemed pretty good, considering! I'd gone in prepared for something much worse.
But I've noticed that most of my Trek friends were less impressed, and I've concluded that I was actually
more pessimistic than the fandom at large. I saw all the bad signs Nate chronicled in the other thread and was preparing myself for not just bad Trek, but bad
entertainment. That doesn't seem to be typical. Apparently, despite everything, nobody was actually expecting outright garbage. So my legendary easy-to-pleaseness took a new form this time: I lowered my own expectations too far and wound up happily surprised!
Moreover, this week has brought another unexpected realization. See, there are no good transcripts out there for recent Trek (or most TV -- transcript sites these days are laaaazy), so I really have to watch it again for the fiver. And I just keep putting it off. As much fun as I had at the time, there's also a lot here I really don't want to subject myself to again. Number one on the list: the "Klingons". These aren't the complex Klingons of TNG/DS9. They're not the cunning Klingons of TOS. Hell, they're not even the stock-villain Klingons of ENT. These are pure Into Darkness Klingons: a race of boring, savage idiots.
Number two on the list is pretty much anything to do with the main character, Michael Burnham, whose name I find it actually hurts to type. That name says it all about her, really -- they gave her the most traditionally male name they could think of for
absolutely no reason. She's just
special that way. (At least pretend you named her after Michael Piller, you idiots!) The general theme is that we're supposed to admire and like this person, both in and out of universe, not only without evidence but
against the evidence. I was hanging in there for the first episode, remembering that Kirk and Archer had their unearned glories and this could still be going somewhere... but again, the fact that she does what she does at the end of episode 1 and is
allowed on another important mission by the same people before the end of episode 2 just says it all. It's one thing to give your characters flaws, and shocking the audience is always fun, but there are limits -- and Burnham sped past them at warp. Somehow we're supposed to be fine with a main character who is basically one of TOS's single-episode "officer who went crazy" villains.
I really did enjoy the show. I just hope there's some real Star Trek in the episodes to come, because so far this is just an entertaining but shallow fanfic with a really big budget.
Huh. Weird -- now that I've got this out of my system, I
do kinda feel like watching it again.