It's taken two whole episodes to get here, but I think the story's actually starting now. If it had been me, I'd have started it here. Those first two episodes feel like they could have been covered in flashbacks and dialogue without wasting so much time.
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| The show's namesake finally appears. |
We begin with Michael on a prison transport ship. Her fellow prisoners seem to be aware of who she is and what she did, and she seems to be utterly uninterested in conversing with them. Very quickly the shuttle runs into trouble - some sort of space bullshit - and is rescued by another Federation vessel, the titular Discovery. It later turns out that the situation was engineered by the Discovery's captain,
Lucius Malfoy Gabriel Lorca, to get Michael onto his ship.
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| This should have been the start of episode one. |
Once on board the prisoners notice and very clearly point out a guy with a black badge, an insignia of unknown meaning. I know a bunch of people on the internet were speculating that it relates to Section 31 from DS9, but since they've never actually been acknowledged to exist it would make absolutely no sense for them to have identifying insignia. My guess is that it does indicate some sort of special intelligence service though.
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| So mysterious! |
Anyway, by some huge coincidence Saru's on this ship, and he's not happy about her being there. In fact, no one's happy about her being there. Except for Lorca, who immediately asks to see her. He wants her to work for him. She doesn't want to. He tells her to suck it up because there's a war on and she's kind of (not really though) responsible. He's also clearly a really weird dude.
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| Not nearly so annoying in this episode. |
She then meets her new roommate, who is absurdly cheerful and friendly and also must be the only person on board who doesn't already know who Michael is. Finding out doesn't put her off too much either. Then it's off to work and time to meet the new boss, Paul Stamets, who just constantly reminds me of Alan Tudyk. He's an astromycologist (expert on space-fungus), which seems like a really dumb thing to have on this space ship.
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| mfw i heard he was an astromycologist |
It's all very secretive and Michael isn't even allowed to know what she's working on, so she sneaks into the high security area and takes a look anyway. It's a bunch of fungus, I guess? She finds it very impressive, but I don't.
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| Meh. |
Then they find out that the ship Stamets's colleague was on has suffered some sort of catastrophe, so they go to check it out. So he, Michael, Michael's roommate and (I think) a couple of others go over to check it out. They find a monster and run away. Lorca secretly has the monster beamed on-board though, and seals it up in a force-field in his office.
Back on the ship, Lorca tries to convince Michael that she should stay and shows off the new technology they're developing, which is really fucking dumb. OK, so Star Trek has always had magic in it, but this isn't just magic, it's over-explained magic that makes no sense. They're trying to make a new engine that can teleport them anywhere instantly, and it works by linking up spores that apparently already exist all over the universe. Like, they've been there the whole time and no one's noticed.
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| I still don't know what actually happened here. |
On top of that stupidity, we immediately know that this technology is either not going to work, or is going to have some huge drawback that makes it unusable later on. And this is why I really didn't want this to be a prequel. If you think the weight of canon is bad going further into the future, going into the past is even worse, because now you have a whole lot of established events and rules but you also can't innovate in any meaningful way because it would contradict the future that's already written.
This episode was OK, but it really should have been episode one. By episode three, the plot should be moving. We shouldn't still be introducing our regular characters and setting. Those first two episodes feel like a waste of time, and if I were to recommend the series to someone who hadn't seen it yet, I'd tell them to skip them. There's more than enough here to establish who the characters are and what happened previously and I don't know why they felt that it was necessary to show us in such detail.
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| Michael's new roommate is just way too chipper. |
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