[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Highlights

More science, less war!

If last season’s overall plot felt dark and bleak, this season does more embracing of exploration and science. This is a show called Discovery, after all; it’s nice to see them discovering things. Setting things up by investigating a scientific phenomenon certainly helped. The whole sphere story in “An Obol for Charon” is a great example of using the show to tell stories that feel like the kind of optimistic science fiction that people were really looking for and not finding in season one.

It’s also a breath of fresh air to see Starfleet officers being more ethical this time around. They immediately jump to help May’s people in “Saints of Imperfection,” a far cry from torturing tardigrades and calling prisoners animals a year ago. We’ve also got to praise “New Eden” for giving us that episodic Trek nostalgia of going on an away mission and objectively investigating a new culture, even if Michael was condescending the whole time.

Sonequa acts her ass off

This series threw everything and the kitchen sink at Sonequa Martin-Green and she rolled with it! Especially in the emotional roller coaster “The Red Angel,” in which she battles with the idea that she’s going to turn out to be the titular Red Angel, learns the truth about Project Daedalus from Leland, has to go through some absolutely bananas torture and death scenes, and then gets reunited with her mother absolutely out of nowhere (or out of the future, I guess). Does Michael cry too much throughout the season? Yeah maybe, but she just does it so well!

Pike is instantly likeable

Considering that Anson Mount was given the herculean task of portraying the legacy character Captain Christopher Pike, we were onboard from the first introduction. Pike has climbed to the top of a lot of people’s Best Captain lists because he is so charismatic, he treats his crew like people, he’s always cool as a cucumber (who else can pull off taglines like “Hit it”?), and his compassion is off the charts. When we see in “Through the Valley of Shadows” that Pike accepts the distressing fate we all know awaits him per “The Menagerie,” we can rest assured that this is a leader who will do what’s right for the good of the many.

Ethan Peck had some big ears to fill

Our other legacy characters in Spock and Number One were also handled pretty dang well. Especially Spock, who had the added constraint of skirting elements of the canon, sometimes with success and sometimes less so, as you’ll see in our Season Lowlights section. But Ethan Peck still nails Spock’s curiosity, reserve, and dual nature. The way his relationship with Michael develops throughout the season, from contentious and cruel to supportive and loving, was actually one of the better-paced elements of the back half of the season. And how damn pretty was he with that beard? I just wish he could nail the eyebrow.

Saru is still the GOAT

Our collective fave from season one is even more interesting in season two! Doug Jones is always a treat, and his acting in Saru’s near-death scene in “An Obol for Charon” is stunning. Even if you know they’re not about to kill off a main character, you forget for a minute that he has plot armor. And after his threat ganglia have fallen off, Saru’s character journey begins its new chapter. What was a character who used to be afraid of everything all the time and advocate much safer plans (usually running away!) is now a character who is learning to become more impulsive with a new perspective on how to perform on a team.

Unbury your gays

Another character who is learning a lot about his new self is Hugh Culber, who is back from the dead. The manner in which he comes back in “Saints of Imperfection” is absolutely ludicrous (I didn’t follow a word of the technobabble surrounding the spore cocoon thing), but we must admit that it was nice of the writers to undo the bury your gays trope that left a lot of people with a sour taste in their mouths. This opens up a lot of substantial character work for this doctor who, admittedly, had almost nothing to do in season one except die. Witnessing the scenes in which Wilson Cruz beautifully portrays Culber’s struggle with identity was phenomenal.

An engineer with a side of sass

We loved Jett Reno! Whenever an episode didn’t have Jett Reno, we were definitely asking, “Where’s Jett Reno?” There was not enough of Tig Notaro’s sarcastic yet brilliant engineer this season, but what we did get was a whole lot of fun. Unlike some of the comedy that comes out of various other characters, her jokes have the greatest tendency to work. She’s also just plain brilliant, able to keep her Hiawatha crewmates alive with duct tape and gumption. And you just can’t turn down more representation of LGBT characters in Trek! Happy Pride, y’all!

Amanda isn’t just a trad wife

Though we’ve seen little bits and pieces of Amanda Grayson over the years, it’s almost always been in service to either her husband Sarek or her son Spock. Getting more dimensions to this human among Vulcans colors in more of her character. She’s not content to just sit idly by while Spock is in danger, as we learn in “Light and Shadows” when she has him holed up in some caves to keep out of the hands of Starfleet or Section 31. Plus look how well dressed this wife of an ambassador is. Desperate Housewife she is not, but fashion icon she definitely is.

More Kelpiens = more good

We meet Saru’s sister Siranna in “The Sound of Thunder” and she’s immediately really cool. The whole Kelpien race fascinates me, and their relationship with their predator species introduces some interesting elements to the show. It allows Saru and Pike to debate the Prime Directive a bit, something we always love doing on this podcast. What else is the Federation around for if not to help oppressed people? And the Ba’ul’s whole drama queen vibe proves just so fun to watch, from their boggy design to their guttural language to the way they always know how to make an entrance.

The other bridge characters get something to do!

Okay, this one was a low bar, but last season we didn’t even clear it. The rest of the bridge crew were practically interchangeable, and if they had names, no one knew them. But now Joann Owosekun gets another trait in “New Eden” when we learn that she hails from a community of luddites (which is so interesting we wish it got explored more!). The little montage of people, including Owo and Detmer, writing farewell messages in “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 1” also gives them some much needed characterization. And Airiam having to upload her individual memories to the cloud in “Project Daedalus” was practically Black Mirror levels of sci-fi… but we’ll get back to her later.

We get to make googoo eyes at the Enterprise

We gushed last season over the aesthetics of the Discovery, but when the Enterprise rolls in, we realize that’s what we really want. The uniforms are way better than the Discovery uniforms, coming in the bright departmental colors we’re all accustomed to from The Original Series. You can tell what division/rank everyone is more easily with the colors and the bars on the sleeves (when they remember to CG them in) instead of on the combadge, which was a damn mistake.

The ship itself is a loving update to the familiar design. We’ve talked up this version of the Enterprise before when we covered Starfleet vessels, but this one is definitely a highlight. The bridge is definitely an improvement over the Discovery’s giant, dark cavern of a set. When we see it in “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 1,” we definitely find it more intimate and bright, though the colors and lights do make it feel like you’re inside a pinball machine.

Back to the future!

The choice to end the season by going to the future is commendable. Some could argue that’s where they should have started this whole show from the onset, but that may just be me. Prequels are just inherently hamstringing. The established canon can really limit your options; and conversely, breaking canon always results in alienating fans. So we’re looking forward to what options for creativity have opened up for our heroes 900 years forward. Having more advanced technology will make more sense. We’ll be able to explore more alien cultures without wondering why we’ve never met them before. The galaxy is their oyster. Yum yum.

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Lowlights

1+1+2+1…

While I just praised this season for sending us into the future at the end, I struggled the hardest of any Trek to follow the rest of the time-traveling plot arc. Some of the confusion can probably be blamed on the switcheroo of showrunners that happened in the middle of things, which sure didn’t help. And due to the usual pacing issues of a lot of streaming television (Surf Dracula, anyone?), the episodes careen headlong to an ultimately exhausting ending. Everything is explained at breakneck speed so that you can’t think about it because if you do, you’ll be three scenes behind. 

So… somehow seven red signals appear simultaneously despite being across many lightyears AND then again later for the Discovery to visit individually AND then again whenever the Red Angel appears? Somehow it’s all convenient and convoluted at the same time—which is the real magic of time travel! It’s both a bootstrap paradox and an alternate timeline at the same time!!

Who’s the biggest Mary Sue in Star Trek?

Michael Burnham gets a lot of flak for getting buffed into the Most Important Character in the Universe™, especially starting this season. One day we’ll have the debate on the podcast over who the biggest Mary Sue in Star Trek is (my money’s on Sisko or Spock), but the writers aren’t doing Burnham many favors when time and time again everyone gushes about how important she is. 

Regardless of if you think Burnham’s a Mary Sue or not, her crewmates sure act like she is! In “Project Daedalus” Airiam tells us Michael is at the center of all this; Spock and Michael decide she’s the lynchpin in “The Red Angel”; Control inexplicably lures Michael specifically to the derelict Section 31 ship because she’s so vital in “Through the Valley of Shadows”; and Spock basically praises Michael as the messiah all throughout the two parts of “Such Sweet Sorrow.” Even when we learn that the Red Angel is Gabrielle Burnham in “Perpetual Infinity,” somehow Michael is still the better Red Angel because she saves the day so miraculously that even the wormhole aliens would find it contrived.

“Make it look like a movie”

I said this last season too and I could pretty much cut and paste the same lesson here: less is more. The aspect ratio this season has even widened from 2:1 to 2.39:1 to make it look more like a movie. But why? Not only are all the camera tricks dizzying and distracting, but it seems like every piece of tech this season is a transformer. The floor corkscrews down to a lower level. The asteroid catcher unfolds like CGI origami. We see the unfathomable turbolift netherspace. The characters’ spacesuits just appear on them. All that’s in “Brother” alone! And where the hell did the Jacob’s Ladder’ing shaft, the thousands of shuttles and drones, and the DOT-7 repair droids we see in “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2” come from??? It’s all such overkill just to make the series look cinematic when Trekkies are usually perfectly fine accepting an obvious sound stage like in TOS’s “The Empath.”

Tilly regressed into a manic Sonia Gomez

Remember how last season we praised Tilly’s subtle character growth? Well, this season the writers forgot about that and decided they needed to establish in every single one of her appearances that she’s manic and awkward and babbling, even when she’s not even central to the scene! She ham-fistendly injects herself into conversations, disrupting the flow of scenes, and generally getting on our nerves. They had the perfect opportunity to help her character develop by being in the command training program, but then that idea went nowhere and seemed to get dropped in favor of her delivering goofy one-liners all the time.

Wakka wakka!

Tilly isn’t the only one delivering lots of dorky one-liners. There are so many cringey jokes this season! From Tilly’s “This is the power of math, people!” to Spock’s “I like science,” to Burnham and Spock’s “Hamlet, hell yeah,” the quippiness of the dialogue does not land. Possibly the absolute worst offender is Nhan’s “Yum yum” in “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2,” which sounds like something a novice writer would put in a YA novel with an entire lack of subtlety and nuance. Each line sticks out like so many sore thumbs.

Linus, for that matter, is introduced solely to be a joke. When we meet him in “Brother,” it really feels like Discovery’s reaction to The Orville getting more attention in some Star Trek circles at the time. This funny alien lizard sneezing on the Mean Guy™ could literally have been a joke from the Seth MacFarlane–driven comedy show; like, seriously, cover your mouth, asshole!

And then Georgiou turns up out of nowhere just to be a quip machine. Like Tilly, she’s required to have at least one sardonic retort in every scene she’s in to underline that she’s evil. Which reminds me…

The depraved bisexual trope

One of the most awkwardly acted scenes in the whole season is the one in which Emperor Georgiou is teasing Stamets and Culber mercilessly in “The Red Angel.” “Don’t be so binary,” she taunts. “In my universe, he was pansexual and we had DEFCON-level fun together. And you, too, Papi.” It's so cringey and the actors don’t seem to know how to deliver it. At this point, the only bisexual characters we’ve really established in Trek (other than the Trill, which are their own things) are villains from the mirror universe using their sexual orientation to depict how evil they are (there’s a whole tv trope about it), especially compared to their straight, respectable prime-universe counterparts. What a strangely regressive depiction for Trek to include in 2019.

The magical disabled person trope

You know what else comes across as kind of gross and unprogressive (and also has its own tv tropes page)? Using Spock’s disability as a magical power. Spock having l’tak terai is fine on its own, and can even serve as solid representation to include and accommodate characters with learning disabilities, but then we find out that his Vulcan dyslexia was established only to advance the plot. Making a disability into a magic power is pretty often looked upon disparagingly by the disabled community, who would rather just be allowed to exist as they are. We’ll never see Spock’s l’tak terai come up again; it only existed to get them out of a problem.

Did we really need the Talosians?

Here’s another element that only exists to get the crew out of a problem. The Talosians in “If Memory Serves” were only there for one reason: to magically advance the plot. Scratch that. Two reasons: to magically advance the plot AND to make the fans wank because they recognized a thing. And wank they did! This is a generally positively reviewed episode because people liked seeing the Talosians, but we really wondered why they were here other than as a reference. They magically solve the problem and advance the plot, but they don’t earn it. They aren’t characters; they’re member berries. 

Airiam, we hardly knew ye

Speaking of things that aren’t earned: Airiam’s whole sacrifice episode. Anyone familiar with television could tell once they started filling in her backstory in “Project Daedalus” that meant they were going to kill her off by the end (another tv trope!). And it’s such a crying shame because her backstory is so good! The idea of her surviving a horrible accident by being installed into a cyborg body is damn cool! Her uploading memories to the cloud, as mentioned above, is excellent sci-fi! And her death scene is fucking stunning! But when I should be feeling devastated at the loss of a beloved character, I only feel rage that we didn’t get ANYTHING before this episode to get to know her. How hard would that have been???

Everything’s a soap opera

So many decisions are for the sake of drama this season of Trek. The whole Klingon soap opera in “Point of Light” feels absolutely unnecessary to us. Excise that whole episode and you’re not missing anything because we’re absolutely done with Klingons after last season. Relatedly, there’s exactly no reason why Tenavik has to be L’Rell and Tyler’s kid in “Through the Valley of Shadows.” It doesn’t pay off in any way. Cut it.

The only consequence from the Klingon plot that has bearing on the rest of the season is that Ash Tyler leaves Qo’noS to join Section 31, which is all too convenient. And then he’s only stationed on the Discovery to add drama to any scenes with Stamets and Culber and to remind us that he and Michael like to smooch despite having no chemistry. Cut it.

And then the Klingons show up in “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2” with the Kelpiens somehow, just so Saru and Siranna can say goodbye? Contrived. Laughable. Cut it.

In non-Klingon drama, the reveal during “If Memory Serves” of what Burnham did to Spock as a child was a massive letdown. The show had been building up to this giant revelation all season because it takes forever to find Spock, and then when we finally find him, we learn that Michael just pulled a Harry and the Hendersons on him and then neither of them talked for, what, twenty-five years? Cut! It!

Optional materials aren’t optional

I really liked the Short Treks episodes that precluded this season. They were nice to exist as little stories in their own bubbles. And then they turned out to tie directly into this season, and I’ve got to be honest: I liked them a little less! “The Sound of Thunder” needed a whole recap of “The Brightest Star” to provide the context for the Kelpiens’ relationship with the Ba’ul. If you didn’t see or have access to that Short Trek, then at least the episode mostly filled you in, but you wouldn’t have the full picture.

Even more blatant was bringing in Queen Po in “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 1.” They write away who she is in a rapidly spoken Tilly-babbling line, but there’s absolutely no context if you missed “Runaway.” People were asking online after the Discovery episode if they were supposed to know who this character was because her inclusion was reliant on you seeing the Short Trek AND they don’t explain it.

For that matter, I’m curious how much sense “If Memory Serves” makes for fans not familiar with “The Menagerie.” It makes me wonder who this show is for if it’s inaccessible to new viewers. Shrug.

Once more for the neckbeards in the back

Finally, there was just too much from this season that was obviously in response to fan rage from season one. I already mentioned that Linus is just a joke from The Orville. We also see hack writing like introducing Connolly in “Brother” specifically to kill him off as if it’s a statement to the fans about bad-faith criticism or something. Guys, never respond to internet trolls.

For some reason, the writers also decided to retcon some of things that fans complained about. Pike is adamantly anti-hologram because by the time we get to TOS there isn’t holocommunication anymore even though this show had it. The Klingons grow their hair back out with the pathetic cover line that they shave their heads during times of war—something we’ve never seen before—but people hated the Klingon redesign so much they fixed it. And finally, it’s just so ham-fisted that “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2” needs to spell out that we’ll never speak of the Discovery, the spore drive, and Michael Burnham again and that’s why none of the other series mention them! These writers buckled like the neck of the Klingon Sarcophagus ship and it shows.

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