Weekend Trek “The Vulcan Hello”

I have seen, prior to my Trek watch, exactly one episode of Star Trek Discovery.  And…it was this one.  It aired on regular CBS, back when the streaming service was called CBS All-Access, and at the time, I let it be known that I didn’t see the point of a streaming service for one of the four big networks, and certainly not enough to pay to subscribe for one show, no matter how much I enjoyed Star Trek.

Then, I found a good deal to get CBS with Showtime and Apple TV+, CBS and Showtime merged to become Paramount+, and there’s enough there to keep me generally subscribed even if I don’t find Paramount itself all that impressive, and that was before the Skydance merger made the whole company seem a bit suspect to a lot of people.

I mean, I am still hoping they don’t acquire Warner Brothers…

Anyway, I did write a review for this episode when it did that regular TV airing.  I read it over and..yeah, the episode was fine but didn’t impress me enough to subscribe to the service.  In many ways, my reaction to the episode hasn’t changed much.  It’s fine.  There’s not much here that really grabs me enough to keep going, though I will since I came this far, and maybe it’ll grow on me.  I mean, I think Ryan liked this series.

Regardless, let me point out a couple things here.  First, this is the first Trek series I have ever seen where the focus is on the First Officer and not the Captain.  Michael “Number One” Burnham was partially raised on Vulcan by Sarek (the one character in the episode who isn’t original to the series, played by genre TV mainstay James Frain, a good choice, honestly).  Michael is…fine.  She’s fine.  She’s arrogant because she thinks she knows better on how to handle Klingons by consulting with Sarek, and when her boss, Captain Georgiou, says no, Michael accepts that decision and moves to assist her captain.

Or she tries the Vulcan neck pinch on Georgiou and then orders the ship to fire on the Klingons because that’s the “Vulcan Hello.”  You hit the Klingons before they hit you, the Klingons will respect that, and then they’ll move on.  Now, I had thought that humans couldn’t quite master the neck pinch since it requires superior Vulcan strength and maybe their telepathic abilities, and I must has been right because Georgiou is back on the bridge before too long, really pissed.

Why would you make Michelle Yeoh upset?  I know she’s just a guest star, and I am gonna guess she gets killed off or something, maybe paving the way to Burnham’s eventually ascendancy to the captain’s chair, but seriously, don’t mess with her.  That twinkle in her eye when she figures out how to signal the ship for a pick-up in her and Burnham’s opening scene is enough to make me think she’s too good for this series right now.

As it is, there are some things I like.  I still like Saru, the 6’8″ alien science officer from a species that was bred for prey and has a built-in danger sense.  Then again, he’s played by Doug Jones, and I adore Doug Jones’s work, and not just because his brother used to comment on articles here.  Saru is clearly this series’s version of the Spock, the alien character who is different from the rest, and then he needs to fit in somehow.  That’s Spock, Data, Odo, the Doctor (maybe Seven of Nine), and Phlox, all Trek character types.  These are the outsiders that make themselves part of the crew anyway.

So, I like Saru.  What about the Klingons?  OK, I don’t mind the new look.  It’s not the first time the Klingons got a major redesign.  I was wondering why they spoke as slowly as they did, almost as if the actors had just learned the long Klingon speeches and had to go through them phonetically on-set.  Burnham takes one out during a one-woman space flight, possibly while proving why the bat’leth is a horrible weapon in the grand scheme of things.  They sure are acting like Klingons even if I didn’t recognize them right away.  They’re fine.  I also don’t mind that the level of technology on this show, clearly set before the Original Series, is also clearly more advanced than anything Kirk, Spock, and McCoy handled on a routine basis.  That happens.  Ultimately, this is stuff that doesn’t much matter.

What I do mind is the ending.  It’s a cliffhanger, and that’s not the issue.  It just ends rather abruptly  The Shenzhou is suddenly surrounded by Klingon ships.  OK, not bad.  But then the episode just cuts to black, almost as if the producers weren’t quite planning on ending it there.  That may be possible.  Or it may be this was intended to be a longer episode by itself and the episode got split in two to put half on commercial television.

I am inclined to think the latter.  Mostly because Bryan Fuller co-wrote the episode, and he’s not only a Trek veteran, but also has done some damn good TV like the first season of American Gods and all of Hannibal.  The guy knows how to do TV.  He was also the creator of Discovery, so maybe it gets better from here.  All I know is, from this point, it hasn’t done much for me one way or the other.