Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 3×01: That Hope Is You, Part 1

I’ll get back to Short Treks when I get around to it. Just a short blunder this week. In the weeks leading up to this, I’d been increasingly worried that Disco was going to evolve into Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, but so far, they’ve avoided that in a very key way that I bet will piss people off.

To wit: despite the neverending pull of the grimdark, this far-future where the Federation has fallen? It’s not grimdark. Everyone’s… Okay. For the first half of the episode, Book is a jerk to Michael, but he’s in dire straits and she has caused him a lot of trouble; he’s actually a pretty great guy. Book is all like, “Oh the Federation’s gone and everyone’s out for themselves now and no one cares about the ideals of Starfleet any more,” but he just randomly knows a guy who is has spent his whole life being ridiculously devoted to his duty as a technically-not-even-really-a-Starfleet-Officer. (Now, it is a bit of an annoyance that they keep trying to play this fake-out “Rah, we’re all grimdark and everyone is only out for themselves and you need to get all hard and mean and dystopian or this universe will eat you up,” when they’re clearly not going there) Even the antagonists aren’t really bad people; their response to Michael and Book is pretty darned reasonable given that they are in the middle of pulling off a major heist. They’re… Pleasant.

That is why this is not Andromeda: because it is not fundamentally set in a fallen, grimdark universe; it is set in a universe which is at its fundamental level, oriented toward utopia, even if it has been pushed farther from that goal than ever before.

Other things I like:

• How incredibly obvious it is that the Orion and the Andorian enforcers are a couple.
• Things Book Namechecks:
  • Quantum Slipstream
  • A time war
  • Recrystalizing dilithium
• The Federation didn’t collapse in one big dramatic explosive confrontation; it just sort of petered out in the face of the work of utopia having gotten much, much harder.
• I do really like the play of emotions Michael goes through at the beginning, alternating between despair at her situation and her inability to locate Discovery, with her elation to confirm that sentient life still exists, to determination as she slaps on her badge and walks toward the smoke from Book’s crash.
• Kitty!
• This thirty-second century design trend of stuff just growing out of the floor is neat.
• Everyone taking time travel in stride. Also, Michael and Sahil both understand wormhole-based time travel well enough to casually explain that Discovery and Michael should’ve ended up close to the same physical location, but Discovery might show up years in the future. Is that a reference to Star Trek (2009), where Spock and Nero show up decades apart?
• I get that people are gonna find it corny. But when Sahil confesses that he isn’t really an officer, and Michael commissions him? I actually got goosebumps. You can feel what he feels, having spent his whole life manning this outpost waiting to be helpful to someone from Starfleet, thinking probably it would never happen, and then getting it. That’s Star Trek. That right there.

On the other hand:

• The transition from Book setting Michael up and being a jerk for the first half of the episode who only looks out for number one and doesn’t believe in the principles of unity and utopianism to the reveal that he’s a vigilante environmentalist saving the space slugs who I guess is actually into peace and unity and utopianism is clunky. Given that the dialogue in the very first scene reveals that the cargo he’s stolen is a living creature he’s rescuing, it’s weird that the structure of the middle third plays it coy like it’s going to be a shocking reveal that his cargo was a wild animal and he wanted to rescue it.
• Stoned Michael.
• I don’t like Michael’s reaction to learning of the fall of the Federation. Sadness, sure, but her immediate reaction is disbelief. Disbelief that a civilization could have possibly fallen in a thousand years. The Federation is only a hundred years old in her time and already almost collapsed once. And she not only assumed it would still exist but can’t believe it could’ve collapsed in longer than the lifespan of basically any civilization other than Ancient Egypt?
• Michael is more chill with reducing people to puddles of goo than I am really comfortable with.
• Okay, I was fine with it, but for the record, Evelyn had a strong objection that “Book” is not a name, but rather an object.

Random Discovery Reflection:

• The Discovery crew learned about the events of the Enterprise episode, “In a Mirror, Darkly”. So Starfleet spent ten years knowing that one of their Constellation Class cruisers was eventually going to get zapped back in time and into a parallel universe. But they apparently did nothing at all about it. This sounds weird, but it’s less weird if you imagine the USS Defiant as Covid-19.