I'm just starting to catch up to the modern iterations of Star Trek. After all of those, I'll catch up on Star Wars. The last Star Trek I saw, not counting the movies, was when I tried to watch Enterprise (hated it) and before that Voyager (hated it) and before that DS9 (loved it, lived it, breathed it, obsessed about it). So I am relieved but also I suppose a little disappointed that I neither hate nor love Discovery. I like it! I like it just fine.
And I have many things to say about it, because when I watch something, I think about it constantly, to the point where I can't sleep after watching. This is sort of a problem, actually. I mean I was up most of the night. I was confused about why it was so bright outside my windows, until I realized that was morning starting to happen.
Not sure what the solution to that is. "Don't think about it" has never worked with me.
SPOILERS ABOUND. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Discovery! It's fascinating to me that it's very much a first person show, focused on Michael Burnham and her story. We get side stories but they are all connected to her. I don't think Star Trek has ever done that before, since even the original and the recent movies are all definitely ensemble storytelling. This has an ensemble but they're very much back seat to Michael.
She's a very interesting character to me, partly because of her constant code switching, and I don't just mean Sonequa Martin-Green's dialect code switching, which deserves whole entire academic papers written about it. She goes from a sort of standardized American voice to a much more Alabama accent and speech pattern when she's being informal or funny. It's absolutely wonderful. I wish Avery Brooks had been allowed to do that, or maybe had felt comfortable doing it. If you watch the DS9 episode "Far Beyond the Stars" he speaks much more naturally there, as opposed to his usual careful speech.
Martin-Green deserves every accolade for her astonishing acting all throughout. She can destroy you with a glance or an unspoken word. She has so much heart and empathy and energy in every performance. What a gift!
Her character is complicated on purpose, set up with inner conflicts one after the other. I'm not sure I'm always a fan of the "conflicted" character whose energy comes from an interior clash. I like to see storytelling come from character, but is inner conflict from past actions the only way to get that? Surely not. She's torn up over her mutiny, then over losing her captain, then over everyone hating her for her mutiny and losing the captain, then over what happened with Ash Tyler, then as I'm going into season two, over what she did to Spock back in the day, which we haven't found out about yet where I am.
Building character on regrets and pain is one way to go. I would also love to see her built on goals and conflicts over ways to achieve them. That's where we started, after all. She committed her mutiny because she knew, based on information no one else had access to, what the best course of action would be, and knew the horrific results that would follow not doing it. Her choice to mutiny was for the best possible reasons and was not made lightly.
That makes her an excellent but dangerous character, so I hope we see more of that. A person who will do terrible things for the best possible reasons is a very interesting person to me. And she suffered terrible consequences personally.
I liked her relationship with Tyler very much. I have to admit I figured out he was the same actor as Vok because both of them did the exact same things with their facial mannerisms. I have face blindness, so I focus on things like that probably much more than others. I don't know, maybe everyone picked it up. He had a way of flicking his eyes to the left and leaving his mouth hanging open that was obvious in both characters, even through the heavy prosthetic makeup and the contacts and so on.
I liked Ash Tyler very much as a character. He came with layers! He was known to have survived torture in a Klingon prison, so that carried a lot of weight. Then we learned he had been treated as a sexual object by the Klingon torturer, and that he had encouraged it because it kept him alive. That is a super complicated and dark thing to have in someone's past. Of course, we learn later that the two were in a fully consensual relationship before he was transformed into a human, so it's not as ugly as it seemed, but then again, it kind of was, because he wasn't Vok anymore.
I liked how he was supposed to be triggered with a Klingon prayer to return to himself as Vok, but that he didn't, or didn't quite, because of his relationship with Michael. That's cool! Tyler is a very interesting character so I hope he's coming back onto the ship to stay. Where I am now, they gave him and L'Rell a baby and he left the Klingons and sent the baby to be raised by monks. I was sure we'd have Tyler as dad with a Klingon baby on the ship for a minute there and I was not up for it at all, though presumably Discovery has daycare? Or is this before the time of families on ships as in Next Generation?
That's a gigantic flaw in the show, one I can't actually understand. They showed pictures of the Defiant and talked about how it traveled to the mirror universe, but that happened on DS9 literal centuries after this time, so how can they know about it? They're still using flip communicators and old-fashioned phasers. That future hasn't happened yet! Was that a colossal mistake on the part of the writers or did they just shrug and say, we do what we want? I am not sure. Why refer to it at all if you have to go so far outside the realm of the possible? Are they counting on viewers not having detailed knowledge of DS9 from the 90s? That's probably reasonable, come to think of it. But we are SUCH NERDS. How can you assume at least a bunch of us weren't going, "UM!!!"
They are very much playing on our previous knowledge, to the point where Pike and Amanda and Sarek are specifically cast to resemble the actors we're familiar with from earlier appearances. Amanda is based on the actress from the recent movies, while Sarek is based on the actor from Next Generation. Regardless, that familiarity is definitely something they're counting on, so why make such a fundamental time mistake? I'm truly baffled by it.
I was also baffled by the logic (sorry) behind some of the storylines, which don't make any sense at all in retrospect, but I suppose can slide by as you're watching, since you don't have all the information yet. Take Mirror Lorca, who presumably came through from the mirror universe, found his way to a Federation starship, learned all of the command codes and behaviors and information he'd need to impersonate Real Lorca, took command of the Discovery for how long? Ages? Was enough like him to get into bed with a former lover, but not enough like him for her to think he hadn't fundamentally changed. All for the purpose of what, going back through to the mirror universe and getting aboard the Emperor's ship, which he did as a PRISONER, something he surely could have accomplished very easily any day of the week without all those shenanigans. He was a prisoner along with all of his team. He didn't need Michael or anyone else to make any of that happen. It's nonsensical in retrospect.
Maybe someone more versed in the show can explain why any of that was needed, but I don't think it holds up. I don't see any reason at all for Mirror Lorca to be part of the story except that it yanks the rug out from under Michael Burnham again.
Season one seems to be all about this, taking away her family over and over. She loses her mother figure, then she loses her shipmates and that family, then she loses her father figure as Sarek leaves and she thinks she'll never see him again, then she loses her father figure as Lorca defects and then fights against her and the Emperor in one of those really small shootouts that's supposed to stand for a whole massive army battling another, then he gets killed in front of her.
In other words, these things were set up as ways to torture Michael Burnham and don't always stand up to narrative logic at all. I hope that this changes in future seasons. This was one of the things that put me off Voyager and Enterprise so very much, this after the fact logic in storytelling. You don't tell stories this way. You don't go, I want X character to suffer Y way, so we'll do ABC. It has to be organic to the present. Even laying in past trauma as a reason or justification or cause of present action feels weak to me. A lot of television writing leans on that heavily, to its detriment.
That's why the pilot episode felt so strong to me. Burnham made her choice because of knowledge she gained right then and there, from asking Sarek. She had knowledge no one else could get, because of her past, but the knowledge was learned in the moment. Asking was a thing she did. She tried to do things the right way at first. But then she made a choice because of her knowledge and understanding of the situation that was beyond what others had.
And yes, that was based in her childhood trauma, but that's not why she did it. I would have felt extremely cheated if she had just KNOWN that thing about the Klingons and that's why she mutinied all of a sudden. It's essential in my mind that she went and asked a question and acquired information about strategy and that's what informed her actions. That's an ACTIVE character.
Hiding that Tyler was Vok (and a Klingon...sort of) also felt a bit like a way to spring this on Burnham for maximum pain. Once we know that she had a history of family trauma from her parents being killed by Klingons within her hearing, we can figure that finding out her boyfriend was actually Klingon (sort of...) would be especially distressing. She does a great thing where she turns aside in disgust when he speaks Klingon. But before that, she is horrified not because of what he is, but what he DOES. He turns on her and tries to kill her. She is only saved because he is interrupted.
That's a fascinating distinction. What you are and what you do are two different things. We can't help what we are. Another fascinating question: what ARE we? Star Trek plays heavily on these various species and cultures being so visibly different and culturally divergent. It's shorthand for differences among humans, of course. But it also gets into weird essentialism territory, as it always does. What you ARE is not what you DO. Star Trek always focuses on this interesting disconnect.
Burnham was human but raised on Vulcan, but her adoptive mother was human. She has very different modes, where she's stiff and emotionless, versus when she's soft and empathetic. Again, code switching, both physically and behaviorally. Anyone who has to cross cultures in their daily life does this. You speak a different way with friends than at work, or with one group versus another group. I'm sure I do it. It's a very natural thing.
To turn it around, what you have done is also not who you are. I think we've already seen Tyler get turned around from the violent attacker he was, with that explained away by the incomplete personality change, supposedly reversed by L'Rell surgically. (A lot of hand waving there. Is he Klingon or not? Surely there's a way to tell. They were so insistent. No way to tell! Obviously you can tell which person's body this is, though maybe not which person's mind.) We've seen Burnham rehabilitated after her mutiny that made everyone hate her. Even the woman with the facial scarring and cheekbone appliance stopped giving her the hate face.
That points you to a major flaw right there. I don't know that character's name and she's been in it since the beginning. Here are the names I know: Burnham, Saru, Stametts, Tilley, Lorca, Cornwall maybe? The admiral? Georgiou, which may be misspelled. Tyler, Pike, L'Rell. I would probably recognize the various main bridge crew members, and definitely the cute doctor who died, and the other black doctor woman, and Tig Notaro. The Klingons are hopelessly unrecognizable, even before they went to some blurry CGI face for L'Rell and made her impossible to look at, not to mention nothing like her previous face.
Saru is a tricky situation. He's another Doug Jones long tall gangly heavily masked character. It gives me a panic attack to think of that guy's days. He has bizarro hoof shoes on and big rubbery glove hands and his entire face is covered in a heavy prosthetic, plus thick contacts. I can't imagine he can see or hear anything. My back hurts just looking at him. I don't see the character, I just see Doug Jones in major discomfort for no reason. His alienness isn't even a plot point 98% of the time, so WHY. I don't think this show knows how to think creatively about alienness or otherness or any of that.
Saru is a joke or comic relief most of the time, as is Tilley, though it's nice to see a woman who's not bone thin, and she's a great actress. I just don't like that those two are treated as slightly ridiculous. Look at the people who are different from all of us, how funny they are. Oh and it's an outside the norm man and a fatter lady, what a coincidence. I kind of hate that. But I love Tilley and I'm sort of coming to tolerate Saru. I mean, I stopped calling him the fish. That's progress.
Tilley is a cool character because she's wicked smart, insecure, ambitious, nervous, and having a rough time fitting in. She's a nerd! My people! She didn't really have anything going on in the whole first season, though, like the whole rest of the bridge crew. Captain Pike had to ask them to say all their names, and I still don't know any of them. Someone is named Rhys? I think?
It's not an ensemble show and that doesn't seem like it's going to change. Maybe someone wrote interesting backstories for the ops and comm and whatever people, but we certainly don't know it. If they weren't all visually different, I wouldn't be able to tell them apart. Like if they were all one race and shape they'd be interchangeable. They're essentially background actors. I'm not even sure if they're in the credits, actually. I think this is an enormous waste of an incredible storytelling engine. I mean, give two of them history, not to do the thing I complained about earlier. Give two of them chemistry! Give two of them a secret they know about a third but the third doesn't know. Anything to make them pop out of two dimensions.
I wish Michael Burnham *wanted* something so very badly and wasn't able to get it immediately because of whatever character thing of her own. That to me is a character with a drive. It's a serialized show anyway, so why not? Characters who *want* are so much more interesting to me than those who are always fighting back against their past.
I'm not super comfortable with only building story out of characters' past and trauma and pain. "I want a thing but can't get it" is in the present. The storytelling with Stametts and his bizarre mycelium network thing was cool because he was making present choices about what he wanted in the future, even though we could see he wasn't making the best choices.
A funny thing going into season two is that I've listened to a million podcasts where Tig Notaro was a guest, so I've heard her stories about her appearances multiple times. That made the episode I just watched very strange because I knew for instance that she had trouble remembering the nonsense science lines and so someone stood there off camera feeding her each line. I couldn't stop thinking about how upsetting that must have been, not to be able to do the thing you're trying so hard to do. I can't memorize myself so maybe I related a little too well to that, not that I'm any kind of actor. Also I had to laugh because of the cocoon joke. Listen to her episodes of the podcast Do You Need a Ride? and you'll hear the stories. I listen to that podcast constantly as my go-to, as for example when I'm hoping to come down from watching the show and know I'll be unable to sleep. It doesn't work! Oh well.
A good question to ask about any narrative is: what do you want, as a viewer/reader?
Right now I want Michael Burnham to succeed and be happy. I want Tilley to be okay and grow and develop. I want Stametts to get that cute doctor back from death, but I don't think that's going to happen. Is it? I want Tyler to come back from the Klingons and join the crew again as a regular. Don't join section whatever! They're unethical! I want the Klingons to shut up and go away, as they are incredibly boring, standing around smoky halls and fires and shouting exposition at each other. Oh my lord in heaven, the Klingons are just unbearably terrible in this show. If I could figure out how to fast forward on AppleTV, I would do it, because they're excruciating. I don't care about L'Rell and want her to go away, too. I want the rest of the bridge crew at least to get personalities and stories and lives, so we learn their names, maybe even what job they do, sheesh. A whole season already! And I could do with Saru being less of an arch jokey uptight character and more of a full personality, if we have to keep him, which I guess we do.
Look at Saru as an example of what's not great. He has no arc at all. He doesn't want anything. He's an obstacle or an annoyance. He's only persnickety and fussy. And this is one of the top main characters, someone with absolutely nothing going on, a walking joke.
But many other things are terrific and Michael Burnham herself is amazing, though I still want to know why her name is Michael. Nobody ever explained it. Anyway the actress herself is just brilliant and makes the whole thing work. At least, I'll keep watching for her, and because I have to know how things work out for her character. Get that tall cute sort of Klingon confused boyfriend back! You guys had excellent chemistry! Mainly because of all the undercurrents pushing against each other, something I wish the show would have EVERYWHERE, because that's amazing storytelling in the here and now.
Someone recently released from a terrible ordeal and dealing with active PTSD is a great example of here and now storytelling because it's actually happening to them here and now. It's not some nebulous event from the distant past that's still causing pain, it's a constantly daily experience. That right there is the difference between making a character dwell on past trauma versus writing someone who is in a situation here in the present time. That is how you do this thing.
But Michael Burnham is a great example of a character who is very likable because she's generous and kind to her goofy cadet roommate (after an initial bump) and befriends Saru even though he's super annoying and is loyal and determined to do a great job for her captains and tries her hardest to do the right thing, even at great personal cost. That's a terrific character.
No comments:
Post a Comment