The following are my notes from the first FIFTEEN MINUTES of the first episode. Damn, there's a lot to see in this new show!
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- We open with Georgiou and Burnham "undercover" on the planet of the Corpusculans (Really? Corpuscles?) , who despite being under the protection of the Prime Directive (only called "General Order One" here, but we know it's the same) don't seem to pay that much attention to the humanoid bipeds strolling around their patch - perhaps they were just too thirsty to notice. Still, they know they were living there for some 1000 years, so even the Corpusculans may not have originated here.
- Phase weapons as tools. It feels like ages since we've seen them use a gun to do anything but shoot someone. Granted, this rifle shot was really just to penetrate bedrock JUST enough to free up the underlying (and very clean!) water to geyser up, but given the original vision that phasers are also used for more utilitarian purposes, it's fun to see them used as such again.
- I guess they intended to use the rifle from the beginning then - in ANY Trek it's been rare for someone to take a rifle on an away mission unless they were expecting something warranting its use.
- Okay, so Georgiou brainstorms walking a Starfleet symbol into the sand. That's clever and all, but how would Saru and the Shenzhou gang see this in the first place? There's blowing sand everywhere! Georgiou was probably counting on Saru using the MkI eyeball process he used when he was examining the Klingon beacon later on. Regardless, the ship blows sand around everywhere, and the footprints still stay. Must be some pretty funky alien sand.
- The opening has a classic TOS phaser exploding and then reforming as a DSC weapon. Nice - but the communicator we see in the next shot is TOS and stays that way.
- It's stardate 1207.3. May 11, 2256 (a Sunday). If anyone wants to keep track of this stuff, a decade from now it'll be stardate 1312.7 when the Enterprise goes "Where No Man Has Gone Before", and one more year-sh later on stardate 4253.7 (a Friday) when the Enterprise encounters several Klingons and Tribbles.
- The USS Shenzhou carries worker bees! I believe this is the first time in Trek that the little buzzers have been called as such in dialogue. They're cute little things with robot arms on a sort of rotating turret, so the bee can spin around into a sort of "tow mode" to haul the relay satellite in.
-The Shenzhou bridge is BEAUTIFUL. Unlike the JJprise bridge or the others seen in the recent movies, I have very little to complain about at first blush. It's futuristic, it's utilitarian, it's functional, it's ergonomic, it's SPACIOUS. It's got frellin' windows in the floor complementing the windows to either side of the main one. I love it.
- In the first few seconds we see a nod to the NX-01 helm console, with a chair that slides left and right on tracks so the operator can tap commands or use the joystick as needed (to be fair Voyager had this too, but this echoes the predecessor admirably). Most of the other consoles are multi-sided as well so the crewperson there has the option to look at their work or at the central dais. The aft stations are not fully shown (and may never be after this) but there seem to be different configurations to each one. Some may have a console jutting out perpendicularly, while others are an unused door. It's not perfectly symmetrical back there, although the forward "pit" stations are.
- Perhaps this is a commentary on wearable technology, but no fewer than three of the crew members are augmented in some way with obvious technological guff - and I'm not convinced that any of them are wholly artificial. The feminine "robot head" crew member in one of the pit stations is later removed with the dialogue "take her to sickbay!", and is seen with humanoid hands albeit with cables or something running from her fingertips to her wrists. The blue scaly guy has a tube of some sort jutting out from the back left side of his head, surely making naptime tough unless his quarters are in his natural environment or whatever circumstance that makes the tube thingy optional. Then there's the communications officer who is wearing a huge Lobot-esque thing.
- Others have commented on the hodgepodge of sound effects used on the Shenzhou, and I agree that it is unfortunate to hear the TNG-era "nope" sound used on a pre-TOS starship. I guess there's just a huge library of sound for all starships to use and the fleet just rotates as their computer programmers (or crew) see fit. After all, the Enterprise-D re-used the TOS Enterprise's red alert klaxon, even though the E-refit and other Enterprises in between do not.
- Notable continuity error: right after Burnham asks her CO about her sarcasm, a female extra (wearing the short-sleeve version of the uniform) walks out of the portside lift door. Then, as Burnham crosses to Saru's station, the same crew member exits the lift again. I *guess* there's enough time for her to realize she'd forgot something in her quarters, gotten back into the lift, and then decided it wasn't important and re-entered the bridge, but...
- The portside lift door may not be a lift... It's got another door beyond it. And yet this seems to be the entrance that Burnham and Georgiou use later on in the flashback scene. Refit? Option? Different kind of lift?
- Still later on though, you can see an imperfection in the door's lower gap, and light leaking through from whatever it is beyond.
- Burnham emerges from the Shenzhou's oddly long airlock upside down. This means that the airlock's inner side is rigged for microgravity operations and she flipped to the relative ceiling before zipping through two decks worth of airlock tube.
- Yes, the thruster suit's computer is like Siri. But they took care for her to say "Working" as a sort of greeting. Not (yet) as something to say when the computer is ACTUALLY working away, which I doubt would ever happen if this is an extrapolation of how computers SHOULD work in the future.
- Oddly, for all the tactile controls we see in this show so far, the thruster suit is not controlled by anything we can see. She's not grasping any joysticks as Spock would in his version, nor is she issuing commands tot he suit's computer. I can only surmise that she is using the heads-up display and eye-tracking to dictate where she wants to go. Anything ELSE she can flex or squeeze would just not be comfortable to use practically. :P
More to come...
