Is that why it sounds so similar to "you and me"?Mutiny requires at least two people
News Martin-Green: Burnham’s Journey From Failure To Self-Forgiveness
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Nor do I to be honest....
I'm trying to guess at it being in reference to a character of a show I don't watch (Orange Is The New Black.). I can't help it, I really like Janeway and probably associate all the goodwill of that with the actress.
This. This was by far thematically the most botched part of her character arc.
I truly believed the central conflict in her character was that due to her Vulcan upbringing, Burnham believed that she was a logical, rational person - much moreso than the average human. However, in truth she was actually much more emotional than average, and used logic as a rationalization to cover what her emotions told her to do.
As Act 1 moved along, we saw her slowly come out of her shell, gain the respect of the crew, and start acting like a normal human being. This peaked with Into the Forest I Go, which really seemed at the time to be the closure of her arc. The Ship of the Dead was destroyed, the main antagonist on Act 1 (Kol) dead, and her Captian's badge was safely in her hands. She faced down her fears and dealt with the situation in a - well - logical fashion.
If only the ended it there. Indeed, there was zero reason, from a character standpoint, to do much more with Burnham. They could have had the war won then and there, and gone off on their crazy MU adventure. But they decided to torture her character by having no less than three semi-antagonists who all, in various ways, loved her. Ash's sleeper programming coming online and trying to kill her. Lorca's comic book heel turn and suddenly realized romantic obsession with her. And space Hitler's inability - despite being a ruthless sociopath - to put her down because she had the face of an adopted daughter she initially seemed willing to kill.
But by far, saving MU Georgiou - space Hitler - was the worst narrative choice, because it showed that her character had learned NOTHING and was still making random-ass decisions based upon emotional impulse. You can see why they did it - Michelle Yeoh is a great actress, and the character has potential, so of course they'd want to find a way to save her - but it was one of many examples where the showrunners put plot ahead of character, and the arcs suffered as a result.
I can't speak for all Discovery fans, but personally I don't have to do that
Yes, the admiral was way too trusting of a well armed adversary who Starfleet has little information on. That is more than likely the reason that Starfleet's normal tactics in these types of situations was inadequate. Burnham, in fact, had the right idea in contacting someone who had experience with the Klingons.
But in defense of Starfleet, their tactic of not firing first had surely served them well for who knows how many years, not to mention that it was the most humanitarian thing to do in mot situations. Besides all that, WE knew who the Klingons were and what they were planning. But to the characters, this was no different from any other confrontation with an alien species, except for the lack of available intel. In these types of situations, relying on established protocol is even more important.
Additionally, there is no way the war was avoidable. Even if the Shenzhou had given the Klingons the Vulcan Hello, they might have avoided the Battle at the Binary Stars, or may have won it, but T'Kuvma was going to have his war, regardless.
Oh, and your belief that Burnham was "overwrought" or had PTSD (or any of the usual fan theories), after her rescue, is pure speculation and your interpretation of the character's state of mind. Burnham, in fact, acted with appropriate urgency (it was a matter of life and death), but quite rationally in consulting with Sarek.
The mutiny (and the assault on Georgiou) was the subversion of Starfleet principles that led to Burnham's demise and was the focus of her arc. This "theme" was carried throughout the season. At what point, precisely, do you believe the writers abandoned this aspect of the story? In what episode was it dropped?
You and I have clashed on this issue before. Suffice to say that Burnham sided with the Emperor, not just because she looked like Georgiou, but up to that point Lorca had shown himself to be untrustworthy, the Emperor had not. In order to escape from her predicament she needed an ally. She chose the one who had lied to her...yet. Logical.
However, taking the Emperor back to the PU was based on emotion, and surprise, Burnham's emotional attachment was reciprocated.
Actually, addressed this in my first paragraph.
You keep writing that the show is inconsistent with respect to following the "themes" it sets up (or at least I think that's what you're saying). But when you write about this, it comes across as simply "I don't like the themes they set up and how they followed through on them", which is your right of course, but is certainly different from your original premise.
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That's not really plausible, though. The UFP clearly had plenty of past experience with Klingons, almost all of it negative. There were the early contacts way back in the ENT era, as well as the contacts with the Vulcans to which Sarek alluded (of which Starfleet surely should have been aware). In addition, starting in the 2220s there was what Spock in TUC described as almost 70 years of "unremitting hostility," which certainly included (inter alia) the attack that orphaned Michael, sometime in the 2230s, as well as the battle of Donatu V, in the 2240s. By the late 2250s, the Federation should have been pretty well informed about Klingons, their attitudes, and their behaviors.
I agree — there's no way the war was avoidable. That made it more than a little quixotic that so many characters seemed to blame Michael for it (including Michael herself), to the extent that at least some viewers seem to see it that way as well, such as @NeoStar9, to whom I was replying.
I offered that statement as a concession to the points offered by NeoStar9. Short of a soliloquy from Michael, I suppose all any of us can know about her state of mind at the time is ultimately "speculation," but she did seem to show markedly less of the Vulcanesque emotional control that was so typical of her at other times.
The mutiny wasn't really a mutiny (no collaborators), just a brief episode of defying orders — something almost every other major Trek character has done at one point or another — and as I already noted, Georgiou herself was willing to set it aside almost immediately and trust Michael to accompany her on the boarding party. That's a slender thread on which to hang "the focus of her arc," and I don't think that's what the show really did. It seems to me that hard feelings about the "mutiny" (both her own and others') were noticeably back-burnered by the fourth episode and almost completely put to rest by the ninth, as @eschaton has noted. Burnham's dedication to "Starfleet principles" was never really in doubt, even from the early going. Beyond that, she just got put through an increasingly implausible emotional wringer as the season wore on.
What? Of course she had. The Emperor had bombarded a planetary surface just to take out political adversaries, cold-bloodedly killed a room full of her own staff just to keep a secret, tortured countless others, kept sapient beings not only as slaves but as food, and personally held a knife to Burnham's throat. To put it mildly, none of that characterizes a person worthy of trust. Meanwhile, Lorca had... lied to her about where he was from. (And even that wasn't certain; to treat it as true meant trusting the Emperor's account at face value.) Oh, and led a rebellion against the morally repulsive person heading up the Empire. On any reasonable set of scales, Lorca looked far more deserving of trust and support at that point.
No, that's not what I'm saying. There are shows out there with clear, well-developed themes that I simply don't care for (parts of nuBSG spring to mind, for instance), but that's not the situation here. I'm saying DSC didn't set up or follow through on its thematic elements in any coherent way — psychologically, emotionally, morally, or logically. Episode after episode was awash in plot-driven situational ethics, and in behavior driven more by shock value than by internal consistency.
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Painting with a very broad brush, you can summarize her character arc in the first season as follows:
Act 1: Burnham makes a series of very rash decisions on emotional impulse (Killing the torchbearer, disobeying orders, killing T'Kuvma). Has a dramatic fall from grace. Spends the rest of the act redeeming herself.
Act 2: Burham makes a number of very rash decisions based on emotional impule (siding with MU Georgiou, then saving her, then trusting later she will not murder her despite all the evidence to the contrary, then handing over a doomsday device to a Klingon who has been in the brig for most of the season). However, instead of facing repercussions, every single decision works out in her favor.
What changed really wasn't Burnham, whose decision making process seems the same from the beginning of the series to the end. What changed was that the cockeyed way she decided what was the right thing to do went from blowing up in her face to rolling sixes. Basically, she just got lucky, and fortune changing is not a good character arc.
I wonder how much T’Kuvma actually understood his own people by spoiling for a war to unite the warring houses and create a single Klingon empire. Since in-fighting is just something that Klingons seem to do (even in the TNG era they’re always bickering about some honour related thing or other), it was dubious that the empire would unify - since they devolved into anarchy after Kol was (sadly) disposed of (I liked Kol he was Kool). Maybe if Georgiou had tried to contact the Klingon high council to ask them what the heck was going on with their beacon the war might have been averted. But she wasn’t given that option since Michael literally jumped in with both feet and gave T’Kuvma exactly what he wanted. Overall I agree with you that there was no reason for anyone to blame Michael. I also think they missed an opportunity to do Star Trek meets “orange is the new black” and have Michael redeem herself in prison (seriously I’d have enjoyed that).
I totally agree with this. Michael is the same at the end of s1 as she is as the beginning. As for her apparent redemption, in “context” she wants to go straight to jail. It’s only because Lorca is in love with her that he keeps her around so he can use her for her mind to get back to Dimension X. She doesn’t want to be redeemed - but she gets incredibly lucky that Lorca happens to find her (kismet much?).
This is what makes me think they’ve brought the Enterprise into s2 for - to give Michael some conflict (I.e. Sarek and Spock) as any conflict she may have had was wiped clean with her record at the end of s1 because she was right all along. Everything always comes up millhouse, I mean Burnham.
I can't speak for all Discovery fans, but personally I don't have to do that
Same here. I have no idea how the thread got to that at all, earlier. I was scratching my head.
I'm still curious about what that member meant. Or maybe they were confusing Mulgrew with someone else?
Yes it’s a shame he bit the bat’leth before we saw more of him.
I continue to not understand why people struggle so much with Burnham's character arc. You don't have to like it, but it does have a clear trajectory, episode by episode.
The trick of Burnham as a character is that she seems perfectly well-adjusted at the beginning and in the middle of the story... until she doesn't. Her choice to save her crew and Captain is not based solely in logic, but is in part motivated by an innate fear of--one might arguably say bigotry toward--Klingons due to her history with them. Her continued interest in winning the war and beating the Klingons is one-note, and not particularly Starfleet. I don't think we're supposed to feel good about her hawkishness displayed, for instance, in the mid-season finale. Her unquestioned desire to win the war is much too easy, and in retrospect seems clearly to be made simpler than its reality by her underlying feelings about Klingons.
It is only when she sees Klingons face-to-face, living their lives in their own world, that she understands her trauma and bias, and upholds the better nature of Starfleet.
The whole season is Burnham learning about emotions, filling in the part of herself that did not get developed in her youth and early adulthood. She learns about friendship from Tilly, about love from Stamets, about deceit from Lorca, about being in love with Ash, about respect and control from Saru, about the universality of humanity from the Klingons. She continues to struggle with emotions almost through the finale. The difference in the finale is that she has with the help of others cultivated the wherewithal to now recognize and prioritize the good of the many. Because her initial wrong decision in the pilot episode prioritized her own interests despite seeming to prioritize the many. Each episode sees a bit of Burnham's humanity restored and a bit of her Vulcan upbringing tempered.
The person we see the end of the season is not at all the person we saw at the beginning. Burnham at the end is far more in control of herself than she ever was as a child raised by Vulcans.
If people don't like the arc, that's fine. Certainly, there are things to critique about the show. It's totally possible to read the arc differently. But dismissing people who like the story and find it coherent as portrayed as starry-eyed apologists is not terribly constructive.
The trick of Burnham as a character is that she seems perfectly well-adjusted at the beginning and in the middle of the story... until she doesn't. Her choice to save her crew and Captain is not based solely in logic, but is in part motivated by an innate fear of--one might arguably say bigotry toward--Klingons due to her history with them. Her continued interest in winning the war and beating the Klingons is one-note, and not particularly Starfleet. I don't think we're supposed to feel good about her hawkishness displayed, for instance, in the mid-season finale. Her unquestioned desire to win the war is much too easy, and in retrospect seems clearly to be made simpler than its reality by her underlying feelings about Klingons.
It is only when she sees Klingons face-to-face, living their lives in their own world, that she understands her trauma and bias, and upholds the better nature of Starfleet.
The whole season is Burnham learning about emotions, filling in the part of herself that did not get developed in her youth and early adulthood. She learns about friendship from Tilly, about love from Stamets, about deceit from Lorca, about being in love with Ash, about respect and control from Saru, about the universality of humanity from the Klingons. She continues to struggle with emotions almost through the finale. The difference in the finale is that she has with the help of others cultivated the wherewithal to now recognize and prioritize the good of the many. Because her initial wrong decision in the pilot episode prioritized her own interests despite seeming to prioritize the many. Each episode sees a bit of Burnham's humanity restored and a bit of her Vulcan upbringing tempered.
The person we see the end of the season is not at all the person we saw at the beginning. Burnham at the end is far more in control of herself than she ever was as a child raised by Vulcans.
If people don't like the arc, that's fine. Certainly, there are things to critique about the show. It's totally possible to read the arc differently. But dismissing people who like the story and find it coherent as portrayed as starry-eyed apologists is not terribly constructive.
Except for in the prologue, Burnham didn't seem particularly hawkish. She was the one, after all, who didn't want to risk the tardigrade's life if it was a sentient being in the name of victory. She also made Lorca stop and try and help the gormagander. Hell, she didn't even want to be on Discovery when she thought it was a ship generating experimental weapons to fight the Klingons - she was intrigued only when Lorca explained to her what the Spore Drive was really for.
I recognize that what you say was directly told to us (not shown) in the final episode. But I don't think the season did a good job maintaining the "arc" in the mid period of the season. For example, episode 1 made it clear that Burnham was deathly afraid of Klingons. Then in episode 9, she shows no fear of Kol at all, and goes toe-to-toe with him long enough to assure the destruction of the Ship of the Dead. Then, in the final episode, she brings up her fear of Klingons again.
I do agree, as I said, that a lot of Act 1 was about her finding her way as a human. It was sort of implausible, given she had served on the Shenzhou for seven years with other humans that she hadn't unwound a bit already, but I can overlook that. But I disagree strongly that there were any valuable emotional lessons that the MU arc, for example, taught her. Don't fall in love, because your boyfriend might be a Klingon sleeper agent who tries to kill you? Don't trust your commanding officer, because he's an evil creepster trying to get into your pants? Trust a woman with the face of your dearly departed mentor, even if she's a mass murderer who eats sentient beings, because you know, deep down in your heart, there's some good in her? Trust a seeming religious fanatic in your brig with a doomsday weapon because, hey, why not? Seriously!?!?!
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The Shenzhou crew knew enough about the Klingons to know that they weren't facing the Betazoids or Deltans, but not having had any contact with the Klingons for over 100 years, the crew was not about to abandon Starfleet first contact protocols so easily. Georgiou, just like any Starfleet captain in the same situation, was weighing the immediate risk to her crew against the possibility of exacerbating a situation that could have cataclysmic results if she choe the wrong course of action. No doubt the blustery admiral was under the same pressure.
Also, I don't recall seeing any on screen evidence that the Vulcan's experience and method of dealing with the Klingons was not in the Starfleet database. It is possible that it was in the database, but Starfleet chose to not include it in their protocols. Just speculation on my part.
Your last post said the war was avoidable,That is what I was responding to.
As I posted, Starfleet personnel saw one thing; Burnham had a physical altercation with a Klingon which resulted in a confrontation with the Klingons which led to a war. Pretty easy to see them blaming her, although we (the audience) had been told that that was not quite the case.
Not to me. She was the only person on the bridge who was thinking logically.
"Brief episode of defying orders"? She attacked and disabled the captain, disobeyed direct orders, comandeered the ship under false pretenses with the intent of subverting Starfleet first contact protocols. That is why she was charged, tried, and convicted, of mutiny. That is s lot more than a "brief episode of defying orders".
That "thread" was obviously not as "slender" as you describe it.
Your claim that the writers forgot about the crew's feelings after the first four episodes reminds me of the argument back when Ent was on, that the writers forgot about Trip's grief over his sister's death after the first couple of episodes of season 3 (until "The Forgotten"). Just like in the case of Ent, once the writers established the crew's feelings about Michael in the first few episodes after she joined Discovery, there was no need to continue showing negative interactions with crew. Although as I'm sure you'll recall, Saru continued to have problems with Burnham for some time after her arrival. o did Landry, as I recall. He only really warmed up to her in the MU episodes.
But I get that continued friction between Burnham and the crew over Burnham's past is something you apparently wanted to see.
Yeah, the Emperor was a bad person, no doubt, but she did have a kind of code of honor. This is not unlike the Klingon's code of honor. They could commit all manner of violent, and heinous acts, but still retain a sense of honor. This is what Burnham responded to. The Emperor mentioned this to Burnham in her throne room. She needed a powerful ally if she was to get off the Charon. Burnham simply chose the lesser, or least untrustworthy, of the two. I saw this as yet another logical decision.
And actually, the Emperor proved herself to be worthy of that trust. She never betrayed Michael.
Okay, if there were no themes set up, how are you going to then condemn the show for not following through on these non-existent "themes"?
And, I'm pretty sure I've read you stating that DSC failed to follow up on themes the show created. Can't have it both ways, but maybe I'm wrong. I'll go back and check.
Regardless though, it seems to me that the overarching theme of season 1 is war and redemption (namely Burnham's, the show's main protagonist). Not every episode showed the ship fighting the war, but every episode had something to do with the war. Burnham's redemption was painstakingly built episode by episode with some setbacks, using Saru to check the level of danger presented by the Tartigrade, for example, mixed with some triumphs, figuring out how to get the spore drive to work).
I didn't see that any of these themes were abandoned by the writers, but I do see how you might not like the themes or how they were dealt with. that is, if you believed a theme exists.
Legally speaking, it wouldn't be mutiny in the modern sense, because mutiny is a conspiracy, which means more than one person has to be involved. The use of the term mutiny in such a sloppy fashion makes me feel like the writers really don't understand military terminology.
I can certainly think of individual episodes of Trek where characters have done similar things - albeit sometimes under the influence of a foreign intelligence. Although in some cases that wasn't the case. I remember one Voyager episode near the end of its run - Renaissance Man - where The Doctor impersonates Janeway (and several other crewmembers) in a plot to steal the warp core in order to save Janeway's life. Hell, what Saru did in Episode 8 was arguably in terms of breach of command (and potential ramifications) just as bad as Burnham, but he didn't even get a slap on the wrist.
Now, one can take the position that if Georgiou had survived, she would have told the full story, and Burnham would have had a reprimand on her record - maybe been demoted - but not charged with mutiny. That's my headcanon anyway.
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