I finally had the opportunity to sit down and watch all of Discovery straight through. Prior to this, I had not even seen one full episode. These are some of my impressions and opinions.
First, I need to get this nagging bit of trivia out of my system. 'Rejac' sounds like 'Redjac' from TOS. They named the tardigrade 'Ripper'. Admiral Cornwell....Patricia Cornwell wrote a book about Jack The Ripper in which it was her theory that the perp was the artist Walter Sickert (I don't agree with that theory). So, what's all that about? Anything? Probably nothing? Okay, moving on....
Pretty good theme music in the intro. The sketches made me think of Matt Jefferies. The ship flyby, as handled at the end of the intro, has a late 50s / early 60s flavor to it, which is good when you consider that in-universe it's 10 years before TOS. That's the parallel I make, so it works for me. On the other hand, when Discovery makes a spore jump, that flipping around thing is reminiscent of primitive special effects from the 50s / 60s and does not seem well-done.
Starfleet regulations should not be set in stone. Even the U.S. Constitution can be temporarily suspended in extreme situations. Burnham had important knowledge that Georgiou did not allow to be applied. That was a mistake. Then the whole thing was blamed on Burnham. It seemed very contrived, in order to bring about subsequent drama. From the beginning, Starfleet and its regulations, as portrayed in Trek, has not made a whole lot of sense. The galaxy is not this black and white, cut-and-dried thing where a set of inflexible principles can be applied and strictly adhered to with the expectation that it's going to be the best recipe for success in every case. Unbending rigidity to an absolute will lead to disaster in some situations. In this case, the whole war might have been averted if Georgiou had taken Burnham's advice. But, the writers did what they did to bring about their plot. Not smartly, in my opinion.
Some argue that the bomb on the Klingon body, when they were just trying to retrieve their dead, was a war crime. Well, the idea of a war versus 'rules' to conducting one has always been very problematic. You can use grenades, but you can't use shotguns. So much of it is treading a very fine tightrope. Especially when countless lives and the downfall of nations are involved. 'The ends justifying the means' gets brought into it and it truly is a huge bone of contention. Morals, ethics, even religion gets brought up. There is no simple answer.
Next, why did they not self-destruct the Shenzhou to keep it from falling into the hands of the Klingons? Even if the computer was offline, there is always blowing it up the old-fashioned way. For that matter, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense for escape pods in the 23rd century to have no armaments at all for defense. You're out in a galaxy where there are known hostiles and unknowns. By percentage, the reason for evacuating a ship has a higher likelihood of being due to conflict than ship-wide systems failure to a catastrophic level. Concentrated weapons fire from armed escape pods could destroy a friendly ship if necessary, to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.
It was a reasonable complaint against TOS that when they stole the cloaking device from the Romulans, all it required to get it up and running on the Enterprise was a little jury-rigging from Scotty. Well, it wasn't much different with the Klingons extracting the engine component from the Shenzhou and using it to get their ship rather quickly repaired. If it would have simply been the dilithium crystals themselves, that would have been one thing. But no, they were incorporating a piece of alien tech on short notice. So, the availability of the Shenzhou to the Klingons seems like another contrivance.
The spore drive being Stamets' 'baby'.... Why were there two test beds of the drive....Glenn and Discovery? Why wasn't there just one, the Glenn, and why wasn't Stamets assigned to that ship? Did they change that later, considering that Daystrom tested an M-5 computer on only one ship, rather than more than one?
Terraforming that moon to get more spores....that looked very similar to the Genesis process, in the speed of it. Or something like Elon Musk's thing about nuking the surface of Mars. Speaking of which, why mention him with Zefram Cochrane? Way premature to think that Musk's contributions will be anything great in the long-term, isn't it?
The mirror universe....that was not handled all that well from day one. Spock basically saying that peaceful people can portray madmen easier than vice versa was far too much of a generalization. The idea that negativity can't be subtle, but must be over-the-top and blatant is ridiculous. Serial killers can be seemingly absolutely normal in their home life but still go out and kill....and many are very methodical and calm about it. That's part of why they are successful. Too many people look for 'obvious' signs. Mirror Lorca was believable....until he crossed back over into the mirror universe. Then, not so much. The blatant villain is too one-dimensional. Even in TWOK, Khan was too foaming-at-the-mouth and not as clever and devious as he was in 'Space Seed'. Yes, the 15 years on Ceti Alpha V could have brought that about, but TWOK would have been more interesting if his inner strength had simply kept him biding his time and awaiting an opportunity to employ his clever deviousness once again. Sometimes ego comes down to pride in patience, and by not going that route the story was less interesting. But, I digress....
The light sensitivity thing, as it was portrayed to be, did not make a whole lot of sense.
What are cadets doing on an extreme test bed ship like that? From what we hear on the intercom, Tilly is not the only cadet on Discovery. That doesn't make much sense. A starship out on the frontier is rather like a submarine. Other training and duties come first and personality screenings are done. Tilly....more than anything, she simply seems to be not yet 'settled' with where she is at. She does very well with everything that is heaped onto her, but the very fact of that being done at that stage in her career seems unrealistic. To place all of that responsibility onto a cadet seems contrary to what would actually happen. The humor seems very contrived. So, we are to believe that a highly paranoid culture like the Terran Empire is going to hear that stumbling hesitation and uncertainty in her voice on the comm and it will not immediately throw up red flags? Well, she is just having some kind of a bad day and we won't ask any questions, for fear of pissing her off. Still seems pretty thin....
Standing policy of non-fraternization in the hierarchy of command, yet Cornwell and Lorca hop right into the sack together....with her having portrayed a by-the-book personality. Bit of a contradiction there.
I do like the fact that the episodes are connected. A lot. The stand-alone episodes of TOS and the other Treks were annoying in the aspect that they were so largely disconnected from each other.
But, thus far, this series could be called 'Star Trek: Burnham'. In TOS, we got to know Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and other members of the crew in what seemed like a fairly natural way over the course of time. I've never felt like it was simply the Kirk show. I would have preferred if they had let us get to know Burnham in a more gradual way and balanced the series with the other characters. At this point, what do we know about the people on the bridge of Discovery? Plus, they have killed off Lorca, Landry, and Culber....plus Georgiou, except for leaving her mirror self alive. Somewhere. So, we did not get much context for any of those people....not a whole lot of sense of what came before, their character over time, their motivations, their reasons for doing what they did. Stamets and Culber having a relationship and then Culber being killed off so soon....makes you wonder about the motivations of the producers with that.
Tilly saying that she had never heard of any other female with the first name of Michael....that seems very contrived, especially considering that it's the 23rd century.
Sarek....For Michael to have a part of his katra with her all the time seems to contradict the idea of what a katra is. The long-range communication....I don't have a 'big' problem with that. Something akin to 'astral projection'? Whatever. But the scenes inside of Sarek's mind....the producers lost a bit there. When Michael was talking with Amanda, Sarek was way off to the side talking with the Vulcan official....so that would not have been in his memory, because he did not witness it. And it was not from Michael's memory, because we were seeing it from her perspective from being inside of Sarek's mind.
The spore drive....it's mushrooms, BUT it needs a tardigrade to make it work, BUT NO, connecting to a human can make it work, too....sort of. This seems to be the mice-lab rats-dolphins initially and humans subsequently thing taken and ultra-compressed in time frame just as the terraforming of the moon. All along the way in Trek, things happen faster than what is logical and plausible. Do we have to keep that going?
If Discovery was from a different franchise altogether, or there had been no Trek at all before it, that would be one point in its favor, in spite of its problems. But, that is not the case.
Visual continuity, and rebooting of that, is one thing, but when characters, specific technology, plot elements, etc, show up sooner than has already been established and / or are quite different than what has already been portrayed....that's a larger can of worms.
At this point, in all honesty, I am more curious than I am critical. Kurtzman says they are going to sync things up neatly with canon. I am very curious as to how they are going to go about pulling that off.
Right now, as Star Trek, I give Discovery a 4 out of 10. As something else, I give it a 6 out of 10. So, overall at the end of season 1, I will say a middle-of-the-road 5 out of 10.
Some may say I am far too generous, others may say I am far too critical.
This is just my personal opinion at the present time.
Bring on season 2.
First, I need to get this nagging bit of trivia out of my system. 'Rejac' sounds like 'Redjac' from TOS. They named the tardigrade 'Ripper'. Admiral Cornwell....Patricia Cornwell wrote a book about Jack The Ripper in which it was her theory that the perp was the artist Walter Sickert (I don't agree with that theory). So, what's all that about? Anything? Probably nothing? Okay, moving on....
Pretty good theme music in the intro. The sketches made me think of Matt Jefferies. The ship flyby, as handled at the end of the intro, has a late 50s / early 60s flavor to it, which is good when you consider that in-universe it's 10 years before TOS. That's the parallel I make, so it works for me. On the other hand, when Discovery makes a spore jump, that flipping around thing is reminiscent of primitive special effects from the 50s / 60s and does not seem well-done.
Starfleet regulations should not be set in stone. Even the U.S. Constitution can be temporarily suspended in extreme situations. Burnham had important knowledge that Georgiou did not allow to be applied. That was a mistake. Then the whole thing was blamed on Burnham. It seemed very contrived, in order to bring about subsequent drama. From the beginning, Starfleet and its regulations, as portrayed in Trek, has not made a whole lot of sense. The galaxy is not this black and white, cut-and-dried thing where a set of inflexible principles can be applied and strictly adhered to with the expectation that it's going to be the best recipe for success in every case. Unbending rigidity to an absolute will lead to disaster in some situations. In this case, the whole war might have been averted if Georgiou had taken Burnham's advice. But, the writers did what they did to bring about their plot. Not smartly, in my opinion.
Some argue that the bomb on the Klingon body, when they were just trying to retrieve their dead, was a war crime. Well, the idea of a war versus 'rules' to conducting one has always been very problematic. You can use grenades, but you can't use shotguns. So much of it is treading a very fine tightrope. Especially when countless lives and the downfall of nations are involved. 'The ends justifying the means' gets brought into it and it truly is a huge bone of contention. Morals, ethics, even religion gets brought up. There is no simple answer.
Next, why did they not self-destruct the Shenzhou to keep it from falling into the hands of the Klingons? Even if the computer was offline, there is always blowing it up the old-fashioned way. For that matter, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense for escape pods in the 23rd century to have no armaments at all for defense. You're out in a galaxy where there are known hostiles and unknowns. By percentage, the reason for evacuating a ship has a higher likelihood of being due to conflict than ship-wide systems failure to a catastrophic level. Concentrated weapons fire from armed escape pods could destroy a friendly ship if necessary, to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.
It was a reasonable complaint against TOS that when they stole the cloaking device from the Romulans, all it required to get it up and running on the Enterprise was a little jury-rigging from Scotty. Well, it wasn't much different with the Klingons extracting the engine component from the Shenzhou and using it to get their ship rather quickly repaired. If it would have simply been the dilithium crystals themselves, that would have been one thing. But no, they were incorporating a piece of alien tech on short notice. So, the availability of the Shenzhou to the Klingons seems like another contrivance.
The spore drive being Stamets' 'baby'.... Why were there two test beds of the drive....Glenn and Discovery? Why wasn't there just one, the Glenn, and why wasn't Stamets assigned to that ship? Did they change that later, considering that Daystrom tested an M-5 computer on only one ship, rather than more than one?
Terraforming that moon to get more spores....that looked very similar to the Genesis process, in the speed of it. Or something like Elon Musk's thing about nuking the surface of Mars. Speaking of which, why mention him with Zefram Cochrane? Way premature to think that Musk's contributions will be anything great in the long-term, isn't it?
The mirror universe....that was not handled all that well from day one. Spock basically saying that peaceful people can portray madmen easier than vice versa was far too much of a generalization. The idea that negativity can't be subtle, but must be over-the-top and blatant is ridiculous. Serial killers can be seemingly absolutely normal in their home life but still go out and kill....and many are very methodical and calm about it. That's part of why they are successful. Too many people look for 'obvious' signs. Mirror Lorca was believable....until he crossed back over into the mirror universe. Then, not so much. The blatant villain is too one-dimensional. Even in TWOK, Khan was too foaming-at-the-mouth and not as clever and devious as he was in 'Space Seed'. Yes, the 15 years on Ceti Alpha V could have brought that about, but TWOK would have been more interesting if his inner strength had simply kept him biding his time and awaiting an opportunity to employ his clever deviousness once again. Sometimes ego comes down to pride in patience, and by not going that route the story was less interesting. But, I digress....
The light sensitivity thing, as it was portrayed to be, did not make a whole lot of sense.
What are cadets doing on an extreme test bed ship like that? From what we hear on the intercom, Tilly is not the only cadet on Discovery. That doesn't make much sense. A starship out on the frontier is rather like a submarine. Other training and duties come first and personality screenings are done. Tilly....more than anything, she simply seems to be not yet 'settled' with where she is at. She does very well with everything that is heaped onto her, but the very fact of that being done at that stage in her career seems unrealistic. To place all of that responsibility onto a cadet seems contrary to what would actually happen. The humor seems very contrived. So, we are to believe that a highly paranoid culture like the Terran Empire is going to hear that stumbling hesitation and uncertainty in her voice on the comm and it will not immediately throw up red flags? Well, she is just having some kind of a bad day and we won't ask any questions, for fear of pissing her off. Still seems pretty thin....
Standing policy of non-fraternization in the hierarchy of command, yet Cornwell and Lorca hop right into the sack together....with her having portrayed a by-the-book personality. Bit of a contradiction there.
I do like the fact that the episodes are connected. A lot. The stand-alone episodes of TOS and the other Treks were annoying in the aspect that they were so largely disconnected from each other.
But, thus far, this series could be called 'Star Trek: Burnham'. In TOS, we got to know Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and other members of the crew in what seemed like a fairly natural way over the course of time. I've never felt like it was simply the Kirk show. I would have preferred if they had let us get to know Burnham in a more gradual way and balanced the series with the other characters. At this point, what do we know about the people on the bridge of Discovery? Plus, they have killed off Lorca, Landry, and Culber....plus Georgiou, except for leaving her mirror self alive. Somewhere. So, we did not get much context for any of those people....not a whole lot of sense of what came before, their character over time, their motivations, their reasons for doing what they did. Stamets and Culber having a relationship and then Culber being killed off so soon....makes you wonder about the motivations of the producers with that.
Tilly saying that she had never heard of any other female with the first name of Michael....that seems very contrived, especially considering that it's the 23rd century.
Sarek....For Michael to have a part of his katra with her all the time seems to contradict the idea of what a katra is. The long-range communication....I don't have a 'big' problem with that. Something akin to 'astral projection'? Whatever. But the scenes inside of Sarek's mind....the producers lost a bit there. When Michael was talking with Amanda, Sarek was way off to the side talking with the Vulcan official....so that would not have been in his memory, because he did not witness it. And it was not from Michael's memory, because we were seeing it from her perspective from being inside of Sarek's mind.
The spore drive....it's mushrooms, BUT it needs a tardigrade to make it work, BUT NO, connecting to a human can make it work, too....sort of. This seems to be the mice-lab rats-dolphins initially and humans subsequently thing taken and ultra-compressed in time frame just as the terraforming of the moon. All along the way in Trek, things happen faster than what is logical and plausible. Do we have to keep that going?
If Discovery was from a different franchise altogether, or there had been no Trek at all before it, that would be one point in its favor, in spite of its problems. But, that is not the case.
Visual continuity, and rebooting of that, is one thing, but when characters, specific technology, plot elements, etc, show up sooner than has already been established and / or are quite different than what has already been portrayed....that's a larger can of worms.
At this point, in all honesty, I am more curious than I am critical. Kurtzman says they are going to sync things up neatly with canon. I am very curious as to how they are going to go about pulling that off.
Right now, as Star Trek, I give Discovery a 4 out of 10. As something else, I give it a 6 out of 10. So, overall at the end of season 1, I will say a middle-of-the-road 5 out of 10.
Some may say I am far too generous, others may say I am far too critical.
This is just my personal opinion at the present time.
Bring on season 2.
Good one! 
