Michael Burnham and the Klingon War

[fireproof78]

She seems like a capable actress - I’ve never seen her in anything else so I’ve no basis for comparison. But the way her character is written is dreadful and reminds me of Harry Potter... “yer a human, Michael”

Which stands to reason a little bit.

 

[lawman]

Basically, what I saw was this...

• Burnham was immediately remorseful and accepted full responsibility for her actions. She already made the major shift from defiance to guilt by the end of the second episode.
• When she is re-introduced after her imprisonment in Episode 3, we see a character who is totally committed to the principles of Starfleet, even if Starfleet rejected her. We see this in her initial rejection of Lorca's offer, how she's dead-set opposed to helping when she thinks it's an experimental weapon, and her concern for the welfare of the tardigrade and the gormagander. She is presented as The One Who is Right, the one who stands up for Starfleet principles, with Lorca as her foil.

Yeah, that's an even more concise example of why Burnham didn't really have a character arc. At the beginning she was an uber-competent diehard Starfleet ideologue who made one tragic emotional mistake (and I'd argue that the "Vulcan hello" idea wasn't even the mistake; it was actually going to the sarcophagus ship alone with Georgiou, letting her get killed, and then killing T'Kuvma). She then immediately reverted to type, and at the end of the season she was still an uber-competent diehard Starfleet ideologue who was still making tragic emotional mistakes (notably, trusting Mirror Georgiou).

To the extent that these episodes do show growth on the part of Burnham, it seems to be growth away from her buttoned-down, fake Vulcan front into someone more comfortable with her humanity. However, this doesn't make much sense, because why wouldn't she have loosened up a bit when she was on the Shenzhou all those years? It's also a bit inconsistent, with her depicted as a normal woman in one script, then inexpressive again in the next episode.

This would indeed have been more interesting. It was one of the key aspects of "Lethe," one of the season's best episodes. Sadly, it pretty much got pushed to the side.

Honestly, at the end of the last episode, I decided Ash Tyler had a much better arc over the course of the season than Burnham. He started the series as an emotionally crippled mess, and ended it with accepting both "sides" of his history and a desire to move on. And he decided to run off with his rapist and wasn't even the main character of the show.

I agree. I still don't think what was done to him makes a lick of sense, either scientifically or strategically, but at least it wound up being interesting in character terms.

I wonder what kind of modern-day person Burnham is meant to represent? She’s young, she’s entitled... Is Michael Burnham a millennial?

Nah, I wouldn't go there. It doesn't seem to be the writers' intent. More importantly, Millennials get an undeservedly bad rap from the tradtional media. I'm not exactly one myself, but I live, work, and socialize with hordes of them, and I can tell you that one thing they typically are not is "entitled."

Not much is canonically established for 2257/2258. We know Kirk graduates from Starfleet, and the USS Farragut loses 200 crewmembers to the dikironium cloud creature. Kodos begins his undercover life as part of a traveling Shakespeare troupe. And Robert Wesley's daughter is born. That's about it.

Not even quite that much, actually. I think you may be quoting from Memory Alpha here, but great as that site is, it makes a lot of speculative (and sometimes inconsistent) leaps with its dating. Specifically, we have no reason to believe that Kirk graduated in 2257. We know that he was a freshman 15 years before S1 "Shore Leave," which puts his fourth year 12 years before that. We also know that he was a lieutenant aboard the Farragut 11 years before S2 "Obsession." By my reckoning that puts him in the Academy from 2250-'54, and puts the Farragut incident in 2256. There's enough wiggle room to push those dates maybe a year later, but not really more than that.

Quark and those close to him were about the best thing DS9 did. ...
Look at the Ferengi episodes taken as a group - they're some of my favorites, but you won't have any trouble finding Niners around here who hate them.

OMG, I couldn't disagree more. I always found the Ferengi characters on DS9 pretty much intolerable. They weren't effective as comic relief, or as a satire of capitalism, or as serious characters, or really on any other level. They were almost always tonally inconsistent with almost everything else on the show. I'm a big fan of DS9, but I dislike stories about the Ferengi almost as much as I do ones about Bajoran religion.

 

[Lord Garth]

Finally getting to this lawman. I'm trying to mentally wrap things up here, instead of leaving things hanging, and Cold Turkey is hard to do so I'm weaning myself off instead, and now is as good a time as any to address the valid points you raise.

And they believed L'rell had the means to destroy the planet because what, exactly? She held up a remote control and said so? She had absolutely no way to validate her threat without actually following through on it. Just how credulous are we supposed to believe the leaders of the other Houses to be?

A lot in the finale was rushed. There's no denying that, so I won't even try. I will say this: one of the Klingons probably scanned to see if what L'Rell said was true, off camera and/or off-screen time, and we just didn't see it.

And, as I said upthread, I don't think the season finale was truly the end of anything. I fully believe someone will want to challenge L'Rell and test whether or not she's actually willing to use the bomb. I'd be very surprised if this was "And they all lived happily ever after."

 

[fireproof78]

And, as I said upthread, I don't think the season finale was truly the end of anything. I fully believe someone will want to challenge L'Rell and test whether or not she's actually willing to use the bomb. I'd be very surprised if this was "And they all lived happily ever after."

I'm always amused by the idea that in a ongoing serious things are completely done.

 

[lawman]

A lot in the finale was rushed. There's no denying that, so I won't even try. I will say this: one of the Klingons probably scanned to see if what L'Rell said was true, off camera and/or off-screen time, and we just didn't see it.

"Rushed" is not what we should see from the finale of a story they had all season to set up, in an episode that spent time on things like Tilly getting high with Clint Howard, but yeah, it was. (More time on the inter-House politics would have been interesting and helpful. We never even got any sense of who was in a position to command that fleet approaching Earth... it's not as if those ships would suddenly accept orders directly from L'Rell.) It's reasonable to assume someone among the Klingons did verify the bomb as you say, although a line of dialogue to that effect certainly wouldn't have hurt. It's still not reasonable to assume they took her threat seriously, IMHO... unless she convinced them the remote came with some kind of deadman-switch sensor, all she really did was paint a target on her back. It's kinda like the scene in Blazing Saddles where Cleavon Little takes himself hostage, except played straight.

I'm torn about what I want and expect the writers to do with this next. On the one hand, I hope they realize how unsatisfying the resolution was and revisit it enough to smooth out the rough edges and update the Klingon status quo. On the other hand, I could certainly understand (and possibly even agree with) the impulse to just sweep the whole thing under the rug and move on.

 

[Jadeb]

Yeah, I don't know that I want any more of that. This is a serial, so if the storyline is going somewhere, they should have laid some groundwork for it, whether some conflict among the Federation folk about what they'd done or some business with the Klingons to foreshadow more to come. Or something -- anything. Instead, everyone gets medals, the Enterprise swoops in and we're on to the next thing. It's a strangely finite conclusion for a show of this nature.

The last thing I want is for them to devote more energy to the tiresome war arc just to try to fix things retroactively. If that was their ending, move on.

 

[Lord Garth]

I've never done this with a Star Trek series before Discovery, because it wasn't how I approached television viewing in the '90s... but with more recent shows I've watched like Orange Is the New Black, Mad Men, Halt & Catch Fire, and Better Call Saul, I've approached each season as if it's a movie. And each new season as if it's a sequel.

In Part I of The Klingon Storyline, the war is wrapped up. In Part II, we see The Aftermath and a new story develops. I have no idea what's in store for Season 2 (besides the Enterprise), but maybe this Klingon Sequel a.k.a. Chapter 2 of Our Ongoing Soap Opera will cover that Aftermath.

So, yeah, I agree, The Klingon War is done. The Klingon Storyline probably isn't. As long as it's not the same as Worf vs. Gowron vs. Duras, I'm okay with it. So far, this doesn't look like same story they did with the Klingons in TNG and DS9.

Having said all that, I hope it's a minor part of the season, if it is a part. I'd like the major focus to be something else too. So, if you tell me, "I want to see something besides the Klingons!", you're preaching to the choir.

 

[Jadeb]

I've never done this with a Star Trek series before Discovery, because it wasn't how I approached television viewing in the '90s... but with more recent shows I've watched like Orange Is the New Black, Mad Men, Halt & Catch Fire, and Better Call Saul, I've approached each season as if it's a movie. And each new season as if it's a sequel.

I prefer a whole story, but I don't think I'd go quite that far. "Mad Men," for example, never made me feel like everything was wrapped up with a tidy bow. For genre stuff, "Lost in Space" handled it just to my taste -- the characters had gone on a complete and satisfying journey, but the final episode makes it feel like everything we saw was just the beginning. I'm excited for more. With Discovery, they resorted to trotting out the Enterprise to generate that excitement, rather than doing it in a more meaningful way through the storytelling.

 

[Lord Garth]

I prefer a whole story, but I don't think I'd go quite that far. "Mad Men," for example, never made me feel like everything was wrapped up with a tidy bow.

Yes! Another Mad Men fan! Noted for future reference. I could talk about that show for hours, non-stop.

 

[fireproof78]

I've never done this with a Star Trek series before Discovery, because it wasn't how I approached television viewing in the '90s... but with more recent shows I've watched like Orange Is the New Black, Mad Men, Halt & Catch Fire, and Better Call Saul, I've approached each season as if it's a movie. And each new season as if it's a sequel.

In Part I of The Klingon Storyline, the war is wrapped up. In Part II, we see The Aftermath and a new story develops. I have no idea what's in store for Season 2 (besides the Enterprise), but maybe this Klingon Sequel a.k.a. Chapter 2 of Our Ongoing Soap Opera will cover that Aftermath.

So, yeah, I agree, The Klingon War is done. The Klingon Storyline probably isn't. As long as it's not the same as Worf vs. Gowron vs. Duras, I'm okay with it. So far, this doesn't look like same story they did with the Klingons in TNG and DS9.

Having said all that, I hope it's a minor part of the season, if it is a part. I'd like the major focus to be something else too. So, if you tell me, "I want to see something besides the Klingons!", you're preaching to the choir.

This definitely fits with the current contemporary style of TV, especially on streaming platforms. For me, my first introduction was Daredevil on Netflix and it worked very well for me. I never felt like things were perfectly wrapped up. The enemy was defeated for a time but not forever.

In my opinion, the Klingon War simply came close from going to full boil back down to more of a cold war. And, the end is hardly known to our heroes.

 

[BillJ]

My thoughts on Michael Burnham and canon from another thread...

***

I think it is more about whether or not something is a good idea or not. The canon considerations are always secondary for me.

Is Michael Burnham being Spock's sister a "good" idea? We saw the backlash over Sybok (Luckenbill, like Martin-Green is a good actor, that got saddled with bad material.), so I'm not sure who in the writers room thought it was a good idea to go back to that well? I'm not sure the optics were all that good with Burnham either. The first female minority lead on a Star Trek series that is supposed to be a polished officer in line for command immediately has a breakdown over Klingons then has to go running to a white male parental figure for guidance.

So while it doesn't violate the letter of continuity in the Prime universe, I think it was a decidedly bad idea to try and connect Burnham to Spock/Sarek. It kinda shifted the spotlight away and added unneeded baggage to what was supposed to be the center of the show.

I was hoping she would stand on her own in season two. But we all know that isn't going to happen...