TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery, season 2

TV #51 of 2023:

Star Trek: Discovery, season 2

The cast still does a fine job emoting with the material they’re given in this second season of Star Trek: Discovery, but there aren’t enough smaller personal moments to convincingly sell the relationships before they wind up in crisis. It also doesn’t help that I like science-fiction primarily for the plot, and everything here is even more of a mess on that front. To some extent it emulates the giddy propulsion of the show’s first year, but that story burned through ideas in the service of its big twisty reveals, which were fun to see deployed even when predicted in advance. This time, we don’t get plot twists so much as a sequence of sudden developments that spring out of nowhere and are never adequately explained. Mysterious signals in space; visions of angels; hallucinations of a dead friend no one else can see — what is this, Battlestar Galactica?

We do learn the reasons behind all of those events after a while, but it generally boils down to a rogue A.I. and a time-travel predestination paradox, neither of which holds up well under logical scrutiny. The villain of the piece is the most frustrating, in both its motivations and the means of its eventual defeat, though that’s probably too spoilerish to describe in more detail in this review. Yet the build-up to that threat is absurd, too. The previous finale teased the arrival of the USS Enterprise, and it’s quickly confirmed here that this is the ship pre-Kirk, with his predecessor Christopher Pike beaming aboard Discovery and taking over as acting captain. So we don’t get the fan-service of a recast William Shatner / Chris Pine, but his loyal lieutenant Spock should still be present in this era. And he does eventually arrive in the form of new actor Ethan Peck, but there are no fewer than four fake-outs first, lifting audience expectations only to have someone else step off the transporter bay instead.

This is a series that just can’t commit to what it wants to be. The writers could choose to either fold existing major characters like Spock into the narrative organically — these are the adventures that the Vulcan had before TOS! — or else have those figures function as quick fun cameos — check out who else was around for this! — but this year tries to chart a middle course that really doesn’t work for me, perpetually delaying the foregone conclusion of the man’s appearance while talking up how important he is to the action unfolding in the meantime. It’s an approach that already had dubious success back in the 1984 movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and is even less effective for the franchise to repeat decades later.

Speaking of diminishing returns, Section 31 plays a rather large role too, less clandestine and thematically opposed to the nobility of Starfleet than ever. The concept of the dark underbelly to Gene Roddenberry’s utopian dreams once had real bite to it, but at this point, they just seem to be a faction like any other and are apparently known widely across the fleet. Maybe that’s the next item that Star Trek: Discovery will retcon, as there is a noticeable effort this season to try and address some of the things that made the previous run fit poorly as a prequel to established canon. (Personally, I like the idea that Pike is a bit of a luddite who insists that the shiny new technology on Discovery doesn’t have a place on Enterprise, which is a goofy but reasonable workaround to why we never saw all those bells and whistles in the 1960s program. But the ultimate declaration that it’s now become treason for anyone to mention certain topics like the spore drive is too silly by far.)

In the end, the Discovery narrowly escapes in a way that strands it somewhere unexpected, which I guess means we’re getting a Voyager sort of premise beginning in season 3. That’s a retooling that will require the creative team to start over largely from scratch, which can only be a good thing after all the misfires here.

[Content warning for gun violence, gaslighting, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

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