Review : Star Trek : Discovery Episode 3

Keeping things spoiler-free.

I'm prepared to move from, "I don't think we can be friends" to, "getting mixed messages". I'm not sure what to make of this. Certainly it's better than episodes 1 and 2 (I'd tempted to suggest skipping them completely). Far less Klingons so we don't have to endure 20 minutes of oook oook oook noises, and we meet the actual ship and crew we're going to be exploring with.

What I like about this episode :
- Much better pacing. I don't think I quite realised how bad it was last time until I saw this week's episode. We're not subjected to plot overload, we get conversations at a reasonable pace without things exploding every five minutes.
- Better cinematography. Still too much lens flare and bloom, but just a little less obnoxious. Heavily toned down the stupid angled screenshots and weirdly rotating cameras (not gone completely, but reduced significantly).
- More interesting storyline. More sci-fi and less war.
- Somewhat more interesting character development. I'd actually rate this even as "decent", provisionally (see below).

What I don't like :
- The violence and gore. No, no, no, no, no. Star Trek should always be a family show, dammit. I want it to inspire the next generation of young scientists, not give them nightmares (well it won't actually do this, but only because it's far too gory for children to watch at all).
- The gritty "realism". One of the core values of Trek - relentless optimism about the future - seems to have been lost. Without that, it's just not Trek. Period.
- The weirdness of many of the characters. The acting is halfway decent, I'll grant you, and the characters themselves are more interesting than the mess we saw last week. But dang, this feels like a ship made up of a very unprofessional crew compared to what we've seen before. This would be fine in another show, but I have strong reservations about this in Trek (see above). The character ambiguity is... well, I'm just not sure I want to be second-guessing people's motives in Trek. Part of the ethos of the show is that humanity has evolved and people aren't assholes any more. Make the characters more complex by all means, but the way this is done leaves me very much on the fence.
- The pseudo-mystical elements. These too I will reserve judgement on until we know more about what's going on.