Review : Star Trek Discovery Episode 4

Keeping things spoiler free.

After quite some promising moves last week, episode 4 largely degenerates back into farce. Once again we have too many damn bloody great glowy things and weird camera angles. Too many really frickin' irritating Klingons speaking their stupid language and having stupid side plots that have lost what little interest they ever contained (oh, and now they eat their enemies, making them seem like even more ridiculous primitives). Too much war, not to mention a captain who's explicitly a warrior in command of a science vessel. Daft. A side-plot based on the Federation designing new weapons : no thanks ! You can't call it Star Trek and have it revolve so much around war and death - not from the word go, at least. In parts it borders on bleakness porn.

Some of you may cry, "Deep Space Nine !!!". Ah well, Deep Space Nine was more like bleakness eroticism : you actually already cared about the characters and the world they inhabited; they were trying to rebuild and explore long before the Dominion showed up. Only in the later seasons did it wholly devote itself to the war theme, by which point the treachery and betrayal actually meant something. Never mind that Gul Dukat and Garak were magnificently melodramatic. Discovery's characters, on the other hand, are plodding and dull.

After a very nice plot twist to the captain last week, he's fallen back into douchebag territory. The security officer is not only a douchebag, but a hideously, I mean seriously ludicrously stupid one as well. Come to that, virtually the entire crew are rude and obnoxious. The leader character is practically the only one who every behaves with any degree of professionalism, and her main role is basically to be condescending to everyone else by virtue of their stupidity. She has precisely two expressions : worried and smug. The rest of the crew... pointless. Utterly pointless.

And then there's the science. Yes, I know. I KNOW ! It's fiction and it doesn't have to be realistic; insert fifty seven million times Star Trek made a science boo-boo. I'd overlook this completely except... O-type stars aren't yellow, they're blue-white. Does this affect the story in any way whatsoever ? Nope. But I know full well how little effort is requires to swap the RGB values and turn a yellow star into a blue one. Unnecessary unrealism that's absolutely trivial to fix is the most annoying kind.

Rant over, you may return to the dwellings from whence you came.