Cas Sweeney ‘19
Associate Editor
“Star Trek: Discovery” has aired six episodes since its premiere last month. The “Star Trek” series, which shows only on CBS’s new only streaming service, has taken a new perspective on the tv show that so many people have already come to love.
Fans knew before the show began that the writers planned for it to be different from all previous “Star Trek” series. The decision to air the show online instead of on cable set the stage for a sequence of firsts, creating a very different show than the other eras of “Star Trek.”
Discovery is the first “Star Trek” series to focus on someone other than the commanding officer of a ship or space station, and this main character, Michael Burnham, is played by Sonequa Martin-Green, the first black woman to lead a “Star Trek” show. The producer also hinted at the first confirmed gay couple to star as characters on the show.
However, as the storyline progressed, it became obvious that more than details had changed between this series and the ones before it. Although Discovery takes place only ten years before the Original Series, the atmosphere is much darker.
The pilot episode of Discovery plunges the galaxy into a desperate and bloody war. There have been other wars just as complex and deadly in other “Star Trek” series, but the choice to set Discovery so close to the idealism of the Original Series makes a sharper contrast between the two outlooks.
While Kirk and Spock were on the edge of the galaxy, discovering “new worlds and new civilizations,” Michael Burnham is on the front lines against the Federation’s newest enemy, the Klingons. Discovery does not shy away from the implications of fighting a war in these first episodes, the choices, the sacrifices and the evil acts done for the sake of winning the battle. Instead it chooses to focus fully on those difficult and often immoral aspects, creating a world much more like our own than the future Gene Roddenberry, the original creator of “Star Trek,” envisioned in 1966.
For some fans, the contrast was upsetting. Once “Star Trek” was a symbol of what humanity could become once we grow enough as a species. Now Discovery, by putting the same “Star Trek” ideals that made the show so popular in the first place into a place where they do not fit as easily or conveniently, has proposed the notion that maybe we will never reach that idealized place that we once were shown.
The question remains to be answered, however, as to whether that means we should still strive for the ideals that “Star Trek” holds dear. How the writers of Discovery feel about this question is yet to be seen. Because of Discovery’s continuous story line instead of the Original Series’ episodic nature there has yet to be the kind of clear-cut moral statements for which Kirk became famous. Some say that this means the ideals of “Star Trek” have changed.
I believe, however, that the same message, that we should reach for the betterment of humanity, can be delivered more successfully through Discovery’s ambiguous setting than the Original Series’ utopic Earth.
Our world is more obviously dark than ever, and it is disappointing that there will be no escape from this darkness in “Star Trek”’s newest series, but the characters in Discovery come from as difficult place as we do. Seeing them find a way to create good and right in their world has the potential to be a more effective message on how to create change than imagining the end result once the work has been done.
Whether or not Discovery will reach these lofty goals, or even plans to, cannot be known until the end of the season, or perhaps beyond. However, I have hope that “Star Trek” will continue to follow its path of reflecting the world in which we live now and the world in which we one day could be.
