The Vulcan Hello
Alright! Let's give this another go.
Long-Range Sensors
In retrospect, Discovery was inevitable. Every decade gets at least one Trek show; this was the scheduled stop for the 2010s.
We should though take a minute to note how easily that decade could have broken the chain. The franchise was some distance short of qualifying as healthy. If the Crepusculan village had been built atop ground as barren, all the phaser-bored well-shafts on the M-class planet couldn't have kept them alive. It had been twelve years since the last TV show came to an end with an exhausted whimper, and seventeen since the last bleached copies of the franchise's imperial phase faded away to nothingness. The closest there had been to anything approaching a resurgence in fortune since mid-period DS9 had been JJ Abrams' movie reboot, an audition for Star Wars disguised as a film. True, it was diverting enough in its own way, but then it got followed up by Into Darkness, a film completely somehow both aggravatingly dull, and openly evil.
Trek hadn't been in this much trouble since the early seventies, and even then there was a sense of a wide-open idea-space just waiting to be explored. "How do we set sail again" rather than "How can we navigate the maze of shipwrecks just offshore?". Infinite diversity, yes, but the last couple combinations sure hadn't unlocked anything worthwhile. Every Trek show is in dialogue with those that came before it, but Discovery was the first that felt like the conversation had to start with an apology.
It will take us a while to sort through all the ways Discovery attempted to reassure the viewer the late-Berman period was firmly to the franchises' aft (with varying degrees of success), but some were on display before the curtain rose. Bryan Fuller being the name attached to the new show's creation is probably the most portentous, even if he did quit early in production. Every other creator of a Trek TV show had made their name within Trek themselves. Fuller brought heft. Sure, he'd been more than casually involved in Voyager, but since then he'd created four shows that had all been extremely well-received critically, even if only two had made it to a second season, and none to a fourth. This is the guy who gave us Hannibal, I can't overstate how juiced this particular geek was about the idea of Fuller getting to unleash a similar set of spices upon a very different meal.
I know little about the reasons Fuller quit. More accurately, I know little about to what extent the stated reasons resemble the fully story. I'm comfortable with this fact - I prefer my inside baseball to take place within a holodeck - and I'm not going to go into the ins and outs of Fuller heading out. What matters for our purposes is what Fuller did during his brief tenure, and how that was built on (or undermined) by those following. A key concern of what we're going to be covering here will be the ways in which Discovery attempted to reflect what had come before, and how it tried to break from it. As such, it's fitting that two of the biggest pieces of info released early about the new show were that it would a) take place during a war with the Klingons, and b) focus on a character who wasn't in charge.
Character Conflict
This idea of centering on someone not in the command chair was interesting mainly because it wasn't at all interesting. Not in itself, anyway. Yes, it would be fair to call Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway and Archer the "main" character of their respective series (certainly given each show's opening credits, and the salaries paid to the actors). The reality though is that ever since Michael Piller initiated the approach of focussing each episode on a specific character (all the way back in TNG Season 3), the concept of a Trek show being anchored by a first officer, or for that matter a bunch of scrappy ensigns, would be a quantitative change, rather than a qualitative one.
The smart assumption, or at least the hopeful one, was that there had to be something more involved; some angle that made announcing this approach worth the cost of plugging in a microphone. What this might have become in the fullness of Fuller's time, we can never know. In the first three Discovery episodes, though, it meant Michael's mutiny.
This in itself is both new and old - turtles alternating with Squirtles, all the way down. Every Trek since TNG has built itself around a situation in which Starfleet has to work alongside another organisation with a wildly different viewpoint and list of priorities. In DS9, it was the Bajoran Militia. In Voyager, it was the Maquis. In Enterprise, it was the Vulcan High Command. These were respectively a success, a failure, and a rad-soaked millstone that poisoned its show at the same time as dragging it down. Even so, it isn't hard to see how it became the template. It's a good way to interrogate the limitations of Starfleet's approach without abandoning the shared sense of purpose that best defines the franchise (indeed the primary reason Voyager and Enterprise both failed to make this work was in insisting Starfleet be proved right at almost every turn).
Discovery's contribution to this progression is to wildly up the ante, constructing a scenario where people within Starfleet itself could find themselves irreconcilably opposed, and playing out the consequences of that. Which, yes, is still in the turtle half of the Infinite Chelonian Tower. There's been no shortage of stories over the years where our heroes have found themselves at odds with others in the 'Fleet; "The Drumhead", "Homefront/Paradise Lost", "Equinox". Each of those examples share two elements in common, though; it was clear our protagonists were in the right, and the struggle's consequences lasted no longer than their stories did.
This is where the Discovery difference comes in. It's true that the concept of "protagonist" is a little fuzzy here, given more than half the actors in the opening credits don't (appear to) feature in the episode. That said, it's clear Michael Burnham is the central character. It's equally unmissable that her mutiny is going to be an inciting incident for the whole show, rather than never being mentioned again.
As a concept, this was at least somewhat exciting, and also at least slightly worrying. Pushing a Starfleet officer to the point they snap is certainly something worth exploring, especially if the plan is to stick with them once it all goes wrong. What did happen to Admirals Satie and Leyton after they failed in their respective bids for totalitarian overreach? Or as a better example, what if Sisko's actions in "In The Pale Moonlight" had actually been brought to (the pale moon)light? There are any number of reasons this wouldn't and couldn't happen on Deep Space Nine, but starting a show with the question "What if "...Moonlight" immediately went tits up?" is a belter of an idea.
The worry came in two forms. Firstly, there's the deftness of touch that would be needed. The mutineer/traitor/whomever had to be sympathetic, without clearly being justified. Those who stood behind the line the protagonist crossed could be antagonistic, but they couldn't be villainous. Everyone needed to be right, or at least wrong in understandable ways. That's far from an easy thing to do, or at least, it's very commonly failed when attempted. We can safely assume this gets even harder when dealing with Starfleet, where everyone involved is committed to the same philosophy of understanding other viewpoints, and working to resolve differences.
Assuming that commitment would be present, that is. We'll come back to the question of the execution of the EXO's revolt later, but we're still on concept right now. This is where we reach worry number two. It was reasonable to fret over how well all this could be done, while remaining Trek. The bigger concern, however, was that "remaining Trek" was the last thing on anybody's mind.
A necessary disclaimer: it is extremely unlikely anyone who clings to the phrase "Real Trek" - "Real anything", really - has anything to say worth hearing. Almost invariably, it's a simple shibboleth, a way of letting like-minded people know that you, like them, would rather the diversity on offer was significantly more finite. That said, the best Trek has an ethos that is both unusual and valuable. It makes little sense to call that the "real" franchise, but its certainly what makes Trek worth engaging with, even when its other elements get a little ropey.
During the mid '10s, that ethos appeared dead as disco. By that point we'd spent over a decade trapped in "War On Terror Trek". WOTT, as the name suggests, was a post-9/11 phenomenon, tainting both the latter two seasons of Enterprise and Into Darkness. The phenomenon grew out of the insistence that September 11th was an event so paradigm-shifting, it changed what was believable as a dream for the future. The very concept of a society in which people respected difference, plurality, and basic politeness was a dangerous fantasy. No, worse; it was mass-suicide note, signed only by those with the least armoured of heads and most bleeding of hearts.Â
Fundamentally, this is a form of narcissistic paranoia (though ultimately what other form of paranoia exists?). The implicit argument is that 9/11 did more to damage the very concept of intercultural cooperation than the the Nazis' industrial-scale murder, the failure to stop the Spanish flu infecting half a billion people worldwide, or the entire globe being one bad decision away from nuclear ruination, and that's only something you believe if you think the importance of an event correlates with how close to you in space and time it occurred.
Plenty of people very clearly believed just that, though, and so for years, what little Trek was on offer concerned itself with how Starfleet needed to toughly tough out tough situations through toughness. Enterprise needed the MACOs, Starfleet Intelligence needed Khan on the payroll, the franchise needed to look like literally every other high sci-fi being put out. It was cynical, brutish, and lazy. It was actively unpleasant watching Trek spend what seemed like its last breaths trying to defeat its own best instincts. There's also the small matter that all this demonstrably failed to turn around the franchise's flagging fortunes, because "We'll try to be more like everybody else!" isn't actually a particularly good sales pitch.
It very much seemed, though, that an awful lot of people had been paid an awful lot of money to resolutely refuse to understand terrible artistic decisions to tie in with terrible business decisions aren't a smart way to make art or make money.
The question was: had any of that stopped being the case?
The Way We Were
We'll be tracking how all this pans out as we go through the first season, but "The Vulcan Hello" itself certainly suggests the pitfalls have at least been considered. The episode makes two savvy choices in its first half to allay the fears expressed in the previous section. First up is the nature of our introduction to Captain Phillipa Georgiou and Commander Michael Burnham, who we meet on a mission to save a pre-warp society from extinction. Our heroes are risking their lives in an alien desert to save people who they'll never meet, from a disaster they had no part in causing, just because it's the right thing to do. The fact they're doing it with the slimmest justification possible for why it's not violating (what will become) the Prime Directive makes it all the better [1]. After the last two pilots framed Starfleet as focussed on policework and exploration, respectively, the reminder that they are first and foremost about trying to make things better comes as a welcome reminder.
This is then carried into the scenes aboard the Shenzou, both leading up to and during Michael's EVA. There's a easy and generous badinage between the officers here; a sense that this is absolutely the thing they most want to be doing with their lives. There are tensions and disagreements, but these are recognised, expressed, and handled. Everyone knows the importance of doing their jobs, but they're still enjoying those jobs, under the relaxed, even playful command of Georgiou, a leader who doesn't need to constantly demand respect, because she knows she has it [2]. This is smart choice number two: playing up the sense of not just what the Starfleet philosophy is supposed to be, but the actual experience of working within it. I've always been a sucker for the "dedicated professionals doubling as found family" mode of storytelling, and the Shenzhou dynamic delivers that in teraquads. [3]
The zenith of this commitment to being Starfleet is Michael's trip through the asteroid field. Dangerous as hell, surely, even without the surrounding radiation cooking her inside her suit, but her primary emotion is enjoyment. We've talked more than once about the way space exploration is a mixture of the awesome and the horrifying, and the Shenzou, as you'd expect from a Starfleet vessel, is focussed very much on the former. This is demonstrated again by Burnham's trip through the structure she's found. It wouldn't have been difficult at all to frame what she's found as absolutely terrifying. The size, the sharpness, the subterfuge; if its owners hold hostile intent, this could all go very bad very fast, likely for Burnham first. And yet all she sees is the wonder. A chance to learn.
Right up until a fully-armed warrior shows up, implacable and faceless, and we step onto the slide that will carry us out of this episode and beyond.
It's time to take a look at the new Klingons.
"We Do Not Discuss It With Outsiders"
We'll start with what everyone wanted to talk about first: the new designs. The short version of this is that Discovery Klingons look absolutely brilliant, and also look precisely nothing like Klingons. I'm not sure how much point there is getting into that latter fact in general. Everyone has their own tolerance level for how much an aesthetic can change before it becomes too much, and a lot of the back and forth over the new make-up struck me as building sophistic arguments to try cloaking that subjectivity. Frankly, just about nobody was bringing glory to their house over any of this. Mostly I just felt sorry for the Klingon cosplayers, though I can't imagine they didn't ultimately get by just fine.
What's more interesting to discuss, I think, is how oddly the total visual retooling of the Klingons pairs with the attempts at total canonical faithfulness elsewhere. The Klingon symbols, the names of their weapons, the language spoken - there's a definite commitment to canonical accuracy here, it's just that it doesn't extend to the make-up, or the ship design [4]. The result is an odd juxtaposition, and a weird feeling for anyone who's been watching Trek as long as I have; the script and the visuals just won't agree on what's actually taking place on screen, in a way that's hard to set aside while watching. This is the opposite problem to the one I took Enterprise to task over with "The Andorian Incident". That episode attempted to rely on the iconography of classic Trek to have power, even with all context shorn from it "The Vulcan Hello" inverts this approach, likewise shearing decades of context from its iconography, but trying to transplant the former into a completely new series of designs.
Again, it's not particularly useful to noodle over whether this operation was successful (though for sure I prefer the Discovery approach to the Enterprise one). What's interesting is why it was attempted at all. Not in the sense of asking why you'd want to redesign the Klingons. Instead, the question is why, given access to amazing new designs, created using approaches somewhere between impractical and unimaginable three decades earlier, you wouldn't want to label your fantastic creations "Klingons" at all. What part of what you want to do is so dependent on the Klingons that no substitute can be accepted?
This is at least in part unmissable - a desire to make use of the standard Federation vs. Klingon dynamic the original show used. Just barely, of course, but they showed up as antagonists more than anyone else did, as well as appearing or being name-checked in every one of the TOS movies. Only the Vulcans are more familiar as Trek aliens, and they show up here too. There's a more interesting reason to be using the Klingons here, though, which is to use their identity as a fiercely proud and inflexible warrior culture as a lens through which to critique the apparent benign enlightenment of the Federation. T'Kuvma's argument is that the Federation is a society that expands through assimilation, taking over star systems not through force, but through cultural contamination. Sure, they say they come in peace, but all they mean by that is that they'll find it easier to take over your planet if no-one starts shooting at them. Once they have you in their debt, once they have you dependent on you, that's when you suddenly find the price to be paid is giving up everything that you are.
And he's not entirely wrong. As we've talked about before, the Federation talks a great game about respecting both individual and cultural differences, but in practice there's considerable societal pressure to buy in to the specific mode of thinking espoused by the human majority. You don't have to do things the way the humans do, but if you don't, they'll tell you how much they dislike your approach, and then expect replicated cookies for the not turning their vocal disapproval into action against you. Lady Azetbur points out in The Undiscovered Country that the Federation is just a bunch of humans patting themselves on the back about how everyone deserves the chance to be treated like they're human. With that film representing the end of decades of hostility and intermittent warfare with the Klingon Empire, using the same critique as part of the story of how the first Federation/Klingon War began is a savvy move. What the Federation calls hostility, the Empire calls honesty.
As interesting as this is to consider in itself, this approach has the added bonus of allowing Discovery to interrogate the Federation and Starfleet beyond what becomes of Michael. This is useful, since there's only so much any one person's perspective and experiences can reveal about the society they live in. Particularly when the person in question committed mutiny because she was convinced the only way to avoid a battle was to start a battle.
"...There Is Only War"
It's really only here that the question as to the success of "The Vulcan Hello" can truly be answered. Everything I've talked about so far - the state of the franchise, the questions raised by the stated new direction, the fact the T'Kuvma's crew look more like Babylon 5's Drazi than they do Klingons - takes a back seat to whether Michael's mutiny makes sense.
First of all, we need to pin down what "makes sense" means here, because there are two ways to think of it, only one them useful. What I'm pointedly not asking here is whether the Shenzhou firing first would have averted the Battle of the Binary Stars. The answer to this is unambiguously "no". T'Kuvma sees Federation expansionism as an existential threat, irrespective of how it's being done. He might see increased aggression from Starfleet as in some way less duplicitous, but it's hardly going to change his "them or us" mentality if Starfleet shows evidence it's come round to his way of thinking.
Plus, there's the fact this guy has been planning a religious crusade for Kahless knows how long, based on the idea that Starfleet is a clear and present threat. He's not going to admit that he was wrong about that if the Shenzhou responds to a clandestine Klingon incursion into their space - one which refuses to answer hails and that has attacked one of their crewmembers - by opening fire. In fact, what T'Kuvma has done, pretty cleverly, is set up a situation where however Georgiou responds, he can use it to further his ends. If they open fire, it's time for glorious battle. If they sit where they are, they're sticking to their "great lie" that the Klingons must go to war to extinguish. If they run - well, the Klingons have a new system now, and they can move on to the next. Predators don't usually respond to flight by giving up. The captain is absolutely right when she says "If their intention is to attack, balling up our fists won't dissuade them". And we know she's right, because Burnham killed a Klingon warrior three hours earlier, and T'Kuvma used that death to further sell the idea that the Federation was a danger that must be extinguished.
So no. Michael's plan, if deployed, would have done nothing but set off the war a few minutes sooner (something missed in the early criticisms of the show as endorsing violence as a first resort against non-white coded people who can't be expected to understand any other approach). When I ask whether Michael's actions make sense, I mean it in the context of whether we believe she believes her plan could work. This isn't a story seeking to offer overarching commentary on international relations. It's a character piece about how people can be pushed into doing the worst things for the best reasons.
Rebel Dwell
We'll finish off the essay by dissecting Michael's state of mind, then. I've tried to do this based only on what we knew by the end of this episode, but given I've seen every episode of Discovery, I can't guarantee there's been no bleed-through from future stories.
Anyway. The immediate problem we've got here is that the concept of the "Vulcan hello" is impossible to reconcile with Burnham's view of the Klingons. If their ideal end state for any encounter is a battle, why would someone else literally starting a battle be something that dissuaded them?
I can just about imagine a scenario in which the Vulcan's original approach might worked. My own head-canon is that the Vulcans encountered Klingon outlaws, raiders preying on the (apparently) weak in the borderlands of the Empire, and by showing a willingness to fight, they both drove away their attackers [5], and won the respect of the Klingon government, leading to improved relations. Whether that's a plausible scenario or not, though, Burnham's own argument is that something similar cannot work here. And that's before we factoring in the inconvenient truth that the Vulcans were responding to immediate attack in previous encounters, something which clearly isn't the case here, at least not to the same extent. Sarek even points out the danger in extrapolating centuries' old policy to this new situation, following decades without contact with the Klingons, only to be totally ignored.
All of which means Michael's logic is clearly and badly flawed. That's far from the end of the story, though, and this gets us to what we already know, not even one full episode in, about who Michael is. The twin tragedies of Michael Burnham are that she suffered an absolutely horrific trauma as a small child, and then ended up in a society where any reaction to that trauma was considered distasteful. I've discussed on several occasions (most obviously here and here) how difficult it must be for Vulcan's with mental health issues to get appropriate support within their culture, based on my theory that Spock suffers from chronic depression. Whether I'm right or not about Spock, Michael is unquestionably in a broadly similar situation. Indeed, it's potentially a worse one, both because she's fully human [6], and because she was inducted into the Vulcan system only after years of living with her human parents.
Burnham's response to this is slightly different to Spock's. Rather than leaning fully into the idea that she can be just as unemotional as those she grew up with, Burnham recognises her emotions exist, and that (according to her) she can use them to inform her logic. Which seems perfectly sensible - indeed, what more could or should any of us do than use our emotions to inform decisions, while not letting those emotions override our ability to think logically? Trouble is, that clearly isn't what's happening. Perhaps Burnham truly has found a balance, but if so, it goes out the airlock the instant her suit scans a bat'leth.
Because you can't logic yourself out of trauma. Whatever else Sarek may have done for Michael, whatever else she might owe to him, we see for ourselves how his response to his young charge being triggered is to criticise her for allowing the triggering to take place. "Only logic can root us in the present", he insists, as though he'd been working with her to strengthen her coping mechanisms, as opposed to having thrown her into a Mastermind episode with the specialist subject "How my parents were brutally slaughtered".
As bad as that is, it's only part of a broader issue: dozens of Federation citizens dead at Klingon hands, and as far as Michael's aware, nothing gets done, save apparently to tell the survivors they really shouldn't be causing a scene by reminding people of the pain they suffer from surviving a massacre.
And now, Michael's in the same situation again. A Klingon warrior literally just tried to kill her, and Georgiou's response is to sit and wait to see what happens next. Nothing gets done. Georgiou insists - quite correctly - that Starfleet doesn't fire first, but as far as Burnham is concerned, the Klingons have opened fire already, first at Doctari Alpha, and now again on the surface of their ship. Her trauma - both chronic and acute - makes the link immediate in a way no-one else can see or understand.
I mentioned above how much I love "found family" stories, and how this so clearly is one. What that means at this point though is that Burnham is convinced her family is under threat from the Klingons, again, and nothing is going to be done to save them, again. She tries to express this through the Vulcan approach she's been taught, but that only pushes her farther away from those around her. One of the saddest moments in the episode comes when she begs Georgiou to trust her instincts, and because of her training on Vulcan, she's forced to frame it in logical terms instead. Essentially, she's insisting Phillipa should find her logic as compelling on any other day, while refusing to acknowledge what everyone else knows; this isn't any other day, it's the day her parents were killed, come round again. Michael simply isn't experiencing the same reality everyone around her is, but recognising that would mean recognising a whole host of other things, any of which could break her. All she can do, having cherry-picked from her conversation with Sarek the only route to saving the Shenzou's crew she thinks exists [7], she grabs hold and won't let go.
We can recognise what we're seeing; it's survivor's guilt mixed with the trauma of her childhood. It's also plain old fashioned prejudice, of course. For all that Admiral Anderson expresses a staggering lack of tact when dressing Michael down, he's completely correct that she's speaking of the Klingons as though they were all the same. Her response that it's unwise to conflate race and culture is, on its own terms, quite correct, but it's clear that the conflation is coming from her end, not his. "It's in their nature" isn't a comment on culture (which may well have changed over the last 50 plus years of silence anyway), and conflating the two is just a sly way to veil your prejudice, as anyone with any real experience with racism/antisemitism/Islamophobia can tell you. But once again, Burnham was raised by Vulcans; how could she not have picked up the idea that no difference exists between cultural approaches and biological imperatives? What was the final message we saw Sarek impart to Michael after she lost focus in her lessons? "Your human tongue is not the problem, it is your human heart".
Everything in Burnham's life since she was a kid contributes to make this a scenario she couldn't cope with on her best day, and now she's facing it whilst flooded with radiation [8]. I'm not sure there's much more the episode could do to sell us on why Michael does what she does. Yes, she's torpedoing her career, and her dearest friendship, and we already know enough about T'Kuvma's plan to know she was doing it for nothing either way. But it's a weird way to read a tragedy by pointing out the ways it could have been avoided, if our protagonist had simply been someone else than who they are. "Had I been the hero, I would simply not possessed the fatal flaw that brought about my downfall" [9].
There's going to be a lot more to say about all this as we traverse Michael's arc over the season, starting with how she herself explicitly recognises next episode that her mutiny was a mistake. That's for the next post on Discovery, though. For now, it's enough that we're back on the journey once more.
The Klingons are back. So is Trek. So is IDFC.
Let's fly.
Ordering:
1. EmissaryÂ
3. The Vulcan Hello
4. Broken Bow
6. CaretakerÂ
7. The Man TrapÂ
[1] Note also how the show passes the Bechdel test with literally the first conversation had, and that we don't hear a single white person speak until after the credits roll - impressive at any time, but for a series pilot, we should take it as a statement of intent.
[2] I'd gotten so used to the other role Yeoh plays in this show that I'd forgotten how fun she is as a Starfleet captain with the self-confidence to have fun with her officers. She's much more Kirk than she is Picard.
[3] This won't be the last time in Discovery's history that a season will start out much more interesting and enjoyable than it becomes after introducing that year's inciting incident.
[4] The new Klingon fleet bothers me far more than the new Klingons themselves. The latter have had their iconic design swapped for a technically-astonishing but incongruous alternative. The former have had a series of iconic designs swapped for a totally forgettable hodge-podge of much better ship designs.
The hull coffins, though? BAD-ASS.
[5] The second season Enterprise episode "Marauders" features a very similar situation, in which Klingon raiders are driven from a mining operation they regularly attack because the locals (aided by Archer and crew) finally decide to start fighting back.
[6] Insisting she be trained in the Vulcan methods while refusing to allow her to learn Vulcan, in particular, is an act of cruelty masquerading as kindness.
[7] And again, no such route exists. They're in a "real-life" Kobyashi Maru situation, only with Burnham being the Starfleet officer refusing to believe in a no-win scenario.
[8] If you like, you can just blame the radiation entirely for Michael's behaviour, and bypass everything else. I think that's a kind of a dull way to go, but the episode explicitly allows for that to be a viable conclusion, should you want to take that route.
[9] We should also note, at least in passing, at how basically every single female protagonist introduced into an established US sci-fi franchise is shitted upon for either being too perfect, or for doing literally anything which the viewing audience might see as unwise. "We want flaws! NO NOT THOSE ONES!".
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