The latest addition to the Star Trek canon has found a bona fide star in Sonequa Martin-Green, but the world around her lacks the deep space to succeed

Star Trek posits a future of feminism, political rapprochement between generations-old enemies and the pursuit of racial equality. But it’s also only as progressive as its writers think their audience is. Maybe that’s why the latest version, Star Trek: Discovery, is more depressing than it probably intends to be.

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It’s not bad at all. In fact, the new show probably has a genuine star on its hands in Sonequa Martin-Green, the first woman of color to act in the role of series protagonist. She is preceded in the position by both a woman – Kate Mulgrew, who led the good ship Voyager – and another person of color – Avery Brooks, hero of Deep Space Nine – by more than two decades, so she is asked to prove herself a bit less than she might be otherwise, and she is often the anchor that keeps Discovery from drifting off into the shallows of artificially high stakes, over-explained backstory, and tertiary plot threads that pervade so much contemporary sci-fi.

Discovery’s first two episodes amount to an old-fashioned two-hour pilot – a long-form bait-and-switch that establishes our crew, captain and quest and then tosses them all in a blender.

Those episodes are often gripping, but they don’t accomplish as much narratively as one might hope. For one thing, they don’t quite put Martin-Green’s character, Michael Burnham, on the Discovery itself, much less in the captain’s chair. Two actors named in the opening credits, Anthony Rapp and Jason Isaacs, don’t even have a moment of screen time, for another. This is a serialized show that aims to reward time invested, not to do something as paltry as entertain its viewers an hour at a time.

Michael is a wonderful character, an homage to Leonard Nimoy’s Mr Spock, who is her adoptive brother, according to the network. She is a human raised by emotionless Vulcans, and the way Martin-Green plays her longing for her father, distant both physically and spiritually, gives her a rare texture.



When the series begins, Michael is second-in-command to Michelle Yeoh’s Philippa Georgiou, an experienced and levelheaded captain who commands respect and admiration in much the same way as Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard. And as the show’s Picard was to commander Riker, so is Captain Georgiou to Michael: a mentor, a friend, a surrogate parent. There is a crew of recognizable actors, notably a blessedly comic turn from Doug Jones as the fretful science officer, and then everything goes horribly, but excitingly, wrong.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Star quality: Sonequa Martin-Green. Photograph: CBS

Discovery, laden with eye-popping special effects but rather short on high concepts, owes less to other shows in the TV franchise than to the recently revitalized series of movies. JJ Abrams’ first two films, especially Star Trek: Into Darkness, are generic blockbusters, larded with both nostalgized callouts to ageing intellectual property and some artificial gravitas in the form of the visual language of war and terrorism we know from TV news. At the climax of Into Darkness, an extravagant riff on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a rogue spaceship captain flies his vessel into a city, with all the attendant collapsing architecture and plummeting masonry we now, for some reason, permit in our entertainment.

Discovery pulls similar tricks, albeit less ponderously and without the thick-as-an-oil-slick sheen of nostalgia. Michael doesn’t really journey much of anywhere on purpose – she is on less of a star trek than a star war. She accidentally kills someone almost immediately, and then wins the subsequent confrontation with a Klingon military unit by booby-trapping a dead body. She ends up in the brig at the end of the first episode, and convicted of serious crimes at the end of the second –reversals of fortune the show takes far more seriously than the occasional war crime.

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Michael is compelling largely because her character is younger and less likely to correctly solve the problems she faces than her predecessors; the steely confidence Martin-Green brings to the role makes it all the more shocking when she doesn’t succeed. The enemy race here are the Klingons, an alien species newly reimagined and re-revised as darker-skinned on average. The new-old Klingons wear gold skirts and carry elaborate swords – Worf’s bat’leth looks practical and conservative by comparison to its 24th-century ancestor – and their noses are flared.

I would never accuse a contemporary television show of not being self-aware enough to elide the various unflattering cultural comparisons that a wildly otherized violent alien race is more or less guaranteed to call up. Indeed, the writers have already been hard at work characterizing the Klingon rhetoric (“remain Klingon!” is an especially on-the-nose battle cry) as a dissenting response to racist rhetoric from Donald Trump. But it says something more complexly Trumpian about our cultural moment that we seem to need shocking savages for enemies, however much we may deign to humanize them at our eventual convenience.

For all their faults, the previous series had a tendency toward gentleness; the best episodes of the old shows tended to hinge on the crew’s desperate search for nonviolent or at least non-lethal solutions to some seemingly intractable problem. Discovery, I guess in the name of a more grave and serious show about alien monsters and time travel, ostentatiously walks a darker path, and on that path are a lot of our worst tendencies. It will be interesting to see whether those tendencies merit a more serious exploration.