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Something strange is going on in Star Trek: Discovery. Season one, bustling with Klingons, giant space tardigrades, intergalactic mushroom highways, torture, swearing, subterfuge and explosions was, to sum it up in one word, dark. Then along came season two, which is all a bit Next Generation.

It’s a jarring change. This is Star Trek as it always was: a morality play with aliens in it. Three episodes in and the second season of Discovery has already pondered on the Prime Directive and the purpose of faith, and dropped awkwardly self-aware references to Shakespeare and Arthur C. Clarke. All it’s missing is Worf protesting that he is not a merry man.


But this isn’t some ham-fisted return to the Star Trek of old. It’s a confident reimagining of the franchise: funny, clever, optimistic and – as a result – more tightly written and focused. Season one of Discovery had the budget to deliver beautiful special effects, but it forgot that all you really need to make a great sci-fi TV show is some mysterious, off-camera threat and a series of tense, philosophical debates about the nature of existence in Conference Room A.

Enter Jonathan Frakes. Fondly remembered for his nine-year battle with the art of sitting as Commander William T. Riker, Frakes was director on two episodes of Discovery’s second season, having also directed one episode of the first. That episode, “Despite Yourself”, came at the season’s midway point and added some much-needed nuance to the evil-fest: you can have your glassy-eyed utopia, but you’re going to have to fight for it.

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Though it did dark well, the unrelenting evil of Discovery was an awkward fit. The fast-paced, whizzbang fire-and-brimstone that marked the franchise’s return always felt too difficult to sustain. As the season progressed, one apocalyptic scenario being folded into another taking place in a comically evil mirror universe gave off more than a whiff of Interstellar: The Costume Drama – but with added blood and torture. More obsessed with explosions than ethics, it was fun, but it wasn’t really Star Trek.

The first episode of season two, “Brother”, is the exact opposite. The threat, if you can call it that at this stage, is a flashing red light in the distant universe. But first, there is a perilous mission to an asteroid made of non-baryonic matter to investigate a distress call. It’s classic Trek with a Discovery twist. Big budget action mixed with some expertly scripted comic relief provided by chief engineer Jett Reno. In season one, Reno would likely have been a murderous psychopath hellbent on destroying the Discovery. In season two, she’s cracking jokes.


“New Eden”, the second episode in season two of Discovery, takes things further still. Directed by Frakes, it is both a return to and an expansion on what Star Trek does best – a magic formula of clever conceits, philosophical pondering, comical timing and an away team snooping around an intergalactic reimagining of ye olde worlde America. As Frakes put it in a recent interview with Deadline, the series is now “embracing the [Gene] Roddenberry canon in a more valid way”. So far, so good. But this is where things get tricky.

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While it got tangled up in its evil web of cleverness towards the end, the first season of Discovery provided some much-needed context for the franchise as a whole. Set about a decade before The Original Series, it showed, often too forcefully, that the smug righteousness of Starfleet shouldn’t be taken for granted. The reality of 2018 – and the unfolding reality of 2019 – poses some major challenges to Roddenberry’s progressive, anti-war optimism.

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Which makes episode three, “Point of Light”, a necessary muddle of seasons one and two. The Klingons are back, but this time they’ve got feelings other than bloodlust – love! babies! – and have started speaking English. The darkness creeps back in, but now it’s more political and scientific intrigue than bloody violence for the sake of it. More time is spent on character development and less time on raunchy torture scenes. It’s Next Generation with a twist. And it’s excellent.


But Discovery still has a lot of explaining to do. At the end of season one, the sudden appearance of the USS Enterprise provided the ultimate cliffhanger. In season two, it provides the ultimate elephant in the room. We’re only a few years away from the timeline of The Original Series and the show’s writers have a lot of explaining to do. So far, the second season’s switch in tone raises more questions than answers. How it ties everything together will be a real water cooler moment – and hopefully for all the right reasons.

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