761. [DIS] The Vulcan Hello

SCORE: (3/5 stars)

It’s a little hard to separate my impression of The Vulcan Hello and Battle at the Binary Stars since they flow together into a complete narrative. I suspect outside of CBS’s interference insisting this be a streamed show and wanting something to entice broadcast viewers to sign up for All Access right away that we would have just treated this as a 2-hour single episode premiere like prior Trek series. I’ll try to do my part and just focus this on the first episode despite having watched both back to back. The title theme has some cool elemental visuals in keeping with Bryan Fuller’s style (think Hannibal or American Gods), but the music doesn’t feel like it will ever become iconic. I can’t recall a tune to hum along with like I would with the other series. Instead, it seems more to hint and echo at motifs of better themes. Title music doesn’t have to be Jerry Goldsmith’s hum-a-melody style, but it’s nice when it is. At least it’s not Rod Stewart.

The Klingons have been visually redesigned and it’s probably going to take me some time to get used to it. Klingons do tend to have a history of getting reworked every couple decades, so it’s not without precedent. The difference is that the makeup job done here does not appear, to my layman’s eye, to be something unachievable in the nineties, when I consider alien design for the later seasons of TNG or all of DS9. So while the first Klingon facelift was both budgetary and an advance in makeup, this seems arbitrary, making Klingons different just to make them different. I’m also hoping we’re going to see more clothing that resembles their leather-bound look from series of yore, because right now it looks like they’re all wearing ribcages. I could see it being this particular ship’s garb, but once we delve further into the other Klingon houses we’ll see what they look like.

I’m not getting a strong sense of Starfleet unity from this crew. I gather this crew is not the final crew based on promotional materials and the ship being named the Shenzhou, not the Discovery, but even so, I don’t get the feel of an intrepid crew of brave explorers. Instead we see a timid and cautious crew (embodied in Science Officer Saru) only kept together by the measured hand of Captain Philippa Georgiou and the hybrid passion/dispassion of First Officer Michael Burnham. We’re a hundred years out from Enterprise and ten years until Kirk’s five-year mission, but it feels to me more like we’re hot on Archer’s heels and a long way to go before we get to a Starfleet prepared for alien menageries and salt vampires.

Spoilers after the cut.

Keep reading