Star Trek: Discovery - That Hope is You Review

 

DIS "That Hope is You"

To start this Star Trek review, I'll invoke Star Wars. In Star Wars discourse, there's a common idea of taking storytelling to some far-flung corner of the galaxy or a centuries-removed time, so as not to bump existing canon and to provide a verdant new ground to plant narrative seeds. (Star Wars is starting to do a version of that with their upcoming High Republic stuff.) Star Trek: Discovery has taken the extraordinary step of taking one of these leaps in the middle of a show. Thank time travel for that one. So Michael Burnham lands 900+ years in her future, in the 32nd Century.

"That Hope is You" orientates Michael to the new status quo of the galaxy. She learns from rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold Cleveland Book a potted version of galaxy-changing events that have effectively disintegrated the Federation. Most notable is the Burn, where inexplicable dilithium instability crippled space travel across the galaxy. Michael's reaction to her new circumstances runs a bit of a gamut. As seen in the image above, Michael strikes a pose reminiscent of Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, when the wayward Imperator learns that the idyllic Green Place is no more. Michael processes her situation partially with the help of a truth serum drug trip. This feels like a clear example of the writers' room hitting on the idea of adding the counterpoint of humor to undercut Michael's potential despair or solemnity.

The viewer is wrestled into submission by beautiful location filming, helping make the episode's strange new world tangible. The episode trades in a melange of tones and phases. It goes from a pitched space battle, to a fraught adventure where Michael shows up and comes into conflict with Book, to a crime saga where our heroes are chased by Andorian and Orion heavies, to a nature documentary where Book reveals himself to be a futuristic Newt Scamander, and finally to the best stop of all. This variety is an asset, showing the different moves in the show's new toolkit.

That final sequence is the soul of the episode. Michael's poignant interaction with Aditya Sahil, a lonely sentinel keeping Starfleet alive at least on a notional level, will put a lump in the throat of any Trek fan. This is why you tear down the Federation, to build it up again. This romantic idea of after the apocalypse, a candle of hope surviving through belief and good work, goes back to great pieces of genre literature like A Canticle for Leibowitz. As a show, Voyager would always say that if the crew didn't hang onto Starfleet principles, they'd become as lost metaphorically as they were physically in the remote Delta Quadrant. The writers of Discovery have a chance to make that The Whole Point. 7/10.

Stray observations:

- Book tells Michael of the devastating Temporal Wars, the fallout of which includes the destruction of time travel technology. Firstly, Time War from Doctor Who, anybody? Secondly, that element of future backstory acknowledges the near-nonsensical Temporal Cold War arc from Enterprise.

- One of the Requiem guards is a Lurian, the same species as Quark's infamously chatty and omnipresent barfly Morn on Deep Space Nine!