Star Trek: Discovery Review - 6 Ups And 5 Downs From Season 1

The first Star Trek series in over a decade didn't waste any time in getting going. By the end of its debut season, the high octane serialised story arc has boldly taken the latest crew from the ravages of a bloody war to sci-fi’s version of the middle of nowhere.

The show has certainly proved divisive among sections of hardcore fans, from its unwillingness to adhere to the visual continuity of the era in which it’s set to the mature content unexplored by previous incarnations of Trek. Yet, in comparing the first fifteen episodes of Discovery to the same time frame of other shows in the franchise, the adventures of the latest show in canon come off remarkably well.

While most of the earlier shows were notoriously slow in finding their identities, Discovery’s dimension-hopping storyline has demonstrated a fierce ambition unprecedented so early on in a Trek series. It’s highly arguable that no Star Trek show has been this good, this fast since the original tales of Kirk and Spock aired some 50 years ago.

Consequently, Trek fans have been presented with the promise of a series on pace to become a particularly strong entry in the legacy of the franchise. While the first season wasn't perfect - few shows are - its numerous strengths outweigh the relatively minor flaws. which we'll look at first...

While Klingons have long been established as, like all Star Trek races, having their own language, it’s a little much having to sit through entire scenes of artificial alien dialogue.

The guttural grunts and choking enunciations throughout long soliloquies and politically charged diatribes are unpleasant to the ears and, by nature of being a fictional language, difficult for actors to believably express with the emotions they’re going for.

Burnham’s infiltration of the Klingon Ship of the Dead led to a moment where the franchise’s trademark Universal Translator came into effect for the first time, briefly making the Klingons appear to speak English, but it’s hard not to wish that they'd simply kept this effect in place throughout the rest of the show.

There are countless examples throughout the franchise’s history of alien dialogue mostly sounding English; Trek fans are easily able to reconcile the idea that the language is being presented in English purely for our benefit.

That’s an approach that might’ve improved the Klingon scenes seen so far in Discovery. The subtitles aren’t the problem - it’s when the accompanying scenes are comprised of marble-mouthed lizards waxing lyrical about nationalism that an alternative is preferable in the interests of pacing and performance.