Anyway... I put all that talk first mainly as a buffer, because I'll no longer be dancing the spoiler-free dance in these Discovery reviews. If you're not on board yet, come back tomorrow for talk about The Orville.
This week's Discovery felt like a direct response to the criticism the writers no doubt anticipated before a single episode ever aired: "It doesn't feel like Star Trek." The core values of Star Trek informed the central character conflict this time, as Captain Lorca and Commander Landry pushed and pushed to weaponize the creature captured from the Glenn, while Burnham pushed back to do the Trek thing, the "Devil in the Dark"/Horta thing, and strive to understand and respect the "monster."
The Star Trek thing was vindicated as the right thing on many levels. Landry was killed (going through a glass table, pure Star Trek-style) for pressing the opposite. Doing the right thing still got got Lorca something of value. But this is dark Star Trek, so Burnham still has to reckon with the reality that the creature, understood or not, is now a prisoner, an enslaved "computer" for the Discovery's experimental propulsion. The metaphor is surely not lost on her -- she herself can also be seen as a prisoner forced to work for Lorca, though she is choosing this out of her own sense of guilt, where the creature has no choice.
The episode was filled with other great character moments to underscore the way they'd been established in previous episodes: whip-cracking Lorca, awkward motormouth Tilley, thoughtful and wary Saru, and put-upon (understandably so) Stamets. Look four episodes into any other Star Trek series, and I think you won't find characters as sharply drawn as what we have here.
But this was only half the episode. The Klingon storyline was resumed, following Voq's efforts to lead T'kumva's disciples back to glory. Well, back to just functioning, actually; it was revealed that they've been scavenging around the battlefield/graveyard for months, barely subsisting. It's a uniquely Klingon attitude to be all about the battle, yet reject the spoils of a battle as a pollution of racial purity. It's also uniquely Klingon that enduring hardship doesn't really fall under the banner of "honor"; given the chance, most of Voq's followers abandoned him.
It's an intriguing story line, and more intriguing still to see a Star Trek show pursue a serialized story line that's completely isolated from every main character of the show. But I'm going to join the chorus: the subtitles stink. I don't object in principle to the idea of reading extensive dialogue in a foreign language -- it's been used to great effect in Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and other prestigious shows. But there are two major flaws in how it's being approached here:
First, the Klingon language itself doesn't sound right in these actors' mouths. It's so stilted and guttural that the actors seem hard-pressed to emote through it. This episode showed some progress in this from the premiere, but it's still hard to read the impulses driving any given scene. The second problem is the actual font itself in which the dialogue is subtitled -- it's just the worst. It's presented in small caps, which compresses the vertical appearance and makes any character talking about himself (saying "I") stick out awkwardly in a sentence. It has bulky serifs that spindle out and render the individual characters less distinct. And the kerning leaves huge spaces between the letters such that very little text can be placed on the screen at one time; this makes it even harder to follow the throughline of a scene, because a character's dialogue often must be broken up and can't fit on the screen all at once. There's really something to the widespread subtitle complaining, above and beyond a superficial "I hate reading" criticism -- these specific subtitles are almost bred in a lab to be off-putting and hard to read.
Overall, though, the episode was a good one, and the most "Star Trek" episode the series has had yet. I give it a B+.
No comments:
Post a Comment