The Brightest Star

The third installment of Short Treks was a substantial improvement over the previous two, focusing on Saru and his back story.

Saru is an outsider in Kelpian society, not content to wait for a sacrificial death like the rest of his people. His sister tries to understand him, but his father -- the village elder who conducts the sacrificial ceremonies -- doesn't sympathize at all. When Saru gets his hand on advanced alien technology, it becomes a lifeline to communicate with another world (in every sense).

There is, of course, plenty that's familiar about this simple little story. The daydreaming villager who just doesn't fit into their backwater town is a well-worn trope of fiction. This setup in particular is not so far from the Next Generation episode "Pen Pals," though its told from the alien side of the illicit communication and not the Starfleet side. Yet I think it may be to the advantage of these Short Treks to tell a familiar story: there's just not enough time to do justice to a more original one.

After a season of Saru describing his homeworld in bits and pieces, we get a full treatment of it here. Yet again, no expense is spared in making these mini-episodes, as we get filming on location and a dozen people all made up like Kelpians. (Their relative lack of expression compared to Doug Jones shows you what a freaking genius that man is at emoting through complicated makeup.)

There is new information here, though. I feel like we were never explicitly told before that Kelpians were a pre-warp society. (We were certainly never told that they willingly offer themselves in sacrifice to some unknown alien race.) Saru is hardly the first "only one of his kind in Starfleet" character we've had on Star Trek, but there is something about this particular context that really tells us a lot about him. He had to be more clever and inquisitive that every other member of his species to make it to the stars, and he had to permanently say goodbye to his family and everything he knew to do it. The specificity of this speaks volumes about his character that was only whispered in the hints we knew before. And it shows us how unique his perspective on life must be, while making me hope we see more of it in future episodes.

We also got a fun little twist at the end of the episode, as Saru was picked up in a shuttle by none other than Georgiou. I feel like this moment actually gives us a lot of background about her too, even if it's more by inference and less explicit that what we learn about Saru this episode. She's a lieutenant here, but her shuttle's markings are still from the Shenzhou. She'd "grow up" to be captain of the same ship she'd served on for years. It seems probable she requested command of that ship in particular, even though it was an old junker by then... possibly so that it would give her authority to be more selective about her crew (specifically, Saru and Burnham). It suggests that Georgiou is someone with fierce loyalty, and who forms lifelong attachments. It also paints Burnham's betrayal of her at the start of the series in much stronger terms.

By putting Discovery's characters into this familiar old story type, "The Brightest Star" was the first truly successful Short Treks episode for me. I give it a B+.