Review: Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery Remains Stuck in the Future’s Past

The show’s third season plays it ideologically and conceptually safe.

Star Trek: Discovery
Photo: CBS All Access

Values like hope are often deployed to describe Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the Star Trek universe. Season three of Star Trek: Discovery, the franchise’s current flagship series, adopts this view of Roddenberry’s creation as its driving theme: Titled “That Hope Is You,” the season premiere finds the show’s protagonist, Commander Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), stranded alone in a galaxy-wide dystopia nearly a millennium into her future, seemingly the sole embodiment of the transcendent values of the United Federation of Planets and the interstellar government’s military wing, Starfleet.

Burnham tumbles out of her temporal wormhole to discover that 931 years in the future the Federation has collapsed, seemingly leaving in its wake a society that exclusively breeds Star Wars-esque rogue smugglers like her new acquaintance, Book (David Ajala). Star Trek has tried and failed at constructing a one-episode arc around a rugged male individualist before, and Book isn’t the worst instance of this archetype (see—or don’t see—the notorious Next Generation episode “The Outrageous Okona”), but Book is too obvious a pulpy fabrication for the kind of emotional weight his reluctant friendship with Burnham is meant to carry.

Moreover, Discovery clearly intends Book to serve as a foil to the long-collapsed Federation and its values, but he doesn’t seem much more morally ambiguous than many of the dodgy Starfleet characters we got to know in season two, nor does that contrast reveal much about the Federation. As its final representative, Burnham, teary-eyed as she so often is, speechifies at Book about the Federation being “about a vision and all those who believe in that vision,” but the series doesn’t get terribly specific about what those “who believe” actually see.

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As symbol of a generalized hope, the Federation becomes an empty signifier in a season opener that’s capped with what’s essentially a moment of sentimental nationalism, as our hero casts a solemn gaze at the Federation banner. There’s little doubt—particularly given the authoritarian future Earth we encounter in a later episode—that Discovery’s writers would like us to understand this devastated future in terms of our own current socio-global disintegration. But the implied solution set out by the first episode and picked up as the season arc, a restoration of the political order that preceded and probably precipitated the collapse, plays it ideologically and conceptually safe.

All of which is to say: Instead of unrolling the Federation flag and misremembering it as faultless, perhaps we should be folding and stowing it away, looking toward the future rather than the past. To this Trekkie, this—and not hope per se—has been the true guiding spirit and strength of foundational Star Trek shows: their resolute future-orientation. It’s not just that they were set in the 22nd or 23rd century, but that the characters themselves were boldly heading into their own unwritten future. It was a world where change, most often conceived as progress in Federation society, was possible and desirable. There’s a reason Roddenberry’s follow-up to the iconic The Original Series wasn’t Star Trek: The Previous Generation.

For nearly two decades, Star Trek has been stuck in its own past (all shows and films but the dreadful Picard and the animated pastiche Lower Decks have been set before The Original Series). The franchise has wallowed in nostalgia for the deified nobility of earlier series, pandering to fans in a way mirrored by Burnham’s patriotic reverence of the Federation. The stories have suffered as a result, with the prequels transforming Star Trek from a kind of sci-fi anthology about the ethics of encountering difference into an action franchise whose main purpose is producing content to fill in supposed gaps in the established universe.

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But it might be argued that season three of Discovery, by hurdling its characters from Star Trek’s past (the first two seasons are set a decade before the 2266-69 timeframe of The Original Series) into its future, at least promises it might overcome the limitations of its prequel status by jettisoning the baggage associated with the original show like a damaged warp core. And it’s true that, despite the premiere’s uninspired ode to the Federation as a deposit of nondescript “values,” the following episodes begin to show the potential of a series that’s once again fascinated more with the unknown than with the previously established.

Spinning relatively self-contained stories out of concepts like parasitic ice and the suppressed memories of a giant slug living inside a precocious teenage engineer, the remaining three episodes made available to press are more satisfying as sci-fi stories than the mindless actioner that opens the season. This shift to a more ensemble-driven, idea-focused format is welcome. Despite a premiere that augurs poorly for its broader narrative arc, Discovery’s third season at least momentarily succeeds in thinking about undiscovered things to come.

Score: 
 Cast: Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman, Michelle Yeoh, Wilson Cruz, Emily Coutts, David Ajala, Tig Notaro  Network: CBS All Access  Buy: Amazon

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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