The second episode does bring the action with an extremely impressive space battle, though fortunately not entirely at the expense of character. I was particularly intrigued by the flashbacks to Burnham's Vulcan upbringing and her initial arrival on board the Shenzhou (finally answered my question about the weird "lateral" transporters, too!). I loved the sneaky tactic of beaming a warhead onto a dead body, and the resulting explosion was great.
I wasn't quite expecting the deaths of what seemed to be main characters (although honestly, I wasn't completely expecting Michelle Yeoh to hang around all that long), so seeing T'Kumva meet his end this early was surprising. It didn't really feel like Burnham did much to try and capture him, as was the initial plan - couldn't she have stunned him and then beamed back with him as her prisoner?
Her interactions with the computer in the brig felt like something we've never seen before on Trek, as typically when a character tries to engage the computer in some kind of speculation or discussion it ends up getting confused. But I liked it. I'm a little bit sad, though, that the computer voice isn't provided by Majel Barret, as there were so many rumours going around that she recorded a vocal library before passing away which could be used to synthesise her voice.
The Klingons feel like the weak point to me. The redesign bugs me a little bit, but not enough to ruin things. More problematic is if they insist on speaking Klingon all the time then it really slows scenes down due to how stilted the actor's dialogue becomes. However, I quite like that they've given them much more of a culture and meaning, as opposed to the drunken "honourable" warrior caricatures that '90s Trek reduced them to.
I'm impressed that the show has done enough this early to make Captain Georgiou's death have an impact. I must admit, thought, that I'm quite surprised that we still haven't seen the USS Discovery.
Review by LeftHandedGuitaristBlockedParentSpoilers2017-09-25T11:26:04Z— updated 2017-09-27T09:28:04Z
The second episode does bring the action with an extremely impressive space battle, though fortunately not entirely at the expense of character. I was particularly intrigued by the flashbacks to Burnham's Vulcan upbringing and her initial arrival on board the Shenzhou (finally answered my question about the weird "lateral" transporters, too!). I loved the sneaky tactic of beaming a warhead onto a dead body, and the resulting explosion was great.
I wasn't quite expecting the deaths of what seemed to be main characters (although honestly, I wasn't completely expecting Michelle Yeoh to hang around all that long), so seeing T'Kumva meet his end this early was surprising. It didn't really feel like Burnham did much to try and capture him, as was the initial plan - couldn't she have stunned him and then beamed back with him as her prisoner?
Her interactions with the computer in the brig felt like something we've never seen before on Trek, as typically when a character tries to engage the computer in some kind of speculation or discussion it ends up getting confused. But I liked it. I'm a little bit sad, though, that the computer voice isn't provided by Majel Barret, as there were so many rumours going around that she recorded a vocal library before passing away which could be used to synthesise her voice.
The Klingons feel like the weak point to me. The redesign bugs me a little bit, but not enough to ruin things. More problematic is if they insist on speaking Klingon all the time then it really slows scenes down due to how stilted the actor's dialogue becomes. However, I quite like that they've given them much more of a culture and meaning, as opposed to the drunken "honourable" warrior caricatures that '90s Trek reduced them to.
I'm impressed that the show has done enough this early to make Captain Georgiou's death have an impact. I must admit, thought, that I'm quite surprised that we still haven't seen the USS Discovery.