The port bow was decloaking.
It's been 10 months since Michael Burnham was indecisive about whether to stay in Starfleet or go on "Star Trek: Discovery."
The deaths of millions of members of spacefaring species in the galaxy were caused by a young Kelpien with self-confidence issues stranded on a planet made of dilithium.
The last season of "Star Trek" had one of the strongest starts of any new season, but it took a nosedive into absurdity in the second half. One of the best episodes we've ever seen was the first one, "Hope Is You, Part 1," and it continued for a short time, which was wonderful to see.
We were cautiously optimistic for the fourth season premiere of Paramount Plus. We have to report that it's an odd, contrived and somewhat clichéd offering that leaves us feeling disappointed to say the least, but also not much invested in any of the characters.
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The detached nacelles will never make sense to me. Ever. The credit is given to Paramount Plus.
"Star Trek: Discovery" season 4 is going up against a lot. The third and final season of "Lost in Space" will be available on the internet in two weeks. The sixth and final season of "The Expanse" will be available on AmazonPrime Video. "The Book of Boba Fett" is on Disney Plus.
"Discovery" is going to have to work hard to keep up with the other shows that are similar to it, because they represent consistent high-quality, well-written science fiction. It's not going to happen, judging from what we've seen. "Discovery" is one loss away from being demoted.
"The Expanse" is certainly a cerebral sci-fi and it's not a crime to wish for it. It's addictive and I need to watch the next episode as soon as possible because I want to know how the characters survive. This is not the case with the fourth season opening episode of "Discovery." It feels like it has been dumbed down and produced for an easy-to-satisfy audience. "Discovery" underestimates its audience as badly as "Star Trek: Prodigy" does.
The first few episodes of Season 3 of "Discovery" dealt with Michael Burnham landing on the planet Hima almost a year before the Discovery showed up, as a result of the massive jump undertaken at the end of Season 2. We got an introduction to both Cleveland Booker and the city of Mercantile. After the Discovery crashed on a planet called the Colony, it was discovered that there was an alien saloon with a nasty character called Zareh.
A guide to visiting Alshain IV should include the fact that they don't eat meat. The credit is given to Paramount Plus.
Some of the very best of "Discovery" was what that was. The disappointing dilithium-destruction-delinquent story was not really started until half way through. The first episode of the fourth season is somewhat slow.
30 seconds before the end, WHAM!, it begins a culture building for just under an hour. We're not talking about the '80s pop music sensation. Even the '60s diptych pop art. The first episode of the show is too big a deal to use a cliffhanger like that. It also means that the Another Anomaly story has begun immediately. We'll get to that later.
The full trailer for the sixth season of 'The Expanse' was released.
After a nearly two-minute recap of the events of the last season, we see Booker's ship launches form the shuttle and the Discovery spore jumping to a point in space. It flies over Discovery's saucer section, which feels like it's been put there for our entertainment, rather than realism, and heads down to the planet below.
The beginning of "Star Trek Into Darkness" is a repeat of the beginning of Paramount's own film. This is not a first contact situation, but it feels like a second contact situation since diplomacy between the people of Alshain IV and the Federation broke down a long time ago. Maybe that's the influence of Lower Decks, but more than likely not. The use of dilithium is no longer dangerous.
The guys from "Star Trek Into Darkness" were there. The writers are borrowing from Paramount. The credit is given to Paramount Plus.
After some cultural misunderstandings, the already-suspicious Alshains open fire on Burnham and Book who flee into the surrounding woodland. The indigenous population have a relationship with other life forms and are able to use butterfly-like creatures in order to fly. While still shooting and missing the two diplomats, they fly.
The Space Family Robinson are in danger in the Season 3 trailer.
It could've been a fun set piece, but it drags on too long and falls victim to too many clichés. The Alshains are able to follow the undynamic duo for many miles as they flee in a transport Pod, but the moment they see them, they're utterly flummoxed. They don't know what a flanking maneuver is. An implausible plan is hatched, the planet's magnetic field-based sensor-satellite array is reactivated and the Alshains can advance up to and beyond the tree stump.
Book and Burnham beam over the promised dilithium despite the attempts to destroy them. The leader of the Alshains, who hails the Crossfield class ship, apologizes when he bounds back onto the bridge of the Discovery. All round happy.
A happy bridge crew is an effective bridge crew, but you can't help but wonder if this was a bit excessive. The credit is given to Paramount Plus.
The opening credits are the same, there are a few new graphics, and the same astounding number of producers. The list of producers, co-producers, executive producers, co-executive producers, consulting producers and supervising producers takes up over half the length of the credits sequence.
The first example of one of the highlights of this episode is the extensive culture building and taking worlds we've seen before and adding a hole new to them, after all it's been just shy. This is the first season of "Discovery" and the very first "Star Trek" series to air after filming with the Stagecraft LED virtual wall technology developed by ILM, Pixomondo and others. This scene is one of the beautiful set designs we can expect.
The dialogue is mostly exposition as Doug Jones explains to the high council how a "burn" will not happen again and that the Kelpien's should look to once more reach out into space. The President of the United Federation of Planets is in the vicinity of the reopening of the Starfleet Academy, and Burnham is anxious about delivering a speech to celebrate. The chemistry between is Book and Burnham is great, yet the dialogue always seems to let them down, as it doesn't feel natural. No normal couple smiles that much.
After watching everyone on the bridge of the Discovery, it's impossible to not think of this scene from "Airplane!" The credit is given to Paramount Plus.
The President of Ni'var, T'Rina, takes over and talks to the people gathered about the Discovery crew. We learned during the earlier scene on Kaminar that five months have passed since the events of the concluding episode of Season 3, so yes, there probably would still be quite a lot of this sort of thing going, after all, the "Burn" did last approximately 120 years.
This episode is guilty of a little fan service and that's fine as long as it's kept to a minimum, but to this fan, whose favorite series is "Enterprise," the announcement of the Archer Space Dock, along with a few seconds of the familiar closing theme, was rather After El Presidente's speech, she thanks the Discovery's crew personally and then hides to talk to Lieutenant Tilly.
Her promotion to first officer last season from ensign was controversial since she didn't have the training or experience for such a jump in rank. It was almost like the producer felt it was necessary to close the lid on this, so Burnham reassured Tilly that she was ready.
The Kelpien high council was beautiful and we like how some members were in the water.
The emergency transmission will tie everything together. Deep Space Repair is sending a distress call because of the lost reactor control thrusters. The station knocked out the subspace relays in the area, so they cannot wait for any vessel to reach them, so the Discovery must leave.
T'Rina immediately sets up a predictable confrontation on the bridge of the Discovery during the rescue mission when she insists on joining the mission. Naturally, she objects, but she overruled and set up a nice and prickly relationship.
At about 23:20 in the episode, a new sound effect has been added, which sounds like a comedy whistle, and it doesn't do anything for the credibility of the spore drive. It's like how the producers got happy with the phaser charge-up sound effect in the episode "Project Daedalus" until the novelty wore off.
The bridge crew is getting more screen time. The credit is given to Paramount Plus.
An "Interstellar"-style rotation-match maneuver is required in order for the Discovery to mount a rescue. You would think that in the 32nd century they'd be able to use the tractor beam, but no reason is given as to why this isn't possible. There's too much interference when using the transporters.
We went to the beautiful homeworld of Book. It's a nice set piece, although it's painfully obvious that something is going to happen, but the sheer scale of it is still a shock. His nephew is given a traditional amulet containing the blood of his family and the root of a sacred tree, which is never taken off. Book no longer wears his clothes and his brother Kyheem says that he will share it with others.
We return and remain with the dilemma aboard Deep Space Repair. We traveled back and forth from the Discovery bridge to Engineering and back to the station where Adira and Tilly are. One attempt after another to get the survivors off the doomed station fails for a variety of reasons, but the set piece is enjoyable and successfully builds a little tension. The President disagrees with almost every decision made by Burnham. The Discovery and the station are both being bombarded by asteroid debris thrown at them by the distortion of the stars, which has been identified as the cause of the damage to the Deep Space outpost.
In the Season 3 finale, "There Is a Tide...", there is a height of laziness. The image is from Paramount Plus.
Adira can be seen checking out her new outfit when she beam from the Discovery bridge to the Repair Beta Six station, but her clothes change from standard uniform to a more rugged, away mission outfit. In the Season 3 finale, "There Is a Tide", we saw that technology has replaced stairs. It's also replaced dressing yourself? What's the next thing you can do to save time?
There is an unexpected cut to Kaminar where the young Kelpien can easily see the former starship captain's desire to return to Starfleet, the Discovery and his friends. It's a nice scene, with good dialogue that hints at what's to come.
The survivors barely make it aboard the Discovery just as the space station is destroyed and the Federation starship is also struck by a large, thanks to a combination of using the escape shuttle, the President's persuasive skills and an excessive amount of technobabble. The captain of Deep Space Repair was killed when debris fell on the bridge.
Remember the trance worms that Book saved, bringing tears to our eyes in Season 3. The credit is given to Paramount Plus.
The President gives a pep talk to Captain Burnham. It's not what we were expecting. T'Rina uses a famous scenario called the Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario to explain that sometimes we might believe we've lost, but if people have also been saved, then it shouldn't be considered a loss. She reveals that the next generation of starships are under construction and that the prototype ship is the "pathway drive" that we first saw in the episode "Die".
She says that Burnham isn't ready, which puts her nose out of joint. She can't accept all potential outcomes of a decision. She says it's a matter of experience. "Your acts of bravery are irrefutable, but they are also huge swings of the pendulum and in the time of rebuilding, there is a very fine between a pendulum and a wrecking ball," she says, fulfilling the required role of a command character that Burnham can square off against.
We cut to the bridge as the sensors detected something strange. The book explains that his ship was struck by something on his return journey. The image is put up on the viewscreen and we can see the gasping faces of the bridge crew, followed by the book and finally the viewscreen itself. The beloved homeworld of Book, once lush, fertile and full of symbiotic plant and animal life, has now been reduced to a burning cinder.
That's the end of the first episode. It's a surprise that the producers went all out in the Season 4 premiere episode, including a full scene of Alderaan, which jars against the rest of the episode. It's unlikely that this scale of end-of-episode cliffhanger will be maintained each week, so why put it right at the beginning? It's better to commit planetary genocide later in the season. After saving the trance worm was the main focus of the premiere episode, was it a conscious decision to kill them all along with everything else?
There is a commendation by the Starfleet.
The culture building we saw in this episode was great.
The design of the high council set was beautiful.
The impact scene was filmed well.
T'Rina is more interesting than first thought.
Hopefully we'll see less of it because the savior complex is addressed.
Adira was written as the new nervous crewmember.
It was excessive to destroy everything on it in the first episode.
The silly sound that accompanies the jump is the same as the drive.
There's a real danger of falling into a "clue of the week" routine again.
There are so many smiles.
The rating was 512
The first episode of "Star Trek: Discovery" is available to watch now and subsequent installments will be available every Thursday on Paramount Plus in the U.S. Canada's availability will not be affected by this. "Star Trek: Picard" and "Star Trek: Lower Decks" will be on Amazon in other countries.
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