Star Trek: Discovery

WORKING

Star Trek: Discovery (TV series). Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman, creators. Based on Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry, #7 in the Star Trek series of series. USA (and Canada): Secret Hideout, Roddenberry Entertainment, Living Dead Guy Productions, CBS Studios (Production) / CBS, CBS All Access, Paramount+ (networks), 2017 f., 4 seasons as of March 2023; one more season announced.[1] Running time: 37-65 minutes.[2]

Premise (Wikipedia) <block quote> The series begins around ten years before the events of Star Trek: The Original Series, when Commander Michael Burnham's actions start a war between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire. She is court-martialed, stripped of rank, and reassigned to the USS Discovery, which has a unique means of propulsion called the "Spore Drive". After an adventure in the Mirror Universe, Discovery helps end the Klingon war. In the second season they investigate seven mysterious signals and a strange figure known as the "Red Angel", and fight off a rogue artificial intelligence. This conflict ends with the Discovery traveling to the 32nd century, more than 900 years into their future.[3]

Passim but frequently: hexagonal or octagonal shapes used or, more often, suggested in design of Star Fleet vessels. [4]

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Some Episodes of Interest for Users of this Wiki

Season 1, Episode 1, "The Vulcan Hello," 24 Sept. 2017

Generally significant for introducing a tension between interpretations of intentions and actions in terms of the agents' culture or race/species — and gender, with the Klingon forces gendered male, the Federation's more female (though gender-balanced in ways complicated nicely by species). Of interest here for the mise en scène: Star-Trekian smooth and Modern(ist) vs. Klingon complex and convoluted, with Klingon spaces and costuming suggesting the Baroque plus indigenous MesoAmerican-Imperial. Note also the juxtaposing of an ornate, heavy-metal Klingon casket and the burial at space of a male-gendered leader with the female lead on the Federation side on a high-tech gurney in a curative space in sickbay; and cf. and contrast that with a child-version of the character in a Vulcan learning-chamber, quizzed by a computer.

Season 1, Episode 2, "Battle at the Binary Star," 24 September 2017

Note dialog between imprisoned protagonist, Michael Burnham, and the ship's computer, both gendered female; subject: ethical grounds for the computer to release Burnham to go through the vacuum in a wrecked part of the ship to go to a bulkhead hatch the computer will blow open. Cf. and contrast dialogs between David Bowman and HAL-9000 over entry into the Discovery in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (film) and and the dialog with the computerized bomb — both speakers gendered male — in DARK STAR. 

Season 1, Episode 3, "Context Is for Kings," 1 October 2017

Brief but impressive shot of The Garden in the Machine, literally: a lush vegetative area inside Discovery. Note also Michael Burnham, in her prisoner's outfit, inside a transparent box, surrounded by flickering spores, in one of the scenes in which the principle of propulsion? transport? sought (illegally) by Star Fleet is bit by bit explained. We might think of it as a kind of Gaia hypothesis on the intergalactic level, bringing together physics and biology (and quantum mechanics) — and a rationalized mysticism — of the universe interconnected physically/organically. There are also references to the theory of "panspermia," used in an unusual way,[5] and to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, used more seriously.[6] 

Season 1, Episode 4, "The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry," 8 October 2017

Note on bridge of Discovery during the battle to save Corvan II from Klingon attack: Airiam, a female human cyborg, who looks robotic at her battle station and has an important job but no audible lines. Full career and history discussed in Fandom entry, as of March 2023 at link here.[7]

Season 1, Episode 5, "Choose Your Pain," 15 October 2017

See for Commander Paul Stamets, mycologist on the Discovery and "spore drive specialist" — and "the first to make the spore drive viable for traversing great distances by using himself as an organic navigation computer"[8] by "connect[ing] himself to the spore drive" using Ripper's DNA,"[9] i.e., DNA of a space-creature that looks like a huge and heavily armored tardigrade, like Echiniscus succineus[10][11] made very big. Stamets, therefore, makes himself a kind of organic interface and device, to run a device: a starship. ("Ripper" is the nickname given the creature by its human captors; more formally, capital "T" Tartigrade".[12]) Note also Klingon variations on geometric themes in the architecture of their prison ship, and the torture of Captain Lorca: held "down" vertically, but with torture devices superimposed on him, as in, classically (so to speak), Nineteen Eighty-Four novel and 1984 (film) — and more explicitly Alex's eyes' being held open in his conditioning/torture in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (film) and novel.[13] The torture Lorca is paralleled in more detail by the extreme distress of Ripper in the transparent spore box during a "Black Alert" jump to save Lorca.

Season 1, Episode 8, "Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum," 5 November 2017 ("If you want peace, prepare for war").[14]

See for
 • Lt. Paul Stamets hooked up to the spore drive,[15] a human as an interface between the mycelium connecting up the galaxy and the large (compared to a human) and complex mechanism of the starship Discovery.
 • Our first good — if quick — look at Lt. Commander Airiam, a female human cyborg on the bridge of Discovery, who may get her first clear line(s) in this episode.[16]
 • At the end of the episode, the crystal transmitter[17] on the planet Pahvo linked to Federation communications technology and communicating a great distance. 

Season 1, Episode 12, "Vaulting Ambition," 21 January 2018

Set in a Mirror universe,[[18]] where the Classic Trek "agonizer" has been enlarged to "a torturous agony booth"[19] relevant as a threatening enclosing technology[20] and picking up a motif going back to at least 1984 (film).

Season 1, Episode 15 (season finale), "Will You Take My Hand?" 11 February 2018

Features a "hydro-bomb,"[21] and "detonating the bomb in" an "active volcano will annihilate all life on Qo'noS," the Klingon home-world and win the war for the Federation."[22] Note "In Search of the Ultimate Weapon" motif, and this ultimate weapon as a genocidal upgrade of the "doomsday device" in Frederik Pohl's novel, Terror.

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Season 2, Episode 9, "Project Daedalus," 14 March 2019

See for "Starfleet's Control artificial intelligence" and Control in a take-over attempt,[23] atypical for Federation AI, though reversed in the third season (see below).[24]

RDE, finishing, 18Mar23 f.