OK, They Found a Strange, New World But They Absolutely Did Not Go Boldly and, In Fact, Didn’t Even Have an A Story with the Main Cast

This Strange New Star Trek 90210 show Paramount/Secret Hideout seems to want to keep foisting on us despite everyone who answered the CBS All Access questionnaire during the second season of Discovery with We Don’t Care About This; Give Us a Pike Show didn’t mean that we wanted to swallow any old nonsense; it’s that you cast US Grade A hunk of beefcake Anson Mount as a Starfleet captain and certain expectations are already met. Here’s a guy, you take one look at him in the chair and you’re ready to go tussle with some rubber-headed stand-ins physically or philosophically, right? And then they give him a hairdo that takes 45 minutes to create when the captain of a real starship barely has time to put on his shirt from tumbling class and straighten his toupee before he starts punching interlopers in Federation space and quipping like Dennis Miller on Monday Night Football in the early 90s, not this guy who started out great despite being saddled with a time-lost tragic backstory, taking a back seat to all the Love Boat-level shenanigans on his ship.

OK, gonna start out with the weave about the Discovery’s secondary tactical bridge officer (with her red alert displays on the outside of her Daft Punk helmet) and the cyborg Airiam who they made interesting nods to her role on the vessel. That’s why I thought there had to be something more to that character, especially with the Secondary Tactical chick on the Shenzhou. Putting that actress under layers of make-up and head props? Tell us that story. What’s it like being a human jacked in to your ship? Do you ever get time off? Is it challenging powering down and just, you know, Netflix and chilling with a non-plugged-in crew member on your down time? A 5′ 9″ former ballerina and Serbian/Canadian acting coach is on the bridge for a reason, right? OH WHY BOTHER EXPLORING ANYTHING REMOTELY HUMAN IN THE STORY, WE HAVE A MAGIC MUSHROOM DRIVE WITH A LEAD CHARACTER WITH THE PERSONALITY OF A REGULAR MUSHROOM.

And that is sadly typical for the narrative these Secret Hideout guys have with their relationship to character in Star Trek. Any… and I mean any… interesting character bit for any non-main cast crewmember is immediately forgotten, written out, or killed and dealt with immediately. Did these guys worry so much about introducing a new magic evil that will span the three or four episodes left this season that they forgot that maybe killing an audience-in character who is a breath of non-reconstituted air in this claustrophobic show might be roundly regarded as “a bad move”? Did this Vezda-parasite/ensign actually say to M’Benga “Hey, sorry about your transporter-buffered sick daughter; too bad you had to let her go.” He did, right? So they just dealt with all of M’Benga’s tragic family backstory off-camera with a throwaway line from a featured day player?

And then and then and then what’s the A story? Recurring villain introduction with no consequences for the ostensible leads. The B story is our landing party is separated by different planes of existence but still in the same room (yay! finally some science fiction!) but the only way to escape is to believe in the corporeal existence of a stable platform over a deep fall that will exist sometime in the future so effect comes before cause in this magic land and something about quantum entanglement but it’s really “a wizard did it” which isn’t unknown for Star Trek but is usually delivered much more palatably on a clean plate unlike this Dinki-Di of post-apocalyptic dog food you can eat as you scope out the compound through a pair of binoculars set on a tripod but still able to follow a motorcycle as it jumps a ramp into the compound without taking your hands off of your fork and dog food. If you follow that run-on sentence disguised as a scifi reference to metaphorically illustrate what must be going through their heads in the writers’ room. Or Akiva’s office, or whoever is taking decent plots and homogenizing them.

Anyway, introduce an innocent who is just happy-to-be-there on the Federation flagship and give him a few episodes of relentless cheerfulness and optimism and then kill him. Yep, that sounds about right for these guys. Eight or ten episodes a season? Use six of them for out-of-place whimsy and ham-handed references to better shows and bleak nonsense that would depress Stephen King. Maybe they’ll get some Star Trek in there by accident one of these days. I hope it’s not in the nobody-asked-for-it Starfleet Academy silliness, because I’ve already given up on that whiffed ball of a lost opportunity, just based on its first trailer. Actors never turn down a chance to work and I assume they’re all doing the best work they can under the circumstances. I just wish Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti were in an actual Star Trek show and not whatever this current iteration is foisting on us. A Xerox of a Xerox is never the clearest document in the file.