Sorry this is long-winded again. I have lots of thoughts.
Season 1 - Episode 5- Series Acclimation Mil
Sooo… I liked quite a few things but it felt packaged in a way that just grated at me. It’s both emotionally sincere in parts and structurally irritating.
I did not enjoy the whole opening exposition sequence complete with screen prompts. It was annoying, felt like a corporate commercial trying to be hip with the kids, and was bordering on fourth wall breaking. Not for me.
Obviously the episode is a giant love letter to DS9 and Sisko in particular, and that is appreciated, and it’s a cool thing to introduce to younger audiences that might be watching this and have never seen DS9 before (does that audience exist?
). So over-explaining some of that stuff was fine, although it was also juggling extreme member berries territory, which made it a bit jarring in places.
SAM needed an episode and I thought she was kind of great in this. She is probably the character I worried about the most from the first few episodes, but the actress gave a heartfelt and very strong performance and I vibed with the character overall. So I have no complaints with this being a SAM-centric episode, and like Jay-Den last week it does a lot of work making the character someone we can root for going forward. The whole reporting-to-HQ thing felt a bit like Mork calling Orson to me and was artificially made more antagonistic than it needed to be (look! some stakes!), but it served its purpose.
View attachment Mork Calling Orson, Come In Orson - Young Robin Williams-qnp_Yux34Pg.mp4
Seeing Jake was of course fantastic. I was geeking out FOR Cirroc. It was great to see him back on Star Trek and giving a tribute not only to Sisko but really to Avery Brooks as well. It meant more because you know he holds the man in such high esteem in real life.
So yeah, I generally thought the DS9 stuff was handled well, but the teeny-bop energy of this show, which doesn’t even feel that genuine and more “fellow kids”, is draining me. I can do without jokes about boners in Star Trek, (I'm old, Gandalf) especially in an episode that is clearly aiming for something more mythic and emotional.
I still don’t really know what this show wants to be. It’s obviously very Trek-aware and eager to lean into legacy, but it’s all filtered through a 90210-style teen show vibe that doesn’t really lend itself to Star Trek at all.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s perfectly fine to cater to a younger demo and explore younger people’s experiences in Star Trek, but the way this show does it feels very contemporary and paint-by-numbers. It shuttles between barely tolerable and outright cringe-inducing far too often.
With that said, this episode would have been much stronger if the entire drunk-at-the-nightclub scene was left on the cutting room floor. The Kelrec dinner party stuff was mostly fluff, but inoffensive fluff. The bar stuff was just lame.
Another thing that still bothers me is the time period. It continues to feel completely arbitrary. We’re told it’s 800 years since the events of DS9. Fine. But does it actually feel like that? Would anything feel different if it was 400 years? Or 200?
It doesn’t feel like they’re talking about a period that would be the equivalent of the 13th century for us. Honestly, it still feels like Discovery just ass-pulled this date for its own shenanigans, and now it’s going to be weird forever whenever the show has to reference time periods we’re all actually familiar with.
I DID like a small exchange with SAM and the Doctor where he talks about loss though. Seeing as he is 800 years old himself now, hopefully we can meaningfully explore that part of his character, as he would have repeatedly seen his friends and colleagues die of old age. That scene felt like a nod to that, so hopefully we get more of that insight because, you know, it actually USES the extreme time jump.
The Dax reveal was cool, and the Sisko voice-over at the end actually got me. I’m growing sentimental in my old age...
