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A visually stunning new Star Trek timeline was introduced last night with the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery. Wonderful performances, especially from Sonequa Martin-Green and Michelle Yeoh, in addition to the visuals mostly make up for deeply flawed scripts. The unselfconscious contradictions and nonsensical character development have all the earmarks of stories processed by committees yet Martin-Green and Yeoh show how capable performers can still create characters in such a vacuum and the production design and action sequences are gorgeous.

Spoilers after the screenshot



Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), along with Laura Moon on the American Gods TV series, is giving me an idea of a kind of protagonist Bryan Fuller likes to write--young women, guilty of past, character defining sins, nonetheless asserting themselves. And we do root for them, though in Michael's case it's a little tough because her story doesn't make a lot of sense. I suspect before Fuller left Discovery the teleplays and outlines on Michael were much clearer about who her character was meant to be and how she was formed. As it is, we're left with a young human woman who was raised on Vulcan--with one training scene strikingly similar to one of Spock's scenes in the first J.J. Abrams movie.



Unlike Spock, who's compelled to hide his humanity to fit in, Michael shows, when she first meets Captain Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) in a flashback, that she's perfectly comfortable to show emotions, her time on Vulcan mainly seeming to give her some arrogance that apparently burns off by the time we meet her at the beginning of the first episode. Characters still accuse her of being too much like a Vulcan in heated moments but without any apparent reason. But the Vulcans don't act much like Vulcans on Discovery.



Unsure how to deal with the supposed first contact between humans and Klingons in a hundred years (it's been pointed out that Michael's parents having been killed by Klingons contradicts this), Michael contacts her adoptive father, Sarek (James Frain), who informs her the Vulcans have secretly adopted a strategy of firing first every time they run into a Klingon ship. Why is this a secret? How is this a secret? How does Michael, an expert on Klingons who was raised on Vulcan, not know about it? At the very least she must have tried researching every contact made between Vulcans and Klingons and wondered how each incident ended.



Why would such a strategy not lead to all out war between Klingons and Vulcans? Can we really call it peace when they fire on each other every time they meet? I'm assuming the Klingons don't always run away, if ever. Seemingly the whole premise of T'Kuvma's (Chris Obi) argument for uniting the Klingon houses against the Federation is that their message, "We come in peace", is a lie, presumably meaning if they believed it they wouldn't go to war with them.



The producers of the series have said Discovery belongs in the original timeline, but I'm afraid I simply can't accept that. I don't mind another timeline, mostly I just want a good show, but it's silly to pretend this fits in with previous continuity somehow. Obviously the Klingons are wildly different but there's also the fact that all of Starfleet is already using the Enterprise delta symbol, something that didn't happen until after Kirk and his crew made the Enterprise a shining example. The technology is wildly different despite being set only ten years before the original series and everyone communicates using Star Wars style holograms.



And let's talk about the Klingons. The redesign does look pretty fearsome--the makeup's somewhere between Joseph Merrick and Nosferatu and the costumes somewhere between Vlad the Impaler's armour in the prologue to Coppola's Dracula and early 17th century jerkin and ruff. I like the set design even more with its intricate filigrees. But I don't recognise these people as Klingons. It's not just the lack of hair--it's the lack of this:



These new Klingons never smile, never seem excited by the idea of spilled blood and glorious battle. What happened to the merry space Vikings we all love? The Discovery timeline Klingons are perpetually funereal.



I did like the chemistry between Michael and Philippa once we got past the peculiarly stilted and catty dialogue at the beginning. The rapport between Michael and Saru is less satisfying. What a waste of Doug Jones--a race of cowards? That's a bad idea that's just going to get worse. It was interesting seeing Michael get offended when the admiral takes culture traits as racial traits though she didn't bat an eye when Philippa attributed Saru's fretfulness to him being a Kelpien. But it might be nice if the show confronts the kind of casual racism we used to see in Starfleet dealings with species like Ferengi. I wonder why Saru joined Starfleet if he's afraid of everything. Maybe that'll have an interesting explanation instead of just being a glaring inconsistency.



The action sequences were all lovely. It would've been nice if there'd been some explanation as to why Philippa and Michael were able to take on armoured Klingons three times their size in hand to hand combat but I loved the cloaked ship ramming the admiral's vessel and the new birds of prey or warbirds or whatever are pretty groovy.



Twitter Sonnet #1037

In saintly hooks, the pasta priest's reprieved.
The fair and noble glen accords the carbs.
And here was she of stone and grain conceived.
About the den the brambles whet their barbs.
A simple crown delivered clouds to gold.
In paisley stacks the scarves connect the god.
In candy dots the paper tale is told.
And eaten cool, devolved to itchy sod.
The blonding grass is growing pumpkinly.
Eloping legs alight on Terran gates.
The mess is dribbling close to napkinly.
A journey's pointy plane of pizza waits.
The delta served the data tables quick.
A double sun destroys the candle wick.

It's a struggle to think about any other TV show after Twin Peaks but I guess the new episode of American Gods on Sunday was pretty good too. It's not its fault Twin Peaks casts such an enormous shadow over it. "Git Gone" (named for the Fiona Apple song?) felt much more like Bryan Fuller than Neil Gaiman, in fact it felt like an especially gory episode of Dead Like Me. Graded on a curve that omits Twin Peaks, I'd give it a 7 out of 10. On a curve that includes Twin Peaks, I'd give it a 1.5 out of 10.

Spoilers after the screenshot



So now Laura Moon (Emily Browning) is a more developed character than anyone else on the show. I didn't see that coming. It's a reflection of the difference between writing a novel and writing for television--this episode, which adds a great deal of material not found in the book, has the advantage of being conceived almost entirely for television while everything else is forced to adapt. Part of the inherent problem in this is that so much of a novel with a limited third person protagonist depends on you knowing what that protagonist is thinking, getting their thoughts explicitly, and so far American Gods has mostly avoided voice over narration. This problem is compounded by the fact that Gaiman intentionally created Shadow as a character who's difficult to pin down--it's hard to guess his heritage, his personality is very contained--he's mysterious. This serves the dual function of making the story more about what Shadow discovers than about Shadow himself and helps weave the mystery of his destiny. Shadow is his experiences.



Bryan Fuller has taken a detour to establish Laura as almost the polar opposite of this. And it's emphasised from the way Shadow (Ricky Whittle) expresses the fact that he's happy with her and seems completely unable to understand her discontent. Fuller has created her as a queer figure (as established in Queer theory), spending an entire episode explaining why she died with Dane Cook's cock in her mouth (and certainly, that is baffling). I usually don't have patience with fiction that expects me to sympathise with someone for cheating on their partner but Fuller made me kind of get it in this case. Laura is fundamentally dissatisfied with existence and she's addicted to the adrenaline of rough sex, danger, and transgression to compensate for an unfulfilled desire she can't even define.



I wonder why Emily Browning was unwilling to be naked on this show. Is the show not worthy or were the nude scenes she did in the past done because she felt coerced by the system? One thing's for sure, the fact that we don't actually see her with Cook's cock in her mouth really hurts her death scene. The tight close-up on her eyes was really awkward. I guess there is a limit to what you can show on Starz, or more likely to what Browning was willing to do.

I'm not sure why she encounters Anubis (Chris Obi) if she believes in nothing. Because she worked at an Egyptian casino? Her dodging the test where her heart's weighed against the feather keeps the impression that her self-loathing based on her desires is irrational--really, most characters would become a lot less interesting once you cosmically establish them as definitely good or evil. But I don't quite buy her desire to stop the test or her ability to interfere with it, I think the subject ought to have been avoided entirely.



I'm also not sure why she gets super strength when she's resurrected but it was a cool action sequence. It makes the story feel a bit more like a conventional superhero tale--she's proven her worth in combat.

So that was a decent episode of Dead Like Me American Gods. I look forward to the next episode of Twin Peaks.

Last night's première of the American Gods television series was one of the best première episodes of any series I've seen in years. The cast, the music, the editing, everything's well above average even in this day and age of great television.

Ricky Whittle as protagonist Shadow Moon is like no other protagonist on television--muscular and exuding a sense of barely repressed violence, at the same time he's deeply contemplative and sensitive, very much as he is in Neil Gaiman's novel. But the show does the brilliant thing of making him exactly what he's supposed to be but also surprising.



Both he and Low Key (Jonathan Tucker) have the attitudes and appearances of guys who've really been in prison a while and--really, like guys like that--they're also perfectly strange. I like how half Low Key's face seems dead and the other is constantly tugging up into a smirk.



Yetide Badaki as Bilquis is great in a fabulous sex scene, drenched in red with a keenly rendered connexion between orgasm and worship. Much of the show I'd describe as fabulous and dangerous--the scene with Bilquis strangely yet appropriately cuts to the jaws of a dinosaur bar.



And, of course, Ian McShane is perfect as Wednesday.

This is the best translation of a Neil Gaiman book I've seen to screen. His dialogue is superficially clever only to provide a layer to reveal fascinating and insightful undercurrents--like Low Key telling Shadow not to fuck with airport staff and Shadow misinterpreting the moral of the story so that Low Key can reduce it to something suggestively simple. This stuff is well paired with director David Slade who edits the episode with a keen sense of how long a line should linger on the ear and, even more nicely, he knows when to cut in which the throbbing beat of a recognisable tune. I thought this show would be good but it exceeded my expectations.

Twitter Sonnet #988

In croissant snacks the story slowly starts.
A second tea returns to take a fourth.
In compact calculations spring their hearts.
Antennae teeth in pink determine worth.
An amber sky obtains a message sent.
In shadows caught by passing cloud we dream.
The autumn leaves in spring too quickly spent.
The brittle coin confers the thread to seam.
In western times a sortie claimed a foot.
Advances 'long the spine accost the land.
Refrains reroute the desert where it's put.
And only space can cure the lanes of sand.
Burrito eggs are hatching sauce to-day.
Lemon's a lighting too yellow to now allay.