Star Trek: Discovery – Los Angeles Review of Books
“Discovery lives in a different kind of present, when we know better than to think that we are already great. We can’t just wait for the old white racists to die off or become enlightened; they became president when we weren’t looking, and everything that one might have imagined an Obama presidency would represent for America, now, seems hard even to remember. There is work to do. There are losses to grieve and to prepare to mourn. Maybe it will get better; it will certainly get worse first. The present sucks.
“In that sense, the fact that Michael Burnham will have to work ten times as hard to get where Kirk and Picard had the privilege of starting; that she will have to survive disgrace and incarceration to find that family, that home will burn down before we can try to find another one, well… all of that makes me sad. It hurts. I want the utopian vision we used to have; I miss the relief of seeing the future perfect on screen, arrived and triumphal, and I mourn its absence. I would watch the living shit out of a Star Trek with Michelle Yeoh as Captain Picard.
“But maybe it had to die. Maybe Star Trek’s future perfect was always hollow, a paper-thin smugness covering over a triumphalist presentism. And maybe, by going back to where the future should have started, but never really did, we can dream a way into the future that we might yet live to deserve? Maybe it’s a show that, because it knows it doesn’t already have the answers, will do some work to think of a few?”
Aaron Bady and Sarah Mesle for Dear TV ravenously consume two new hours of Star Trek: Discovery. What’s the verdict? The present sucks.
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