TV Series/Blu-ray Review: 'Star Trek: Discovery - Season Two'

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© 2019 Paramount Home Media Distribution and CBS Studios



On Tuesday, November 12, Paramount Home Media Distribution and CBS Studios released Star Trek: Discovery - Season Two on Blu-ray and DVD almost seven months after Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman's series completed its second season on CBS All-Access, CBS Television's streaming service.

Set approximately 10 years before the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS), Star Trek: Discovery chronicles the voyages of the USS Discovery, a Crossfield-class starship equipped with an experimental propulsion system that's faster than standard warp drives, during the last Klingon-Federation War and its immediate aftermath. Starring Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman, Michelle Yeoh, Shazad Latif, Wilson Cruz, and Emily Coutts, Star Trek: Discovery expands the lore of Star Trek while paying homage to the existing canon.

Although its high-tech 21st Century production design and its showrunner Alex Kurtzman's connections to the J.J. Abrams-produced Kelvin Timeline films give casual viewers and skeptical Trekkers the impression that the show is set in the latest films' alternate universe, Star Trek: Discovery is set in the same universe as Gene Roddenberry's 1966-1969 series, as the presence of several characters introduced in that show - played by new actors, natch - demonstrates.

For instance, Mission Specialist (formerly First Officer of the USS Shenzhou) Michael Burnham (Martin-Green) is the foster daughter of Vulcan Ambassador Sarek (James Frain, in the role originally played by Mark Lenard) and his human wife Amanda Grayson (Mia Kirshner, in the role originally played by Jane Wyatt). Adopted by Sarek after the death of her parents, Burnham is the foster sister to Starfleet Lt Spock (Ethan Peck - Gregory Peck's grandson - in the role originally played by Leonard Nimoy).

In Season Two, the connection to Roddenberry's flagship series (which is co-produced by Eugene "Rod" Roddenberry) is even more explicit; not only is Spock an important character in the narrative but Enterprise and her captain, Christopher Pike (Anson Mount, in the role originally played by Jeff Hunter in The Cage) play pivotal roles in Star Trek: Discovery's sophomore season.

Per the producers' official description of Season Two:

After answering a distress signal from the U.S.S. Enterprise, the U.S.S. Discovery welcomes aboard Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) and begins a new mission to investigate the meaning behind seven mysterious red signals. Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) grapples with her past growing up on Vulcan with her foster parents and brother Spock (Ethan Peck).

 Season Two consists of 14 episodes, each one with an average running time of 40-45 minutes, except for the season premiere episode Brother, which clocks in at 1 hour and 10 minutes. In the Blu-ray set released last week by Paramount Home Media Distribution, the episodes are distributed thusly in four discs:

Disc One: 
  • Brother
  • New Eden
  • Point of Light
  • An Obol for Charon
  • Special Features
Disc Two:
  • Saints of Imperfection
  • The Sound of Thunder
  • Light and Shadows
  • If Memory Serves
  • Special Features
Disc Three:
  • Project Daedalus
  • The Red Angel
  • Perpetual Infinity
  • Through the Valley of Shadows
  • Special Features
Disc Four
  • Such Sweet Sorrow, Part One
  • Such Sweet Sorrow, Part Two
  • Special Features
My Take

Star Trek: Discovery is the seventh of eight television series currently in existence, including NBC's Star Trek: The Animated Series and CBS All-Access' Short Treks (two episodes of which are included in the Special Features in the Season Two set). Like all of its TV and feature film precursors in the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Discovery has been hailed by many Trek fans for its bold new approach to Roddenberry's vision of the future and its approach to storytelling. However, many other fans resist the new show, claiming that it plays havoc with existing canon and deplore the decision by CBS to distribute Star Trek: Discovery via a streaming service instead of Star Trek's original venue, broadcast television. 

To be honest, at first I, too, was unhappy with the notion of a Star Trek series being offered via a pay--to-watch streaming service. Most people already pay cable companies $200 or more a month in order to get basic cable plus Internet and (at least for older folks, landline phone service); it seems a bit greedy on the part of CBS, which owns the Star Trek television franchise rights, to "air" their new shows on streaming services. So even though I was open to the existence of the series and wasn't upset by the creative direction of Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman's take on Trek,  I was mad that I would not be able to watch it unless Paramount (the network's corporate sibling by way of Viacom) released it in Blu-ray and/or DVD. 

Luckily, CBS Studios (which for a short time had been cleaved from Paramount until Viacom's recent reorganization) still had a distribution deal with Paramount Home Media Distribution and assented to release Star Trek: Discovery on home media. In November of 2018, Star Trek: Discovery made its Blu-ray/DVD debut with the Season One set, which was followed by last week's release of the Season Two four-disc set. 

Because television dramas have mostly moved away from the old episodic format in which continuity was implied rather than established outright and toward the serialized "continuing story" format made famous in Fox's 24 (2001-2011), Star Trek: Discovery's approach is different from previous television series set in Roddenberry's vision of the 23rd and 24th Centuries. 

Instead of telling 22-26 loosely connected episodes that can be aired out of sequence a la Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Discovery devotes 14-15 episodes per season to tell a complete story with a definite beginning, middle, and an end. Like Amazon's similarly structured Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Star Trek: Discovery is structured more like a miniseries or a long theatrical movie saga devoted to a story arc. 

I'm not going to devote much time to discussing the story told in Star Trek: Discovery over the past two seasons in detail. While I'm sure that many people who come across my blog have watched the show and are familiar with it, I can't assume that everyone has, so I'm not going to spoil it for you by going too deeply into the story. 

I will say this, though. Once I got over the initial reaction of This can't be set 10 years before TOS because everything on this new show looks way more futuristic than the 1966-1969 series,  the storytelling in Star Trek: Discovery is so compelling and intriguing that it drew me in from the series' premiere episode, The Vulcan Hello.    

I love the conceit that unlike previous Star Trek shows and films, we see the story from the point of view of a lower-ranking specialist and not from the perspectives of the series' featured starship captains (Michelle Yeoh's Philippa Georgiou, Jason Isaacs' Gabriel Lorca, and Anson Mount's Christopher Pike). Star Trek: Discovery's avatar for the audience is former First Officer and convicted mutineer Michael Burnham, who is recruited by Captain Lorca for wartime duty aboard the Discovery in the midst of a war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. 

As I mentioned earlier, the show is closely linked to the original 1960s series; Sarek and Amanda (who first appeared on Star Trek in Journey to Babel, played then by Mark Lenard and Jane Wyatt) have pivotal roles in both seasons because they are Michael Burnham's foster parents. Here they are played by James Frain and Mia Kirschner, both of whom are also veterans of 24. Like Ben Cross and Winona Ryder in 2009's Star Trek, Frain and Kirschner don't imitate Lenard and Wyatt, but they still capture the essence of Spock's parents.

An even more important connection to The Original Series is the presence of the Constitution-class Enterprise and several characters from the original pilot episode The Cage, including Capt. Pike (Anson Mount) and Number One (Rebecca Romjin in the role created back in 1964 by the late Majel Barrett Roddenberry). The Enterprise is seen in the Season One cliffhanger finale, then again in several Season Two episodes.  (In keeping with canon established in The Cage, the complement of the Enterprise is mentioned in dialogue as 203 officers and crew, and even though the look of the sets is in tune with modern standards, the design of the bridge is also reminiscent of Matt Jeffries' original concepts.)

The cast of Season Two is excellent. Doug Jones returns as Saru, Star Trek: Discovery's counterpart to Spock and Lt. Commander Data from other TV series in the franchise; Mary Wiseman is the wide-eyed and optimistic Ens. Sylvia Tilly, a bright young officer being trained as a future Starfleet command officer; Anthony Rapp plays Lt. Commander Paul Stamets, Discovery's brilliant engineer, and Star Trek's first openly gay character; British actor Shazad Latif returns as Ash Tyler, a Starfleet security officer with a shady past and now a member of the secretive Section 31; and Michelle Yeoh reprises her role as the mysterious Philippa Georgiou from the Mirror Universe, playing her as a darker and morally ambiguous counterpart to the now-dead Capt. Georgiou who was Burnham's mentor and commanding officer aboard the USS Shenzhou. Like Ash, Mirror Georgiou is a member of Section 31 - although one is left to wonder what her agenda may be.  

I love the show, even though it took me a few viewings to get used to the modern visuals that look slicker and more state-of-the-art than the show Star Trek: Discovery is a direct prequel to. The writing is good, the acting is well-done, and CBS Studios' production values are on the same level as a feature film. 

It is also worth noting that actor-director Jonathan Frakes and other individuals who have collaborated on previous Star Trek productions are contributors to Star Trek: Discovery. The starship designs are done by long-time Star Trek illustrator John Eaves, and the design of the show's titular starship is based on Ralph McQuarrie's abandoned concept for the redesigned Enterprise for the unproduced Planet of the Titans film project of the late 1970s and the canceled Star Trek: Phase II TV series that later morphed into Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  

Additionally, the show's co-creator and original showrunner, Bryan Fuller, wrote for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager and is a self-described Star Trek geek, as is the series' executive producer Alex Kurtzman. 

CBS Studios has greenlit a third season based on the success of Star Trek: Discovery's performance on CBS All-Access, Netflix, and home media sales, as well as several other Star Trek shows, including the upcoming Star Trek: Picard and the Lower Decks animated series. And if the show's bold leap forward into the unknown takes viewers where no one has gone before in 2020, Star Trek: Discovery will live long and prosper. 

Blu-ray Specifications

Video
  • Codec: MPEG-4 AVC
  • Resolution: 1080p
  • Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
  • Original aspect ratio: 2.00:1

Audio
  • English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
  • German: Dolby Digital 5.1
  • Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
  • French: Dolby Digital 5.1
  • Italian: Dolby Digital 5.1
  • Japanese: Dolby Digital 5.1

Subtitles
  • English SDH, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Flemish, Norwegian, Swedish 

Discs
  • Blu-ray Disc
  • Four-disc set (4 BD-50)

Packaging
  • Slipcover in original pressing
  • Embossed print

Playback
  • Region A 


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