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January Meme: Star Trek: Discovery - a Manifesto
Aka the long promised manifesto about what has become my favourite post DS9 Star Trek show, or version of Star Trek, full stop. Some preliminaries and disclaimers about what this isn't: A declaration that Discovery is best, or flawless. No ST movie or show is. Or that I'm 100% behind every plot or character decision. I'm not. People getting creative - which TPTB most certainly did with this show, which is one of the reasons why I fell in love with it - inevitably means that some of their ideas just doesn't work out the way they intended, or they didn't work out for this particular watcher. With every season, I praised and I nitpicked, in different degrees. This is how I do fandom. (When I reach the point where I catch myself only complaining and not enjoying anymore, I say goodbye.) With all these caveats being said, here's why I think Star Trek: Discovery isn't just a fabulous show, but specifically a fabulous Star Trek show:
1), First and foremost: they tried something new, and kept doing that. A few years back, when Disco was in its first or second season and Picard in its first, I wrote some meta along the lines of "I like these shows, but I wish Star Trek wouldn't, post Voyager, have decided to keep going to the nostalgia well, both in terms of movies and tv, instead of, well, boldly going where no ST has gone before. Well, Discovery in its first two seasons did to some degree use the nostalgia well in that it was set in a pre TOS era and used some prominent TOS characters, but not only did they literally go where no ST had gone before from their third season onwards, they also already did some pioneer work from the get go, i.e. the Discovery pilot. First and foremost, there's the overall narrative structure. To some degree, every preceding ST show and movie had as their main character the Captain. Just how much narrative space was given to the supporting cast varied (never mind William Shatner's ego, TOS simply hails from a tv era where you didn't give as much character development and stories to a wider ensemble as was true in the late 1980s when TNG brought ST back to the small screen, let alone the 1990s), but the Captain was the leading man (or woman, in the case of Janeway) in every sense. This wasn't the case any longer with Star Trek: Discovery. Michael Burnham was the lead character in all five seasons, but was "only" the Captain in the last two. In fact, the story that introduced her busted her back from First Officer and aspiring Captain to self loathing and much loathed prisoner, so for the first time in a ST show, we had, within the Starship setting a lead who started on the opposite end of the hierarchical spectrum and was in need of a personal redemption arc (from her own pov) in addition to the general learning arc. The Captain was still an important character, but in a supporting role (narratively speaking), and this would remain the case in the first three seasons, despite the person of the Captain changing. Which btw in addition to the pov shift also meant some interesting compare and contrast to how you can fulfill that role from your crew's pov, as well as part of our heroine's learning arc.
The other thing which ST: Discovery did that was new within ST from the get go was of course the fact it gave us gay regular characters who weren't from the Mirrorverse or whose being gay was just there in a blink and you miss it shot (looking at you, Alternate Timeline Sulu embracing your husband and daughter in Star Trek: Beyond. Back in the 1960s, having a black woman and a Russian character on the bridge crew might have been innovative and progressive, but the increasing reliance on nostalgia in post DS9 and pre Discovery Star Trek outings had also come to mean playing it safe. Occasional attempts to branch out either fell flat on their face (*cough* The Outcast *cough*) or were limited to on episode (Jadzia Dax and Lenara Kahn). But the Stamets/Culber relationship we got graced with from the first season onwards was the romantic and erotic relationship between two male regulars without any attempt to "explain" it by one of them being an alien, and it was in fact given as much narrative weight as that season's heterosexual relationship between regulars (Michael/Ash) (well, one and a half, if you also count L'Rell/Voq). The scene that revealed that Stamets and Culber were an item - their shared evening and tooth brush routine in their quarters - was justly praised for the casual tenderness without any sensationalism or self conscious "look what we're doing" lesson of the week.
When the show then left the just-pre-TOS-era behind with the end of the second season and jumped 900 years into the future, and remained there for the remaining seasons, it felt like it abandoning the safety net of a familiar setting and feeling confident enough to try a completely new era - and it pulled off said new era - and the new regulars that came with it, as well as new roles for several of our old regulars. Most importantly, the new setting allowed the show to do something I thought was direly needed within the Star Trek franchise: to showcase, in a truly show, not tell way, why the Federation in general and Starfleet in particular were something good and an organisation we'd want our heroes to be a part of. (Instead of wanting them to do their own thing on their lonesome.) This brings me to my next overall point.
2.) Back in the 1990s when first a very few TNG episodes and then massively DS9 started to include stories and storylines that highlighted darker aspects of the ST future (Sisko's famous "it's easy to be a saint in paradise!" outburst is representative here), it was something new and felt like fleshing out the overall 'verse, plus note that even the Dominion War arc on DS9 in the end sided with Team Idealism over Team End Justifies Means. Not unimportantly, these were tv shows broadcast at an era where the Cold War had ended and many an audience member (definitely yours truly) was (as it turns out unduly) optimistic about their present. By the time Star Trek: Enterprise came along and 9/11 happened, it resulted in the Xindi arc, which, wellllllll, ymmd, but I think it's where the attempt to mix "getting-your-hands-dirty-realism" into a Star Trek story went sour. The alternate timeline ST movies which in any regard leaned into the pop culture "Kirk the rebel" image among the many nostalgia well contents also used that tried and true ST stalwart, evil admirals and stubborn bureaucrats. It's a storytelling device popular for a reason, because a great many people identify when you give them heroes frustrated with their superiors and "standing up to the man!" and "Down with red tape!" is guaranteed to produce cheer. And then Star Trek: Picard started with a story that told us Picard resigned from Starfleet because due to the Synth catastrophe on Mars, Starfleet abandoned the Romulan rescue operation. I think you can see where I'm going with this. There is is only so often you can show Starfleet as an organisation where basically only our heroes are good guys who want to do something before they look stupid for still being members. Something similar is true for the overall Federation. Especially in a real life context where railing atthe EU UNO transnational organisations who however flawed aim at a union of nations rather than "Every nation for themselves!" has become every populist's favourite stock in trade. (Note I'm not saying just "right wing populists". I'm in the country that produced Sahra Wagenknecht. There are French and English left wing populists as well.) All of which goes to say: I was really really REALLY in need of something that Star Trek: Discovery gave me, to wit: the presentation of Starfleet as an organisation, and the Federation as a structure, to which one would want to belong. The contrast to what Picard did is especially striking, because the reality Burnham & Co. find after their 900 years time jump also has gone through a catastrophe which shattered the Federation of old. But the big difference is that their Starfleet might due to technical reasons be a far smaller scale operation when s3 starts, but it's still there, trying its best to help people. We're not told that, we can see that - Admiral Vance might initially be somewhat distrustful of our heroes in the episode where the Discovery has managed to track down post Burn Starfleet, but he's simultanously engaged in cordinating a resuce mission that brings direly needed medical supplies to people. (And to its credit, Discovery did not fall back on the Evil Admiral/Ignorant Bureaucrate trope for its remaining run, either. It wasn't that every Starfleet or Federation official always agreed with our heroes. But if they didn't, they usually had understandable reasons not to.) As to the Federation, here's another first: until s3 of Discovery, while it was always a multi planet organisation, the headquarters were on Earth, and while in theory, Earth, Vulcan, Andor and Tellus were named as the four original founding members, not least because of rl Doylist factors (actors playing humans or Vulcans don't have to be put into the same expensive make up actors playing Andorians or other species), you could be forgiven for assuming that Earth and at best Earth and Vulcan are the worlds dominating the Federation. In the future the Discovery have arrived in, they have both (for different reasons) seceeded, and Earth in particular has gone isolationist and paranoid. That, however, does not mean the Federation stopped existing. It truly did prove it does not depend on these two membership worlds. Conversely, because this is an optimistic future, s3 and s4 proceed to make the case of "better together" not least through Michael Burnham and friends, and we see Vulcan (which is no longer just Vulcan, more in a second) and Earth rejoin the Federation. As to Vulcan: it's a bit of a ST fandom joke that post TOS shows (and movies) had trouble in how they used their Vulcans, more often going for the arrogant jerk(s) characterisation than not. It was therefore another refreshing change when the 900 years jump into the future revealed that at this point, the reunion between Vulcans and Romulans that Spock worked for in his TNG appearance had actually come true, and the result was a planet no longer named Vulcan but Ni'var, with its culture being a genuine mixture of Vulcan and Romulan traditions, rather than Vulcan simply reabsorbing the Romulans. Discovery took the idea of the Quowat Milat (flippantly put: Romulan space nuns with ninja abilities) ST: Picard had introduced in its first season and then more or less abandoned and ran with it; furthermore, with Ni'var's President T'Rina, it gave us the most interesting post TOS Vulcan in decades. The Romulan-Vulcan mix that was Ni'var was, in a word, fascinating again, instead of just repeating old plot lines. In conclusion: Star Trek: Discovery might have started with that very dark storyline, a war (to be precise, one between the Federation and the Klingons). But it ended up being a genuinely utopian, rather than dystopian, version of Star Trek, and the most attractive one offered in any of the more recent ST shows.
3.) And then there are the characters and their relationships. Making Michael Burnham so clearly the lead was of course a narrative risk in that chances are if you don't like Michael, you'll have difficulties with the show, whereas it's, say, possible to be not keen on Jonathan Archer and still like Enterprise (lest this comes across as raggin on ENT: it's also possible to love DS9 and still regard Sisko as the least interesting regular), because her personal story does dominate in all seasons. But to me - and again, this is a personal judgment - the risk paid off. Michael wasn't a character I fell in love with at first sight, but I found her interesting from the start, and I did come to love her before the first season was over. I also thought overall, her development as a person was well written (and superbly played), and the last season brought that home by letting her to a degree mentor Raynor, who was emotionally exactly where Michael had been at the start of the show (i.e. traumatized after having fucked up with the best of intentions but disastrous results, prickly and in need of redemption), and even in one episode bringing the cast and the audience face to face with her younger self. Saru the Kelpien was quite simply the most captivating non-human (but organic) character ST had offered in a long while, and among so many other things an amazing example of how an actor can emote and get thoughts across while covered in tons of make-up. (On a level with what Andreas Katsulas did as G'Kar in Babylon 5, and this is very high praise from me.) His and Michael's relationship, from their rivalry in the pilot to the deep friendship that develops thereafter became one of the emotional lynchpins of the show. Sylvia Tilly starts out as the adorable geek girl par excellence and has a great figuring-herself-out development through the seasons, and while I later missed the friendship scenes she had with Michael in the first two, the show gave her other captivating relationships - with Stamets, with Saru, with Vance - even with Georgiou, in a way, and basically: whoever you stuck Tilly in a scene with, she was guaranteed to evoke infinitely watchable responses from. I already talked about about Stamets and Culber. Dettmer and Owesekun basically did an O'Brien (as in, Miles, on TNG, before he became a full on main character on DS9) in that they started out with just a few lines in s1 and in the next few seasons became more and more fleshed out and compelling. And then there were those characters who were only in one or two seasons but during that time were an important part of what made these seasons so watchable, whether we're talking about Katrina Cornwell in seasons 1 and 2 or Laira Rillak in seasons 4 and 5, Gabriel Lorca in season 1 or Ozyraas in season 3, Christopher Pike on season 2 or Commander Raynor in season 5. (And while I still think the new Klingon look was a creative mistake, I had a lot of time for L'Rell as a character in seaons 1 and 2.)
Some of these characters, like Pike, Spock and Sarek and Amanda, were new spins at TOS classics. While Alternate Timeline Movie Pike from the Kelvin Timeline movies is possibly the element of those movies I liked the most, I can say Anson Mount's Pike now is my definite Pike. Was introducing him in s2 partly motivated by nostalgia well reasons? Probably. But it really worked within Discovery's larger story, because after the Lorca experience the crew needed a Captain who showed you can lead without being a (not so) secret authoritarian, who can be empathic instead of being manipulative. And Pike, alternate timeline movies aside, had not really been used in TOS beyond The Menagerie's adaption of the failed original pilot The Cage; s2 of Discovery not only was a chance to flesh out the character but to give his canon-ordained fate a new meaning. (And then it led to him getting his own spin-off, but this manifesto is not about Strange New Worlds.) As for Trek's most famous Vulcan-Human family, Spock, Sarek and Amanda: I've said it before and I'll say it again, Discovery is the first screen ST (the novels are another issue) bothering to make Amanda into a three dimensional character. (Pace, Jane Wyman fans: Journey to Babel is possibly my favourite TOS episode, original Amanda is fine, but that was one episode, and her cameos in the movies didn't offer much more, whereas Sarek got far more material in his later outings.) Michael's relationships with Sarek, Spock and Amanda in the first two seasons were my kind of complicated family relationships, and that particular retcon worked so well for me that I now have difficulties reading fanfic in which Michael isn't Spock's adopted sister.
Lastly, and you were probably waiting for this: Discovery had the good luck of hiring Michelle Yeoh when she was still affordable. (At least I'm guessing that post Everywhere Everything At Once, her salary sky rocketed.) (She deserves it, of course.) Since this is a personal manifesto, and I know many watchers feel differently: while she was lovely as Georgiou Prime in the pilot two parter and then in flashbacks, I'm 100 % on board with the show not making Georgiou Prime the first season's Captain instead of Lorca. (And was before the reveal of Lorca's true identity.) I liked Georgiou Prime fine, but not only was Lorca - and having to figure him out - a very interesting character , Michael's entire reaction to Mirrorverse Georgiou depended on her having lost Primeverse Philippa before, and the Michael/Mirroverse Georgiou relationship in seasons 1 - 3 became incredibly fascinating.
(Speaking of the Mirrorverse in general, again something I've said before: the first two DS9 episodes featuring it were good, but after that, each Mirrorverse ep felt like diminishing returns and just an excuse to go camp. Whereas Discovery's take on the Mirrorverse for me was the best since the original TOS episode and thematically highly relevant in a season which basically reversed Sisko's "it's easy to be a saint in paradise" outburst to challenge "it's easy to become a fiend in hell - but I dare you to remain a saint instead". Also: the Disco Mirrorverse costumes are hands down the best.)
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bimo correctly pointed out that s2 of Discovery seems to fall into the trap of treating Mirroverse Georgiou, who, lest we forget, ate Kelpiens for lunch and was a ruthless warlord of Genghis Khan proportions as if she'd done nothing worse than, say, Amanda on Highlander, i.e. a criminal past, sure, but not of genocidal war dimensions. But I would argue that s3 fixes that problem by confronting Georgiou with her past and letting her literally experience that she can't go home again. I wouldn't say she gets a classic redemption arc - but she does prove she has changed, she herself comes to realize that what she thought she wanted - a return to her status as Emperor, with a Michael who is the ruthless executioner her own raising fashioned - is no longer what she can live with. And it's highly significant that she doesn't save "her" Michael in that two parter, though that's what she sets out to do - well, not "save" as much as "make my Michael love me best again" - , but that she saves Saru, for whom she had only disdainful quips in the Primeverse (and is later helped by him in turn). He's not someone she loves - even at her most ruthless, Georgiou was able to love, that ability doesn't mean she's less of a villain. But her time in the Primeverse has made her see Saru and others as people, to see bravery in something other than a killing score, and her discovery that she can't go back to treating them as tools (or food) is all the more important as it happens without Primeverse Michael being there to connect with or impress. It was the relationship with "our" Michael that first caused her to do something other in the Primeverse than snark, but it, and the quest for power, are no longer all that motivates her. I have no idea how the Section 31 movie will deal with her character, but strictly speaking based on Discovery, I would compare Mirroverse Georgiou to the version of the Master in Doctor Who that's played by another Michelle, Michelle Gomez. Both have an unimaginable killing score behind them. Both joke about it. Both originally just do something not destructive due to their relationship with the heroic lead (despite said relationship also including mutual betrayal in addition to the old closeness). But both end up in a place where they really did become more than their old supervillain self. (One reason by I felt so let down by Dhawan!Master.) When we leave Missy, she has literally turned against her old self without witness, reward or applause, the definition the Doctor earlier gives of doing something good. And that's where we leave Mirroverse Georgiou when she exits Discovery as well. It's not redemption exactly, but it is genuine change for the better.
And there you have it: My personal Manifesto of love for Star Trek: Discovery!
The other days
1), First and foremost: they tried something new, and kept doing that. A few years back, when Disco was in its first or second season and Picard in its first, I wrote some meta along the lines of "I like these shows, but I wish Star Trek wouldn't, post Voyager, have decided to keep going to the nostalgia well, both in terms of movies and tv, instead of, well, boldly going where no ST has gone before. Well, Discovery in its first two seasons did to some degree use the nostalgia well in that it was set in a pre TOS era and used some prominent TOS characters, but not only did they literally go where no ST had gone before from their third season onwards, they also already did some pioneer work from the get go, i.e. the Discovery pilot. First and foremost, there's the overall narrative structure. To some degree, every preceding ST show and movie had as their main character the Captain. Just how much narrative space was given to the supporting cast varied (never mind William Shatner's ego, TOS simply hails from a tv era where you didn't give as much character development and stories to a wider ensemble as was true in the late 1980s when TNG brought ST back to the small screen, let alone the 1990s), but the Captain was the leading man (or woman, in the case of Janeway) in every sense. This wasn't the case any longer with Star Trek: Discovery. Michael Burnham was the lead character in all five seasons, but was "only" the Captain in the last two. In fact, the story that introduced her busted her back from First Officer and aspiring Captain to self loathing and much loathed prisoner, so for the first time in a ST show, we had, within the Starship setting a lead who started on the opposite end of the hierarchical spectrum and was in need of a personal redemption arc (from her own pov) in addition to the general learning arc. The Captain was still an important character, but in a supporting role (narratively speaking), and this would remain the case in the first three seasons, despite the person of the Captain changing. Which btw in addition to the pov shift also meant some interesting compare and contrast to how you can fulfill that role from your crew's pov, as well as part of our heroine's learning arc.
The other thing which ST: Discovery did that was new within ST from the get go was of course the fact it gave us gay regular characters who weren't from the Mirrorverse or whose being gay was just there in a blink and you miss it shot (looking at you, Alternate Timeline Sulu embracing your husband and daughter in Star Trek: Beyond. Back in the 1960s, having a black woman and a Russian character on the bridge crew might have been innovative and progressive, but the increasing reliance on nostalgia in post DS9 and pre Discovery Star Trek outings had also come to mean playing it safe. Occasional attempts to branch out either fell flat on their face (*cough* The Outcast *cough*) or were limited to on episode (Jadzia Dax and Lenara Kahn). But the Stamets/Culber relationship we got graced with from the first season onwards was the romantic and erotic relationship between two male regulars without any attempt to "explain" it by one of them being an alien, and it was in fact given as much narrative weight as that season's heterosexual relationship between regulars (Michael/Ash) (well, one and a half, if you also count L'Rell/Voq). The scene that revealed that Stamets and Culber were an item - their shared evening and tooth brush routine in their quarters - was justly praised for the casual tenderness without any sensationalism or self conscious "look what we're doing" lesson of the week.
When the show then left the just-pre-TOS-era behind with the end of the second season and jumped 900 years into the future, and remained there for the remaining seasons, it felt like it abandoning the safety net of a familiar setting and feeling confident enough to try a completely new era - and it pulled off said new era - and the new regulars that came with it, as well as new roles for several of our old regulars. Most importantly, the new setting allowed the show to do something I thought was direly needed within the Star Trek franchise: to showcase, in a truly show, not tell way, why the Federation in general and Starfleet in particular were something good and an organisation we'd want our heroes to be a part of. (Instead of wanting them to do their own thing on their lonesome.) This brings me to my next overall point.
2.) Back in the 1990s when first a very few TNG episodes and then massively DS9 started to include stories and storylines that highlighted darker aspects of the ST future (Sisko's famous "it's easy to be a saint in paradise!" outburst is representative here), it was something new and felt like fleshing out the overall 'verse, plus note that even the Dominion War arc on DS9 in the end sided with Team Idealism over Team End Justifies Means. Not unimportantly, these were tv shows broadcast at an era where the Cold War had ended and many an audience member (definitely yours truly) was (as it turns out unduly) optimistic about their present. By the time Star Trek: Enterprise came along and 9/11 happened, it resulted in the Xindi arc, which, wellllllll, ymmd, but I think it's where the attempt to mix "getting-your-hands-dirty-realism" into a Star Trek story went sour. The alternate timeline ST movies which in any regard leaned into the pop culture "Kirk the rebel" image among the many nostalgia well contents also used that tried and true ST stalwart, evil admirals and stubborn bureaucrats. It's a storytelling device popular for a reason, because a great many people identify when you give them heroes frustrated with their superiors and "standing up to the man!" and "Down with red tape!" is guaranteed to produce cheer. And then Star Trek: Picard started with a story that told us Picard resigned from Starfleet because due to the Synth catastrophe on Mars, Starfleet abandoned the Romulan rescue operation. I think you can see where I'm going with this. There is is only so often you can show Starfleet as an organisation where basically only our heroes are good guys who want to do something before they look stupid for still being members. Something similar is true for the overall Federation. Especially in a real life context where railing at
3.) And then there are the characters and their relationships. Making Michael Burnham so clearly the lead was of course a narrative risk in that chances are if you don't like Michael, you'll have difficulties with the show, whereas it's, say, possible to be not keen on Jonathan Archer and still like Enterprise (lest this comes across as raggin on ENT: it's also possible to love DS9 and still regard Sisko as the least interesting regular), because her personal story does dominate in all seasons. But to me - and again, this is a personal judgment - the risk paid off. Michael wasn't a character I fell in love with at first sight, but I found her interesting from the start, and I did come to love her before the first season was over. I also thought overall, her development as a person was well written (and superbly played), and the last season brought that home by letting her to a degree mentor Raynor, who was emotionally exactly where Michael had been at the start of the show (i.e. traumatized after having fucked up with the best of intentions but disastrous results, prickly and in need of redemption), and even in one episode bringing the cast and the audience face to face with her younger self. Saru the Kelpien was quite simply the most captivating non-human (but organic) character ST had offered in a long while, and among so many other things an amazing example of how an actor can emote and get thoughts across while covered in tons of make-up. (On a level with what Andreas Katsulas did as G'Kar in Babylon 5, and this is very high praise from me.) His and Michael's relationship, from their rivalry in the pilot to the deep friendship that develops thereafter became one of the emotional lynchpins of the show. Sylvia Tilly starts out as the adorable geek girl par excellence and has a great figuring-herself-out development through the seasons, and while I later missed the friendship scenes she had with Michael in the first two, the show gave her other captivating relationships - with Stamets, with Saru, with Vance - even with Georgiou, in a way, and basically: whoever you stuck Tilly in a scene with, she was guaranteed to evoke infinitely watchable responses from. I already talked about about Stamets and Culber. Dettmer and Owesekun basically did an O'Brien (as in, Miles, on TNG, before he became a full on main character on DS9) in that they started out with just a few lines in s1 and in the next few seasons became more and more fleshed out and compelling. And then there were those characters who were only in one or two seasons but during that time were an important part of what made these seasons so watchable, whether we're talking about Katrina Cornwell in seasons 1 and 2 or Laira Rillak in seasons 4 and 5, Gabriel Lorca in season 1 or Ozyraas in season 3, Christopher Pike on season 2 or Commander Raynor in season 5. (And while I still think the new Klingon look was a creative mistake, I had a lot of time for L'Rell as a character in seaons 1 and 2.)
Some of these characters, like Pike, Spock and Sarek and Amanda, were new spins at TOS classics. While Alternate Timeline Movie Pike from the Kelvin Timeline movies is possibly the element of those movies I liked the most, I can say Anson Mount's Pike now is my definite Pike. Was introducing him in s2 partly motivated by nostalgia well reasons? Probably. But it really worked within Discovery's larger story, because after the Lorca experience the crew needed a Captain who showed you can lead without being a (not so) secret authoritarian, who can be empathic instead of being manipulative. And Pike, alternate timeline movies aside, had not really been used in TOS beyond The Menagerie's adaption of the failed original pilot The Cage; s2 of Discovery not only was a chance to flesh out the character but to give his canon-ordained fate a new meaning. (And then it led to him getting his own spin-off, but this manifesto is not about Strange New Worlds.) As for Trek's most famous Vulcan-Human family, Spock, Sarek and Amanda: I've said it before and I'll say it again, Discovery is the first screen ST (the novels are another issue) bothering to make Amanda into a three dimensional character. (Pace, Jane Wyman fans: Journey to Babel is possibly my favourite TOS episode, original Amanda is fine, but that was one episode, and her cameos in the movies didn't offer much more, whereas Sarek got far more material in his later outings.) Michael's relationships with Sarek, Spock and Amanda in the first two seasons were my kind of complicated family relationships, and that particular retcon worked so well for me that I now have difficulties reading fanfic in which Michael isn't Spock's adopted sister.
Lastly, and you were probably waiting for this: Discovery had the good luck of hiring Michelle Yeoh when she was still affordable. (At least I'm guessing that post Everywhere Everything At Once, her salary sky rocketed.) (She deserves it, of course.) Since this is a personal manifesto, and I know many watchers feel differently: while she was lovely as Georgiou Prime in the pilot two parter and then in flashbacks, I'm 100 % on board with the show not making Georgiou Prime the first season's Captain instead of Lorca. (And was before the reveal of Lorca's true identity.) I liked Georgiou Prime fine, but not only was Lorca - and having to figure him out - a very interesting character , Michael's entire reaction to Mirrorverse Georgiou depended on her having lost Primeverse Philippa before, and the Michael/Mirroverse Georgiou relationship in seasons 1 - 3 became incredibly fascinating.
(Speaking of the Mirrorverse in general, again something I've said before: the first two DS9 episodes featuring it were good, but after that, each Mirrorverse ep felt like diminishing returns and just an excuse to go camp. Whereas Discovery's take on the Mirrorverse for me was the best since the original TOS episode and thematically highly relevant in a season which basically reversed Sisko's "it's easy to be a saint in paradise" outburst to challenge "it's easy to become a fiend in hell - but I dare you to remain a saint instead". Also: the Disco Mirrorverse costumes are hands down the best.)
bimo correctly pointed out that s2 of Discovery seems to fall into the trap of treating Mirroverse Georgiou, who, lest we forget, ate Kelpiens for lunch and was a ruthless warlord of Genghis Khan proportions as if she'd done nothing worse than, say, Amanda on Highlander, i.e. a criminal past, sure, but not of genocidal war dimensions. But I would argue that s3 fixes that problem by confronting Georgiou with her past and letting her literally experience that she can't go home again. I wouldn't say she gets a classic redemption arc - but she does prove she has changed, she herself comes to realize that what she thought she wanted - a return to her status as Emperor, with a Michael who is the ruthless executioner her own raising fashioned - is no longer what she can live with. And it's highly significant that she doesn't save "her" Michael in that two parter, though that's what she sets out to do - well, not "save" as much as "make my Michael love me best again" - , but that she saves Saru, for whom she had only disdainful quips in the Primeverse (and is later helped by him in turn). He's not someone she loves - even at her most ruthless, Georgiou was able to love, that ability doesn't mean she's less of a villain. But her time in the Primeverse has made her see Saru and others as people, to see bravery in something other than a killing score, and her discovery that she can't go back to treating them as tools (or food) is all the more important as it happens without Primeverse Michael being there to connect with or impress. It was the relationship with "our" Michael that first caused her to do something other in the Primeverse than snark, but it, and the quest for power, are no longer all that motivates her. I have no idea how the Section 31 movie will deal with her character, but strictly speaking based on Discovery, I would compare Mirroverse Georgiou to the version of the Master in Doctor Who that's played by another Michelle, Michelle Gomez. Both have an unimaginable killing score behind them. Both joke about it. Both originally just do something not destructive due to their relationship with the heroic lead (despite said relationship also including mutual betrayal in addition to the old closeness). But both end up in a place where they really did become more than their old supervillain self. (One reason by I felt so let down by Dhawan!Master.) When we leave Missy, she has literally turned against her old self without witness, reward or applause, the definition the Doctor earlier gives of doing something good. And that's where we leave Mirroverse Georgiou when she exits Discovery as well. It's not redemption exactly, but it is genuine change for the better. And there you have it: My personal Manifesto of love for Star Trek: Discovery!
The other days