Star Trek Discovery "That Hope is You Part 1" - Detailed Analysis and Review

After a long wait, Star Trek Discovery is back. Michael Burnham has succeeded in saving the universe, but she now has to face the fact that the lift she knew is gone forever, and her friends aboard Discovery are nowhere to be found. Worse than that, she learns that the Federation is all but gone in this distant future. What's a Starfleet officer to do? It turns out, this new century might need Michael just as much as the previous one did.

This is a good solid episode that opens the new season and promises an interesting and satisfying story.

So let's geek out about it.

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Transacript

Welcome to Nerd Heaven.

I’m Adam David Collings, the author of Jewel of The Stars.

And I am a nerd.

This is episode 38 of the podcast.

Today, we launch into something new and exciting. We’re covering the first episode of Star Trek Discovery season 3, and we’ll be doing weekly review analysis on each episode until the season is done.

And welcome to my new timeslot. Back when I was covering Star Trek Picard season 1, I’d watch the episode Friday night, then watch it again Saturday morning, taking notes and scripting the podcast. Then I’d record, edit and publish by Saturday afternoon. It got pretty intense. This time, I plan to pace myself a little. I’ll be posted on Mondays, Australian time zone. Probably Monday morning. That just allows me a bit more time to get the episode together and get some other things done on the weekend.

Today’’s episode is called That Hope is You. Part 1.

The description on Memory Alpha reads

Burnham navigates a strange, new galaxy, 930 years in her future, looking for the rest of the Discovery crew. (Season premiere)

The episode was Written by Michelle Paradise, Jenny Lumet, & Alex Kurtzman

It was Directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi

And it first aired on the 15th of October 2020

Make it so.

The end of season 2 was a big game changer, liquifying the status quo of the series. Michael Burnhan and the USS Discovery flew into a wormhole taking them into the distant future. Further into Star Trek’s future than we’ve ever seen before.

And that was an exciting prospect.

So now, finally, we get to see what kind of world they emerge into.

This gives the writers of the show the opportunity they’ve wanted all along, to create something brand new. To establish a completely unexplored era in the Star Trek universe. They must have had so much fun brainstorming ideas.

Honestly, Star Trek Discovery should never have been set in the pre-Kirk 23rd century, given the kind of creative freedom they wanted. The writers finally realised this and used the second half of season 2 to set up this change.

So ... the very first scene shows us a bird, with a digital clock projected on its side. Okay. That’s different. Evidently, this is some kind of futuristic alarm clock projecting a hologram. I kinda like it. I’d wake up to that.

We see a man wake up and leave his bed, which dissolves into a liquid state and disappear. The whole structure seems to be constructed from nanites. It’s very cool on screen.

He cleans his teeth, and a desk and chair are created by the same nanite technology as his bed. The process repeats, giving us a sense that this man’s life is very very routine and predictable.

He’s searching for signals, and he carries a case that bears a Starfleet logo (Oddly, it’s the early 23rd century logo with the split delta.)

When The Next Generation first came out, they designed a whole new aesthetic for the technology. We got the beloved Okudagrams, often referred to as LCARS, although technically, LCARS is the library computer access retrieval system. Anyway, we all love that look.

But for the 32nd century, they needed to similarly re-define the visual look of the Star Trek Universe. This nanite-based technology is both visually interesting and logical. It’s a believable extension from the replication and hologram technologies.We’ve heard the term “Particle Synthesis” from time to time in Star Trek. Arturis used it to fool the crew of Voyager into thinking his ship was Starfleet. Species 8472 also used it to re-created Starfleet Academy in the Delta Quadrant. I can’t help but wonder, is this an advanced form of particle synthesis? The name seems to fit what we see on screen. Later, we’ll see a control panel on a ship. Instead of okudagrams on a touch screen, we’ll see this same nanite technology creating displays and controls. So for the most part, it seems this has replaced the holographic controls we saw in Star Trek Picard. This technology actually reminds me of the Kryptronian technology in Man of Steel. That was kinda simila...