TL;DR – We finally get into the heart of the series, and see both the goals and the pitfalls of the upcoming season.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Review –

So after last week’s almost preview two part-er The Vulcan Hello (review) and Battle at the Binary Stars (review) this week we finally get into the season proper as we get an introduction to the USS Discovery and its crew. This also lets us into the main tension for the season and we can start to see some of its potential, and also some of its problems. So with that in mind let’s jump in and look at Context is for Kings, now there may be some [SPOILERS] coming up if you have not already seen the episode.

So to set the scene, at the end of last week’s episode Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) was stripped of her rank and sentenced for life for mutiny after she Vulcan neck pinched Captain Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) and tried to fire on the Klingon flagship. Not that it mattered because the Klingons were out for blood and to cause a war and in the resulting carnage 8186 Starfleet personal died. Well it has been six months since then and war is continuing between the Federation and the Klingons, and Michael is being transferred to a new prison colony. This is all straightforward, well that is until the pilot of the shuttle is incapacitated. So everyone is going to die, but wait for it just so happens that the USS Discovery a brand new ship just off the production line just so happened to be there to save the day.

Where Discovery excels is in the characters

So as we see from the ship pretty much everyone in Starfleet blames Michael for starting the war with the Klingons, to the point where they are almost happy to sit back and let her fellow prisoners take her out. This is a side of Starfleet you don’t often see, but you don’t usually see Starfleet six months into a war that they don’t know if they will win. We meet Landry (Rekha Sharma) the security officer that shows an indifference to her fellow sentient beings that was off-putting, Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) a science officer that is more than a little upset at how the Federation is using his research. As well as this, we have the twin poles of Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman) who is wonderfully optimistic, and then the Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) who I can sum up with this, he has a bloody Gorn skeleton in his study, but also a Tribble, he’s a complicated man.

Now, one thing I have to say is the USS Discovery is a beautiful starship, just gorgeous, and they showed it off with such glory on its big reveal. So you start with the shuttle starting to shake itself apart, then calm and you hear a sound and blue light beams in through the windows, the shuttle has been captured by Discovery’s tractor beams. The camera then pans up to give us a view of the ventral hull, we then watch as multiple tractor beams direct the shuttle into its shuttlebay, we then zoom past the ship, finally stopping to give us that hero shot, that they earned. We see that throughout the episode, like the fight sequence that was well choreographed, and it was nice to see a fight that wasn’t ‘bring your hands together into a double fist and strike’, whilst maybe wrestling for a bit. You also see that in how the tension was managed when they boarded the USS Glenn, each step was carefully guided towards the big reveal.

Hope no one is wearing red

However, space fungus, eh. My issue with this is that we know they don’t succeed unless we are heading towards a possible third timeline here. Now that whole Manhattan Project vibe is interesting, just maybe not in the reveal. Also, I’m liking that they are showing that the USS Discovery is a much more species-diverse starship than previously seen, but could you show some of the old as well as the new, stop teasing the Andorians please and thank-you.

It is good that we are finally on the Discovery, and I’m looking forward to seeing where they go, and if there are any other science projects running amok out there. My only issue is how they are incorporating this new, almost Iconian technology, but that is a wait and see.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you seen Star Trek Discovery yet?, let us know what you thought in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day.    

Trailer – Click Here to View (all trailers have heavy spoilers)
Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Star Trek Discovery
Directed by – Akiva Goldsman
Written by – Gretchen J Berg, Aaron Harberts, Craig Sweeny, & Bryan Fuller
Based off – Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry
Created by – Bryan Fuller & Alex Kurtzman
Starring in Season 1 – Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Shazad Latif, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman & Jason Isaacs with Michelle Yeoh, James Frain, Chris Obi, Mary Chieffo, Rainn Wilson, Kenneth Mitchell, Rekha Sharma, Damon Runyan, Clare McConnell & Wilson Cruz