"Roseanne" Goes Down in Flames

Well this is a cancellation I certainly didn't see coming.

When I wrote about the premiere of the revival season of "Roseanne" a couple of weeks ago, I was probably a little too optimistic. I thought that the character's support of Donald Trump was a good thing to see portrayed on television, and maybe it could help to mend the country's cultural rifts instead of deepening them. The show's creators insisted that the show wasn't going to be about politics, and mostly kept them out of spotlight, but I thought it was brave simply to bring up the incendiary subject matter in the first place.

What I did not realize was that Roseanne Barr, the actress, is a Trump supporter in real life, a conspiracy theorist, and apparently a raging bigot online. She's been parroting right wing talking points on Twitter for the past several months, which largely went ignored. However, after an especially ugly, racist tweet aimed at a former Obama advisor, ABC shockingly did the right thing and cancelled her show. Let me put that into further context. ABC cancelled the highest rated comedy currently airing on network television, and the third highest rated program overall. The success of the revival was so big, ABC built its entire Upfront presentation around it, and "Roseanne" was likely was responsible for a slew of other revivals and the un-cancellation of Tim Allen's "Last Man Standing." As one of the few outright hits of the last network television season, I fully expected the new "Roseanne" to run another hundred episodes or more.

However, as badly as I feel for everyone else involved in "Roseanne," who are now looking for work, I feel so happy that ABC made this decision, and made it so swiftly. It's exactly in keeping with the spirit of the #Metoo movement where Hollywood made several male stars persona non grata practically overnight, often massively impacting the production of current films and television series. It's also a relief to see this kind of reaction after months of Donald Trump's unhinged behavior on Twitter, where he lies and berates his political rivals constantly with impunity. Even if this kind of bullying is currently being tolerated or even encouraged in Washington D.C., it doesn't fly in the entertainment industry. It's a very strange time when Hollywood is consistently and publicly displaying more moral behavior than Capitol Hill.

The loss of the "Roseanne" revival is not a particularly great one to popular culture. I made it to the end of the current season, and debated over whether I wanted to bother writing up another post for it. The series remained consistently entertaining, but it was never as good as I wanted it to be. The episode with the Conners' new Muslim neighbors was pretty bad, but the episode where Johnny Galecki showed up as David was pretty good. All the guest spots were fun, especially Estelle Parsons' Bev shacking up with a new boyfriend played by Christopher Lloyd in Reverend Jim mode. All in all, I was hoping that the show would improve over further seasons, but that was far from a sure thing. I'm perfectly happy to let it go at this point.

Others, of course, are not. I've been watching the reactions to the cancellation unfold. There's been discussion of how the show might be salvaged by writing Roseanne out and creating a "Hogan Family" style spinoff. Or maybe a right-wing outlet might scrape the funds together to pick the show up from ABC. That's not likely, considering how much of the core talent has now gone on record distancing themselves from Roseanne Barr. Maybe co-showrunner Whitney Cummings sensed what was coming and got out ahead of the storm.

Out of everyone involved, I hope Sara Gilbert will find more work soon. Laurie Metcalf and John Goodman are much in demand and will land on their feet, but Gilbert was the one who I found that I'd really missed seeing on television, and she was a big reason why I felt that the "Roseanne" revival had a future. Now, I'm facing down another "Cosby Show" situation, wondering if the behavior of Roseanne Barr is going to end up ruining one of my favorite sitcoms for me permanently.

The situation is still shaking out as we speak, so I'm sure there will be more developments over the next few days, and the repercussions - both good and bad - are going to be felt for a long time to come.

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My Top Ten Films of 1988

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? - There are some films where it feels like it's a miracle that they exist.  In the case of "Roger Rabbit," you not only have a ripping detective yarn told through the most technically astonishing combination of live action and traditional hand-drawn animation ever put on film, but somehow it also gets all the classic cartoon characters  from Disney and Warners to appear together on the same screen. Such a feat has never been accomplished since, or even attempted. And it's to the credit of every artist involved in this obvious labor of love that the movie is still a wonder to this day.

Cinema Paradiso - One of my favorite movie moments of all time is the ending of this film, a tribute to the movie magic of the past and the fans whose lives it helped to shape.  I am literally unable to hear Ennio Morricone's score for the film or even look at the poster art without welling up. I've only seen the longer version of "Cinema Paradiso," so I can't speak to the controversy about the international or Italian version of the film being superior, but either way I know this is an unassailable achievement in Italian filmmaking.  Of all the movies about loving the movies, there's nothing that remotely compares.

Dead Ringers - My very first David Cronenberg film, and one of his most potent and memorable explorations of body horror.  Jeremy Irons' double performance does most of the heavy lifting here, bringing the curious Mantle twins and their increasingly disturbing relationship to life.  What's really impressive here is that though there are allusions to the supernatural and threats of terrible violence, nearly all the horror in the film stays firmly in the realm of the psychological.  And yet it plays out like the most florid and ostentatious Grand Guignol, a macabre tragedy as impenetrable as it is entrancing.

Coming to America - A modern day fairy tale makes a prince of Eddie Murphy and a happy mockery of pampered foreign elites and the American immigrant experience.  The older the film gets, the more I appreciate its sense of humor and its commitment to its outlandish premise. The obscenely wealthy Zamundan royals in particular are an endless source of laughs.  The opening twenty minutes have some of the most fantastically silly and memorable gag work of the entire decade. This is also easily the best showcase of Eddie Murphy's relentless charm and talent at the height of his career.   

Die Hard - For a certain breed of red-blooded American, the original "Die Hard" might as well be a founding document.  It may not be the best action film ever made, but I think it's a strong candidate for being the most viscerally enjoyable.  The good guy is eminently relatable, spouts cool one-liners, and saves the day. The baddies are all greedy, deceptive nogoodniks, who underestimate our scrappy underdog.  The violence is plentiful and beautifully choreographed. It's no wonder that "Die Hard" became the template for so much media that followed, all the way up to the present day.    

Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbor Totoro - 1988 was a fantastic year for animation, particularly Japanese anime.  To date, the industry has never made anything better than the unlikely Studio Ghibli double feature of Hayao Miyazaki's lovely childhood fantasy, "My Neighbor Totoro," and Isao Takahata's gutting war memoir, "The Grave of the Fireflies."  Both share similar animation styles and character designs, but their sensibilities couldn't be more different. "Totoro" is a lighthearted, pastoral adventure film filled with excitement and incident, but little conflict. The film's iconic fantasy creatures express themselves without words, and are easily understood by the smallest children.  The beautifully observed natural details and child's-eye view of the world would characterize much of Miyazaki's work. "Fireflies," by contrast, brings the audience into the intimate tragedy of a pair orphaned siblings trying to survive during WWII. Though often somber and elegiac, there are also moments of wonder here on par with anything I've ever seen in Ghibli's other films.  However, it's the emotional weight of the unfolding tragedy that makes it unforgettable. It remains my choice for the best animated film ever made.

Distant Voices, Still Lives - Watching Terence Davies' work feels like looking at snapshots of the past.  And so, two different periods in the lives of a British family are presented here like two different photo albums, one covering the 1940s and one covering the 1950s.  Both halves of the film are unusually immersive and feel painfully personal, showing the characters in both the good times and the bad. Music plays a central role, helping to establish communal ties, the changing atmosphere of post-war Britain, and the persistence of hope in even the darkest and most trying circumstances.

Rain Man - Dustin Hoffman is one of my favorite actors, and the iconic Raymond Babbitt is one of his career highlights.  The film is a smart examination of dysfunctional family dynamics and personal responsibility that provides an alternative to the usual, sentimentalized portrayal of people on the autism spectrum in films of the era.  It's immensely watchable too, using the common tropes of road trip and odd couple buddy movies to excellent effect. Tom Cruise also hasn't gotten nearly enough credit over the years for playing the harried straight man here to Hoffman's more colorful performance.  

The Thin Blue Line - If the techniques and format of Errol Morris's landmark investigative documentary feel overly familiar, it's only because so many other films and television shows have copied them over the years.  It's hard to imagine the true crime genre today without the use of crime scene reenactments and interview subjects talking directly to the camera. Morris's thorough, careful building of his case is still engrossing to see unfold onscreen, and the political implications remain sobering.  There are still very few films that have had such a tangible impact in such a specific, visible way.

Honorable Mention

Akira

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My Favorite Wim Wenders Film

The road movie is not an American invention, but it is surely the natural home for them.  There's more open road and more empty expanse in America than in most other countries, with an ubiquitous car culture like no other.  So it should be no surprise that a German director who became famous for directing a series of deeply thoughtful, existential road movies should make his greatest one set in America.  

It's always fascinating to see America through the eyes of a foreign director, and Wim Wenders offers a particularly memorable view.  "Paris, Texas" presents an America that is so vast that a man can lose himself there wholly. The protagonist, Travis, played by Harry Dean Stanton, wanders into view at the beginning of the movie from out of an endless desert, his memory lost and his past a mystery.  Silent and unresponsive, it's not clear if he's all there. Travis's return to civilization is only the beginning of a long, eventful journey to find and try to reconnect to members of his family. He spends most of the film in transit, on foot and by car, traversing great distances both mentally and physically.  

Robby Müller's cinematography here is legendary, not only for the bleak landscape shots of the American West, but the eye-popping neon-lit night scenes, and the separation and merging of two people's faces through a pane of glass.  With such sparse dialogue, much of the story is told through the framing and interactions of the characters. Objects, places, and characters are color-coded to help chart the progression of Travis's journey, emotionally heightening many scenes.  What we're not shown and not told is often as important as what we are. Harry Dean Stanton's performance is another key element. Travis spends the early part of the film nearly catatonic, seemingly lost in his own world as he stumbles through the desert.  Looking as weathered and wild as the wilderness he emerges from, he's an intriguing, mysterious presence. And when his personality and emotions begin to resurface, he also proves a deeply compelling one. Stanton's scenes with Nastassja Kinski in particular are haunting, and it's here that Travis is finally revealed to be a tragic, elegeic figure.        

"Paris, Texas" follows the form of Wenders' previous trilogy of road movies, "Alice in the Cities," "The Wrong Move," and "Kings of the Road," which were  all set in and around European locales. However the story here, loosely based on the work of Sam Shepard, represents a clear shift in tone and content. The characters' journeys in the German trilogy were generally aimless, and represented a disorienting, but also freeing break from the established order, mirroring the changing times.  In "Paris, Texas," Travis is trying to return to a former state of being, represented by his efforts to reunify his scattered family. Regret and nostalgic yearning drive him, rather than a more amorphous search for meaning and purpose. And ultimately, this journey ends when he has to face the reality that he no longer has a place in the lives of his loved ones.    

The movie has been called Wenders' love letter to the vanishing American west, and can be classified as one of his many homages to American cinema.  Prior to "Paris, Texas," he directed American-influenced gangster and crime films, even casting some of his favorite American directors as lowlifes in "The American Friend."  Wenders has become as famous for his documentaries about other artists around the world as he is for his narrative features. He claims that his propensity for globetrotting started with his preparation for "Paris, Texas."  The characters criss-cross America, so Wenders went on his own road trip through the Midwest, taking the first series of photographs that would begin his "Pictures from the Surface of the Earth" project that now spans many countries and continents.  

So it's very tempting to want to connect the journey of Wim Wenders with that of his main character, searching for a bygone America that perhaps only existed in old movies.  Wenders, however, didn't fade away into obsolescence, but has continued making beloved, acclaimed films to this day. I suspect it's because he never really got off the road, even after he stopped making his road movies.  

What I've Seen - Wim Wenders

Alice in the Cities (1974)

The Wrong Move (1975)

Kings of the Road (1976)

The American Friend (1977)

Hammett (1982)

The State of Things (1982)

Paris, Texas (1984)

Wings of Desire (1987)

Buena Vista Social Club (1999)

Pina (2011)

The Salt of the Earth (2014)

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The New Perils of Social Media

It has been a long time since I've written anything on this blog about social media, because I honestly don't use much of it these days.  I abandoned Twitter for the most part. I never used Snapchat or Instagram, being very privacy-conscious and a little paranoid about too much exposure.  Facebook, however, I still check daily, mostly to see what my friends and family are up to. I'm also still addicted to Reddit.

At the same time, social media has become the latest battle ground in the culture wars.  Russian bots and influencers have unleashed waves of fake news and other propaganda to influence unsuspecting users around the world.  Cambridge Analytica stole information left and right.  The neo-nazis, now rebranded the alt-right, use them heavily for recruitment. I remember the early days of Twitter, when people were scoffing at the prospect of anyone being able to say anything important with a 140-character limit.  Now it's the U.S. President's primary means of communication. Frankly, it's little terrifying.

Looking back over my own posts on the subject, we were all wrestling with these questions and pointing out the potential for abuse for years.  I was more worried about corporate giants trying to sell me things, honestly, as I watched the Facebook advertisements invade my feed and the proliferation of sponsored content popping up like daisies on news sites.  The hoaxers and the conspiracy theorists pushing alternative narratives and propaganda were very obvious, or so I thought, and I never took their efforts very seriously. The early skirmishes with fake news, like the ACORN scandal, felt like rare occurrences.  It wasn't until the 2016 election that everyone finally seemed to realize how susceptible a huge portion of the online public was to these tactics, and how willing various groups were to use them to push their agendas.

One of the biggest things that changed was the sheer volume of the propaganda.  A major early warning sign was the steady disappearance of comment sections on the major news sites, which were increasingly being taken over by vitriolic agitators.  Since the early days of the internet I would stumble across the occasional pocket of white nationalists or NRA die-hards who spent all their time online ranting about their pet causes, but they usually stayed in their own little bubbles.  Suddenly there was a new breed of more vocal, more aggressive zealots who were instigating fights everywhere you looked. And it makes so much sense now to know that a lot of these agitators weren't just our home-grown crazies, but deliberately deployed trolls from Russia and other countries looking to cause disruptions in online discussions.  So many sites just did away with comment sections because they didn't have the resources to deal with it.

Of course, social media can't do that because the whole point of them is the person to person interaction.  There's been a lot of hand-wringing about how to combat the onslaught of propaganda, mainly looking at ways to make the platforms more responsible for their content the way the old school media like television and newspapers are.  There's also been a huge push to educate the public about fake news and manipulation before the next round of American elections. Twitter and Facebook have made some very public efforts to curb hate speech and step up their enforcement of existing rules against notable bad actors.  How much of an effect they're actually having is a matter of debate, and it may be an issue of too little too late.

I've very carefully curated my Facebook experience so that there are almost no political postings.  I banished the majority of third party links and only a few odd relatives continue to rail about Trump or Marine Le Pen with any regularity.  Mostly I just see baby and vacation photos, and the occasional silly meme. In Reddit, I stick to the media subs and try to avoid the main subreddits.  It's a little harder, but I can usually ignore the trolls.

However, I know that this is no longer the common social media experience for a lot of people.  I've watched friends and relatives get caught up in online fights, share ridiculously hyperbolic or outright fake stories, and become increasingly polarized and pushed to the extremes of the political spectrum.  The fact that we're all liberals doesn't mean we're any less susceptible to the same mechanisms that got Trump elected.

To be continued...

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The 2017 Movies I Didn't See

I've been writing these posts every year for the past several years to sort out my feelings toward some of the more prominent movies I've made a conscious decision to skip watching. Once again, I'm working through the last handful of 2017 films on my "To Watch" list, mostly foreign films with later domestic releases.  The bigger 2018 titles are starting to roll in, so it's time to make some decisions. This year I have to be especially tough, because the amount of time I have to consume media has shrunk considerably.

Below are seven movies that didn't make the cut this year.  I reserve the right to revisit and reverse my viewing choices in the future.   However, I still haven't watched anything from last year's list.

"Hostiles" - Well, I'm just going to be blunt.  I haven't enjoyed much of anything that director Scott Cooper has made, and I'm a little sick of Christian Bale at the moment.  "Hostiles" was positioned as an Oscar film, and got positive reviews, but little passionate reaction. And while I'm glad to see so many Native American actors employed in a film with authentic portrayals of Native Americans, that seems to be the best thing going for it.  And frankly, that's not enough, especially since the POV characters are still the white male characters. I'd be much more receptive to the film if it were actually about the Native American experience instead of your typical Hollywood movie about a white guy processing his trauma through interaction with another culture, a la "Dances With Wolves" and "The Last Samurai."     

"Suburbicon" - I think I've given George Clooney enough chances to dismiss this one sight unseen, especially considering the amount of negative press it has gotten.  Review after review lists the same complaints, that it's trying to do too much at once, and it doesn't have a handle on the satirical elements and the social commentary.  The presence of a Coen brothers' script sounds mildly intriguing, but the consensus seems to be that Clooney bungled the all-important tone, especially in regards to the parts of the movie dealing with a black family moving into an all-white neighborhood in the 1950s.  Oscar Isaac is supposed to be very good in this, and I do like Oscar Isaac very much, but not enough to want to watch this. Can Clooney just go be a humanitarian full time for a while?

"Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool" - Another prestige pic that got some attention in the lead-up to the Oscars, but was never really a contender.  The performances got a lot of acclaim, and I like Annette Bening and Jamie Bell, but the particulars of the plot here make me cringe just reading them.  I haven't seen any film about the older Hollywood stars done well recently, including "My Week With Marilyn," "Trumbo," and "Hitchcock." There's just something terribly artificial about them, and the reliance on nostalgia often galls.  I'm not that familiar with actress Gloria Grahame, which might actually help here, but I suspect that the genre may just not be for me. And it's not a good sign that the director is Paul McGuigan, whose most recent film was the disastrous "Victor Frankenstein."

"Goodbye Christopher Robin" and "The Man Who Invented Christmas" - Two biopics about famous writers of literary classics that came out within a few months of each other.  Both seem to be following the "Shakespeare in Love" formula of explaining elements in the plots of the written stories by examining the lives of their authors, something that's hard to do well.  A lot of similar films end up feeling awfully contrived, like "Saving Mr. Banks." The reviews were decent for both of the new movies, but frankly I'm not enough of a fan of Winnie-the-Pooh or "A Christmas Carol" to care about the circumstances of their creation.  More to the point, both movies came and went quickly without much fanfare, so I doubt there's much to them worth making a fuss about.

"The Glass Castle" - Woody Harrelson had several smaller films out this year that I wound up skipping, including "Wilson" and "LBJ."  However, the one I feel bad about passing over is Destin Cretton's second film, "The Glass Castle." I enjoyed "Short Term 12" very much, and was interested in what he was going to do next.  However, the subject matter of "Glass Castle" gave me pause immediately. Dysfunctional family dramas are all well and good, but this one features exceptionally miserable content, including child abuse.  I kept this one on my "To Watch" list for a very long time, but ultimately the critics were fairly cool on it, so I was never in much of a hurry to seek it out. Eventually I just wrote it off as a title I didn't think I was going to get much out of.  

"The Snowman" - Now, in a different year I'd watch a movie like "The Snowman" just because of its notoriety.    Director Tomas Alfredson claims this detective thriller came out so badly because the production ran out of time and important scenes were never shot.  The flabbergasted audience reactions to the unfortunate finished product have been very entertaining to read. I'd like to get in on the fun myself, but I can't justify spending two hours on a movie I'd only be watching to mock.  Maybe if I find more breathing room later in the year I can sneak it in somewhere, but for now I still have way, way, way too many other films to watch.

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"Faces Places" is Off to the Races

It has been a very, very long time since the last Agnes Varda film, "Beaches of Agnes," which was announced at the time to be her swan song.  So when I heard that she was coming back for another documentary, I knew I had to see it. Like several of her other later films, "Faces Places" turns the camera on 88 year-old Varda herself, along with her co-director JR, a 33 year-old photographer and street artist.  The pair reportedly liked each other's work, and decided to embark on this movie together.

Most of the film is taken up with our duo travelling about the French countryside in JR's van, a whimsical mobile photo booth that has been painted to look like a giant SLR camera.  They engage in the creation of several art projects together, mostly involving taking photos, enlarging them, and then using these to make gigantic murals on blank walls or other empty spaces.  At their first stop they put giant pictures of miners all over a neighborhood in a former mining town, sparking discussions and remembrances. At another, they blow up a picture of a farmer and place him on an empty barn, overseeing the fields that he works.  With every project, they do their best to involve the locals, both as subjects and as contributors of commentary and criticism. Varda remarks at one point that the best part of making the film was getting to meet all these people - factory workers, dock workers, cheesemakers, and plenty of others.

After several of these mural projects, they get to be a little repetitive, but this isn't all the film has up its sleeve.  There's also a meta-narrative interwoven throughout "Faces Places" about Varda and JR's developing friendship. They start off the film with a series of fake scenarios of when they first met - at a bus stop, at a bakery, or most amusingly, at a dance club.  We see the pair having conversations on various public benches. They talk about getting old, about their careers, and how JR never takes off his sunglasses, like Varda's old friend Jean-Luc Godard. JR accompanies Varda to the optometrist, to see about her blurring vision.  Varda pays a visit to JR's grandmother to ask about his childhood. Most of these vignettes are clearly staged, but others leave room for doubt. There's a particularly touching moment at the climax, where the scenario may be fake, but Varda's emotional reaction to it clearly isn't.    

There are some absolutely breathtaking images here, and the whole film is brimming over with creativity, inspiration, and artistic provocation.  I want to describe some of my favorite scenes, including an absolutely glorious Jean-Luc Godard tribute, but they're much better left for the viewer to discover for maximum impact.  The odd couple pairing of the grandmotherly Agnes Varda and the fleet-footed JR is a lot of fun, especially the different ways that they are able to approach people, and what happens when they're at odds.  I want to stress that this disagreement is brief, and very cordial. Unlike most of the heavy, serious documentaries I've been watching lately, "Faces Places" is such a lark. Varda and JR have no message to push but the joy of creating art and the excitement of exploration.  Their energies, even if Varda needs to rest often, are infectious and invigorating.

And there are moments of poignancy too.  While the film touches on JR's background briefly, much more time is devoted to Varda returning to bits of her past, as she did in "Beaches of Agnes."  Visits to a former model's house, to a cemetery, and to the home of an old friend prompt occasionally painful reminiscences. There's no getting away from Varda's sadness at the loss of so many important collaborators and friends over the course of her long career, and "Faces Places" takes the time to deal with this directly.  It all leads up to a delightful final shot that reminds the audience that however much Varda likes to share personal moments with her viewers, there are many parts of her life and relationships that will always remain a mystery.

Finally, I wish we could have gotten an epilogue of some sort with JR and his Varda standee at the Oscar luncheon, which was just too perfect for words.            

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"Star Trek: Discovery" Year One

All the spoilers.  All of them.

For the first half of "Star Trek: Discovery," I was firmly in the position of the patient, long-time Trek fan who wasn't particularly happy with what the new series was doing, but who understood that "Star Trek" shows often had bumpy first seasons.  There were a lot of things that weren't working, but I was optimistic that things could improve with time.

And then the Discovery went to the infamous Mirror Universe, and everything got much better in a hurry.  It honestly didn't occur to me that the first half of the season was doing so much set-up for the second half, because that's not how "Star Trek" traditionally operates.  However, this time around with the benefit of a serialized story and ongoing character arcs, "Discovery" could do things like big plot twists and evolving relationships and all that good space opera melodrama.  And the payoffs, though often predictable, were so satisfying to see play out. Purists might have fretted that this wasn't what they wanted out of "Star Trek," but I was ecstatic to find the show's creators committed to trying something so different.  There was a definite sense of ambitious experimentation, of turning the old formulas upside down and seeing what interesting things could be done with all the familiar "Trek" tropes.

The flip side of this, of course, is that the series is dreadfully inconsistent and some of the ideas are very badly executed.  Most of the season embraces a darker, gloomier aesthetic and more serious atmosphere, which works great when the show is fully in that groove.  This is the most apparent in the Mirror Universe episodes, where the narrative momentum gets a big boost from the nightmare scenario of an alternate dimension populated by evil versions of everyone we know.  Much less successful are the adventures that try to incorporate lighter material, like the Harry Mudd (Rainn Wilson) episode with the time loops. It's mostly thrilling and darkly humorous, but then has a weirdly sentimental ending that doesn't fit.  Or there's the finale, where a lot of time is spent on a big exciting mission, except it also has to tie up all these loose ends, and winds up feeling sloppy and unfocused.

I liked the central character of Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) more than most, though her stoicism made it difficult to really empathize with her, and rendered her romance with Ash (Shazad Latif) difficult to swallow at times.  There have been a lot of awkward romantic relationships in "Star Trek" history, but this one was still pretty rough. Fortunately Martin-Green's performance was consistently strong throughout, and she managed to sell the tougher aspects of the character and nail a few big monologues.  The rest of the Discovery crew quickly grew on me, especially Cadet Tilly (Mary Wiseman) and Commander Saru (Doug Jones). I will also be extremely disappointed if this is the last we ever see of Ash, Lorca (Jason Isaacs), Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), and Culber (Wilson Cruz).

It has to be said that Fuller's treatment of the Klingons was a huge misstep, not only because the redesign made it so much more difficult for the actors to get anything across, but having all those lengthy Klingon language scenes in the early episodes was mind-numbing to sit through.  I don't think the Voq storyline was worth it, even if the twist was very clever. The Discovery handing L'Rell (Mary Chieffo) ultimate power doesn't make any damn sense. The whole resolution of the war happened far too quickly. I suspect that there was some significant rewriting that went on to reduce the amount of Klingon involvement in the second half.  This is a disappointment, since the Klingons have a lot of potential for more epic storylines, and they were never remotely so problematic in the past.

Going forward, my hope is that "Discovery" relies less on spectacle and stunts, and widens its scope a bit so that we can focus on characters other than Michael Burnham.  I had no issue with how corny some of the big plot developments were - this is "Star Trek" after all - but it did get tiresome how everything seemed to revolve around Michael.  Stamets (Anthony Rapp) or Tilly or even Ash would be good candidates to take a bigger role next year. And I'll definitely be back for next year, if only to see how "Discovery" continues to change and grow.  I don't think the show is done surprising us yet.

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