Will becoming captain change Michael Burnham on Star Trek: Discovery?

So: Michael Burnham is now officially the captain. This happened at the end of last season, after she and her crew managed to single-handedly both solve and resolve the crisis that had rendered a universe’s worth of dilithium inert, and hey, good news, it has not unhappened since then. It was an odd dramatic note to end on, the sort of thing that makes conceptual sense but doesn’t feel nearly as meaningful as it is clearly intended to feel.

In theory, Michael has been working towards this promotion since the pilot, when she was the second officer on a ship before she committed mutiny and inadvertently helped get her captain killed. If you squint, you can probably imagine some kind of line connecting that point to this one, a journey of development and growing maturity as Michael learned to temper her bolder decisions with the wisdom and patience that comes from experience.

Again: that’s the theory. In practice, Michael is the main character, and while she didn’t always have the authority to make her wishes into commands, it rarely stopped her from doing what she wanted for very long. That in and of itself is not necessarily a problem; breaking the rules and getting results is a time honored narrative tradition, and Michael’s self-confidence and intelligence are a large part of what makes her a protagonist. But it does make the promotion to the captain’s chair something of a lateral move. Yes, she no longer has to pass her orders through Saru first to get things done, but did that ever really matter that much? Last season toyed with Saru (and various other important characters) being disappointed in Michael’s actions, but it never really seemed to change much about her relationships or her; putting her in command is more symbolic than anything else.

“Kobayashi Maru” opens with Michael up to her usual shenanigans—trying to make peace with an alien race that doesn’t trust the Federation (for good reason). Booker is also there, because apparently being in a relationship means you also work together constantly. At least it does on Star Trek, where work is the only meaningful thing any of these characters ever really do. The negotiations get uncomfortable, the aliens attack, but Michael takes a risk and orders her crew to fix a broken satellite as a gesture of good faith. The satellite helps the aliens guide themselves while they fly, and by restoring it, Michael proves to them that the new Federation are actually definitely good guys, and everybody goes home happy.

All the usual Discovery tics are present and accounted for. The fight with the aliens starts because Booker, for some reason, brought his cat with him in the ship he and Burnham took to the planet. The aliens don’t understand the concept of pets or metaphor, and take Booker’s comment that Grudge is a “queen” literally. It’s clearly supposed to be funny, but it’s the sort of goofy, stupid funny that makes it hard to take any of these characters, or their concerns, seriously. I’m not sure how a culture that apparently depends on flying didn’t adapt to the broken satellite, just as I don’t know why they chose to fly after Michael and Booker instead of just, y’know, running so they could actually fire their guns straight. Maybe it’s a cultural thing.

Or maybe it’s just that everything is so exciting that we’re not really supposed to think about any of this. It’s been the show’s m.o. almost from the start: an emphasis on whiz-bang thrill ride and broad emotional beats over thoughtful world-building and character development. It would be surprising if they tried to change things now, and to its credit, the show still looks exceptionally shiny and bright, even if it is occasionally too visually cluttered to get a clear sense of what’s happening. (Beyond just a general sense of “uh, stuff.”) But if we’re supposed to still be invested in the gradual re-building of the Federation, this basically works. Michael’s in charge now, but as argued above, not much has changed. The only real difference is that we don’t occasionally cut to show Saru looking concerned.

We do check in with Saru later in the episode, though; he’s hanging out on his home planet with Su’kal, the guy whose broken hearted temper tantrum blew up a bunch of dilithium a while back. In the near millennium since Michael and Saru completely overhauled Kelpian society, the former slaves have come to live peacefully with their older masters, although said old masters are still presented (somewhat hilariously) in creepy evil darkness. Su’kal is doing well enough, and the couple of scenes we get on Kaminar seem to exist solely to reassure the audience that this plot thread has been tied off, and to push Saru back to Discovery where he belongs.

Meanwhile in the main plot, Michael is grumpy because the Federation is opening a new Starfleet Academy, and President Laira Rillak (Chelah Horsdal) is going to make a speech. This makes Michael unhappy because she’s convinced the speech is going to be political, and Michael doesn’t like politics. This is a standard issue trait for a certain kind of hero, a way to signal to the audience that Michael is a straight-shooter, not like those fatcats in Space Washington; more specifically to this show, it’s also a way to clue us in that, captain or not, Michael is going to have to deal with yet another person trying to tell her what she can and can’t do.

There’s a certain amount of sense in this. Michael is far from the first Trek captain to struggle against government oversight—the original series had Kirk dealing with a grumpy, ill-informed ambassador, and every entry in the franchise since then (with the exception of Voyager, which spends most of its time far beyond Federation reach) has had its share of pissy beaurucrats and corrupt leaders.

There’s some effective irony in seeing Michael finally get the command she wanted for so long, only to learn that “command” is as much a matter of perspective as anything else. But it’s a dynamic the show has leaned into so many times, from so many angles, that I’m not sure there’s anything more to say about it. Michael will want to do something, someone will tell her she shouldn’t, she’ll do it anyway, rinse repeat. The entire series kicked off when Michael committed mutiny, and if she didn’t learn anything then, I don’t imagine a new lady frowning at her is going to achieve much now.

To the show’s credit, at least President Rillak doesn’t seem to be a hypocrite or a monster. Her insistence on coming along on a Discovery rescue mission is mildly irritating, but it turns out she has a good reason for it; she’s sizing Michael up for the captaincy of a ship with a fancy new kind of propulsion system. Her sole sin of the hour is lying to a panicked space station commander, but the lie was necessary in order to get the man to hear reason, and the fact that he winds up dead by the end isn’t her fault.

But all of this feels more than a little familiar. Once again, we have Michael taking risks to save lives, while an authority figure tells her she should stand down, lest she get everyone on the ship killed. It’s a pointless debate, given that we know how this is going to end up, and the reveal that Michael is now out of the running for the new fancy ship because she doesn’t have “experience” feels like an argument we’ve been hearing variations on for two seasons now. Even the fact that it’s a new form of propulsion is old hat. We’ve got the spore drive. Are there no other ideas worth exploring?

As if to confirm this, the episode ends on a cliffhanger: Michael has managed to save most of the beleaguered space station personnel and her own crew, just in time for Booker’s ship to arrive on autopilot. Booker is injured and terrified, and when Discovery jets back to his home-world (minor gripe, and I get the spore drive is a thing, but I miss when distance mattered), they find the planet, once gorgeous and vital and full of life, is a fiery hellscape. Everyone’s dead. Something Bad Is Happening.

I’m sure we’ll learn about what that “something” is next week. Which is fine, as far as that goes, but at this point it feels more like a box being checked than a thrilling development. Destroying a planet has lost its power to shock in fiction, at least not when it’s as casually deployed as it is here. It’s a bit sad that Booker’s cute nephew is dead, and Booker himself is clearly upset, and I have some vague memories of the nature preserve he and his family were protecting that has now been burnt to ash. But really, it’s a special effect, and it’s a kick-off to a storyline, only it’s the same storyline we’ve already done. Discovery has saved the universe multiple times. Can’t they just, I dunno, fly around and hang out for a while?

But of course they can’t. It’s far too early to predict where this season will go, at least on the micro scale: I’m sure Michael and Rillak will continue to butt heads, and I’m sure we’ll get more of Adira trying to find a body for Gray (more on that below), and I’m sure we’ll get more expensive special effects and constantly swooping camera movements, along with music that never lets us forget for a second exactly what we’re supposed to be feeling. Hopefully, some of those feelings will be earned.

Stray observations

• I don’t really have a lot to say about Adira and Gray, but I do wish if it was important for the show for them to remain a couple, that they hadn’t killed Gray off in the first place. This isn’t how the Trill worked, and while there is certainly precedence for resurrection in the franchise (hell, in this show even), it’s not nearly as charming as the writers seem to think it is.
• Tilly is a lieutenant now.
• I just need the camera to stop. Please. My stomach, it is very sick.
• Michael literally says, “I’m pretty sure we don’t need politics as usual.” What does that even mean? We’ve barely seen any politics on the show, and besides, isn’t the ability to negotiate and work with a wide variety of interests to achieve your own goals (ie, politics) part of what a captain does?
• Booker’s planet is destroyed by a scary black cloud, always a good sign when a creative team decides on “scary black cloud” for its major villain.
• The episode is called “Kobayashi Maru” because apparently, Rillak knows about the Kobayashi Maru. Show, I’m begging you, please stop making me wish I was watching Wrath of Khan.