In a lot of ways this is the best Star Trek premiere yet. Now that is damning by faint praise: *The Cage* and *Where No Man Has Gone Before* were shaky early TOS episodes, *Encounter at Farpoint* was largely bad, and *Emissary* was mixed at best. So, simply by clearing the bar to ‘good’, this makes it in as the best.
But it’s really a promising start. The characters are well developed, and the actors seem to be fairly comfortable with who they are already. The setup includes some good internal conflicts. And even the ‘comic relief’ character is, after a bad start, capable of some interesting depth. Although I wis they’d be confident enough to not bother with the comic relief.
But there are also some worrying signs. The writing does a bad job of setting up the ‘long way home’ problem, and resorts to a long ‘heroic captain speech’ to do the job. The ‘bad guys’ are very one-dimensionally drawn, with no depth provided. And Paris is just a bit too smug to be watchable.
But all in all, so far so good.
347 down, 390 to go.