Reviewing The Vulcan Hello and Battle At The Binary Stars
By Duncan Smith
The show is marvelously shot. As opposed to every other Star Trek series to date, ships don’t appear on a single plane, facing off level to each other. Particularly when the Klingon flagship and the Shenzhou face off, the two vessels sit at odd angles to each other. In its strange and unusual appearance, it lends a dose of realism.
The show uses non-linear time well with multiple flashbacks, including during the cold open in “Battle At The Binary Stars” when we see Burnham’s arrival on the Shenzhou seven years earlier with Sarek.
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Speaking of cold opens, the second half of the cold open in “The Vulcan Hello” is problematic. While on a desert planet, Georgiou and Burnham are endeavoring to open up a well to save an indigenous race. You might see this as a violation of the Prime Directive, which to be fair, is about as practically flexible as something called a “prime directive” could possibly be. They explain around this by saying as long as the planet’s inhabitants don’t see them, they won’t violate Starfleet’s General Order One.
That’s not how the Prime Directive works, and the inhabitants saw them anyway.
In addition, when separated from the Shenzhou by a dust storm, Georgiou traced a Starfleet delta in the sand in order to give the ship a point to pick them up. No, if the ship’s sensors couldn’t penetrate a dust storm, they shouldn’t be able to visually spot a large delta from the sky.
It’s a bit silly to use the delta, and utterly preposterous that it worked.