The past two Discovery episodes feature a show that has found its groove and settled into being what it’s going to be, whether good or bad or in-between. How much you enjoy these two episodes will probably serve as a barometer for how well you enjoy most everything that will follow. The show was recently renewed for a second season; that’s not a shock considering CBS has been touting the 200% subscription increase for their All Access internetwork, and the fact that Netflix is footing the bill for the show almost entirely (and reaping the non-north American streaming rights as a result). It’s an easy renewal. But there are warning signs that must be mentioned, both internally and externally.
Externally, a 200% increase is a vague accomplishment since it doesn’t include the fact that the service barely had any subscribers to start with. In fact, they had barely more than a million just before Discovery premiered. A 200% increase means they now have about three million subscribers…or at least they did on the day Discovery premiered. For comparison, Netflix is inching closer to the 100 million subscriber mark. CBS is holding Trek hostage on its own homebrewed network when the more reasonable course of action would be to just put the thing on Netflix and let the 50 million USA subscribers enjoy it.
Whether Discovery sinks or floats is tethered to whether CBS All Access sinks or floats, and the opposite is true as well. They are linked just as Voyager and UPN were linked and just as Phase II and the PTC would have been in the mid-1970s.
And, as previously mentioned, whether or not you continue to subscribe and pay for the right to watch this show (commercials and all) is largely going to be decided by how you feel about these two episodes because they are the most traditional, Star Trek-like shows the series has had to date. They are predominately stand-alone in their stories, and have a clear-cut A/B plot-structure. The little things that make this show wholly unlike other Trek series’ (the ambiguous captain, the glorified extras of a bridge crew, the focus on a junior officer) are still there, but the structure of these episodes are Trekkian and familiar to everyone who grew up watching TNG or DS9.