Star Trek: Discovery (3×01) That Hope Is You Review

For our review of the last episode of Star Trek: Discovery, click here.

Synopsis: Arriving 930 years in the future, Burnham navigates a galaxy she no longer recognizes while searching for the rest of the U.S.S. Discovery crew. (IMDb)

After an 18 month hiatus (and a Picard spin-off series), Discovery is back with its third season. It was always a question of how Discovery would tackle its glaring plot holes that destroyed the fabric of Star Trek Lore spanning decades, but last season managed to set this starship on coarse for a new destination: the future. Well not our future,  Star Trek is all technically the future, but this is Star Trek’s future so maybe it’s the future future? Future squared? Anyway, Discovery has been propelled 900 years into the future sending it to a place unknown by any other series (and removing it from the previous lore as well). So how does this premiere shape up? The answer may surprise you!

That Hope Is You, Part 1 starts us off right back into the action of the finale with Michael jumping through the wormhole and evading Control, sending herself into the future and tying up the final storyline of last season. Hooray! But what happens next is unfamiliar territory. The show which has heavily relied on its ensemble cast, political themes and constant references to Star Trek lore finds itself avoiding all three of these elements bringing an entirely different, albeit still familiar Trek premiere.

Michael lands on a desolate planet, shot on location in Iceland with some magnificent shots of the landscape. She runs into Book (David Ajala) who is essentially the latest Han Solo-type to enter a sci-fi story. He acts as an expositionary character more than anything for the moment giving Michael a way to learn about what happened in the past 900 years. Hopefully, he becomes more than that which they teased at through this episode.

What he reveals is a universe ravaged by problems, temporal wars and a severe lack of dilithium making warp travel practically obsolete. This new desolate world is the scoundrel side of the Star Trek universe. It is the Star Wars, criminal underworld that Trek rarely mentions (although we are sure it exists). It certainly brings a different tone to Trek as a whole, but it manages to work and even enhance Burnham’s character and situation.

This of course wouldn’t have worked if not for the brilliant performance and charisma of Sonequa Martin-Green who carries this episode with ease. After having a cast of many supporting each other for two seasons, it seems that the one can excel on a solo adventure. We feel every ounce of emotion she experiences from the initials joy of saving the universe to the complete flip of sorrow and isolation. It is through this character, and Martin-Green, that this episode manages to work so well with all these new elements in a way that few Star Trek series could.

If this is what the future looks like, I want a lot more of that!

Captain’s Log

• What happened to Discovery and its crew?
• What happened during The Burn?

What did you think of That Hope Is You, Part 1? Was it a good soft reboot for this franchise? Let me know in the comments below!

If you liked this, check out my YouTube channel The Film Fanatic, my other reviews and my website!

Please read our other reviews here and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, and also like us on Facebook.

Dylan Phillips