[CliffFletcher]

Watched the first two episodes on Crave. I've been immersed in Star Trek the last year or two, with binge-watching TOS and TNG on Netflix, and starting into DS9. So I'm coming to this from the context of the Star Trek legacy. My thoughts:

The Good

* Production values are excellent. It looks feature-film quality.

* Acting is good. Especially by Star Trek standards (though that's damning with faint praise).

* Lead role seems interesting and is well-acted.

The Meh

* Klingons seem genuinely alien, which is cool. The Klingon speech grew tiresome, though.

* Besides the lead and the scaredy-cat alien, the rest of the cast is a blank slate at this point. You'd think we'd have some sense of the crew after two full episodes.

The Bad

* The writing is terrible. I can't recall any movie or TV show that had so much clumsy exposition. "As you know, we're on this planet to identity the blah-blah-blah." "As you know, I'm from XYZ planet, where we're all either predator or prey. I was prey. That means my character is cautious to the point of annoyance, etc. etc."

* For a pair of action-oriented episodes, very little actually happened. They came across a beacon. A bunch of Klingons showed up. Space battle. The end.

My overall impression is somewhat negative. Star Trek lives and dies by its writing, and Discovery is not off to a good start so far. More importantly, Discovery doesn't feel like Star Trek. It feels more like a Marvel series. Or the bad Star Trek movies. It doesn't feel like an optimistic TV show that will place science, exploration, and moral dilemmas at the centre. Frankly, the Orville feels a lot more like Star Trek to me than Discovery.