Parents' Guide to Star Trek: Short Treks

Exploring some of the lesser-known corners of the Discovery universe, this series of standalone shorts is fun, but asks a question: Why weren't these just B-stories on regular episodes? Take the inaugural episode, Runaway, in which a lower-ranked officer has a meal interrupted by a shape-shifting alien on the run from her home planet. There's nothing about what happens next that wouldn't fit into a regular Discovery episode. Tilly and the alien bond over ice cream, talk politics in the sketchiest of terms, emit some science-y gobbledygook, and then resolve to Do the Right Thing for the Good of Your People. It's not bad Trek, it's just regular old Trek, instead of taking viewers somewhere out of the ordinary (using Trek standards).

The brevity of Short Treks' episodes also subtracts time for nuance. Tilly convinces her alien to change the course of her life in about four lines of dialogue -- yet there's still time for a line in which the alien swiftly figures out how the transporter works: "Does it function by compensating for the position and direction of the subject's subatomic particles?" Uh, okay, yeah, thanks for breaking that down for us. Rabid Discovery fans -- and they are out there -- will be eager to watch this to get more of their chosen world, but the so-far non-converted aren't likely to be particularly won over by this one.