In my TNG season 1 rewatch, I finally got to the season finale, “The Neutral Zone.” Though best known for Picard’s utopian declarations to the cryogenically frozen people from the 90s about the post-scarcity future, it also centers on a tense confrontation with the Romulans. I noticed many parallels with the setup of the Discovery premier, “The Vulcan Hello” In both, our heroes confront a foe that has not been heard from in many years – the Klingons for Discovery and the Romulans for “Neutral Zone.” In both, they are befuddled by a cloaking device. And in both, there is a dispute about how to respond to the situation – Burnham and Worf both insist that they must fire first or risk annihilation, and both are drawing on the experience of their parents being killed by the respective species. And I suspect that this parallel is intentional on the part of the writers, because of the crucial difference – Worf is 100% wrong about the need to fire first, while the verdict is much more ambiguous for Burnhan. She agrees that she was wrong to attempt mutiny, but was she wrong to try a preemptive attack under the circumstances? We never know for sure, and even she never directly repents of her desire to strike first. By creating a parallel with a well-known TNG episode and then inserting a crucial difference, the writers are sending the signal that we are definitely not in the utopian TNG era.
But what do you think?
Yes, I agree. I wish the writers had made it a bit more clear that Burnham was being scapegoated for “starting” a war the Klingons wanted no matter what.
Yeah I think Burnham being aggressive there if anything probably ended up saving lives, but that is easy to forget in retrospect because we basically just see those events commented on later in the series by the way rando starfleet people ostracize her because they have been told a story that uses her as a scapegoat.
The one open question, I think, is whether the other Houses would have united against the Federation had the encounter gone down differently. I’m not sure what the answer is on that one.