Animated Star Trek is back! Prior to the launch of two new animated series in the years ahead – Lower Decks in 2020, and the still-untitled Nickelodeon show sometime later — CBS has served up two animated Short Treks for December, entirely breaking the mold for what kind of stories we have come to expect from this franchise.
Each of today’s new Short Trek tales totally non-traditional Star Trek stories that take advantage of their animation styles to tell big, visual tales — but while the two new entries are similar in length, both “The Girl Who Made the Stars” and “Ephraim and Dot” (which we’ll be reviewing separately) each tell very different stories.
Written by Brandon Schultz — who last scripted Discovery Season 2’s “Perpetual Infinity” — and directed by Discovery executive producer Olatunde Osunsamni, “The Girl Who Made the Stars” takes us back to a happier time in Michael Burnham’s childhood, prior to the Klingon attack on her family’s research outpost and her adoption by Sarek and Amanda.
Unable to sleep, young Michael (voiced here by Kyrie McAlpin) summons her father (voiced by returning guest star Kenric Green), who offers to tell her a story. It turns out the story he tells her — of the girl who made the stars — is the same as the story Burnham tells to Discovery viewers in the opening moments of “Brother,” the Season 2 premiere.
Mike tells a fantastical story to his daughter, spinning a tale about a little African girl who defies the orders of her village elders not to travel at night, lest she fall prey to the beasts that live in the dark. When doing so, the girl encounters an alien, who then gifts her with the ability to bring light to her village at night by creating the stars in the sky.
The story that he tells young Michael might not amount to much in terms of what it tells us about the Star Trek universe – it is a fictional story inside a fictional story, after all – but it does give us a great insight into the formative mind of Michael Burnham, with some delightful animated visuals along the way.
While Discovery certainly gave Burnham the chance to connect with her mother to showcase the potential relationship that was lost by their tragedy, “The Girl Who Made the Stars” does a nice job in showing us the emotional connection to her father that was stolen by the Klingon attack.
Like the eponymous girl who made the stars, Michael Burnham is impulsive, inspired, gifted, and not afraid to bend the rules in order to achieve her ends — sounds about right! t turns out that, while Spock and Amanda had a profound impact on the character of Michael Burnham, they were not her only influences. It is easy to see how the way this story resonates with young Michael helps to set up the woman she would become, for better and for worse.
“The Girl Who Made the Stars” is a cute story and a visual feast. It doesn’t have much about it that would visually identify it as a Star Trek story — save an opening shot of a starbase and a stuffed tardigrade — but it does continue to help flesh out a pivotal character in the franchise. But given its brevity, it’s tough to see it as more than that.