Showdown time, I suppose. I am not overly thrilled with the pacing of last week’s episode of Discovery, but there’s an obvious reason for some of that which, frankly, played me like a fiddle. We don’t get the climactic space battle last week’s trailer seemed to promise; that’ll come tomorrow. This worries me a little because I think it suggests that we should expect the pacing to continue to flail a bit in order to accommodate everything the season finale needs to accomplish.
Everyone evacuates Discovery for Enterprise, which is now finally fixed, but Discovery knows it’s the star of the show and refuses to let itself be blown up. Michael reckons that the solution is to build a new Red Angel suit and have her tow Discovery to the far future so Control can’t get it. A new red signal leads Discovery to Xahea, where Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly reunites with her buddy the queen, who – I called it – works out a way to use her dilithium recrystalizing technology to power the time crystal, but with the caveat that the process would shorten the crystal’s lifespan, so Michael will be trapped in the future. All the named characters decide to stay on Discovery and go to the future with Michael except for Tyler and Pike, and maybe Hugh. Enterprise catches up with them near Xahea just a few minutes ahead of Control’s fleet, and everyone throws down for the big climactic battle.
It’s a little wheel-spinny. One last chance to get in some character development before an action-packed denouement, I guess. The main selling point of this episode is very straightforwardly that we get a good long look at the Enterprise, including our first look at the bridge, and it is predictably lovely. Though it’s consistent with the Discovery visual style overall, there’s also many more touches to remind us of the classic TOS design. The chairs look like TOS chairs. The conn has the familiar red alert lamp in the center. Some stations have those pop-up 3D viewmaster things. The elevators have handles you have to grab. Enterprise is also a lot smaller than Discovery. Most of the difference is down to Discovery’s extremely long nacelles. Their footprints are otherwise pretty close, but the shape of Discovery’s secondary hull gives it a tremendous difference in interior volume. In fact, Enterprise is smaller than virtually all the Starfleet ships in Discovery, which is consistent with the notion that Enterprise is already a fairly old ship (It’s more than ten years old in Discovery, which is probably not as old as the Shenzhou, which was already “old” four years after Enterprise’s launch. We have no idea what counts as “old” for a starship, really. US Navy ships have operational lifetimes mostly around 40 years, but they don’t go into space. NASA’s space shuttles were designed to last 10-15 years. The only number I can recall for Starfleet ships is Admiral Morrow in Star Trek III telling Kirk that the Enterprise was due for retirement because it was twenty years old, which doesn’t fit into any reasonable sort of timeline because the Enterprise was already older than that during TOS). This episode to a large extent does what the season premier carefully avoided doing: letting the gravity of the Enterprise take over the story. At the other end of the season, we had to keep it at arms’ length, but by now we’re confident enough in Discovery’s identity in this new postwar story arc that we can afford to let the Starship Porn carry us off for a bit before we finish up. So:
- The beginning sequence, where Discovery sort of rolls itself around Enterprise to get into docking position is super lovely.
- Discovery’s origami evacuation tunnels that unfold themselves into position. Joyous.
- When Pike grabs the handle in the elevator on the Enterprise, the Discovery crew all give it a slightly incredulous look.
- Michael gets a vision from the time crystal which prompts her to stop Pike from trying to blow up Discovery the old-fashioned way lest it raise its shields. She doesn’t explain how she’s so confident about what’s going on, but Pike gives her a haunted look that very clearly conveys that he knows what’s going down. It’s not the only time in the episode when he uses that look. This seems to be how they convey the effect that his own vision had on him.
- Xahea has a sort of large root or tentacle wrapped around it that is so large as to be not only visible from space, but to visibly project from the surface. So cool.
- When Tilly tells the bridge crew about Po’s dilithium recrystalizer, Saru’s expression clearly indicates that he thinks the idea is bullshit, but the he dials it back before saying anything, and just points out that it would completely reorient the space-economy.
- Po is wonderful. She’s got great chemistry with Tilly and good rapport with Reno, and she’s a bouncy goofy teenager who’s also a brilliant engineer and also, don’t forget, the queen of a politically important planet. And it seems she’ll be accompanying Discovery into the great unknown.
- More of Discovery‘s glib avoidance of bullshit: when Pike realizes that Po intends to stay on the ship, he just waves it off as a “Diplomatic meltdown for another day.”
- Also, Tilly tells them that Po is unwilling to share her dilithium technology because she doesn’t trust anyone to use it responsibly. But this doesn’t come up once Po arrives. TNG woulda spent all of act 2 with them trying desperately to convince Po to share her technology given the crisis. Voyager would probably have spent act 3 with them deciding to steal it and having a terrible comeuppance. But nah. Po is just like, “Well duh, of course I’m going to help you prevent the destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy; I‘m sentient life in the galaxy. Also this crazy plan sounds super cool and I get to build a mini supernova.”
- Discovery has been light on Star Trek‘s trademark “Babble something technical then explain it with a simple metaphor,” banter. But Reno gets to describe the method for charging the time crystal as being like getting a drink from a waterfall: it’ll work, but then you drown.
- Speaking of Reno, finally she gets to contribute to the plot directly. To charge the crystal in time, they have to take it out of its cage, and risk having Scary Visions of the Future. So Reno kicks everyone else out of the room and does it. She gets a clip of next week’s episode just as Michael did, the money shot of Enterprise being impaled by an unexploded torpedo. Her own haunted expression suggests that she saw more than the audience did, and I’m thinking that the direction this is going is that Reno will be the one who ends up removing or defusing the thing, possibly as some form of heroic sacrifice.
- The fact that Michael is about to become a new Red Angel and is the actual source of the red signals drops so offhandedly that it hardly counts as a reveal. Which is nice in its way, because it was so obvious by this point that it would’ve felt like a bit of an insult to the audience had they played it off like we were meant to be surprised.
- As always, Rebecca Romijn is delightful as Number One and Mia Kirshner is delightful as Amanda Grayson. She’s come a long way from being covered in goo on a Morthren cloning table.
- As Pike beams away, Georgiou reveals her true identity to him. His response? “What mirror universe?” and a knowing wink. I think Pike may be my favorite captain in the franchise by now. I’ll miss him.
- Also, there is absolutely no commentary on Georgiou remaining on Discovery. Doesn’t need to be. I mean sure, she’s evil, but what else is she going to do anyway? She’s got no real stake in this universe other than the fact that she’s fond of Michael.
The pacing is this week’s big problem. Other issues I have include:
- There’s some wheel-spinning with Stamets and Culber; they have a conversation but it doesn’t go anywhere. Culber says he’s going over to Enterprise when it arrives, but this is before anyone’s actually made the decision to stay with Discovery.
- Sarek and Amanda show up for one scene that… Really isn’t very interesting. They just show up, tell Michael that they’re proud of her, lament that they’ll probably never see her again, and leave.
- If Amanda sees Spock on this visit, it happens off-screen. Canonically, Spock and his dad won’t speak to each other for another ten years. This has always been presented as due to Sarek’s disapproval at Spock’s career choices (Discovery has fleshed this out a bit: the position Spock turned down to join Starfleet was one Sarek had recommended him for over Michael. Which left Sarek guilty that he’d basically screwed over his adopted daughter for no reason), but Sarek claims their estrangement is by Spock’s request. That’s not per se a retcon, as it could fully well mean something like, “He told me never to talk to him again until I was willing to apologize,” or something.
- So Sarek knew where Michael was and what was going on because the two of them have a psychic bond from an old mind meld. This came up in the first season too. Fine. But Sarek and Amanda could apparently get a ship from Vulcan to Xahea faster than Enterprise and Control could get there. How does space even work? If they can do that, and Tyler can jet off to wherever at the end, why is “Control has taken out the subspace network” a problem? Why can’t they send someone in a shuttle to go call the cavalry?
- Given the scale of the devastation during the war, this problem would go away if they didn’t present it as a communications problem but as a matter of Starfleet just not having many ship available that are combat-ready.
- Also, I don’t really care for James Frain’s Sarek.
- I don’t think nearly enough is made of the fact that apparently Discovery could’ve built a new Red Angel suit whenever they liked. Off-screen. Sure, it needs a time crystal, but for the first two-thirds of the season, the Red Angel was presented as having these almost inconceivable powers. If it were just a time machine, fine, but this thing also has, remember, comparable range to Discovery, an EMP generator that can fry a planet, and the ability to raise the dead.
- This is the downside of Discovery‘s anti-bullshit attitude: there’s a fine line between “We’re not going to waste screen-time on the implementation details which, after all, were never really anything more than scientific jargon we randomly pulled out of wikipedia tossed in a blender,” and “All the stuff that should be hard will happen conveniently off-screen so we can spend more time with the kissing and punching.”
- Admiral Cornwall is on the Enterprise. She doesn’t really do anything; she’s just there.
- The viewscreen on the TOS Enterprise was a lot smaller than the wall-sized screens on every subsequent incarnation, and the one in “The Cage” was even smaller. I was a little disappointed that this version of Enterprise has the same wall-size display as everyone else.
- I feel like I missed something about how Pike could contact Enterprise but neither Discovery nor Enterprise could call for any sort of reinforcements because Control had taken down the subspace relay network. “Enterprise was the only ship in range” was an old standard, but last we heard, Enterprise was in drydock for major repairs. So… They finished the repairs, fine, but then happened to fly the ship out near the Klingon border to just hang out in case Discovery needed them?
- When Michael sees an “Everybody dies” version of the future, the direction treats Owosekun’s death as the Big Dramatic Money Shot of the scene, which just seems weird for a character I have never mentioned before because she has like 2 lines all season.
- Similarly, Pike addresses each of the bridge crew personally in his departing speech, but it feels a little fakey when he’s talking about their grace under pressure and how proud he is of their performance to the five characters who who’ve spoken eight lines between them all season.
- Fun fact: one of the Barely-Speaking-Part bridge crew is Nilssen, who is Airiam’s replacement. Nilssen is played by Sarah Mitich, who also played Airiam in season 1, but was replaced by Hannah Cheesman for season 2. So I wonder if the reason for the recasting was because they wanted to keep the actress despite killing off the character?
- Why do they need to take Discovery into the future? I get the argument, but last time they tried this, they had the option of moving the data into the Red Angel. If they can build a new Red Angel suit, they should be able to do the same thing and leave Discovery where it is.
- This would be trivially fixed with “We can mostly recreate the suit but a few of its features are beyond us, so we’ve replaced the infinite quantum storage unit with a couple of SD cards.”
- Wish someone had mentioned “high energy photons” when discussing the dilithium recrystalizer so that Spock could remember it fifteen years later.
Next week will have a lot of heavy lifting to do. Some thoughts on that:
- Obviously, if the time crystal will fail once Michael goes to the future, we still need a way for her to create the red signals.
- Taking Discovery “out of the equation” still leaves us with the matter of actually defeating Control, which remains a threat even without the sphere data
- Could it be that Discovery’s fated abandonment as told in “Calypso” is because it’s been left somewhere to wait for a time traveler to catch up with it?
- Also, small thought, could “Zora” be a corruption of “Sphere”, not unlike “Vedraysh” for “Federation”?
- The fourth minisode, featuring Harry Mudd, has not been relevant to anything this season. Given that two minisodes have already provided key backstory for episodes and the third seems likely to come into play next week, is “The Escape Artist” just an outlier, or will it come up somehow?
- Where’s Tyler off to? He returns to Enterprise with Pike in order to “make sure nothing like Control ever happens again,” but all we know about this plan is that it involves him being somewhere else during the climactic battle. If he’s planning to take down Section 31 altogether, I’ve got some bad news for him.
- Any chance L’Rell is going to show up and we’ll get a proper look at the D-7?
- With so little time left, I fear we might end the season on a cliffhanger. Might season 3 start with Discovery in the far future? That might shut up the people who continue to object to Trek’s resistance to setting anything post-Nemesis in the timeline.
- Personally, I have zero problems with a prequel. Space and time are big enough that lots of other stuff can happen which never intersects TOS or TNG. I know a lot of people object to the existence of the spore drive in the first place since, “Why haven’t we ever heard of it before?” As if Voyager didn’t discover at least four new drive technologies every season and then never speak of them again. Even TNG had two Radical New Alternatives To Warp Drive Which Almost But Didn’t Quite Pan Out And Were Never Spoken Of Again. Given humantity’s bugaboo about genetic engineering, I don’t think we really need an explicit justification for “We never managed to come up with an alternative to splicing a human with a water bear to fly the thing, so we never productized magic mushroom technology. There’s still some researchers working on it, but their paths didn’t happen to cross any ships named Enterprise.
- I think it’s a good thing that Spock didn’t get a Time Crystal vision since Pike’s vision is substantially the same as what would his would certainly be, but I wonder now if Spock will have an unshown encounter with it, and the similarity between his and Pike’s visions will figure into Spock’s decision to kidnap Pike. Now that we’ve seen that Pike and Spock have such similar near-death experiences, there’s a neat symmetry between Spock stealing the Enterprise and going to a forbidden planet to save Pike and Kirk stealing the Enterprise and going to a forbidden planet to save Spock. It particularly ties into the notion of Pike’s Star Trek as a not-fully-formed prototype: Spock can only give Pike a limited form of new life, while he himself is fully reborn.
Next week: the big showdown. We can’t really expect Michael’s plan to go off as expected since even if you could make the episode length work, “Enterprise and Discovery fight Section 31 for forty minutes then Discovery disappears into the future forever” is not really a great plot. But how quickly will the plan change?