Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 3×10: Terra Firma, Part 2

I have feelings about this episode! They are conflicting!

• Yeah, Carl is exactly the most obvious thing for him to be unless you thought he was Q. You can predict a lot of things about this show by always guessing, “The most fanwanky thing that would make the fanboys excited except that this is Star Trek so they will actually be furious instead.”
• On the one hand, YAY IT’S THE GUARDIAN OF FOREVER!
• On the other hand, WHAT? Really? Why? How? What for?
• I mean, it kind of undermines the epicness of the reveal when Paul Guilfoyle suddenly develops stentorian reverb to announce, “I AM THE GUARDIAN OF FOREVER,” when Georgiou and Michael are both like, “The what now?”
• And as I mentioned in a random aside last season, the one thing I find most interesting about the Guardian is completely ignored here, just as it has been completely ignored in every other appearance the Guardian has made since the original: the bit where Kirk asks the Guardian if it can present them with time travel in some form other than a high-speed uncontrolled montage of his home planet’s history, and the Guardians says, “Nope. I was built to do it this way and can’t change.” The Guardian has very obviously changed.
• The thing about the Guardian of Forever is that it is such a beautiful mystery that you both want to invoke it, but also the more you delve into it, the less wonderful and weird and mysterious it becomes. So using it here in such an offhanded way is a let down, and yet they found a new and weird way to use it, giving it agency and a human face and making it weird and irascible and letting it send Georgiou to a parallel universe to test her, and that is so much better than the, “Oh it’s just a time machine when we need one as a plot device” approach that has been taken in the one pseudocanonical appearance it made and most of the expanded universe appearances it’s made.
  • Ranking of Guardian appearances by Worthwhileness:
    1. The City on the Edge of Forever
    2. Terra Firma, Part 2
    3. The Shatner novel “Preserver”
    4. James Cawley’s fan film where the Enterprise flies through a giant one
    5. Tim Russ’s fan film “Of Gods and Men”
    6. Peter David’s novel “Imzadi”
    7. The roughly eight million novels I haven’t read where it’s just a magic time machine.
    8. The TAS episode “Yesteryear”
  • So I guess it’s not that bad, but they still shouldn’t have done it. I might even go as far as to say, “This was the best way to have done that thing they definitely should not have done.”
• One imagines the angry fanboys were so busy complaining about the Guardian being on the wrong planet that they missed the bit where the Guardian very clearly explains why it is on the wrong planet and Michael figures out how Zora found it.
• I guess they really are doing that Georgiou-centered Section 31 spin-off after all. Meh.
• I love that not only is Reno back, but also that the first thing anyone says to her is Stamets making a deal over the fact that no one’s seen her in weeks.
  • Is Reno the chief engineer now? Did that officially happen at some point and I just missed it? Maybe just a cut line from season 2 where Pike says, “I’ve asked Commander Reno to stay on as our chief engineer,” because this whole time, it kinda just seemed like they forgot to drop her off at the medical starbase with the surviving bits and pieces of the Hiawatha crew.
• Why doesn’t Mirror-Saru pull out his Fuck Off Murder Darts? This would’ve been a perfect moment for some Fuck Off Murder Darts.
• I really like that Georgiou’s arc is not actually, “Then she becomes good.” In fact, it’s very close to Mirror Spock’s arc in the original mirror universe episode – she’s still not one of them, not like them, but she realizes that the Empire is counterproductive. That even if all you want out of life is cheap thrills, the Terran approach isn’t an efficient way to get them.
• Anyone else surprised Evil!Tilly didn’t turn on Georgiou? This whole “Evil Tilly” thing just did not work, tbh.
• I should not have expected less, but I appreciate that Georgiou pronounced “Genghis Khan” correctly.
• Not at all cool with Prime!Saru transparently in denial over the fact that he’s emotionally compromised by the reveal that a Kelpien ship is where The Burn started. Saru has shown himself to be a competent administrator and I want him to grow into a good captain, but the show is actively undermining him at this point, and if that doesn’t lead up to something, I will be disappoint.
• Vance gets a little bit Obstructive Admiral, which is disappointing. This may be the first time Michael got the better half of the plot.
• This whole season continues to feel sort of rudderless. There’s a big season-long mystery to be solved and things in motion, but it doesn’t feel like the show is on a particular track. There’s several mini-arcs and plot threads, but there’s no overall sense of forward motion with one revelation leading to another or one action having knock-on consequences. Rather than an evolving story, it’s more like a ’90s TV plot arc, where there’s an ongoing plot, but it’s dispensed in the form of weekly plot tokens that don’t really come from anywhere. Are they deliberately trying to be more episodic this season?
• Coming back to an observation I made last season, though, I guess you could say that in Discovery, it’s characters who have arcs, rather than plots. Saru’s working through becoming a captain in this world, Georgiou’s working through evolving beyond the Terran mindset, Michael’s trying to find her place after her year in the cold, Adira’s trying to sort out who they are as a conjoined being, Book’s working through coming around to the Starfleet Way.
• It feels like there’s a line of exposition missing or something at the end, when Saru declares Georgiou dead and they hold a wake. In particular, it’s easy enough to imagine them deciding that what with time travel being strictly verboten and the very existence of the Guardian being a threat to the temporal accord and them having promised to not unleash a retired Terran empress on an unsuspecting galaxy, it would probably be best to let the record reflect that she’s gone, she’s not coming back, and probably she’s been dead for like nine hundred years, so let’s just say “deceased”. But they don’t actually say that. Saru asks if she’s dead, Michael gives him an evasive answer, and Saru clearly understands that “It’s complicated,” but then declares her dead anyway.
• And then everyone misses her and reflects on how much she meant to them and did I actually miss several episodes, because I do not remember Georgiou ever earning the love and respect of this crew in any meaningful way. Sure, she came with them to the future when she didn’t have to and she did kill Leland, but she barely interacted with anyone but Michael, and even that was only every third week. A big part of the problem here is that because this show is so much tighter than previous series, we don’t have the occasional bottle episode to show the crew interacting and establish the bond between them in a low-stakes adventure. Which would probably be okay if the tighter structure was in service to a strong plot, but this is a character-driven show that doesn’t seem like it has time for its characters. As is generally the case in the modern era of Trek, they really ought to pick a lane.