Well now. As an episode, this was pretty good. As the culmination of a plot arc, I’m less sure. Like last season, the last few minutes are more of an epilogue than a conclusion, but they’re far less satisfying this time. It feels more like a series finale than a season finale: a highly articulated, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Or continued to not-live in the case of Gray.
When you get down to it, my problems with Discovery mostly derive from the fact that it is a 13-episode prestige series, plotted like a 13-episode prestige series, but with the worldbuilding of a 22-episode arc-moderate broadcast series. So a lot of character beats and background are developed as if they should be doled out a little at a time in the C-plots of half a dozen episodes, but Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That – we’ve still got fifty minutes of Michael crying and the camera turning upside-down to get through, so instead of slow-simmering development that culminates in a focus episode, you get a little hint of something, then two episodes later a casual reveal that the character arc had culminated off-screen some time ago. So, like, we have a few scenes of Stamets feeling some familial affection toward Adira, and Hugh not interacting with them much at all, and then a couple weeks later, Paul and Hugh have adopted them. And everyone misses Mirror!Georgiou and remembers how she’d grown on them and was too one of the gang despite her tough exterior… Despite the fact that she’d barely interacted with anyone but Michael.
Compare this to something like Doctor Who. There, you get more-or-less thirteen bespoke one-off worlds in a season; there’s no building going on at that level. And characters like the Doctor exist in a state of punctuated equilibrium: they aren’t really meant to be developing week-to-week, but in big dramatic fits that occur on season boundaries. Having said this all out, it actually makes me kind of optimistic for Strange New Worlds, which is alleged to be planned as a planet-of-the-week series whose major characters’ life paths are already carved in stone.
So…
- Why must they keep turning the camera upside-down? Why? What does that accomplish?
- Somehow Xahean Adira and Vulcan Gray are even more adorable than regular Adira and Gray.
- We finally do get some interaction between Adira and Hugh, and it is, in fact, very good and nicely subtle in how comfortably dadly he is toward them. And the fact that he’s got this instant rapport with Gray is pretty cool too. Have Hugh and Stamets adopted Gray too, or is he more like a son-in-law?
- Speaking of: called it. Gray gets to be corporeal. And it makes it even worse for him when he’s about to go back to being non-corporeal. But I hope this isn’t a protracted thing next season. Like, now that they know it’s possible, it should’t be too hard for a ship full of geniuses to Programmable Matter-up a body for him.
- Saru doesn’t bat an eyelid at Gray. I guess Adira has been open about their ghost boyfriend? If this communicates that Saru is a good captain who is really up on what is going on in his crew’s lives in a way that even, say, Picard never was, I like that. But probably it’s more, “Ain’t Nobody Got Time For Thirty Seconds of Hugh Explaining his kid’s ghost boyfriend.” Also, Saru’s had kind of a day and might just be too burned out to question it.
- So… There’s a lot of setups where either the payoff doesn’t work, or the payoff never even comes. Like, everyone does a lot of stuff but hardly any of it is actually involved in resolving the plot.
- Like, the crew going to blow up the nacelle and knock the ship out of warp…. It works, it’s very dramatic, everyone nearly suffocates. Owo nearly explodes herself. DOT actually does explode herself. There’s the tense moment when we don’t know who made it out alive… But… Michael kills Osyraa and reclaims the ship about one minute later, so did it even actually matter?
- Or how Ni’Var shows up with a fleet to defend the Federation, and that is great and perfect and I called it, but… Do they actually do anything? They do not.
- Or how Gray gets to use the fact that he is already dead to step outside the simulation without ill effect to see what’s going on outside, and he’s out there for like five minutes, but all he comes back with is, “Yeah, the ship is falling apart,” which we already knew.
- Or how nothing at all comes of Clancy trying to make peace with the Chain.
- Or how Michael mentions that rebooting the computer reset it to before the upgrade, but this has zero impact on the rest of the episode.
- I’d been considering since last week – and this was the closest they came – that possibly the season might end with Discovery abandoned in the nebula for a thousand years and the Federation joining the Chain, presaging what appears to be a more imperialistic Federation in Calypso. Discovery reverting its upgrade could’ve been setup for that, and I wonder if they were trying to fake us out.
- Or that Adira’s role in this episode is purely to deliver medicine.
- Or the fake-out where we’re meant to experience some kind of fear that Discovery didn’t manage to jump and was destroyed with the Veridian, thus also dooming Saru, Adira, Hugh and Su’Kal. There was zero chance of anyone believing that, and it just deprived us of a cool VFX shot of them jumping while inside another ship.
- If you wanted tension, show the jump, but have something unrecognizable on the viewscreen after and cut away after Michael says, “Then where the hell are we?”
- The DOTs were of comically little use, weren’t they? I mean aside from the one who saves Owo.
- I really enjoyed the cleverness of Michael giving in to Osyraa’s demands in order to hit the medical quarantine button.
- Osyraa doesn’t get water poured on her, but I do like her end. I get that a lot of people won’t, and that’s fair. But it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about this season: Osyraa is a cheap thug and she doesn’t deserve a big impressive exciting demise; she deserves to get shot easily once the heroes decide to stop fucking around. I want the message in their defeat to come down to, “Actually we could’ve ended this a lot sooner, but we are Starfleet and were willing to suffer in the hopes of finding a peaceful resolution.”
- Like, she shoves Michael into a wall, and is just like, “Okay she’s dead now, good,” and walks away and it just turns out that being shoved through a programmable matter wall is not lethal so Michael walks back out again and shoots her dead. Why were we supposed to think that the computer core had a programmable matter murderwall in it to begin with anyway?
- Book murdering the fuck out of Zareh because he threatened the cat was nice.
- I’m not entirely sold on Michael’s decision that, having liberated the ship and having a plan to escape by jumping away, they also need to blow up the Veridian, killing everyone aboard, is quite moral though. There’s no reason they needed to eject their warp core before they jumped.
- Again, unless there was some version of this season where, say, Book couldn’t control where they ended up and they needed to abandon the ship because they had no warp core and couldn’t get home by jumping.
- Like I said before, there was zero chance that any explanation could be big enough to be properly satisfying. But I think the emotion is right for “Su’Kal saw his mother die, and his scream did it.” And Hugh’s technobabble explanation about how Su’Kal’s mutation gives him the ability to scream at the resonant frequency of dilithium in subspace, honestly? That is the most TNG-era feeling technobabble we’ve ever gotten from this show. It feels absolutely peak Star Trek. It’s deliciously [TECH].
- By the way, again, called it: Guy Whose Name I Still Can’t Remember figured out that Kwijan empaths can operate the spore drive.
- I keep trying and pulling out “Atoholan”, but that’s the magic memory glacier from Frozen II.
- His face-turn occurs entirely off-screen I guess. I wonder if he’ll become a recurring character. Not sure there is really a niche he fits into on Discovery as a regular since his skill-set overlaps with Stamets, Adira and Reno, but he’d be a solid addition to the gang at Federation HQ.
- The fact that the brain-control technology is aparently his work might indicate he could play the key role in giving Gray a physical presence – maybe that circlet could be modified to bridge Gray’s consciousness (which one assumes resides in Tal) to a holoprojector.
- Did not call it: Su’Kal looks normal. He’s not the monster. The monster is exactly what it was presented as: a security feature in the program specifically designed – in keeping with Kelpien folklore – to scare him away from the “off” switch until he was old enough to face reality.
- But the whole, “Oh don’t worry, once we get him away from this planet, he won’t be able to blow up every ship in the galaxy any more,” thing is a little Makes It Easy I Guess.
- Nice touch that there’s a big modern city visible in the distance on Kaminar now, because the Kelpiens aren’t technologically suppressed and the Ba’ul aren’t hiding out. We haven’t really seen any Amazing 32nd Century Future-Cities, with the borderline exception of the exchange back at the other end of the season.
- Overall, the action-side of the plot was pretty solid action that did what it needed to. The emotional side of the plot had good emotional beats, but I think the catharsis was a bit muted because of the extent to which it came out of nowhere. Su’kal being a character who has only been in about half an episode so far paired with Saru having gotten comparatively little focus so far reduces the emotional impact. And Hugh, Adira and Gray fare just a little better: this is where these characters should be going given where they started out. It’s just that they haven’t actually done the middle bit of moving toward this climax because Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That.
- I’ve said before that it was weird that Hugh suddenly seemed happy and well-adjusted all season when the rest of the crew was struggling, as though his third act catharsis back in the season 2 finale was just a magic wand that left his emotional problems completely solved. This would be business as usual for earlier incarnations of Trek (I’m still a little cheesed about the Deep Space 9 where Nog loses a leg and is very upset for the remainder of the episode and then is perfectly fine afterward. Or the multiple episodes where O’Brien goes through extremely prolonged torture and suffers PTSD over it until the end of the episode after which he is perfectly fine again, but that’s not how Discovery works. So we did eventually get some closure with Hugh a couple of weeks ago that, yeah, this change in circumstance has helped him to heal, and that culminates here, and this is the logical place for his journey to go given where he started… It’s just that the journey never actually happened because Hugh is only in a handful of scenes all season.
- I will qualify this with the understanding that a global pandemic did happen while they were making this show, which probably had some impact on which actors were available at which times and might have influenced the relative screen-time devoted to different plots. I know in particular Tig Novaro had more scenes scripted than filmed because of which filming sessions she was willing to travel to.
- But we didn’t really need “Terra Firma” to be a two-parter. I liked it fine and all, but that screen-time could’ve been spent developing the actual characters, even if the cast probably benefited personally from getting to spend a few weeks chewing the scenery as their OTT leather daddy counterparts.
- And then we get to the epilogue. It’s…. It’s not actively bad, but it isn’t a great fit for the show we’ve been watching. First of all, it’s so “Makes it Easy I Guess”. I mean:
- The Emerald Chain, which I was kind of interpreting as a comparatively loose-knit cabal of crime syndicates completely collapses because one ship was destroyed. I know there was the whole, “The Chain is running out of dilithium and is desperate” thing going on, but that was very tell-don’t-show; the fact that Osyraa used a transwarp conduit to pursue Discovery is the closest we come to demonstrating that the capture of Discovery and strongarming the Federation into an alliance is a make-or-break gambit for them. If that’s true, the whole thing where Osyraa is promising to destroy the Federation utterly is hard to swallow. Osyraa and the entire Chain has lost the second the Federation decides to stop fucking around. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not demonstrated well. All the plot beats are set up with the idea that the Federation is desperate and completely fucked if the Emerald Chain comes gunning for them, but it’s actually the reverse: the Chain only exists at all because the Federation has chosen to focus its resources on preserving and protecting peace.
- Off-screen in the time it takes to patch themselves up and get a new warp core installed, the Federation figures out how to safely harvest dilithium from the nebula and so now the galactic shortage is completely solved and not a problem any more. Makes it easy!
- Trill rejoins the Federation. Not a surprise since they’d left it as, “We’re interested in rejoining the Federation as soon as they are operating in this part of space again,” but still.
- Ni’Var hasn’t rejoined yet but is moving toward it. Makes it easy!
- I am not entirely over the tension between the implication (Which, admittedly, only comes from Michael, but the fast resolution of everything at the end seems to back this up) that fear of a second Burn is keeping the people of the galaxy insular and unwilling to commit to unity and the observation that literally no one except Michael shows the least interest in determining the cause of the Burn. In a hundred years, she’s not just the only person to track down enough black boxes to establish the timing of the Burn, she’s the only one who’s even tried.
- It was nice to see Sahil again, though I wish he’d had some kind of role.
- Michael’s captain now, as the show has been desperate to do for years now. Fine, I guess. But I’m not crazy about it.
- 32nd century uniforms suck. And Tilly’s looks weird. Did they digitally recolor it in post? Why is she wearing blue now? She wasn’t blue before. Is she chief science officer now?
- Michael is the only one wearing a red uniform in that scene, which is a little strange. Kind of approve of the color scheme being TNG instead of TOS, though possibly having an entirely different color scheme would’ve been better? I dunno. I guess there is an advantage to using a color scheme that we would still recognize so that the audience can appreciate what it means when Michael walks onto the bridge wearing red.
- Is “Captain’s Boyfriend” a bridge position? Though Leah points out that his full title is “Captain’s Boyfriend And Spare Magic Mushroom Wrangler”.
- Adira is an officer now for some reason. Again, something you might have wanted to have happen on-screen with proud space dads and proud ghost boyfriend attending their commissioning.
- One thing that isn’t Makes It Easy which I really like: Stamets hasn’t forgiven Michael. Every time you see him in the epilogue, he’s giving her a dirty look.
- Why is Discovery’s new mission to deliver dilithium? You might well say, “Because Spore Drive”, except that Discovery clearly goes off on this mission by warp. It’s a little vague, but my impression is that in the 32nd century, Discovery’s spore drive isn’t really important for its speed nearly as much as for not-being-warp: without dilithium as a constraint, it seems like 32nd century warp drives are fast enough to reach much of the galaxy in reasonable time frames. So why send a fairly small, millennium-old science ship on these delivery runs instead of a thirtieth century cargo ship the size of Deimos?
- Hey, remember that mysterious lullaby that everyone in the galaxy knows? It came up like six episodes ago in the pattern of distortion on the Kelpien distress signal. What was up with that? I assumed that it was going to turn out that the lullaby was the reverse of Su’Kal’s scream and they’d go full Symphogear or something and reverse the Burn by having everyone in the universe sing together. That would be thematically lovely and make trekkies’ heads full-on explode Scanners-style. It doesn’t fully fit to just be some form of “Su’kal’s lullaby, like his scream, resonates in subspace,” because it seems to predate the Burn across multiple cultures.
- In all, this season felt like it rapidly got bored with its own premise. The first few episodes do a great job of Bringing The Weird – morphing ships, programmable matter, parasitic ice, trance worms, personal transporters, floating boulders. You have this really interesting setup where Discovery has free travel and a stockpile of dilithium worth a king’s ransom, but is a thousand years out of date technologically in galaxy that is insular and paranoid. But it only really comes up twice, and once they’re reunited with the Federation, they’ve got support and all the upgrades they need.
- While “Die Trying” isn’t my favorite episode, if Discovery was going to link back up with the Federation so quickly, it really should’ve been a model for the rest of the season: Discovery using the fact that they have free travel to zap out and handle things that aren’t actually hard except for the fact that no one else can get there in time. I’d be okay with a season that didn’t have an explicit antagonist, where the “bad guy” is distance. But they set up this thing with Saru wanting to help but Vance holding them back because Discovery is his “rapid responder” and there is not a single episode where they are used that way. “Die Trying” is the only episode whose setup is “There is a thing that could be solved easily except that dilithium shortages mean it would take a year to get there. Thank goodness Discovery can magic mushroom itself anywhere in the universe instantly.” We needed more episodes like that, but Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That because we need to burn three episodes on Georgiou having quantum epilepsy from time travel.
- Instead, Vance is constantly authorizing Discovery to go fuck off all over the galaxy to do its own thing. In almost every instance, specifically to make Michael happy. To Ni’Var so she can bug the Vulcans for their sensor data; to Kwijan to bail out her boyfriend’s family; to Dannus to save her mentor’s evil twin; and finally to the nebula to solve the Burn, which they have consistently characterized as being almost entirely Michael’s personal thing. And those episodes are mostly pretty good – probably better than “People of Earth” and “Forget Me Not”, but both of those episodes felt like they were setting a direction for the season that just gets lost. “Discovery goes on missions for Starfleet because in this time, they are the only ship with free travel,” is a potentially interesting setup. “Discovery is cut off from the Federation in a more dangerous time” is a potentially interesting setup. “Discovery has the resources of the Federation, plus free transit, and they use it mostly to pursue their Chief Science Officer’s pet project and/or boyfriend,” is… Less so.
- I never really felt like the Federation was in any sort of peril – this would be fine if the season arc was, “There’s no particular antagonist, but we no longer have the resources to perform the basic responsibilities of Federation,” but the show takes a strong turn against that arc once they decide that, “No, seriously, the Wicked Witch of the Western Spiral Arm is the Big Bad,” around episode 6.
- I have no idea where the show goes from here. Both previous seasons ended on a tease for things to come. This season ends with Discovery taking on a bold new mission as a dilithium delivery ship. Now, this could be fine. This could lead into a fourth season based around them visiting planets that have been cut off for a century and solving their local problems. We would be close to a TOS status-quo with a smaller, looser-knit Federation undergoing rapid expansion. But I don’t think that’s a likely plot for this show, on account of the fact that Discovery has not thus far never been content to be a Planet of the Week series, and CBS already has Strange New Worlds lined up for that.
- Still no one is really all that worked up about their ship having developed its own sentience? I do kinda want Vance to at some point be like, “Oh, yeah, that’ll happen. We have a ship become sentient every twenty years or so. Just make sure it’s the friendly, protective kind of sentient and not the evil megalomaniacal kind of sentient.” It would be at least consistent with Vance’s whole “Grumble, I’m gruff and irritable and you weirdos don’t appreciate how tough things are these days and… Actually whatever. You go off and do whatever you want.”
- Things that are conspicuous by their absence this season:
- The Borg. They probably don’t want to commit to what became of them, but it seems like something that would turn up
- Synths or sentient holograms. Given that some of them could pass for human, I suppose it’s possible that they’ve just assimilated transparently into human society. Some hint might’ve been nice, though. It’s odd that there are holographic people in the future but they seem inhuman even compared to Voyager-era medical holograms. This could be deliberate, to hint (or misdirect) that the people of the 32nd century have some reason to keep their holograms more constrained.
- Michael’s ship. Remember how she offhandedly mentions that she had her own ship during her year as a courier? And then it is never mentioned again? That’s weird, right? I mean, she probably just sold it, but still.
- The name of Book’s ship. What is it with them not bothering to name ships?
- Klingons. You’d think the Klingons would be a big deal in the Space Mad Max future, unless something’s happened to them. I’m hoping when they do resurface, their absence has something to do with the intersection of the Timekeepers of Boreth and the Temporal War.
- Statues of Miles O’Brien. Well, we can’t have it all.
Can prestige TV die please?