“Rubicon” is a good solid name for an episode of pretty much any sci-fi adventure series. It’s got a clear meaning but is just obscure enough that people feel good about themselves for getting it (I mean, not countries which teach schoolchildren the history of the Roman empire in detail, obviously, but I’m American). It’s respectable. Plus it just has a really nice cadence to it.
Something I don’t usually get to say about Discovery is that this episode is really well-paced. This episode is really well-paced. A lot happens but it never feels rushed and it never drags. In fact, as I was sorting out my thoughts, I had to stop a moment and confirm whether or not all these plots actually happened in the same episode.
Now, none of this is to say that the episode was flawless. It’s not. For one thing, they mention Reno but she doesn’t actually appear. And there’s multiple character beats which are certainly good things to do, but just kind of fall flat because of how under-served half the cast is. The biggest example is Nhan, who returns to babysit Michael as she confronts Book. She’s got some new breathing implants that are a bit more discrete, and she’s now “Federation Security”, but… Look, Nhan was a fairly minor character in season 2 who had one or two interesting moments but was mostly defined by how she didn’t fit in with the family, who kind of inexplicably decides to throw in with the gang primarily out of a sense of responsibility after Erimem’s death. Just like they did with Georgiou, they wrote her out and then turned around and treated her like a beloved part of the family who everyone’s missing even though we never actually saw her interact with any of them. Nhan has a bit of a character arc in that she’s struggling with her inability to reconnect with her family since she can’t tell them where she comes from, what with the whole “Flagrant violation of the temporal accords” thing and it culminates in Michael teaching her, near as I can tell, “Why not just lie?” It makes more sense the way they phrase it, but the whole thing is largely informed. We did get to see this notion of how important family is to Barzans last season, but we only have a thin sense of what that means on-the-ground, and no idea what it means for Nhan personally. Similarly, showing some tension between Bryce and Rhys over their position on Tarka’s plan. Okay, kudos for showing that not everyone on Discovery is in complete agreement, but they’re all going to defer to their captain and work together anyway, but it would carry more weight if I knew a damn thing about these characters beforehand.
It also undermines it a bit that the “Destroy the BSTiS without making contact first” side is just so transparently wrong. I mean, there’s just not an even two-sided moral debate here. The 10-C are unfathomably powerful beings from beyond the galaxy, and the two equal sides here are, “Go talk to them and ask nicely” and “Provoke them by using our most powerful and dangerous weapons and the maximum extent of our powers to blow up mining equipment with no idea what they could do if we actually made them angry.” Also, they just have not done enough to sell the threat of the DMA: everyone is acting out of fear of what it might do, but so far, Kweijan is the only planet that actually got its shit wrecked without plenty of warning. This isn’t a battle between revenge and justice or between compassion and pragmatism or between safety and understanding, because when your opponent is even more godlike than all the other godlike aliens from fifty years of Star Trek those goals are all aligned. It’s neither right not pragmatic to attack. And just in case you missed that point, Tarka’s pretty clear that he doesn’t give a fuck about the galaxy; he just wants the power source so he can go dimension-hopping.
Which doesn’t work out for him, of course. It couldn’t, as a practical matter, since we need him to still be around for next week, but it’s almost a little too much to mix in the pathos of Tarka tempting Book away from Michael, endangering our heroes, betraying Book, possibly starting an intergalactic war, and it turning out to be all for naught. This is bordering on the comeuppance you expect for a kid’s show villain.
And in the light of Tarka’s actions here – firing on Discovery, launching the weapon after Book has agreed to stand down, secretly adding murdernanos to Book’s ship – what are we supposed to make of him saving the shuttle? Is that the hint that even he might be eligible for redemption? I assume that’s where we’re going, Tarka redeeming himself in the end. When the shuttle’s being torn apart, Tarka is very quick to say that he can’t possibly reprogram the defenses in time to save them… But with his next breath he suggests them EMPing themselves to let the shuttle break free. I’d expect Tarka to be cold and unhelpful and this to be the beginning of the rift between him and Book, with Book horrified to be complicit in attempted murder and Tarka being upset when Book endangers their quest to protect the Discovery crew. But no, Tarka just steps up and helps. Interested in where this goes.
Now, what does land this week very well is the denouement between Book and Michael. I love that everyone keeps reiterating this: Book is not irrational. Book isn’t doing the traditonal Big Manpain Lashing Out thing where his own pain and grief and lust for vengeance is making him blind. No; Book isn’t out for revenge, because that’s not the kind of person Book is. Book isn’t Batman, angrily beating the crap out of the mentally ill because he’s still the little kid raging at his parents’ death. No, he’s Batman: violating every norm and convention of a civilized society in his desperate, cloying need to ensure that no other little kid has to go through what he did. Book came to a different conclusion than Michael and the Federation, but not because he’s irrational; reasonable people can disagree.
(I mean, that’s what they want it to be; as I said above, this is undermined by how transparently wrong Tarka’s plan is)
So Book eventually stands down not because he’s outgunned (Why is Book’s ship capable of taking on Discovery in a fight anyway? That seems weird) or because he’s outmaneuvered, but because Michael offers him new information: that there’s time to try both plans. Tarka fucks this up, of course, for reasons that aren’t well-communicated, but yeah, that’s our big Discovery theme: most of our problems can be solved peacefully if we just take time to listen to each other. Please do not let them fuck this up by having the 10-C be assholes.
Other small things in this episode: Aww. President T’rina asked Saru out on a date. Those two are adorable. I do not like Linus’s new voice. The visual effects of cloaked Discovery are pretty cool. Bunch of decent Magic Mushroom effects, but none of them are the full-on blacklight-rave-space effect.
Even when ST:D succeeds it fails.