Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 4×10: The Galactic Barrier

And another low-key one, oddly. “The Galactic Barrier”‘s A-plot is exactly what it says on the tin: Discovery crosses the galactic barrier. It’s… Strangely empty as storytelling goes. That plot boils down to “They fly through a dangerous part of space and it gets dicey for a bit but ultimately works out”. The barrier itself is not much like its depiction in TOS, coming off as a far more direct threat – we basically see the ship starting to burn away as it passes through – and not so much of the whole, “May induce godlike powers and megalomania” aspect (NGL, I was kinda hoping that this one thing they’d keep the original VFX for, just for the novelty of it). The meatier part of the episode is the character work. And this is pretty well done, though I think the context undermines where the biggest focus went.

That is, about half of this episode is about Tarka’s backstory. And sure, they did a good job at it. Even did a good job at making Tarka visibly younger in the flashbacks. But… Look, I hate Tarka at this point. You’re not going to walk it back by showing me a montage of him cuddling his boyfriend to help him through a PTSD flashback. It’s not really helped by the frankly-too-easy-to-miss reveal that Tarka had originally been placed with Othros to spy on him, since the Chain had already expected him of plotting escape. We’re meant, I assume, to see this as the source of Tarka’s guilt. But, I mean, it would have been enough if Tarka had just been forced to leave Othros behind when he escaped; all this does is remind me that Tarka is a piece of shit who has a history of fucking over other people for his own ends. There just isn’t enough weight given to the other side of it, the side that says, “Look, this imprisonment is so bad that even a good person would be driven to do terrible things.” I know Star Trek is technically capable of selling that, because they have done that – see also The Many Psychological Traumas of Miles O’Brien. But the difference here is that they gave full weight to the torture they put O’Brien under, and also that they led with the audience having faith that O’Brien was a good man. We have no such charity for Tarka because we’ve never seen him be anything other than a complete and utter dick. And that could certainly be part of a balanced storytelling breakfast – the tale of a complete and utter dick who, under duress, does dickish things, and ultimately has some kind of emotionally satisfying denouement where he either learns not to be a dick, or else fails at a critical moment because of his tragic inability to rise above dickishness. But the moral texture of this episode reads very strongly that it wants Tarka’s ark to be the same as Miles O’Brien: a good man who was driven by extreme trauma to do terrible things, and who will in time redeem himself by letting his Inner Goodness win. And that just is not the character they have given us.

Meanwhile, literally everyone of importance in the entire Federation is all going on this incredibly deadly mission together, with the Ni’Var president and the Federation President and the Earth – I think she’s not the president but has some cool title like “Defender of the Solar System” instead? I realize this is in some respects obviously dumb, but in other respects, it is just such peak Trek that I admire the brazenness of it. Also the brazenness of Saru being super awkward when he confesses his feelings to T’rina then finds out she’s coming with them.

Speaking of awkward, Adira is back and we get a nice Awkward Space Dad scene with Stamets which just makes me all the angrier at how thin the runtime is spread with the most compelling characters disappearing for weeks at a time. There’s just a hint at the fact that it ought to be weird for Adira to be without Gray for the first time since well before he died, but it’s just one line and then they disappear into the background noise of the episode again. They wrote out Bryce for some reason, sending him off to work on Kovitch’s SUPER SECRET PROJECT which… Are we introducing a new plot thread at this point?

Which leaves us I guess with the Room Elephant. After weeks of me pointing out that the Big Swirly Thing in Space hasn’t actually done a huge amount of threatening since it destroyed Kweijan, there is a correction now. And one hell of a correction: the new, bigger, faster-moving BSTiS is threatening Earth and Ni’Var. And, I assume other planets which are in between those two; I got to be honest, it’s a bit much to buy that this thing is simultaneously threatening The Two Planets We’re Most Likely To Care About (ie. Michael’s birth-home and planet-of-legal-residence). They do (if you blink you will miss this) clarify that the BSTiS is not actually close enough to squish Earth and Ni’Var, but rather, it’s close enough that its gravitational field will fling stuff at both systems. But still, it’s maybe just a bit too much? Unless they’re planning to actually go ahead and have Earth get its shit fucked up; that would be a hell of a thing. I don’t know. It’s probably too much.