Star Trek starts continues down the final stretch of Season One. Spoilers after the break.
The big ‘reveal’ of the episode is that Tyler is a surgically altered Voq with brain-washing of some type. I’ve talked about this development plenty in previous episodes. Ultimately it doesn’t really feel super ‘earned’. At least it explains Voq being smart enough, in that they’ve fixed that through implanting another personality. But there’s still a very poor continuity between Tyler/Voq and the Voq we saw early in the season.
But I am somewhat reassured by the result that the Tyler/Voq thing has really gone nowhere for now. Not that it was ever very clear what the point of the whole exercise was in the first place.
The rest of the Mirror Universe stuff was a bit flat, and didn’t result in anything interesting I should point out that the entire point of the Mirror Universe is to stick existing character into fun roles on the other side. Voq feels like a boring choice, though, made more in service to the Tyler plot than dong interesting things in the mirror universe.
(Sarek turning up was not much of a surprise either – but they did nothing of interest with his character).
The rest of the episode back on the Discovery felt more like plot maintenance than anything, moving some pieces on Stamets for the final four episodes.
Quick thoughts:
– Voq in the ‘previously’ suggests early that we’re going to get some resolution to the plot there. It really affected the way I was watching the early scenes, pointing so strong into a plot that I’m not so keen on.
– Some nice long lingering beauty shots of the Discovery and the Shenzhou at the start.
– Didn’t like the initial pre-credits narration sequence from Burnham – the prose was a bit too purple, and we didn’t learn very much about the mirror universe.
– I thought using the nearly-certain-to-be-monitored ship-to-ship channels to discuss things in plain was very stupid. Surely they could have worked out some pre-etsablished code phrases or something.
– Every time the spore drive stuff comes up we head into minutes of ridiculous treknobabble.
– Not wanting to be species-ist, but that Andorian looked a *lot* like Shran.
– Never take your victory lap until you’ve won, Tilly. Hard way to learn that lesson.
– I really hate the trope of ‘you thought it had failed but as you’re mourning it the machine comes back to life’.
– Don’t put *both* the very dangerous Klingons into the same brig where they cn talk to each other, please.
– And who had ‘Captain Georgiou’ in the ‘secret Emperor’ stakes? That could be an interesting episode coming up next.
750 down. Four to go in this run.