Discovery meets an old friend. Spoilers.
With lesser actresses this would have been a relatively dull episode. But with Sonequa Martin-Green and Sonja Sohn it’s incredible. The honesty and truth in both performances is fantastic, really drawing out what the mere words on a page couldn’t have done. There are several really great scenes, most notably Michael coming to terms with her mother’s arrival at the start of the episode, and the big face-to-face scene towards the end. I got a real sense of both what Burnham’s mother believed, and why she believed it.
The non-Burnham part of the episode was OK, but not great. I was a bit worried we’d see Georgiou and TyVoq reduced to idiots not noticing the complete change in Leland’s personality, but fortunately that was handled promptly and well. But that still leaves us with a villain in Control that has very little clear motivation beyond wanting the data. It’d be nice to try and round that characterisation out a bit more, try and make Control something more than just a villainous AI.
As an aside, a lot of this season has been consecutive episodes in the ‘setup, payoff’ structure. I’m an old-school TV watcher, and prefer it when the episodes at least try to stand alone. But maybe that’s an out moded view of the world with modern streaming culture. So maybe I should be averaging this and the previous episode, rather than treating them as separate things.
Quick hits:
– I need to know what Tilly’s favourite law of physics is. So many possibilities.
– There are way too many ‘let’s sit around and argue while there’s a crisis going on’ scenes in this show overall. Does no one respect a ticking clock?
– Is Georgiou trying to hide her true identity or not? She just comes right out and says it to Burnham’s mother.
– The suit is DNA strand encoded – 100% guarantee that Michael Burnham is going to end up in that thing.
– I am very glad that they get full value out of Michelle Yeoh’s Hong Kong action side.
769 down.