Discovery explores the end of the second season. Spoilers.
Wow, that was a lot of episode. Jumbo sized at 63 minutes, but had more story than some Star Trek movies I could name. Even excluding The Motion Picture…
There are four main threads, so might as well go through them each.
First we have the sequence on the Enterprise with Pike and the Admiral. A lot of this is just action material to back up the overall battle, the main core is the Admiral’s sacrifice to stop the torpedo destroying the ship. Leaving aside the ‘this doesn’t quite make sense’ parts, it just didn’t have enough resonance for me. More like cleaning up a loose end than a real story.
Back on Discovery we have Saru leading the main battle, with the ultimate appearance of the Klingon’s to help. It’s a well done action sequence, with lots of good moments. It did feel a bit ’samey’ at times, with it being hard to really understand the evolution of the battle as it went on. Saru continues to be a very interesting Captain – he has a style of his own, but is very effective.
Also on Discovery is Georgiou’s confrontation with Control/Leland. Another well done action sequence, with one of the best individual fight scenes that I can ever remember in Star Trek. But we didn’t really learn anything much about any character, just an opportunity for Georgiou to kick ass.
And then finally we have Spock and Burnham, finally setting into action the various threads from the red beacons that started the season off. Although I’m still not clear what it was that started the season – the beacons seem to go off one by one on specific star dates, so what was detected that set the mission running?
The episode then wraps up with a nice epilogue moving the pieces back to where they should be. And they squeezed in why Spock (or anyone else) never mentioned Burnham – doesn’t make perfect sense, but good enough. And it also explains the spore drive disappearing as technology.
Overall a great episode, and even more exciting for the future of the show (but more on that in the season review, which I’ll write once I’ve had some time to digest this season).
Quick hits:
– I completely missed the opportunity to make a ‘We have the technology’ joke following on from Saru’s ‘We can rebuild it’ last week. Fortunately the ‘previously on’ gives me the opportunity to do it this week.
– Sorry Captain Pike, ‘This is Starfleet, Get it done’ is going to need some retooling as a catch phrase.
– Shades of Ang Lee’s Hulk in some of the split screen work.
– It’s remarkable foresight to have had a formation all ready to go with the unlikely ‘we need to hit both emitters at once’ scenario.
– Is this the longest ship-to-ship combat scene in Trek? It’s a good 20 minutes, so I think it might be.
– “Today is a good day to die”, yay!
– I was underwhelmed by Stamets and Culber’s reunion – didn’t feel earned. Stamets should have had to change more.
– I still maintain that the wings on the suit look a *lot* like the Roman emblem.
– The shifting gravity fist fight was wonderful, iconic stuff.
– No, not Admiral Bob! (TM The Greatest Discovery podcast).
– Glad we didn’t have a silly link between Control/Leland and the Borg.
– The bit with Spock in uniform and without the beard was pure fan service, but I really liked it.
772 down.