More Star Trek. On TV. Several weeks in a row! Spoilers after the break.
This felt more Star Trek-y to me. I liked that the main impetus of the plot at several points was people’s drive to help Corvan II, and also that the main plot was very much about ‘don’t assume the big scary monster is a threat without evidence’.
One thing which was a genuine improvement on a lot of previous Trek was the scenes on Corvan II. By getting a better sense of the stakes in terms of the people in the ground (something that would normally be ‘told not shown’ in previous series) the actions of Lorca and others are better justified. This is war, it’s not business as usual for Star Fleet as much as they might like it to be.
The Klingon stuff is a bit more puzzling so far – the politics felt pretty consistent with what we’ve seen from previous series. But it’s not clear to me where it’s going, and it really took quite a long time to get to the point with the scenes.
Characterisation is still pretty uneven. For instance, Landry was unlucky – normally Star Fleet security officers who are that bad at their jobs have far better longevity. But her ‘gung ho’ approach rang false to me – not enough work establishing characters before they take consequential actions. But Burnham is starting to come into focus a bit more, which is a significant improvement on the last few episodes.
Quick Hits:
– Long title! “For The World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” retains the record for longest title, but only by two characters (50 versus 48). The average Star Trek episode title is 14 characters long, and there’s never been a single character episode title.
– Captain Lorca has a few echoes of Admiral Thrown from the Star Wars expanded universe.
– I was glad we didn’t spend several weeks before finding out about the Captain’s weird collection teased at the end of the previous episode.
– It probably doesn’t count as cannibalism if you’re eating other sentient species, but it does feel like pretty blatant ‘bad guy’ marking.
– Didn’t like the Elon Musk reference – too contemporary, could age very badly.
– I worked out the solution to the ‘issue’ of the episode (i.e. the super tardigrade is the super computer) pretty early, but it did feel like I honestly had more pieces of the puzzle than anyone so didn’t bother me too badly.
– Despite my best attempts, I have to admit that Cadet Tilly is growing on me. I will deny this if asked, of course.
– The telescope at the end was a nice moment, but I’m left wondering ‘how on Earth did they get it off the ship’…
743 down.