Discovery finishes up its fourth season (reaching what is known as ‘The Enterprise Point”. Spoilers.
This is going to be a shorter review than usual, as a lot of my thoughts are more about the overall season. This is a pretty reasonable conclusion to the season, which wraps the story up well. The episode is more successful at generating tension and urgency than most others, there are some entertaining action sequences, and the resolution to the 10-C plot line is strong.
There’s a lot of the action being driven by the ongoing frustration of Book’s blindness to Tarka’s madness. Together with General Impatient from Earth, who can’t wait a moment or two before acting, it causes a bit of frustration in watching the episode.
And then, we have the end of the episode. I literally shouted “For fucks sake” out loud. For a show that loves trauma so much, it really felt pretty darn cheap to bring Book back from the apparent dead. From a dramatic construction perspective it was pretty obvious that he wasn’t dead-dead given the abruptness of his disappearance. But it’s still a terrible cop out. We only lose one character, Tarka, in the episode. That’s very 1990s TV story telling.
Quick hits:
– Yay, Tilly! Gee it’s nice to see her.
– The Earth scene was, at long last, a successful way to demonstrate the stakes and urgency. Pity they couldn’t have had a bit of it before.
– It took a very long idea to think about trying telepathy.
– Some messy technobabble scenes this episode.
– Of course the heroic sacrifice can’t be a main character. Still, it was nice to at least have a little fake out on that.
– Big pyro budget for this week. Lots of sparks and fires everywhere.
– So – advanced 10-C tech can’t stop Book, but a single shuttle can crash into it?
– Final reveal of the 10-C lived up to the build up.
– A campaign speech with allegorical language does not seem like the best way to communicate when you barely speak the language.
– So Book is going to jail for like a million years now? Along with the General?
– I did hope for a little that we were going to be seeing Season 5 be the Discovery making its way home Voyager style, but alas.
– “We have come a long way” – yeah, that’s a direct reference to the Enterprise theme song. Love it.
– This is Lord of the Rings level multiple endings to an episode. And I wrote this joke three endings before the episode stopped.
– Stacey Abrams as President of Earth is a cute cameo.
845 down.