Are big and bright. Deep in the heart of Texas. Spoiler warning claps.
(Yes, I do know that’s the joke of the episode title. I still couldn’t resist).
A good episode, but a poor follow up to the previous episode and a poor finale.
There are two main parts to this – the bread crumbs that are bought together for the main plot, and the way the Mariner story is resolved. In terms of the big plot, while the bread crumbs add up there really just aren’t enough of them. And the plot is all just a bit too ‘blah’. Yeah, it’s nice to tie this in to Rutherford’s past, but there was little satisfaction in the reveal. Just a ‘meh’ and move on.
The bigger problem though is the way we go from the ending point of the previous episode with Mariner and Freeman into the start of this one. Freeman doesn’t mention Mariner once until she’s back on the ship and in the crew. That just doesn’t follow from where things landed. This would have been easy fixed, just a line or two. “I can’t lose my daughter and my ship in the same week.” But without that we lost the momentum.
And then on the Mariner side it’s just too quick. Really we needed a whole ‘Mariner on her own’ episode. It kind of feels like that was how it was set up, complete with mysterious patron. But it’s over in about two scenes, and it really doesn’t give sufficient development to get Mariner from ‘I hate Star Fleet’ last episode to ‘let’s rejoin’ this episode. It’s a harder fix, nothing short of its own episode would have really worked here I think.
Leaving that quibble aside this was fun. It’s been a while since we had a real ‘evil’ Star Fleet Admiral. And while his motivation was still a bit underdeveloped there was a fun story with some incredible action senes. I also really liked the Shaxs sub-plot, which moved nicely and actually built well on earlier episodes as well.
Quick hits:
– Star Fleet was founded for Humans? Welp, that’s putting the speciesism front and centre even with a few aliens in the room…
– Indiana Mariner and the Temple of Ferengi??
– Galaxy Class engineering? Surely Titan or Sovereign Class by now.
– Rider manoeuvre training. LOL.
– ‘Brigadoon type planet;. Also LOL.
– Surely a Star Base is better protected than that.
– Xindi reference! Possibly the first since Enterprise?
– The Warp combat scene was very pretty.
– Loved all the California Class ships coming together. ST IV victory music too.
873 down. And back on deck after a pretty long break due to being overseas. Next, a season review and the second half of Prodigy Season One. And then Picard in mid-Feb.