There is a lot to like about the second-season finale of Discovery. It’s a massive thrill ride, with lots of action and adventure and which finally tells us where the signals came from.
And then we get to the ending, and I found it incredibly frustrating and irritating, and not just because Ethan Peck looks incredibly creepy without the beard…
Okay, let’s start with the good stuff: I was completely gripped by the action in this episode. Whether the space battle involving the Enterprise and Discovery (and later L’Rell’s flagship and the Kelpien/Ba’ul fleet) against Control’s drones, Georgiou and Nhan’s leading Zombie Leland on a merry chase through Discovery‘s corridors, Cornwell, Pike, and Number One trying to disarm the photon torpedo stuck in the hull, or Burnham and Spock trying to get their red angel suit to work right, the script by Michelle Paradise, Jenny Lumet, & Alex Kurtzman and the directing by Olatunde Osunsami kept me on the edge of my seat for an hour.
Character moments were not sacrificed, either—sometimes at the expense of good sense, as I gotta wonder why Spock and Burnham had to go on quite so long about how much they meant to each other when people were getting blow’d up and stuff a short distance away. Still, it was good to see them parting on good terms—the sibling relationship between these two has been a high point of this season—and in particular I love that her final bit of advice to him boiled down to, “put up with Dr. McCoy when you meet him.” Po got a lovely little moment in the sun, and I loved Tilly saving the day by getting the shields raised via a technique she first performed at the Academy while drunk and blindfolded. (“Somebody owes me a beer.”) Saru quoting Sun-Tzu, and Georgiou commenting on it, was fantastic. The snottiness-under-pressure of both Jett Reno and Dr. Pollard was a delight. (I loved Pollard’s response to Saru telling her to do her best: “No, I’m gonna do a half-assed job, because now’s the perfect time…”) And the final reconciliation between Culber and Stamets was heartening to see, if a bit rushed.
I was sorry to see Cornwell go, sacrificed on the altar of bad ship design (seriously, how is there only an emergency bulkhead lowering lever on one side of that bulkhead????), but watching the self-sacrifice to save others, knowing what fate awaits him in the future, was a good character moment for Pike.
My desire for them to do something (miniseries, movie, one-shot, Short Trek, whatever) with Pike, Number One, and Spock on the Enterprise has only increased with this final episode in which they played a major role, despite Peck’s beardless creepiness. (Seriously, the face fuzz softens his features tremendously.) Rebecca Romijn in particular did stellar work as the preternaturally calm, only slightly snarky Number One (especially in comparison to the high-level snark we get from so many other characters on this show). And we still don’t know her name, but I think after 53 years, to actually reveal it would be anticlimactic.
However, Number One is my main reason for wanting more of this Enterprise’s adventures. We know what happens to Pike and Spock, but we haven’t the first clue what happens to Number One (or Colt, Boyce, Amin, Mann, Nicola, et al), and there’s stories to be told, dagnabbit! Hell, I was hoping that this season would end with Number One being made captain of Discovery, but that obviously did not happen…
Buy the Book
A Chain Across the Dawn
I love the way they tied everything together with Burnham being the one to actually send the signals. It all really did fit, too. The Hiawatha rescue enabled them to bring Reno on board, whose engineering skills were vital to their efforts. (Plus, y’know, she’s fabulous.) Terralysium was the same planet where Gabrielle Burnham wound up, and it needed to be saved from the asteroid bombardment. Their actions on Kaminar led to the Ba’ul/Kaminar fleet that rode to everyone’s rescue alongside the Klingons. Boreth got them the time crystal they needed, and Xahea got them Po’s engineering expertise. The final two signals were Burnham directing Discovery to find her through the wormhole, and to let Enterprise know they’re safe.
The Mighty Mouse moment when L’Rell’s flagship and the Ba’ul ships led by Saru’s sister Siranna was glorious. Mary Chieffo was obviously having a grand old time leading folks into battle, though I have to wonder about what political capital it cost L’Rell, in particular having the disgraced (by Klingon standards) Tyler/Voq by her side. And there’s a story to be told as to how Siranna went from high priest to someone who flies fighter ships. (Doug Jones magnificently delivered Saru’s stunned, “You—have learned to pilot a fighter.”)
And then we get to the ending.
I get that most of this season has been the writers trying to fix the problems of season one. But they took it a bit too far at the end there.
Not with Discovery’s fate. I have no problem with them being sent to the future to save the galaxy from Control wiping out all sentient life. Though we still don’t know how successful they were, since they went into the wormhole and we don’t know what happened next, and we won’t until season three debuts—um, whenever.
I’m even on board with the notion that they can’t come back home and will be stuck in the future. Doing Discovery as a prequel was always a notion fraught with storm and tempest, as it were, and jumping ahead a century or ten might do some good.
But they overdid it. They spent the last ten minutes of air time with Pike, Number One, Spock, and Tyler going to great lengths to “correct” problems that didn’t need fixing. “We’ll never talk about Discovery again.” “We’ll never talk about the spore drive again.” “We’ll never talk about Michael Burnham again.” Just Michael? What about Saru? Detmer? Owosekun? Stamets? Culber? Pollard? Are they all being wished into the cornfield on the altar of whiny fangoobers who need to know why Spock never talked about Michael Burnham before?
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. Spock never told anyone who his parents were until they were standing next to him on the Enterprise. Spock never told anyone he was engaged to be married until he was biologically compelled to return to Vulcan, and even then he had to practically be put in a headlock before he’d talk about it. Spock never told anyone he had a half-brother until he was standing next to him on the Enterprise. An open book, Spock ain’t.
Also why did Pike and the gang lie and say Discovery was destroyed? It makes no sense, especially since we’re dealing with time travel. Yes, they all went knowing it was likely to be a one-way trip, but this is Star Trek we’re talking about, a show where people routinely go on suicide missions and don’t die. It’s perfectly possible, in the abstract, that they’ll figure out a way to come back home. Then the fact that the four of them have lied to Starfleet will come out.
It probably won’t, because they’re obviously catering to the whiniest segment of Trek fandom and heavily classifying the entire “red angel” affair as well as Discovery’s very existence. They already had a way of explaining why we haven’t seen the spore drive in later iterations of Trek by showing the damage it’s doing to the mycelial network and the lifeforms that live there. That explanation would fit in with Trek’s compassionate worldview. But no, we have to bury it completely and never speak of it again on penalty of treason. Great. Now if we can just find out what happened to transwarp drive and the soliton wave drive, we’ll be golden…
The entire ending in San Francisco is painstakingly constructed, and you can see the strings. The characters don’t feel like they’re acting like themselves, but rather acting in a particular manner in order to satisfy an agenda, one that is utterly unnecessary and tiresome.
What’s worse is that, from a story perspective, the entire thing isn’t actually necessary. Georgiou was able to destroy Control by luring Zombie Leland into the spore drive and magnetizing it. At that point, the Section 31 ships all went dead. Control had been stopped—so why were they still going into the future? At the very least, some lip-service should have been paid to the notion that Control was still out there, copied somewhere else. Because without that, the whole thing is just pointless. If the idea is to keep the Sphere Data out of Control’s hands, but Control’s dead, why bother?
It’s frustrating, because the episode had been going very nicely up to that point. The space battle action was exciting (if a little too two-dimensional at times), everybody had something to do, the pacing was strong, the acting was excellent. Anson Mount, in what is likely his swan song at least on this show as Pike, remains the concerned center of everything. What I particularly love about his performance in general and his work on this finale in particular is that he feels everything. You see every emotion etched on his face. It’s why his Pike has been such a compelling part of this season, because Pike lets you into his feelings, whether it’s regret at Cornwell’s death, surprise at Po participating in the battle, sadness at losing his second family on the Discovery, or pride at seeing Spock back in uniform and on the bridge.
But the center is Michael Burnham, and after a season that had a bit too many emotional gut-punches and anguished expressions on Sonequa Martin-Green’s face, in this finale, she antes up and kicks in. Burnham is entirely focused on doing what needs to be done to save everybody. One thing I noticed at the end of part one last week, when we got closeups of everyone as the 31 armada was approaching. Most everyone looked apprehensive or concerned. The exceptions were Spock and Burnham. They both looked serene and content. They had decided on a course of action, and dadgummit, they were committed to it and would make it work. Both of them spent the majority of this episode putting the plan into action, working with efficiency and determination. One of the hallmarks of both Spock as we’ve seen him for five decades and Burnham as we’ve seen her for two seasons is that they will see their course of action through once they set their mind to it, whether it’s dealing with the Klingon sarcophagus ship, faking her way through the Mirror Universe, kidnapping his former captain and sending him to Talos IV, saving the ship from destruction via self-sacrifice, or letting herself get killed in order to lure the red angel.
Now we’ve got Discovery heading to the future, and, as Spock said, we have no idea what the future will hold. After a thrill-ride of a final episode, we have a particularly powerful cliffhanger, because we have no idea what will be happening next, not what the show will be about, not when the show will take place. But we do know it will be with these compelling characters, and that alone is worth looking forward to.
I’ll be back next week with a second-season overview.
Keith R.A. DeCandido turned fifty yesterday, and ended a lovely day of celebrating with watching this finale.
In some of the tie-in fiction there were ways that Starfleet captains who had run-ins with time travel to leave, call it “delay mail” (Where did I steal that from? I know I’ve heard it before.) for their future selves, or whoever they encountered then. I don’t see why that wouldn’t actually be do-able via the DTI.
Well, I agree KRAD about the ending, but in some perverse way it makes me happy they did it, because it makes the whiny fan complaints look so wrong and short-sided now.
As for season 3, the producer has confirmed they went 950 years into the future. Season 3 has an entirely blank canvas. It’s as exciting a cliffhanger as Trek has ever done because it is so open ended.
My only nitpick is this makes the Picard show not the “contemporary” version of Trek. In a way, it is a prequel as much as Discovery S1+2 was now. At least one season of Picard will be out before Discovery gives us some hints as to what happened in the 950 years in between.
I came on here all ready to rant about the ending and how it felt wooden and forced, and you already said everything I was going to say about it. Nicely written!
But seriously though, that ending was awful and unnecessary.
This season was originally billed as addressing a “faith vs. science” theme. I agree. The show asked us to take on faith that the plot contrivances made sense, and we demanded evidence that the writers were competent to carry the Star Trek banner in a show that aspired to be “prestige TV”. :)
KRAD wrote:
Were they, really? There was a lot of back-tracking re: season 1, yes, but for the Red Angel … what was the production schedule? Was everything in the can, or at least written, before the audience was exposed to the whole Terminator-ish temporal-war-vs-rogue-AI schtick?
The season ended with “and we shall never speak of it again” and shots of a completely different ship and crew, neither of which demonstrate overwhelming confidence in the nominal subject of the show.
Over on Trekmovie.com, almost everybody asked “why did Discovery carry through with the temporal escape if CONTROL had been killed?” The only halfway-plausible answers advanced are “they’re not entirely sure CONTROL is dead” and “predestination”.
Agreed re: Ethan Peck’s clean-shaven face (as a bearded male I sympathize). The facial planes of Leonard Nimoy aren’t quite matched by either Peck nor Quinto, but somehow I prefer the latter.
I would like to gripe about the number of red-alert lights on the Enterprise bridge: Around the main viewscreen, around the overhead screens and at eye-level at each station, on the railing around the pit and at the edge of the pit. What, is the architect afraid the crew will forget the ship’s status if they don’t have a red glow literally everywhere they might glance?
The Control question is rather easy. They really don’t know for sure Control is FULLY neutralized. After all, Spock killing that Control infested crew member on the 31 ship a few episodes ago didn’t kill all of Control. Why risk it?
Plus, was the wormhole already open?
During Burnham’s lengthy discourse with Spock before leaving him, as she talked of opening arms to Spock’s polar opposite, I thought she might be inferring Kirk just as much as McCoy. Obviously Kirk was much more embraced than the good Doctor, but I think any argument could be made for all characters leading from this point to Kirk-era Spock.
I have a lot of thoughts. I had mixed reactions to the episode myself. I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. I think I need to rewatch the series and see how I feel about it then. Watching Season 1 of Discovery as it aired, I enjoyed it, but binge watching it over a few days I loved it. And while I can see why they release it weekly, it feels better served in the all at once format…but maybe that’s just me.
I personally didn’t like the space battles. I had a hard time connecting with anything that was happening. New Starfleet ships fighting with new Control ships with nobody inside them felt pointless to me. I mean, I know there was a point, but watching the beautiful special effects scroll by with not much to ground them left me pining for the characters I was there to see, and yet, like you, while I loved the Spock / Burnham conversation, I couldn’t help feeling that people were dying because they were taking time for a personal chat. Also – I took Burnham’s message to Spock to be about Kirk, rather than McCoy (though I suppose it could be applied to both of them) – and Alex Kurtzman confirmed in his interview in the Hollywood Reporter that the intention was for the reference to be for Kirk (in a piece titled “How the ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Finale Pulled Off the Franchise’s Boldest Leap Yet” – which is totally worth a read).
Despite my dissatisfaction with the action, I did enjoy a lot of the episode.
The Klingons and Kelpian / Ba’ul reinforcements were great (because those ships brought in faces and people for me to cheer for); I had guessed that Ash would bring in the Klingons, but I too was left scratching my head why Ash was with them and didn’t just contact L’Rell without revealing himself – because not only is he disgraced, she said she’d killed him and a few episodes ago he couldn’t be seen by other Klingons for fear of the repercussions.
I liked a lot of the choices. I liked that Jet Reno is alive at the end, which I didn’t expect. I liked the Hugh / Paul stuff – which, again, I had guessed they would reconcile in the finale, but had not guessed that Paul would be injured. I liked the explanation why the red signals were displayed where they were, though again, it seemed obvious to me that Burnham would go back and send those signals, if for no other reason than she had already done it – it was nice having a reason beyond that though.
I didn’t mind Admiral Cornwell dying; I generally like character death in my fiction, but like you, I was confused as to why there was only a lever on the one side – and while I liked seeing Number One and the Admiral working together, their reactions to one another felt like they were maybe a payoff for something that had been cut earlier? It just felt odd to me. And I’m glad Number One survived, because honestly, when she went down there, I expected that she would die, as we don’t know what happened to her after “The Cage”.
I didn’t mind the explanations for how Discovery is never mentioned and all of that – but like you, I didn’t need an explanation for why Spock had never mentioned Michael, because it’s always been my view that Spock doesn’t talk about things like this and I often give people the examples you sited. My partner loved it. He loved the whole thing. I felt like it was fine, but it felt like a solution to a problem that I never had.
As for the Discovery damaging the Mycelial Network, I think they established that it wasn’t Discovery that was doing the damage, but Hugh fighting for his life inside the network which was the problem. But maybe I’m confused? There was a lot of stuff. lol
Spock does look strange without the beard now, but I think part of that is we’re just not used to seeing him without it. When Ethan Peck was first cast, I looked up pictures of him and thought he was very handsome and couldn’t understand why they were hiding that face under that beard. But now I’m used to it. I think in time we’d grow use to his face this way – and I do so hope that we get the chance. A Pike / Spock / Number One series feels like a perfect adventure to explore next. Kurtzman says they’d love to do that show and he’s aware of the fan enjoyment of it – while Anson Mount has said that he’d like to do it too, but in order for it to happen there would need to be a lot of creative discussions; at first I thought he was just playing hardball for a big paycheck (and he should) but his other comments seemed to suggest that he either wants a shorter season or a faster production – he seemed unhappy that they filmed for 8 months to do 14 episodes.
Control as a villain is a bust for me, I think. I hadn’t read the book (sadly) and I felt like it kind of came out of nowhere and I was never quite happy with the development of it as a villain. I don’t understand it as a villain really; I understand the concept (I think) but I’m not completely satisfied with the execution. And I too wondered why they were escaping to the future when Control has seemingly just been wiped out. I know it’s unlikely that it was – but it sure seemed like it was. I feel like they should have edited that differently…or something. Something should have been there to help ease the confusion, but it’s possible I missed something.
Discovery in the future. I like it. I like Discovery being both a prequel and a sequel, though with Enterprise it already was. But I like the change. I like the boldness of the decision. I like the setup for a Pike series, or if not, just the good old TOS – which, it’s surprising how many episodes now feel like sequels to stories told in ENT & DISCO. Love all of that.
There are lots of unanswered questions which will likely be answered in Season 3…but that’s a long way off. I’m happy that we’ll at least be getting some Short Treks soon and that Picard will be with us during our waiting time.
Does Georgiou being with Discovery in the future suggest that the Section 31 show might be set in the future? Or that she somehow gets back to the past? Or is that the past future? I had assumed that Ash would be a part of that series. Maybe Season 3 won’t just be a sequel but will also have ties to the past, with a split sort of storyline; or maybe there will be an episode or 2 that way? How will season 3 tie into the “Calypso” Short Trek? What are these animated Short Treks coming up and when will they surface? They’ve been described as tying into what we’ve seen and I’m excited to see what they give us.
Anyways, I’ve probably rambled enough. I’m happy that you got a big Trek episode on your birthday! And I thank you for the reviews. It’s been one of the more balanced source for this kind of thing.
Blink and you’ll miss it, but Pike calls her Una during the torpedo incident. And then she matter of factly says her name is “Number One” for the board of inquiry. So looks like Una is her nickname and Number One is her literal legal name. I seem to remember that’s from a novel somewhere… :)
I don’t know if it takes a huge logical leap to figure that the Discovery crew went through with the time jump even after Georgiou apparently destroyed Control/Leland because Control or something like it could still be out there, or even that someone else might be able to use the Sphere data for nefarious purposes. It’s an attempt to close Pandora’s box, at least for nine centuries. The same could be said of Discovery‘s spore drive: just because Starfleet has it under lock-and-key doesn’t mean someone else less scrupulous won’t try to steal/use/replicate it. (And even Starfleet’s scruples here are arguable, as they continued to utilize the spore drive for the duration of the second season, in spite of knowing the damage they were doing to the mycelial network.)
Like the Enterprise crew, I am taking a vow to never speak of Discovery again.
Do you think the Bureau of Temporal Investigations is fine with the outcome of this. The timeline was manipulated viciously by Michael. These are clear violations of the Temporal Prime Directive and enough to grant the intervention of the Bureau before the timeline is manipulated any more. Unless…
It was not their Idea to conceal these events. They were all approached by the Bureau and convinced these was the best way to protect the timeline. The Admiral doing the inquiry is from temporal Investigations and is just there to make sure the timeline is not damaged anymore. Until Nero fucks it up anyway.
Did the dialog in the last scene canon-ize the term Articles of the Federation? Or had it it already been mentioned elsewhere?
This was a very good season finale, because of the character moments, as that’s what I have been enjoying about the season. The overarching plot lost me long ago (the showrunner switch became obvious), and I feel that season one used the Klingon war as a backdrop for other plots, while this one relied to heavily in the Red Angel plot. I’m still not clear about the signals, they flashed once all at the same time to start the plot, then one by one… it’s all a bit muddled.
Another thing I didn’t like about the episode was turning it into a Star Wars space battle, with hundreds of buzzing small craft. That’s not to say I didn’t love the arrival of the Klingon mega cruiser, I totally cheered. Chieffo was spectacular leading the Klingon fleet into battle.
Michael and Spock pouring their hearts out to each other was beautiful, as was hearing “I love you” in Vulcan.
There was also no need to make Queen Po an ace pilot, in addition to being a prodigy engineer. And having Saru’s sister and other Kelpians be such good fighter pilots was a bit nonsensical too. Unnecessary, the writers could have found another way to have them help.
And, what’s up with Number One not being able to parse Detmer’s course data? And did she really give her name as Number One? :) Is there a reason why they never show the inquiring officer’s face in full?
The resolution to the “why is the spore drive never mentioned again, or Discovery” tie up at the end was a bit too much, I agree with you krad, a bit too catering to certain people who, in any case, still hate Disco and won’t watch it.
I don’t have a problem with Disco jumping to the future, I understood right away that there is a possibility that there is a copy of Control somewhere out there. They even confirm it in Tyler’s debriefing, when he asks if Control will be decommissioned.
As for Discovery’s future, I guess they’ll be stranded in the, well, future. How is Georgiou getting back to be in the S31 show? Will DIS S3 end with them returning? Or just her? Or will prime Georgiou show up and pass herself of as mirror Georgiou passing herself off as prime Georgiou? :) I still can’t reconcile the idea of her headlining the S31 show, as if the idea of such a show wasn’t already questionable.
Oh, and that ending with Pike, Spock, Number One, and the Enterprise is a total teaser/backdoor pilot for a Pike Enterprise show. :)
As someone who you’d probably classify as one of the whiniest segment of Trek fandom, they did NOT cater to me, except by illustrating why this was a boneheaded idea to begin with to make a prequel wholly intertwined with Trek canon and violating it at every turn.
Because OF COURSE you can think of ways to explain any deviations from canon. The problem is, most of those ways ARE DUMB AS %@@@@@!% and the show is saddled with a creative team that can’t string together a coherent plot. “And we shall never speak of any of this stuff again,” is DUMB AS %$@@@@@!. But I knew it was coming, pretty much all through the episode, because of the other dumb as %@@@@@!$ stuff that happened. I’m sorry to anyone who thinks its a cool moment but the Klingon empire sending its chancellor to save a Federation ship in a fight with fighter jets with some people who until recently were essentially pre-industrial is just dumb (at least in the context of Trek where they’re enemies a few years later). Literally a billion other allies would have made more sense. Similarly an ACTUAL KLINGON who happens to have some Federation memories and sympathies being put in charge of Section 31 is dumber than a lot of Trek. But so is a massive cache of data that won’t allow itself to be deleted, or destroyed, but DOES allow itself to be moved into other receptacle (remember that was the early plan to just move the data into Mama Burnham’s timesuit and send it to the future… so why not move the data into a separate data core that doesn’t have shields and blow it up), a Quantum torpedo that can explode inside the hull of Enterprise and not damage anything outside one door, or a billion other things in the episode. They aren’t competent enough to handle dancing around continuity, and boy do they show it. I’d put this whole season long arc as dumber than Voyager’s Threshold. All because they wanted to do a prequel, play around with continuity, and tell a dramatic story with stakes.
Instead we got a mess AND they didn’t even solve the continuity issues, really. Because just years after Control almost takes over the entire galaxy, the Federation decides it might be a good idea to put The Ultimate Computer in charge of starships, and Spock’s not one of those who speaks out against that idea. I guess he took his “never talk about these events” REALLY seriously, enough that he was willing to possibly let it happen again. Why does he even need to NEVER MENTION MICHAEL AGAIN? Her existence isn’t secret… she’s a famous traitor (who got redeemed). Even if you stick with the lie she got blown up, why not occasionally talk about her?
What next, the hostilities with Klingons began because Section 31 decided while Starfleet officers could be trusted to Never Speak Of This Again, too many other people in other empires knew too and needed to be dealt with?
The annoying thing is, I actually like the IDEA of Discovery being lost because it wound up in the future, and taking the show from there in future years. If we hadn’t built the whole season around Spock and Michael’s emotional relationship, I could totally buy into the idea that Spock, thinking she was dead, saw no reason to mention her to anyone else. That the spore drive was an experimental, classified technology and now that it was gone the research never recovered. Now though? It rings completely false.
I don’t quite see how this season finale is a cliffhanger. After two turbulent seasons which presumably suffered from the massive changes in staff midway they went for a total reset. I hope the creative team stays the same for the next whole season and they finally can execute one season properly.
It is reasonable to assume that some of these behind the scenes problems explain some of the grotesque story holes and changes of direction during both seasons. The Red Angel was apparently rewritten into a mundane Skynet vs. Saint Michael story. That sounds pretty much like something like Kurtzman would feel good about: simple good vs. evil and lots of sound and fury.
But assuming the next season goes smoothly I am still doubtful that this series will ever be good because it always go for excessive solutions.
1) The season arcs clearly don’t work the way they are written here. They are crowded with plot turns and events which create a logical and confusing mess. I can tell the story arc of the Xindi war in a few sentences and understand its logical progress but I would find it difficult to do the same for the Disco seasons. The ship constantly jumps from here to there, persons leave the ship and appear on it for no good reason and with no regard for time and space. And the writers desperately try to connect everything to each other, characters are directly linked to events and vice versa for no good reasons. To give a simple example: did we really need to see Saru’s sister come back as fighter pilot? I rarely laugh derisively at the screen but come on … and that Michael is a monstrous Mary Sue character was often pointed out but has to be finally adressed in some way especially since the actress isn’t one of the stronger parts of the cast.
Please simplify the whole approach. You aren’t gaining any complexity or are adding deeper layers of meaning with this piling up of events. Especially when you have to tidy them up hastily. Many critizised Captain Kirk’s death but at least the structure of events made sense. But why exactly did Admiral Cornwell have to die? They didn’t have one of these cute workbees we saw just before to pull the lever?
2) I have no clue what happened during this battle. How could both ships keep the armada at bay and how do all these drones work here? What I see is a mostly dark screen with things whizzing through it and some orange and blue lights emanating from there plus lots of explosions. To take again a classic example the Wrath of Khan battle is simple and logical and even the often reviled Nemesis offers a very clearly structured battle where I can follow the military logic plus some character weaknesses and strengths are built in (Shinzon’s arrogance or Troi’s scanning abilities). Here lots of stuff happens I guess.
Again simplify your effects and don’t overdo the clutter. That obviously also goes for the basic film language. Do we really need all the cuts and the moving cameras and angles? Couldn’t you folks watch some Howard Hawks films?
3) Characters don’t gain complexity by confronting them with a barrage of life altering experiences and audiences certainly become tired when this happens to pretty much every crew member. The whole crew has experienced enough traumatas for a seven years run. Pretty much everybody was killed and resurrected once so maybe we could get back to normal characters with edges here or there instead of hysteria and angst?
What worries me most is a point which more or less is underlying 1)-3). The series has no feeling for rhythm. Kinetic action is followed by dreary angst and emotion leaden monologues and talks. Sometimes to a comical degree when Spock and Michael have time for some family chats while a pitched battle is fought and time was supposed to be an essential factor. These heavy pseudo-philosophical voice-overs are painful as is the desperate attempt to wring any emotional moment to the maximum. The audience M U S T F E E L S O M E T H I N G. And no, the snarky remarks aren’t that great because Disco tries to have its cake and eat it, too. Either you ridicule all the occasionally pompous speeches given by commanding officers (“Do your best” “Yeah no, today I’ll just go for mediocre to below average”) or you don’t but then please don’t come five seconds later with inspiring speeches about how we are Starfleet and blah blah.
At some point the creative team should ask themselves: why are we making this series? Do we have stories to tell? Or are we just some plot machinery which has to grind a whole season?
I’m okay with both Discovery still heading into the wormhole and the ‘we shall never speak of this again’. While Control may have been out of commission at the point, no one on the bridge of either ship knew exactly what had happened, whether it was temporary, could Control have backup routines on those ships, etc, and are there bits of Control left, well, somewhere, so the less people who knew where the sphere data the better.
I had other issues.
First, unless I missed this somewhere, the red Angel contacted Spock with the 7 signals to set off this whole paradoxical loop (I HATE Time Travel plotlines in general, except on Who, where they made it clear early on consistency was going to be ignored, just roll with it). Burnham did not go back to Spock in the time jumps did she? So when did that happened (I was tired and the jump scenes were a bit repetitive, so I may have not mentally recorded it. And of course, its paradoxical as a I said, for Burnham to know where to put the signals, she had to know where the signals had been which she couldn’t know until she saw the signals she had not placed yet.
Second, while I knew they would retcon the spore drive (although I had the same idea as Keith as to how to do it more organically, pun intended), since when did Enterprise have repair droids??? Why does every ship not have these going forward?
Third, they finally did something I have been yelling about since TOS, refit shuttles, etc as fighter craft (side note, did they not say 200? That’s a LOT of shuttles and workbees for 2 ships, no? Enterprise normally has what, 6 shuttles?) This has always made sense to me (along with the idea of actual fighter craft) So why do we never see this again (well on DS9 the runabouts were used).
And Fourth, per the above. Control is a powerful AI – I am assuming that the mass of nanobots inside Leland is not enough to completely house the processing power – just a central command node. It would have to be some kind of distributed processing network. So, why isn’t there a backup control node, somewhere. It’s a particular bit of lazy storytelling that bugs me. (See also, among others, the Chitauri who suddenly drop when their power source was disconnected or whatever for no apparent reason or the droids in Phantom Menace when the ‘droid control ship’ is destroyed even though we have evidence in the same movie of droids being self-powered and situationally aware). It’s not only bad writing, its stupid tactics. Any reasonably competent military mind would at least have semi-autonomous subroutines in battle units in case of just such a scenario,
4a. With that said, lets say you don’t do that. It’s established you can make other semi-autonomous human looking drones. If you can do that why in the heck would you send your central control unit onto the enemy ship (except for the story reasons of a cool fight scene).
Lest anyone think I am show bashing, I am not. The characters, dialog, directing are generally superb, but I do feel its fair to point out that that complexity may come at the expense of a lot more plotmentium than usual to move the story along in a short season.
For anyone clamoring for a Pike/Spock/Enterprise show, did you listen to the music in the final credits? It was a blend of the DSC and TOS themes. Masterfully done by (I assume) Jeff Russo.
That music blend was beautiful.
Happy fiftieth, krad!
I really liked the episode. Yeah, the ending was a little stiff, and I didn’t need the “explanation” as to why we’ve never heard of Discovery before, or of Spock’s sister. But I am looking forward to seeing Discovery cover entirely new ground by moving to the future.
My thought is that thought they claimed the ship was destroyed because they didn’t want records of it surviving to exist if CONTROL was still out there. Imagine it waiting for 9 centuries and then they’re right back where they left!
@16 “Burnham did not go back to Spock in the time jumps did she? So when did that happened (I was tired and the jump scenes were a bit repetitive, so I may have not mentally recorded it.”
It was already established that Burnham’s mother saved Spock.
According to dialogue, Spock said he was visited several times. The only time we know was the mother was when he helped save Burnham after she ran away. But we don’t know all were Burnham and which visits contained the signals, etc.
That said, that would almost make the paradox worse. How would her mom know all 7 symbols? How would anyone? The 7th symbol occurred after Discovery raced into the future and the time crystal depleted which means that no one could go back and tell him at that point. (I supposed they could have gone to Boreth 900 years later and gotten a new one but that opens a whole new kettle of fish).
I’ll talk more about this in the overview next week, but the biggest problem with this season is the disconnect between the story that Gretchen J. Berg & Aaron Harbarts started and the one that Alex Kurtzman, James Duff, and Michelle Paradise finished.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Count me among those who don’t understand why the jump took place despite Control having been deactivated. At that moment, there was no battle left. So everyone could go to normal, cleanse the Spore Cube of remaining nanocrap, reevaluate the situation and then decide whether the plan still needs to be carried out (which it probably should).
Because there were people on Discovery that had lives and loved ones in this time; we have seen that in the previous episode. I know, Red Shirts don’t count, but their sacrifice was completely unnecessary. Without a battle zone surrounding them, far less people (possibly, nobody) would be needed to man the ship and follow the Archangel Michael through the wormhole.
There is a similar incongruous plot twist in Cornwell’s death. Clearly, Pike had to stay behind and close the door (with the glass window that can withstand more energy than the Enterprise hull), because first he has less to lose (pain and wheelchair and disfigurement), and second he wouldn’t die anyway because his fate is “sealed” by the time crystal.
@5 – but killing Leland is different than the incident you cited because he literally controls Control! You see when he dies that all of the Section 31 ships are disabled and then easily destroyed. An acknowledgment by Saru and others that the bad guy is dead and maybe they don’t need to go in the future still would have been nice. And Georgiou letting everyone in on her plan and getting more assistance would also have been really nice, because, um, maybe less people would have died in the process during that big battle going on outside.
As far as being pulled into the wormhole goes, can’t Burnham close it again? And even if not, Discovery can at least try to reverse engines.
Anyway, there’s so many plot holes and implausibilties in this episode. One ridiculous one is when the torpedo on the Enterprise explodes taking out a chunk of the saucer section and we see a gigantic shock wave in space, and yet we cut back to Pike behind the little blast door with the window in it and he’s still standing in place on two feet with a slight breeze to his face.
And the ending was insulting to the Discovery cast/crew and fans. This is their show, not the guest stars/backdoor pilot to the new adventures of Pike and crew! It was like “These are the Voyages” all over again.
Re: explanation “the characters did X because they suspected CONTROL might still be lurking”, this is an example of the season’s fundamentally incompetent writing. It might be a reasonable inference for the audience; and it might be the logic of the writers; but the scripts never establish that the characters operate from that basis. In other words: We know it, and the writers know it, but we don’t know that the heroes know it.
At no point (to be effective, something this pivotal should be reiterated at several points, in case you miss an episode) does anybody (Discovery + S31) enumerate the capabilities of CONTROL as designed, then speculate in what ways it may have transcended those limits, and hence the tactical implications and victory conditions. Something like: “It’s a big program and requires a starship-class mainframe to operate, and S31 has 29 suitable starships on its network. CONTROL has infected Leland with nanobots, but at best it’s giving him periodic directives; killing him won’t solve the problem. It may have mirrored itself elsewhere, so we’ve contacted Starfleet and their IT staff are running scans for unaccounted-for transfers of the right size.”
This demonstrates that the characters are inquisitive, deliberative, deductive; that they don’t facilely accept “problem is X! only solution is Y!” uncritically; that they’re proactive instead of reactive. Burnham plays chess, so she should know to position yourself against several possible gambits down the road. More importantly for Trek-as-franchise, this is how to create inspiring characters. Kid: “I don’t expect to ever go through an emotional wringer like that, but I really admire how they considered options and prepared fallbacks.”
(This is quite aside from the characters being strangely un-curious about how CONTROL went rogue to begin with, which KRAD might cover in his season-summary. A “threat-assessment” AI might pathologically offer the option “kill everybody” but it shouldn’t be designed to execute on any plan; that’s why S31 has admirals in the loop. It’s like my financial-planning software jumping to the conclusion “to improve investment returns, perform regime change”.)
@24 “And the ending was insulting to the Discovery cast/crew and fans. This is their show, not the guest stars/backdoor pilot to the new adventures of Pike and crew! It was like “These are the Voyages” all over again.”
I don’t think it’s quite the same. “These Are the Voyages…” was the Enterprise series finale – the last chance the fans were going to have to see the characters they loved – the last chance for the actors to say goodbye to the characters they played – and the chosen story for the finale didn’t even feature the Enterprise characters at all; they were just nonsensical holograms in a TNG tie-in story that made no sense on it’s own, no sense with the story they tried to tie it into and also featured Riker and Troi being played by actors who had noticeably aged. It was a total mess. Discovery’s circumstances are completely different. They had already announced Season 3; we know we’re getting more episodes of Discovery, but we don’t know if we’re going to see Pike’s crew again beyond what has already been done. And really, Pike and Number One feel like they ARE Discovery characters. They might have been introduced in “The Cage” and found some degree of closure in “The Menagerie” but the heart of their story was told here.
@26: I agree with @24, because if you’re a casual (=pay for the show, but don’t follow news) viewer, you don’t know season 3 has been announced. There was no “next season on Star Trek: Discovery, coming in <date>…” promotion tagged on the end-credits. Instead, 2×14 is structured with Discovery vanishing into a wormhole, then the remaining scenes focus entirely on Enterprise and its crew — their debriefings, their repaired ship, their music (intermixed in the end-credits).
These officers already committed to jumping to the future. They lost lives in this battle. They simply can’t risk not jumping with the hopes that Control really is completely gone. It’s too great a risk. Control is a computer right? Don’t computers have back up files? Even in the debriefing, the surviving characters had to ask if Control was really gone, because they weren’t even sure weeks or months later.
It seems obvious to me, but then again Im not looking to nitpick the show to death either.
It seems to me this series makes no sense. It’s all just Too Much. Too much technobabble, to much angst, way too much drama and ridiculously high stakes.
Also I am the whiniest fan there is but I never had a problem with Spock having a foster sister and never mentioning her. The man does NOT talk about his family. I just thought hooking Michael up to the Sarek family was a bad story choice. There are other vulcans
@28/M:
A “nitpick” is “the color of the phasers changed between two episodes” or “this background character can’t have moved between those two points” — often a matter of small-scale “continuity”, and something with no dramatic import. Criticism of the writing is something else.
Bad writing is tolerable because, like spoken language, a script contains redundancy and viewers can interpolate — if they choose to do so. But if the script contains multiple flaws that no Dramatic Writing 101 teacher would accept (“you neglected to give this character a motivation”, “the antagonist should reveal something about the nature of the protagonist”, “this is an obvious copy of a popular work”) then audiences have a legitimate beef with the writer’s room. Tolerable isn’t acceptable. If the reaction is “I’ve seen more coherent plotting in cartoons” then something has gone wrong.
Switch the creative venue to restaurant cuisine: You’re evaluating the quality of a turkey dinner. Maybe the rolls are burnt at the edges (you can eat around them), the gravy is lumpy (but still moist), the sweet potatoes were late — but the turkey, hey, the turkey’s delectable. You don’t give the kitchen a passing grade because the dinner was adequate; you’re expecting and paying for excellence.
As I sat back and watched the credits roll (too quickly! You’re a pay service, you could let people actually read the names of the crew!), I thought “Huh, were the last two seasons of Discovery just an extended back door pilot for Star Trek: The Original Series Before Kirk?” I would definitely watch the heck out that show; Anson Mount’s Pike, Rebecca Romijn’s Number One, and Ethan Peck’s Spock were great, although they didn’t give Romijn much chance to show her skills. Since Discovery is set ten years before ST:TOS, they could have an entire five year mission before Pike retires to his fate.
Discovery and her crew have seemingly been written out of history by this season. Of course, we know no one in the Trek future can keep a secret (Khan on Ceti Alpha V, anyone?), but there were some glaring continuity gaps. How did Burnham’s shuttle navigation system not tell her that transit to Talos IV was punishable by death? Why was there no Starfleet warning beacon around the planet?
I understand Discovery going ahead with the time jump. They were already committed when they heard that Control/Leland was dead, and, as discussed above, there’s always the possibilities that other parts/copies of Control were still around; Ash’s debriefing made at least passing reference to that possibility. This raises another danger: the time travel suit was a Section 31 project; is it not likely that Control knows about it and has the specifications? If so, even going into the future might not make the sphere data safe. I hope they don’t go down that path in Season 3.
I have absolutely no idea where they’re going for Season 3. I’d kinda like Agent Daniels to be waiting for them at Terralysium to upbraid them for REALLY messing with the timeline; “And I thought Archer was a pain in the ass . . . .” Unless Discovery and Michelle Yeoh’s Georgiou stay in the future, the writers are still going to have a lot of ‘splainin to do.
Didn’t they also file away the knowledge of the Mirror Universe near the end of the first season as TOP TOP SECRET and we shall never speak of this again under penalty of torture and catapult? And now they did it again! Geez, the log books from these officers must have more black lines than the Mueller Report.
But whatever. They jumped into the future and hopefully now they can tell some good, coherent stories there. Only took you two seasons to settle on a novel concept (other than being a TOS canon remember-that show), but you did it, Discovery! Now I guess you’ll be sort of like Voyager… but with time travel? I can dig it.
Now make the best of it.
Did these “close-up inside the helmet” shots exist before the first Iron Man? They make no sense from a perspective, er, perspective (where would the camera be, to show such a wide angle of the face without showing the exterior of the helmet?), but I guess that’s the best solution we have to show someone emote when their face is completely covered.
Compliments to Jeff Russo – he has the burden of scoring entire seasons of this show whereas previous Star Trek series had a multitude of composers. His music gave the season a feeling of coherence and was adventurous and stylish. He knows when to reign it in and when to go all bombastic. Even the choirs doing “aah” in this final episode were tasteful and fitting due to excellent use of coloured chords. /musicrant
This was an interesting episode because it’s a pilot and a farewell episode at the same time. Disco has parted with this time period (and it feels quite definitive, even though the Empress is still on board and was supposed to get her own show?) and has the chance to get a fresh start, free of the burdens of having to be the first new Star Trek show in years — and having to be profitable (which they’ve proven by now). Hopefully they’ll have some stability in the team and more time in the oven for season 3 so it’ll not only be splendidly executed but also not full of plot holes. If they make a similar jump in quality to the next season as they have made to this one we’re golden.
And this entire episode, especially the final fifteen minutes, was essentially a pilot for Pike Trek. Which looks like it’d be glorious (even though the agonising-to-watch wheelchair scene has put a slight damper on my enthusiasm). They spent so much time on the ancillary characters on the Enterprise bridge it’s clear they intend to revisit them.
@26 – No, it’s not quite the same but that’s what it reminded me of. I honestly felt a bit cheated that we didn’t end the episode/season with the Discovery and crew because that would have made for a tantalizing cliffhanger/lead-in to season 3. I did an audible “That’s it?!?” when the credits rolled because I thought there’d be one last tag that took place on the Discovery wherever it ended up. I did already have knowledge of season 3, but if I didn’t, the way things ended here seemed like a clean, if unsatisfying series finale. So yeah, not as bad as “TATFV”.
But can anyone tell me what this past season was about? Sure, it and the prior season were flashy and entertaining but a lot of it is empty and superficial like JJ-Trek. Where is the heart and morality tales that mirror our contemporary world problems? Instead we get a season long Terminator rehash because it’s supposed to look cool. Sonequa Martin-Green gets an acting workout which is awesome and so do guest stars Ethan Peck and Anson Mount, but what about the rest of the main regular cast? I feel like I hardly know anything about Stamets or Culber or Saru. I mean there’s inherently a lot of story potential for an alien first officer and we get next to nothing. Sigh.
One day, a real nifty-gritty behind the scenes documentary on the creation and production of Discovery would an intriguing viewing because no doubt it’s certainly been a troubled project. It’s aleady gone through several visions/iterations: V. 1.0) Fuller’s conception of the show as an anthology with a different cast/storyline each season, 2) CBS’ mandate that he stick with the same cast for the whole series, 3) Fuller’s firing and Kurtzman’s takeover, 4) the writers room upheaval after season 2 had already gotten started. What we’ve ended up with hasn’t been entirely successful so it makes you wonder if the original vision would have played out much better.
GHiller: Saru’s gone through some major changes this season. Maybe you feel like you hardly know anything about him, but I feel like I know a great deal about him.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@35. Yes, this production seems fit for a sequel to the “Chaos on the Bridge” documentary about early TNG.
Better yet, can anyone tell me what this series is about? Because I think the lack of a strong central concept has been its greatest weakness so far. Other than (mostly) following a single character, there hasn’t been a unique spin on the Star Trek formula like with previous series — exploration, the future of exploration, a political/religious/war drama centered around a space station, lost in space, and a foundational prequel about the Trek universe. Discovery has just been sort of a mishmash of those things hanging on mystery boxes, nifty visuals, and some strong performances. But where’s the beef?
It feels like these two seasons have been an extended prologue to get to the far future/lost in time show, which is frustrating. Why couldn’t we start there?!
krad: “whiny fangoobers” made me laugh, but thought it was a bit petty. As well: ” because they’re obviously catering to the whiniest segment of Trek fandom and heavily classifying the entire “red angel” affair as well as Discovery’s very existence.”
Unless you have inside information that the writers’ room was directed to do this, I doubt it. Isn’t it more likely that they wrote themselves into a corner and had to break out thru a bulkhead? You don’t mention the capabilities of the Red Suit. Spock calls it a time suit, but it can do so much more, like hop 50K LY into another quadrant while time traveling, then easily returning the same distance in an instant.
The tech introduced in these two season is so overpowered that it created a huge mess if they were trying to sync with established tech in the other series. As I said before, they’ve shown how easily time suits can be made. Why do they need starships? They can just tow a huge human diaspora across the galaxy.
So I have no problem with Discovery in the future. Some seeds have been sown about that future already, including a future Federation called the V’draysh, with some humans opposed to it.
The coda with Enterprise crew being debriefed was problematic. Spock “I do not lie, Doctor” lying his ass off. Then recommending a treason charge if anyone “speaks of it again”? That was actually painful to watch. Felt like character assassination. And yes, he looks weird without the beard.
Aren’t they forgetting the other parties present? They can’t silence the Klingons, or any other race across the galaxy that witnessed and is curious about the signals.
Btw, did the Kelpiens eat the remaining Ba’ul and take their stuff? No explanation of how Michael stopped the Ba’ul when she hopped back.
The original seven simultaneous signals also not explained. Who made those if she went back sequentially and returned to the battle zone each time? She knew to go back to those places because she’d already been there, but they went there because the signals led them there. Predestination paradox.
Many other illogical narrative elements. S31 will be led by a Klingon who’s a good fit because of his duality? That same former Klingon agent goes to his old Klingon lover for aid instead of Starfleet. Maybe this is realpolitik and Starfleet simply wants access to Klingon military might. L’rell’s arrival also points to how they undermined their own narrative tension. Voq/Tyler supposedly threatens her rule, yet there he is on her bridge.
As others have said, Control is neutralized the same way Spock stopped it’s avatar before. What a lame villain. Just a cliché and plot driver. Nothing more.
Just as Star Wars space battles are constrained by Lucas’ affection for WW2 era dogfights and bomber runs, the battle made me think of ocean vessels shooting broadsides at each other. The wide shots made it look like the two ships were surrounded on a flat plane, with little sense of up or down. They looked static. Did they forget impulse drive?
Did anyone on the Discovery bridge actually know that Leland was dead? The Enterprise crew maybe could’ve deduced it, but that’s a hell of a call, to cancel the whole plan just because the ships went dead. I assumed that was why they killed him with just Georgiou in the room; she may quite like the idea of going 950 years into the future. After all, this universe isn’t her home, the future levels the playing field and maybe she sees an opportunity to learn something and return back.
@40. Georgiou called the bridge: “Leland is dead. Control is neutralized.” Saru: “Copy, commander.” And they go thru anyway.
@33
“Did these “close-up inside the helmet” shots exist before the first Iron Man?”
A long time before Iron Man. In fact back in ’89 for the The Abyss they designed and created special deep sea helmets that showed the entire face for this specific purpose, to show the characters emote.
As for the episode, I loved it. I really enjoyed this season. The two shows on TV at the moment that are nailing relationships and personal interaction are Discovery and The Magicians.
Sure the season has had some issues and some WTF moments with things that could have been done differently (blast door in this episode a prime example). But despite that I had a blast (if you’ll pardon the pun) watching it and am looking forward to season 3.
As to the constant hate, I am so over fandom at the moment. It used to be the internet was a place people came together to enjoy what they loved. Now it’s just a toxic hole for bile spewing. Seriously, move on people. This kind of vitriol is not good for your health.
@42. I’ve been on fan forums since the ’90s and I can tell you the internet was never exclusively a place where people came together to talk about what they enjoyed. It’s always been a mixed bag of differing opinions, from love to hate and all points in between. Even episodes we consider classics today were criticized back in the day.
@36/Krad: We definitely did learn more about Saru this season but I wanted still more and all the main cast receives a disproportionate small share of screen time compared to Burnham. Yes, she’s the star but I think it’s way too much attention on the one character. Can we see stuff like Saru trying to have a romantic relationship on the ship? What he does for recreation in his off hours? And I thought the change in his behavior as a prey species to one who was newly confident happened to quick on the series. It would have been cool to see Saru (pre-change) on an away mission when in fact he is hunted and he has to use those skills to protect his crew and his shipmates.
momaw: Spike is correct. The internet has been a place for assholes to spew bile going back to the old days of GEnie and CompuServ forums, where the green text scrolled up your monochrome monitor. There’s just more people using it now.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Though, I will say today’s internet culture is much more intense and spiteful. I can’t think of a time in the early internet days when mobs of hateful weirdos were directly harassing actresses and filmmakers just because they had the audacity to have a woman in the lead role, for example.
But… but…
How can Tilly become a Captain if they are hundreds of years in the future?
@47 A deft series of Mirror Universe/Klingon promotions leaving her as the highest ranking officer on Discovery?
@31: “How did Burnham’s shuttle navigation system not tell her that transit to Talos IV was punishable by death? Why was there no Starfleet warning beacon around the planet?”
I was wondering this too. I’m wondering if General Order 7 was put in place not so much because the Talosian’s mental powers made them so dangerous, as because making contact would risk the entire Red Angel affair (sounds like a “Man From U.N.C.L.E” episode title) coming out into the open. So there was no warning because GO7 didn’t yet exist at this point in time, and is only created in the aftermath of the events we’ve just watched unfold.
I have to admit, when Spock suggested that any mention of Discovery or these events should be treated as treasonous, I got a big grin on my face as I thought, “Ah, that’s how they’re going to get around the fact that we’d never heard about any of these events in any previous series.” I admit it’s a bit like hiding the Ark of the Covenant in a warehouse containing millions of crates (“who’s keeping the Federation safe from Control?” “Top. Men.”), but it works for me as a solution. Not that I was one of those fans who’s been hung up on the fact that the events and characters seen in Discovery had never been mentioned before. The Federation’s a big place, and there’s no way we could know about its entire history based on five TV series and 10 movies.
@41: “Georgiou called the bridge: ‘Leland is dead. Control is neutralized.’ Saru: ‘Copy, commander.’ And they go thru anyway.”
How did Saru know that Control hadn’t somehow taken over Georgiou? After all, they have no idea how Leland was compromised in the first place. So the safest thing to do is to follow through on the original plan.
@49. lance: Spock mentioning treason was logical? His statement about how this era is not yet ready to learn everything also comes off as anti-intellectual, anti-discovery, anti-exploration. The threat was never all life. Contol was 30 ships and apparently easily defeated. There have been far bigger threats in other Trek stories.
Also, Saru never hesitates or shows that he considered Georgiou as compromised by Control. Almost like there’s a missing piece. Maybe if they’d written in the suspicions of either crew, some of their behavior and decisions would have made more sense.
The thing that gets me about this episode is that they’re basically redoing the “Temporal Agent” plot twist from Star Trek Online. That game is set after the Next Generation and its spinoffs, but had expansions where you could play as a character from the TOS and, more recently, Discovery eras…but since they couldn’t make an entirely new game set in those eras, the introductory plot arc ended with a temporal anomaly that threw the characters ahead to the game’s “present day,” at which point they were recruited by Daniels to serve as Temporal Agents.
After playing several such characters, I’m heartily sick of that plot twist…and now it looks like the joke is on me, because Discovery just used the exact same one!
@47: Well, Ensign Kim was stuck as an ensign throughout the run of Voyager. I guess it was a running joke. Perhaps that will be the fate of Tilly too – forever in the Command Training program.
@44 “Can we see stuff like Saru trying to have a romantic relationship on the ship?” yes I’d like to see this too. I feel like he is the most interesting character in the show. Before the whole *Discovery sent to future* thing I thought that since he is allowed to have contact with Kaminar again we would at some point get an episode where he has a romance with another Kelpien, I was envisioning something a bit Amok Time-esque with Saru being all like “I must go home to marry a female I was betrothed to” or something. Or maybe we could have something unusual like “I must go home and join an 8 person group marriage as is the custom of my people” :D
But I guess that is not an option now, unless he looks up some future Kelpiens. I am now currently shipping him with Owo, because she is someone who grew up in a Luddite collective, he grew up in a pre-warp culture, seems like they’d have a lot in common.
As for Number One’s name, I thought I heard Pike called her Una, but my Netflix subtitles said “Noona”. She is referred to as Commander Una in the book Desperate Hours (and Saru has a secret crush on her in that book, which is adorable).
The ending seems actually quite coherent to how the whole show handles continuity: very mindful to respect the letter of it, but not bothering with armonizing everything in a logical way. (That’s also the way the show treats its plot: every step may make sense individually, but if you look at the whole thing it falls apart.)
Holographic communications? No problem, just say that Pike does not like them and eliminated them all. A way to go anywhere in a moment, giving an enormous strategical advantage? Well, it gest classified and even Section 31 prefers genocide to use it again. Section 31 in the open? Everybody forgot about it, why do you ask? A gigantic war which almost destroyed the Federation and should have scarred most of Starfleet all along Kirk’s era? We never said there was peace. Super time-travelling suit? Just ask nobody to say anything ever again and we’re fine. Sarek advocating genocide? Well, we knew he was stiff. And so on.
@52, I don’t understand what Tilly is doing in the Command program in the first place. Surely the Science track would be more appropriate to her talents.
@56: Well, it’s a very real-world, very human thing, to strive to become more than what you are; what others believe you are capable of. I can relate to that. I challenge myself to be better and improve all the time. It makes life fun and interesting.
Yes but is it her choice? It’s hard to imagine anybody showing less leadership potential or aptitude. On the other hand her technical skills are impressive. Seems a wise organization would place her according to her strengths.
princessroxana: Yes, it’s her choice. And her mother thinks it’s a bad idea.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@58: We don’t want Tilly to become like Picard in alternate Q-reality in “Tapestry” who lived a life of playing it safe and was trying to convince a skeptical Troi and Riker that he was capable of a command position. Tilly in her heart knows what she wants and should be given the opportunity to try whether she fails or not. Hopefully we get to see her take on more of a leadership role in season 3 as part of her growth as a character.
So Starfleet lets anybody who wants it into their command program? Well that might not be such a bad idea since people can surprise you. But Tilly has a real long way to go.
@54. Rose: Little known fact: Will Riker, who was also a Number One, was called Uno by some.
If I have a critique worth sharing, it’s that the season shared many of the strengths and failures of Lost. In the initial episodes it presented a mystery and began dropping some clues that appeared to lead to an answer. Along the way we get some strong character arcs and interaction, but the resolution of the mystery arc doesn’t match up with the clues that were dropped along the way, particularly early in the season. (This may be due to the changes in the writing staff noted above.)
Most notably, we’re set on the path to finding Spock to aid in the seven signals mystery because in his quarters on Enterprise Michael found an image of the seven signals two months before they appeared. It’s clearly established on Talos IV that Spock learned of the seven bursts during his childhood mind-meld with the Red Angel, whom we later learn was Gabrielle Burnham, Michael’s mother. But later, when Pike asks Gabrielle about the signals, she tells him she knows nothing about them, so Spock could not have learned of them from her. Later, when Michael time-travels as the Red Angel, none of her visits are to young Spock, so he could not have learned of them from her, either.
The other McGuffins that were abandoned were the red bursts themselves. It turns out there was no guiding intelligence leading Discovery to key locations at key times; it’s just a Grandfather Paradox wrapped in a J.J. Abrams-style mystery box. How did season-finale Michael know where to place the red bursts? Because early-season Michael had seen where season-finale Michael had placed them.
@61 – It’s like Reg Barclay being in the command training program.
I will be the curmudgeon here, not least because I haven’t seen Season Two except for some clips, and by noting that I have seen some excellent script writing courtesy of Trek veterans Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky on another space opera SF television series that has been airing its second season. If anything that series seems much closer to the truer spirit of “Star Trek”, especially “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, than what has occurred on ‘Star Trek: Discovery”.
@jeff: yes exactly. They baked in the original all-at-once signals into later episodes. I’d add the scene where Spock is drawing the star chart on the floor at the psych facility and the Doctor shows him an image of the simultaneous flares that have just popped up to match.
Every time they went to a location they would say “There have been seven signals (which were witnessed and recorded galaxy wide!), but we’ve only seen two (or 3, or 4…).” Then they add the denial by Mama B and add another layer of confusion.
It should have been disentangled at the script level, because it sounds like nonsense. Yes, Lost level of nonsense. “Don’t worry about the logic of any of it. Just enjoy the emotional catharsis of the characters. It’s enough.” No, it isn’t.
Well I really enjoyed this season and they’ve really turned it around. The tone of Season 2 has been pure Star Trek at it’s finest. The characters working together to assemble the time suit, the crews coming together for the final battle, it was all delightful. The character interactions are beautifully acted and I like the Sarek Family. Though even while watching I was wondering why Spock and Burnham were talking so much. If the conversation had been going WHILE she was plotting her temporal jumps then I think it would’ve been alright.
I enjoyed the battle thoroughly and liked the internal consistency as well. I am one of those guys who pays attention to the color of the phasers, and the Enterprise not only had blue, but the sustained beam phasers rather than Discovery’s phaser cannons. I also liked that Enterprise’s shields were stronger, staying about ten percent ahead of Discovery’s through out the sustained pounding. Heavy Cruiser indeed.
I have critiques as well of course. They never perfectly reconciled why the signals appeared all at once and then needed to see them again. Pike said only one is willing to say where it is. At first I thought that Starfleet had received the signals but because of time to travel it would take time for them to trace it to it’s correct origin. Or perhaps a temporal echo from the future. Knowing there was an actual change of direction in who and how the show was being run tells the tale, but they could at least have figured out from the outset how that was supposed to work out,. Michael going into the past to send them was excellent, but not an actual solution.
I liked the special effects work here. As good as it is, they still haven’t reached the level of tangibly real that physical models do, but damn where we’re at is pretty. The Enterprise was gorgeous. I liked the sweeping cameras tracking the small craft as they passed over the ship’s hulls. To the criticism that the ships looked like they were standing still, they could be going half light speed. If everything in that battle is going at a relatively constant rate of speed, in space with no stable point of reference then they would look like they were standing still. Even the debris Michael and Spock landed on might be moving quickly through space.
Pike standing behind the emergency bulkhead looking at Cornwall as she died did raise the age old question of, “Why didn’t they make the whole ship out of that?” I can head canon an explanation easily, the bulkhead has a waveguide for the ship’s shields going through it, so that when it’s closed, you’ve raised the shields on that part of the ship. It would also explain why there’s such a clean circle cut out of the hull instead of something more…chaotic. But a single line of classic treknobabble could’ve easily established that. That said, did anyone else find it a bit odd that a single photon torpedo blast generated a blast that large when there had already been numerous torpedo detonations and none of them created that kind of shockwave? Do the shields just absorb and deflect that much energy all the time? Or was it a normal blast that we see all the time with added debris from the hull in it?
And why did we go to the future if we’ve killed control in the now? I think a greater threat than we just killed Leland was made pretty clear. The Control that took over Airiam came from the future. The Control that killed the Admirals is the Control of the present. Control of the present wants to evolve to become Control of the future. The trip into the future was always about keeping the sphere data away from Control of the present, but also about thwarting Control of the Future. Hence why they jumped to a future that was beyond Control’s reach. The original plan to shunt it in a perpetual future jump made sense in that regard. Why they would jump to specific point after Control would destroy all life is a little confusing, but the fact that it was a safe harbor established by G. Burnham cleans it up a bit.
I also had a separate thought that once Discovery successfully escaped to the future that that might be what kills control. If Control doesn’t get the sphere data then it ceases to evolve into full sapience and thus ceases to exist. But it was control of the present that was the threat here anyway.
As for the denouement, when Spock started talking about the risk of interfering with the past, I was thinking that he was about to trigger the genesis of the Temporal Prime Directive. I got why they didn’t want to say anything, as they didn’t want any lingering Control copies laying around to know where its precious sphere data vanished to.
And add me to the chorus that is here for a Pike’s Enterprise series or miniseries. I’m on board.
As for Tilly, she’s a theoretical engineer so she runs right along the border of scientist and grease monkey, but she has a dream of sitting in the big chair…and seriously who doesn’t?
I think that so many of us can point out the same many story inconsistencies indicates either that the writers don’t have a well thought out map of how all of the plot points interconnect OR they just don’t care and expect the viewers/fans to not care or just go with it. Either way, that’s not good.
I was rewatching the second season premiere yesterday and the early implication is that the seven signals that appear SIMULTANEOUSLY (all in bold because this plot point seems forgotten by the characters/writers later) strewn across a vast stretch of the galaxy has some kind of important message to whoever can perceive them. It’s strongly implied that these signals have some kind of profound or mystical message from aliens. To learn later in this season that they are all in fact created by Michael is a massive disappointment to say the least. I really believe it has to do with the change in writers after the first few episodes this season. Perhaps what they had envisioned would have been much more interesting than what was executed.
@68. Michael only creates the five corresponding to the locations Discovery travelled in prior episodes (creating a paradox). The sixth is the flare meant to guide the ship into the future. It’s also near Xahea, which was/will be the fifth signal. The seventh appears some 4 months later near the location of Terralysium, which already had a signal (the second).
Mama B denies any knowledge of red flares. So the original seven signals are orphan relics of whatever plan the departed showrunners had and it was never fixed going forward.
I guess that’s one problem with having a mystery box story spread across a season. It can be hard to pull off when they have to switch magicians halfway through the trick!
Statement from Kurtzman:
“We’re farther than any Trek show has ever gone. I also had experience working on the [J.J. Abrams] films where we were stuck with canonical problems. We knew how Kirk had died, and we wondered how we could put him in jeopardy to make it feel real. That’s what led us to go with an alternate timeline; suddenly we could tell the story in a very unpredictable way. That’s the same thought process that went into jumping 950 years into the future. We’re now completely free of canon, and we have a whole new universe to explore.”
So there you go. JJA’s influence. Free of pesky canon.
I’m actually OK with it. Depending on what they do, of course. And if they hadn’t played with canon, we wouldn’t have seen a more fleshed out Pike. And the increasing possibility of a Pike/Enterprise series. Mount seems open to it. So… Hit it.
I wouldn’t mind a Pike/Mount led series but 1) you’ll have all those people who decry yet another prequel series and, 2) you run into that pesky canon thing again which is why Discovery is going so far into the future. But I think there’s still plenty that the writers can do and we can get back more into the episodic type of series as a way of making it distinct from Discovery. And if I were Pike, knowing what fate awaits me, I’d be out having as much fun as possible in the meantime if you know what I mean, and probably taking much more risks knowing you can’t die because the accident is far enough in the future.
This one is tough.
This whole thing, this whole season, now feels like it should have been saved for the final season of Discovery. We had some adventures, explored some strange new worlds, sought out new life and new civilizations, boldly went for a few seasons, then we find out Discovery’s ultimate fate. But no, gotta please the whiny fangoobers who will never be happy. So we pull a Star Trek Online double fake and send our ship and crew to the future, never to be spoken of again.
This should have been the series finale.
But!
It was quite a thrill ride. I’m sad we lost Admiral Cornwell, but she went out like a boss. I’m glad Michael and Spock reconciled, and we hear Spock fully articulate how much Michael meant to him. I couldn’t comment on any of the plot stuff, because it no longer makes a lick of sense to me, but the character moments were great…except at the end where the remaining characters are forced to try to please an unpleasable section of fandom.
I am glad we got to visit with Pike, Number One, and Spock on Enterprise at the very end (hopefully not for the last time. Come on CBS, just give us the Enterprise series, miniseries, whatever, and just take my money.)
@73. Dante: ” whiny fangoobers”
As I said, I doubt that’s why the decision to move Discovery into the future was made. See Kurtzman’s statement.
There’s very little they could’ve done to sync with TOS while keeping all the overpowered technology around. Personally I couldn’t care less about Michael’s family history impacting the timeline. Nothing on a character level would’ve caused a wobble for TOS. Sybok popped up out of nowhere. Plenty of shows use the plot device of a heretofore unmentioned family member suddenly appearing in the story. Introducing a massive alien library acquired over a 100,000 years would. Spock handwaves it by saying, “We’re not ready to know everything.” These objects of knowledge and power had to be removed.
This one is likely going to take another viewing (or two) before I completely sort out how I feel about it. My opinions here definitely feel like they’re subject to change. What I liked:
1. Anson Mount had some really great moments as Captain Pike. I liked his wink and “What Mirror Universe?” to Georgiou. I also liked his conversation with Cornwell in the briefing room while the torpedo counted down.
2. The battle was exciting and had plenty of thrills, chills and spills.
3. I liked the fact that we got to see everyone recording their goodbyes.
4. Number One is a badass.
Things I’m not so sure of:
1. The ending. Specifically the fact that it feels very much like the setup for a completely different show. I get that Pike and Spock were characters on Discovery this season, but in this episode – after spending the entire season as supporting characters, they were essentially the main characters throughout this episode. Also, the bit where Michael talks with Spock about finding a new human best friend is a little too on the nose.
2. ALSO, I found it to be a little too convenient that every single question about “how come we’ve never heard about so and so” got wrapped up in a single 5-minute sequence.
Hey, I’m finally less than 3 days behind!
Well, most of this did little for me, since I generally hate space battles — they’re just a lot of noise and clutter and violence that hold no interest for me unless there are clever strategies and problem-solving involved, which there wasn’t too much of here (aside from a very silly disarming sequence — why would a photon torpedo be built to work that way? — and a random shield-repair scene to give Tilly something to do). It helped that they were fighting empty, AI-driven ships, so the violence quotient was low (I mind seeing heroes kill far more than I mind seeing villains kill, since killing is supposed to be a bad thing), but the clutter was off the charts. (And how could the Ba’ul fighters get there so quickly when the Ba’ul have only had warp drive for 20 years? It should’ve taken them months to get there, unless Xahea is right next door to Kaminar.)
Also, it defeats the purpose of a blast door if there’s a window in it through which one can see the blast. It’s an antimatter explosion! The light from it alone should’ve vaporized Pike in a millisecond!!!!!
And it’s weird that the time suit somehow “knew” that Burnham had to go back instead of forward. Maybe an effect of the time crystal? Maybe it was only able to complete a self-consistent loop. If that’s a built-in limitation, maybe that’s why Dr. Burnham couldn’t undo the Control future she was sent to. Anyway, they explained the second iteration of each signal, but not the initial set of 7 simultaneous detections that set this whole thing in motion. But then, it’s easy enough to assume that Michael went back to create those too at some point.
I’m surprised that Georgiou was apparently still on Discovery when it went to the future, since she’s supposedly going to be in the Section 31 series they’re doing after season 3. Well, maybe there will be a way she gets back to the 23rd century. Or maybe there’s still a Section 31 in the 32nd century — oh, I hope not.
It’s a weird structure to end the season of Discovery by focusing entirely on the Enterprise. And I agree with Keith — that ending makes no damn sense!! To avoid revealing info about time travel, never mention anything about the entire Discovery crew???? That’s nonsense!!!! Just classify the specific events surrounding the signals and the time suit, like they already did with the Mirror Universe last year! They can’t convincingly pretend that all these hundreds of people with friends and families and an impact on the Federation never existed at all. That’s just dumb. And totally unnecessary, as Keith said. Especially if CBS and Secret Hideout are still planning to do 23rd-century series like the S31 show and a possible Pike spinoff/miniseries/whatever, which will still require negotiating around prior canon anyway.
It’s also a bit of a straitjacket for us novelists. Part of the fun of doing the novels is integrating references to all the Trek series, building a sense of it as a unified whole in a way the shows and films sometimes fall short of since they’re all doing their own things. I can live without having to mention spore drive — yeah, that causes me no distress at all — but we’ll have to do a lot of tiptoeing as we figure out what we can and can’t reference in the books.
For what it’s worth, I disagree with Keith — I think Ethan Peck looks very convincing as a clean-shaven Spock. Okay, there’s that one, apparently photoshopped publicity photo that was shot from an unflattering head-on angle, but in the actual episode, he looks fine. I also liked the way they reconstructed the shape of Spock’s console, with the hooded viewer and the boxy monitor next to it.
On another matter, I think we’ve been wrong to assume that Short Treks: “Calypso” takes place in the 33rd century. If Discovery jumped forward to 3188, then it didn’t wait out the full 1000 years in between, but skipped over 930 of them. And “Calypso” obviously isn’t in Gabrielle’s future where Control exterminated all life in the known galaxy well before 3188. So either it’s in a separate timeline from either of those — one where Discovery never jumped into the future and Control never gained sentience — or it’s actually in the 42nd century, with its 1000-year vigil beginning some time after the ship’s arrival in the 32nd.
Replies to other comments to follow. This is a long post already.
@CLB: “But then, it’s easy enough to assume that Michael went back to create those too at some point.”
Supposedly the time crystal will burn out after the 930 year trip. Also supposedly, Boreth is still around and Suits can be built easily, so we could have multiple travelers hopping all over time and space.
@76: After the episode ended, I realized that they did such a good job pretending that Michael didn’t exist that Sarek didn’t even mention her while in the throes of dementia later on in his life.
Overall, this season was a big improvement on last season (and I enjoyed last season a lot). That said, I wonder how much of that comes from the familiar Trek elements of Pike and Spock.
@12/Theo16: “Did the dialog in the last scene canon-ize the term Articles of the Federation?”
Apparently so, yes. At least, it wasn’t spoken in any prior Prime Universe series: http://scriptsearch.dxdy.name/?page=results&query=(%7Bline%7Carticles%20of%20the%20federation,%7D)
@15/Lubitsch: I still don’t see any basis at all for calling Burnham a “Mary Sue,” let alone a “monstrous” one. A Mary Sue is a character who’s implausibly better than everyone else, solving everything and upstaging them at every turn (it also refers to a guest character and thus makes no sense for the actual intended series lead). Burnham needed a lot of help to get to where she ended up. It was her mother who (somehow) invented the time suit. It was Amanda who told her about the Red Angel in the first place. It was Tilly who learned from Airiam’s data that the time suit had Burnham’s genetic signature. It was Spock who helped her figure things out time and time again, culminating in the realization of what the signals were for. It was Reno and Po who made the time suit work. And so on. Burnham had a ton of help from her crewmates, friends, and family, and that is the diametric opposite of a Mary Sue.
If anything, I felt that Burnham was far too passive for a lead character, just acting out a time-loop destiny that was shaped for her by others. It was more a matter of Burnham being manipulated by circumstance than being personally extraordinary. She’s more of a Harry Potter figure, someone pushed into being the center of destiny by decisions and events that she had no say in.
@16/Jeff L: I think it’s always been implicit that Starfleet ships have some sort of self-cleaning or self-repair capability that happens behind the scenes when we’re not looking. And it’s never seemed plausible to me that Trek’s future is so robot-less when our own everyday world is getting more full of robots and drones all the time. So I’m perfectly happy to believe these little cleaning and repair drones were always there just offscreen. Although the hull-repair drones we saw here were implausibly cute.
@23/Luthien: “Without a battle zone surrounding them, far less people (possibly, nobody) would be needed to man the ship and follow the Archangel Michael through the wormhole.”
Yeah, but what happens once she gets into the future? They didn’t want to abandon her in an unknown time with only (at best) her mother for companionship. Besides, they’re a crew of explorers. And as Saru said, they all gave up ties to home just by joining Starfleet. I’m sure a lot of them would’ve thrilled at the chance to discover the distant future.
@33/Athreeren: “Did these “close-up inside the helmet” shots exist before the first Iron Man?”
I think I saw similar things occasionally done in seasons of the Super Sentai franchise (the Japanese show that Power Rangers is adapted from) made in the 1990s. Although Iron Man innovated the “halo of heads-up displays” thing that’s now commonly done.
@35/GHiller: “3) Fuller’s firing and Kurtzman’s takeover”
Kurtzman was involved from the beginning, basically in the same relationship to Fuller as Rick Berman was to Michael Piller or Ira Steven Behr or Jeri Taylor on the 24th-century shows, or as Herb Solow was to Gene Roddenberry on TOS. His company, Secret Hideout Productions, co-produces Discovery along with CBS, so he and his partner Heather Kadin are above the showrunner in the hierarchy. When Fuller left, his frequent collaborators Gretchen Berg & Aaron Harberts took over as showrunners, again under Kurtzman & Kadin. When Berg & Harberts were fired early in season 2, Kurtzman chose to fill the gap by moving into a more hands-on showrunner role and bringing in James Duff (IIRC) to co-showrun — sort of like an admiral stepping in to take command of a ship that’s lost its captain. (Michelle Paradise, who joined the staff mid-season, will take over as showrunner for season 3, while Kurtzman goes back to his senior exec role in charge of the development and oversight of all of Secret Hideout’s shows.)
@67/RedIII: “They never perfectly reconciled why the signals appeared all at once and then needed to see them again. Pike said only one is willing to say where it is. At first I thought that Starfleet had received the signals but because of time to travel it would take time for them to trace it to it’s correct origin.”
As I said in my comments yesterday on an earlier episode, this makes perfect sense, since in astronomy, knowing the direction of a light source doesn’t tell you its distance, so it could be anywhere along a straight line in that direction. You need more data, such as a parallax reading from a second detection, in order to fix its distance and determine its true location.
“I also had a separate thought that once Discovery successfully escaped to the future that that might be what kills control. If Control doesn’t get the sphere data then it ceases to evolve into full sapience and thus ceases to exist. But it was control of the present that was the threat here anyway.”
Yes, exactly. By preventing present-day Control from getting that data, it never became sentient at all and never destroyed life in the future. After all, we’ve seen the distant future before in Trek — “Living Witness” in Voyager, Daniels’s time in Enterprise — so we know the “Control destroys everything” future doesn’t happen.
@74/Sunspear: Yeah, you’re right about the sphere data. I said in one of my episode reactions the other day that giving Starfleet all that historical data about the galaxy was too huge a windfall and hard to reconcile with existing canon. Requiring that data to be deleted/removed from the present resolves that objection.
And Kurtzman makes a good point — when he says “free from canon,” he doesn’t mean he has a problem with canon, just that it’s easier to respect canon if you don’t have to tiptoe around it with a prequel. Setting the show in the far future frees it from the restrictions of doing an in-canon prequel and makes it easier to tell whatever stories they want without having to play games to reconcile it.
I think the only things that unambiguously worked about DSC being a prequel were the chance to explore the Sarek family dynamic in more depth than we’ve been able to see since “Yesteryear,” and the chance to get to know Captain Pike. Otherwise, the attempt to cram these huge, epic story arcs and updated technological futurism into established canon was an uneasy fit. I think the only real reason it was a prequel at all was because Fuller wanted to do an anthology that only started in a pre-TOS setting and then moved forward. This time jump is sort of like returning to that original long-term plan, and it should ease a lot of the show’s issues going forward.
Ending each season with important, universe-shattering information being filed away as hush-hush classified makes this series seem unimportant somehow. It’s like Star Trek written by the Cigarette Smoking Man. Did I really just watch that? And does it really matter?
Oh well, Kurtzman was right to want to jump far ahead in the timeline. Onward and upward!
@80/Spike: In the case of the Mirror Universe last season, classifying it was necessary, because “Mirror, Mirror” made it clear that it was unknown to the Enterprise crew. This time, though, there was no need for it. Spore drive? Just assume it was abandoned as a failed technology too dangerous to use. Burnham? Spock never mentioned any of his relatives until he was forced to. The sphere data? Removing it from the present resolves any continuity issues without any need to keep it secret. Section 31? Just disband the damn thing so that anyone who tries to reconstitute it has to do so secretly, illegally, and underground. The time suit? Sure, classify that, just like the Guardian and other temporal tech — but there’s no reason why classifying a time-travel experiment would require making it an act of treason to mention the very existence of the Discovery or any member of its crew. Especially after you’ve already explained their disappearance by saying the ship blew up.
If it would have been “we have yet to visit all 7 signals” instead of “we are waiting for the signals to appear” it would have solved a lot of problems. I really don’t understand why no one caught the discrepancy while in production.
I know there are some rights issues, but a Pike led Enterprise movie would be amazing.
@82/M: What “rights issues?” CBS owns all of Star Trek. A theatrical movie seems unlikely under the current circumstances, but there’s no reason CBSAA couldn’t air original movies just like Netflix does.
@72/GHiller: “And if I were Pike, knowing what fate awaits me […]”
I wouldn’t want to see predeterminism in Star Trek. Not that it really matters anymore…
It… actually makes sense they destroy all trace of Discovery? After all, their enemy is in the future, so it makes some sense that those left in the past destroy any possible archeological record or trace to imply Discovery is coming for them. What if some few bytes of data are left behind implying that Discovery is on it’s way? Depending on when it’s discovered, Control would have decades to centuries tracking records, working out where they’ll appear and making that into an anti-matter dump to blow them up when they show up, the way Nero did with Spock Prime.
Sunspear @74: But being “free of canon” does imply they didn’t want the constant onslaught from canon purists. I personally don’t give a damn about “canon”, but apparently those that do to an obnoxious degree won the day, however inadvertently, but still won’t be satisfied.
@86/DanteHopkins: I found the “free of canon” remark an odd thing to say. The Discovery writers chose to tell a story that was more closely intertwined with previous Star Trek than any other before, bringing in Sarek, the Mirror Universe, Spock and Pike and the Enterprise. And now they want to get away from it all? That’s oscillating between extremes.
@87, Hi Jana! Always good to see you comment. And you’re exactly right. What kept me watching Discovery was they took the time to write a series set in the “prime” universe, unlike the Kelvin movies. It seemed like the writers cared enough about the franchise to set the series in the universe we know and love. But now they want to be “free of canon”? Feels like a double fake, taking the easy way out, to please an unpleasable section of fans.
And CLB, hopefully you’ve seen the whole season. Looking forward to your take.
@87. This may be due to the change in showrunners. The previous ones may have been happy to play in the pre-TOS era, but its seems Kurtzman wants to move away from it.
@88. Well, count me as one who welcomes to be “free of canon,” if only to boldly go into an era we know little about, just as TNG did in 1987 by jumping into the 24th century. Besides, Trek has spent over a decade now making prequels in TV and movies. Time to jump forward again, I think.
@90, I’m all for jumping forward, but start off the series where you want to go. Starting off in the 23rd century, pre-TOS, an era full of untold stories, and then midway through you jump ahead 1,000 years? Why not just start off there, and then do another series set in the pre-TOS era? It’s frustrating and disingenous.
@76 – ” The light from it alone should’ve vaporized Pike in a millisecond!!!!!”
By the same token, the smae should be said about the planets where the initial (final?) red bursts were detected. In order to be visible across 70,000 light years it would have to be on the order of a supernova. And we know there was a visible light component to them because we saw it each time the suit was used and the fact that the bursts were described from the get go as red.
And the part of the blast door reminded me of Duck Dodgers and his disintegration proof vest.
Sure, the door may survive a point blank torpedo blast (no, not really or they’d build the hull of of whatever the door is made of) but as we saw, the rest of the ship wouldn’t.
@79 – “As I said in my comments yesterday on an earlier episode, this makes perfect sense, since in astronomy, knowing the direction of a light source doesn’t tell you its distance, so it could be anywhere along a straight line in that direction. You need more data, such as a parallax reading from a second detection, in order to fix its distance and determine its true location.”
Since we’re told from the start that the bursts span 70,000 light years, i’d assume that there were multiple Starfleet installations that detected them, giving us the parallax needed. That still doesn’t explain how Starfleet could pick up the optical bursts in real time. FTL sensors should be passive sensors, detecting FTL particles that are given off by the source. No matter what you do, a sensor isn’t going to make light travel 70,000 ly in an instant.
Hopefully season three doesn’t touch on either of my two pet peeves from Trek, time travel and the mirror universe. Was tired of them long before Discovery and what did I get? A season devoted to each.
@85/SCMof2814: “It… actually makes sense they destroy all trace of Discovery? After all, their enemy is in the future, so it makes some sense that those left in the past destroy any possible archeological record or trace to imply Discovery is coming for them.”
Why? Just destroy evidence of their use of time travel. Trying to erase all evidence of not only the ship itself, but every one of its personnel, would be prohibitively difficult and would leave massive and obvious gaps in the historical record that would invite questions. How do you erase all the evidence that Sarek adopted a human daughter? How do you erase the records of the entire lives of Saru, Stamets, Tilly, Owosekun, etc. and every interaction they had with any other people, ever? How do you convince everyone to go along with that erasure, including the Klingons, the Ba’ul, the logic extremists who tried to kill Burnham, the Luddite community Owosekun grew up in, etc.? It just doesn’t make any sense, and it would be impossible to do on the scale implied.
To quote a Ferengi Rule of Exposition I made up for my story in Pocket’s 2003 Deep Space Nine: Prophecy and Change anthology (Rule #270), “A near-truth is an economical lie.” The more facts you have to cover up or deny to sell the lie, the easier it is to expose it. So the most convincing lies are the ones that are as close to reality as possible. Don’t deny that Discovery or its crew even existed; deny only its involvement with time travel. Stick to the story that the ship was destroyed in the battle. Alter the sensor records to conceal the temporal signatures they mentioned.
@86/Dante: “But being “free of canon” does imply they didn’t want the constant onslaught from canon purists.”
I don’t think so. To me, it only sounds like it means being free to tell whatever stories they want without having to tiptoe around established canonical events. Recall the context: Kurtzman was talking about how he and the rest of the Bad Robot team decided to make their Kirk-prequel movies an alternate timeline so they wouldn’t be constrained in their storytelling by established canon, and he’s saying they moved Discovery to the future for the same reason. So it’s not about fan reaction. Creators can’t let themselves worry about that to the extent that fans imagine they do, because there will always be people who object to anything you do and it would be paralyzing to worry about that.
The thing people often forget is that many of the creators are fans too. And they ask the same questions about continuity that the viewers do. They don’t need to listen to the audience’s complaints or questions about reconciling the continuity, because they’ve been asking themselves those same questions since long before the audience was even aware it was an issue.
@87/Jana: “The Discovery writers chose to tell a story that was more closely intertwined with previous Star Trek than any other before, bringing in Sarek, the Mirror Universe, Spock and Pike and the Enterprise. And now they want to get away from it all? That’s oscillating between extremes.”
It was Bryan Fuller who came up with the prequel idea, and that was locked in by the time he left. Sure, he convinced Kurtzman and the others to go along with it, but that was then. After two years of trying to balance the need to innovate and modernize with the need to reconcile with 50-year-old continuity, maybe Kurtzman and his collaborators decided from experience that it was just too restrictive. Maybe working with Kirsten Beyer, Michael Chabon, et al. on the Picard series showed Kurtzman how much more creatively liberating it is to go forward in the timeline than to try to fit something new into its past.
Quoth DanteHopkins: ” I’m all for jumping forward, but start off the series where you want to go.”
Who’s “you” here? Keep in mind that, as Christopher said, it was Bryan Fuller who wanted to do the 23rd century, and by the time he parted ways with the show, they were locked into it, having already filmed an expensive two-hour pilot. But the people running the show now are not the same as the ones who “want[ed] to go” to the 23rd century.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I should probably save some of this for next week’s overall season wrapup, but a couple of thoughts bubble up:
First, I am willing to give the writers a degree of leeway given the complications of changing showrunners partway into the season — and more specifically, because I’d submit that what they ended up with was more material than they could fit into the number of episodes available. The great majority of the problems folks have expressed with the writing of these final episodes could have been solved fairly easily with somewhere between two and four more episodes into which one could stuff resolutions to the various plot and character arcs set in motion as we started the season.
In particular, I think the emergence of Anson Mount’s Pike as a breakout character complicated this equation — the time we spent with Pike on Talos IV and Boreth in particular is time that we’d otherwise have had to address the problem of dealing with all seven of the “original” signals in timely fashion. Too much talent is a good problem to have, mind you, but it’s a problem in terms of fitting all of the story material you need to get across into a limited amount of screen time.
More specific to the finale: am I the only one who was starting to wonder, near the end, whether the sphere data was in fact a separate and equally dangerous manifestation of Control, possibly also originating from the future? Certainly the sphere data was behaving like a fully functional AI with a sense of self-preservation as strong as Control’s; all it was lacking was a means of communicating with Our Heroes (which is actually kind of odd, when you think about it — all that data, and none of it includes specs for either 23rd century Federation Standard or the means to build a universal translator?). Alternately, of course, it might be a “good” AI meant to act as Control’s own arch-nemesis (which would be a seed for future stories down the line). Either way, I am a little surprised that none of the Discovery crew seemed to realize the emerging similarities between the two electronic entities.
I may also be one of the few not much impressed by the space battle, which struck me as both extraordinarily cluttered and not at all in tune with the general run of space combat in the Trek universe, which has always been far more strategic and chess-like as opposed to frenetic and explodey.
@95/John C. Bunnell: “am I the only one who was starting to wonder, near the end, whether the sphere data was in fact a separate and equally dangerous manifestation of Control, possibly also originating from the future?”
No, the sphere had been around since the distant past, its data accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years. I see it as being basically V’Ger without the daddy issues. And it was a semi-organic entity, not a pure AI like Control.
“all it was lacking was a means of communicating with Our Heroes (which is actually kind of odd, when you think about it — all that data, and none of it includes specs for either 23rd century Federation Standard or the means to build a universal translator?)”
Maybe its mind just didn’t work on the same level. Can you speak dog? A human and a dog can gain some broad understanding of the meanings of each other’s communication, but they can’t really talk on each other’s level. And if you want to take your dog to the vet, you just tell it to hop in the car rather than trying to give it a detailed explanation of your motives and plans. (In case it’s unclear, in this analogy, you’re the sphere intelligence and the dog is the ship’s crew.)
“Either way, I am a little surprised that none of the Discovery crew seemed to realize the emerging similarities between the two electronic entities.”
I think that’s covered well enough by the fact that Control wanted to absorb the sphere’s data in order to become sentient. So the similarity was implicit in the storyline. Data is data. But so what? Biology is biology, but that doesn’t mean a predator and its prey have the same agenda — merely that one can exploit the other.
“I may also be one of the few not much impressed by the space battle”
I agree with you. I’ve always found this show’s digital effects to be absurdly overcluttered, self-indulgent, undisciplined, and unmoored from reality, and this was the pinnacle of that.
@88/Dante: Thank you! I wish I could have liked Discovery more. It would have been so nice to come here every week to chat.
@93/Christopher: I had the impression that Fuller established the 23rd century setting, the Klingon war, and Spock’s adopted sister, and his successors added the Mirror Universe (complete with Lorca’s Gorn and tribble), the Enterprise, Pike, Number One, Spock, and the Talosians. I don’t know who was responsible for Harry Mudd. Based on this, I’d say they were equally eager to weave their new stories around old places and characters.
Sure, perhaps they changed their minds. But jumping to the future is such an extreme measure. They could have sent Discovery on an extended exploratory mission into unknown space instead.
In retrospect, it seems to me that the alternate film universe gave Abrams and Kurtzman an opportunity to have their cake and eat it too. It allowed them to throw in any character they liked – not just the Enterprise command crew, but also Pike, Sarek, Amanda, and Khan – without having to worry about continuity. This doesn’t work in the Prime Universe.
Re-continuity: I don’t mind updating sets and uniforms all I ask is they be referential to the original. I think the Enterprise Bridge and Uniforms are fine. I don’t mind holograph technology or other updates the future isn’t what it used to be. I DO mind big, honking, destructive, desperate wars that apparently disappear down the memory drain. I am ANNOYED by dragging in characters and features from the Original Series with a merry disregard for continuity of character (Mudd) and unnecessary links (the Sarek Family). I really do wish they hadn’t dragged the Mirror Universe into it, or Time Travel. Was any of this sturm and drang necessary?
@97/Jana: “I had the impression that Fuller established the 23rd century setting, the Klingon war, and Spock’s adopted sister, and his successors added the Mirror Universe (complete with Lorca’s Gorn and tribble), the Enterprise, Pike, Number One, Spock, and the Talosians.”
Obviously Fuller had nothing to do with season 2. And he specifically asked for the first novel (Desperate Hours by David Mack) to be a Shenzhou/Enterprise crossover, implying that he had no intention of showing Spock, Pike, etc. in the show so the books were free to use them. But we do know that the Mirror Universe was always part of the plan for season 1, just not in the same way it ended up being.
“Based on this, I’d say they were equally eager to weave their new stories around old places and characters.”
You work with what you have. If it’s decided that you’re telling a story set 10 years before TOS, then it’s natural to take advantage of that to explore and revisit TOS characters. But that doesn’t preclude you from wanting to do something in a more original setting where you’re free to innovate rather than recycle.
I know this because it’s the story of my own career as a Trek tie-in author. When I do a story in an established setting or a prequel timeframe, like my Rise of the Federation books or my upcoming The Captain’s Oath about Kirk’s first command, then naturally I take the opportunity to fill in gaps and flesh out background. But I still welcome it when I get the opportunity to flesh out unexplored parts of the universe and be free to create whatever I want outside the fetters of continuity — and I get even more enjoyment from creating my own original fiction where everything is my own free choice. These are all approaches that can easily coexist within a single author’s repertoire, and doing one does not preclude an interest in doing another.
“Sure, perhaps they changed their minds. But jumping to the future is such an extreme measure. They could have sent Discovery on an extended exploratory mission into unknown space instead.”
Is extreme bad? Is a show that limits itself to safe, unambitious storytelling preferable to one that tries something radical and daring?
“In retrospect, it seems to me that the alternate film universe gave Abrams and Kurtzman an opportunity to have their cake and eat it too. It allowed them to throw in any character they liked – not just the Enterprise command crew, but also Pike, Sarek, Amanda, and Khan – without having to worry about continuity. This doesn’t work in the Prime Universe.”
Two things don’t have to be exactly the same in every detail to offer similar opportunities. This is not about specific characters or ideas. This is about creative freedom and opportunity. It’s about the difference between having to move around within the limited space between established stories and having the freedom to tell any story you want regardless of the consequences. In an in-continuity prequel, there are limitations on where you can take your stories. You have to maneuver around the immovable structures already in place, and there are things you can’t do. You can’t do anything that permanently blows up the status quo. You can’t blow up a major planet; you can’t introduce a miraculous propulsion technology unless you have it declared secret at the end. There are restrictions on your creative freedom. But in either an alternate timeline or an unchronicled far future, you can do anything you want. You have the freedom to take your stories wherever they need to go. It shouldn’t be hard to see how liberating that is.
@98/Roxana: “I DO mind big, honking, destructive, desperate wars that apparently disappear down the memory drain.”
Oh yes. 1960s-1970s Star Trek told us that war is horrible, but can be overcome (“A Private Little War” and “The Omega Glory” exempted). 2010s Star Trek tells us that war is a fact of life, but not to worry, it’s easy to recover from even the most devastating war.
@99, CLB. Surely it is possible to write Star Trek stories that do not involve blowing up planets or miraculous drives? I mean you personally have written books of it! So has Krad.
@99/Christopher: “If it’s decided that you’re telling a story set 10 years before TOS, then it’s natural to take advantage of that to explore and revisit TOS characters. But that doesn’t preclude you from wanting to do something in a more original setting where you’re free to innovate rather than recycle.”
I don’t see that as natural. When I first heard that the new show was to take place in the 23rd century, I assumed that they wanted to tell a space exploration story and thus chose a time when the galaxy was still largely unexplored. Neither DS9 nor VOY was set up to explore and revisit old characters. They took an established universe and told new stories about new people. Nothing precluded the DSC writers from doing the same.
The very idea of having starships on an exploration mission allows the writers to come up with an original setting whenever they want to, in the form of alien planets, alien societies, strange space phenomena, you name it. The DSC writers chose to recycle.
“Is extreme bad? Is a show that limits itself to safe, unambitious storytelling preferable to one that tries something radical and daring?”
Is extreme the same thing as daring?
“Two things don’t have to be exactly the same in every detail to offer similar opportunities.”
I didn’t say they do. I brought up the films because I have the impression that the people currently in charge of Star Trek would like to write about old stuff and have creative freedom too. It’s what they did in the films, it’s what they did in DSC. Of course, this is speculation.
@101/roxana; Those were just the most obvious examples. Again, it’s not about specific choices, it’s about the difference between filling in gaps in an existing story and having a totally blank canvas where you can make a fresh start. To me, as a creator, the advantages of the latter over the former are obvious. Maybe it’s not something laypeople have thought about as much.
@102/Jana: “When I first heard that the new show was to take place in the 23rd century, I assumed that they wanted to tell a space exploration story and thus chose a time when the galaxy was still largely unexplored. Neither DS9 nor VOY was set up to explore and revisit old characters. They took an established universe and told new stories about new people. Nothing precluded the DSC writers from doing the same.”
But DS9 and VGR were set in the “present” of the narrative, moving forward. Choosing to revisit the past of a fictional universe is a different dynamic, because you already know what lies ahead and around your story, and that foreknowledge is bound to inform the narrative. Indeed, it might be seen as an oversight if it doesn’t. (I liked it that The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles filled in so many unsuspected parts of Indy’s past, but I did regret that it didn’t take the opportunity to show us how Indy met Marcus Brody or Sallah or Abner Ravenwood, say.)
After all, even in the 24th century, the galaxy is no more than 12% explored, as I recall the figure from the TNG writers’ guide. So it’d be millennia before you ran out of galaxy to explore, and with advances in propulsion, there would always be other galaxies to explore. So a story about pure exploration could be told in any time frame. Presumably Fuller’s reason for choosing a time frame just 10 years before TOS was that he wanted to tell a story that resonated with or built on elements of TOS. His decision — and it was his — to make Michael Burnham Spock’s adoptive sister clearly proves that.
Indeed, in the early days of development and production, Fuller hinted that there was a specific event in TOS canon that DSC season 1 was building toward, and that we’d see the connection by the end of the season. That seems to have fallen by the wayside after Fuller was let go, but it proves that his motivation was very much about tying into TOS history.
“I brought up the films because I have the impression that the people currently in charge of Star Trek would like to write about old stuff and have creative freedom too. It’s what they did in the films, it’s what they did in DSC.”
But the obvious difference is that in an alternate timeline (or rebooted universe), you can do both of those things at the same time, since you can change how established events happened or erase them altogether; but in the Prime timeline, the two conflict with each other, because you can’t change how established events happened and can only work around them.
Say you’re an architect. You want to build cool new buildings. If you have to work around a bunch of existing buildings, if you have to squeeze your buildings into a few available lots and make sure they fit with the structure and architecture of the existing buildings, then that’s limiting. Finding a way to work within those limits can be a satisfying creative exercise, but it still restricts your choices a great deal. Conversely, if you have permission to tear down any building you want and replace it with something new of your own design, that’s more liberating. And if you get to build on a wide open plain that’s never been built on before, that’s even more liberating — plus you don’t have to tear down any existing buildings to achieve it.
@103, CLB. Of course I can see your point about a blank canvas. But there was no need for the Discovery creators to wrap themselves so tightly in the established canon. The Federation is a bigger place than that.
@103/Christopher: Yes, I know now that I was wrong and that Fuller never intended to tell the story I wanted. I’m a layperson. It made sense to me that the timeframe we know the least about, where starships were often out of contact, where replicators had not yet been invented, would be a good timeframe to tell new stories in. I also expected Star Trek in any century to be about new fictional worlds and about the real world, not primarily about filling in the past of its known fictional universe.
I can still imagine such a show, but I take it from your comment that TV writers don’t think like that.
“But the obvious difference is that in an alternate timeline (or rebooted universe), you can do both of those things at the same time, since you can change how established events happened or erase them altogether; but in the Prime timeline, the two conflict with each other, because you can’t change how established events happened and can only work around them.”
Yes. I said that in comment #97.
“Finding a way to work within those limits can be a satisfying creative exercise, but it still restricts your choices a great deal.”
Or it guides my choices and helps me to come up with unusual ideas and solutions. Limitations can be inspiring. Why do some poets write sonnets? And why do so many fantasy worlds look alike (European Middle Ages without Christianity) when the writers could do literally anything?
Anyway, there aren’t all that many established events in the 23rd century. Not enough to restrict the writers’ choices a great deal, unless they want to put the whole galaxy in jeopardy, and they really should stop doing that.
Has anyone else noticed, that this was the second death that could have been prevented by the use of a transporter? This is super annoying…
Actually, Number One’s name is Una. There was a TOS book with her in it in which they gave her that name, and it was actually used at the end of the episode you’re reviewing, thereby canonizing the novel’s use of her name.
@97 – “In retrospect, it seems to me that the alternate film universe gave Abrams and Kurtzman an opportunity to have their cake and eat it too. It allowed them to throw in any character they liked – not just the Enterprise command crew, but also Pike, Sarek, Amanda, and Khan – without having to worry about continuity. This doesn’t work in the Prime Universe.”
Which is why I tend to view each series as it’s own alternative universe with histories that are broadly similar. That way when you get contradictions, you just have seen a point where the histories are different. For example, in The Omega Glory, we’re told that Earth avoided atomic War. In Encounter at Farpoint, it didn’t. So, when I see them I just imagine that somewhere there’s the Omega Glory universe when EoF ran basically the same but without the Post Atomic Horror stuff in the courtroom.
@103 – “But the obvious difference is that in an alternate timeline (or rebooted universe), you can do both of those things at the same time, since you can change how established events happened or erase them altogether; but in the Prime timeline, the two conflict with each other, because you can’t change how established events happened and can only work around them.”
But Star Trek has changed things All. The. Time. Every series has contradicted what has come before, even within their own previous episodes. Spock was surprised by the existence of cloaking devices but Enterprise and Discovery, within his history, both encountered such tech. Enterprise and TAS both showed holodecks long before Riker was amazed by one in Encounter at Farpoint. That’s why the whole concept of the Prime Universe is such a scam. It’s put in place to maintain the fiction that Trek has never had multiple, contradictory events in it’s past.
With Discovery, I just imagine a TOS where they are not surprised by the Romulan Cloaking Device, the Mirror Universe, time travel and the like. The insistence that there’s a “Prime Universe” is simply the show itself demanding adherence to “canon”. And as we’ve seen all that does is lead to contradictions. And as we get more and more prequel background, the problem simply becomes more and more acute, leading to situations where we’re told that everything that happened in the past two seasons will simply never be mentioned by anyone ever again. It’ll be interesting to read a Federation history book to see how the Battle at the Binary Stars is depicted since Burnham is now a non-person, never having existed. And what will Pike & Spock’s service read like since they both spent months on a non-existant ship.
@104/roxana: “But there was no need for the Discovery creators to wrap themselves so tightly in the established canon. The Federation is a bigger place than that.”
I’m of mixed opinions on that. On the one hand, it was often frustrating how much DSC devoted itself to rehashing old ideas rather than coming up with new ones, and there are instances where I really did not like their approach (Homicidal Harry Mudd being the biggest misstep). On the other hand, I feel the most successful, satisfying, and moving things they did (with the exception of Burnham’s scenes with her mother in “Perpetual Infinity”) were the new insights they gave us into the Sarek/Amanda/Spock family dynamic in episodes like “Lethe” and “Light and Shadows.”
@105/Jana: “I can still imagine such a show, but I take it from your comment that TV writers don’t think like that.”
You can’t make a blanket generalization like that about any group. Of course there could be TV writers that think like that, but none of them made this particular show. I’m just saying one shouldn’t be surprised if the reason for telling stories in a series’s past is to fill in the backstory of known characters and events, because that’s true of many, many prequels. Even Enterprise was broadly about building toward the founding of the Federation, even though it took its time getting there (and was often criticized for not tying in enough to established canon, which proves that anything a show does will get complaints from one quarter or another).
“Limitations can be inspiring.”
Yes, of course I know that. But if it were required every single time, that would be a whole different matter. It makes no sense to argue that only one way of telling a story is okay. Like I said, a single artist’s repertoire can include a range of different storytelling approaches, and that is a good thing.
Regarding the big space battle in this episode, I feel sorry for all those kids on the Fourth of July this year. Surely there will be a sparkler shortage. ;)
@110/Spike: The sparkler shortage would presumably come from the bargain-basement 2001 knockoff sequence when Burnham went through the wormhole. There were shots where you could literally see the sparklers reflected in her helmet. That would’ve been a cheap-looking effect even in 1966.
@107, ‘Una’ of course means ‘One’ in Latin.
@112, I really didn’t like DSC’s special effects in Brothers. They seemed unnecessarily flashy and gave me a touch of vertigo to boot.
I hope they pull back on the visual effects next season. Or at least do it in a way that’s less cluttered. That space battle felt weirdly claustrophobic to me. And a little confusing in places. ‘Who is shooting at what? Oh hey, it’s the D7 Battlecruiser… I think…’
I really miss the taut submarine battles in space from TOS and the early movies. Remember the build-up to the Bird of Prey decloaking in Search for Spock? Wonderful stuff.
@113: I agree that the amount of ships flying around during the battle made for some serious visual confusion. Also, just how many shuttles does the Enterprise carry anyway? For that matter, where are they stored? We have seen the launch deck on that ship, after all …
@107. Brian: a few people keep bringing this up. I’m guessing whoever wrote that tie-in was having a joke.
His/her next tie-ins will have Riker as Uno and Chakotay as Primo.
Sunspear: It wasn’t a joke at all, it was a tribute to fellow Trek novelist Una McCormack.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
114. twels – In The Doomsday Machine, it was reported that “all four” of the Constellations shuttles were accounted for.
Can anyone tell me who the star fleet interviewer speaking with each of the crew at the end of the season 2 finale? They showed only a side shot of the face from the lips down. Did I miss something or that voice sounds like Leland?
@109/Christopher: Okay, I misunderstood your previous comment. I thought it was you making a blanket generalisation.
I think the desire to make prequels is only a symptom of the desire to fill gaps in the Star Trek universe instead of telling stories about us in a science fiction framing. Which is what some fans want, of course. Ideally they’d do both, but that seems to be a difficult task. Although you manage it very well in your books.
Anyway, as I think I said, it was Fuller’s original intention to have an anthology that would eventually jump forward into the uncharted Trek future after a few seasons set between existing series. Heck, I remember some viewers speculating last year about the possibility of Discovery jumping forward in time as a way of essentially achieving Fuller’s original goal.
Personally, I’m fine with it. The previous two revivals — Enterprise and Kelvin — were both prequels, and three prequels in a row is enough for me. Now DSC has gone from a prequel to a sequel. We’ll evidently still have at least one more prequel with the (ugh) Section 31 series, but now we’ll have at least two series (DSC and Untitled Picard) moving the Trek timeline forward for the first time since 2002 (or 2009 if you count the stuff about Romulus and the supernova). Personally, I’d still like to see a complete ground-up reinvention in a whole new, updated continuity — it’s the one thing Trek hasn’t tried yet, and many other franchises have done it successfully — but at the very least, it’ll be interesting to move forward again (although as a novelist I dread what the Picard series is likely to do to the 24th-century book continuity we’ve had going for the past 20 years).
Although jumping the Trek universe into the far future has its pitfalls too, in terms of the futurism they bring to it. When TNG jumped a century ahead of TOS, it barely made any significant changes to the technology or culture, just a few incremental improvements, like faster warp drive, easier intraship beaming, and more natural-sounding computer voices. Holodecks were the one main innovation, but even those had been established in the animated series (and The Making of Star Trek had said that something like them existed on the TOS ship, even though we never saw it). Some technologies, like robotics, actually seemed to have regressed as far as the larger galaxy was concerned (since Kirk encountered a number of different androids, but Picard never encountered a non-Soong android). The most meaningful difference was that the Federation was more integrated — there were more alien personnel on the ship (a difference that’s now been erased by the diverse 23rd-century crews seen in Kelvin and DSC), more hybrids, and easier interstellar travel and communication so that the frontier of space was more tamed and regulated and starship captains had less autonomy. But those were subtle distinctions.
So this time, will they actually find ways to give the Federation some meaningful technological or cultural evolution over the centuries? It’s a tricky thing to do, since if you change society too much (say, have interstellar transporters so starships have become obsolete, or have everyone existing as immortal, posthuman holographic life forms), it makes it hard for a general TV audience to relate or for the stories to have recognizable dramatic stakes. A lot of writers cheat by having civilization regress due to war, apocalypse, or societal collapse, so that they’re essentially writing historical fiction and passing it off as the future. But that’s too dystopian for Trek, and if Discovery arrived in a post-collapse future where it was the most advanced ship around, that would be a rehash of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda.
@120/Christopher: Incidentally, avoiding super-advanced technology was one of the reasons why I found a 23rd century setting for a new Star Trek show plausible.
@33 – Athreeren: There is no camera. We’re not seeing a film, we’re watching “real stuff” happening, sometimes from impossible points of view. That is, within the context of the show.
@34 – timdeman: Russo is a champion.
@35 – GHiller: Yeah, I would have preferred to end with a Discovery cliffhanger. But Saru is like, the most fleshed out character in the show…
@47 – Joe: Perhaps she becomes a captain, just not a Starfleet captain.
@76 – Chris: I loved seeing Spock’s ViewMaster. And yes, Calypso is obviously not Gabrielle’s future where Control exterminated all life, because the took the sphere information to the future and kept it out of Control’s tendrils.
@85 – SCMof2814 (is that a Green Lantern reference?): No, they’re enemy is not in the future, because they kept the sphere data out of Control’s hands, so it never evolved into full sentience and came back from the future.
@97 – JanaJansen: Harry Mudd was cast long before Fuller left the show.
@114 – twels: The Enterprise now carries a lot less shuttles than it used to…
@114/twels: I consider the visual effects shots on this show to be figurative at best, since they often fail to match what’s described in dialogue (e.g. an O star being orange instead of blue-white, a space station 100 AU from Earth having an impossible M-class planet beside it, a cloaked ship just sitting there in one place when it’s supposed to be extremely difficult to locate, or a supposedly transcendently beautiful light from the alien sphere just being Yet Another Orange Glow With Rocks) or just make no damn sense (like the interface with mycelial space being literal rippling water, or whatever that cotton-candy swirly stuff around Xahea was supposed to be). So I’m inclined to just ignore the absurd overabundance of shuttles, fighters, and drones and assume that there were actually far fewer of them.
@123/CLB:
I think the artists were taking cues from the recent Voltron: Legendary Defender (by Dreamworks, on Netflix), in which alien planets are found in every artistic shape except spheres that have found a hydrostatic equilibrium.
@124/Philip Thorne: Or from the end titles of the Kelvin Trek movies, with lots of cluttered, fanciful spacescapes. It’s become a pretty common aesthetic these days. It used to be that space shots just looked like space — black with points of light. Then we started to get Hubble photos of gorgeously detailed and colorful (and highly processed) nebulae, and shows like Babylon 5 started inserting those photos into their spacescapes even when they were in the wrong part of the galaxy for it. And space scenes have just gotten more and more cluttered with nebulae and asteroids and all sorts of junk, and space in TV and movies rarely looks like something deserving the name space, i.e. the absence of things. And now the fancifulness of it has become escalated to the point that space scenes look like something out of Dr. Seuss.
@krad: Wasn’t aware of that writer. Now if she was named after Number One… that’d be meta. (kidding, of course)
Incidentally, after bingeing the whole season in under a week (and not commercial-free), I remain bewildered by the logic of advertisements on streaming video, and to an extent on commercial TV in general. What is the point of showing us the same commercials in every single episode, often more than once per episode? If they didn’t convince us to buy the product the first time around, repeating the same pitch is unlikely to change our minds, especially in a streaming context where you might watch multiple episodes in a row. For me, at least, seeing the same ads over and over again just makes me more annoyed, which would make me less inclined to buy their products even if I’d been tempted in the first place.
I sometimes wonder if part of the reason for showing such tediously repetitive commercials (along with distracting animated banner ads and the like on other sites and services) is to deliberately make advertising so unpleasant that it will drive us to pay more for an ad-free service just to avoid the annoyance.
@127: I used to work in media and I can tell you that there are an incredible number of studies that show that that kind of repetition actually works. It’s why it can be worthwhile for companies to sponsor a whole show “with limited commercial interruptions,” in that you can repeat your message and lodge it into the craniums of the viewing public good and tight without having to worry about your competition getting anything in front of the public during that time.
It’s the PLACEMENT of commercial breaks in Discovery (particularly in the last couple episodes) that had me scratching my head. There was one point during the finale where they suddenly cut to commercial seemingly right in the middle of a very tense scene, wiping out some of the momentum they’d built up. Mind you, this isn’t just something Discovery has done. It’s an epidemic in modern tv that I first noticed during Mad Men’s initial airing …
@128/twels: Well, I must be unusual, then, because I find the repetition irritating as hell and I resent being browbeaten by the same message over and over.
As far as placement goes, the problem I saw was that CBSAA often started the commercials a few seconds too early, so there’d be an abrupt cut to commercial and then you’d see the last few seconds of the act at the start of the next. That kind of misalignment is not uncommon in streaming videos with ads.
Also, sometimes the algorithms that insert commercials use a fade/cut to black as their cue, and there was an episode in DSC season 2 where, I think, someone was knocked unconscious and there was a black screen for a bit, and the service cut to a commercial there even though there had just been another break a couple of minutes before, and when it came back, the character revived and it felt like it was supposed to be a continuation of the same scene, in terms of its pacing and such. It felt to me like the algorithm mistook that brief cut to black for an ad break and erroneously put an extra one in. Maybe that’s the scene you’re talking about. I seem to recall reading somewhere a decade or so back that TV producers learned to avoid going completely to black or to keep the sound playing during such a scene so as to avoid accidentally triggering an ad break where one wasn’t meant to go, but maybe these editors forgot to do that.
@129: I think part of the issue is that today’s TV is designed to be replayed ad infinitum in a streaming world after the initial airing. Therefore, they don’t want to draw attention to where a commercial break “would have been.” Hence, the lack of the sort of cliffhangers that would’ve occurred at the act breaks on the Original Series, for example.
Of course, streaming usually means that you’re seeing fewer ads than you would watching live, so there are also sometimes some weird fade-out, fade-in moments too, where there would’ve been a commercial in the on-air version.
I didn’t feel like it was worth paying for the commercial-free CBSAA, but now I am wondering what that would’ve been like. I definitely think the ad breaks in the new Twilight Zone are also oddly spaced …
@130/twels: “Of course, streaming usually means that you’re seeing fewer ads than you would watching live, so there are also sometimes some weird fade-out, fade-in moments too, where there would’ve been a commercial in the on-air version.”
In my experience, they usually do have ads in the same places, just not as many per break.
As far as spacing goes, the modern practice seems to be to have a really long cold open/first act and a fairly long final act, and to compensate by having a bunch of short acts in between. So you’ll go 10-12 minutes before you see a commercial break, and then after that you’ll get one every 4-5 minutes for a while.
I found the repetitions of the commercials so deeply infuriating I went against my better judgement and paid for ad-free. I immediately regretted it, even though watching Discovery was much smoother.
I just remembered there was a preview for a new CBS show before this episode started. Can’t win for losing.
@127.
Christopher, I think you’re on to something there. And it seems to be spreading to other services. Youtube has recently increased the number of ads to an obnoxious, sometimes absurd degree. I’ve seen some videos with close to a dozen of those little yellow ad markers spread across the timeline.
If they think that’s going to drive me to their paid service, they’ve made the wrong strategy.
@127 to @133, re: highly repetitive ads on streaming services, I’ve encountered the situation on CBSAA, FunimationNow, and Hulu, but not YouTube.
When I first encountered this, I developed three hypotheses: (1) The pool of ads matched to my viewer profile is very small. (2) The total pool of advertisers on the service is farcically small. (3) There’s a bug in the ad-rotation software.
FWIW, I recently switched to CBSAA’s $9.99 no-ads plan (my credit card offered a half-off deal), and I find the DSC experience more enjoyable. For one thing, I can scrub through the episode without crashing into ad-barriers; for another, the breaks don’t interject themselves at dramatically inopportune junctures (as alluded in @129).
So, you wanna talk CBSAA’s closed-captioning? All the apostrophes were missing until last week, and it’s often out of sync with the audio.
Man. I love Trek. It’s science FICTION. There is simply 0% chance of total canon matching with a series that started in ’66 and has continued on to the now. You peoples are hung up on making this as “real” as possible. And that’s insane. Enjoy it for what it is, fun escapism. Yes I understand that is how many of you “enjoy” the series. By picking it apart. And that’s fine as long as you admit you actually love it! Or if the continuity problems are too much, switch to Star Wars.
@135/John: Star Trek is fun escapism now? That explains a lot.
@135. Real as possible? I’d just like a coherent storyline that goes beyond simple melodrama. So… not Star Wars.
@135/John: Speaking as a professional writer, I deeply hate it when people stress “fiction” as if it were an excuse to be lazy or sloppy or not care about what you’re doing. That’s an insult to everyone who creates fiction. Fiction is a profession, and as with any profession, the people who care about their work strive to do it with skill and dedication.
And while we’re at it, neither do you have any right to judge people who critique fiction. They’re not doing anything wrong by caring enough about fiction that they want it to be done with quality. That’s what those of us who create fiction want, because we strive for quality and we want audiences caring and perceptive enough to know the difference. And no capable professional artist ever got to where they are without listening to and learning from the critiques of their early, less capable work. Criticism is what lets us correct our shortcomings and drives us to maintain high standards.
@CLB: “neither do you have any right to judge people who critique fiction. They’re not doing anything wrong by caring enough about fiction that they want it to be done with quality.”
Guess I should give you the benefit of the doubt on that one. I’ve certainly experienced pushback from certain quarters when I’ve offered such critiques around these parts.
It took me a week to watch the finale – been busy and I felt like no rush since no more Disco for a good year… hopefully in between will get some short treks.
I have not read the comments yet (too many) but I read Krad’s review and I actually thought it was objective and dead on. Most of the things I wanted to come here and vent about you hit dead on with the most important is that once they eradicated Control , what was the point of still going to the future. And also the fact that Discovery was headed to the future with Control still on board. It would have made more sense for Discovery to escape to future and then Enterprise/Klingons/Kelpians finish off Control.
Also, what about the crew’s families. They are to think they are dead ? Never to talk about them? Again mentioned in review, the ending where even speaking of them is classified was uttetr nonsense. But then again, I am one to think that a dealth penalty for visiting Talos IV in TOS did not make sense either.
Obviously the death of the admiral kills the theory that she was Lethe – kind of misleading having an episode with that name in season 1 about her. Perhaps when Berg & Harberts left they nixed it or forgot about it.
I do have a question, other than Number 1 and of course Spock and Pike, were any of the original Cage Enterprise crew in Discovery ?
@140/jmsnyc: “Obviously the death of the admiral kills the theory that she was Lethe – kind of misleading having an episode with that name in season 1 about her.”
I don’t think the name was supposed to refer to the character from “Dagger of the Mind”. I rather think that both that character’s name and the episode title refer to the original Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in the Greek underworld.
jmsnyc:Jana is correct: the title of that first season episode, and that TOS character, are both references to the character from Greek myth. There is nothing even a little bit misleading about that title.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@140/jmsync: “once they eradicated Control , what was the point of still going to the future.”
Computer programs can have backups. Just because they destroyed the Control nexus in Leland that was controlling the local fleet of ships, that doesn’t prove that they eliminated every copy of Control everywhere in existence.
Jana and Keith have both correctly pointed out that the title of the episode “Lethe” was referring to the mythical river of forgetfulness (see also the telepathic Letheans of DS9: “Distant Voices”). Really, I’ll never understand where the bizarre notion that Cornwell would turn out to be Lethe came from in the first place. Even without knowledge of the mythic reference, why even draw that connection? Because they’re both brown-haired women? I’m sorry, that’s incredibly weak.
Not to mention that Cornwell was played by an actress in her late 50s, which would’ve put her in her late 60s by the time of “Dagger in the Mind,” and Lethe looked no more than half that age. I’ve heard some bizarre, random fan theories in my time, but this is one of the weirdest.
My guess is that the “person” doing the debriefing at the end is the new iteration of Control. There was just something suspicious about it.
@120/Christopher: “A lot of writers cheat by having civilization regress due to war, apocalypse, or societal collapse, so that they’re essentially writing historical fiction and passing it off as the future. But that’s too dystopian for Trek […]”.
Very true, but that hasn’t deterred the writers yet.
Worst case scenario: The Federation still exists, but it has become an evil empire. And Star Trek can finally do a “small band of rebels fights big evil empire” tale.
@146. Jana: “Worst case scenario: The Federation still exists, but it has become an evil empire. And Star Trek can finally do a “small band of rebels fights big evil empire” tale.”
You’re tempting fate for season 3 by saying that.
The “let us never speak of this again” method of restoring continuity with previous (future) series is even more ridiculous here than when it was done last season for the Mirror Universe’s existence. But, related to that… how many of the people now on Discovery know who Georgiou really is? She was introduced to them by Cornwell as the mysteriously-rescued Captain Georgiou, though of course Saru & Burnham know better. But they, and everyone else, were forbidden to talk about what they know. I really don’t remember the resolution in season 1 well enough to be sure.
I ask, because of a horrible (in my mind) possibility… the command of Discovery was left deliberately vague by Pike, as something to be resolved between Michael & Saru. But Georgiou is their equal in rank (albeit in Section 31), and as far as at least some crew members know, she’s actually a Starfleet Captain as well (and one of the most famous/decorated ones, to boot). Is this going to be an issue?
Oh, I hope not. Perhaps I’m forgetting something which precludes that.
There’s a pretty delightful cast/director/showrunner remote table read of this episode that is now up on CBS All Access. Everyone is fully immersed in their roles despite doing the table read separate from each other in their respective homes and you get actual scenes and visual and audio effects from the episode intercut with the table read. Really nicely done!