Okay, my favorite part of the the third-season finale of Discovery is the ending: the closing credits, which employs the closing-credits music from the original series. This probably would’ve been even niftier last week, which was the 800th installment of Trek onscreen, but it’s still a nifty little call-back to end this season, and as we just completed a year that had three new seasons of Trek in it.
The episode’s ending prior to the credits also isn’t a cliffhanger, which is a welcome relief, frankly.
There’s, um, a lot going on here, most of it good, some of it head-scratching, none of it actively horrible, though there were some moments there where I was really worried. And that non-cliffhangery ending is wonderful in so many ways, but the status quo it leaves for our two leads is problematic.
Before we get to that, though, we have this action-packed thrill ride of an episode, one that has a 61-minute running time. There’s Burnham, Book, and the bridge crew working to take Discovery back from Osyraa, and then there’s Saru, Culber, and Adira trying to find their way off Su’Kal’s deteriorating holodeck program—with help from Gray!
This hugely sophisticated holodeck program that can turn Saru into a human, Burnham into a Trill, and Culber into a Bajoran also turns Adira into a Xahean and Gray into, not just a Vulcan, but also a solid hologram. This allows Gray to participate in the mission and talk to everyone and also actually touch Adira (and hug Culber). Adira’s presence has already helped in that they brought meds with them (which they kept in their mouth so the meds wouldn’t be transformed by the holodeck), and Gray is able to move through the damaged exit (which would be fatal to a living person) to assess the damage to the ship.
I thought the bizarre alteration of people to a different species was a bit odd, but it does give us one of the best moments of the episode. The fear that Su’Kal needs to face in order to banish the monster and finally shut down the holodeck is the fear of being alone. He was just a child and the last one left alive, and he saw everyone else die—including his mother. We see the final recording of his mother dying, an event that so traumatized Su’Kal that it caused the Burn. (The reasons are given by Culber in a bio-technobabble infodump involving the radiation affecting him in vitro and dilithium and subspace and other such nonsense.) Su’Kal is reminded that he’s alone, but then he turns around and, for the first time, sees Saru as he really is: another Kelpien.
Bill Irwin’s work as Su’Kal here is superb, as is Doug Jones’. The sheer wonder in Su’Kal when he sees another Kelpien for the first time in a century is a joy to behold. And it’s a very Star Trek story: the Burn was caused, not by an antagonist or a malevolent force, but by a child devastated by the death of a parent.
The other half of the story is less Star Trek and more action-movie, continuing from last week, and while some of it is fun, I find myself less able to recall too many specifics, nor to be that interested in doing so. There’s a lot of shooting back and forth and riding on turbolifts (in those ridiculously wide-open turboshafts that take up way more space than makes any sense in a ship of Discovery’s size) and leaping around and kicking and punching and it’s just not that compelling overall.
However, there are moments. Burnham getting herself and Book out of sickbay (where the latter is being tortured) by activating a quarantine field is genius. Osyraa pushing Burnham into a wall of programmable matter is an effectively horrifying visual. And best of all, the bridge crew saves the day even though they can barely breathe.
Buy the Book
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
My favorite part of the ship-board portion was writer Michelle Paradise and the rest of the gang understanding something basic about science that is often missed. If you shut off life support on a spaceship, that doesn’t mean that from that moment forward, the area is uninhabitable. The air that was already there is still there. What turning off life-support would do is keep any fresh air from coming in, which means that, if you’re in that area, your air supply will continue to dwindle and the carbon dioxide in the air will increase. We see those effects on Tilly, Detmer, Bryce, Rhys, Ina, and Owosekun, with only the latter—whose background includes deep-sea diving and training in how to manage her breath—able to make it to the nacelles to perform the sabotage necessary to get Discovery out of warp.
That part also looked to piss me off, because it seriously seemed like Owosekun was going to have to sacrifice herself to save the ship. Luckily, the kill-your-POCs cliché was avoided by giving us instead the old Trek standby of the everyone-survives-the-suicide-mission cliché, in this case with Owosekun saved by one of the Dot-23s that was loaded with the Sphere Data.
Still, the taking back of the ship, while visually exciting and tense, is pretty much standard stuff. Burnham convinces Vance to let Discovery go with its hostages, and her argument pretty much boils down to, “We’re the stars of the show, so we have to be the ones to handle it,” which makes nothing like actual sense. A fleet from Ni’Var shows up, and then doesn’t do anything particularly useful. The final fight scene between Osyraa and Burnham is so constructed it’s hard to really be invested in it.
Osyraa herself, after gaining significant depth in the last two episodes, reverts back to the mustache-twirling bad guy she was in “The Sanctuary.” This does Janet Kidder no favors, as her dialogue is reduced to the usual cliché nonsense, and it all boils down to a Final Fight between her and Burnham. Snore.
The day is saved in the end because of Book’s empathy with alien animals, established way back in “That Hope is You, Part 1” at the top of the season. (And as an aside, not doing Part 2 until 12 episodes later? Really, guys? Then again, this is a season that has the third part of a story cycle that started in 1991, so whatever…) This means he, too, can operate the spore drive, especially since 32nd-century technology has made the interface a bit less exclusive. They overload the warp core, dump it in Veridian, and then black-alert themselves away before it goes boom.
Our season ends on a hopeful note all around. Discovery is able to rescue the away team and Su’Kal, and now there’s a new source of dilithium! The Emerald Chain is shattered, as both Osyraa and her flagship are toast. (Aurellio, who discovers just how awful Osyraa really is, survives, and joins the crew in the end.) Both Trill and Ni’Var are in talks to rejoin the Federation. Discovery is tasked with using the spore drive to bop back and forth between the nebula and various locations to provide them with dilithium.
The closing scene has some nice cameos, including Karen Robinson’s Leader Pav of Trill, Tara Rosling’s Ni’Var President T’Rina, and Adil Hussin’s Lieutenant Sahil (who I really wish had played a bigger role in this season).
And then we have the problematic part of the ending: Saru takes Su’Kal back to Kaminar to help him regain the life he’s lost and familiarize him with the home he’s only been taught about. Vance then gives Burnham command of Discovery, complete with promotion to captain.
While this keeps Discovery’s tradition of having a new captain every year, I’m not entirely happy about Saru being pushed aside like this. Saru is Discovery’s best character, and while there’s no news one way or the other about whether or not Jones will be back, even if Saru does come back, what happens to him? A ship can’t have two captains, and Burnham is now firmly ensconced in the center seat. Mind you, it all makes sense in-story, as Saru has a bond with Su’Kal, and the 125-year-old child will need significant guidance. (Plus he’s still kinda dangerous…) Still, I don’t particularly want to lose this great character, nor see him lose the captaincy he deserves.
Having said that, it does bring Burnham’s journey to its logical next step, as she finally attains the command that Captain Georgiou of the Shenzhou was grooming her for before the Battle of the Binary Stars.
The story possibilities for season four are endless, as Discovery helps put the Federation back together and brings hope to the galaxy. Plus, of course, without Osyraa around, there are a lot of criminal elements that will try to fill the power vacuum. There’s the determination to find a way to have Gray be corporeal again. There’s the hints Book dropped about his mentor after whom he’s named himself. And Stamets and Burnham’s friendship has been sundered and will need to be repaired (especially with her as captain now). Real curious to see what happens next.
Keith R.A. DeCandido wishes everyone the happiest of new years, and urges everyone to look for the third-season overview next week.
Hey Keith, you forgot to call Adira “they.”
So the Dilithium Scream was literally a scream, with sonic animated waves and everything. Maybe that also explains the nursery/child’s song everybody kept hearing a while back that the show completely forgot about.
Maybe I nodded off for a second, but I don’t think I actually saw Ni’Var’s ships. They also kept referring to Voyager doing things and I didn’t notice it either. The HQ ships were nicely lined up when Discovery returned from the nebula, but it’s too bad the VFX obscured so much of them in deep blue shadows. They have some cool designs, why not some beauty shots or fly-bys?
Overall, I was pretty pleased with it. It solves the problem of having the main character not be the captain, had a solid technobable reason for the Burn, and ended on a hopeful note. I think Saru will be back on Discovery as the Federation ambassador to the planets they visit while trying to rebuild. That solves the problem of two captains and retains the excellent character. Looking forward to season 4!
@1: Updated, thanks!
Sunspear: We saw the Ni’Var ships briefly when Discovery left the shield, but that was about it.
Jason: I like the idea of Saru as an ambassador……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I knew Burnham would end up as captain eventually God help Discovery!
I’ll admit, I clapped when Book threw that guy off the turbolift and into the impossibly large lift system that looks like a Remnant Vault from Mass Effect Andromeda. I also clapped when Michael killed Ossyra.
I think my only real complaints are the grey drab uniforms look terrible on the Discovery crew, and they need to show us more starships.
What is it with Kurtzman trek referencing the Mass Effect games anyways? First in Picard, now Discovery. Someone on staff must love the Mass Effect series, and I am not complaining about it at all.
It’s funny- previously I had preferred the Discovery stuff over the Sukal holodeck, but in this episode it was the opposite. The quote by the great bird of the galaxy himself at the end really hammered home the point of the season (although I’ll be fascinated to know if it was always intended to be there or was added later to shut up Trek fans about Burnham being emotional). The message of facing your fears and connecting has flowed through all of the series, be it Kirk and Azetburs renewed faith at Khitomer, Picard and Dathon at el-Adrel, or this is as our valiant recapper reminds us, a very Trek story
On the other hand I was a bit put off by some of the action on board Discovery. Where exactly on the ship is the giant turbo lift chasm? For that matter why does the turbolift that can apparently twist, turn and do backflips have a back door? And why does the data core that was clearly inspired by HAL9000 from 2001 seem to be disconnected from everything? Also how exactly does Ossyra have encyclopedic knowledge of the interior of discovery and of the Starbase bubble? She didn’t figure out where the shield emitters were, she knew already She seemed to know where Burnham was going at the end, but not that the crew would go to the nacelle or that Burnham would use the quarantine field (how did she get out btw?). For that matter why did she just leave the bridge crew in her evil air escaping death trap? Why not turn off her transport jammer for ten seconds and beam them to the bridge or into space? This reminds me of TNG’s Descent Part 1 where characters have to act in a very inconsistent manner for the plot to play out.
All of that aside, I did like the episode, really appreciated the coda, and like the huge amount of possibilities for next season as we can catch up with a universe that’s entirely new to us. I hope that the two Captains thing is addressed next season, appreciate that Stamets is still out out at Burnham, and that we at least brought up most of the plot threads from earlier. O
I liked the stuff in the holodeck on the dilithium planet, but big action-fighty climaxes rarely do much for me, and I can’t get past the insane turbolift hammerspace that is bigger than the entire ship. Before, it was just a couple of brief glimpses I could easily ignore as just an overly indulgent stylistic embellishment, but here it became diegetic, an integral part of the action sequence. And it’s doubly ridiculous when, within the same sequence, there are good close looks at the ship cutaway on the turbolift wall screen showing the lift shafts as actual ordinary shafts, sometimes in the same shot as the yawning void outside. It’s inexplicable why they do something this nonsensical, something that so badly sabotages the credibility of the universe.
Also, the concept that the Sphere data survived in the ship and made it sentient was totally squandered. The only payoff we get is that it takes over a few cute robot mascots? That’s it? They don’t even play that much of a role in the final battle. They’re just there. It should’ve been more. The Sphere data is an immense collection of knowledge from all over the galaxy. The Sphere intelligence should’ve played a role in solving the Burn mystery or preventing a repetition.
Still, at least there was a good character story at the core, with Saru and Su’Kal, and the latter coming to terms with his tragedy. That made up for the parts where it fell short. As for Saru, here’s a thought: As the restored Federation grows, it re-establishes starbases, and Saru is made a commodore and put in command of the starbase that serves as Discovery‘s command base, so he fills the role that Vance filled this season. Still, I would’ve rather had him remain as captain.
As for Gray, couldn’t they have just whipped up a mobile emitter to store his hologram in? Well, they would’ve had to do it using the Kelpien ship’s failing holosystems, so probably not a viable idea. (I still say they could quick-clone a new body for Gray and perform a zhian’tara to download his mind into it.)
By the way, I was thrilled to hear the computer refer to the gormagander as a cosmozoan. While that word for a spacegoing organism existed previously, I was the one who introduced it to the Star Trek universe in Titan: Orion’s Hounds, and other novelists picked it up going forward. I presume it was Kirsten Beyer who was responsible for inserting it here, and I’m grateful to her. (It’s the second time a bit of my novel terminology has been used in DSC; there was an earlier reference to a “first contact specialist,” which is a variant on the “contact specialist” job title I coined to describe Deanna Troi’s responsibilities on the Titan and T’Ryssa Chen’s on the Enterprise-E.)
I really enjoyed the episode as I watched it. The action stuff, while not innovative was compelling and moved fast enough to keep the pacing steady. I was impressed how well the moving back and forth worked in this episode between the nebula and the Discovery-side action.
The Nebula stuff was by far the best part of the episode, and maybe even the best work Discovery has done. I cannot say enough good about Jones and Irwin. I found myself crying multiple times during the nebula set pieces. Just totally overwhelmed by emotion. The scene where Sukal turns to see the others (especially Saru) as how they really are just wrecked me. That split-second realization before the moment when I knew what he was about to see. Just amazing.
Doug Jones is basically confirmed as already shooting Season 4 (with the rest of the cast), so I am interested in what his role will be? Captain of a secondary ship? Something on Kaminar or at Fed HQ? Will Vance be back? Book was supposed to be a one-season character, but maybe not? (And what about Queen Grudge!)
My only real criticism is that the Discovery crew nacelle trip dragged a little. All the walking around running out of oxygen. It killed the momentum ever so slightly, but I was thrilled that no one got sacrificed.
Two notes on the final scenes: I LOVE the new uniforms. Very sleek. Very future. Will take some getting used to though. Also, I thought “Let’s Fly” was a terrific catchphrase. During her slight pause (searching for what to say), I wondered what she would use. It just came so naturally, and Martin-Green delivered it flawlessly. A great moment for Burnham and the crew.
@10/WTBA: If Saru does get a ship, maybe it can be the Shenzhou-F or something.
The turbolift scene showed that Discovery is bigger on the inside!
Next season I’d love to see some time spent on Kaminar. We could see Saru reconnecting to his people and helping Su’Kal. Those scenes/episodes could be interspersed with what they are doing on Discovery.
Now that Book is on the ship we also have an alternate spore drive navigator. I wonder if they will reach out to his planet to train more people to run that technology. That could be useful as they learnto build more spore drives.
If book can communicate with the spores, does that mean other telepathic races like the Betazoids could too?
@13/hanakogal: Aurellio said that Book’s species’s particular kind of empathy is specifically attuned to animals (which somehow includes fungal spores), so I don’t know if common-or-garden telepathy would work.
@10 Agreed. A consistent irritation of mine was the uniforms. I’ve hated them since season 1 and it only got worse when we saw the Enterprise uniforms in season 2. The new ones are a vast improvement!
@10, 15; I must be in the minority that actually liked the Disco uniforms. They seem much less formal and easier to actually work in than the new grays, or the Star Trek 6 until next gen Reds with the flap. It felt more like flightsuits to me and had a shoe versus a boot. Here’s a tquestion though: have any of the other series had a in-universe uniform change (versus out of universe tweaks like the 1 piece v 2 piece Next Gen unis) during their run? I know TOS did it in the movies but anything during the TV runs?
@16 DS9 changed uniforms to match the TNG movie uniforms between seasons 4&5. I don’t think they ever gave a reason though.
So…this episode made me cry a lot. Su’kal watching his mother die in front of him…yeah that would be pretty horrific. I appreciate that in this episode Su’kal took some initiative and showed that despite his contained development he is an adult and wants to know the actual truth. But that moment when he hears Saru’s voice, turns around and sees Saru as a Kelpien for the first time. That was beautiful.
Gray showing up was fantastic, it was a deeply beautiful moment, especially with Hugh immediately shifting into Dad mode and accepting their other child. Also, Vulcan is a good look for him.
I am a little sad that Tilly’s counterattack was nullified so easily. Normally taking Engineering is the simplest way to retake the ship, but she was aiming for the bridge and was cut off. But we can simply say that Burnham’s plan worked because she was actually the more experienced fully trained officer.
I was also deeply confused by the interior configuration of the ship. I know there’s a lot of space in that Delta Stardrive Section, but does this thing have compactified subspace manifolds or what? Like that one ship from the future on Enterprise? Kal Dano’s ship for my STO fans. The shut down of life support was also well handled because Osyraa vented the atmosphere to make the air go faster.
The blow the nacelle magnet is very weird, especially since there seemed to be streamers connecting the nacelle to the pylon, shouldn’t the nacelle should’ve been elsewhere. That’s why I wouldn’t have a disconnected nacelle. I was also scared we were about to see the last of Owo, though her backstory of freediving was dope. Owo is a bit of a superhero. But why wasn’t she immediately able to breath more easily when she entered the nacelle? I would figure that area would’ve still had air with the force field up.
Also, that undulating warp core explosion was weird. It’s one blast. There’s not going to be a secondary explosion unless it’s the Veridian’s core going, and that’s not what was shown. And what was with that core ejection anyway? Maglev rails not working right? Why was it bouncing around in there?
Booker for the save. And I was thinking that Kwejiani people would suddenly become highly desired as spore network pilots. What is it in Warhammer 40K Psykers?
I’m not really surprised with Osyraa as even a smart thug, is still a thug. They’re a thug because they’ll always resort to thuggery to get what they want. Osyraa can’t get what she wants, then she’ll use whatever despicable means she has available to get what she wants. What I don’t understand is how the hell her pesticides is supposed to get into shuttlebays, intakes, and airlocks? The type of things that anyone sane would have sealed and secured in a battle.
I’m disappointed that the Ni’var fleet wasn’t more critical for the save, and that we didn’t get to see them up close. At this point I’m not surprised though, Discovery appears to be deathly allergic to proper ship beauty shots. And from what I saw, the Ni’var ships look kind of like the Disco Klingon Birds of Prey with a glowing singularity core in the middle.
I can’t overstate how satisfying it was for Book to give that scumbag Zareh the ole, “SHE’S!! A! QUEEEEEEN!!!” sparta kick into Discovery’s unexplainable chasm. Ship architecture aside, that was perfect.
Osyraa’s death….well, I liked the fight between the ladies, Burnham using the pulsewave shot setting to launch Osyraa’s goon at her was (chef kiss) choice. As was Osyraa repeatedly targeting Burnham’s bad leg. The attempted programmable matter stage fatality made no sense. Why would Starfleet have something like that in the computer core, why wouldn’t it have safeties to prevent it killing anyone? Though It could be then inferred that it did, since aside from getting some down her throat, Burnham was fine. Osyraa seems to not understand Starfleet design philosophy. I do like that in her rush to push Michael in, she neglected to maintain control of her weapon.
I only have two gripes about this ultimately. First and foremost, “Fly” is what my Captain says in my Star Trek writings. THAT’S GIMMICK INFRINGEMENT! Second….I can’t possibly overstate how much I despise grey as a primary color in uniforms, especially Starfleet uniforms. The blue was meant to connect with the Enterprise era flightsuit look, I get that. But going grey in the future? It was bad when the Time Cop Starfleet officers were wearing them and it’s bad now. If it’s a secondary color for enlisted or cadets, fine I can roll with it. But as the primary color? Yuck.
But that ending. Vict’ry. The return of Sahil. Trill rejoining the Federation and Vulcan about to. I was thinking Saru was going to go home, Su’kal is kind of the son he’s never had. He gave the opportunity to raise a Kelpien son when he chose to go to the stars. It’s a lot like Nhan’s decision actually. Hopefully both will be back. Burnham becoming Captain seems like it was inevitable. The story thus far has of course been about her fall and return to grace. She’s also by far the most proactive and disobedient character. Putting her in charge makes perfect sense. I’m hoping next season won’t require a season long myth arc, but instead will focus on smaller stories as we piece the Federation back together. And of course the TOS theme is almost always welcome. I am surprised they went to warp instead of jumping though. Oh well.
@14/ChristopherLBennett
And Aurellio is demonstrably wrong in that. The first demonstration of Book’s abilities was stimulating a plant to grow in order to retrieve some alien Aloe for Burnham’s burn. Kwejiani empathy seems to interact with any life form.
@19/Mr. D: Well, maybe I misremembered what Aurellio said, but I think the point was that Book’s ability is about coming into sync with another life form, communing and becoming one with it, not just talking to it. Whatever the details, the impression I got is that it’s meant to be his species’ own special variety of empathy, not that it’s something any generic telepath could do.
I haven’t been able to watch very much of season three of Discovery, but I do have some questions. What happened to Commander Nhan? Or Linus the Saurian? Has anything been set up for getting Georgiou back to the right time and/or universe for Michelle Yeoh’ s spin-off series about Section 31? And last but not least, who had the bright idea of using the mirror universe AGAIN? It’s being overused. It’s getting ridiculous!
@21/garyish: Nhan took on another mission and left the series. Linus is still around in the background. Georgiou had a whole 2-parter to remove her from the show for her spinoff. And it was heavily Mirror Universe-oriented, which doesn’t answer your last question but certainly underlines it.
Incidentally, why is it only now that the Discovery crew gets the current Starfleet uniforms? They’ve been part of future Starfleet for half a season now. That change should logically have happened at the same time the ship got its refit.
I loved the revelation that Book could use the spore drive. They set up his being an empath way back in the beginning, but this was still an unexpected development. What a cool surprise!
I loved Saru’s gently guiding Su’kal towards courage. I love Saru SO much, and I think I could face anything with him gently guiding me towards courage. :-)
I wonder if Discovery will have delivered all the dilithium during the season hiatus, or if that delivery will be the premise for Season 4. Delivering dilithium to all the former Federation planets could be a great way of getting the ship to a different planet every week, while still having a thematic connection.
I hate the new uniforms. Gray? Seriously? That’s so ugly and boring. Admittedly, I grew up on TOS’s bright primary colors :-), but I thought Discovery’s existing uniforms were snazzy. I guess they had to change them, since it’s a new century and all, but geeze, GRAY?
I’m loving Wilson Cruz as Culber. He has such sweetness and warmth, with a core of strength underneath. I hope we see a LOT more of Culber next season!
It looks like we get to keep Book! I was afraid they might kill him off, but no, he’s alive. Ajala is a good actor, and he has great chemistry with Martin-Green, so I’m glad we get to keep him.
Owo’s smile lights up the screen! Do anything you can to make that lady smile.
Michelle Paradise was a great addition to the team. The writing was much better this year, and I like what she’s doing. There are things I dislike and things I wish were done better, but compared to Seasons 1 and 2, I think she’s been very much a positive influence.
It did this old Trekkie’s heart good to hear the TOS music at the end! I admit that I teared up.
I’m glad that Doug Jones is filming Season 4, because I wouldn’t want to be without Saru! He’s by far my favorite character, and I just love what Doug Jones does with him. I guess maybe he’ll be first officer once he’s got Su’kal settled? Whatever they do with him, I hope he has a MAJOR role and isn’t relegated to the status of minor character, now that Burnham is captain.
The Emerald Chain weapons evidently have settings just like phasers, since everybody in this ep merely fell down, whereas last episode, Osyraa disintegrated Ryn. I’d expect 32cen rayguns to shoot around corners, or track people through bulkheads — but concession to action tropes, I guess.
Even a single deck of Discovery is huge, and the amount of oxygen should last a handful of people for hours — actually, what kills you is the exhaled CO2, which would take a similarly long time to build to lethal concentrations. But worse, “cut off their air” is an implausible threat on a fully-equipped spaceship — there should be emergency supplies stowed everywhere. Did Osyraa beam away all of it, except for a few overlooked breath masks? If Burnham could find a life-bubble escape harness for Stamets (which would necessarily have some kind of environmental control), why not adapt some of those? Given the compact nature of omnibadges and p-matter holsters, how is “breather” not a standard part of a uniform?
That cavernous space could exist because TARDIS-interiors seem to be 32cen tech (judging by the Tikhov-M seed ship), and Discovery was thoroughly refitted, but why is it a thing? Is it all for future expansion? If you can create that much spare cubic, why also have cramped Jefferies tubes?
The Great Glass Elevator flying turbocabs don’t seem to be consistent, even within their scenes. Sometimes they fly through a series of floating square rings made from just-in-time p-matter, but not always. And if most of Osyraa’s Regulators are chasing Burnham and Book, who’s riding around in the other turbocabs? ISTM they’re zipping around to provide a sense of action to the background, just like DOTs in corridors and workbees in Discovery’s shuttlebay.
So, we finally see Discovery’s warp core-and-environs, a pure-CGI dim cavern with no sense of scale — we’d normally call that place Main Engineering, but if it’s not a place for human crew, can we really? The core slides (badly) “down” an unnecessarily long shaft, and emerges from a point ventral to the shuttlebay — which I’d normally call geometrically implausible, but <throws up hands in surrender>.
I wonder if any of this was a concession to filming during the pandemic? I.e., “we intended to build another set, but couldn’t allocate the carpenters” or “it was meant to be a virtual set for actors, but our VFX artists couldn’t handle that while working from home.”
Turbolifts flying around in a space large enough for Discovery herself to maneuver in really bothered me… and I’m appalled at the use of special effects budget for a turbolift chase when there was a space battle raging outside.
Otherwise, a decent finale for a decent season.
I was immensely disappointed to see Saru shunted off to the side (at least with regards to captaincy of the Discovery). While I don’t really have a problem with Burnham as the captain per se, the fact that we lose Saru in the process is devastating.
The action plot was meh, at best, but it worked to give Osyraa a send-off, so at least she’s not around anymore. I never really liked her as an antagonist — she was most interesting when she was trying to stop being one, but that went nowhere, so saying goodbye to her is fine with me.
I didn’t really notice the incongruity with the size of the turbolift shafts while watching the episode, but now that it’s been pointed out… it’s just bizarre.
@25/philip_thorne: The visual of some kind of programmable-matter frames assembling ahead of the turbolift to create its path imply a 32nd-century refit of the turbolift system, but that doesn’t make sense. I mean, they can beam anywhere in an instant with their combadges. That renders turbolifts obsolete except as an emergency backup. So there’d be no need to refit them.
This show once again forces me to revert to the Doylist interpretation that Gene Roddenberry sometimes advocated to explain inconsistencies: What we’re seeing are not the “actual” events, but a dramatized depiction of them, subject to artistic license and error.
It was fascinating to see the inside of a TARDIS. I just wish it hadn’t been in Star Trek.
Though I guess this also explains how the entire non-bridge crew could be evacuated aboard a single shuttle. And how Owo had to walk/climb some distance to get to the nacelle, and then was dragged back to where the rest of them were by the droid in the split-second before the explosion.
I thought the episode was great!
I too was still puzzled by the turbolift situation but it’s not the first time we’ve seen this, we also saw on the Short Trek on the Pike Enterprise when Spock and Number One were trapped in one (still didn’t make sense then either but at least makes this current episode consistent). Though newer Trek (from the ’09 movie forward) has played a bit fast and loose with the more “mechanical/industrial” areas of the ships (brewery engineering anyone?) so I can’t say I’m too surprised.
I wonder how the Federation is going to be approaching the pre-warp civilizations that Ossyra intervened in. Are they going to be welcomed into the the fold (i.e. Kwe’jan) or are they going to go back to our normal understanding of the Prime Directive where it’s hands off?
The only thing that I think might help the potential inconsistency regarding the oxygen issue the crew was having was that Vance stated during their scan of Discovery that air was slowly leaking out so Ossyra didn’t just turn off life support but open a small hole for air to start venting out.
Finally, on the planet, I wonder if Suk’al’s mother knew he had the potential to do the type of harm like the burn as she apparently didn’t want him to know of her dying or even going to the bridge/command center of the ship with her saying not to touch the console to keep the holo-environment active. Did she (or others in the crew before they perished) have to deal with additional damage to the ship due to any normal times of sadness/crying that a baby or small child would go through that they had to try to pacify him as much as possible?
Looking forward to season four!
@30/navibc31: “it’s not the first time we’ve seen this, we also saw on the Short Trek on the Pike Enterprise when Spock and Number One were trapped in one (still didn’t make sense then either but at least makes this current episode consistent).”
Like I said, the difference is that those prior instances (that was the second, and the season 2 DSC premiere was the first) could be easily ignored since they were just brief glimpses in the background with no effect on the story or acknowledgment by the characters. This time it was integral to the action sequence and heavily featured, making it far harder to shrug off.
This scene was hysterically funny, and took me completely out of the episode. Star Trek has done several “really moronically stupid” things before, ranging from Spock’s Brain to Federation inter-system beaming to magic blood to the brewery engine room to Warp 10 newt-regression, but this was comfortably up there. There were shots of the turboshaft that indicated this space was larger than Discovery itself (certainly longer and taller) and presumably could only exist in subspace. It’s one of those scenes where you can only assume the writers were drunk, especially when characters were pointing at schematics of the turboshaft on the schematics and it’s just a normal thin tube, before cutting to this vast, eerie otherspace. I’m almost (not quite) ready to forgive JJ for his crimes against rationality after that display.
It was annoying because the episode had some other good moments – not Burnham’s massively unearned promotion of course – and solid action scenes, but overall events proceeded only because the writers made them extremely contrived.
Overall Season 3 of Discovery was the best so far, with some solid episodes, character beats and callbacks to the older series, but it also continued the tradition of on-the-nose dialogue; people bursting into tears every five minutes, often for no discernible reason (remember on older series when someone like Sisko would cry and the viewer would be shocked because he had been so stoic for dozens of episodes in a row and so you knew stuff was really serious?); messy and incoherent CGI that doesn’t tell the viewer WTF is going on; randomly vanishing crewmembers (where did Lt. Nilsson go?); randomly appearing crewmembers (who the hell is Lt. Ina and where did she come from?); random crewmembers leaving the ship and everyone acting sad despite them being given zero development and viewers asking who that person was (hi, Commander Nhan); more trips to the Mirror Universe, the most hated aspect of Season 1; a massive overreliance on magic technobabble solutions; and overly merciful bad guys who’ll murder extras without a qualm but have no problem sparing major characters even after they cause them multiple problems.
Also, can someone stop Sonequa Martin-Green whispering half her lines for no reason? I don’t remember her doing this in previous seasons but this year it became her thing and I had to keep cranking up the volume to hear what she was saying and then dropping it again because everyone else was speaking perfectly normally. Easily the most inexplicable and annoying character tic since Littlefinger started doing a Batman voice in Season 3 of Game of Thrones.
Discovery remains watchable (largely down to Doug Jones and Anthony Rapp, but Blu del Barrio did some good work as well this year), but I’ve had to downgrade it to the level of Doctor Who: a live-action cartoon with nonsensical plotting and a cut to massive explosions whenever the writer threatens to have a scene with actual character development in it. And that’s fun, although possibly a disservice to Lower Decks, which is an actual cartoon but much better-written, better-characterised and more charming than Discovery. But it is massively failing to achieve its potential, not with both The Mandalorian (which is also doing SF action-adventure) and The Expanse (which is doing adult, intelligent SF politicking and intrigue) dealing in the same space but achieving their goals far better. Discovery remains an incoherent mess.
@32/Werthead: “It’s one of those scenes where you can only assume the writers were drunk”
Writers don’t design visual effects shots. We don’t know how much of this sequence was specified in the script; for all we know, it just said “Burnham and Zareh fight in the turbolift” and all the action beats were developed by the director, stunt coordinator, and VFX supervisor. On the other hand, showrunner Paradise and big boss Kurtzman would have had to sign off on the sequence, at least.
“I’m almost (not quite) ready to forgive JJ for his crimes against rationality after that display.”
Why bring up J.J. Abrams? He has no involvement whatsoever in Discovery or any aspect of Star Trek beyond the three Kelvin-timeline movies. Did you mean Alex Kurtzman?
@33: The showrunners obviously had to sign off on it, hopefully knowing full well it was idiotic.
The previous most idiotic things I’d seen in Trek were the result of JJ Abrams, and this was probably even more stupid, hence the comparison.
As a wise man once said “The empath can stay, but the turbolifts in hammerspace have got to go.” … Okay, I’m just swiping the joke from Generations, deal w/it :D
Seriously though. Great fights in those scenes but the setting is ludicrous. You have instatransporters (which are cool); do you really even need turbolifts?
Further nitpick and/or thing I missed: I thought they blew a nacelle off of the ship to knock them out of warp. Did those repair droids duct tape it back on before they got to Federation HQ?
That said, this was a delightful thrill ride start to finish. Am I hype about the gray uniforms? Nope. They look like the TMP uniforms got mixed up in the uniform replicator with TOS dress uniforms. Saru will be missed on board but I love the idea floated above of him coming back as an Federation outreach ambassador.
And Book finally closing the bo- er, I mean door on the Hell On Wheels incursions into Discovery? How good was that? Do not fuck with a man’s cat. Yippie-ki-yay. On a different page (I’m so witty.), Book’s empath abilities did still feel somewhat like an unfired Chekhov’s gun, finally resolved in this episode. I wonder; was that the writers’ plan all along?
Oh, and while I’m gushing, Ian Alexander/Grey REALLY rocks those Vulcan ears.
@34/Werthead: “The previous most idiotic things I’d seen in Trek were the result of JJ Abrams, and this was probably even more stupid, hence the comparison.”
There have been idiotic things in Star Trek since long before Abrams came along.
https://www.tor.com/2020/05/07/star-trek-voyager-rewatch-threshold/
https://www.tor.com/2021/01/04/star-trek-voyager-rewatch-demon/
@35/Jason: “I thought they blew a nacelle off of the ship to knock them out of warp.”
Judging from the FX shot, they didn’t blow it off so much as blow it askew. I suppose maybe this is a partial answer to my question of why the hell they need detached nacelles. We saw the nacelle knocked out of position, enough to break the warp field, and the energy field connecting it to the pylon glowed and twisted and stretched like taffy, but it held onto the nacelle.
I just thought about something that genuinely grinded my gears. The concept that Su’kal caused the Burn is fine enough, but the idea that Dilithium has a subspace component actually gets on my nerves because of how much it breaks. We know how warp drive works. It’s very simple. Dilithium regulates the collision of Matter and Anti Matter, tunes it into usable warp plasma and uses it to energize the warp coils to produce a warp field. It’s been like that for decades. Dilithium having a subspace component is deeply unnecessary and contributes to the misconception that the warp core does the warping.
@37/Mr. D: I’m choosing not to take the “subspace component” line too literally. After all, the Burn didn’t blow up all dilithium, only the crystals that were in use in active warp cores. So I take it more as some sort of resonance with subspace signals, which is amplified when incorporated into a warp core with subspace driver coils and such.
Although if you do take the line literally, it’s reminiscent of the joke idea from John M. Ford’s comedy Trek novel How Much for Just the Planet? that dilithium has a 4th-dimensional component, extent in time as well as space, so that in order to break a crystal, you have to hit it not just in a specific place, but “last month, now, and a week from Tuesday, so to speak.” (Which, unfortunately, Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens took seriously and incorporated into a couple of their Trek novels and one comic story.)
I’d like to see the results of Burnham’s Kobayashi Maru test as she apparently also does not believe in no-win scenarios.
I would say that mutinying in an attempt to prevent war and volunteering to go alone 1,000 years into the future to prevent the destruction of all life in the galaxy would also meet the definition of a no-win scenario, and she did those willingly.
Or I may need a better understanding of what qualifies as a no-win scenario.
@39/qbe_64: I interpret “no-win scenario,” at least as defined in the Kobayashi Maru context, to mean a scenario where it is impossible to achieve your goals by any means, rather than one where it’s impossible to avoid sacrificing something. Going into the future was a win, because it prevented Control from destroying life in the galaxy. It required a sacrifice, but it was still a decisive victory over the opponent. Plus it led to further victories, in that Burnham gained a boyfriend (and his cat) and helped save the Federation yet again. So I’d hardly call that no-win.
As for the mutiny, I don’t think she would’ve tried it if she didn’t believe it could succeed.
@40
I would agree that self-sacrifice is a reasonable price to pay for an achievement of a goal that is worth the sacrifice. I would even agree that it may constitute a win of the scenario, but I interpret the “KM no-win scenario” as relating to one’s personal standing at the end of said situation.
If you ejected your crew into escape pods, contacted the Maru to adjust their deflector to ride a shockwave, flew your ship into the Klingon cruisers to weaken/take out their shields and then detonated your warp core sacrificing yourself to destroy the Klingon ships and letting the maru ride the shockwave back into federation space. That would effectively pass the test. While unlikely to work, even if it did I think it would still constitute a failure of the test (I can’t imagine that I’ve come up with a plan that no cadet in the history of starfleet hasn’t tried, and if Kirk is the only one to pass that would suggest that it also ended in failure).
So I would say what Burnham was willing to do at the time, regardless of how future events played out, would be the relevant factor as to her belief in no-win scenarios.
Decommissioned and court marshalled for mutiny would hardly qualify as a win for her even if war was prevented.
Alone and in the future with everyone she knew 1,000 years dead, would not qualify as a win.
Her past decisions would seem to illustrate that she does indeed believe in no-win scenarios and is willing to place herself in them if she believes the cost is worth the result.
I think its a misrepresentation of the character by the writers no good reason.
At best it’s a poorly thought out callback/easter egg.
At worst its a deliberate attempt to parallel Burnham to Kirk, which….don’t.
@ALL: I must have blinked at the wrong time . . . when were we back in the Mirror Universe?
@41/qbe_64:”I interpret the “KM no-win scenario” as relating to one’s personal standing at the end of said situation.”
That doesn’t make any sense. It’s a command training simulation, putting a cadet in the situation of being a starship captain. Command is not about your own selfish interest or survival, it’s about your responsibility for the safety of your crew and the Federation’s citizens. Any starship captain would give their life to save their crew or to save civilians — and if necessary would sacrifice their crew to save civilians. Winning would have to mean saving others, regardless of the cost to yourself. Anyone who thought otherwise wouldn’t be in Starfleet to begin with. They’d never pass the entrance exam.
The whole point of the Kobayashi Maru simulation is that there is no way to save the freighter or your own crew, no matter how clever you are. If there were, it would defeat the purpose of assessing cadets’ reaction to utter failure. (Although Julia Ecklar’s novel The Kobayashi Maru had Sulu save his crew by declining to answer the distress signal at all.)
The turbolift systems are an inverse TARDIS: They’re bigger on the outside.
@38/ChristopherLBennett
I appreciate that. I’ll try not to, after all the doctor said it, not the engineer. And you’re right the Burn didn’t blow up any Dilithium, what it did was render them inert. I took that to mean the piezo electric effect that let’s them regulate M/A reactions thus making them just as prone to blowing up in contact with anti-matter as anything else. But a subspace wave being amplified by warp fields is actually a really great idea. The Burn didn’t uniformly affect all dilithium, maybe the difference is caused by interaction with active warp fields. Or maybe I’m just getting too deep into the nitty gritty.
As for the Kobayashi Maru, I thought the intention was always clear. A Starfleet Psychological Test that shows each Starfleet Command track Cadet how they deal with unavoidable overwhelming defeat. “How we deal with death, is at least as important as how we deal with life.” The whole point of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was that Kirk’s ego made him unable to believe in a no win scenario, and he had screwed death and defeat over so much he should’ve been in a Final Destination movie, but this time, the price for escaping with his life was the death of his best friend.
Or, as Thanos said, “In time, you will know what it’s like to lose. To feel so desperately that you’re right, and then fail, nonetheless. It’s terrifying, turns the legs to jelly. I ask you to what end? Dread it, run from it, Destiny still arrives.” No one has a one hundred percent win record. Everybody gets their ass kicked eventually. Starfleet not only wants to know what a cadet will do when faced with crushing defeat or an insurmountable problem, but also they want the cadet to know how they will react. Even if it’s just a simulation. How do you react when failure cannot be avoided? Which is why Kirk’s cheating the simulation while deserving of a reward for original thinking, was simultaneously showing Starfleet everything they needed to know about Cadet Kirk and also robbing Cadet Kirk of something he needed to know about himself. In a way Kirk failed the Kobayashi Maru test anyway, because he didn’t get the self reflection that the test would normally impart.
On the other hand seeing as how other Starfleet Officers in a variety of fictions have taken unorthodox methods and beaten the No Win Scenario, it could also be seen, that beating it is a sign of greatness in future officers. Possibly.
Starfleet seems to have lots of psychological pressure tests, to see where future Starfleet officers will break. Take Deanna Troi’s Commander evaluation test, where she had to of her own volition decide to order someone to their death.
Burnham’s journey to the future on the other hand falls more in the reasonable gamble territory. With time travel on the table, escaping Control basically boiled down to when do we go? Considering some of the stuff Starfleet officers have done, that was basically a simple win condition as long as they actually got to do it. The Red Angel suit seems a lot more reliable than the transporter on the Enterprise when you’re manually flying a ninety megaton fusion bomb into an antiproton matter converter with a bad attitude and a big appetite.
@45/Mr. D: “The whole point of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was that Kirk’s ego made him unable to believe in a no win scenario, and he had screwed death and defeat over so much he should’ve been in a Final Destination movie, but this time, the price for escaping with his life was the death of his best friend.”
Which makes no sense, given that this is a guy who lost the love of his life and his brother and sister-in-law in consecutive episodes, and lost his wife and unborn child not much more than a year later. Not to mention the dozens of crewmembers he lost under his command, including his best friend Gary Mitchell.
Just one of about a hundred things in TWOK that make no sense if you think about them…
“On the other hand seeing as how other Starfleet Officers in a variety of fictions have taken unorthodox methods and beaten the No Win Scenario, it could also be seen, that beating it is a sign of greatness in future officers. Possibly.”
I don’t know what fictions you’re referring to. If fanfiction authors are using that trope a lot, then they’re willfully missing the point of the exercise. It’s not meant to be a puzzle to solve. That’s what other simulations are for. It’s designed to guarantee failure no matter what you do. In one novel — I forget if it was the TWOK novelization or Ecklar’s The Kobayashi Maru — it was established that the program modifies the scenario to counteract anything a cadet tries and guarantee its failure, no matter how implausible the failure has to be. Because the point is to assess a command candidate’s reaction to failure, and you can’t do that if they don’t fail.
And of course, Kirk didn’t beat the scenario — not in any real sense. He reprogrammed it. Depending on which version you read, he changed it either to guarantee his victory or to make it a genuinely fair test that could be passed with sufficient cleverness.
Regarding Doug Jones/Saru going into the fourth season, I wonder if it’s possible that he asked for a slightly less prominent role, number of scenes per episode, due to what must be extremely grueling work getting made up to look like Saru and work long hours wearing it each and every day? Just a thought. (He makes what Michael Dorn had to deal with on TNG and DS9 look almost easy by comparison. And I know there were other full head prosthetic aliens but most of those weren’t featured in every episode, or were only in a scene or two (like Morn on DS9). I guess the Cardassian characters like Garak and Gul Dukat were probably the most difficult and time consuming jobs prior to Saru (and Linus, but, again, he’s only in a limited number of scenes, usually).
Yikes! This post really got away from me.
Summary:
Kirk is a narcissist because he thinks he IS the best.
Burnham’s a narcissist because she think she KNOWS best.
Kobayashi Maru actually isn’t that hard.
@43
I agree with you. So does Spock at the end of TWOK. Sacrificing yourself to complete the mission I would say qualifies as beating the “no-win” scenario. I’m saying Star Trek lore disagrees. If all you had to do was evacuate your ship and take it on a kamikaze mission to disable 3 Klingon ships to pass the Kobayashi Maru, then there wouldn’t only be one person in the history of Starfleet to pass it. That’s not an unwinnable scenario, that’s a Tuesday in Starfleet. Apparently in the book Kobayashi Maru (thank you Wikipedia), Chekov does just that. I’m unclear if the books says if he “passed” or not.
It’s a very simple solution to the problem, Starfleet can disavow your actions as having gone rogue to prevent the war from starting, and you’re conveniently dead so as not to be able to protest. They can’t add another ship showing up to stop the escape pods and shuttles from reaching Federation space, because again you’re “dead” simulation over.
So I suppose I shall rephrase my original point.
The term no-win scenario intentionally elicits fandom to think about Captain Kirk and his definition of the phrase. Every decision and action Kirk takes, Into Darkness aside, he expects to succeed fully with no lasting personal consequence. At no point that I can recall (maybe Generations?), does he take an action that will knowingly result in his death or a significant personal loss for the greater good. You can argue that letting Edith Keeler die cost him personally, but he sure seemed to get over it pretty quickly. This is Kirk and by proxy Star Trek’s definition of the term. Everything will work out for everybody but especially for me because I am the strongest, smartest and handsomest person in the galaxy. Just because he’s usually right doesn’t mean he’s not a narcissist.
Michael Burnham on the other hand, has continually demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice everything that she holds dear to do what she believes is necessary for the greater good.
The term no-win scenario clearly means very different things to the two of them. Trying to shove Burnham into the Kirk/Star Trek definition of the phrase does her a disservice. While she’s also a narcissist, at least her narcissism is based on her thinking she knows better as opposed to that she is better. And she’s willing to die for those beliefs.
@48/qbe_64: “At no point that I can recall (maybe Generations?), does he take an action that will knowingly result in his death or a significant personal loss for the greater good.”
Off the top of my head, I can think of two occasions where he asks a superior antagonist to punish him instead of his crew: Uhura in “The Gamesters of Triskelion” and Thompson and the security guard in “By Any Other Name”. In the latter episode, the antagonist even comments on this: “I think we’re somewhat alike, Captain. Each of us cares less for his own safety than for the lives of his command. We feel pain when others suffer for our mistakes. Your punishment shall be to watch them die.” Then there’s “Court Martial” where Finney threatens to crash the Enterprise, and he tells him “I logged the mistake, Ben. Blame me, not them.” In two of these cases, the antagonist declines the offer; in the first one, he takes him up on it, and Kirk survives. But he doesn’t know that when he makes the offer. Becoming a “practice target” certainly doesn’t sound survivable.
Or what about “Amok Time”? First Kirk decides that he’ll bring Spock to Vulcan even though it will cost his career (“I owe him my life a dozen times over. Isn’t that worth a career?”), then he gets himself into a situation where he has to either kill Spock or be killed by him. He refuses to kill Spock. How is that not a no-win scenario? Or, for that matter, “facing death”? And he doesn’t survive because he’s strong, or smart (or handsome). His life is saved by McCoy, and after that his career is saved by T’Pau. Ultimately he suffers no consequences, but that isn’t for lack of trying. It’s just the way TV was written back in the day.
I guess you could argue that saving one’s best friend or one’s ship isn’t sacrificing for “the greater good”, so what about not surrendering the ship to Khan in “Space Seed”? He doesn’t save himself here either, he’s saved from suffocation by McGivers. He’s almost executed in “Bread and Circuses” after refusing to help turn his crew into gladiators; in this case, he’s saved by Scotty and Merik. Although you could argue that this isn’t action but the refusal to take a (harmful) action, so I’m not sure if it qualifies either.
But perhaps it still shows that Kirk is actually pretty selfless. This isn’t unique to Kirk; it’s probably a job requirement for Starfleet command personnel. But it’s baffling that people come away thinking of him as a narcissist. I’ve always found that the remark about not believing in a no-win scenario was out of character for Kirk. It’s ironic that it has come to define his character for so many people.
“You can argue that letting Edith Keeler die cost him personally, but he sure seemed to get over it pretty quickly.”
Uh, we don’t know that. She’s never mentioned again because that’s how TV was written back in the day. So it’s open to interpretation. Perhaps he got over it pretty quickly. Or perhaps he keeps mourning her, and that’s why he never falls in love again during the rest of the TV show except when he’s amnesiac (“The Paradise Syndrome”) or drugged (“Elaan of Troyius”) or confronted with an android built to be “the perfect woman” (“Requiem for Methuselah”), although he seemed to have plenty of girlfriends prior to her.
“Apparently in the book Kobayashi Maru […], Chekov does just that. I’m unclear if the books says if he “passed” or not.”
The book says not: “You violated the Klingon neutral zone. You engaged three Klingon patrol vessels in combat while there was still the potential to retreat. You willfully destroyed a Federation starship […]. All to rescue a fuel carrier you cannot prove was indeed in distress at those coordinates!”
@47/David Young: I find it hard to believe that Jones would ask for less time in makeup, given that most of his screen career has been spent in elaborate prosthetic makeup of one sort or another.
@48/qbe_64: “Kirk is a narcissist because he thinks he IS the best.”
Good lord, that is an incredibly, staggeringly wrong assertion. Kirk was a good commander because he constantly doubted himself, because he didn’t assume he had all the answers and therefore stayed humble. He wrestled over his doubts, he relied on his advisors as a check on his judgment, and he never hesitated to admit his mistakes (it seemed he did in “Obsession,” but it turned out not to be a mistake after all). See the scene in “Balance of Terror” where he asks McCoy if he’s doing the right thing and McCoy tells him not to beat himself up so much, or the log entry in “The Immunity Syndrome” where he agonizes over the choice to send one of his best friends to their death.
All of this is spelled out in the TOS Writer’s Guide: “Kirk feels these responsibilities strongly and is fully capable of letting the worry and frustration lead him into error. He is also… inclined to push himself beyond human limits then condemn himself because he is not superhuman.” A narcissist would assume he was superhuman and would always blame others for his failures, because he’d be incapable of believing they were his own fault. Kirk was always keenly aware of his failures and determined to improve. “Yes, I’m a killer, but I will not kill… today.” He knew he had the worst of humanity within him and therefore had to strive very hard to be better than that. He never assumed he would automatically be great. That’s an incredibly fundamental misreading of his character.
I’m constantly staggered by how completely disconnected the popular myth of Kirk’s character is from the actual man. I think a lot of people project their perception of William Shatner’s egotism onto the character he played.
“I’m saying Star Trek lore disagrees. If all you had to do was evacuate your ship and take it on a kamikaze mission to disable 3 Klingon ships to pass the Kobayashi Maru, then there wouldn’t only be one person in the history of Starfleet to pass it.”
That statement is based on an erroneous premise — that it is possible to “pass” the KM in the first place. That, as I said, is a fundamental misunderstanding of its nature and purpose. It’s not about whether you save the blasted freighter. It’s not even remotely about that. That’s a smokescreen for the real purpose of the test. It’s not a strategy game but a psychological assessment. The real purpose of the KM is to assess how a command candidate will react to facing certain, inescapable death and the death of their crew. Starfleet life is dangerous. To be a captain, you have to be realistic about the possibility that you and your crew will die in action — that no matter how clever and resourceful you are, you could still lose everything due to factors beyond your control. The KM is about confronting you with that hard truth and assessing how you react to it, whether you can be realistic about the risk rather than overconfidently assuming you can cope with everything and therefore being too reckless to keep your crew safe.
Pretending the KM is just one more strategic simulation that can be “solved” is just avoiding that harsh truth that you and your crew could die out there, and that avoidance is in itself a failure of the test. Hell, that was the whole point in TWOK — that by cheating on the KM, Kirk never really confronted the reality of death that the test was meant to drive home. (Which I still say requires ignoring all the death he faced in TOS, but that was the narrative and thematic point of the KM in the movie.)
@ChristopherLBennett
You’re not wrong. TOS Kirk and Film Kirk actually have slightly divergent personalities. “Stop, competing with me Decker”. In TMP it makes some sense, as it seems that Kirk’s success went to his head a little and he also was suffering from withdrawals from his well diagnosed Enterprise addiction. Star Trek II is built on the idea that Kirk is too clever by half and now it’s going to catch up to him, when really the Khan situation is based on Starfleet’s, now well documented. bad habit of not checking back in on things after they resolve them.
But Chang’s argument of Kirk being a career minded opportunist really does only apply to the film era Kirk, and even the only in The Motion Picture. Wrath of Khan was a ghost from his past, The Search for Spock was rescuing his best friends, The Voyage Home was saving the world again then getting punished for what happened in the Search for Spock, by putting him back to square one, and The Final Frontier was….more Shatners ego than Kirk’s. I’m still rather fond of it though. TOS Kirk still carries a lot of “The Cage” Pike. Always mindful of the weight of 400 lives on his back. Cowboy Kirk was always a myth. But he does have a bit of an ego, but that’s because he’s very successful. He’s in no way a narcissist though, that’s Klingon propaganda.
The thing about Kelvin Timeline Kirk is they took the misconception and made it the bold text. Prime Timeline Kirk was noted for being a bookworm with a stick up his ass, not unlike TNG Season 1 Picard. A humorless by the book straight arrow. Now, of course Kelvin Jim Kirk is a different person being raised without the stability of having his father in his life, but from the Doylist perspective they basically rewrote Kirk as the flanderized version rather than the actual one.
On the Kobayashi Maru, the novel Sarek featured Peter Kirk using sociological knowledge to win by challenging the Klingon captain to a ritual duel, a trial by champion where no other battle can take place, and having his crew rescue the Kobayashi Maru and get away while he stayed behind. I can’t place the origin of it, but I heard of one Starfleet officer whose response was to not try to save the KM because it was obviously a trap. All I remember is it was a Vulcan. Maybe I’m thinking of Mackenzie Calhoun, who destroyed the Kobayashi Maru, arguing that it was obviously bait and the crew was likely dead.
The fact that Kirk cheated became a guide for creators. The idea of beating the no win scenario is inherently human.
@51/Mr. D: “The thing about Kelvin Timeline Kirk is they took the misconception and made it the bold text… from the Doylist perspective they basically rewrote Kirk as the flanderized version rather than the actual one.”
True, but with the proviso that this was a younger Kirk at the start of his career, and his intended arc was one in which he would outgrow that youthful brashness, learn humility through hard experience, and grow into the Kirk we knew by the end of the trilogy. And though the change in production team and the time jump between STID and STB means we don’t get to see most of that process, the Kirk of STB essentially is the Kirk we know from TOS, just two years younger than his Prime counterpart in “Where No Man.”
It’s actually a rather clever plan — start with the myth of Kirk and evolve him out of it into the real deal.
“The fact that Kirk cheated became a guide for creators. The idea of beating the no win scenario is inherently human.”
Which is still missing the point. It’s not meant to be beatable. It’s meant to face a cadet with inescapable failure and see how they cope with it. If there is a way to game out the scenario, then it fails to achieve its actual intent and is reduced to just another mission simulation like a thousand others. Yes, cadets compete with each other to find a way to “beat” it, but that’s a blind, a facade over its real intent as a psychological assessment.
It’s also missing the point of Kirk’s cheat. Kirk didn’t just cheat to “win” the game. It was nothing that superficial. He cheated because he rejected the premise of the simulation, because he thought it was detrimental for anyone to go into a situation believing it was hopeless. Win or lose, the right thing to do in any situation is to try to win. It wasn’t just “Awesome, dudes, I found a way to break top score and beat the final boss” or whatever lingo gamers actually use. It was civil disobedience, an act of protest against the very existence of the simulation. Or at least that’s how the prose fiction has fleshed it out.
Not only am I going to be interested in seeing how Staments comes to an acceptance (if not agreement) with what Burnham had to do—the admiral said Burnham did the right thing getting him off the ship, and I’d bet Culber will tell Staments this, too—but I’m also interested in seeing how Staments feels about Book being able to jump the ship. It will have to be a bit of an odd feeling for him, that he is no longer quite as “essential” in that regard. (This is assuming that David Ajala is back as a regular next season.)
@52/ChristopherLBennett
Well I know that, I’m just saying that not wanting to bend to that inevitability is natural. And yes Kirk got the commendation for original thinking and 99 demerits. One shy of expulsion I believe. Which is a brilliant detail by the way. That’s practically the more awesome part of the story. And Kirk thought that the test was cheating that it couldn’t be beaten. As a lifelong gamer, Nintendo Hard games and enemies that suffer from SNK Boss Syndrome, are my nemeses, and I hate those things whenever I encounter it. Of course those things are still designed to be beaten, whereas the KM is about how you handle losing.
But people trying to game it out is also natural. It’s kind of the stages of grief. The test is meant to inflict simulated despair, to find out and show the cadet how they deal with it. Naturally people will, deny their loss due to it not being fair, get mad that it couldn’t be beaten, try to negotiate to a better outcome i.e. keep trying everything, get sad about it, and then likely accept it. I think it’s also useful for them to go through all of that as it’s not necessarily good for a Captain to accept defeat as the first response. You’d want a Captain who after getting knocked down would get back up and try again, that’s probably part of the reason why cadets can take the test more than once.
Speaking of Chang in 6, his speech on Kirk doesn’t have to be correct. Why can’t it be the Klingon biased version of Kirk?
@55/M: Yes, that surely goes without saying. Of course any Klingon’s assessment of James T. Kirk is going to skew toward the negative.
So there was no reveal on who the president is? They are saving that for next season? I was kind of annoyed because I am subscribed to Star Trek Discovery subreddit and someone posted a pic of Nahil and I thought it was a spoiler that he was the president
Saru will definitely be back for s4 but likely probably less episodes – like Reno. I think Kenneth Mitchell will get more episodes if his health permits it, God-willing
I think the Gray scenario is going to be quite simple, now that we know she can exist in holographic form she is going to get a futuristic version of the Doc from Voyager’s holo-emitter
Zareh reminded me of TWD Negan – even had a quote that made me think of Jeffrey Dean Morgan – only thing he wasn’t the main villain
@57/Gary7: Does it matter who the president is? The Federation president has hardly ever been mentioned or seen in canonical Trek — only in ST IV & VI and DS9’s “Homefront”/”Paradise Lost,” plus a throwaway reference to the president pardoning Burnham in the season 1 DSC finale, and a barely-visible history screen in “In a Mirror, Darkly” saying that Jonathan Archer eventually became UFP president. It’s only in the novels that UFP presidents have been the focus on a recurring basis.
Gray is a he, not a she.
Am I the only one that thinks it’s weird that there aren’t more emergency oxygen units or EVA suits on a star ship? We already accept that they are no seat belts on the bridge or emergency rails in case gravity fails. I’ve never seen any of them wear a suit during a battle even though so they is always so many hull damage. Cheers!
Christopher: It does matter who the president is, and the fact that the president hasn’t been a factor in Star Trek hardly at all up until now is a bug, not a feature. We should have seen the Federation president a lot in, for example, the final two seasons of DS9 when there was a war on. It was, frankly, appalling that there were no representatives from the UFP government at the signing ceremony in “What You Leave Behind.”
I get why Vance was used instead of the Federation President in “There is a Tide…” but I don’t like it and think it was a mistake from a storytelling perspective. It’s also perpetuating the misperception that the Federation is actually run by Starfleet.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I thought this was good but not great. I didn’t like how Osyraa was offed rather anti-climactically by being shot and becoming a one-note villain after the previous episode really served to make her a more cunning and interesting character. Was it really necessary to kill her as opposed to leaving her open to come back at some point?
While I like for real world reasons seeing the first regular black female captain of a Star Trek series, I don’t like the in-universe sidelining of Star Trek’s first regular alien captain and frankly the best and most interesting character on the show. I know Saru will be back next season and Doug Jones is in the main cast, but it would be great to see him in the captain’s chair again, even if it’s not on the Discovery. This season has been quite the arc for Burnham though: from doubting she even wanted to stay in Starfleet to first officer to shamed ex-first officer to the captain’s chair. I don’t know. I don’t quite buy that from all of her impulsive actions this past season and disobeying Saru that she’d be chosen as captain by Vance. But hey, who else in the cast is gonna do it?
I think I’m also still soured on the revelation that the all-mysterious Burn was just the result of a child having emotional pain amplified through incomprehensible technobabble and thus causing the destruction of warp drive throughout the known galaxy. I find it hard to believe Su’Kal didn’t have other warp-drive busting outbursts during the span of his 120 year or so lifetime. Surely he had to have had other incidents when he got really upset like stubbing his toe or something. I did find it rather curious that Saru is the one to be acclimating Su’Kal to Kaminar when Saru himself hasn’t been to the world in over 900 years. That’s like if any of us were brought ahead in time over nine centuries in the future and tasked with being the guide to Earth for a human that’s never been there before. Earth to us would be completely foreign to us too by then: social norms and culture and the latest technology, as well as geographic and climate changes. If anything, someone else should be guiding both Su’Kal and Saru to Kaminar of the present.
It seems implausible that none of our heroes died in this finale. The Emerald Chain and Osyraa and her regulators were supposed to be the big baddies of the season but it seems they did no lasting damage, at least to the characters we care about. Glad Booker survived. Also think it’s nice that Aurelio is being integrated into the crew. I like the actor, the character’s interesting, and it’s wonderful to have someone disabled on the series representing that segment of the population especially as you see relatively few disabled actors who have regular or semi-regular series roles. It will be nice to see Aurelio’s partner and children too.
Not sure I’m digging the new uniforms. They just seem rather bland and muted. They remind of the drab pajama-wear of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Overall, I thought this was a good season of the show and a nice step up from season two which itself was an improvement on season one. So we’re seeing a nice upward trajectory in quality here. Therefore I’m yet again really looking forward to the next season. If Discovery is a courier of dilithium to Federation and non-Federation worlds then we’ll see old alien favorites and meet some interesting new ones as well. I also like that Stamets and Burnham aren’t all hunky dory with each other either yet so I’m sure that’ll be explored further. And I’m still waiting to see what happens with Zora/the embodiment of the sphere data and how that will eventually line op with the events of Calypso although I recognize that may not be a pressing thing for the writers and that story was conceived and executed before there was a change in show runners during the second season.
@60/krad
It should be noted that the highest ranking official at the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on the USS Missouri was The Japanese Foreign Minister for Japan and Fleet Admiral Nimitz for America, with no American Civilian government officials present.
However, seeing as how the United Federation of Planets government occupies the same space station as Starfleet Headquarters, there should’ve at least been a cameo appearance at some point. We’re worrying about the president, what about the Federation Council?
@61/garreth: “I find it hard to believe Su’Kal didn’t have other warp-drive busting outbursts during the span of his 120 year or so lifetime. Surely he had to have had other incidents when he got really upset like stubbing his toe or something.”
I find it grotesque that you’d trivialize a child seeing his mother die in front of him as equivalent to an everyday annoyance. Surely he has gotten upset in the interim, but as we saw in the penultimate episode, most of his tantrums only have a mild, local effect on subspace. It took the most profound, painful loss imaginable to trigger the Burn.
“I did find it rather curious that Saru is the one to be acclimating Su’Kal to Kaminar when Saru himself hasn’t been to the world in over 900 years.”
I’m sure it’s a learning experience for both of them, but that’s not the point. Saru didn’t volunteer to guide Su’Kal because of his expert knowledge of Kaminar, but because he’s the only person Su’Kal knows and trusts.
I tend to be apprehensive whenever the Federation government is shown because I’m always worried that the writers will model it closely on the US system. Which makes no sense. The US system was the first democratic system on Earth, invented when the whole idea was still new and untried. The Federation, by contrast, could draw upon the experience of several species on several planets over several centuries. It should look vastly different. Therefore I am happiest when we only get the occasional glimpse. That said,
@62/Mr. D: “We’re worrying about the president, what about the Federation Council?” – Oh yes.
@63/CLB: I’m not trying to minimize the pain of child losing a parent, especially right in front of him. My point that I’m reiterating now is that Su’Kal had to have had in his very long lifespan other measurable outbursts due to pain he experienced in some form or another. Yes, obviously stubbing one’s toe doesn’t rise to the level of pain of a child losing a parent. I thought I was rather obviously giving a silly example of a type of pain anyone could relate too. But Su’Kal could also have had outbursts reliving the initial trauma.
@65/garreth: “But Su’Kal could also have had outbursts reliving the initial trauma.”
Did he even remember it? It seemed to me that he’d buried the memory until he saw the holo. And the holodeck characters probably did a lot over the years to comfort and preoccupy him.
I was disappointed that the sphere data bots didn’t play a more prominent role in the finale. Given how big a role the ships play in each Star Trek series, I would love to see a ship AI that is sentient or near-sentient. It seems like that would be an obvious technology that far into the future. Make the ship an actual character!
I’m starting to think “TARDIS technology” is fundamental to 32cen mechanisms, and everything certain things that looked like VFX planning errors were intentional — except the scripts dialogue neglected to “hang a lantern” on what we (and our 23cen protagonists) saw. Or rather, not enough lanterns, given the many divergences from technologies previously established by the saga in the lore, and a few things were explained (the term “programmable matter,” the capabilities of Starfleet omnibadges).
* Interior of the Tikhov-M seed-vault ship, whose exterior is shuttle-sized.
* Personal transporters, when scanners and pattern-buffers have previously been show to be much larger than their cargo.
* The many capabilities of an omnibadge.
* Stashing a hand-phaser in a stick of gum on your sleeve.
* Detached nacelles.
Even Discovery’s vast interior makes sense if it obviates the need for turboshafts and their complicated topology — rather, it enables all the doorways(*) to be mapped to a single planar surface in TARDIS-space. Under this hypothesis, the fistfights-while-flying took a long time because the routing was overridden (it’s this century’s equivalent to “turbolift, hold” for when you want to prolong a private chat). The empty volume seems unnecessarily huge, so must have a reason — maybe TARDIS-space is quantized (like a General Products Hull, per Niven), and steps from “one-meter diameter“ (suitable for personal gear) to “100 meters” (for the Tikhov) to “10,000 meters” (for a ship of the line). Presumably each ship has a distinct TARDIS-space, because if the fleet could share an interior with a single turbolift network, the spore-drive wouldn’t be so impressive.
(*) Now that I write “doorways,” I’m reminded of the climactic chase scene in Pixar’s Monsters, Inc.
Edit: Clarified my argument based on Sunspear’s response.
The fine little on-line series Star Trek Continues had an entire episode where Kirk broke down under the weight of guilt about the women he had left who had died, Edith definitely among them. Anyone who hasn’t seen this series, I highly recommend it. It takes a bit of getting used to seeing other actors playing the TOS characters, but the writing is excellent and the acting, once they get the right people in the roles, is pretty good too.
@68. philip: I’m wondering what the show would look like if they switch VFX studios. There’s been enough instances now where they don’t match what the writing claims. Unless the script for the first episode, as an example, actually said, “There are floating rocks in the sky.” Somebody higher up in production is OKing it of course, but it’s been off too many times now. At least tone down the frickin’ debris fields, which I tend to see as Video Game Graphics Because It Looks Cool tendencies (and I play video games).
And show us some actual crisp ship models instead of the washed out crap we got.
Maybe the people doing FX for The Expanse can come over after their last season and we’ll get a bit less fanciful and more scientifically rigorous visuals. Or just resign ourselves to watching a moody fantasy show.
@61: Captain Carol Freeman of the USS Cerritos from Lower Decks is the first regular black female captain in Star Trek history, not Burnham. Although she beats her only by a few months.
The first black female captain to appear in Trek at all was the unnamed captain of the USS Saratoga in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (played by Madge Sinclair, who went on to play another Starfleet Captain, Silva La Forge of the USS Hera, in TNG).
@70: The visual effects in both Discovery and Picard have been impressive from an absolute point of view, but often dreadful in composition, in detail and in storytelling. They’re murky, heavily stylised and are so far from Trek‘s traditional clean, clear-cut vfx which you can follow easily that it’s quite annoying. Again, this is an area where The Expanse (and The Mandalorian for that matter, or the almost-20-year-old BSG) is embarrassing Trek.
@71. Werthead: I was in STO last night, visiting the Kobali homeworld in my Romulan warbird. The lighting, the texture, and detail on the ship were so far beyond what we saw in in murky season 3 shots (excepting perhaps some of the texture in close-ups on Discovery itself), that it’s not just other SF shows that display much better graphics; a game engine over a decade old (sometimes referred to as spaghetti code) can render a solar system and arriving ships in a much crisper and legible manner in real time. Chiaroscuro is fine as long as you show actual contrasts, not flat monochrome. I don’t know what software and resources the Discovery VFX house is using, but the results are lacking.
@71/Werthead:
It’s established that Captain Freeman has been CO for a while. Burnham’s capabilities as skipper have yet to be demonstrated, and for all we know, during season 4 she’ll pull another boneheaded defying-the-chain-of-command stunt and get demoted yet again (because the drama), thereby negating the provisional adjective “regular.” (I’m not showing a lot of faith in the quality of the scripts, I know.)
@72/Sunspear:
Lessee… There’s a CBS VFX team in Los Angeles, plus multiple vendors. At least one ship-exterior scene was by Pixomondo, which uses Autodesk Maya, Side Effects Houdini and Foundry Nuke. See: “Star Trek Discovery in COVID” at FX Guide. Pixomondo is a principal VFX vendor for The Orville, which does have clear ship imagery (their site doesn’t have a portfolio section, so I’m necessarily citing third parties). The show’s VFX supervisor is Jason Zimmerman — credits start at 2004, supervision at 2011, but no pre-Trek experience with space scenes. The simplest hypothesis is that any murkiness in DSC is directorial in origin.
@73. Philip: terrible aesthetic choices then.
@71: Okay, I had completely forgotten (disregarded) the captain on Lower Decks as I pretty much don’t pay attention/much care for that show. So I will correct myself and say that Michael Burnham is the first regular live action black female captain of a Star Trek series. If the pandemic hadn’t screwed up the production schedule of the most recent season of Discovery Michael would have been the first regular black female captain period.
@philip: looking into it a bit more, I can’t fault Pixomondo here at all. They produced some of the best recent VFX in Orville’s “Identity” two-parter, including the scenes from the clouds over Kaylon and the Battle of Earth in part 2.
Am I the only one who thought the final scene – with the crew in era-appropriate uniforms – was long-needed? Seriously, the Federation had enough resources to turn an entire starship into programmable matter, but not to provide new uniforms?
Got to say I was not impressed with this episode at all. After what has been by far the best season if Discovery so far, this was a rather tedious ending. The villain is dull, the fights are predictable, the whole thing cliché, and suddenly everything is fine… Right.
I guess I’m a minority, I like the new uniforms.
As for Gray himself, it’s interesting, because nobody here seems at all surprised he’s “real.” I’d operated all season on the theory he was only real in the sense that Adira could see him–my assumption was that a Human/Trill joining created a different way to manifest a previous host, but that it was Gray Tal because Adira was close to him, not because he existed outside of them. I never expected that Gray Tal was a being in and of himself after his death.
But his appearance on the holodeck, and ability to see things Adira can’t have seen, means he’s actually a separate, incorporeal life, and I don’t think the show hit that hard enough. That’s HUGE. How is a trill’s previous host existing outside that Trill, able to see things the new host can’t see, but his memories are still there in Adira’s mind?
I’m looking forward to some answers on this in Season 4.
I’m hoping we get more from Ni’Var as well; I’m a lifelong fan of Romulans who thought (probably because I liked Diane Duane’s Rihanssu books more than any TV appearance) that it should have been Romulans who joined the Federation in TNG, not Klingons. But I’m really happy to see them now as members of Ni’Var; it’s even more cool than the Romulan Republic I’m part of in the non-canonical Star Trek Online.
@78/JohnstonMR: “But his appearance on the holodeck, and ability to see things Adira can’t have seen, means he’s actually a separate, incorporeal life, and I don’t think the show hit that hard enough. That’s HUGE. How is a trill’s previous host existing outside that Trill, able to see things the new host can’t see, but his memories are still there in Adira’s mind?”
I don’t think that’s true. Gray is a phenomenon we’ve seen once before, in DS9: “Field of Fire” when Ezri used a variant of the Trill zhian’tara ritual to separate out Joran’s memories and perceived him as a hallucinatory person standing beside her. So this is a recognized phenomenon that the Trill are familiar with, so there’s no reason why anyone would’ve had trouble believing in it once they understood how Trill stuff worked.
As for Gray appearing on the holodeck, I think it’s clear enough that this advanced holodeck had some capability to interface directly with the brain, because it was able to make Saru not only look human, but feel his heels touching the ground. So it must’ve been altering people’s sensory perceptions as well as their outward appearance. So if the holodeck could interface directly with the brain in that way, then it could’ve registered the second personality sharing Adira’s brain and manifested a holographic body for it. Perhaps Gray’s consciousness transferred into the holo-body in the same way Dax’s hosts in “Facets” transferred into her friends’ bodies. Or maybe Gray’s mind was still running inside Adira’s brain and the mind-linking holodeck fed the hologram’s sensory perceptions into that part of their brain.
A not-too-small thing that annoyed me – ejecting/detonating the warp core was 100% unnecessary other than to build up tension (will they jump in time? Well, of course).
They didn’t need the warp core to clear any sort of path for them – obviously not, because they were trying to jump well before the detonation. They were prepared to jump out from within the Veridian (cool name from the Emerald Chain of course) anyway. But this way we get Booker having to get a jump to work on the first try, using a unique system that he’s never so much as touched before… and incidentally killing a large shipful of crew, some no doubt as charming and misguided as Aurellio.
Sorry, which I could add this to the previous – it suddenly struck me that Osyraa hadn’t killed anyone (on the Federation’s side, her own nephew was her business)… her takeover of Discovery only led to “scratches and bruised egos”. Oh, of course she was capable and very willing to kill, and what she had done in various places was just as reprehensible. But over Booker’s planet, she bombed defences, not people – then Detmer came out and attacked her ship, possibly or possibly not causing casualties.
Then here again, she was careful not to kill – nobody (we saw) was even stunned, to wake up with a headache – so Our Heroes drew first blood, with Michael spacing those regulators (we saw only one, but it appears the others closing on her were also ejected). We know they were to take her alive – it’s not clear whether she heard that part of the orders or not.
Yes, Osyraa did execute the Andorean… but that was it, a lot of seemingly low-impact space pew-pewing, and then Our Heroes blew up the huge Viridian.
I’m definitely not comfortable with the casualization of killing by Starfleet in general, and in these episodes it seemed really gratuitous in retrospect, and shockingly one-sided.
@81/Gary: Don’t forget that Osyraa tried to kill Michael and very nearly succeeded except for the fact that Michael is the star of the show! So the former’s actions are hardly inconsequential in regards to Federation, not to mention hijacking a starship, and putting the lives of the away team in the nebula in serious jeopardy.
@82/garreth: Osyraa tried to kill Michael only after Michael killed regulators, no? I don’t pretend that Osyraa wasn’t evil (and a murderer!), just that she hadn’t, to our knowledge, killed anyone from the Federation before Michael killed some Emerald Chain thugs (who also, as far as we know, hadn’t killed anyone). Our Heroes are pretty quick to use lethal force, is all I’m saying.
And she didn’t know about the away team – in fact, I wondered if she might not have helped pick them up had the Discovery crew revealed their location (much to her advantage, finding the dilithium planet in the process). She could very well have done so simply because she was clearly going out of her way to portray herself as sincerely seeking peace. Just think how it would have bolstered her case, to have TIlly have to report how Osyraa, mercifully, jumped Discovery in to rescue the away team?
Overall, I liked the season finale, it had some great moments, but I don’t believe it was up to the same standard as the rest of the season.
Good things: we closed the central story arc of the season, the Burn. The Federation now has the resources to rebuild (something I hope will be the focus of season four), and while the Emerald Chain still exists, without Osyraa they’ll be a more manageable enemy (plus, they don’t have much dilithium). Saru has an interesting development as a “father”, but I hope we don’t see less of him next season.
I loved the Culber-Stamets-Tal family, with Gray being hugged by Doctor Space Papi, err, Hugh, and Hugh’s and Stamets’ reunion. Oh, and the scene with Sahil officially being commissioned as a Starfleet episode was great.
On the negative side, the episode was too much of an action/explosion blockbuster, more like Nemesis than like a ST TV episode. I thought it completely unnecessary that it all had to boil down to a fistfight between Michael and Osyraa.
On the other hand, I am not one of those that criticizes Discovery for revolving around Michael; first because they stated from the get go that she would be THE star of the show, and second, because I still find we have nice development in other characters. Saru Stamets, and Culber in a second tier, and the rest in a third, althoough I’d like to see more of them.
But having Admiral Vance (GREAT character) chastize, and rightly so, Michael during the whole season for being a loose canon, and now, she has one thing come out right, she gets to be captain? Well, that seems a bit much to me. Not because it will give “fuel” to the haters, mind you. This was always the point of the show, to get her in the big seat.
I understand, and I am very happy, about how POC, particularly women, might feel about seeing a black woman in the main seat of the hero ship. But I think they could have achieved this in a different way, with Michael getting the position in a different way.
Oh, and minor gripe, but I don’t like the new uniforms. I wish the rest of the fleet had adopted Discovery’s uniform in honor of “the good old times” of the Federation.
@3 – Jason: Saru as an ambassador sounds good. My kid wants him to be the Federation president, as he suspects Vance is actually a dictator and there’s no actual president.
@13 – hanakogal: Yeah, I was theorizing that this meant a new source of employment for Book’s species.
@16 – Mike: I love the blue uniforms (and they did have boots, just inside the pants).
@60 – krad: I agree, we need to see the Federation’s civilian government.
@71 – Werthead: While freeman is the captain of the hero ship, she is a supporting character in LD.
@75 – garreth: I don’t believe Discovery’s release schedule was affected by the pandemic.
@84/MaGnUs: “My kid wants him to be the Federation president, as he suspects Vance is actually a dictator and there’s no actual president.”
It’s not uncommon for viewers to mistake the Federation for a military dictatorship, but that’s mistaking narrative selection bias for in-universe importance. The UFP looks military-dominated because the shows all center on Starfleet, so we’re only seeing it from the perspective of its military. If all you knew about the United States came from shows like Baa Baa Black Sheep, Hogan’s Heroes, JAG, and the like, you’d think the US was a military dictatorship.
“While freeman is the captain of the hero ship, she is a supporting character in LD.”
That’s why it’s cool that she’s Mariner’s mother, so both the lead character and the captain are black women.
@86/roxana: “the problem is the fictional universe revolves around her… In the third it’s up to Michael to restore the Federation.”
See, I don’t think that argument holds up at all for the third season. Finding the answer to the Burn was only “up to Michael” in Michael’s own mind. She chose to make it her mission to find the answer. But she didn’t do it alone. All she really accomplished was to track down the starship black boxes that gave Stamets and Adira the data they needed to reconstruct the origin point of the Burn. And when they got there, it was Saru, Culber, and Adira who saved Su’Kal, and it was Book who figured out the safe route through the nebula that would let the Federation mine the dilithium planet. Burnham had been totally sidelined from the Burn arc by that point, being shifted over to the action arc with Osyraa (after a detour to resolve Georgiou’s arc). Certainly in the finale she played a key role in “saving the Federation” from having its HQ destroyed by the Emerald Chain, but that was what you’d expect of a series lead, she didn’t do it alone, and it was a smaller, more short-term danger, not the single driving season arc like the Klingon War or the Red Angel.
Yes, the third season did seem to move a little past the Michael Savior of All meme. I hope they keep it up.
I finally got to finish this season. No more forced periods without any form of internet access.
I think it was one of the TOS Blish adaptations that described the Enterprise’s turbolifts as being able to travel sideways as well as vertically. Obviously, I was never able to reconcile the concept given the Enterprise’s own shape and design. Why would they even design turbolifts this way? Discovery simply decided to implement it visually. It looks cool, but that’s about it.
I liked this finale much more than last season’s. It still suffers from third act movie climax issues, which is an inherent design flaw from the way these Kurtzman shows are made. But this one flowed more naturally, building everything up from what came before without being forced or artificial. While the action sequences are nothing to write home about, the episode excels in the character moments. Saru bonding with Su’Kal being the best of them. I really appreciate the season actually ending in a note of closure (it could have worked as a series finale, had they not renewed), especially with the final shot of Roddenberry’s remarks on human connection.
As for Burnham, she still suffers from the Saint Michael problem to an extent. @krad has a point regarding her plea to Vance. It only works because she’s the star of the show. There’s a ton of plot armor backing her choices and the way others react to her. I hope that season 4 addresses the pitfalls of being in command. The Discovery crew can’t be relegated to being a supportive happy family all the time. I expect some friction next year.
@89/Eduardo: Turbolifts moving sideways has always been canonical — you can see it in several TOS episodes when the lights in the wall panel shift from moving horizontally to moving vertically, or vice versa. The TOS writers’ bible states it explicitly (on p. 7 of the 1967 revision): “Turbo elevators, which can run both vertically and horizontally, interconnect every deck and compartment of this huge vessel.” The TMP-era turbolift graphic shows the horizontal and vertical shafts.
Obviously, though, it meant that some shafts were vertical and others were horizontal. It was certainly never supposed to mean that the lifts could move in 3 dimensions within a single shaft. That’s just stupid.
@90/Christopher: I need to rewatch it, then. Clearly, I wasn’t paying enough attention to those onscreen graphics.
I recently signed up for CBS All Access and have been binging all the new Star Trek stuff the last few months. The comments on all your reviews have been getting turned off so this is the first time I have been able to comment.
The stuff that I liked was: Lower Decks, Short Treks (I absolutely LOVED the Harry Mudd Short Trek), The Ready Room (Wil Wheaton’s interview show)
The stuff I didn’t really like was: Picard, Discovery (all 3 seasons)
I am not a fan of the serialized format of their big budget flagship shows. They are based around some mystery or conspiracy with twists and the end never lives up to the build up. That being said, they have been sprinkling some episodic stories within the bigger arcs and those usually tend to be good.
But the high stakes of every season gets tiring quickly. In Discovery season 1, season 2 and Picard season 1 the fate of THE ENTIRE GALAXY WAS AT STAKE. The entire galaxy bores me. Give me something to care about.
“Unification III,” “Forget Me Not” (from season 3) and “The Sounds of Thunder” (from season 2) were some of the best episodes of the series. Why? Because they are relatively self contained and also very character centric. The action scenes in both these series have mostly bored me, as have the space battles. It feels like they’re taking cues from Star Wars for most of the space combat stuff.
Season 3 had two main plots: The Burn and the Emerald Chain. The Burn, even though it was a mystery that strung the audience along, had a character centric end to it, which I liked. The Emerald Chain was cliched sci-fi action schlock (aside from the 5 minutes of negotiating) and most bored me. I really liked Booker and hope he sticks around. He had good chemistry with SMG, unlike Ash from seasons 1 & 2. And Saru is the best character in the whole show so I was afraid he was leaving the show but they said he isn’t going anywhere. Whew.
What irked me is how Tilly got thrown under the bus at the end. She did an okay job as first officer and Saru did a good job as captain and yet Michael, who mutinied in season 1 and has been emotionally compromised on virtually every mission they’ve been on and went rogue in season 3 is given the captain’s chair. It did not feel earned at all.
But according to the showrunner, this was the season that they wanted to make Michael the captain. They should’ve just had her as captain to begin with. I wonder if that was a vestigial remnant of when the show was supposed to be more of a “lower decks” story.
What I want to see from Star Trek going forward: No more prequel stuff. No more rehashing old Trek tropes. Lower the stakes and make the stories more character centric. No more generic sci-fi schlock (season 1 didn’t feel at all like Star Trek to me). Work more on themes and less on action. Their big budget shows tend to focus on convoluted mystery box plots and action, while their lower budget shows focus more on character, story and theme.
I know they can do this as Lower Decks and Short Treks have been really good. It seems like this is the approach they want to take with Strange New Worlds but I’ve been burned too many times thinking, “Next season will finally be the good season” so I won’t hold my breath.
After watching all that Trek, I’m a bit burned out on the franchise. I think in 3-6 months from now once I’ve recovered I’ll probably try watching Deep Space 9. That’s supposed to be one of the best, if not the best Star Trek series.
LLAP all! (and thanks again to KRAD, CLB and all the other commenters)