The Breen have never been interesting.
There, I said it.
First mentioned as a throwaway “other nasty empire” in a few TNG episodes here and there, we finally saw one in DS9’s “Indiscretion,” where they were pretty much just generic bad guys who looked like Leia’s disguise in Return of the Jedi. Later, DS9 had the Breen enter the Dominion War on the side of the Dominion, but even there, they were just a plot device—something to make it clear that the Cardassians were just one of many species subsumed to the Dominion and that the Gamma Quadrant empire would do whatever was necessary to win and expand.
But we’ve never once gotten any sense of what the Breen are, or who they are. Supposedly, that was the point, that they were mysterious, wearing their encounter suits all the time and such. To me, though, it just felt like they were a plot device—and a cheap one, at that, because the fact that they don’t have comprehensible dialogue means you can just hire extras to play them and not pay them as much. (Given that pretty much every episode of the last two years of DS9 had guest-star lists longer than one’s proverbial arm, you can see why they wanted to cut corners, but still.)
Both “Mirrors” two weeks ago and “Erigah” this week make an attempt to finally change that, to give us some genuine insight into the Breen.
And, well, they’re still not interesting.
Folks in the comments of “Mirrors” pointed out that having the Breen be just another set of Forehead Aliens is disappointing, having expressed hope that they might be more complicated than that. As an example, author David Mack—who, full disclosure, is a close friend of your humble reviewer—established in the Typhon Pact novel Zero Sum Game that there are multiple species in the Breen Confederacy, and that “Breen” is a culture, not a species. Dave did this by way of explaining the contradictory facts that had been established about the Breen. (Indeed, Dave’s notion is still compatible with what’s been revealed on Discovery so far, since L’ak and L’ak’s uncle remain the only Breen we’ve seen without the encounter suit.)
But the Breen culture we get is one of factions all vying for power, and didn’t we already do this with the Klingons in season one? And L’ak is important because he’s a scion of the royal family, so we get yet another alien species that has futuristic technology alongside medieval notions like primogeniture and the political importance of genetics and bloodlines over more relevant criteria, and bleah. It’s been done before and nothing interesting is done with it here.
On top of that, we get some other tired clichés here, including one of my least favorite: Incompetent Starfleet Security. Moll moves to escape sickbay after L’ak distracts everyone by overdosing on tricordrazine. (How the super-duper 32nd-century technology can allow a patient to possibly overdose themselves is left as an exercise for the viewer. Especialy since it winds up killing him.) The two nameless security guards are taken out in nothing flat, and then Culber tries to stop her and he actually does better than the trained security personnel, mostly because he’s an opening-credits regular and therefore a bigger badass than the trained security personnel. Sigh.
I do like that Moll isn’t really able to get anywhere on the ship because even she’s not that good. And it’s good to see Rachael Ancheril back as Nhan in charge of the security detail holding Moll and L’ak.
Okay, I’ve spent almost 600 words dissing the Breen and this episode, so I should probably at this point mention that I generally actually liked this one. In particular, I enjoyed the negotiating done by T’Rina, aided by Vance, Burnham, and Rayner. T’Rina is the one doing it because Rillak is elsewhere and so she delegates it to Ni’Var’s president. By the way, this makes absolutely no sense. It was established back in “The Galactic Barrier” that Rillak has a vice president who would be in charge in her absence. But I’m willing to accept it because Tara Rosling just kills it in this episode, and her steel and her logic and her resolve are all magnificent.
Anyhow, we get some more background on Rayner, as we find out that one of the Breen factions subjugated the Kellerun people a while back, and Rayner was under their power. But it also means he knows a lot about how that faction works, and they’re able to use his knowledge to convince the Breen standing in front of them that they’ve negotiated with another faction to turn L’ak over.
In the end, Moll convinces the Breen that she’s L’ak’s wife—and they have the tattoos to prove it!—and is therefore part of the royal family now, plus she has information about the Progenitor technology. The Federation agrees to let the Breen have Moll in exchange for the Breen’s incredibly big ship not opening fire. (Burnham and Rayner saw a possible future with Federation HQ destroyed by the Breen in “Face the Strange,” and so everyone’s priority is, understandably, to avoid letting the shooting start.)
Now it’s a race. Moll doesn’t have any of the physical evidence or clues, but she has knowledge, and now a big-ass Breen ship. Starfleet has the Romulan notebook, most of the puzzle pieces, and a ship with a spore drive.
The B-plot is more of what Discovery does best, which is figure shit out. Tilly and Adira discover that the piece of metal that they found last week is, basically, a library call slip. Back in the 23rd century, Reno was part of a gaggle of rare-book enthusiasts who kept things in a traveling library. It’s still around nine centuries later, and Reno doesn’t know anyone connected to it now, obviously, but it’s enough to get them moving in the right direction.
Something Discovery has continued to excel at is intense discussions, negotiations, debates, whether it’s Osyraa and Vance in “There is a Tide…” or the grand debate about how to approach Species 10C in “…But to Connect” or the T’Kal-in-ket in “Unification III.” T’Rina’s negotiations with the Breen live up to that standard, and it’s beautifully done, making the climax of the episode far more intense than a shooting war would be. (And if you desperately need action, there’s Moll’s escape.)
Next week, it looks like we’re back to the chase for the Progenitors’ tech. Cha cha cha.
An okay episode, and I like seeing negotiation and Starfleet cleverness find an alternative to a violent resolution. The Breen were still a plot device here, but a fairly effective one in terms of being an almost completely intractable enemy that Burnham still figure out a way to, uhh, tract.
But Rayner is still not working for me, because he has a variation on the same arc every week, being the angry, unreasonable tough guy who needs to be persuaded to soften up or listen to other people. I got tired of that after it happened twice in a row, and that was weeks ago.
I also don’t care for the trope of making starships preposterously huge to sell how powerful they are. That Breen “ship” was bigger than a space station — surely past a certain size you’d hit a point of diminishing returns and it would take a prohibitive amount of power even to move something that huge. I had enough of a problem with TNG’s Romulan Warbirds being bigger than the gigantic Enterprise-D; after all, cloaking devices take lots of power, so you should realistically need a compact, stripped-down ship like a Bird-of-Prey (either Romulan or Klingon) or the Defiant to make most effective use of one. But this attempt to convey menace through size was ridiculously over-the-top.
While we’re on the subject, has Federation HQ always been this small? I thought it was much bigger than it was shown to be here in proportion to the starships that showed up to defend it. (And why did all four ships arrive on the same flat plane as if they were ocean vessels? It’s space!! A trapezoidal englobement of HQ would’ve made more sense.)
I’m still not crazy about their treatment of the Progenitor tech as some sort of magical “life-creating” power rather than just programmed DNA designed to nudge evolution as “The Chase” established it to be. Suggesting that something designed to incredibly gradually influence evolution over 4 billion years would be capable of resurrecting a dead individual makes about as much sense as saying, oh, that a Genesis Device programmed to restructure the surface of an existing planet with a biosphere could manufacture an entire planet and star out of the diffuse gases of a nebula. It’s treating technology as magic instead of as technology.
As for T’Rina negotiating, I figured that was because she was already there on the station when the Breen came and it was locked down. Granted, I seem to recall that the station houses both Starfleet Command and the UFP civilian government (which is why I thought it was much bigger than shown here), so it’s unclear why the vice president (VPOTUFP?) wasn’t present.
Incidentally, it bugs me that Tara Rosling mispronounces her own character name as “Trina” when another character got it right as “T’Rina.”
Anyway, the season’s 24th-century greatest-hits medley continues next week with a trip to the Badlands. And we still have no idea what the Klingons are like in this century.
Back in early S3, when Discovery was searching for Starfleet HQ, I was really hoping it would end up being Qo’noS. I thought it’d make a nicely poetic “epilogue” to the Klingon War if the Federation’s most hated enemies (as far as Disco‘s crew knew) ended up becoming the last stalwart guardians of the Federation’s principles and ideals.
It’d also have made for some good drama as the crew worked through their Klingon War-era biases and PTSD.
Oded Fehr would probably have made a good Klingon admiral.
I kind of wonder if they’re partly dodging the question of which Klingon makeup to use between Discovery’s updated look and SNW and Picard’s more 80s/90s version. Or maybe at this point there’s a Klingon plot in Starfleet Academy whose toes they don’t want to step on.
No reason they should. Strange New Worlds is a spinoff of Discovery, and it’s already featured Klingons with a classic Michael Westmore-style makeup. Alien makeups are matters of artistic interpretation, so different productions — or the same production in different seasons — can depict the same species differently and it doesn’t have to be justified or tiptoed around, any more than it has to be explained why the ISS Enterprise from sometime in the 2270s or after looks exactly like the USS Enterprise from the late 2250s.
Heck, DSC changed its own Klingon makeup between seasons 1 and 2, not only giving them hair but greatly shrinking the backs of their skulls, to bring them closer to the traditional appearance. These things are best not taken literally.
Or it could be the Klingons just fared particularly poorly in The Burn. If they were still an Empire, lack of easy transport may have allowed conquered planets to break free. I always had the impression their empire worked because all those other planets grew the food, built the ships, mined resources, while the Klingons themselves focused exclusively on military service. Being trapped on Q’onos maybe they civil war’d themselves back to the stone age. Or maybe they joined the Federation pre-Burn and were just an average Federation world by this point.
But that’s just the point — it would be interesting to see a Klingon culture radically different from the one we know from the 22nd-24th centuries. A society can transform massively over 800 years, yet so far we haven’t really seen that explored much. The biggest change we’ve seen over time is that Vulcans and Romulans reunified and changed Vulcan’s name to Ni’Var, but their culture is still basically a blending of the two familiar cultures. The Trill are different in that symbionts have become rarer, but are otherwise exactly the same as before. Humans are still about the same, Orions are about the same, Breen are about the same. The show hasn’t really embraced the opportunity to show a culture radically transformed over time, and I think it would be interesting to do that with the Klingons, one way or another. I don’t want to speculate about it online, I want to see the show actually do it. If not Discovery, then hopefully Starfleet Academy will deal with it.
Agree with your point here 100%, would love to see it. I also have always wondered why there was no new antagonistic species since Discovery jumped to the future. 10C sure, but they hardly mattered and we didn’t meet them aside from one episode. No new equivalent to the Ferengi, Romulans, or Founders.
Modern Trek’s refusal to introduce new villains has been a source of continual frustration to me.
It’s a trend far beyond Trek. Modern franchise fiction tends increasingly to be built around rehashing past continuity rather than creating new continuity. Comic-book franchises are reviving older adaptations as alternate universes crossing over with the current ones. New Doctor Who is bringing back decades-old villains and companions, and the Fifteenth Doctor has infodumped more of his backstory to his companion in two episodes than the Ninth and Tenth Doctors combined revealed in three seasons.
I suspect that maybe they were keeping the Klingons in reserve for a planned final season. It’s a shame, it would have been a good way to bring the series full-circle.
They did at least have Book commenting that it seems like a stretch that the Progenitors’ tech would have the capacity to resurrect an individual. Hopefully, that’s actually a good point and not just an instance of lampshade hanging.
You KNOW they are going to resurrect L’ak. We have to have the ‘Happy Ending’, don’t ya know.
I don’t know; they resisted the urge to show Tarka’s special friend as having gone to a heaven universe last season.
I really didn’t like this episode much. Lots of plot contrivances, protagonists catching the idiot ball, and really awkward expository dialogue to go around this week.
The biggest issue though, mulling it over, is the end of the episode initially feels like upsetting the status quo, but it changes nothing. At the beginning of the episode, the threat was that they might “sell” the technology to the Breen to get the Erigah lifted, leading the Breen to destroy Federation HQ. At the end of the episode, Moll is actively working with the Breen Primarch to…find the Progenitor tech, in a longshot attempt to resurrect La’k, which could lead to the destruction of Federation HQ.
She brings to the table what exactly? The knowledge the tech is out there somewhere? Maybe a scanned copy of the journal? Discovery has four out of five of the key bits, and is on their way to the fifth. Moll absolutely will not be able to lead the Primarch to the final bit, which means the only recourse will be to attempt and capture it after Discovery has already solved everything.
This betrays a central issue with the season: Moll and La’k have been terrible antagonists. Except for right in the premier, when they got to the diary first, they’ve always been a step behind. They’ve not beaten Discovery to a single key. Imagine how much higher the stakes would seem if Discovery had failed in a few of the semi-episodic missions, with the duo stealing bits under their noses. Imagine if Moll brought along 3 out of 5 bits on her person. Then there would be tension, because Discovery would have to hunt the Breen Primarch down, instead of having to wait around until they showed up for the inevitable, pointless random encounter.
I think that this one did a better job of keeping a tense situation feeling tense than Discovery has done in the past, but I agree that it was mediocre. They even have Reno commenting on how unnuanced the Breen feel; maybe, instead of doing that, they could actually flesh them out a bit? The fact that they seem to be behaving just like they did 800 years ago doesn’t help.
T’RIna shows us that Star Trek is usually better when you add Vulcans. :-)
I disagree, and introduce as evidence the four dreary seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Ah, but would they have been better without T’Pol?
Absolutely not, which is a good counterargument. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’ve always liked the Breen’s appearance, but that’s admittedly because they look like they’re cosplaying Leia cosplaying a bounty hunter, not in spite of that fact.
The fact that their politics is all about factions and bloodlines doesn’t really bother me either, because you can do lots of different things with that, and I don’t think there’s anything about it that is inherently contradictory with futuristic technology.
That being said, it does kind of fly in the face of L’ak’s insistence that the Breen don’t “think like humans do,” because none of that sounds particularly alien. Perhaps he’s talking about the relatively “enlightened” humans of the far future (and why wouldn’t he be), but still, if they wanted to make the Breen truly alien, they probably should have come up with something weirder.
As for the episode, it was fine. I liked last week more, just because I was more interested in the story it was telling than the season’s overarching plot, but it did all of the things that this show does well, well.
Did not like. A few random thoughts:
1. This felt like a really, really polished Voyager episode. Magic reset, nothing new of consequence, nothing substantive actually happening if you stop and think about it.
2. Moll and L’ak are just dull. We’re seven episodes in and the show’s barely fleshed them out. They are turning into caricature Harrys & Meghans of Star Trek. I don’t like them, I don’t care about them, they’re whiny self-absorbed punks. Every time Moll copped some attitude I was wondering where the nearest airlock was and why she was this side of it.
3. Agree totally with @Karl about the “race” for the Progenitors’ tech. Don’t our heroes have all the pieces and clues retrieved so far? Aren’t they the only ones who know where the next clue is?
4. Have Detmer, Owosekun, and Nilsson been written out of the show? Yes, I know they were assigned to bring in the ISS Enterprise, but a) that is a super cool premise for a story that Discovery seems completely to have ignored and b) I want them on my screen.
5. Admiral Vance must get exhausted being the only Starfleet officer at Federation HQ.
6. I like Rayner a lot, and his Breen experience was profound. Agree with @CLB though that the Angry Outsider Guy Schtick is getting a little repetitive.
7. Reno!
I don’t undertand the perception that nothing substantive happened. The Breen learned about the Progenitor tech that Starfleet’s been desperately trying to keep them from learning about. L’ak died, and Moll went with the Breen. That’s a major change in the status quo, the complete opposite of a reset button. By standard 3-act structure, this is the midpoint reversal, a major twist that shakes up the status quo and intensifies the conflict.
Also, the characters have information now that they didn’t have before. They learned just why the Breen are after Moll and L’ak and why M&L are so desperate for the tech. The audience has more information on Breen culture as well, whether or not we find it particularly interesting. We also got a big, important piece of Rayner’s backstory and motivation, which is a major advance. Story is about character development as well as plot development.
“Don’t our heroes have all the pieces and clues retrieved so far? Aren’t they the only ones who know where the next clue is?”
Burnham said the Breen can track Discovery‘s jump signature. The spore drive has the advantage of instantaneous travel, but once they get to their destination, the Breen will know where they are and it’ll be a race to find the last piece before they get there.
“I know they were assigned to bring in the ISS Enterprise, but a) that is a super cool premise for a story that Discovery seems completely to have ignored”
I think it’s more likely that the actresses left/were let go for some reason and the prize-ship line was written in as the excuse for their absence. After all, the idea of officers being assigned to command a prize/salvaged ship is one I don’t think we’ve seen in canonical Trek before, though it’s shown up in 2 or 3 of the novels.
I would argue that nothing really changed because we already knew that this story arc was about a Red Directive to find the Progenitors’ tech before it fell into Breen hands, and we were explicitly shown the/a future where the Breen used it to destroy Fed HQ. So the events of this ep change nothing. The stakes have not changed. The reality is the same.
Likewise Moll and L’ak. They came into this season as two tough couriers who just want to be together and free and will do anything to make that happen. After six episodes that’s really all they became, Breen fugitive/royalty notwithstanding. Granted L’ak is apparently now dead so I’ll give you that development, and personally I applaud it, but I sense he will continue to be Moll’s motivator just as always. And Moll will continue to bore me as a two-dimensional foil from a bad Marvel movie.
Story change is not just about what the audience knows, it’s about the status quo of the characters. Before, the possibility of the Breen finding out was just a looming threat, a potential bad thing that the characters were trying to prevent. Now, the thing they feared has changed from a potential to an actuality. Their attempts to prevent it have failed, so that phase of the story is over and what comes next will be a new phase with higher stakes.
I mean, come on, countless stories are structured this way — the heroes try to prevent the villains from gaining some knowledge or power, then the villains get it after all, and that changes what the heroes have to do, making things more difficult for them. E.g. Indiana Jones tries to find the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis do, but he fails in that effort and Marion is captured, and the rest of the story is about trying to get it and her back from them and prevent them from wielding its power. Or the Avengers try to stop Thanos from using the Infinity Gauntlet, but they fail to prevent it and the rest of the story is about trying to undo its effects. This is the part of the story where the advantage shifts in the villains’ favor and the heroes are on the defensive.
I was literally thinking about Raiders, and how that’s any different, and I guess my answer would be that the premise in Raiders is the Nazis know about the Ark and are racing our heroes to find it. So the whole story is, like you said, a back and forth about who’s ahead. Beloq is a vastly more compelling foil than Moll & L’ak because he keeps outwitting Indy to the next step.
If you compare this episode to, say, the map room scene in Raiders, the big plot twist there was that Indy inadvertently found the Ark for the Nazis. Damn, Belloq wins again! Here, the big plot twist is . . . uh, Moll goes with the Breen? Magic tracking powers that let them follow Discovery?
Moll and L’ak have this plot-relevant superpower but haven’t actually found anything beyond the opening clue. They’re like the anti-Belloq.
I mean of course you’re technically right this episode advanced the story and gave us new insight, I’m just being a smart alec, but my basic complaint is for a season long story arc in a 10 episode season, it feels like 5 minutes of story stretched out to a whole episode.
“Here, the big plot twist is . . . uh, Moll goes with the Breen?”
It’s not a “twist,” just an advance. The thing the characters feared happening has happened. What was a hypothetical threat has now become an immediate threat. That is indisputably a change in the story. Something doesn’t have to be a surprise to be a change. There’s a big difference between knowing that something might happen and having to deal with the aftermath of it actually happening.
“Magic tracking powers that let them follow Discovery?”
Not magic, physics. All FTL travel requires vast energies. The Trek universe has FTL sensing technology. Thus, it stands to reason that a drive as powerful as “spore drive” would have an energy signature detectable over a considerable distance. No, the Breen probably couldn’t detect it if it jumped to the Delta Quadrant or the Andromeda Galaxy, but we’re not dealing with those distances; we’re dealing with the comparatively small area of space that 24th-century Federation scientists would’ve had access to.
“Moll and L’ak have this plot-relevant superpower but haven’t actually found anything beyond the opening clue.”
No, beyond a journal that contained most of the clues. That one find put them multiple moves ahead.
“my basic complaint is for a season long story arc in a 10 episode season, it feels like 5 minutes of story stretched out to a whole episode.”
That’s because it’s missing the point to think it’s only about the overarching plot. Rather, the season plot is just an excuse to set up the individual episodic stories. That’s why it’s a quest narrative with multiple destinations. The stories that happen at the destinations are the real point. The quest is just the framework.
Also, plot is not the only thing stories are about, for pity’s sake. Plot is a mechanism for exploring characters and ideas. This episode was about exploring Rayner’s character, exploring Moll and L’ak’s characters, exploring Book’s character a little more, revealing Jet Reno’s character a little more, etc. The plot was only part of it.
The spore drive does not seem to need an inordinate amount of power, and is instantaneous in transmission. The power output is at the beginning of the jump, not the end point. So even if it could be detected on activation, there is no evidence it could be detected at destination. Wasn’t that the point of that multi-jump assault on the Klingon ship in S1? They could appear time and again without detection, fire, and appear again. And to throw that tracking point in NOW, in episode 7 of season 5, seems the height of bad writing. Then again, I don’t know! What is the spore drive? It’s the most underused piece of game changing tech in ST!
I’m just saying that, logically, any drive that allows rapid interstellar travel should entail vast energies, because getting around relativity is really, really hard to do. At the very least, it should entail very exotic energy signatures that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. Thus, regardless of prior onscreen precedent, I find the claim that spore drive has a distinctive energy signature to be entirely credible. Certainly more credible than pretty much everything else about spore drive.
“Wasn’t that the point of that multi-jump assault on the Klingon ship in S1? They could appear time and again without detection, fire, and appear again.”
With mid-23rd-century sensors. This is the late 32nd century. Presumably science and technology have advanced.
So the Breen began looking like Leia as a pretend bounty hunter, then give us roughly the same disappointing hohum answer of ‘what is Boba Fett really like under that helmet?’ Gotcha.
Underappreciated comment!
Ok. I think I’ve finally figured out why this arc has annoyed me. I’ve always liked the progenitor backstory and you can go back to the TNG rewatch where I point out that the one episode should have been an entire seasons worth of stories but that’s not how syndicates TV worked in the late 80s/early 90/s.
Problem. #1 for me is Moll and Lok are a pair of antagonists with limited resources and knowledge yet somehow they’re keeping pace with a federation starship and it’s highly educated crew. That would suggest a level of intelligence and capability that we never see whenever they’re on screen.
Problem 2a is the show- which is VERY good at working within existing trek lore and calling back to previous shows sets aside one thing: space is BIG. So the Breen can somehow track Discovery? A ship that just showed up in the universe from the past a couple of years ago and has one of a kind technology? Right….. and even if they did then who cares? If Discovery jumped to the badlands it should take days or weeks for them to get there by which time Disco should have jumped somewhere else? Heck why not jump to the badlands, drop Burnham and friends off in a shuttle and lead the Breen on a merry chase across the delta quadrant?
Problem 2B is the show picked up the same problem as Picard in that it forgets its own history. The Breen show up in the middle of a power struggle (I can somewhat forgive it’s having a futuristic war of the roses because what the hell why not?) and they do so in a ship the size of a bloody planet. But if this faction has one then the only way that they haven’t crushed every other faction is that they to ALSO have a massive ship because who needs the Scion if you can just flatten your opponents. So now there are a half dozen big honking ships in a galaxy that lost its primary power source for a couple centuries due to a child’s temper tantrum. What’s powering a ship that large exactly? I mean as Chris points out there’s a diminishing return to a ship that large.
So these fundamental logic hurdles are getting in the way of what is otherwise a cool story- The origin story of the universe and all of its power is hidden by an ancient conspiracy to protect it- it’s a grail quest! And we get some good acting by our normal cast and recurring guest stars and it’s thrown away by the fact our primary antagonists are two punks on the run and we forget the rules of the universe.
Oh yes and as KRAD pointed out security red shirts are still red shirts getting their asses handed to them. At least Commnder Nhan didn’t go to the Worf school of security chuffing where you exist to get your ass handed to you to show how tough this weeks bad guy is.
“Problem. #1 for me is Moll and Lok are a pair of antagonists with limited resources and knowledge yet somehow they’re keeping pace with a federation starship and it’s highly educated crew. That would suggest a level of intelligence and capability that we never see whenever they’re on screen.”
I think it’s a matter of “intelligence” in the sense of information gathering. They had the Romulan scientist’s journal, so they had most of the answers to start with. They could just read in the book what the DSC crew had to piece together a little at a time.
“So the Breen can somehow track Discovery? A ship that just showed up in the universe from the past a couple of years ago and has one of a kind technology?”
Why not? Any drive capable of instant travel like that would probably produce a very powerful energy signature, and once the Breen observed it, they’d know what it looked like. The laws of physics are universal; there may be different ways of achieving the same result, but the result will have certain intrinsic properties that can’t be changed. There are various different ways to start a fire, but a fire is still a fire.
“If Discovery jumped to the badlands it should take days or weeks for them to get there by which time Disco should have jumped somewhere else?”
Except the Secret Hideout shows, even the ones set in the 23rd century, routinely portray interstellar journeys as a matter of hours or days at most. Recall how Moll and L’ak reached Trill before DSC left, even though DSC was said to have a considerable headstart.
Also, the volume of space in which the 24th-century scientists had to hide the pieces in is presumably quite small in comparison to the range the Federation covered just before the Burn. So the distances wouldn’t be that great by 32nd-century standards.
As for the Breen ship, I’d say it’s probably close in size to a Borg cube. Implausibly large, sure, but not impossibly so. And the galaxy didn’t “lose” dilithium, it just became relatively more rare — and though it wasn’t always shown that way, I think the reason it was used sparingly was less that it was scarce and more that people were afraid of a second Burn and thus avoided using dilithium more than they had to. We know that Earth had a large stockpile that it hoarded, so the Breen could well have had one of their own.
There was one detail in the episode that really bugged me. I freeze-framed the scene to be sure. When Mol is mourning over L’ak’s corpse and biobed, they’re using a medium/wide shot where she’s flanked by both Starfleet and Breen characters. And then all of a sudden, the image cuts to a very similar, but slightly differently framed shot when the Breen finally speak.
The thing is, I was thinking I was looking at a projection of sorts. That Starfleet had somehow conjured up a fake death scene in order to deceive the Breen somehow (even their doctor not getting the real picture). I say this because Rayner certainly voiced a similar idea by suggesting the use of thoron fields and duranium shadows (a favorite technobabble solution from the DS9 writers). And the weird cut certainly suggested that might be the case – a jump from fakery to reality. But that’s not what ultimately happens. And I really don’t like it when such a blatant error of editing somehow survives all the way to the final cut. Seriously, it took 2 full years for this shorter season to come together. It shouldn’t happen.
Otherwise, I like the episode for giving a little more depth to the Breen, even if it feels unoriginal. But I do agree that incompetent security is a trope that should have been retired long ago. Thankfully, the episode more than makes it up with the character work. Burnham and T’Rina navigating their way through this diplomatic minefield makes for some tense scenes. And I’m glad the Stamets/Tilly side of the story yields actual results, so it’s not a complete late act 2 setback either. Looking forward to seeing how the Badlands are depicted through VFX of the current Trek era. It’s been a while since VOY.
Also, for a moment there, I was scared they might actually kill Culber off – again. He’s certainly been at the forefront lately with the Trill experience, talking to holo-abuela and whatnot. And with three episodes left, I don’t discount the possibility of the show killing major characters off.
One detail I overlooked. This was written by M. Raven Metzner, who I have a lot of admiration and respect for doing an insane amount of work trying to fix Iron Fist after that disastrous first season. Not that season 2 was perfect by any means, but you can see the effort.
Keep in mind that this season was written and shot before they knew it was the last season, so one can’t ascribe motives with regards to it being the final season to the writing because they didn’t think it was.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m still confused about the Breen’s Jell-O form. What is going on here again? They are transparent? Turning into shapeshifter? Genuinely asking, the fx were not enough for me to just get it.
If I had to guess, it’s another variation of that “Stages of Evolution” nonsense Trek writers have loved to dip their pens in since the original series (e.g. TOS: “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, “Errand of Mercy”; TNG: “Transfigurations”; VOY: “Threshold”). The Breen are “evolving” to become liquid and prefer this state for reasons not given.
Granted, that’s not now evolution works, but when has that stopped TV writers before?
Dear Starfleet Security,
You have stunners. Stunning means you can shoot first and ask questions later. You don’t need to say “hands up.”
When Culber didn’t immediately fall over, for a moment I confused him with M’Benga. I guess ass-kicking is in the curriculum of 23rd century medical school?
Hmm… Realistically, there’s always a chance that a “non-lethal” weapon could be lethal, so it makes sense not to use one unless you have to. Although in Trek and other fiction, stun weapons are usually portrayed as reliably non-lethal, so you have a point.
On the other hand, if the other person is holding a weapon that isn’t set to stun, there’s a risk that they could get off a shot before they passed out, or that the stun charge itself would convulse their muscles and cause them to fire wildly. So it’s not a good idea to stun someone holding a gun.
I love me a good play on words and Tig Notaro can almost do no wrong, but there were crickets here after Reno’s “You haven’t lived ’til you’ve tried my Seven of Limes.” (The convo around it was, happily, just fantastic.)
Wait a minute, didn’t she say she’d been a bartender before she joined Starfleet? Which would’ve been in the mid-23rd century, long before Seven of Nine existed.
Which suggests she was just pulling their legs and making it up.
I believe she said that she still pulls a shift occasionally, although with her deadpan it’s hard to take anything seriously…
There’s one thing I noticed – The drug which L’ak OD’s on is Tricordrazine. Hop back to ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’, and ONE hypo full of Cordrazine is enough to send our ol’ Country Doctor McCoy into a nutso spiral, screaming out about Killers, Assassins, and deliberately using the Transporter by his own will, if you needed any other evidence he wasn’t compos mentis. It took him days to come down, and that’s only through the ministrations of Edith Keeler.
L’ak taking that much, should have been like giving him Max Strength Coffee brewed with Red Bull (Other energy drinks are available) – Never mind Moll busting them out, he should have been able to do that himself….
…. if it didn’t outright kill him instantly.
And Yes, Doctor McCoy, I guess I am making a medical comment!
I would imagine that a futuristic, more advanced successor to cordrazine would’ve been refined to be safer rather than more potent. But even so, taking that large a dose would probably negate that.