This season of Discovery has been a mix of two storylines. There’s the search for the Progenitor tech that led to the creation of all humanoid life in the galaxy (spinning off of the revelations in TNG’s “The Chase”), which has been a fairly standard but quite enjoyable quest narrative, as Burnham and the gang use their big brains to search for clues that will lead them to putting all the literal puzzle pieces together to find the tech.
And then there’s Moll, L’ak, and the Breen. This week mixes both storylines, and also introduces us to the Archive, a traveling library that exists outside of any political structure, and which is currently located in the Badlands. Introduced in DS9’s “The Maquis, Part II” as a turbulent, dangerous region wracked with plasma storms, it’s where Voyager was lost in “Caretaker,” and it’s where the Archive is located now.
The Archive is where the last of the clues is, placed there by the Betazoid scientist, Marina Derex, in a volume entitled Labyrinth of the Mind. Not surprisingly, given that Betazoids are telepathic, the clue involves ENTERING BURNHAM’S BRAIN!
That’s the fun part of the plot. Burnham is in a mindscape created by Derex but shaped by her own subconscious. The avatar that helps her through the mindscape looks like Book (though Book is dressed like Hy’Rell, the librarian who serves as Discovery’s guide through the Archive), and the mindscape itself is the Archive. The avatar gives Burnham some vague assistance, but she has to find her own way. She takes many a wrong turn—including believing it relates to the history around the Dominion War when the gaggle of scientists were examining the Progenitors, and also thinking it’s a maze she has to find her way through—before finally figuring it out. The fact that they’re in the Archive is a clue: The mindscape is dictated by what Burnham is thinking about, and what she’s focused on primarily is the current mission. So of course it took her to a place that looks like her current mission. The avatar looks like Book because she trusts him, though he acts nothing like Book (credit to David Ajala, who does a lovely job of playing not-Book when they ENTER BURNHAM’S BRAIN, as well as Book in the real world).
Eventually, Burnham admits that she’s scared, specifically of failure. Which makes perfect sense, especially given that the first time we saw the character of Michael Burnham she failed pretty spectacularly and she’s been trying to make up for that failure ever since. But that’s what convinces the avatar that she’s worthy to get the final clue: the self-awareness and knowledge of her own limitations. So the avatar tells her where the final puzzle piece is and also gives her one other piece of knowledge, which they cut away from before we can hear what it is.
Burnham wakes up only to find that all hell has broken loose. The Breen showed up in the Badlands, and—once it was clear that the Breen had no intention of moving peacefully through the Archive—were denied entry. And so they’re forcing their way in.
One part of that plot is fun: Rhys (in charge because Rayner beamed over to the Archive with Culber once Burnham fell unconscious) has Discovery hide in the plasma storms in the hopes that the Breen won’t know they’re there. Then Reno, Tilly, and Adira work their technobabble magic to foil the Breen as much as possible.
Nonetheless, the Breen do get a boarding party on board, and Rayner and Book have to hold them off while Culber protects Burnham’s unconscious form, and then Burnham leads them to the clue, getting off the Archive in the nick of time.
I do want to pause here to sing the praises of Elena Juatco, who does a wonderful job playing Hy’Rell. As the child of librarians, and someone whose first job out of college was as an assistant editor for Library Journal magazine, I really loved seeing a librarian be a helpful and heroic character who is devoted to the preservation of knowledge, but not to an absurdist degree. As an example, they invite Book to join Burnham on the away team because they have an artifact from Kwejian. They want Book to provide context for it, and also offer to let him take it with him. My wife kept thinking that the Archive was going to be some sinister thing where they’d imprison Book in order to preserve him as the last survivor of Kwejian, and I’m so glad she was wrong, as that would’ve been tiresome. Instead, the Archive is what a library should be, and it’s a wonderful thing.
It would’ve been nice if it had a few more ways of defending itself beyond “good shields and hide in the Badlands,” as I can’t imagine that the Breen Primarch is the first person to get cranky at them.
Which leads us to where the episode falls down, and again, it’s the Breen.
On the one hand, we get a great visual of the Breen all tapping their glowy staffs on the deck of the dreadnought in unison. It’s very effective and menacing in the same way that the Cybermen moving in stompy concert with each other on Doctor Who is effective. The thing is, on Who it conveys their menace as a united, mechanized front, where individualism is subsumed. Which would make sense for the Breen, given that they all look the same on the outside.
Except the entirety of the plot line involving them is all about individuals: the Primarch being a dick, L’ak being the scion, Moll being his wife and therefore the only connection to the scion, and the scion being the only descendant of the monarch that has the legitimate claim.
Every cliché is hit in this: the Primarch going back on his word because he’s the bad guy. And of course he made a special oath that no Breen would ever go back on, because societies in fiction always have some stupid-ass oath that they never go back on that is necessary to make the plot work, and half the time the bad guy goes back on the unbreakable oath to show what a piece of shit he is and I’m falling asleep just describing this incredibly tired storyline.
Worse, when Moll tries to call the Primarch out on his dickishness, a fight ensues, and she kills him and then takes over, and I did not buy that for a nanosecond.
One of the biggest problems with this season is that the ticking clock/competition for our heroes has not been that compelling. Moll and L’ak are just a couple of ex-Couriers who should not be able to run rings around an entire starship full of smart people. Nor should one of them be able to put herself into a position of power on a Breen dreadnought. I’ve said all along that Moll and L’ak reminded me of Honey Bunny and Pumpkin from Pulp Fiction. And that’s the problem—the characters played by Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth in that 1994 film would never have taken over, say, an Army regiment. Hell, those two characters were pretty much undone by bumping into two only-very-slightly smarter criminals in the diner they were robbing.
And that’s the problem with Moll’s storyline here. Ever since the Breen showed up looking for the pair of them, she’s been punching way above her weight class and the scripts have insisted that she win those fights, and I have yet to actually buy it. At one point in “Labyrinths” Moll casually mentions that Discovery has the other four clues, which is the first time the Primarch even knows there are other clues. At that moment, the Primarch should’ve shot and killed Moll. Which, frankly, would’ve been fabulous, a great twist that actually would make sense. Usually what undoes criminals is getting too big for their britches, as it were, and getting hammered.
The Primarch is perfectly happy to blow up the Archive, even though it has some important Breen artifacts, even though he swore on the bizarre-ass alien oath that he wouldn’t. So why does he even let Moll live? She’s proven to be untrustworthy and he’s got the bigger ship and now knows that Discovery has all but one of the clues.
In the end, the Primarch confronts Burnham, and while the Breen half of that conversation is tiresome (swearing the stupid-ass oath and then going back on it), the Discovery half is a delight. Burnham agrees to hand over the completed puzzle (though not until after she’s activated it and had Zora record everything it provides, including stellar coordinates), and then creates the illusion of being blown up by activating the spore drive while they’re being fired on and venting plasma.
Discovery now gets to proceed to the coordinates with two advantages: The Primarch thinks they’re destroyed and Burnham knows about the one more thing that the avatar told her before she woke up.
One final note: This is yet another episode without Doug Jones as Saru, Emily Coutts as Detmer, and Oyin Oladejo as Owosekun. I know that the staff didn’t know this was the final season when they wrote and produced this season, but it’s still disappointing that we’re getting so little of these three—especially Saru, who is the best thing about Discovery. Sigh.
Yeah, the Breen Primarch was strictly Gargamel/Dr. Claw tier as an antagonist here. That whole segment of the show felt like an AI upscaled Saturday morning cartoon, with unnuanced bad guys and stilted, expository dialogue. While Moll shanking him and becoming queen was completely unconvincing, I was ultimately happy, because I don’t have to watch that idiot in the next two episodes.
The “Burnam’s mind” plotline honestly reminded me more of DS9’s Move Along Home than anything else. I don’t think that episode is the nadir of the show like many, but it’s still not a favorable comparison. I think this would have worked much better if Michael were actually stuck in the simulation with at least one other character, because too much of it relied on her essentially talking to herself. I recognize weird monologuing is a standard part of the Trek structure now, but IMHO it almost never works right in filmed media.
The worst turn in the whole episode, though, was the decision that Michael made at the end to turn over the data to the Breen. Yeah, she copied it first, and came up with a crafty trick to keep them in the game for two episodes, but it’s completely insane. This is a Red Directive mission, and we know that the stakes are high, since if the Breen get this tech, they will destroy Federation HQ, and presumably millions/billions more. Threatening to blow up the archive, which has a few thousand? Discovery should have called the bluff, since it would be a lower body count. Or hell, logically Discovery should have set its auto-destruct sequence, to ensure the tech couldn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Instead, Michael did the one thing which allows for the Breen to destroy the Federation. It also solves a pickle I had from the start – how Moll and La’k stay in the game when they’ve lost every match since the first episode. The answer is, Michael just gives Moll the data! It’s nuts, and can only be explained as because they wrote themselves into a corner by not allowing the two to “win” across some of the weeks.
This was okay, but I had some issues. The attempts to justify why Burnham saw her mindscape as the library and the guide as Book were pretty flimsy covers for “We can only afford to use the sets and cast member we already have.” Okay, it’s not quite as stupid an excuse as the one in that DS9 episode for why the inside of Agent Sloan’s mind looked like the station and the Defiant, but it’s still a pretty standard, formulaic trope.
Also, it’s a bit implausible that a 32nd-century galactic archive looks so much like a 20th-century Earth library complete with card catalog (something that younger viewers today probably wouldn’t recognize, let alone someone born in the 23rd century). I can buy the archive wanting to preserve antique books and documents in their original physical form, but I can’t buy that they would all be codex-type books of the sort humans use. It’s possible they were writing around an actual location, since it seemed to be pretty large and elaborate to be a studio set, but on the other hand it seemed too elaborate to be an actual library.
I also don’t entirely buy the logic of how Burnham being honest with herself about her doubts means she can be trusted not to abuse the Progenitor tech. For all Marina Derex knew when she set this up, an aspiring conqueror overcoming their self-doubt might just make them a more effective conqueror.
On the Breen side, as soon as Moll pointed out to the Breen captain that the Primarch didn’t care about his people, it was obvious that the episode would end with the Primarch being deposed, but I expected the captain to do it instead of Moll herself.
Anyway, if the Archive had the technology to create a calm pocket in the middle of a ship-destroying phenomenon as powerful as the Badlands (I assume it was artificial since it’s hard to believe a natural one could last for 50 years, plus they had to somehow get the Archive in there through the storms in the first place), it’s hard to believe they don’t have the shield technology to stave off a Breen assault.
CLB wrote: I also don’t entirely buy the logic of how Burnham being honest with herself about her doubts means she can be trusted not to abuse the Progenitor tech.
Thank you, thank you! I could not understand the logic, and simply decided to let it go by . . . assuming that the problem was in my aging brain, not the writing of the episode.
The Archive was filmed at the rare book library at the University of Toronto.
Ah, that would explain it. Still, I wish they’d made at least a token effort to rationalize why it had so many Earth-style codex books on its shelves, like saying that this was their special wing specifically for that type of antique book, or something. Instead, they gave the impression that the entire Archive looked like that.
So there’s something that’s been passively bugging me on this season of Discovery that’s really come to a head in this episode, namely: all of the tests so far have been to gauge the individual worthiness of the person seeking the clues. But scientific discoveries are seldom dangerous because of what the scientists themselves might do with it, but rather what society as a whole might do with it. Case in point: no sooner does the crew learn the coordinates of the Preserver technology than does it fall into the hands of a Breen Warlord. The tests were all for nothing–and, in fact, so far all that they’ve accomplished is to assemble a presumably devastating superweapon for the bad guys.
With that out of the way, I actually liked this one. The scene with Book being presented with the last fragment of the Kwejian world root is devastating and excellently played by David Ajala; the library was an interesting environment, and we even got a shout out to Hysperia, the Ren Faire planet from Lower Decks!
Also, regardless of what Michael claims, I’m pretty sure that the real reason why she feels more comfortable in the Archive than anywhere else in the universe is precisely because Book is there. Of course wherever she can be with Book is the most comfortable place in the universe to her.
I’ve seen this misconception elsewhere, and thankfully Keith referenced what I’m about to say: Burnham has an EXTRA piece of information from the not-Book program. The Breen simply getting to the coordinates first isn’t going to be enough to obtain/activate the technology. They might kill some folks along the way the normal way, but the technology isn’t apparently like picking a loaded gun up off the table.
Obviously, only Burnham knows the extra information, as they hid it from us the audience. Maybe it won’t land well or she’ll screw up somehow and the Breen WILL get access to the tech. But as it stands, we shouldn’t assume that getting to the coordinates alone is necessarily enough
Progenitor technology, please, not Preserver. Despite the tendency of fans (and even some tie-in writers) to confuse them, they’re completely dissimilar. The Progenitors lived 4 billion years ago and created life where none existed; the Preservers’ single known act was only a few centuries ago and merely relocated a population that already existed.
And yes, this is shaping up to be yet another iteration of the trope I may have complained about earlier, where a dangerous power or artifact was hidden long ago to keep it out of evil hands, so of course the heroes have to follow the clues to unearth it and thereby lead the evil hands right to it, so it would’ve been safer if they’d left it alone. In their defense, though, they were quite successful at keeping the whole thing secret from the enemy until Moll spilled the beans last week. Still, maybe a story like this works better when it’s the villains who are ahead of the game in searching for the artifact and the heroes have to try to catch up and take it from them, like in much of Raiders of the Lost Ark. That one goes the other way for a while when Indy reads the back of the medallion and finds the right place to dig, but it’s a back-and-forth where the villains usually have the advantage, which is probably a better structure with more urgent stakes.
Although as I write that, I’m reminded that I liked it that the stakes weren’t so high for much of the season, that we could just focus on the episodic plots of the week with the treasure hunt being simply the catalyst.
I’m glad there a Raiders reference brought up here. I was reminded of it the same as Whoever is Against the Discovery Crew at This Moment would either have an advantage, or yoinks! whatever advantage the Disco crew had.
I pondered at the start of the season if cutting down the episode length was beneficial, since last season seemed bloated by three episodes. Now I’m wondering if those three episodes would have benefited 5th season, especially filling out the Breen part. Oh, NOW suddenly the factions are behind the Primarch because the Scion is dead? And oh, they won’t have any problem with him trying to destroy the Artifact? Mol let him off easy by killing him. That would have been an interesting dynamic in Breen politics that we won’t see.
I have the feeling, like DS9, the Breen are here as an invincible Big Bad only to be defeated in the last two episodes or so.
Someone once pointed out to me that if Indy and his friends hadn’t gotten involved in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the entire Nazi high command would have been melted by divine wrath, and I’ve never been able to watch it the same way since then.
That was an entire episode of The Big Bang Theory.
If memory serves, regardless of Indy’s involvement, the Ark was going to be opened on the island first; Belloq insisted it be tested there. So no, Hitler was never going to get his face melted, unfortunately.
People often say that Indy’s actions made no difference to the outcome of the plot, but that’s missing the point. Recovering the Ark isn’t the plot, it’s the MacGuffin. The plot is about Indy competing with Belloq and reconciling with/rescuing Marion.
Agreed. But even absent all that, if Indy hadn’t been involved, the island would have been an initial face-melting trial run. Eventually, the Nazis would have figured out how to weaponize it, even if it was just by figuring out the safe distance to stand, and then having suicide agents open it in Allied territory with other agents close enough to go in, mop up, take it out, and then rinse and repeat. It’s a deadly weapon once you’ve figured out its area of effect and duration.
Exactly.
Oh, and while we’re at it: Of course the mind lies! The mind lies to itself all the time! That’s why optical illusions work, why dreams and hallucinations happen, and why therapists are needed. And even when the mind isn’t intentionally lying, it routinely gets things wrong, because its perceptions are subjective and based on incomplete information.
*pondering the meaning of life*
On a minor note, I’m disappointed that they didn’t take the opportunity to canonise the name “Efrosian” for Hy’Rell’s species (unless they did and I missed it).
Hy’Rell’s species was never mentioned, alas.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
So you brought up something I said last week- Moll and Lok shouldn’t have been an adversary week after week to discovery. Even with the diary as help there’s no way they are just that damn good. Maybe if they had some extra resources or capabilities or whatever they could hang with but we know they’re on their own.
The next problem I have is the primach is an absolute dick. There’s no way he got to a position of authority like this without knowing how to play people (even Stalin could be charming) yet here he is being one dimensionally bad. It’s just frustrating
My other problem is the discovery escaped by faking their own deaths. Last week we were worried the breed could tell when they jumped. This week they jumped and the breed missed it and fell for the same trick Riker used in peak performance? It seems inconsistent.
Lastly I’ve decided that warp just got a lot faster. Just like the scales were rewritten between TOS and TNG with warps of 13 or 14 now being equal to warp 9 or so, maybe by the 31st century drives are just that good that they can cross quadrants in a day. Otherwise we have to concede that the writers forgot that space is really really big
“The next problem I have is the primach is an absolute dick. There’s no way he got to a position of authority like this without knowing how to play people (even Stalin could be charming) yet here he is being one dimensionally bad. It’s just frustrating”
Sometimes one-dimensionally awful people manage to succeed in spite of it.
Besides, maybe the Primarch wasn’t this overt about it before. He as much as said that the Progenitors’ power means he doesn’t have to play the power games with the Scion and seek alliance with the other factions. That implies he was previously keeping his excesses in check, but he got drunk with power upon learning of the Progenitor tech.
And that’s the real problem. Moll even reminded him he was jumping the gun by acting like he already had the power. He was being stupid and reckless by getting ahead of himself, and that made him a weak villain.
And writers forgetting the scale of space has been a problem with Trek ever since the Kelvin movies. Into Darkness had the Enterprise get from Klingon space to Earth orbit in a matter of minutes. A first-season DSC episode, IIRC, had shuttlecraft get from a planet to both the E and a starbase within 20 or 30 minutes to treat urgent medical emergencies. As I’ve remarked before, I think this generation of writers, raised in a world of jet travel and satellite communication, have trouble understanding the idea of journeys taking weeks or longer.
Although earlier Trek had occasional problems with that as well. DS9: “Armageddon Game” (where Commander Rayner’s Kellerun species was introduced) showed a runabout getting from an alien star system to DS9 in less than half an hour. And of course there’s ST V claiming that the E could reach the center of the galaxy in 8 hours — and then having it actually take only about 20 minutes of continuous narrative with no time jumps.
It was actually an explicit rule in the ST:TNG writers’ bible that writers should avoid “treating deep space as a local neighborhood,” that they should remember that interstellar journeys are major undertakings instead of easy commutes. The modern productions have forgotten that.
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I feel like ever since the first season, the writers haven’t really tarried with what a significant, significant advantage Discovery has in being able to apparate anywhere in the galaxy instantaneously. They shouldn’t have even needed to go to the future at the end of season 2; they could have just popped off to the Delta Quadrant and CONTROL would never have found them.
The performances of the regulars, particularly Sonequa Martin-Green and David Ajala, were the only things really holding my attention during the episode. I still don’t care about the quest, the Breen are just kind of nowhere for me, and I agree that Moll taking over the faction was just ridiculous. The only episode where she ever worked for me was the one with her and L’ak’s backstory. Before that she just felt like a random criminal, and since then her story has just gotten silly. I did really like the librarian though. I had the same thought about the Archive perhaps being some sort of trap for Book, but fortunately that wasn’t the case.
Incidentally, when Burnham was talking about feeling the need to prove that she deserved her captaincy, did anyone else think that was a metatextual reference to some audience members’ reactions to the character?
I was actually thinking it harked back to when she wasn’t *good enough* to actually convince Captain Georgiou of how important it was to make a show of violent strength to the rogue Klingons way back in season one.
Not really. Burnham was a human child raised by Vulcans and the general Vulcan supremacy belief is well noted. I’d imagine she’d develop a bit of an inferiority complex from that. Plus she was recently reminded that she was Starfleet first mutineer and thus was unworthy of captaincy (at least in her own eyes). A reinforced sense of inferiority and unworthiness would explain why she feels the need to do all the away missions and be in all the things so she can control them better.
My last few comments about this show have been fairly critical, so I’ll avoid doing that here other than to say this episode left me whelmed, at best, and that I agree with the other criticisms already raised.
Like @CLB I was disappointed a centuries-old galactic archive basically looked like a nice Earth library. Wasted opportunity but still a cool concept.
I predict the end will be our heroes finding the Progenitors’ tech and using it with the root fragment Book acquired to somehow recreate Kwejian. Not a bad outcome frankly.
Hmm, depends on how they do it. I really hope they don’t reinterpret the Progenitor tech into some magic godlike power that can instantly create life, rather than the much subtler original idea of programmed DNA nanotech that took billions of years to produce results.
Come to think of it, though, shouldn’t the Federation already have the technology to create life from lifelessness? It’s called Genesis. Surely by the 32nd century they should’ve sorted out that whole protomatter problem and made it practical. A working Genesis Device would easily equal or surpass what the characters here are suggesting the Progenitor tech is capable of.
How many times has Star Trek invented a plot-necessary bit of incredible technology only to forget after the episode that it ever existed?
Yeah. I’ve been saying for years — combine the seemingly routine quick-cloning process from DS9’s “A Man Alone” with the consciousness transfer from “The Passenger,” and you’ve got immortality.
+1 to pretty much KRAD’s entire review.
I was figuring the book that the Book-a-like avatar was reading would be the key — that Burnham, who did tell Book that she cared about what was important to him before they beamed to the Archive, had to get out of her own head (despite, you know, literally being in her own head) and engage with Book-a-like’s interest, basically hidden in plain sight, to prove her empathy or something.
Oh, man, I wish I’d thought of “Book-a-like” when I wrote the review. Bravo!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The lack of Jones, Coutts, Oladejo (and Sara Mitich as well) has been incredibly disheartening for me. I know they didn’t know it was going to be the last season when (for whatever reason) they sidelined these familiar faces in favour of (in my opinion, at least) bland and uninteresting replacements, but as someone who enjoyed these (admittedly relatively minor) characters throughout the run of the series thus far, it’s galling to have them inexplicably absent for so much of the season.
I think the intent here was to show us that greed is a universal negative trait no matter the species or culture. The Primarch’s greed and individualism are the Achilles’ heel that helped to not only upend the Breen situation, but also add some extra depth to Breen society. Sure, it’s similar to stuff like Duras and Gowron’s corruption being detrimental to the previously honorable Klingon empire, but it still provides some color to a species that certainly needed some.
Having said that, I agree that the end result felt rushed and forced. Eve Harlow does her best with the stuff she’s given, but Moll really doesn’t fit with the Breen officers in this story.
I much preferred the Burnham plot this time around. I for one am glad the show remembers that our protagonist still has major flaws, and that they’re an inherent part of her. Loved her coming to terms with her fear of failure – a crucial trait from the pilot episode.
I was thrilled throughout the Discovery side of the story and their tense hide-and-seek situation with the Breen while Stamets and company tried to technobabble yet another clever solution. Riveting. And I think it has to do Discovery’s music, which has been a bit more noticeable as of late. Not only the different (and excellent) end credits theme, but also the other motifs during the big moments. Russo has certainly outdone himself.
The Badlands have never looked better. And I adored the Library set. The browns, the wood, the warm lighting, the endless rows of books. And kudos to the VFX artists for the way they extended that set. If this had been made in the Berman era, it would have looked sterile and visually boring. Endless rows of books in an ever-expanding universe of cultures seems implausible (and ecologically questionable at best), but I’ll take a compelling visual presentation over logic in this situation any day.
And I’ll say the same for the superlative VFX during the opening sequence. That wide shot of the Breen funeral rally looked stunning in 4K/HD. Actually, a lot of the shots were so distinctive in this episode that even before the opening credits rolled, I was positive this was in fact the season’s Jonathan Frakes episode (it’s actually next week’s). But the director is new to me. Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour, Ghanaian-American in origin. I hope we see more of his work in future Trek shows.
Admittedly, rampant individualism seems like an odd vice to give to the Breen, whose main distinguishing characteristic, up to this point, has been their complete lack of distinguishing characteristics.
Yeah, of all the ways to build on the Breen, that’s a really odd choice…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As mentioned above, the library is not a set but a location, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. And that first wide shot was not a set extension, or at least not much of one — it actually is that big.
Although looking over the photos of it on Google Maps, I think the maze-like stacks may have been studio sets designed to match the location (and the maze shot certainly was digital, of course).
As for the direction, I assumed it was another Olatunde Osunsanmi episode before I saw the credits, because the turbulence sequence in the cold open had those ridiculous flame pots on the back wall of the bridge that go off for no damn reason, a gimmick that seems particularly prominent in Osunsanmi episodes.
One small continuity note that I enjoyed from this episode (and was surprised to see go unmentioned): we ENTERED BURNHAM’S BRAIN via a nucleonic beam, the same type of device that knocked Picard out and forced him to experience an entire lifetime as part of a long-extinct alien civilization in “The Inner Light.” Clearly Marina Derex was inspired by that incident when she created this test.
And, yes, Hy’Rell was delightful. “How fun to have a Book visit me in the library, for a change!”
It’s a bit of fridge brilliance, because of course the scientists they sent after the Progenitors would be specialists in space archaeology, and of course a space archaeologist might be aware of the Kataan probe.
Or, it’s simply that the laws of physics are consistent and there are only so many ways of achieving a given task, so it’s natural that the same goal would be achieved with the same mechanism.
Watsonially, maybe, but in Doylistically, the writers specifically selected that one bit of technobabble rather than some other bit of technobabble.
That’s my point. It may just have been for the sake of consistent worldbuilding: “We need a technology that can create a dreamscape in someone’s mind and render them unconscious, and this fits the bill.” Better to reuse what’s been established before than make up something new to do the same thing. Berman-era Trek did that way too much.
Except that nucleons are particles found in nuclei, i.e. protons and neutrons, and I don’t see how a beam made of either one would be particularly salutary to shoot at someone’s brain, or particularly useful as a way of transmitting information to it.
Oooh, good catch! I totally missed that!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This episode a tribute to Borges?
I had two things on my mind when watching the episode:
1) if the Breen was sooooo powerful AND agressive, why they would not have attacked and conquered half of the galaxy already? Very conveniently they are only dangerous when the plot needs them.
2) The trial/test – I was hoping for something along the lines of Harry Potter: to figure out if the person who wants to find the clue does not want to use the technology, but to protect it. In the Philosopher’s Stone it was relatively convenient (magic!), but here they would have actually had to design some test that would figure out the person’s true intentions. I would buy a test like this more than a boring “are you aware of your weaknesses to some extent and can you face them?” type of question that is not even asked and tells little about the intentions of Burnham…
1) Presumably because they don’t have enough of a technological advantage over the other powers. That’s the whole point of this — whoever gets the Progenitor tech will gain a decisive advantage. The fact that the Breen want it so badly tells us that they don’t already have such an advantage. They have big scary ships, sure, but their use of those ships was probably limited by the post-Burn dilithium shortages the same as everyone else. Or maybe they’ve only just recently managed to build ships of that size in the post-season 3 landscape where the Burn is no longer an issue. Starfleet seemed unfamiliar with those ships when they showed up, which suggests that they’re new.
2) I agree, the test wasn’t very convincing.