Last week, it was a race to get to the Progenitors’ tech, and our heroes had one advantage: a last-minute instruction that wasn’t on the clues themselves, but which Burnham was told when she got the last clue.
By the end of “Lagrange Point” we have learned that the last-minute instruction was a specific phrase that Burnham would need to speak at some point. And we also learned that the tech is in a big container that was left at the Lagrange Point between two singularities that are two of the oldest stars in the galaxy, and which is an interdimensional portal, apparently.
The episode ends with Burnham following two Breen and Moll into the portal to try to find the tech, with Rayner about to order Discovery to follow them in.
Getting to that point really didn’t need to take up an entire episode, but it did. And it was at once very exciting and very annoying.
In terms of straight-up action and intrigue and maneuvering and thinking their way out of the problem, the story worked. The Breen snagged the tech and put it in their cargo hold, and Discovery (which has been cloaked the entire time, so the Breen still think they’re destroyed) has to, in essence, pull a heist.
Now I loves me a good heist. Two of my favorite TV shows are heist shows: Leverage and Hustle, and I also loved the heist parts of the TV show Animal Kingdom and the movie Solo. And visually, veteran director Jonathan Frakes does his usual excellent job, with mostly perfect pacing.
(I say mostly because the script calls for Burnham and Book to have a heart-to-heart in the middle of their time-sensitive away mission. Sure.)
But the script, by Sean Cochran and Ari Friedman, is a big honkin’ mess that makes no sense.
On the face of it, Discovery’s plan seems like a good one: infiltrate the Breen dreadnought, disguise themselves as Breen, and steal the doodad. An advantage to trying to steal something from the Breen is that it should be easy to disguise yourself as one of them.
Except for one problem: the Breen are supposed to be (a) incredibly advanced, and (b) completely mysterious. How is Discovery able to perfectly replicate a Breen suit enough so that a real Breen can’t tell the difference? How are they able to suddenly translate the Breen language? And how can they all communicate with each other without the Breen—who are supposed to have superior technology—knowing that they’re doing it?
Basically, the notion that Discovery’s away team can so perfectly imitate Breen so that no one notices strains credulity well beyond the breaking point.
Having said that, the final bit of the heist did work, mostly because at this point Burnham and Book were exposed and they had to think their way out of the problem. Burnham mentions their first confrontation with Moll and L’ak back in “Red Directive,” which is meant as a hint to Rayner as to how to rescue them.
This results in a visually spectacular sequence as Discovery basically rams into the cargo bay and blasts its contents out into space, including both Book and Burnham and the doodad. The idea is to beam them off, although Burnham has entered the portal by this point, following Moll.
Speaking of Moll, despite Eve Harlow doing the best she can, I remain utterly unconvinced that she’s now the leader of the Breen, and I have yet to see a single reason why anyone would even consider taking orders from her.
Meantime, another Breen Primarch is on her way: Tahal, the Primarch who occupied Kellerun during Rayner’s younger days. She doesn’t actually show up—like far too much, that’s being saved for next week’s finale—but it’s obvious that Rayner still has some major PTSD regarding her.
One bit of good news: Saru’s back! After an unconscionably long time without Doug Jones, he’s back, and has volunteered to try to negotiate with Tahal to keep her from blowing everything up. But we don’t see him performing that mission, either. However, we do get him and Tara Rosling’s T’Rina being adorable, which is always welcome. Plus Chelah Horsdal is back as President Rillak, which will always make me happy. (Allow me to once again plug my Rillak short story “Work Worth Doing” in Star Trek Explorer #9.)
Also, I do want to single out Blu del Barrio and Patrick Kwok-Choon as Adira and Rhys, respectively. Their banter as they work to bring down the Breen shields—Adira using their super brain and Rhys providing support and protection—is hilarious. I especially loved when Rhys hit upon the notion of bullying the low-ranking officer at the console and making him leave so Adira can do her work. Adira just mutters, “Everyone always picks on the ensign…”
Last season, Discovery was paced perfectly for its first half, and then slowed to a crawl for its second. It’s happening again, as the season started out well paced, but we kept side-stepping into Breen stupidity and other weird distractions, and now spending an entire episode with a heist that just gets us to where we should’ve been at the beginning of the episode: with Moll and Burnham both chasing the tech in the dimensional portal. Everything else has just been wheel-spinning to get us to where we need to go, and we should’ve gotten there already. It’s like last season when they spent an entire episode getting through the Galactic Barrier (a trip that took Kirk’s Enterprise all of five minutes each of the three times they did it). Once again we’ve got an entire episode that should’ve been a pre-credits teaser.
And now we have to wait another week for the finale—which will apparently be 90 minutes long, so hopefully there’ll be room for everything…
Discovery returns to its bad habit of sticking its major relationship beats in the middle of a time-sensitive high-stakes crisis–not just Book and Burnham but Saru and T’Rina (and even Tilly and Rayner, to a lesser degree). This has been an issue since at least the second season and I’m disappointed that they couldn’t have worked it out by now. I also don’t really understand why Burnham felt any particular need to run into the portal at that point; it’s not like Moll had the final clue, and even if she was able to get the tech out in spite of it, she’d just emerge onto the Discovery after they’d stolen the cargo.
I don’t know; the back end of this season is feeling kind of limp to me.
I was fully engaged in the episode and then Burnham pulled Book aside to talk about herself. ON THE BREEN SHIP. I lost my mind!!! This happens too often, and the constant coddling of Adira is getting nauseating.
I just threw up my hands in frustration when Burnham pulled Book aside. There seems to be a moment like that in almost every episode.
The impression I got is that Burnham is still hoping to save Moll, to stop her before she gets herself killed or something when she fails to pass the final test.
One aspect of this I really dislike is since Moll is on the other side of the portal from Book, the wind up about Moll being the daughter of the last Cleveland Booker meant…absolutely nothing!
Except in the highly unlikely case that Book flies another shuttle into the anomaly to find Burnham, Moll is stuck inside until the crisis is resolved. Hell, she might stay there forever, provided La’k gets resurrected and they can get a “happy ending” in the pocket universe, away from any expectations that he has to be the Breen emperor or whatever.
Are the Breen still supposed to be super-mysterious 800 years later? Maybe the Federation learned all about them sometime in the centuries between Deep Space Nine and Discovery. (Or did I miss something this season about their continued mysteriousness?)
That they basically know nothing about the Breen has been a thing all season, including nobody resizing that L’ak even was a Breen until he identified himself.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The last clue wasn’t a phrase Burnham has to utter; it was a clue to an action she’ll have to perform, though she hasn’t figured out what it means yet. It was “make the shape of the one” out of something-or-other, so presumably it’s one final puzzle she’ll have to solve.
This was okay, but I wasn’t crazy about the “Iron Man helmet” close-ups they kept using for the characters’ faces. It got really awkward in Burnham & Book’s heart-to-heart scene. Now, that discussion should really have taken place before they went on the mission; sure, time was of the essence, but Saru had time for several minutes of heart-to-heart with T’Rina before going on the mission the president had ordered him to leave for “immediately.” But as I was watching it, I found myself wishing they’d use a technique often used in Japanese tokusatsu superhero shows, where the characters are often fully encased in armor suits and helmets: when there’s an emotionally intense scene between two armored characters, you cut to a figurative depiction of them out of armor, often against a blank space or a white light, so the actors can play off each other.
It also lost me at the end where their plan to grab the artifact was to depressurize the Breen shuttlebay, and that translated visually to “blow up the shuttlebay and implicitly kill most of the crew,” which is going to a much more violent place than Starfleet should. Until then, I’d been assuming that the Breen would just beam back anyone who got sucked out into space.
Although I’m tired of the mythical conceit that depressurizing a spaceship compartment would drag all its contents out into space. Air has much less mass than solid objects, not enough to push them out unless there’s a really huge volume of air available like in a tornado or hurricane. Plus, it tends to flow around things, which is why irregular objects fired out of cannons need to be encased in sabots to create an airtight seal, or else they’ll just sit there in the barrel or just weakly flop out. Something as evidently heavy as the structure containing the portal would’ve probably just sat there on the deck as the bay depressurized.
And yeah, I did find myself questioning how easy it was to fool the Breen. Since they always wear the armor, you’d think that a lot of people would’ve tried to infiltrate them that way over the centuries, and they would therefore have countermeasures for it, or ways of recognizing each other in the armor that aren’t obvious to outsiders.
Point of order (or order of points): There are five Lagrange points in a two-body system, not just one. Assuming the black holes are of approximately equal mass, that point midway between them would be the L1 point.
“I’d been assuming that the Breen would just beam back anyone who got sucked out into space.”
Correction, sir, that’s blown out.
As I said, neither one would realistically happen, so if the premise is counterphysical in the first place, it really doesn’t matter which term you use.
Also, isn’t it a specious distinction? Both are the result of following a pressure differential from higher to lower pressure. Blowing is increasing the pressure from behind and sucking is decreasing the pressure from ahead, but it’s still essentially the same physics operating on the object itself.
I liked this more than the last few episodes. I thought the heist section was well put together, there were lots of nice character touches here, and I didn’t even mind the brief, out-of-place feelings discussion between Michael and Book.
But man, oh man, do they reduce the Breen to Imperial stormtrooper levels here. To the point that they’re actively a source of comedy, rather than any real sense of tension/danger. Between that and the way that the season has failed to make Moll seem like anything beyond a monomaniacal, petulant teenager who somehow fell upward until she has her own dreadnaught.
And now they’re floating a new Breen primarch. An even nastier one, who killed Rayner’s family, and has a whole fleet, as a surprise last-minute antagonist. Who presumably will be defeated with 5-10 minutes of screen time, if we see her at all.
Not every story needs a villain, or even a personified antagonist, but man, has this season fallen flat in that respect.
Tahal isn’t any newer than Ruhn. Raynor revealed his history with Primarch Tahal in, I believe, Erigah. She has been referenced several times since. She’s the named face representing the competing Primarchs.
Now, I agree with Chrisotpher and Keith that its a shame they fell back on a very old trope with the Breen. There isn’t anything new and mysterious about them, which was always the hallmark of the Breen.
There’s a difference between being told about a name in passing and having a character established as a character through seeing them in action. We haven’t seen the new primarch in action, so the writers are effectively introducing an entirely new villain for the final episode. Worse than that, as part of a B or C plot for the final episode, since we know that Michael/Moll won’t be involved, and possibly Rayner & company won’t be initially dealing with her onboard Discovery either. This is why, as I said, this is more like a B/C plot than anything. Not to mention narratively unneeded, as the damaged Breen dreadnaught provided plenty of threat to Discovery as it is.
We’ve been given much more than a name — we’ve been shown that Rayner has a history with Tahal and hates her for what she did to his world and his family. You can learn about a character without seeing them by seeing their effect on other characters. Indeed, that’s a classic way of building up a character as important before you meet them.
When watching a short, serialized season of television (I know 10 episodes seems normal, but as someone who grew up with 20+ episodes being the norm, it still feels short to me) I often find myself thinking that It would be better as a film, and that’s definitely the feeling this season is giving me. I really wanted to love it, because I’ve been a fan of this show since the beginning, and I wanted it to go out on a high note, but this story just hasn’t captured me at all, and I feel that if it weren’t so stretched out, I could get into it more. At least Saru’s back. I really hope he doesn’t die.
It definitely wouldn’t be better as a film, since then it would be only about the treasure hunt. For most of the season, the treasure hunt was just a catalyst to bring the crew to the planets-of-the-week for the episodic stories, and that’s how it should be. DSC has always been a better show when it focused more on the individual episodes and less on the big serial arcs.
The only episdode that’s felt like a real “planet of the week” type episode to me this season was Whistlespeak, which not coincidentally was the one I enjoyed the most. I’m not saying there haven’t been plenty of other detours, but the only other one that I thought was really interesting was Jinaal. Last week’s episode at the archive was alright, too, but that was more down to the performances than the material. Perhaps when the whole season’s over, and I’ve watched it all again, knowing where it’s going, I’ll enjoy it more.
I don’t see them as detours. The format was a quest made up of multiple puzzles to solve in multiple locations. Each puzzle was its own distinct story, its own problem to solve. Each one challenged and affected the characters in a different way. Those aren’t diversions from the story, they are the stories that the larger story is just a framework for. The arc exists to serve the episodes, not the other way around. At least that was true in the first half or so of the season.
I just don’t care about the puzzles. I wish I did.
The puzzles are just MacGuffins. The audience isn’t supposed to care about a MacGuffin; the audience is supposed to care about the characters who care about the MacGuffin and are motivated to difficult choices or acts of heroism by their pursuit of it. It’s what the characters choose or experience in pursuit of it that matters to us.
I mean the character work is what I keep coming back to this show for. I just wish I enjoyed the story they were in more than I do. It would make it easier for me to care about the fact that the characters care about it.
Well, I like the treasure-hunt format better than the fate-of-the-galaxy stuff of the previous few seasons, at least. But I may have already said that I think DSC has always been better with individual episode plots than with its overarching season arcs.
The shortest episode of the season so far. Its 47 minutes included 2 1/2 minutes of previouslies, 1 1/2 minutes of opening credits, 1 minute of end credits, 3 minutes of fake Breen talking to real Breen, 2 minutes of Moll pouting, and some set up for the next episode.
I would so much rather be watching Detmer and Owosekun exploring the ISS Enterprise and making a few port calls along the way and then being debriefed by Saru than this. C’est la vie.
@krad – They explain the ability to translate and replicate the Breen tech by claiming to have gained info from Breen materials at the Archive last week.
I liked the direction of Frakes EXCEPT one shot. Burnham gives orders and the other three members (in their helmets) respond side by side by side at the same time. I couldn’t help but think we were about to form Voltron.
The fact that this wasn’t a planned last season makes things stick out a bit but I did like some of the beats. Rayners reluctance to sit down was a great instance of showing not telling that he’s got some confidence issues, and it makes him sitting down feel that much better. According to Frakes the pounding on the arm rest was all Callum Keith Rennie. I do love that they’ve really formalized the pressure of being in command.
“a great instance of showing not telling that he’s got some confidence issues”
Except that it got called out in dialogue to make sure we noticed what was going on.
Yeah, I definitely got Voltron vibes from that one shot.
Two immediate thoughts:
– a pair of black holes orbiting each other appeared (“Polo’s Bolos!”) in the David Gerrold TOS Bantam novel “The Galactic Whirlpool”
– Rayner’s last scene was giving strong “Mister Worf, fire!” vibes a la “Best of Both Worlds” part one, and I have no doubt our favorite director had that in mind.
“Polo’s Bolo’s” has driven me crazy ever since I learned that the ball-and-cord weapon Gerrold was referencing is actually called bolas, not bolos. A bolo is a machete-like knife from the Philippines, or a Western string tie.
One thing just occurred to me: I’m not sure it should’ve been possible for Tilly to determine the difference between a primordial black hole and a stellar-remnant black hole with a quick sensor scan. One of the defining features of black holes is their lack of any discernible features beyond mass, radius, charge, and angular momentum (IIRC). Although I guess she could’ve determined it based on their masses, if they were in a range that couldn’t feasibly be explained by formation from dying giant stars.
Also, “These are older than the galaxy so it must be the Progenitor site” doesn’t work, since the galaxy is 13 billion years old and the Progenitors lived only 4 billion years ago.
I was mostly bored during the heist. Too long, too unnecessary. In the last episode i wished they spent a bit more time exploring the library, here, i was just hoping to get over with the action, so that the main plot at least can move. But it was good to see Saru again, I was actually hoping that his mission will also fit – at least partially – to this episode.
Nothing wrong with devoting a whole episode to a heist if it’s a clever heist. This one was too basic — one team just had to stand on the bridge and be ready to drop shields, and the other team just had to get to the shuttle bay and attach the beacon to the structure. And seriously, the second step was unnecessary. Just lowering the shields should’ve been enough to get a lock on it.
Also, it’s hard to believe that lowering an enemy ship’s shields is as simple as saying “I relieve you” and standing at the shield console for 20 minutes with nobody on the bridge catching on. Or that their clever plan to secretly tag the structure for transport was to stick a huge flashing light gizmo on it that everyone could see. I mean, these people have actual transporters in their finger-sized combadges, yet a transporter beacon is ten times bigger?
Ah, don’t get me wrong, i love good heist movies. But this one was just boring. :D
Something I forgot. “The Chase” was directed by Jonathan Frakes, almost exactly 31 years ago. Story issues aside, one thing that episode certainly had was good pacing and tension.
31 years later, and he hasn’t lost his touch one bit. I wouldn’t put this in the same league as First Contact, but it’s a visual marvel of an episode with relentless pacing. It helps that the story is designed as a heist movie. Historically, I was never a fan of the genre, but it’s put to good use here to create that sense of urgency. That, plus twin black holes, helps to establish the stakes.
Still, I feel story-wise, the episode and season in general haven’t built enough personal stakes or done the emotional homework required to get us to this point. I feel Discovery could have leaned much harder into Book’s connection to Moll, as well as playing that into his fraught relationship to Michael. When we get to that beat at the very end when Michael jumps into the dimensional hole, you certainly feel the dread in Book’s “NO!”. But I don’t feel the season spent nearly enough time building to that moment. It’s the penultimate episode of the show. You expect Michael to be put in a precarious position. And it shouldn’t feel expected. It should feel surprising.
One area where the episode succeed in doing that was during the Saru/T’Rina scenes. She suggested a course of action that would spare him, and he immediately picked up on that and volunteered, adding tension to their marriage. It helps that even with Saru’s absence in recent episodes, the early part of the season did more than enough work on them to make me tense for what might happen next episode.
And as much as I enjoyed them employing this exciting stealth heist operation, it does diminish the threat and potential of the Breen as a whole.
We’ll see how it plays out next week with the series finale – that I’m not happy it was written before Paramount/CBS dropped the bomb. There are some touches here that imply the show is somewhat aware that it’s ending – not only the Saru/T’Rina material, but the equally excellent Adira/Stamets/Culber farewell scene. It feels as if the show (and the writers) realized at the last minute that next week it all ends for good. I don’t know how much (if any) rewriting took place to account for the cancellation, but I do get the sense that it’s a factor in these scenes and I’m eager to see next week’s series finale to get the full picture.
The whole season of Discovery is chasing Moll and Lak for a very ancient device, not a Star Trek philosophy., so I was never impressed with this series and the final season doesn’t do anything to change my mind.
I maintain a childlike hope that Discovery will manage to answer the “So what?” of this season in the final episode.
All I could think about when I saw Breen Tal was “aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?”