Star Trek: Discovery - Season 4 Review, Part 2

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I've finally reached the middle of Star Trek: Discovery's fourth season! Just five months later than planned. It's the season about the DMA blowing up planets if you've forgotten.

I'm sorry I disappeared for so long, I was supposed to get this article finished and published in September last year, but I decided to focus on getting Babylon 5's last season done instead and messed up all my plans. Then it just carried on slipping down my list of priorities, even though it was next in line to get published. Funny thing is, I wrote these reviews back in December 2021 right after watching each episode and all they needed was a bit of tidying up to make them readable.

Okay, most Trek series have 10 episode seasons these days and Discovery's going to join them this year, but season four featured 13 and that doesn't divide evenly into three articles. At first I thought about writing about 4.33 episodes in every article, but I figured it'd be simpler to just add a bonus review to this one and write about 5 this time:

• 4-05 - The Examples
  
• 4-06 - Stormy Weather
  
• 4-07 - ...But to Connect
  
• 4-08 - All In
  
• 4-09 - Rubicon

There will be huge SPOILERS for each of these episodes, and earlier series, but if you're watching the Discovery for the first time you don't have to worry about me spoiling anything that happens afterwards. I hadn't even seen the later episodes when I wrote these reviews.

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Note: I rate episodes on a 1-9 scale, with 5 being where my attention starts to fail.

Star Trek: Discovery - Season 4
4-05	The Examples		6
Episode: 047 | Writer: Kyle Jarrow | Director: Lee Rose | Air Date: 16-Dec-2021 Discovery is tasked with evacuating asteroids in the path of the DMA anomaly, which leads to Burnham and Book breaking into a jail to rescue the prisoners. They have a bit of trouble with the defences, plus the prisoners aren't keen on leaving without their freedom being guaranteed, but Burnham gets the job done. It turns out that only one of them is guilty of any real crime and he decides to stay behind and die as penance, with Burnham respecting that choice against Book's protests. Meanwhile Stamets and a genius scientist called Tarka nearly get the ship blown up by making their own DMA in his spore drive lab! Sometimes I can't tell if Discovery's writers are just screwing with us. Like how every ship seems to be named after a classic Star Trek character now, and how they keep giving bridge crew members one scene where they talk to Burnham about a bit of their backstory that's relevant to the plot. This time it was Rhys's time to shine as he volunteered to help lead the evacuation, and his scene where he said "My home was hit by a hurricane once and Starfleet saved me and now I want to be the Starfleet that saves people," was deeply moving. Well it made my eyes roll at least, which is a little bit of movement. On the plus side, Bryce, Owo and Detmer are completely absent in this story! The trouble with Discovery's bridge crew is that they get too much attention to be extras, but not enough to be characters, so they're forever trapped in a terrible limbo between existing and not existing. This isn't a problem that Next Gen ever really had, because characters like Lt. Jae were kept so anonymous you wouldn't even know she was at the helm in like 63 episodes and 3 movies. It did have characters like Chief O'Brien that got more attention, but he was more the equivalent of Jett Reno, and he eventually got his own show so I can't really claim he was underused. Speaking of Jett Reno, she's finally back in this episode... just not in the same room as the rest of the actors. She pops up on screen occasionally to make low-key snarky comments about Stamets trying to get them all killed by creating a scale model of the DMA in his lab. Right when they're in the middle of an evacuation mission as well! I have to give him credit though, he did not create it immediately next to the warp core, which is what Geordi and B'Elanna would've done. Plus he was being pushed into it by his foil, Dr Tarka, whose arrogance, brilliance and single-mindedness rivals his own. The guy nearly blew up the ship and all their refugees in an experiment and was annoyed that they didn't keep it going longer! The episode strongly hints that there's more to Tarka than he's telling people, with his giant scar on the back of his neck. Captain Lorca kept secrets and had giant scars on his back as well, and that story didn't have an entirely happy ending. We're definitely being led to wonder if the obsessed next-gen spore drive creator and the angry next-gen spore drive pilot are going to be up to something a bit dangerous together in future episodes. In fact I have a theory that Tarka's going to be the final villain. He's so eager to get hold of that DMA and he wants revenge against the Emerald Chain (presumably), so I can see him taking it and using it against Andoria or Orion. Speaking of the spore drive, I'm glad that they mentioned that Stamets has told Aurellio how to avoid bothering the jahSepp! In fact I remember thinking that a lot of the dialogue early in the episode was pretty decent (even if it was maybe a little disappointing that they were talking about the DMA being a superweapon made by an alien race instead of a force of nature). They even remembered that super powerful aliens exist in the Trek universe, and listed the Metrons from the Original Series ep Arena, the Iconians from Next Gen, the Nacene from Voyager, and the Q (who have apparently left the galaxy alone for the last 6 centuries) as possibilities. Though no word on the Organians, the Douwd, the Thasians... etc. The Federation has designated the DMA designer as Unknown Species 10-C and somehow I have a feeling that it's going to be a humanoid species that Burnham can have a hand-to-hand fight with in the finale. But I've been wrong before! I thought Burnham's plot started strong as well, with her and Book working together like the old days, fighting landmine bugs that fire giant saw blades. We never got them in the Berman era! But then they met the prisoners and the plot took a huge dive for me. If you wrote down the events on paper I'd say they had the basis for a decent story here, but the way it was realised made me want to bury my face in my palm. We learn that there's just six prisoners there and they claim that they were arrested for basically nothing in order to be an example to the rest of the population. Okay that's fine so far, we've seen that system before in Justice where Wesley was sentenced to death for falling on some flowers and I like the ambiguity of whether they're telling the truth or not. But everyone's dialogue was so formal and awkward and cliché that I was thrown right out of the scene. I mean they literally said that one was arrested for "stealing bread for his family". Nope you don't get to say that with a straight face, not in a TV show made this century. They didn't seem like real people, and the prisoner they had talking for them, Felix, was the worst of the bunch. His performance destroyed any sympathy I had for the character. Plus it was just bizarre to have Burnham searching through the internet looking for a way to get them asylum with the DMA just minutes away from annihilating them all. Stamets once taught Tilly a valuable lesson that I think Burnham could make use of herself: use fewer words. Or at least have natural normal conversations! Maybe they could've also brought up the fact that she was a prisoner once herself, that seems kind of relevant to the story. I did at least like that she didn't offer them guaranteed freedom, she promised that their cases would be reviewed by the Federation. Plus I liked her self-righteous reply to the Magistrate at the end, as she was in a bad mood, he was a dick, and it was a very human thing to do. Regardless of what you think about about his justice system (which apparently ended all serious crime, seeing as there was one real criminal in jail and he murdered someone decades ago), his utter disregard for the prisoners' lives was bad enough even before we learned they barely did anything. In fact it was downright cartoonish. And I realise that the Emerald Chain were the ones who set up the prison and they're fond of death traps, but did they really need that much security just for six people? I suppose the answer might be 'yes' seeing as Burnham and Book got inside in minutes with just a gun and a tricom badge, but still. Then there was the Culber plot where he's sad because he's been in too many therapy plots recently, and I could relate to that. Fortunately guest star Dr Kovich laid out his issues in a scene, so that's dealt with now! I feel like scenes like this have diminishing returns for me, and the more the series devotes entire scenes to nothing but a character working through their problems, the less I care. I mean I'm glad that the series is taking its characters' mental health seriously, especially as Trek has had a tendency to drop traumatic events on people and then have them forget all about them the next week, and I'm glad that Culber's resurrection continues to have consequences. Also it's nice to see David Cronenberg back again! But I didn't personally find their scene all that gripping. On the plus side, Zora got more lines this episode and she's developed emotions now! Just got them recently. So that's cool, their ship now has empathy. I'm glad Data wasn't in the room for that reveal though, as the way she achieved his goal of understanding emotion in just a couple of years would've probably made him very sad. The Stamets plot was the highlight of the episode for me, though it was also cool to check in with the Akaali and see that they're doing alright. They were very first alien civilisation discovered by humans, in an early episode of Enterprise called Civilization. They were pre-warp last we saw them, pre-industrial even, so they've come a long way in 1039 years. But overall this episode was just 'alright' for me, brought down by some bad dialogue.
4-06	Stormy Weather		7
Episode: 048 | Writer: Anne Cofell Saunders & Brandon Schultz | Director: Jonathan Frakes | Air Date: 23-Dec-2021 Discovery heads inside a rift left behind by the DMA to get more data, but their Spore Data lifeform in the computer starts to panic and the hull begins to get eaten away. Very clever Discovery, you got me. The characters all talk about how stormy it's going to be in the rift, the title's literally called Stormy Weather, but the rift is actually more like the empty void in the Next Gen episode Where Silence Has Lease. Except with fewer godlike aliens tormenting them. I've mentioned before that the series has turned into Star Trek: Therapy and Emotional Support, but I'm not saying anything that isn't blatantly obvious. I mean Burnham's epic heroic moment in this episode is to sit on a burning bridge and endure the heat in order to help the ship itself cope with its panic. Even the USS Discovery needs a counsellor in this series! But I thought it worked really well in this case. Sometimes it feels like Star Trek's done every story three times over already, but we've never seen a friendship form between a captain and her evolving ship's computer. Plus it finally gave Gray a purpose in the series as he's the one who first notices that Zora's struggling and tries to help! The whole episode is all about people feeling that they need to do something in a bad situation and everything tied into that in a very satisfying way for me. Gray's left alone in the bar when everyone runs for their posts (even the weird Ferengi bartender with the wrong makeup), Zora's guilty about not doing more to save people, Owo wants to leave her station and make herself useful, and Book feels that being stuck on the ship is stopping him from going out and tracking down who's responsible. I wouldn't say the Book plot was my favourite part of the episode, but it had the advantage of its outcome being in doubt. My guess was that once they got out of the void he'd choose to leave the ship to follow his own leads, maybe even team up with Tarka. But nope, he stood his ground time and time again, never giving an inch against his hallucinations. Which is good, because it turns out that his contacts would be no use at all as the DMA isn't even from this galaxy! Threats from outside the galaxy are nothing new, that's where the original Doomsday Machine came from, but the big difference this time is that Discovery might have the capability to spore jump over there to its origin. Exploring another galaxy is something else that Star Trek has never ever done before, and this is definitely the right time period for it. Oh plus we got a Galactic Barrier mention, for the first time since... probably the Original Series. The solution at the end of the episode relies on using a sonar ping to find the exit while everyone's safely stored in the pattern buffer where they can't be incinerated, which is cool. I did have a couple of problems with it though. First, why would the ship need to find the exit in a calm storm-less void when they could just go exactly backwards? Second, they mentioned in the previous episode that they can only beam so many people at once, so did the transporter get an upgrade in the meantime? Also I don't think they mention once what a pattern buffer actually is! I know what it is, because I've seen a million other episodes, but this is one case where I think a little extra technobabble explanation would've helped. Really all they had to say was "the transporter's pattern buffer." There's some great imagery in this by the way, with the ship being eaten alive by evil subspace and the hull being on fire. Somehow. I guess shutting off life support didn't vent the oxygen. Plus I don't think we've ever seen a Starfleet vessel get this trashed before and still get repaired, with the possible exception of the NX-01. In retrospect maybe they shouldn't have sent their only spore drive ship on a mission where the spore drive couldn't be used. Overall the episode kind of felt like a successor to season 2's An Obol for Charon to me, even before the ending where a character sings someone a song to stay calm! I think it's because everyone's doing their own things in the middle of an entirely shipbound crisis. Plus it doesn't hurt that they're both major parts of the Zora arc... and highlights of their respective seasons. Personally I reckon this is the best version of what Discovery wants to be at the moment. It had a proper Star Trek space exploration story with proper Star Trek drama and all of the plots tied into the main themes instead of being distractions. Everything was pulling in the same direction for a change. But it achieved this without sacrificing anything of its own identity and style... for better or worse. When I try to think of all the things I didn't like about the episode, it's mostly just things I don't like about Michelle Paradise's incarnation of Discovery in general. Especially that Owo scene at the end where she explained her reasons for wanting to be useful in a crisis, man that annoyed me. It was a retread of Rhys giving his backstory in the previous episode and even more cringeworthy here. Seriously, is a producer writing these scenes into other people's scripts?
4-07	...But to Connect		6
Episode: 049 | Writer: Terri Hughes Burton & Carlos Cisco | Director: Lee Rose | Air Date: 30-Dec-2021 Stamets comes into conflict with Zora when she withholds crucial information to protect the crew, leading to an investigation into her nature. Meanwhile Burnham and Book find themselves on opposite sides of a vote to decide what to do about the DMA. The vote goes Burnham's way, with people deciding to send out a ship to make first contact with Species 10-C, so Book and Tarka go rogue with a stolen spore drive to destroy the DMA themselves. The problem with Discovery is that it'll start an episode with a joke about everyone having a group hug and then end with a group hug. Actually the problem with it is that it's written by people who think that's a good thing, though it's only a problem for people like me who would rather they didn't. ...But to Connect has got two plots about ethics that intersect at the end (mostly due to editing rather any link between the events). On paper this is good and it was often good on screen as well, but I was also cringing a lot, and I don't like cringing. Burnham's plot was mostly about her having to choose between siding with her boyfriend or her principles, and (as foreshadowed last episode) she goes with Starfleet's plan to make contact with Species 10-C over Tarka's plan to nuke it now. I think the problem I have with this plot is that it's not established how long it'll take to meet these aliens so we don't know if they have the time to spare. They can usually get this kind of thing done within an episode though, so Book comes off as incredibly impatient. Getting some intelligence on who they're facing before taking drastic actions has to be a good idea, especially as there's nothing stopping the Federation from preparing to destroy the thing at the same time. Even Star Wars' Rebellion got hold of the Death Star plans before even thinking about taking on the Death Star! (That's in the opening crawl, I'm not spoiling anything). In the end the other governments were swayed by Burnham's speech, and I'm fine with that. There were two people giving speeches and two options, so they were going to be swayed by someone. But I was confused why Burnham got a vote. Book's representing the Kwejian, the Federation President is representing the Federation, and Burnham's... also representing the Federation? The Zora and Stamets plot is all about determining whether they can trust Zora and what to do with her, and it actually leads to the most sensible Star Trek outcome: classify her as alive and make her a Starfleet officer! Hopefully they'll also give her some training, as it's no surprise that she's not acting like a member of the Starfleet crew when she's basically a civilian child. I liked that the episode took the plot seriously, brought up Control and the Sphere Data, and generally had people making sensible arguments. Like 'how do we deal with a lifeform that's growing inside our ship, has control of phasers and photon torpedoes, and isn't obeying instructions?'. But I did have a few problems with it. Like they've determined that Zora is more than AI, something entirely new. Uh, what? Seems to me she's just like Data, the Doctor and Soji. Also her line "I feel seen," at the end made my eyes roll right out of my head. It was enough to have her identify as a spaceship, I got it thanks.  I'm glad that Zora's right to exist was absolutely never in question, just whether they should be allowed to continue to inhabit the ship, but I hope that Kovich was being less than truthful when he said that he would've recommended removing Stamets if he had an issue with her. She's an untrained pre-teen who just developed emotions this month and has all of their lives in her hands, I think it's perfectly reasonable for Stamets to have concerns! I mean everyone thought the M-5 from The Ultimate Computer was great until it got emotional and attacked the USS Excalibur. Also they can't remove Stamets; he's the damn spore drive operator that they need to make the ship move! They did have backup spore drive operator to be fair... but he's just gone and escaped with a tiny next gen spore drive installed in his ship! It's nice that they're finally putting the technology into other ships, but I didn't like how small it was. This is the prototype of a new kind of propulsion far more powerful than warp drive and it can fit into a shoebox? C'mon! They didn't even need to add any fuel. Turns out I was entirely wrong about Tarka, by the way. I mean sure he's the villain, but for completely different reasons than I assumed. He's not after revenge, he's after an escape to another universe. So he's only halfway to being Lorca. Overall this was a very talky Star Trek episode all about philosophy and how to correctly respect other beings, which is mostly a good thing. But sometimes it felt like it was written by a AI chat bot that had been taught by feeding it Twitter. It's got an awkward formalness, with lines like "Thank you for reaching towards me," that no person would ever say, even if they are a computer. Well, no one I know anyway. We're all in our bubbles I suppose. Like a lot of Discovery episodes I enjoyed this a lot at the start but started to get annoyed by it by the end and my opinion of it is falling the more I think about it. So I'm going to stop thinking about it. But the absolute worst part of it for me was the scene where Zora materialises a failsafe they can use to kill her if she turns evil, because I've seen that exact thing happen in another story and I couldn't remember what it was! It was driving me mad trying to figure it out. (It turned out that it's a Tom Baker Doctor Who story). • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION ...But to Connect is the first ever Star Trek episode to start with 'but'. In fact it's the only episode to have a 'but' in the title at all. It's not the first to start with an ellipsis however, that would be DS9's ...Nor the Battle to the Strong.
4-08	All In		7
Episode: 050 | Writer: Sean Cochran | Director: Christopher J. Byrne & Jen McGowan | Air Date: 10-Feb-2022 Burnham and Owo go on an away mission to a casino in order to get hold of some star maps and hopefully run into Book, who drops by in order to get an explosive for Tarka's anti-DMA bomb. Burnham and Book both find they need more money to buy the explosive, so Owo hustles people in a wrestling match while Book and Tarka hunt a Changeling. It ultimately comes down to a card game between Burnham and Book, which Book wins. But Burnham saw this coming and planted a tracker on the explosive. All In isn't a particularly exciting episode of Discovery, in fact the protagonists and antagonists mostly just hang out and they even help each other on a couple of occasions, so it's maybe a strange episode for the series to come back from hiatus with. I liked the change of pace though. It's the fun Burnham and Tilly away mission I've been waiting for, and honestly the fact that it actually stars Burnham and Owo isn't a negative. The A plot is about a very contrived situation where Burnham (who has the resources of the Federation) has to put Owo in a wrestling match to raise money, while the fugitive they're after is in the same room hunting down a gambling cheat, but I was willing to give it a pass. Burnham got the opportunity pull a Kirk by hustling people, cheating at poker, and planting a tracker on the prize, and even better Owo actually got to join in! I was actually getting more and more worried about Owo the longer the episode went on, especially as she had a chat with Tarka about his motivations, as I started to suspect they were going to pull an Airiam and kill her off. But nope, this was just an Owo story! I'm liking this trend of giving the bridge officers fewer appearances but more to do when they do show up, and I reckon the actress did well enough to justify her getting a more substantial role in the future. Tarka's actor did pretty well too! I like the way he can pull off lines like "Pardon if I mispronounce this, but you were right". We learn a tiny fraction more about the character's motivation here, as he's apparently fuelled by grief like Book is, though he doesn't want to elaborate. It really seems like these two are not in the right state of mind to be firing bombs at anomalies, so it's a bit of a shame that Burnham and Owo couldn't capture them here. In fact they didn't even make any effort to, even though I'm pretty sure that the two of them could've taken them even without weapons. I get that it's outside their jurisdiction and Burnham did plant a tracker, but the stakes are already Doomsday Machine level and those two could escalate things even further. Did I forget to mention that he caught a Changeling! Sure its shapeshifting effect looked a bit different, but looking different is what Changelings are all about. It seems that with Prodigy following on from Voyager and Picard continuing from Next Gen, Discovery has decided to be the one to follow on from Deep Space Nine. We've got a Bajoran-Cardassian president, Lurians and off-model Ferengi everywhere, and now an actual Changeling. Still no Klingons though. The episode's more focused than most this season, which I appreciated, though there is a tiny tiny single-scene B plot about Culber obsessively cleaning a self-cleaning ship because of his guilt of not being able to cure Book's guilt. It's not really my kind of television to be honest, not the way it's been executed here. It's very appropriate to the season's theme of mental health, but when a series dwells on the same thing for eight episodes I start to resent it. Overall though this was a decent episode I reckon. I know the internet's a bit disappointed with it, but I'd put it in my top three so far this season. Discovery often shines when it leans into its goofy side and takes advantage of Sonequa Martin-Green's charm, and this really feels like one last adventure for Burnham and Book before everything goes to crap. The episode doesn't really push the arc forward a whole lot, but we do learn a bit more. Now we know that the race that built the DMA has a huge barrier set up around their star system that they're apparently fuelling with material mined by the DMA. So the device using up an incredible amount of energy is actually being used to generate an even more incredible amount of energy. Also it seems like Species 10-C is located just outside the galaxy, not in another galaxy, which is very disappointing. It's okay to go to other galaxies, Discovery, other series visit them all the time!
4-09	Rubicon		6
Episode: 051 | Writer: Alan McElroy | Director: Andi Armaganian | Air Date: 17-Feb-2022 The Discovery crew tries to secretly board Book's ship before he can complete and deploy Tarka's anti-DMA device. Unfortunately Tarka's set up more security and the shuttle team are nearly killed. This leads to Book and Burnham have a spore drive battle, which ends with Burnham finally getting through to Book and talking him down. Unfortunately she didn't talk Tarka down, and he destroys the DMA. It's then immediately replaced by another one. Well that went badly. Book's officially burned his bridges, Tarka has no chance of getting his DMA power core, Burnham failed her mission, they've officially pissed off Species 10-C, and after all that the DMA just reappeared again! Now they have one week left before it destroys another world. The moral of the story: keep Tarka away from the damn controls. Seriously Book, what the hell were you thinking? The guy fired a full spread of quantum torpedoes at your cat without even hesitating and you let him carry on sitting at the same console afterwards? Season 3 kind of made it feel like Book's ship was somehow more powerful than even the upgraded Discovery and this episode pretty much confirms it. Discovery got its ass kicked this episode. That tiny ship had them down to 20% shields and it didn't even need to swoop around the hull shooting at gun turrets to do it. Starfleet really should've examined Book's ship when they had the chance and copied its advanced technology. They could've at least discovered what the vessel's called so I can start referring to it by name. On the plus side, we got some actual conversations between the bridge officers in this episode, which was great. They weren't entirely natural conversations, but it's a step up. Even the mandatory scene where a character talks about the traumatic event that's influencing their current choices kind of worked this time, with Commander Nhan discussing it like a normal person! We got plenty of Nhan here and she got plenty to say, which was cool. All the hugs were well earned this time as well, as it was nice to see her again after over a year. It's just a shame that the theme of the episode is reaching 'middle ground', and she really wanted Burnham to know it. She wasn't the only one talking about it though, and they had me double checking the episode title to make sure it wasn't called Middle Ground. Maybe it actually should've been that. The name Rubicon feels a little too close to All In for me, as both titles are about the characters making a choice to cross a line. I feel like they probably should've trimmed some scenes from the teaser as well, as I was getting impatient for the plot to get started already. The episode definitely got there in the end though, giving viewers all the Book vs Burnham drama you could want. The two ships even had a spore jump battle, with Discovery somehow managing to jump in front of the other ship each time. I guess Burnham just knows Book that well. There was also a 4 minute 23 second B plot about Saru's relationship with President T'rina taking another half-step forward which felt like it took up half the episode for me somehow. Saru's been one of my least favourite characters this season, maybe because he's so consistently thoughtful and soft-spoken, and we've already got enough of that from everyone else. But I'm sure a lot of people loved this plot so I won't complain. I kind of predicted that Burnham wouldn't actually get the happy outcome she negotiated for (she kept trusting Book and forgetting there's someone else on his ship with his own agenda), but I'm not sure I expected the weapon to actually go off in the end. Fortunately the aliens just kept on mining instead of launching an all out war and annihilating everyone with their vastly superior technology. Plus it seems like that the explosion didn't go through the wormhole and hit Species 10-C on the other side like they feared, so really everyone actually got off lightly here. Especially Burnham, who got to keep her job after her utter failure. Though I suppose it was actually Nhan's failure really. She had one job! Overall this was a fairly average episode for me. I didn't hate it, I didn't love it. It inspired no strong emotions in me. • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION Both of the ships in this episode have gotten upgrades. Book's ship has a transporter security disruption field it didn't have in Choose to Live and Discovery can now jump while cloaked.

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NEXT WEEK

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the final four episodes of Star Trek: Discovery season four! I usually put up the next part as soon as possible, but I need to buy time to get more writing done so it'll be coming next week.

If you can remember any of your own thoughts about these ancient Star Trek episodes, leave a comment below!