Star Trek: Discovery - Season 4 Review, Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the climactic resolution to Star Trek: Discovery's fourth season!

In fact I'll be covering four episodes, telling the story of Discovery's journey... to do stuff. I'm not going to spoil anything in this intro. I don't have to, the episode titles are doing that for me.

• 4-10 - The Galactic Barrier
  
• 4-11 - Rosetta
  
• 4-12 - Species Ten-C
  
• 4-13 - Coming Home
  

There will be SPOILERS past this point though, for all four episodes and previous Trek stories. I won't spoil a thing about what happens next however. Mostly because I don't want to, but also because season 5 hasn't aired yet at the time I'm writing this and no one really knows what happens next.

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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
4-10	The Galactic Barrier		6
Episode: 052 | Writer: Anne Cofell Saunders | Director: Deborah Kampmeier | Air Date: 24-Feb-2022 Discovery sets out on journey to Species 10-C's homeworld, which is complicated by the way the mycelial network thins out at the Galactic Barrier, preventing them from using the spore drive to get through. This part of the barrier features bubbles they can use to cross it, but it's not a safe or easy task, and the ship is almost destroyed during the journey. Also they get news that Earth and Ni'Var are both going to get wrecked if they don't succeed. Meanwhile Book and Tarka return to his old Emerald Chain lab/prison to get something to reinforce their ship to make the trip through the barrier themselves, and Tarka tells a story about his past. It's funny how they've made an episode where Burnham really nailing her job as captain, but the episode focuses on Tarka instead! Okay there's plenty of Burham and Discovery action as well, but it kind of feels like a B plot to the Tarka story. One of the problems I had with the Tarka plot is that it didn't really give me any new information. We already knew that Tarka had a friend, we knew that they were held prisoner by the Emerald Chain, we knew that they wanted to escape with their interdimensional transporter and we knew that only one of them got out. Okay the bit about Tarka doing something bad was new, but it was said so quickly that I actually missed what it was to be honest. Another problem I had is that was that they decided to bury Osric Chau under a ton of alien makeup, and it made it hard for me to take their emotional scenes seriously. This isn't my first sci-fi series, and I can typically buy into any dramatic scene featuring Ka D'Argo on Farscape or G'Kar on Babylon 5, but this guy's rubber mask was a little too much for me. And the bit about the two geniuses reciting every third digit of the golden ratio was so boring that it sent one of them to sleep, so what chance did I have? The Discovery plot was split between the perilous journey through the Galactic Barrier, and Burnham and Rillak arguing with each other again, and honestly I think I was more interested in what was going on between the captain and her president. Sure their dialogue was incredibly earnest to the point where I have to wonder if actual aliens are writing for the series, but it seemed like they were facing a good dilemma with no right answer. Though I don't get how Ni'Var and Earth can be in imminent danger from DMA, as the two planets are 16 light years apart. I mean sure it's flinging debris at them, but it'd take years, not days to get there. The clue is in the name, 'light year'. Also wouldn't Andoria be hit as well? I guess no one cares about them right now. The journey through the Barrier on the other hand got a bit ridiculous to me, because it made the ship seem weaker than Kirk's ancient vessel even though it's had a 32nd century refit. In fact they even mentioned that it's had brand new shield upgrades at the start of the episode. But hey at least the shields stopped anyone from getting godlike powers... that we know of. In fact we even got dialogue to confirm that the shielding was was necessary to prevent the energy from burning out their brains. My favourite part of the episode was when they showed off the classic Starfleet hardware at the start, including the old cylindrical universal translator from TOS and a sneak peek at the beautiful new Strange New Worlds communicator! I'm not exactly sure why Dr Kovich is so certain that the universal translator's not going to work with Species 10-C however, as episodes about communication issues are pretty rare and super-advanced aliens often have super-advanced translators of their own. Speaking of communication, it seems like Discovery's communications officer is going to be leaving the series, as we got a suspiciously long scene explaining why he isn't going to be on the ship for the last four episodes. It's weird, I feel like the guy's had more to say this season than in the last three seasons combined, but all his scenes are about how he's not going to be around much. Overall I thought the episode was alright, but Tarka's flashbacks really dragged it down for me.
4-11	Rosetta		6
Episode: 053 | Writer: Terri Hughes Burton | Director: Jeff Byrd & Jen McGowan | Air Date: 03-Mar-2022 Burnham leads a team to investigate a planet near to Species 10-C's hyperfield and discovers alien hydrocarbons that trigger emotions. Meanwhile Book and Tarka infiltrate Discovery to make a blind spot in their sensors big enough to let them attach their ship to its hull. Book makes contact with Ndoye and they agree not to make a move unless Burnham fails, while Tarka is discovered by Reno and decides to kidnap her. Also Adira wants to talk to Detmer because she thinks she's cool. The episode is split into two stories, Burnham's proper Star Trek away mission to a planet and Book's infiltration mission... which is weird because there's also a Dyson ring structure nearby and plenty of characters available to get a third mission going. I suppose it's less dramatic if everyone's hopes aren't resting on Burnham's expedition. Though the delegates they've brought along ruined Burnham's literal slow motion hero walk by interrupting the team to remind them that they don't have time to waste. And then it turns out they were just going to beam to the shuttle anyway! I suppose it did make sense that the President would want to stop her to question the wisdom of having the captain and first officer on a potentially dangerous mission. She didn't question bringing the ship's counsellor to a dead world though! I suppose he's also an expert on biology though. Plus I'm glad that so many of the heroes got to go out to a planet together. I definitely approve of away missions, especially when Detmer's invited along, everyone's wearing flashy Mass Effect suits, and they're exploring such a well-realised alien environment. We've come a long way from a few rocks on a stage with a red-tinted backdrop. It's just a shame they didn't find anything there, except some minor weirdness and a few piles of hydrocarbons, and by the point that they stopped to discuss their emotions I wasn't really feeling it anymore.  I remember when the episode Stormy Weather came out I was kind of rolling my eyes at people who were mocking it, saying things like "Even the ship has emotions now!" I thought it was the natural progression of the Zora arc and it worked well in the episode. But I have to point out that in this episode they went to a planet and even the dirt had emotions. It turned out that the reason they were all being affected was that the alien hydrocarbons were beyond anything ever encountered before and the suits didn't know to filter them out. A suit for exploring unknown environments that doesn't filter out unknown substances seems kind of flawed. Though I guess it's fortunate that 32nd century spacesuits are too advanced to be hermetically sealed or else they might not have discovered the crucial clue. There were two things that annoyed me here: the scary sound that kept playing started getting ridiculous around about the second time it was used, and not one single person mentioned Detmer's implant as being the possible reason why she wasn't affected by the hallucinations. It wasn't the reason, and they might have all been well aware it couldn't have been the reason, but I wanted someone to mention it!  I do have to give them credit however for bringing up Detmer's past trauma a lot more organically than they did Owo's and Rhys' in early episodes. Unfortunately these scenes have turned into a running joke for me, so I wasn't able to take her tragic backstory seriously at all. Especially as it's pretty much doubled what we know about her as a person, and they're standing around chatting about it when there's only hours before the debris hits Earth and Ni'Var. Less talking, more saving the world! Though even if they do stop the DMA, that's going to do nothing about the debris that's already on its way to wreck their planets... even though everyone's acting like it will. Also I'm glad that Detmer can fly good, but I wish characters would talk good. I feel like I start every episode this season thinking "Hey, this one's much better than those other episodes. Whoever wrote this story is pretty good!" and then it wears me down until the joy is gone. Not because the episode's slow paced, but because I need more from its conversations than it's giving me. One conversation in particular stood out to me in fact, and that's the one where the President talks to the new linguist. It's pretty unusual to get a scene like that without any regular characters present, in fact it reminded me of my beloved Deep Space Nine, and I was curious about what the linguist's deal was. He's been one of the more interesting characters to me this season, just because he's been allowed to be a bit more jokey than the others. But then it turned out that the scene was about the President chewing him out for being jokey instead of supportive, and at the end we see that he's learned his lesson and he'll knock it off from now on. This is not an atmosphere in which an acerbic character like Reno can thrive! So it's probably for the best she got kidnapped by Tarka and taken to Book's ship, where people are both allowed and encouraged to be assholes. Tarka taking Reno hostage was very Tarka and also the exact opposite of what his plan was supposed to achieve! There's no way the Discovery crew aren't going to notice that their chief engineer (or whatever she is) is missing! Wait, this is Reno I'm talking about, it's a surprise when she actually turns up. The actor was unable to visit the set much this season due to Covid so even when she's in an episode she's barely there. At least Tarka didn't kill her. I was getting worried for a moment. Meanwhile Book's infiltration mission featured a lot of eavesdropping on various conversations, which was an interesting change in format. He decides to contact the Earth general who tells him that they should let Burnham try begging Species 10-C to stop first, and then if that fails they can go with Tarka's backup plan to stop 10-C by force. Though hang on, this doesn't seem like something anyone would argue with. Of course they're going to try to stop 10-C if communication fails. So everyone's basically on the same side now right? The two of them spent an episode sneaking around, making secret deals and kidnapping people to achieve what Discovery was going to do anyway. Well, unless Burnham doesn't want to have a Plan B if communication fails, which would be insane. Especially as it's brought up in dialogue. "What if they know what they've done and they don't care? How do we connect with a species like that?"  Incidentally, the continual use of phrases like 'connect' and 'common ground' is putting me off now. It's good to have themes running through your stories, but Discovery is prioritising the message over the drama this season and worse it's doing it in a way that makes me cringe.
4-12	Species Ten-C		7
Episode: 054 | Writer: Kyle Jarrow | Director: Olatunde Osunsanmi | Air Date: 10-Mar-2022 The crew struggle to decipher Species 10-C's language using what they learned from the planet. Progress is made, but Tarka just wants the DMA power core so he throws Book in the cell with Reno and detaches Book's ship from Discovery so he can fly over and get it. 10-C cuts off communication but keeps the ship in a bubble, preventing them from stopping Tarka from causing a disaster that will kill them all. A lot of Discovery episodes this season won me over early on, then started to lose me as the story went on. Species Ten-C was no different, except for the part about losing me. Sure there were little things that bothered me, like a room full of people with different perspectives bringing in three more random people so the episode could make a point about different perspectives being good. Plus every mention of feelings, or reaching, or support makes me roll my eyes at this point, but that's mostly due to overexposure over the course of the season. The episode itself is fairly blameless. I liked that Species 10-C really were a brand new species, not the Kelvans or the Borg or Tarka's friend's species or anyone else we've already met before. It means they really were something entirely new for the characters to work out. Plus it turned out that Dr Kovich was right in his baseless assumption that the universal translator wouldn't be any help, and most of the A plot is about finding a way to communicate with them. The story's a little bit Star Trek: The Motion Picture and a little bit Darmok, but it's mostly about a group of clever people working to solve a problem. And honestly I don't know enough about molecules or language to poke holes in anything they were doing. It's hard to believe that this is the simplest language the 10-C could think of to teach them, but hey this kind of thing comes with the genre. The A plot is interesting, but the B plot is more exciting, as it's about Tarka being an absolute bastard. Tarka is one of the most interesting characters in the series, partly because he gets the clever dialogue, so he's been a favourite of mine. But man his single-minded determination to get what he wants even if it leads to the annihilation of Discovery, the Earth and the 10-C's entire system makes him incredibly hateable. He's basically Dr Soran from Star Trek: Generations, willing to blow up a civilisation if it gets him into paradise, and I want Kirk and Picard to come out of a time anomaly and beat the crap out of him. I'd settle for Burnham and Book doing it! People have complained about the season's slow pace and I really felt it this episode, but I think that's probably deliberate in this case. There's basically a bomb right beneath the characters and that tension drags out time. It especially dragged out time for Culber who took maybe hours to get down to engineering to look for Reno. I mean bloody hell man, just beam around with your badge like literally everyone else is doing! Also I kept waiting for Reno to do something to save the day with that gadget she had hidden in her sleeve. But everything went horrifically to plan in both plots. Horrifying because Tarka's plan took just a little less time than Discovery's, meaning that they were on the verge of solving the problem when he screwed everything up. The episode also continued the Saru and T'Rina romance arc, which has been really slow paced this season. But it seems to be working for a lot of the show's audience and I don't feel like I can criticise it. All I can say is that I was far more fascinated by the reflections on the orb in this scene, and I was wondering how they did it. They've been using an AR wall for these scenes, so everything behind them in scenes like this is generally a pre-rendered background displayed in real time. But the reflection matches the actors' performance perfectly, so that part must have been composited in afterwards, right? Did they film them from the other angle? Are they standing in front of a mirror? Did the VFX team just cut them out of the shot and clone them in the background, making them too blurry to tell which side of them we're seeing? We also got a little backstory for Book this episode, just a tiny bit about the origin of his name. Turns out that he's the latest in a long line of Cleveland Bookers, who pass their contacts and the reputation they've built up onto the next when they retire. That's actually a really nice explanation, I liked it. Though resolving his biggest mystery does strip away a lot of his plot armour and sets up him for a redeeming sacrifice next episode. Or at least a goodbye. He is the one with empathy powers, even if they didn't work so great on the butterfly people in episode one, so I can see him being the key to 'connecting' with Species 10-C. Overall this was a good episode I thought! One of the best this season. It did a lot right and had very few things to irritate me. Plus also revealed that Zora isn't actually spying on everyone all the time as she had no idea Reno wasn't in engineering. So people actually do have some privacy! That's such a relief.
4-13	Coming Home		7
Episode: 055 | Writer: Michelle Paradise | Director: Olatunde Osunsanmi | Air Date: 17-Mar-2022 The Discovery crew escape the bubble by burning out their spore drive, but someone has to be sent out on a suicidal shuttle mission to stop Tarka from going after the DMA power core. Burnham has grown to the point where she's willing to send someone else, but Detmer's off the hook when Ndoye volunteers. Fortunately she survives! Tarka's not so lucky however, and even though he comes to his senses and tries to beam his partner to Discovery, Book's transporter signal is lost. The crew meets with Species 10-C and manages to explain why the DMA is bad, and 10-C reveals that they intercepted Book's transporter beam! Book uses his empathy power to finish the job, and 10-C agrees to stop mining and clean up their mess... just in time to save Tilly and Vance, along with everyone else on Earth. They even bring Discovery back home, and everyone hugs, though Book has to go and do community service for his crime.   Okay first I have to mention that once again I'm disappointed that the season didn't end with Riker swooping in to save the day. Overall though it's hard to call this episode a disappointment, because it pretty much stayed within the lines drawn by the previous episode. It did not fall below or exceed my expectations. I was very let down by Federation technology this episode however, as first we learn that it'll take Discovery decades to get home with its conventional warp drive, indicating that there's been very little improvement since Voyager's day (never mind the timeship Relativity's day). Then Discovery's unable to beam Book from an exploding ship! I've seen so many people get beamed off so many exploding ships, going all the way back to the Original Series, that it was downright bizarre seeing Book's signal cut out when the ship blew up. That's not how it works! Also killing the guy off like that felt downright cruel. Then it seemed like the aliens had brought him back from the afterlife and that was even more bizarre! Fortunately it turned out that they'd just intercepted his transporter beam, so everything made perfect sense in the end. In fact I feel a bit dumb for not figuring it out, but hey if the trained Starfleet crew didn't suspect a thing, what chance did I have? I'm still not happy about their crappy warp drive though. Seriously, it would've taken them decades to get back? It's kind of frustrating when Discovery says things like 'it'll take decades to get back' or 'we've never left the galaxy before', as it's putting limits on the series that are set before it. Fortunately Species 10-C (we never do learn their name) gives them a lift home, so there's no consequences for their spore drive blowing up either. Plus T'Rina's telepathy incident and Ndoye's suicide mission also have their consequences undone. It feels like the only reason her shuttle ride was presented as a suicide mission was to redeem her, which feels a bit unnecessary at this point. Also I think they should've really hammered home that it was a suicide mission before the scene of Detmer volunteering, because I was only half aware of what they just said. It was only when I saw Detmer looking very resolute and Owo looking concerned that I figured out something was up. The episode also could've done a better job of drawing attention to the fact that Burnham does here what she couldn't do in Rubicon: ordering Book's death. In fact just sending someone else to do a dangerous mission instead of doing it herself is a big step for her, as she failed to do that in Kobayashi Maru. This is the end of her arc this season, the pieces are in all in place, but her big moment goes by like any other plot point. The scene of her pulling herself back together after his 'death', and becoming the captain again was good though. Anyway, this is a very plot-driven story without many interruptions by people talking about connections and reaching out. Well, except for the entire scene where they talk to Species 10-C. I'm not sure what to think about the scene really as it's just a very straightforward conversation where they lay out what's happening and ask Species 10-C to stop blowing up their planets. This is very strange as the last episode was all about how they're struggling to communicate even the most basic concepts, like 'us'. Now they're able to say whatever they want to and Saru just types it in. I guess Dr Hirai must have been busy off-screen improving the process. Plus it's a bit ironic that Book has a whole speech about how the 10-C don't need their space wall to protect them right after the scenes of Earth's space wall protecting them from apocalypse-sized rocks! Well, for a little while anyway. It's not a solution, but it certainly bought them time. Then the episode ends with lots of scenes of characters just chatting between themselves and honestly I had no problem with this. It was nice for Book to get a proper goodbye, even if I'm not certain that he's really leaving the series. Either way he's gotten a much more enlightened form of justice than Burnham received for her crimes during the Battle of the Binary Stars. The Federation's come a long way. It was also great to see Earth re-join the Federation, though I was mostly relieved that the Discovery writers didn't blow it up to be honest. I wasn't keen on the scene with the Earth president arriving though, because the direction is saying 'Look who we got as a cameo!' instead of 'Here is the Earth president'. The actor is apparently a famous American politician but even though I didn't recognise them I knew right away it had to be someone. The final shot of Africa worked a lot better, as Earth is basically Space Africa to the humans we've met in this timeline: not necessarily somewhere they've been themselves, but it's the birthplace of their ancestors. And now Starfleet Command has apparently returned home! Man I hope this means they'll drop that horrible blue tint now. It made sense when we didn't know if Starfleet could be trusted, but at this point it just makes Starfleet HQ look cold and unpleasant. They clearly know how to do warm lighting, just look at Burnham's bedroom! Overall it was a very 'nice' conclusion. With hugs and everyone going on vacation and Admiral Vance's family showing up. The Federation is coming back together due to Starfleet figuratively kicking ass in a crisis that required science and diplomacy instead of firing missiles. It's kind of fortunate that they were facing extremely reasonable alien miners who just stopped mining when they asked them to, but it's a nice change after dealing with the Klingons, Control and the Emerald Chain. In fact they even sucked all the debris back again somehow. The episode could've really sucked too, this season hasn't been Discovery's greatest, but I think they stuck the landing. Mostly.

CONCLUSION

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Thank you Discovery season 4 for sharing your story.

I think my main issue with the first few seasons of Discovery was how nonsensical and overdramatic they were. Burnham kept finding mother figures and they kept getting eaten by her future boyfriend, or they turned out to be the emperor of the evil dimension, or they were time travellers fighting a war across history against a computer that will eradicate all life everywhere.

But season 4 Discovery is downright sensible a lot of the time. The science is 'Star Trek' weird, not 'mushroom-dimension' weird, Burnham doesn't have a fight inside the two-mile wide turbolift dimension at the end, and the storyline develops naturally without continually getting bored of the status quo it's just set up and swinging wildly to a different one. In fact they don't have many fights at all in this season and I don't think the crew kills a single person. Discovery is now a proper science vessel on a mission of discovery and diplomacy, and the big threat of the season just didn't understand that its mining operation was hurting anyone.

It's a bit like The Devil in the Dark, except from the perspective of the Horta... or I guess the Tilly plot from early season 2 from the perspective of the jahSepp. I've also heard people compare this season to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but I think it's more like One of Our Planets is Missing from the Animated Series. That's the one where the Enterprise crew discovers that a planet has been destroyed, goes on a dangerous journey through a cloud, and then tries to make a strange alien being understand that planets have intelligent life on them. Discovery's writers have managed to drag out a 20 minute story across 13 episodes! Either way the season is extremely Star Trek in every way... to the point where it almost feels like a cutting satire of Star Trek: The Next Generation and its rules against interpersonal conflict.

Season one was Drug Trek, as you'd expect from all the Alice in Wonderland references it had. It was trippy and dark and weird and paranoid. Season four is Hug Trek. Self-discovery was always part of the mix, but now it's the focus, with every episode about the characters analysing their feelings and what motivates them, and trying to cope after a catastrophe. The writers have chosen the themes of making connections, dealing with trauma, and being supportive, and they return to them relentlessly. And lots of viewers... are totally into this! It didn't work for me though. I got nothing from a lot of these scenes, I just sat there and waited for them to end.

I've been reading a lot of other people's thoughts on the style of dialogue and use of characters in the season, trying to pin down exactly what's been bothering me. Because it's been elusive. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of reviewers are much better at communicating their feelings about characters communicating their feelings than I am. But the basic gist is of the problem is that series has been jettisoning or softening its quirky, snarky and difficult characters, and everyone that remains talks like they've spent the gap between seasons training to be a therapist. Which is weird because only one of the main characters did that.

More scenes of characters interacting is good, Trek excels at being talky sci-fi, but the dialogue this season was missing wit, subtext, playfulness, humanity and all the things that make me care about the words that are coming out of their mouths. It was all so... earnest. The characters have entered the uncanny valley for me, as even Berman-era Star Trek people don't behave or talk like this! Everyone's very careful with their language in order to minimise any possible offense and they apologise afterwards when their concerns about the AI that's wrapped itself around the photon torpedo controls and life support could be considered to be hurtful. Lots scenes of people 'reaching' and being grateful for the chance to 'connect'. Lots of heartfelt emotionally open conversations. Like I said earlier, it feels like it was written by aliens.

Plus there were all these weird interruptions where a bridge character would suddenly bring up a traumatic event from their past, so that someone else could be a supportive ally. At first I put the unnatural dialogue down to bad writing, but the season is so consistent with it that I think it has to have been a deliberate choice by the showrunner. In fact there's one scene near the end where a character quips "In other words, don't screw this up," then gets a lecture about not being supportive enough, and it made me wonder what the writers' room was like. Well, I guess it would've been a writers' video chat this year, due to COVID. Though I think the pandemic's biggest influence was on the story itself.

This is a season about people dealing with a huge scary life-threatening crisis that affects everyone and lingers in the background for months, so there are some parallels there. It's a problem they have to live with, and unlike a lot earlier Trek they're also living with grief and uncertainty over multiple episodes. Unfortunately repetition breeds contempt and the series had already hit my limit for scenes of characters helping others with their issues by episode two. If you do something too much it's inevitably going to lose its emotional impact for the viewer. Then they'll start to get frustrated. Then they'll start to tune it out. Then they'll want to turn it off.

I've heard a lot of complaints about the pacing this season and how the story was spread too thin, but I think that's more of a problem with the content rather than the concept. Enterprise also had a season all about hunting for aliens sending a doomsday device towards Earth and got almost twice as many episodes out of the premise without dragging things out.

I did feel that the season seemed unusually planned out and consistent though. The start of the first episode is Burnham and Book making contact with an alien race, struggling to communicate precisely, giving them a gift and ultimately proving their good intentions, and this is all echoed by the ending. She's now Captain Burnham and her arc is all leading up to the moment where she has to sacrifice Ndoye in order to kill Book and then continue to function as their leader despite her grief. The actual scene wasn't pulled off as well as it could've been and it turns out that both characters survived, but the writers apparently knew exactly where they were going the whole time, and how they wanted Burnham to develop along the way. Plus putting her in the captain's chair really has pulled the two sides of the series together just like I hoped. She's now the centre of the bridge, not the universe.

Though she does hang out with the commander of Starfleet and the president of the Federation a lot... which works for me, as they're two of the best characters. The series took an unexpected interest in politics this season and I think President Rillak's presence as Burnham's frenemy mostly worked out.

It's just a shame the writers didn't have anywhere for the Adira and Gray plot to go. Not that there was even a plot there, just concern, and they didn't really give me much reason to care. They made a big deal about Gray being 'truly seen', in a very cringeworthy and obvious way, and then once he'd served his purpose he wasn't seen again! It made the two of them feel like pandering, and not the good kind of pandering... like when a series gives me a spaceship I recognise! Meanwhile Saru and T'Rina's arc this season was about two very reserved and dignified people making careful delicate steps to become closer. By episode 13 they get as far as holding hands or whatever. Didn't really work for me, I was bored to figurative tears, but I'm sure a lot of other people enjoyed it so I won't complain.

I did care about the destruction of Earth though, because for perhaps the first time in Star Trek I was genuinely not certain it'd make it. So I was very happy when the faster-than-light debris got dragged away from the planet while all the ships remained in place. I didn't understand why it was happening, but it would've been terrible if it hadn't, so I'm not questioning the miracle. Plus Earth is back in the Federation now! The Federation isn't entirely restored yet but they got two of the major players back this season. And the organisation definitely still has its heart, as after everything Book did he was sentenced to... community service. Proper Star Trek!

Another thing I liked was how Species 10-C really was an alien we'd never seen before. There was no twist, no shocking reveal that it was the Klingons or Gary Mitchell or whatever. Plus they weren't even humanoid. Discovery is actually seeking out new life and a new civilisation this season! They weren't even related to Burnham in some way (though they did threaten both of her homeworlds at once after first blowing up her boyfriend's world). The scenes of the crew trying to figure out how to communicate with them were some of the best in the season. More problem solving please next season!

So overall I'm glad that Discovery is extremely progressive this season (even the politicians were ultimately good guys), and it's nice that it's solved its split personality issue. The series isn't violence and emotions anymore, it's just emotions. But it goes so overboard with its messages about connecting to people, being supportive, dealing with trauma, and processing feelings that it feels like a Very Special Season of Discovery. It's so flooded with positive messages that it becomes a huge negative. For me anyway. It's not the themes that are the problem, it's the execution. I've got no problem with Star Trek being a bit preachy, that's kind of its thing, but it's not recommended to preach the same message for 13 episodes in a row. And they could be a bit less on-the-nose in the future.


My top three season 4 episodes:

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1. Stormy Weather (7)
2. Species Ten-C (7)
3. All In (7)

Every time I watch a Discovery episode lately I give it a score and then later on I look back at that score and think 'I'm being way too kind to this series'. But I'm pretty sure I enjoyed Zora picking a bad time to freak out in Stormy Weather, the crew trying to solve a communication issue in Species Ten-C, and Burnham and Owo having fun on a casino barge in All In. A lot of people weren't keen on that last one, maybe because they were eager to meet Species 10-C already, but I love seeing the crew go on away missions and hang out.


Bottom three season 4 episodes:

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11. The Galactic Barrier (6)
12. The Examples (6)
13. All is Possible (5)

The Galactic Barrier wasn't a terrible episode, but the scenes of Tarka's backstory really didn't work for me, for a number of reasons. The Examples was going pretty well until they met the remorseful prisoner, and All is Possible could've been alright if the drama with the cadets wasn't so trite and obvious. Galactic Barrier and All is Possible also suffered from actors being buried under too much makeup.


Next time on Star Trek: Discovery:

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What do I want from season 5? I want the series to promote the macho pilot and the cage-fighting ops officer to regular cast, and then let them have regular conversations instead of just exploring their traumas. Because if they're just going to act like season 4 character there's no point. I'd like the writers to include a variety of themes over the season instead of hitting the same ones over and over again until I'm sick of them. And I'd really appreciate it if they could stop giving scenes that nasty blue tint.

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NEXT TIME

Star Trek: Discovery will probably return at some point. I mean I've been writing about it for four years now, so I seem to be stuck doing this. But next on Sci-Fi Adventures, a veteran Starfleet team goes on a trip into Earth's past to save its future in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home!

Leave a comment if you find yourself motivated to do so.