- 3-01 - That Hope is You, Part 1
- 3-02 - Far From Home
- 3-03 - People of Earth
- 3-04 - Forget Me Not
This is one of those times where I already wrote these reviews right after watching the episodes, so was genuinely clueless about what was going to happen next, aside from the glimpses in the trailer after each episode. Well okay to be honest I wrote a first draft, these have been rewritten a bit since then, but I'm not exactly editing in correct guesses to make me seem like the best at Star Trek.
There will be HUGE SPOILERS for every episode this season, plus earlier episodes too. I mean I can't even mention the season's premise without spoiling the end of season 2.
Note: I rate episodes on a 1-9 scale, with 5 being the extreme low end of 'good'.
| Star Trek: Discovery | ||||||||||||||
| 3-01 | That Hope is You, Part 1 |
7 | ||||||||||||
Burnham flies out of the time portal in her Red Angel suit and collides with a ship piloted by a courier called Book. They both crash on a nearby planet and with the suit destroyed he's her only hope to get back to Discovery. They fight, they team up, he betrays her, she gets drugged, and the episode into an action movie. But after some Jumper teleportation and a trance worm massacre they eventually manage to get the endangered cargo in his ship to a sanctuary. Along the way Burnham discovers that almost all dilithium exploded 120 years ago, crippling Starfleet, and she helps a Starfleet wannabe put his flag up in exchange for him helping her find Discovery. Nice
job Burnham, your mother managed to do hundreds of jumps with her Red Angel suit, but you went and broke yours after just eight or so. Then you had it fly into space and self destruct! You could've at least
taken the time crystal out first, Captain Pike sacrificed his future for that thing!
I don't know what I was expecting from this episode exactly, but I had a feeling from the trailers it was going to involve Burnham being stranded on a planet and having to wait around for a year or three, growing braids. Fortunately this was not the case. Instead she went on a weird action adventure, as it turns out that the far future is Farscape, where a typical day involves being drugged, teleported into the sea and eaten by a giant worm. Poor Burnham suffers many indignities in the John Crichton role this episode, mostly due to her association with the mysterious Book. We still don't know a lot about him, but as Outrageous Okonas go he's definitely more of a Mal Reynolds than a Neelix, and he's given enough screen time here to firmly establish him as this season's guest star. In fact it's only him and Burnham in this story, with Discovery entirely absent, and the more I write Burnham's name the more I wonder just a little bit more if she's the cause of the Burn. The clues are all there: their names both start with 'Burn' and she's apparently responsible for everything in this series. There's been theories going around the internet for what caused the Burn, the one that sounded the most plausible to me was Omega particles wrecking subspace, but I would never have called that it was due to dilithium exploding everywhere. That's a pretty damn weird thing to happen and the episode doesn't even begin to explain it. In fact that seems like it's going to be the big mystery at the heart of the season. So FTL travel is still very much possible and ships have all kinds of ways to do it now, but they don't have the catalyst, or whatever dilithium is. Suddenly its presence in the opening titles since the beginning of the show has become a lot more relevant... though it's also a lot more red this season for some reason. It seems like communication and long range scanning has also been affected somehow, as there's a real lack of information about what's really going on and what's left standing. It's still unclear what this Star Trek universe looks like without all the star trekking and how all our favourite planets are coping. We do get to see one consequence in this episode: endangered animals are even more endangered. It might seem like a bit of an unusual problem to focus on for the first story in a new future, but it makes it clear that Federation did some actually good while it was around. It shows how a future without Starfleet is a bad thing, without having a character say 'There's no one around to scan all the nebulas anymore, it's horrible!' Overall I thought the episode did a great job of introducing a darker future without being depressing. The Federation has fallen, Starfleet blew up, Burnham's separated from everyone she cares about, animals are going extinct, and it's time to have some fun. Sonequa Martin-Green definitely seemed to be having fun with the role this time, as she was allowed to be a lot goofier than usual, in addition to the usual agonised crying etc. We also got to visit a planet for once and the location shooting was fantastic. It made the episode appear very expensive and cinematic, and it looked pretty nice as well. Shame about the plastic makeup on that Orion though, I'm not sure what happened there. The episode was a bit of a step down coming from Lower Decks' amazing season finale (and Discovery's season finale for that matter), but it was very solid television I thought. • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION |
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| 3-02 | Far From Home |
7 | ||||||||||||
Discovery crashes on a planet covered in living ice that grows to engulf the ship. Saru and Tilly decide to go for a walk to see if they can get help and end up in a space western. Fortunately Georgiou crept out as well and she turns up just in time for the bar fight. Meanwhile a severely wounded Stamets pointlessly risks his life to repair a part that someone else could've fixed... and it turns out they were too late to escape the ice anyway. But then Burnham comes to the rescue and tells them that the previous episode took place a whole year earlier. That's a bit weird. Why is this called Far from Home and not That Hope is You, Part 2? Did someone make a mistake when they were reporting the title?
That Hope is You (part 1?) showed us what the series could be if it made Michael Burnham the absolute focus, instead of being half about her and half about the crew. It worked pretty well I thought! Now Far From Home gives us the flip side, showing us a version of Discovery that's a proper ensemble series, with no Burnham. It also worked pretty well I thought! This isn't a The Enemy Within situation where the two sides of the show have to come together again to survive and be whole, they were doing just fine apart. In fact I was actually disappointed when Burnham showed up at the end with a tow truck, and not just because it meant that the crew could've just stayed on the ship and sat on their hands all episode and everything would've still worked out fine. I wanted them to stay separated, at least for a little bit longer. But this was nice to have a proper ensemble while it lasted. In fact the episode gave everyone something to do or say, at least at first, before most of them faded away to let the main cast take over. We even learned a bit about Nhan and why she went to the future with them. Turns out she did it for Airiam! We didn't learn what's up with Detmer though, which surprised me considering the episode kept drawing attention to her. It seems like maybe her implant is damaged? Either way, if she's actually getting an arc this season I hope it leads to someone finally telling us what the thing does. We at least learned how many people stayed on Discovery for their one-way trip to the future, and it wasn't everyone. There's only 88 people left on Discovery now (an important number for time travel, at least according to Back to the Future) which means maybe 50 people remained behind on the Enterprise. That's about the same number of crewmembers as the NX-01 and far fewer than Kirk's Enterprise or even Voyager. Not a lot of people for a ship that's twice as long as either of them. Though it looked really small somehow this episode when it was trying to escape the ice. The A plot was all about Saru and Tilly going on an away mission together, which has somehow never happened before. In fact the crew have rarely gotten out much at all, especially in the first season, but now we've had two episodes of beautiful Iceland locations in a row. We never really got to see how the Discovery team would've handled a problem like Zareh back in the 23rd century with a full crew complement, state of the art functional technology and Starfleet backing them up, but here he seemed like a legitimate threat to them all. At least until Georgiou and Saru wiped out his whole gang. It seems like Saru uses the Steven Seagal style of combat: minimum effort, maximum arms getting snapped. The B plot was all about Stamets recovering from his five minute coma and teaming up with Reno to fix the ship before the killer ice got them. The characters were really stupid here but I liked it because it was a very human kind of stupid and they were called out on it. Nilsson was willing, capable and available to get the job done, but Stamets had to fight the pain and get it done to prove to himself... that he's an idiot. But he got the ship fixed in the nick of time, except not really as the ice had already covered it too much and they needed Burnham to bail them out. Even when she's not in a story she's still the hero! Overall I'd put this on the same level as the season premiere. It tells a good story, it uses its characters well, and it gives us another good reason why we need Starfleet back. Plus it provides us a few more clues about this new future they've arrived in and left me with some questions: Are we really done with Control or can it use 32nd century programmable matter to create a new Leland? Has Detmer's implant been infected like Airiam was? If the Federation really is the V'draysh, then did they turn evil? And how the hell did Burnham grow so much hair in just one year? • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION |
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| 3-03 | People of Earth |
7 | ||||||||||||
A repaired (but scarred) Discovery drops by Earth and ends up in the middle of a conflict between raiders and the United Earth Defence Force. Burnham runs off with all the ship's dilithium as part of a cunning plan she hasn't told anyone about, but Saru plays along and they ultimately reveal that the raiders are just desperate humans from Titan in need of help. Also Adira joins the crew and the human officers get to visit a tree at what used to be Starfleet Headquarters. People of Earth is about
the people of Earth returning home to find the people of Earth aren't as welcoming as expected due to
the attacks by raiders who also turn out to be people of Earth... kind of. There are pretty
much three threads running through this episode: Burnham adjusting to being back on the ship, the ship
returning to an unknown future Earth, and Adira snooping around the ship.
The Adira plot is pretty much nothing, but it does give us a new crewmember, boosting the number to 90. That's counting Georgiou, even though she's pretty much an Evil Neelix, who invites herself to all the staff meetings and issues demands despite not being in the chain of command (she's great). Turns out Adira is a human with a Trill symbiont, which is a combination we haven't seen since Next Gen. It might even be a symbiont we've met before, which would be a bit of coincidence, but I wouldn't complain. I'm also not complaining about the series remembering the Sphere Data, which gives them a way to know more about alien races like the Trill than a 23rd Century crew usually would. The Burnham plot properly introduces the new version of the character, who's loosened up a bit during her gap year. She grew up on Vulcan and went straight into Starfleet (then to prison, and then back to Starfleet), so she's never had a chance to just be a person and experience the real world as an adult until now. She needed a chance to grow the braids. Getting to see more of the actress's charm shine through is definitely a good thing, especially in scenes where she's playing off Book. Unfortunately she hasn't grown out of her tendency to go rogue and her plan to let Discovery take a hit for them was quickly proven to be kind of insane. I've been curious to see if the series was going to actually acknowledge that Discovery is like a galleon in an age of nuclear aircraft carriers and I got everything I wanted here. Discovery's shields survived the whole of Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2 under constant bombardment by the entire Section 31 fleet, but a United Earth vessel knocked them out in one go and blew a chunk out of their bridge as a bonus. It's no wonder Detmer was reluctant to do move the ship into the way; you don't need to be traumatised to know that's going to lead to a bad time. In fact I'm surprised the Sphere Data even let them do it. The United Earth story was bittersweet in a very satisfying way, for me anyway. The writers managed to push just far enough to show us a broken future without breaking Star Trek, and they subverted my expectations in a good way. I knew the Federation had almost collapsed but it never occurred to me that Earth would have left! The Starfleet Headquarters buildings still exist but Starfleet itself is long gone, leaving a slightly xenophobic defence fleet protecting an isolationist world. But on the plus side, Earth is a self-sufficient paradise that's survived the intervening centuries of Borg attacks, whale probes, and other sci-fi bullshit just fine. It's not the home base the crew had hoped for and it'll be no help to them, but it's doing okay. And that's such a damn relief, for them and for me. Discovery didn't quite work as a prequel, the tone and style of it didn't mess with The Original Series or the movies, but now the series is in the future under the command of their new showrunner it's working pretty well so far. Plus the episode somehow provides more closure than Voyager's finale. The crew get to return to Starfleet Headquarters and hug a tree that provides a link to their own time, Burnham is a first officer again, and Georgiou's telescope is back in a ready room. I didn't quite get why Saru chose that moment to unpack it at first, but then I realised it's because it's his ready room now! He was just waiting for Burnham to make him the official captain before moving in. I don't know if I'd say this was better than the last two episodes, but I wouldn't say it was worse either. Seems that this Jonathan Frakes guy is a good director. The episode also shows where the Discovery stands in this future: they've got the most fragile starship in space but they've got the advantage of the spore drive, the Sphere Data, a sizeable stash of dilithium, Saru's Starfleet benevolence and Georgiou's Terran violence. We also know that cake is eternal, and that the crew actually have the sense to tell people they're the descendants of the original crew on a generation ship instead of revealing the truth. It's always nice when characters are smart! • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION |
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| 3-04 | Forget Me Not |
6 | ||||||||||||
Burnham and Adira visit the Trill to unlock her memories and learn that she's repressed her boyfriend's tragic death. Meanwhile Saru and Culber try to help the crew release their stress with help from the ship's computer... which is sounding a lot more like Zora from Calypso now. First there's arguing at the dinner table, then there's laughter at Buster Keaton, and then Georgiou gets handed some popcorn. This has to be one of my least favourite episodes of Discovery so far, but it's a very consistent series so that's not actually saying much.
The episode's all about mental health this time. The crew have all recovered from their injuries (even the ship's finally had its scars healed), but they're a little messed up from the giant fight to save all life in the galaxy and their one way trip to an unfriendly future. There's fewer fun shoot outs and fist fights in this story, more sad piano music and people hanging around a garden in robes. It went straight for the emotions, taking us on another trip inside a mindscape with a dead lover like Vaulting Ambition, but I wasn't moved. They really struggled to explain why Burnham had to go down to Trill with Adira and I don't think they quite managed it, but it's a good thing she did as Adira needed some time with the protagonist to sort out her mental wiring. Turns out that it was her boyfriend's sudden death after a near-inexplicable accident that blocked the symbiont's memories (along with her own), but now she's sorted that out he's going to be showing up as an imaginary ghost. Like Ezri Dax's serial killer host, except slightly less creepy. Adira made a good impression this episode, the Trill not so much. They went from 'she's an abomination' to 'she'll save us' in record time (Burnham and Adira couldn't have been in that underwater dreamscape for long or they would've drowned), but hey at least they're ready to sign on to rejoin the Federation! I don't know why they believe Discovery is capable of reconnecting their planets in that kind of way, but it's nice that they're onboard. It's less happy to learn that the situation's been flipped for them and they now have more symbionts than potential hosts. That kind of implies that there aren't a lot of Trills left in the galaxy. The B-plot was pretty sedate as well, but it was great to see the bridge crew getting to do some acting. I also liked how Saru doesn't learn a lesson from the dinner and then try a different approach, as I'm so used to that happening on TV. Instead he just moved onto Zora's other suggestion, and it turned out that the crew had to vent before they could get together and enjoy Buster Keaton. That's entertainment from 330 years before their time and they're watching it 930 years after their time. Zora does like her classic movie holograms. Oh plus Zora's finally turned up! She hasn't got a name yet and she still might be an primitive version of the character we saw in Calypso, but it's her, and the series actually confirmed my theory that it was the Sphere Data that caused the computer to evolve! I was worried that the series would basically just ignore the Sphere Data once it stopped being a McGuffin and I'm glad that's very much not the case. I'm also glad that Saru was onto her, despite appearing completely clueless in their first interaction. The Sphere Data knows that the crew are an important part of Discovery so now it's working to protect them in the same way as it protects the ship. Makes sense to me! Personally if my computer suddenly developed a strange voice and told me to move the entire crew to a room with only a computer-controlled forcefield between them and outer space I'd skip that suggestion, but they've probably defeated Control forever so their AI is probably safe. Probably. Anyway, Zora is our second big clue (after the word 'V'draysh') that we're on the path to Calypso and another time jump might be in Discovery's near future. Next though, they're visiting the Federation! • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION |
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This is apparently the first time in Star Trek history that the Starfleet
arrowhead insignia has been called a 'delta shield' on screen.
This was the first episode to feature the final season 3 logo with 'Star Trek'
written in the Original Series font instead of the old Discovery font. Apparently That Hope is You, Part 1 had the
wrong logo because of a mistake they didn't have time to fix, but it was corrected later.
We've seen similar shots of Starfleet Headquarters and that tree everyone remembers wasn't actually there before.
Tal has had fewer hosts than Dax had at the time of Deep Space Nine, despite the fact that Tal must be over twice as old now than Dax was then to have had a host wearing a Picard-era uniform.
NEXT TIME
You can leave a comment about these four episodes right now though!
In fairness, most of Discovery seems to be turbolift shafts and launch tubes, so there's just not room for hundreds of crewmembers.
ReplyDeleteI might have something to say about the turbolift shafts later...
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