- 3-08 - The Sanctuary
- 3-09 - Terra Firma, Part 1
- 3-10 - Terra Firma, Part 2
These reviews were written back when I first watched the episodes so I'm not pretending that I don't know what happens next, I really didn't know at the time. There'll still be GIANT SPOILERS for the story so far though.
Note: I rate episodes on a 1-9 scale, with 5 being worse than 'good' but better than 'bad'.
| Star Trek: Discovery | ||||||||||||||
| 3-08 | The Sanctuary |
6 | ||||||||||||
Discovery travels to Book's homeworld Kwejian to help his brother, but the planet is soon under siege by Osyraa herself in the Viridian because she wants to the crew to hand Ryn over. Fortunately Detmer is able to drive her ship away by flying around and around shooting at it in Book's ship, giving Book and his brother a chance to drive away the pests eating their crops with their powers combined (and Discovery giving them a bit of a boost). Also Adira falls asleep and Georgiou is dying. And they found the source of the Burn. Man this is a busy episode. I'm sitting here trying to think what to
write about first and I keep recalling subplots and revelations I'd
forgotten about.
 In other Adira news, Gray has stopped talking to them for some reason and I think Staments and Culber may have adopted them as their kid? It's unclear if Adira knows about this yet.  I don't mean her mysterious sickness, I mean her condition of constantly acting like a supervillain even though everyone knows she's not that bad. Burnham even calls her on it, saying that she didn't really kill her own mother like she claimed. Her flashbacks give clues that she did lose someone close to her however.  Turns out that the melody everyone in the 32nd century seems to know actually comes from a distress call broadcast from the source of the Burn that's being distorted by a neutron star. That sounds kind of implausible, but honestly when they mentioned 'distress call' and 'nebula' all I could think about was that Calypso already gave us a flash-forward to a ship in a nebula and it was Discovery. I was waiting for the reveal that it was sent by Michael Burnham. It's maybe a little strange that the crew don't race off to the rescue, but seeing as the call is a century old it doesn't seem like there's any need to be hasty. Plus it's Starfleet tradition to wait a hundred years before checking up on these things.  I'm not sure he settled on one in the end, but it appears that first officer Tilly is working out for him at least. It seems that he didn't really want a first officer after all, he wanted a personal assistant, and that's something that Tilly is very capable of (she's also good at demanding respect from Andorians, perhaps because Ryn's her husband in real life). It makes me wonder why Saru didn't make her his yeoman instead, if that what he actually wants. Sure the job didn't exist after the Original Series, but Discovery is from the time when it did.  Unfortunately Tilly's plan to have Detmer pull a Burnham and go rogue in a much inferior ship probably worked better in the writers' minds that it did on screen. Disabling a Star Destroyer in the Millennium Falcon by targeting the weak point and flying circles around it for half an hour is kind of dull when you do it in a video game and kind of ridiculous in live action. Still, she got the job done in the end. It's just a shame that it was blatantly the Discovery crew to blame, and Osyraa doesn't think for a minute that it wasn't. It feels like Saru made the most moral choices he could've (well, except for his choice to say 'Do you require assistance?' in the most mocking tone possible) but they may have just declared war over one Andorian.  On the plus side, throwing herself into a dangerous situation was apparently what she needed to help her recover from the trauma caused by throwing herself into dangerous situations. I don't know much about PTSD, but according to season 1 of Discovery that really isn't how this works.  Is this meant to be the same planet used as the trance worm sanctuary in That Hope is You, Part 1? The trees look the same, plus this episode is called The Sanctuary, but Burnham acts like she's never been here before and Book hasn't seen his brother in 15 years. Is Book's brother the planet's leader? We don't get to see anything but his (really nice) house and a forest, not even the starving people or the crops being eaten by pests, so it's hard to get a sense of the situation down there. The distances confused me a little as well. I got the impression that the first few eps of the season took place too far from the Alpha Quadrant for ships to travel there with normal warp, but Osyraa gets to Book's homeworld with regular warp in no time at all.  They've got to be better than Osyraa at least, as she executes her nephew early on just to prove her villain credentials. Though she's a surprisingly normal person aside from the plastic green face, and that's actually a bit of a relief after all those scenes of Narissa and Bjayzl hamming it up in Picard. I also appreciated how the 'previous on' clips at the start showed all the times Osyraa's name had been mentioned so far this season, because I barely noticed first time around. Overall this was another alright episode I thought. Didn't amaze me, didn't annoy me, I dozed off a bit during the scenes when Book and his brother were together and I rolled my eyes a few times too, but it also gave me some explosions and I'm easily pleased. • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION |
||||||||||||||
| 3-09 | Terra Firma, Part 1 |
7 | ||||||||||||
Burnham and Georgiou beam down to a snowy planet to find a cure for her condition and meet a mysterious stranger who's apparently one of those godlike beings. He's too cryptic to get any answers out of, so Georgiou walks through his door and finds herself in her own past, back in the Mirror Universe. Here she recruits Saru, counters Stamets' betrayal with a knife through the neck, and tries to redeem her evil daughter, Mirror Burnham. Well I feel like an idiot. I figured this episode was going to be about
time travel and getting Georgiou where she needs to be for her spin off
series. I completely missed the very obvious clue in the title that it was going to be a return to the Mirror Universe!
The Sphere Data pointing the crew towards a mysterious being and his convenient door got me rolling my eyes a bit, but it would've taken a hell of a lot of weirdness and technobabble to put Georgiou back into an earlier point in her life otherwise so I'll let them off. Plus it gave them an excuse to go film actors out in the snow for perhaps the first time ever in TV Trek (not that the production crew were expecting the snow to be there). It also means that the rules of Georgiou's Mirror Universe trip are completely unknown to us. Is any of this real? Is she capable of changing her past? Is that even a good idea seeing as she came really close to inadvertently destroying all life in the multiverse with the Charon? And why is the series using up their Tapestry episode on this instead of having Burnham trying to save Prime Georgiou instead? The episode doesn't arrive in the Mirror Universe until halfway through, but once we're there Georgiou becomes the absolute star. This is the first Mirror Universe story in Star Trek without even a trace of the Prime Universe crossing over... though that's not entirely true as Georgiou has been changed by her time with the Prime Discovery crew. We don't know how much she's changed however, so there's a question mark over all of her choices. Is she acting out of compassion and respect when she saves and recruits Saru or is it purely in support of her agenda? And would she have always tried so hard to redeem Mirror Burnham instead of executing her for treason? Putting Georgiou back in her element shows why she became the person she is, as we see how challenging it is for her to even save her own daughter without the people around her sensing weakness. It also gives the series a chance to redeem her a bit in time for her spin off, if she ultimately decides she can't live like this anymore. I thought Michelle Yeoh gave a good performance of someone appearing to be doing an impersonation of herself, uncomfortable in her previous life. All her 'I'm so evil!' supervillain quips completely disappear once she's back in her natural environment and she can't play around anymore. Meanwhile Soniqua Martin Green did a great job of being extremely comfortable as Genuine Evil Burnham, acting nothing like Fake Evil Burnham from season 1. The episode also gives us something we missed out on the first time we visited the Mirror Universe: the ISS Discovery! It's so nostalgic to see the ship back to its old design again for a little while, and we finally get to see Captain Killy in command! Also Landry's back! So's Hannah Cheeseman, possibly playing a fully human Airiam! Lots of dead people getting screen time here. But despite all the mentions of Lorca we didn't get any Jason Isaacs. Maybe they're saving him for next time? They did at least find time to give us an Owosekun vs Rhys fight in the corridor, which I did not expect to see in season 3. Also there was a bit of plot on the USS Discovery with Saru learning a lesson from Admiral Vance that saving crew members wins loyalty (so we're definitely not in Mirror Starfleet here). Plus we got the contents of the distress call this episode and it's not from Discovery! That was actually a genuine surprise to me, which I guess shows how little faith I have in the writers. But overall I thought this episode was a definite step up from the last few. It was more focused than the last episode and it had a story worth focusing on. They didn't go overboard with all the mirroring either, as all I spotted was Georgiou putting a sword to the neck of both her Burnhams, and the two of them going on a final walk in the snow that called back to their first walk in the desert at the beginning of the The Vulcan Hello. They didn't draw a giant delta shield with their footsteps this time though. • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION |
||||||||||||||
| 3-10 | Terra Firma, Part 2 |
7 | ||||||||||||
Georgiou continues to steer the Terran Empire down a slightly kinder and gentler path, while torturing her daughter out of love. It all ends in tragedy, but it turns out it was just a test and Georgiou passed! Her reward: she gets to travel to her spin-off series through the mysterious portal, which turns out to be the Guardian of Forever! They actually inverted the colour of the opening titles, like people hoped they would
during the original Mirror Universe arc! It's strange though that
they also flipped them vertically, because mirrors don't generally do that.
This is a really strange episode in general, as it's all about Emperor Georgiou trying to bring her daughter around to her side again through torture... because she's become a better person. She honestly seems to believe that subjecting her to months of agony is the most compassionate choice, which I guess shows she's still got a ways to go as a person. She does consistently make compassionate choices though, and it's ultimately her decision to help Saru that saves her, and perhaps the timeline she ended up in. Maybe it will have a better future than the Mirror Universe we know. Or more likely it was all just a fantasy, because why screw up so many other lives just for her benefit? At least we know that this Charon's mycelium core won't destroy all life in the multiverse, because when Georgiou gets back to the future there's still a future there. We also got an explanation here for why Carl was so vague in the first part: he was testing Georgiou and couldn't tell her. He had to know if she was worthy to have her own spin-off series and she passed! Georgiou understands now that the Terran Empire was a terrible system, she's seen for herself how the Federation outlived it by hundreds of years, and she'll be fighting for a better future. Some fans aren't keen on how an actual murderous borderline-cannibal dictator has been given a redemption arc, especially as she keeps hitting people and bragging about how evil she is. But the idea that if you free someone from fear, provide them with a support system, and give them a future to hope for, they can become a better person is incredibly Star Trek. Or it should be at least. The big twist to the episode had been leaked a while back, so Carl being the Guardian of Forever didn't come as a surprise to me, but it worked I thought. It clearly wasn't behaving like the Guardian we know, but it's been 900 years and it's lived through a time war since then, so it's no surprise it's gotten a bit eccentric and grown cautious about who it sends back. Plus I'm glad they answered the question of what happened to the Guardian after time travel was banned, and the answer is that it went into hiding! Which makes sense to me. I'm also glad that Discovery is dealing with the consequences of the Temporal Cold War that Enterprise set up, as I never thought there was any hope of us seeing the aftermath, or living in the aftermath. Why did Discovery get much better at dealing with Star Trek canon after it jumped ahead a millennia to escape it? It was a bit weird that Burnham and Saru decided to fake Georgiou's death instead of just revealing what happened, they've been forthcoming about everything else so far, but I suppose Burnham wants to protect the Guardian. Plus it gave the crew the chance to see the character off at her wake and talk about how they secretly loved her all along for some reason. Well, we know Linus did at least. Wait a minute, Mirror Georgiou really is dead! Unless she travelled back 100 years or less she's absolutely died of old age by this point. RIP Mirror Georgiou. Overall I thought the episode was alright, though a bit of a let down maybe. For one thing, Georgiou's mysterious flashbacks didn't get even the slightest bit of explanation or resolution. Plus I don't know if they tried to get Jason Isaacs back or just decided not to use him, but I feel like Lorca's absence is a real problem. Especially as this could've been our chance to meet Prime Lorca! We didn't get Mirror Reno either... so much wasted potential. Despite that, the story definitely did the job of getting Georgiou where she needs to be for her spin-off series, temporally, physically and mentally. Carl tried to jinx it with his 'she'll have many adventures' line (or whatever he said), but I don't think Section 31 is going to share the fate of the doomed Assignment: Earth. And even if it does, this likely won't be the last we'll see of Emperor Georgiou. • IMPORTANT OBSERVATION |
||||||||||||||
One of the sound files was from Gray, so either Adira made a recording of his performance when he was alive or it was copied out of their memory.
The ship's being converted to use polaric energy instead of plasma. We've seen the tech before, in the Voyager episode Time and Again,
where an accident in a reactor annihilated all life on a planet and
shattered subspace, so I hope they've found a way to make it safer in
the last 800 years.
NEXT TIME
Comments are welcome!
No comments:
Post a Comment