Star Trek: Discovery 5-04: Face the Strange (Quick Review)

Episode:

59

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Writer:

Sean Cochran

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Director:

Lee Rose

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Air Date:

18-Apr-2024

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing my thoughts about the latest Star Trek: Discovery episode, Face the Strange.

You can't judge an episode by its title, though it can certainly give you clues about what to expect. Like if you're watching a Star Trek episode called 'Prophet Margin' or 'Give Us a Q' or 'Those Bloody Tribbles are Still Trouble', you basically know what you're getting. So I'm going into Face the Strange expecting characters to face strangeness and if this doesn't happen I'm going to be very disappointed. Discovery's often been at its best when it's leaned into the weird, like in Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad and An Obol for Charon, and the series is about due for its next injection of creative chaos.

There will be SPOILERS below for Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek in general.

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RECAP

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Burnham and Rayner are arguing about him shutting down the bridge crew's attempts to contribute, but they're interrupted by a report that weirdness is starting. It turns out that the device Moll planted on Adira's uniform was a Krenim chronophage (time bug) left over from the Temporal Wars, and when the two try to beam back to the bridge they end up physically dragged to different points across Discovery's timeline.

One trip takes them to the future, where they learn that without Discovery, the Progenitor tech will fall into the Breen's hands and they'll destroy the Federation. The two mostly revisit past events however, like the Klingon War, the battle against Control, and Osyraa taking the ship. It all looks pretty much the same from inside a ready room, though they do get to fight some Emerald Chain soldiers on their way to Stamets, who is immune to time weirdness and has been working on the time bug problem himself.

The three of them find themselves back at the start of the season one and begin their plan to pop Discovery's warp bubble to make the bug vulnerable. Unfortunately Blue Uniform Burnham runs into Red Uniform Burnham and they have a bit of a fight, ending with the experienced captain taking her past self down with a nerve pinch. Though she just leaves her lying in a hallway afterwards, so it's not long before she's confronting Rayner in Engineering. Captain Burnham heads to the bridge and convinces Airiam to trust her while Rayner convinces Specialist Burnham to trust him, and together the crew sorts out the time bug without any damage to the timeline.


REVIEW

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First, I want to say that I am deducting points for them failing to do anything clever with the opening titles. They can't let Strange New Worlds have all of the fun! It's already having too much of the fun as it is.

Anyway, this week on Star Trek: Discovery, the show is saving money!

It's not quite a bottle show, as they did visit a planet at the start (which means the season is 4 for 4 when it comes to strange new worlds), but it's close enough. I guess L'ak's makeup must have also cost them a bit to apply, considering how extensive it is. Elias Toufexis is known for his voice acting and even he's struggling to project a performance through that mask. I guess it shows just how good Doug Jones is as Saru, who incidentally doesn't appear in this episode.

In fact, this trip through Discovery's past doesn't actually revisit many past characters. There was no way they were going to pay for a surprise appearance by Lorca or Georgiou, but there was also no Landry, Tyler, L'Rell, Sarek, Amanda or Cornwell either. Or Pike, Spock, Leland or Nhan for the season 2 fans. You know what would've been crazy? If they'd brought Harry Mudd back and had the heroes time travel back into his time loop episode.

We did get the return of Bryce though. Plus Airiam too... who also clearly impeded by her makeup.

I think the main problem I have with the episode is that it doesn't do a whole lot with its premise. The characters could've revisited any episode in the show's run, any situation, but right away the episode limits the amount of time travel shenanigans it can have by preventing Burnham and Rayner from interacting with the past.

The episode does jump to plenty of big events across Discovery's history, but they all look more or less the same when the heroes are hiding in an empty room out of sight. It really demonstrates how little the sets have changed during the series. Well, they didn't change a whole lot during this episode at least. I guess they did take a wall and table away in the scene where the ship was parked in San Francisco.

This scene reminded me of the start of the Voyager episode Relativity, where we get to see the hero ship in dry dock before being launched. Except here we don't actually get to see anything, as an expensive CGI shot would go against the spirit of a bottle show. We did get to see a construction worker listening to music on 23rd-century earbuds though, which is new. The 'listening to music' part I mean, not the earbuds... Spock and Uhura wear them all the time!

The episode's fondness of the ready room set did confuse me a bit at first, as I was wondering what the characters were talking about when they said the time jump always returned them to the same spot. They were in the same spot because they kept walking back there themselves! I guess Burnham did teleport a foot backwards at one point.

Though the main thing going through my head during the trip to the bad future was that they were going to finally explain the Short Treks episode Calypso! They were time travelling, Zora was alone on an abandoned Discovery, they visited the original version of the ship, this could've been it.

It's generally not a good idea for a writer to hype the audience up for something they're not going to deliver on, unless they've got something even better in mind. This was not better than a payoff for Calypso.

Zora does keep asking asking if she's dreaming, which could mean they're implying that Calypso was actually Zora's dream. This would also be worse than an actual payoff.

It was nice to see Burnham and Rayner having to work together though, with him gaining a bit of respect for her along the way. I figured that he'd also get a better appreciation for what the crew have been through and why they do things the way they do, but he barely sees any of it. The important thing is that he's had some character growth.

Though I'm not saying I 100% trust him now, as the episode did make a point of showing Burnham typing in her override code right in front of him. If he wanted the Federation destroyed he could've just not helped with the time bug, but he may have another agenda.

Speaking of destroying things, if this time jumping actually had the potential to affect the timeline, then this was the wrong ship to plant a time bug on. Discovery saved the multiverse in the first season and all life in the galaxy in season two, so it's not in anyone's interest to mess with its history.

The episode reminded me a little bit of classic Discovery at times, possibly because that was the whole point of it. It was nice seeing the blue uniforms make a return, along with some of the old hairstyles.

I also appreciated Stamets getting to bring the comedy again, with his running joke about clearing Engineering ending with him just telling everyone to piss off, because at this point in the timeline he's still Grumpy Stamets. Though it raises the question of how pre-Tardigrade DNA Stamets is still unstuck from time.

Stamet's involvement really made the episode feel like a successor to Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad from way back in season 1, though we don't see enough of past Burnham to remind us of how much she used to struggle with love.

Instead, we get brought back to when Burnham and Book's relationship was at its strongest, before the tragedy and his betrayal. I found this scene awkward to watch, but it was a smart idea. I imagine it was awkward for Burnham as well, getting a reminder of what she's lost. Though maybe it's also made her more eager to get it back.

I still think she needs to repair her relationship by the end of the season, so that the two of them can be the positive mirror of Moll and L'ak.

Burnham also runs into herself, giving the production crew a chance to show how far technology has come. Star Trek has always been great having two people played by the same actor on screen at once, but now it's even better at it. Sure, most of the time Sonequa Martin-Green is fighting a stunt double, but there are a few shots like this which put the actress against herself while the camera moves around them.

But I doubt it was a huge shock for viewers to see the two fighting, as the episode covers some familiar ground, and I'm not just talking about how it revisits memorable events. I've already seen this kind of plot play out in series like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Voyager, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, Voyager again... and so on. There's also a certain recent Marvel movie which featured a mirror match just like this.

This time though, the fight happens because Classic Burnham can't believe New Burnham's story. The idea of a mutineer like her becoming captain of the ship she arrived on as a prisoner is just too far-fetched. She has no hope for her own redemption. Fortunately, Rayner finally discovers the power of connection and is able to get through to her using everything he's learned in the episode.

He's also able to talk Rhys down by convincing him that they're friends... though in his case he only really needed to know the 20 words he told him about his favourite spaceship. So actually, technically, Rayner's own approach of minimal interaction with his crew worked as well!

Rayner is adapting, but I hope he becomes a proper first officer to Burnham instead of just a cheerleader; more Spock, less Chakotay. The series needs some proper discussions.

Meanwhile, Burnham was working on wining the bridge crew over, and I don't know if that was made easier or harder by Lorca being off on a mission somewhere. I've seen stories where the hero comes back in time to when the villain is pretending to be good and it can be an interesting situation. But this didn't do that.

Instead we got a surprisingly tight-knit bridge crew who were really not happy about Burnham's prophecy of Airiam's death. It's my recollection that the ship was brand new at the start of the series and Lorca wasn't exactly encouraging his officers to bond, so I was a bit thrown off by this. I figured that we'd see a contrast between how the crew behaved under a captain similar to Rayner and how they are now after the experiences of the last five seasons.

I can't say the episode wasn't focused on its messages though. This is an episode about not giving in to hopelessness and the importance of making connections with people, and it doesn't have time for any extraneous side plots about things like Adira and Gray's relationship. Well, aside from that scene at the start. I can definitely respect a well-paced episode that knows what it's trying to say... that actually has something to say, and I can appreciate that it pushes character arcs forward even if they don't make any progress in the season arc.

That said, if Discovery does one more episode about how we need to connect to people I'm going to punch it.


RATING

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I am going to compare Face the Strange to the Voyager episode Shattered, because they're both fun stories featuring a character from the present taking someone on a nostalgic tour of the show's history. They're both from their show's final season as well, which is a good time for a retrospective like this.

I think Shattered does a better job of delivering on its premise for sure. But then the Voyager episode had 150+ fairly standalone stories to work with, compared to the 58 serialised chapters we've had of Discovery, so it could do things like having Borg Seven of Nine take on Seska, while throwing in Doctor Chaotica and macroviruses and adult Naomi Wildman. But Face the Strange actually has a little more substance to it. Just a tiny bit more, but enough to avoid being entirely throwaway with no consequences whatsoever. And I think I liked it a little more as well. I'd give Shattered is high 6, while this gets a low...

7/10

It's definitely not my favourite Sean Cochran story, but seeing as he wrote Despite Yourself, New Eden and All In, that's not the harshest criticism.

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NEXT EPISODE

Star Trek: Discovery will return with Mirrors, but next on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm writing about Star Trek: Picard season 3, episode 3: Seventeen Seconds.

Comments are welcome.