| Episode: | 62 | | | Writer: | M. Raven Metzner | | | Director: | Jon Dudkowski |
| | Air Date: | 09-May-2024 |
This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm reviewing the Star Trek: Discovery episode unfortunately titled Erigah.
The episode was directed by Jon Dudkowski, who only has one other directing credit on IMDb, for season 3's Unification III. Though he's credited as the editor on 17 episodes of Discovery, including the pilot, so he probably gets the show's style.
It's the first Discovery episode to be written by M. Raven Metzner, he's entirely new to Star Trek, but it's far from his first credit on IMDb. In fact, I hope this is very far from it, as his first credit is the movie Elektra, which was so bad that it and Catwoman pretty much killed female-led superhero movies for over ten years. Then he became showrunner on the worst Netflix Marvel series, Iron Fist... but it's okay, he was the one who did the second season, not the first one. I've heard that it's a lot better.
Okay, there are going to be SPOILERS below for Star Trek episodes, including this one, obviously. So don't get caught out when I mention something that happened in Deep Space Nine or whatever.
RECAP
The previous episode ended with another clue recovered and the fugitives found. Tilly and Adira work with Reno to investigate the clue, learning that it's a library book card for a travelling archive. Meanwhile, Stamets and Book find an empathic imprint which indicates it's in a plasma field: the Badlands.
Breen Primarch Ruhn shows up at Federation HQ in a massive dreadnought to claim the prisoners. It seems that there's no way he's going leave without them, as L'ak is the Scion of the Breen Imperium, next in line to the throne! The Federation can't turn them over as they know too much about the Progenitors, but Burnham's visit to the future showed what happens if they try to fight them. President T'rina attempts a bluff, saying that they'll hand them over to Ruhn's rival unless he lets them remain in Federation custody, and it almost works until L'ak gets himself fatally wounded in an escape attempt. Moll wants to use the Progenitors' technology to revive L'ak, revealed here to be her husband, and the Federation has to let the Breen take her. Now it's a race between Discovery and the Breen.
REVIEW
It's very reassuring that this is the level of nitpicking I've been reduced to, as it means we've come a long way from giant turbolift chasms. And they're probably the right size anyway!
Anyway, doesn't matter! The important thing is that Nhan is finally back! I was disappointed that we didn't get any major returning characters in Face the Strange, but at least we got one more appearance by Nhan before the finale.
In fact, these scenes gave me some weird deja-vu, like I'd seen them before and recently too. Or at least I'd seen conversations in a corridor with a quirky recurring guest star engineer who has an interesting past involving art and more important things to be getting on with.
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| Strange New Worlds 2-10: Hegemony |
Tilly's absence during season 4 didn't last all that long, but the series is actually doing a good job of making use of it to push her character development forward. The first thing she does when she hears that the academy is in danger is pack her bags and grab a phaser to defend her kids, and she's a good mentor to Adira in this episode.
Her team also does a good job of solving their part of the clue, figuring out that they need to visit a library that moves around every 50 years. Which doesn't seem very long, but whatever.
Okay, I suppose Next Gen already did the memory imprint thing in Eye of the Beholder, so Discovery's worst crime here is being inspired by a rubbish episode, but I still don't like it. I also thought it was a bit weird that Stamets was so adamant that Book stay with him and solve the clue, especially as Book had volunteered for the job as something to do while he waited to be useful again. Moll being loose on the ship was clearly a more urgent concern and it wasn't going to take long to resolve.
The last couple of episodes had me wondering how the bad timeline seen in Face the Strange could've happened, seeing as Moll and L'ak had gotten themselves into a bit of a situation, but now it seems like the Breen didn't even need the Progenitors' tech to wipe out the Federation. The warships in this century are absurdly massive and Starfleet hasn't been keeping up with their rivals.
It does make sense on some level, due to the whole 'The Burn ended warp drive, the Federation collapsed' thing they're just now recovering from. But the Breen and Emerald Chain had the same problems and it didn't stop them from supersizing their starships!
We only knew a few facts about them, things like they wear refrigeration suits (but don't need them), they wreck any fleet that means them harm, and you should never turn your back on them, and Discovery isn't just staying faithful to that, it's building on it. It even stays true to their language being untranslated, for some reason, through T'Rina can somehow understand them so well that she can correct their interpreter.
I really liked T'Rina in this episode actually and it was nice to see her get a turn in the spotlight without having to share it with Saru. It meant that the spotlight was on the people having heated discussions in circular rooms.
Despite that, this episode felt like things were happening. It had some actual tension to it and it insisted on my full attention. It's a bit of a political thriller, but it does things in a Star Trek way, with the heroes trying to find a creative way out of the situation instead of just making hard choices.
Vance does try to set up a story arc of Discovery going on the run, with the Breen chasing them around the galaxy for their kidnapped scion (wasn't their ship able to fly 5 months away in a single jump in season 3?), but Burnham successfully talks him around. It's a bit late to change the show's premise when they're so close to the finish line.
Okay, there was nothing surprising about Rayner getting increasingly wound up about the Breen until he's kicked out of the meeting, but Burnham's reaction was unexpected. In season 4 she might have given him a lecture on how connection is important and tried to talk him around. This time however she starts asking questions and discovers that he's a bit of a Kira Nerys, who suffered under Breen occupation. And then she uses that information to come up with a plan to get rid of the Breen without giving over the fugitives!
The plan doesn't actually work, because Moll and L'ak screw everything up again, but our people aren't at fault there. No one could've predicted that L'ak would've been dumb enough to give himself an overdose.
So I was completely blindsided by the fact that Moll and L'ak didn't even attempt to steal their stuff. In fact they had no plan whatsoever and their attempt at brilliant improvisation ended with L'ak's death. This isn't the first Star Trek season in recent memory to kill off a main antagonist right before the end so it could introduce an even bigger bad guy for the finale, but I didn't see it coming. In fact, I assumed it would be one of the Discovery crew that died to tempt the others into using the Progenitors' technology to resurrect them.
Honestly, the Moll and L'ak plot went a lot better than I was expecting it to, with one small exception... Moll's fight scene wasn't great.
The first time I watched the fight I didn't realise she was wearing handcuffs and I definitely didn't notice that she smashed them across a dude's head. Fortunately it was only the restraints that shattered and not her arms; I guess she has anti-freeze augmentations to go along with her sensor cloaking device.
But the Federation has all the clues, so it's a bit of an unfair race.
The real question is whether Burnham and Book can get back together by the end. They hit a bit of a setback here with him strongly disagreeing about letting Moll go, but that Saru and T'Rina plot a while back showed that this doesn't have to be anything but a road bump. I'm more worried about how they're chasing resurrection technology that works on lost lovers.
RATING
Every time I rate an episode I use another story as a reference point, and this time I'm going with Deep Space Nine's amazing In Purgatory's Shadow/By Inferno's Light two-parter. It's Discovery's own fault for reminding me that it gave us the Romulan saying "Never turn your back on a Breen". Personally I think Deep Space Nine is tied with Lower Decks as my favourite Trek series and the Purgatory's Shadow two-parter is a highlight of the show's entire 7 season run, so Discovery has to be doing very special if it's playing at this level now.
But Erigah's not that good, not really. When it comes to jailbreaks, Worf vs endless Jem'Hadar is far better than Moll vs Nhan, and the surprise death of L'ak can't compare to the surprise reveal about Bashir. Plus the ending with a recurring villain allying with the Breen doesn't come close to hitting as hard as when the same thing happened with the Dominion.
The episode didn't even need to have much going on though, as I found that even the quieter scenes had my full attention thanks to good writing and solid direction. In fact, this is easily my favourite episode of the season so far and I'm not just saying that because of all the Deep Space Nine references.
But the title sucks, so I'm only giving it...
9/10
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NEXT TIME
If you want to share your thoughts on Erigah, maybe even explain to me why it's actually bad and isn't the best episode this season, the box below awaits your words.
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