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| Episode: | 63 | | | Writer: | Lauren Wilkinson & Eric J. Robbins | | | Director: | Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour | | | Air Date: | 16-May-2024 |
This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching the antepenultimate episode of Star Trek: Discovery! Only two episodes left after this one and then the series is done.
That means that this will be the only Discovery episode that Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour will ever direct, though there are plenty of other Star Trek series for him to move onto afterwards. Well, two of them now. It's also the last episode for writers Lauren Wilkinson and Eric J. Robbins, who each have one other credit for Discovery. Robbins co-wrote my least favourite episode of season 4, All is Possible, and Wilkinson co-wrote my least favourite episode so far of this season, Jinaal. They should've teamed up with Kirsten Beyer, my season 1 and season 2 bad episode champion, and shown us just how low this series can go.
Just to be clear, I don't actually think that they're bad writers. Some of the most acclaimed Trek writers have scripted far worse than anything Discovery's done. Gene Coon - Spock's Brain, Ronald D. Moore - Aquiel, Joe Menosky - Masks, René Echevarria - The Muse, Ira Behr - all of DS9's bad Ferengi episodes, Brannon Braga - oh man, this one could take a while.
There will be SPOILERS below, for Discovery and probably some earlier Trek episodes as well. Plus I might make a reference you'll only get if you've seen Voyager.
RECAP
Discovery survives its journey through the Badlands and arrives at the Eternal Galactic Archive to collect the final clue. Book is surprised to find that the archive has something for him as well: a piece of the Kwejian world tree.
Burnham investigates the book they came for and is taken into a dreamworld based on her own thoughts, with an AI guide that looks like Book. She's not told what the test is, so she starts tackling the problem logically, looking through history books and navigating a labyrinth, but nothing works. Meanwhile, the Discovery crew spot Primarch Ruhn's dreadnought arriving and hide the ship in the plasma storms.
Discovery's science team stops the Breen dreadnought from tunnelling through the archive's shields, leaving Rayner and Book to mop up the few Breen that made it over. Back in the simulation, a defeated Burnham admits to the AI that she's reluctant to get back together with Book because she handles failure badly, and is told she's passed the test. Unfortunately, Ruhn threatens to destroy the archive unless they hand over all the clues, so Burnham makes the choice to give them over... while also faking the destruction of her ship as they jump away to get a head start.
Ruhn then decides to break his oath and blow up the archive anyway, along with all the Breen treasures within, which doesn't sit well with his crew. Moll takes the opportunity to kill him and maybe take power?
REVIEW
These are definitely not the people you want chasing you, which raises the question of why Discovery let them chase them to the archive. Okay, there may be good reasons why the ship can't just spore jump over to the far side of the Beta Quadrant to set a trail and then jump to the Badlands from there, even if no one actually mentions any, but why does it have to be Discovery that goes to the archive? They know the Breen will be tracking them, so just send someone else and let Discovery be the diversion!
Speaking of the Breen tracking Discovery's spore jumps... how could they have been fooled by Burnham faking the ship's destruction and jumping out if they can detect jumps?
My rationalisation is that it's a big place with a variety of conditions. Some regions are quiet enough for people to actually live there on actual planets and some regions are savage enough to one-shot a Cardassian Galor class warship. The blue parts you can park a giant library in, the orange parts will wreck a 32nd century Starfleet vessel in seconds. Well, it'll wreck Discovery anyway.
The trip through the Badlands reminded me of last season's The Galactic Barrier, where Discovery had to make another perilous journey through another familiar location, and the ship got absolutely hammered this time as well. I know that Discovery only had a three-week refit when it arrived in the 32nd century, it wasn't rebuilt entirely, but it really does feel like a fragile ancient vessel at times, struggling to survive conditions that late 24th century ships like Voyager and the Defiant could handle fine.
I didn't know what to make of the archive at first, as it's a very mysterious facility and Hy'Rell seemed completely unconcerned about the dreadnought heading their way. Was she being serious when she warned of possible grievous harm and mentioned the oubliette?
It turned out that no, she was just being quirky and having fun with them. The archive is exactly what what it should be: a big old spaceship full of books with enough shield power to survive an attack by a dreadnought that could wreck Federation HQ, but not for very long. I guess Hy'rell was confident that their collection of Breen treasures would keep them safe and I suppose in the end she was right.
Incidentally, I loved Hy'Rell's reaction to a Book visiting her library. The character actually gets a lot of screen time early on for someone who's basically irrelevant to the plot, but that's fine with me. Half the fun of visiting strange new places is meeting strange new people. Especially when they've got a bit of tree to give you as a gift.
I don't know if a cutting of a the Kwejian world root means that Book can go grow some Kwejian trees or if this is setting him up to be tempted by the Progenitor's tech, but Hy'Rell did tell him to come back and let her know how it went, so that seems encouraging. I'm just happy to see him get a plot that isn't about him worrying about Moll or feeling like he's got nothing to do.
I think the Burnham plot was mostly successful, though I might just be saying that because of the novelty of a character's mind not being represented by the hallways of their own ship or space station for once. Instead Burnham gets to walk around the rare book library, played by the real life Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and the beautiful location gave the episode a lot of production value.
They could've just said that simulation was designed to look like the archive because that's where the designer lived, but instead they tied it into the test and made it mean something. The archive is the most important place in the world to Burnham, more than even Discovery, because it's where her mission is.
Though the designer was an empathic Betazoid like Deanna Troi so I kept waiting for Burnham to remember what show she was on. I mean, I liked seeing her attack the problem logically; she was so hyped about getting to use her maze-solving technique that she actually used the bucket of sand despite having a computer mapping system. But this is Star Trek: Discovery; the series is all about connection and therapy, not mazes and history lessons!
Being focused on the mission and driven to win is pretty much the defining trait of a Starfleet captain, so I think she's doing okay. Though I feel like she's made a breakthrough when it comes to her relationship with Book, and I'd be very happy to see that arc reach a satisfying conclusion in the next two episodes.
Man, look at this, the episode used its mystery plot as an excuse to make a character talk about their feelings and potentially push their relationship forward, and I'm actually fine with it! They did a pretty good job with it! I don't know what to complain about anymore.
I wouldn't have guessed this episode had a new director as this is 100% shot like any other Discovery episode. Then again, if a new director told the crew to tone down the flame jets in the walls because they distracted from the exposition, would anyone on set have really listened? It's pretty obvious at this point that flame jets are what these people live for.
But I do have to give the scene a couple of bonus points. The first is for Reno giving us a Lower Decks reference, mentioning how she partied with the folks from Billups' Renaissance Faire colony. The second is for getting the Trek science right when they talked about interfering with the Breen's ability to match the archive's shield frequencies. Granted in the past if you figured out a shield's frequency you could just beam through, there was no need for a giant destabilisation beam, but this isn't the past.
Moll volunteers to beam over and handle it herself and I have to wonder if she was lying. I mean I have no doubt she'd take on an entire Discovery landing party armed only with a toothbrush to save L'ak, but they just said they couldn't beam anyone else over! Was this part of her scheme? Did she even have a scheme?
Somehow Moll being a Seska in a pit of Kazon kind of worked for me, as I appreciated the ambiguity of her choices. The actress plays her with enough sincerity that there's no way to know if she really gave a single damn about all the people who would've died if Ruhn had destroyed the archive, or if she was just using it as an opportunity to turn the bridge crew against him.
I was pretty sure that this guy wasn't going to survive the end of the season, he was just way too monstrous, but I soon changed my prediction to 'not going to survive the episode'. Maybe the writers should've had him go through the library test as well, so we could see if he had any hidden depths.
Burnham actually faced two tests in this episode, with the second being 'What do you do when someone threatens a library full of people to get their hands on the Progenitor's tech?' She chose to save lives, which has always been the correct choice so far... though the people who set the tests were pretty clear that they'd kill people to prevent the technology from falling into the wrong hands, so I guess she made the wrong choice?
RATING
Okay, I'm going to compare Labyrinths to another story all about a captain on an urgent mission who wastes most of the episode rushing through what she assumed was expected of her, before finally getting a new understanding at the end: Voyager's Sacred Ground.
Both stories explore how the captain has a psychological need to solve problems and push themselves harder, but the episodes come at the subject pretty differently. Sacred Ground ultimately makes the case that Janeway shouldn't try so hard to find a explanation for everything and just leave some things as a mystery, and her attempts to find a scientific solution during her trials send her on a wild goose chase. Not hard to see why some Trek fans had a negative reaction to that.
Burnham also fails when she applies rational logic to solve her test, but that's because it's actually a test of character. Sacred Ground's trials felt like a waste of the audience's time in retrospect, but here it's pretty obvious that a Betazoid scientist wouldn't be judging people on how efficiently they can solve mazes. We get to watch Burnham fall apart when the end credits are getting close and it seems that she wasn't good enough to figure out the solution this time. Burnham's reaction to the no win scenario shows her, and us, who she is. Damn, I should've compared this to the episode Kobayashi Maru instead.
I joked in my intro about how Labyrinths was written by the worst Discovery writers, but this far from the worst episode of the series, or even the season. It's a perfectly reasonable, extremely okay episode that does its job and pushes the story forward... unlike Sacred Ground, which IMDb users voted as Voyager's fourth worst episode.
So I'm going to give it...
7/10
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NEXT TIME
Anyway, I'm interested in hearing what you thought about Labyrinths.
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