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| Episode: | 13 | | | Writer: | Ted Sullivan | | | Air Date: | 28-Jan-2018 |
This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching Discovery season one's antepenultimate episode What's Past is Prologue. Wait, hang on, Trek already had a story called Past Prologue! It was the second episode of Deep Space Nine. Though now that I think about it the first episode of DS9 stole its name from a Next Gen story called The Emissary, so it's only fair.
The title comes from The Tempest, which means this is the second Discovery episode in a row to take its name from a line in a Shakespeare play. The phrase 'vaulting ambition' appears in Macbeth, and is spoken by a character trying to talk himself out of committing regicide, while in The Tempest 'what's past is prologue' is said by a character talking someone else into it. So I'm spotting a bit of a theme there. I don't know if that was deliberate though, as this one's by a different writer.
With this Ted Sullivan becomes part of the elite group of writers who've written more than one episode, and Olatunde Osunsanmi becomes the only director so far to return. So if you were ever curious about what would happen if the writer of the episode with the shortest title (Lethe) teamed up with the director of the episode with the longest title (The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry), now you know: they made an episode with the most average length title. Organise the episodes by the length of their name and you'll find this in the exact centre of the list; it's spooky is what it is. I thought both of their previous stories were decent enough though, so no warning signs there. In fact, I've actually been pretty hyped for this one, mostly because the title maybe possibly hints that we're getting some backstory and explanations at last.
This is going to be one of my relatively quick reviews, meaning I won't be going through the episode scene by scene, but you'll still find massive SPOILERS for this story and the ones that preceded it below. In fact, I'll throw in some spoilers for other Trek series like Deep Space Nine for you as well, plus Return of the Jedi and Alice in Wonderland.
