Things happened in this episode. That's about all I can say with any honesty. Maybe those things would have been interesting if we didn't already know that Lieutenant has-already-forgotten-Kahless Tyler is not who he claims to be, but we do, and so most of the things were not interesting. It is also true that an inordinately large number of those things happened for no good reason, so I'm going to try to do this review in-line with the recap, because it's going to be very hard to talk about what is going on without, you know, losing it.
Last week left off with the Discovery in orbit around Pahvo, a planet peopled by clouds of pollen that are either incredibly primitive or the most powerful force not named Harry Mudd we have met in this series (as my wife pointed out, the pollen people teleported Lieutenant prefers-his-revenge-piping-hot Tyler from wherever Commander Saru presumably beat him into submission to the enormous crystalline antenna just in time for the episode's denouement and no one bothered to wonder "do they really need our help to do... anything?"; American Exceptionalism being a foundational idea of the entire Star Trek Universe, I'm going to let this one pass). The Klingon Ship of the Dead, T'Kuvma's former vessel turned General Kol's flagship, was on its way. Anticipation was in the air. This week opens with Starfleet ordering Discovery to retreat to Federation space, its mission to use Pahvo to disrupt all Klingon cloaking devices everywhere having failed. Captain Lorca, who, as I have already pointed out, does not play by the rules (and also bangs admirals) will have none of it. He orders his crew to set course for Starbase 46 at warp speed, rather than mushroom speed, telling them that they have however long this trip takes to figure out a way to defeat the Ship of the Dead (the first Klingon ship ever to cloak), at which point they can turn around and Do the Right Thing. The plan that Specialist Burnham, Lieutenant would-never-cut-his-own-palm-with-a-knife-that's-just-weird Tyler, and Commander Saru, who is notably not in the brig even after last week's interesting display of disloyalty, come up with is as follows: as soon as the Ship of the Dead decloaks, a team of two Discovery commandos will beam on board in the brief window when the Ship of the Dead's shields are still down and place two sensors strategically aboard the Ship of the Dead. The telemetry from these sensors will allow Discovery to use complex machine learning algorithms to intuit the Ship of the Dead's location based on how its cloaking field distorts the light passing around it. Unfortunately, collecting the data necessary to train these algorithms will take four days, unless Discovery performs a rapid series of 133 mushroom drive jumps in a matter of minutes, gathering the sensors' telemetry from "all possible vectors" (I actually don't think I mind this use of the word "vectors"). Let me reiterate: their plan is to beam aboard the Ship of the Dead and place something that is neither a straight up tracking device nor a bomb (you know, that thing that Captain Michelle Yeoh used to disable the Ship of the Dead in the pilot episode) on board. One could argue that Discovery's objective was to create a tool that could defeat all cloaking devices everywhere, which neither the "single tracking device" nor the "just blow them up from the inside" plan would achieve, but the stakes at the beginning of this episode were just "save Pahvo," and I think that killing the self-proclaimed leader of the Klingon Empire would be further incentive enough to just take the short-term win rather than spend several hours devising a much more complicated scheme that still involves getting your people on board Kol's ship. That is rant the first.
Obviously, Specialist Burnham has to be one of the people sent over, because one of the fancy sensors must be placed on the Ship of the Dead's bridge and only she has been there before. Once more I reiterate: their brilliant plan involves infiltrating the Klingon flagship's bridge and everyone thinks it will work. Just as obviously, the other one sent over on this critical mission is Lieutenant drinks-with-his-enemies-all-the-time-except-that-he-never-drinks-with-his-enemies Tyler. As the saying goes, the strike team that snogs together has horribly divided loyalties and is generally a terrible idea. That is rant the second.
Meanwhile, in order to sell his "we can only leave Pahvo at warp, rather than mushroom speed" story to Starfleet, Captain Lorca orders Doctor Boyfriend to do a full medical work-up on Lieutenant Stamets because of a made up reason that justifies his disobeying Starfleet's orders (no mushroom drive if Stamets is sick). Turns out, the wibbly-wobbly parts of Lieutenant Stamets' brain are changing and Doctor Boyfriend definitely doesn't want him doing any more jumps. Technically, neither does Lieutenant Stamets, having confided last week to Lieutenant Tilley that he has started experiencing time in a less-than-linear fashion. Captain Lorca takes Stamets to his ready room and shows him data gathered from Discovery's previous mushroom jumps indicating that a series of "negative mass" (or maybe "anti-gravity"... anyway: wibbly-wobbly) pockets have been left behind Discovery after each jump. These pockets apparently indicate the existence of multiple dimensions (see aside from previous post) that the mushroom drive may have access to. Stamets gets excited by the prospect of studying these other dimensions and agrees to make the requisite 133 jumps in a few minutes to train the cloak-breaking machine learning algorithm.
Aboard the Ship of the Dead, the strike team plants their first sensor and then, proving how little I understand the writing of television, discover signs of another living human on board. That human is, of course, Admiral Cornwell who, though alive, appears to be paralyzed from the waist down. The strike team earnestly debates how they are going to protect the Admiral and accomplish their mission when they discover that L'Rell is also alive and less-than-well in the Ship of the Dead's charnel house. Recall that last week, L'Rell and Admiral Cornwell were working together to try to escape the Ship of the Dead when they were discovered by General Kol, at which point they fought and L'Rell appeared to kill Admiral Cornwell. While "disposing of the body", L'Rell discovered a room full of her slaughtered coreligionists and swore revenge against Kol, leaving Admiral Cornwell's "body" behind to go try and insinuate herself into General Kol's good graces. Now we are supposed to believe that, when that happened, Admiral Cornwell was still alive, meaning that either L'Rell was an idiot for not being able to tell that her vicitm wasn't dead, or that L'Rell was an idiot for leaving her unconscious co-consiprator in a room full of Klingon corpses with no idea how to get out. That is rant the third.
Upon coming face-to-face with L'Rell, Lieutenant is-a-Merry-Man Tyler, whose Manchurian Candidate backstory is that he spent seven months on a Klingon prison ship, only escaping torture because the Captain of said ship, L'Rell, "took a liking to him," immediately starts flashing back to his memories of being tortured. We see a fast cut montage of Klingon faces, our plucky hero in saran-wrap, and bloody mekleths. The problem, of course, is that all of these things are also consistent with the presumably very invasive surgery needed to make a Klingon pass for a human. Lieutenant does-not-spell-his-name-with-an-apostrophe Tyler goes catatonic, and the Star Trek universe finally acknowledges the existence of PTSD, forcing Specialist Burnham to stun L'Rell. I repeat: Specialist Burnham stuns L'Rell. Why was her phaser on stun? She is fighting a war. Presumably, when fighting a war, you want some guarantee that the person you just shot is not going to get up and jump your comrade from behind just as he is beaming back aboard your ship (spoiler alert). I don't have much good to say about this scene. While it was nice to see torture having some lasting consequences, the flashbacks seemed gratuitous and, as I said, since we all know what happened (later in the episode, Lieutenant won't-shut-up-about-his-theories-regarding-the-evolution-of-Klingon-forehead-ridges Tyler explicitly states that he spent 220 days being tortured by L'Rell, a fact which we know is impossible given how L'Rell spent the first 180 days of the war), the flashbacks mostly served to tease the audience. "Maybe he's going to wake up and start being Voq again." Alas, the writers think they can milk this for at least a few more episodes. He ends this episode still convinced that he is a human named Ash Tyler. That is rant the fourth.
Leaving her now catatonic boyfriend in Admiral Cornwell's care, Specialist Burnham makes her way to the Ship of the Dead's bridge (can we just let that statement sit for a moment...) and plants the second scanner. Discovery starts mushroom jumping all over the place and we are treated to many fast cuts between Captain Lorca looking stern, Doctor Boyfriend looking concerned, and Lieutenant Stamets looking changed. It's nothing definitive. He just started getting blonder, bordering on albino, and in a lot of pain.
Refusing to be a stock villain, General Kol decides this is some kind of trick and he wants no part of it. He orders the Ship of the Dead to retreat, at which point Specialist Burnham reveals herself and challenges the General to single-handed-combat. The General accepts because Klingons and a knife fight ensues. The fight is remarkable only for the fact that Specialist Burnham wastes a perfectly good opportunity to deploy a Vulcan neck pinch. That would have been clever and a little unique, but it's a pretty standard knife fight.
Eventually, Discovery gets its data, trains its algorithm, beams its people back on board (at which point, as I warned you, L'Rell wakes up and jumps onto our red-not-pink-blooded Lieutenant Tyler, hitching a transporter ride onto Discovery), and destroys the Ship of the Dead. I guess General Kol was not this season's "big bad," after all (hmmm..... what the could the final climactic conflict of this season be?)
Some time later, Captain Lorca receives word that Admiral Cornwell (who, just before being captured by the Klingons, was asking for Captain Lorca's resignation from command of Discovery) has made it safely to a Federation hospital aboard a medical shuttle. Discovery is ordered to finally return to Starbase 46 so that Captain Lorca can receive the Legion of Honor for his efforts. Lieutenant Stamets agrees to make one more mushroom drive jump to get the crew out of danger before handing himself over to Starfleet medical so that they can figure out what is going on with the wibbly-wobbly parts of his brain. Did you see what happened there? I almost missed it. Admiral Cornwell made it safely back to Starfleet on a medical shuttle, but Discovery has to use the mushroom drive, for fear that the Klingons might catch them. How long, exactly, have they been lingering at Pahvo? Rant the fifth.
Stamets makes the mushroom jump, but something goes wrong. Discovery appears to split in two (see aside at end of previous post) and materializes in the middle of a wreckage field somewhere that Commander (why isn't he in the brig?) Saru cannot pinpoint on his star charts.
Meanwhile, a dazed and confused Lieutenant gags-on-gagh Tyler stumbles down to the brig, falls to his knees in front of L'Rell's cell, and asks "what have you done to me?" to which L'Rell responds "Don't worry; I won't let them hurt you." And thus, what was probably supposed to be a very suspenseful cliff-hanger is ruined by Jonathan Frakes and the existence of IMDB.
In case you can't tell, I found this episode largely annoying. It may have furthered the plot in a world in which the twist that we are all waiting for had not been sussed two months ago, but that is not the world we live in (maybe it's the world in which Discovery materialized, though). I know that twists and reveals are not the whole sum of storytelling, but, at this point, it seems to be all this show is banking on. While Discovery has paid lip service to the underlying causes of the war between the Federation and the Klingons, they have not really explored them or made them any kind of theme in the stories being told. If anything, the writers of this show have doubled down on a gross misreading of the actual events in their own scripts. Repeatedly, Specialist Burnham and those around her parrot the line that "[my] actions caused this war." That is just not true. In the pilot, then Commander Burnham mutinied because she wanted the Shenzhou to fire on the Ship of the Dead before the Ship of the Dead fired first. She thought the Klingons would respect Starfleet's strength and return home humbled/chastened/disinclined to go to war (it's not clear). Captain Michelle Yeoh overruled her and sent her to the brig. The Klingons arrived in force, then Starfleet arrived in force. Starfleet asked the Klingons if they could exchange emissaries and open a dialogue. The Ship of the Dead fired first. Commander Burnham was right, insofar as she predicted what would happen if the the Shenzhou did not fire first. I do not see how her actions can be said to have "caused this war," and yet she and everyone around her (even those who were aboard the Shenzhou and saw what happened) accept her culpability as fact. It's almost as if the writers wanted a protagonist who was dark, brooding, and guilty, but forgot to come up with a reason for her guilt until the last hour before shooting started and just slapped together the first thing that came to their minds. Maybe this is some deep message about how Starfleet and the Federation are so obsessed with the ideas of their own moral and technological superiority that they refuse to grant the Klingons agency in starting a war that they clearly wanted. Somehow, I doubt this show is that subtle. That was rant the sixth.
We now have a month-and-a-half hiatus before Discovery returns in January and we are treated to the last six episodes of this season. Of these first nine episodes, I have enjoyed the two-part pilot and two other episodes ("Lethe" and "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad"). The story which the pilot started to tell has stopped making sense. "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad" involved (good grief, I'm going to say it) Harry Mudd. I wonder if the problem with Discovery is that it is trying to be something Star Trek was never very good at. "Lethe" and "Magic..." were reasonably self-contained episodes. They existed within the Klingon war arc, but they were really just wacky space adventures of the week. Every other episode has tried to forward the arc of this season, such as it is, and they have all been either boring or annoying. Historically, Star Trek has not done arcs well. The Original Series was definitionally episodic. The Next Generation had a handful of drawn-out story lines (the House of Mogh; Captain Picard versus the Borg) that played out in a half dozen episodes over a half dozen seasons. They revisited them just often enough to remind you that they were there, but never enough so that you got bogged down in them. Deep Space Nine tried a proper multiyear arc with the Dominion War. It felt directionless. I did not watch enough Voyager to get a sense of what they did with the Borg, but I suspect I wouldn't have liked it, never having bought into the idea of the Borg Queen, anyway. I do not acknowledge the existence of Enterprise. Perhaps the writers of Discovery should acknowledge that the universe in which they are writing, especially as a prequel to the aggressively episodic Original Series, is too slipshod to support interesting arcs and go back to producing wacky space adventure of the week television. They seem able to do that well enough. As it is, the arc they have presented us with appears to have been too predictable and the opposite of compelling.
Last week left off with the Discovery in orbit around Pahvo, a planet peopled by clouds of pollen that are either incredibly primitive or the most powerful force not named Harry Mudd we have met in this series (as my wife pointed out, the pollen people teleported Lieutenant prefers-his-revenge-piping-hot Tyler from wherever Commander Saru presumably beat him into submission to the enormous crystalline antenna just in time for the episode's denouement and no one bothered to wonder "do they really need our help to do... anything?"; American Exceptionalism being a foundational idea of the entire Star Trek Universe, I'm going to let this one pass). The Klingon Ship of the Dead, T'Kuvma's former vessel turned General Kol's flagship, was on its way. Anticipation was in the air. This week opens with Starfleet ordering Discovery to retreat to Federation space, its mission to use Pahvo to disrupt all Klingon cloaking devices everywhere having failed. Captain Lorca, who, as I have already pointed out, does not play by the rules (and also bangs admirals) will have none of it. He orders his crew to set course for Starbase 46 at warp speed, rather than mushroom speed, telling them that they have however long this trip takes to figure out a way to defeat the Ship of the Dead (the first Klingon ship ever to cloak), at which point they can turn around and Do the Right Thing. The plan that Specialist Burnham, Lieutenant would-never-cut-his-own-palm-with-a-knife-that's-just-weird Tyler, and Commander Saru, who is notably not in the brig even after last week's interesting display of disloyalty, come up with is as follows: as soon as the Ship of the Dead decloaks, a team of two Discovery commandos will beam on board in the brief window when the Ship of the Dead's shields are still down and place two sensors strategically aboard the Ship of the Dead. The telemetry from these sensors will allow Discovery to use complex machine learning algorithms to intuit the Ship of the Dead's location based on how its cloaking field distorts the light passing around it. Unfortunately, collecting the data necessary to train these algorithms will take four days, unless Discovery performs a rapid series of 133 mushroom drive jumps in a matter of minutes, gathering the sensors' telemetry from "all possible vectors" (I actually don't think I mind this use of the word "vectors"). Let me reiterate: their plan is to beam aboard the Ship of the Dead and place something that is neither a straight up tracking device nor a bomb (you know, that thing that Captain Michelle Yeoh used to disable the Ship of the Dead in the pilot episode) on board. One could argue that Discovery's objective was to create a tool that could defeat all cloaking devices everywhere, which neither the "single tracking device" nor the "just blow them up from the inside" plan would achieve, but the stakes at the beginning of this episode were just "save Pahvo," and I think that killing the self-proclaimed leader of the Klingon Empire would be further incentive enough to just take the short-term win rather than spend several hours devising a much more complicated scheme that still involves getting your people on board Kol's ship. That is rant the first.
Obviously, Specialist Burnham has to be one of the people sent over, because one of the fancy sensors must be placed on the Ship of the Dead's bridge and only she has been there before. Once more I reiterate: their brilliant plan involves infiltrating the Klingon flagship's bridge and everyone thinks it will work. Just as obviously, the other one sent over on this critical mission is Lieutenant drinks-with-his-enemies-all-the-time-except-that-he-never-drinks-with-his-enemies Tyler. As the saying goes, the strike team that snogs together has horribly divided loyalties and is generally a terrible idea. That is rant the second.
Meanwhile, in order to sell his "we can only leave Pahvo at warp, rather than mushroom speed" story to Starfleet, Captain Lorca orders Doctor Boyfriend to do a full medical work-up on Lieutenant Stamets because of a made up reason that justifies his disobeying Starfleet's orders (no mushroom drive if Stamets is sick). Turns out, the wibbly-wobbly parts of Lieutenant Stamets' brain are changing and Doctor Boyfriend definitely doesn't want him doing any more jumps. Technically, neither does Lieutenant Stamets, having confided last week to Lieutenant Tilley that he has started experiencing time in a less-than-linear fashion. Captain Lorca takes Stamets to his ready room and shows him data gathered from Discovery's previous mushroom jumps indicating that a series of "negative mass" (or maybe "anti-gravity"... anyway: wibbly-wobbly) pockets have been left behind Discovery after each jump. These pockets apparently indicate the existence of multiple dimensions (see aside from previous post) that the mushroom drive may have access to. Stamets gets excited by the prospect of studying these other dimensions and agrees to make the requisite 133 jumps in a few minutes to train the cloak-breaking machine learning algorithm.
Aboard the Ship of the Dead, the strike team plants their first sensor and then, proving how little I understand the writing of television, discover signs of another living human on board. That human is, of course, Admiral Cornwell who, though alive, appears to be paralyzed from the waist down. The strike team earnestly debates how they are going to protect the Admiral and accomplish their mission when they discover that L'Rell is also alive and less-than-well in the Ship of the Dead's charnel house. Recall that last week, L'Rell and Admiral Cornwell were working together to try to escape the Ship of the Dead when they were discovered by General Kol, at which point they fought and L'Rell appeared to kill Admiral Cornwell. While "disposing of the body", L'Rell discovered a room full of her slaughtered coreligionists and swore revenge against Kol, leaving Admiral Cornwell's "body" behind to go try and insinuate herself into General Kol's good graces. Now we are supposed to believe that, when that happened, Admiral Cornwell was still alive, meaning that either L'Rell was an idiot for not being able to tell that her vicitm wasn't dead, or that L'Rell was an idiot for leaving her unconscious co-consiprator in a room full of Klingon corpses with no idea how to get out. That is rant the third.
Upon coming face-to-face with L'Rell, Lieutenant is-a-Merry-Man Tyler, whose Manchurian Candidate backstory is that he spent seven months on a Klingon prison ship, only escaping torture because the Captain of said ship, L'Rell, "took a liking to him," immediately starts flashing back to his memories of being tortured. We see a fast cut montage of Klingon faces, our plucky hero in saran-wrap, and bloody mekleths. The problem, of course, is that all of these things are also consistent with the presumably very invasive surgery needed to make a Klingon pass for a human. Lieutenant does-not-spell-his-name-with-an-apostrophe Tyler goes catatonic, and the Star Trek universe finally acknowledges the existence of PTSD, forcing Specialist Burnham to stun L'Rell. I repeat: Specialist Burnham stuns L'Rell. Why was her phaser on stun? She is fighting a war. Presumably, when fighting a war, you want some guarantee that the person you just shot is not going to get up and jump your comrade from behind just as he is beaming back aboard your ship (spoiler alert). I don't have much good to say about this scene. While it was nice to see torture having some lasting consequences, the flashbacks seemed gratuitous and, as I said, since we all know what happened (later in the episode, Lieutenant won't-shut-up-about-his-theories-regarding-the-evolution-of-Klingon-forehead-ridges Tyler explicitly states that he spent 220 days being tortured by L'Rell, a fact which we know is impossible given how L'Rell spent the first 180 days of the war), the flashbacks mostly served to tease the audience. "Maybe he's going to wake up and start being Voq again." Alas, the writers think they can milk this for at least a few more episodes. He ends this episode still convinced that he is a human named Ash Tyler. That is rant the fourth.
Leaving her now catatonic boyfriend in Admiral Cornwell's care, Specialist Burnham makes her way to the Ship of the Dead's bridge (can we just let that statement sit for a moment...) and plants the second scanner. Discovery starts mushroom jumping all over the place and we are treated to many fast cuts between Captain Lorca looking stern, Doctor Boyfriend looking concerned, and Lieutenant Stamets looking changed. It's nothing definitive. He just started getting blonder, bordering on albino, and in a lot of pain.
Refusing to be a stock villain, General Kol decides this is some kind of trick and he wants no part of it. He orders the Ship of the Dead to retreat, at which point Specialist Burnham reveals herself and challenges the General to single-handed-combat. The General accepts because Klingons and a knife fight ensues. The fight is remarkable only for the fact that Specialist Burnham wastes a perfectly good opportunity to deploy a Vulcan neck pinch. That would have been clever and a little unique, but it's a pretty standard knife fight.
Eventually, Discovery gets its data, trains its algorithm, beams its people back on board (at which point, as I warned you, L'Rell wakes up and jumps onto our red-not-pink-blooded Lieutenant Tyler, hitching a transporter ride onto Discovery), and destroys the Ship of the Dead. I guess General Kol was not this season's "big bad," after all (hmmm..... what the could the final climactic conflict of this season be?)
Some time later, Captain Lorca receives word that Admiral Cornwell (who, just before being captured by the Klingons, was asking for Captain Lorca's resignation from command of Discovery) has made it safely to a Federation hospital aboard a medical shuttle. Discovery is ordered to finally return to Starbase 46 so that Captain Lorca can receive the Legion of Honor for his efforts. Lieutenant Stamets agrees to make one more mushroom drive jump to get the crew out of danger before handing himself over to Starfleet medical so that they can figure out what is going on with the wibbly-wobbly parts of his brain. Did you see what happened there? I almost missed it. Admiral Cornwell made it safely back to Starfleet on a medical shuttle, but Discovery has to use the mushroom drive, for fear that the Klingons might catch them. How long, exactly, have they been lingering at Pahvo? Rant the fifth.
Stamets makes the mushroom jump, but something goes wrong. Discovery appears to split in two (see aside at end of previous post) and materializes in the middle of a wreckage field somewhere that Commander (why isn't he in the brig?) Saru cannot pinpoint on his star charts.
Meanwhile, a dazed and confused Lieutenant gags-on-gagh Tyler stumbles down to the brig, falls to his knees in front of L'Rell's cell, and asks "what have you done to me?" to which L'Rell responds "Don't worry; I won't let them hurt you." And thus, what was probably supposed to be a very suspenseful cliff-hanger is ruined by Jonathan Frakes and the existence of IMDB.
In case you can't tell, I found this episode largely annoying. It may have furthered the plot in a world in which the twist that we are all waiting for had not been sussed two months ago, but that is not the world we live in (maybe it's the world in which Discovery materialized, though). I know that twists and reveals are not the whole sum of storytelling, but, at this point, it seems to be all this show is banking on. While Discovery has paid lip service to the underlying causes of the war between the Federation and the Klingons, they have not really explored them or made them any kind of theme in the stories being told. If anything, the writers of this show have doubled down on a gross misreading of the actual events in their own scripts. Repeatedly, Specialist Burnham and those around her parrot the line that "[my] actions caused this war." That is just not true. In the pilot, then Commander Burnham mutinied because she wanted the Shenzhou to fire on the Ship of the Dead before the Ship of the Dead fired first. She thought the Klingons would respect Starfleet's strength and return home humbled/chastened/disinclined to go to war (it's not clear). Captain Michelle Yeoh overruled her and sent her to the brig. The Klingons arrived in force, then Starfleet arrived in force. Starfleet asked the Klingons if they could exchange emissaries and open a dialogue. The Ship of the Dead fired first. Commander Burnham was right, insofar as she predicted what would happen if the the Shenzhou did not fire first. I do not see how her actions can be said to have "caused this war," and yet she and everyone around her (even those who were aboard the Shenzhou and saw what happened) accept her culpability as fact. It's almost as if the writers wanted a protagonist who was dark, brooding, and guilty, but forgot to come up with a reason for her guilt until the last hour before shooting started and just slapped together the first thing that came to their minds. Maybe this is some deep message about how Starfleet and the Federation are so obsessed with the ideas of their own moral and technological superiority that they refuse to grant the Klingons agency in starting a war that they clearly wanted. Somehow, I doubt this show is that subtle. That was rant the sixth.
We now have a month-and-a-half hiatus before Discovery returns in January and we are treated to the last six episodes of this season. Of these first nine episodes, I have enjoyed the two-part pilot and two other episodes ("Lethe" and "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad"). The story which the pilot started to tell has stopped making sense. "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad" involved (good grief, I'm going to say it) Harry Mudd. I wonder if the problem with Discovery is that it is trying to be something Star Trek was never very good at. "Lethe" and "Magic..." were reasonably self-contained episodes. They existed within the Klingon war arc, but they were really just wacky space adventures of the week. Every other episode has tried to forward the arc of this season, such as it is, and they have all been either boring or annoying. Historically, Star Trek has not done arcs well. The Original Series was definitionally episodic. The Next Generation had a handful of drawn-out story lines (the House of Mogh; Captain Picard versus the Borg) that played out in a half dozen episodes over a half dozen seasons. They revisited them just often enough to remind you that they were there, but never enough so that you got bogged down in them. Deep Space Nine tried a proper multiyear arc with the Dominion War. It felt directionless. I did not watch enough Voyager to get a sense of what they did with the Borg, but I suspect I wouldn't have liked it, never having bought into the idea of the Borg Queen, anyway. I do not acknowledge the existence of Enterprise. Perhaps the writers of Discovery should acknowledge that the universe in which they are writing, especially as a prequel to the aggressively episodic Original Series, is too slipshod to support interesting arcs and go back to producing wacky space adventure of the week television. They seem able to do that well enough. As it is, the arc they have presented us with appears to have been too predictable and the opposite of compelling.
I'm here partly for the reviews and commentary and all that, but mostly for the references to Lieutenant today-is-a-terrible-day-to-die Tyler.
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