[5.5/10] Mr. Plinkett (he of the famed ninety minute Phantom Menace review) referred to The Last Jedi as the “Homer’s makeup gun of films.” For the uninitiated, in an episode of The Simpsons, Homer decides he wants to become an inventor, and one of his failed creations is a shotgun full of powders and lipstick to be blasted in one amorphous mass at one’s face in “three fifths of a second.” The results are a predictably disastrous (Marge’s reaction is “you have it set on ‘whore’”), and Homer quickly puts aside his shotgun-fired cosmetics contraption.
I don’t agree with Plinkett (who’s reviewed his fair share of Star Trek) about The Last Jedi, but that description and imagery feels all too apt to account for Discovery’s second season finale. In a bloated yet breathless hour of television, the show throws storyline after storyline at the viewer, spackling it together with boatloads of sparkly but flavorless CGI fireworks to try to distract from the fact that this is one big undefined blob of plot and character beats and spectacle rather than any sort of clear, propulsive, or unified final bow.
The hour features, in no particular order: the Discovery team building the time suit, the Enterprise fighting the Section 31 armada, Culbert and Stamets kinda sorta reconciling, the Discovery team fighting Control’s swarm, Admiral Cornwell and Number One (and eventually Pike) defusing a photon torpedo, Tyler predictably helping to save the day with his Klingon counterpart, Saru’s sister Sirana joining the fray in a starfighter, Tilly’s friend Queen Po helping to figure out how to defeat Control’s ships, Georgiou going toe-to-toe with Leland, Burnham going into the past to set the signals, Burnham reconciling with Spock, Burnham leading Discovery into the future, Spock recommending that everything about Discovery be stricken from the record. And I’m sure I’m leaving some things out.
It’s just too much, and that list understates how much of that hour is just flashy bits of computer-generated detritus crashing into one another. The back half of “Such Sweet Sorrow” is not without its aesthetic charms. Burnham’s free-flying journey through space whilst cocooned by ships and pods is memorable and unique. And her journey back and forth through time, while in large part ponderously montaged, is visually striking when she actually makes the jumps. But so much of the nominally epic battle between Control’s forces and our heroes is just undifferentiated laser blasts and the usual smoke and shaking cameras, running for an exhaustingly long time with little-to-no rhythm or genuine flair.
Even in an extra-long episode, the amount of time those movie-Trek-esque action shenanigans take mean there’s extraordinarily little room for the litany of storylines and character interactions the show packs in here to be resolved. Just one episode ago, Culbert declared that he was going to the Enterprise, but now, all of a sudden, he’s just like “nope.” All the panic and threat of Control-qua-Leland is neutralized via a generic Terminator-ish chase between him and Georgiou that takes forever, relies on a thinly-established spore-based conveniences, and ends in a preposterous Ender’s Game-ish “we killed the main bot so the others will cease to function” that makes no sense for nanoprobe-ridden, otherwise omnipresent A.I. It’s all rushed and uninspiring.
And that’s before we get to the Burnham material. The solution to this whole Red Angel thing being a closed time loop thing is fine, but not exactly novel, even for Star Trek, which makes the big reveal land like a thud when the show tries to make it seem like a shocking resolution. What’s worse is that after a baker’s dozen episodes to try to establish the weight of the Spock-Burnham relationship, I never bought into it. That makes the supposedly emotional moments of Spock being faux-stranded (but then not? false jeopardy!) and saying that Burnham balances him fall completely flat. I admire the show for trying to pause to deliver a sentimental and character-based climax, even in the midst of this cybernetic firestorm when it doesn't really make sense. But it just doesn't work, making the whole Spock escapade seem like a failed experiment to draft off the fond memories of arguably the franchise’s most iconic character and its most interestingly-sketched family dynamic.
Then there’s Cornwell’s death, which is treated with such gravity and a sense of sacrifice despite Cornwell having had nothing interesting to do for at least a season. The show wants to wring such emotional heft from her noble martyrdom, but it’s just not there in what is, at most, a tertiary character on the show. And Cornwell is the only real casualty here, retroactively dampening the stakes of this whole thing when the major focus on costs comes in the form of a sure-to-be-saved Stamets and the generic death of a sporadic guest star.
Don’t get me started on the ending. Discovery’s final escape into the future is oddly anticlimactic, potentially because the tempo of this entire episode is turned up to eleven from the jump, so there’s nowhere for the episode to go when it wants to an exclamation point on this whole extended skirmish. The bad guy was uninteresting and defeated too simply and inevitably, the battle to hold off his forces was a lumpy hodgepodge, and the character beats are all too brief to create a real impact.
Then you have the epilogue, which is wrongheaded on so many level. The first and most obvious stems from the series’s answer to the “Why haven’t we heard anything about Discovery or all of this tech before?” question that’s been plaguing Discovery from the beginning. That becomes a particular issue here, where all the battle pods and fixer droids and other high-octane nonsense seems out of step with even the Next Generation’s tech some eighty in-universe years later, in a fashion that’s glaring even to continuity apologists like yours truly.
But the show’s solution is to imply that Spock convinced Starfleet Command that, given how badly things went with the rogue A.I., nothing involving Discovery should ever be mentioned again upon penalty of treason. Not to default back to The Simpsons again, but it’s basically the same ending to the controversial “Principal and the Pauper” episode, where Principal Skinner is revealed to be a fraud who stole another man’s life, only to have a judge randomly show up at the end to declare that the “name, life, and mother” of Seymour Skinner belongs to him and that anyone who says otherwise will be tortured. There, it’s meant as a stealthy satire of the sitcom mandate to return everything to the status quo, but here it’s dead serious.
That’s unsatisfying for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s implausible. Even if you could bottle up Starfleet’s blabbers, you still have the Klingons, Saru’s people, and Po involved in this final shake-up, not to mention all the other non-Federation people that our heroes have interacted with over the last couple of seasons. I’m willing to accept the move as, like Abrams-led Trek flicks’ alternate timeline, a mere sop to the fans so as to not disrupt things, but it’s a pretty pale effort to account for a heap of inconsistencies and unlikelihoods from Discovery.
Plus, the show ends with the implication that this whole ordeal is what made Spock into the Spock that we know, except that even in the traditional Starfleet blues and clean-shaven, Ethan Peck doesn't look like Leonard Nimoy, and comes off more like a ruddy cosplayer in a cheap wig. The Enterprise doesn't look like The Enterprise. And while Anson Mount’s Pike was a welcome addition to the series and expansion of the lore here, no matter how much effort Discovery goes to conjure up the ghosts of its 1960s predecessor, its efforts to emulate The Original Series are abortive and false, and aim to lend Discovery fake-feeling gravitas that the show is utterly incapable of earning on its own.
The good news is that the Discovery and its crew have been launched 950 years in the future, hopefully free from continuity snarls and easy efforts to coast on the franchise’s past glories. Season 2 of the series had its high points, particularly in more episodic tales featuring Saru and Pike. But its overall arc this year can only be termed a failure, one that is ambitious, as all failures should be, but which ends in a morass of cauterized stories, weak explanations, predictable results, unsatisfying finishes, and empty spectacle. Perhaps the jump to the future (er, further future) will revitalize the show and free it from some of the flaws that have limited its potential in its first two years, but some of them are so deeply rooted that their past as prologue is no more easily shed than Pike’s fated, heartrending ultimate destination.
A really good story about the personal implications the Prime Directive can have. Why it can be important sometimes to look past the sheer letters of the law. And, if you know your Trek, you also know that one James Kirk has bended that rule oftentimes for lesser reasons. Yes, it is a story telling tool. But it does work in a way that it provides a moral dilemma where with every decision you only seem to be getting deeper in trouble. I didn't particulary like the selective memory wipe, but with Data placing the stone in her hand there was closure.
I must say I appreciate this episode more now. Usually I thought of it more like a little boring. Not anymore.
But did Data, when trying to erase sever the connection, maybe pushed a wrong button on purpose to strengthen his position ? Interesting way to think about it.
A little nitpicking: When Picard and Troi enter the holodeck, you can see the horse already being saddled. In the next shot from inside the holodeck the saddle is off the horse. I'd never noticed that in multiple viewings. There you have it: The Curse of HD :grinning:
Worf hostility towards Data is strange. I understand it somewhat during the discussion in Picards quarters. But on the bridge ? I understand he's annoyed by what Data does. But since Worf is a lower rank........Data could pretty much do as he pleases.
