1x13 What's Past is Prologue

[5.3/10] What is Star Trek Discovery trying to be?

Maybe that’s an unfair question. Television show’s are collaborative efforts, and one of the advantages of having a writers’ room and some T.V. real estate to play with is that you can give the audience a diversity of perspectives and takes on the same material. Different writers, directors, and other creative folks from episode to episode can give you different variations that stay true to a core theme.

But Discovery feels wildly different from episode to one episode. One week may feature the show bringing back Harry Mudd in the type of standalone episode that wouldn’t feel out of place in The Next Generation. The next, it may feature a sturm und drang-filled character study and thematic exploration that shows its connection to The Walking Dead.

And in episodes like “What’s Past Is Prologue”, Discovery seems to be aping the worst excesses of Star Trek’s cinematic outings, embracing tired tropes and turning into a generic sci-fi action movie.

Ye gads. Gone are the nuance and richly drawn characters the series has developed over the course of its previous twelve episodes. In their place are a snarling bad guy, a monologuing mentor, and our protagonist playing Die Hard on a Federation starship.

As empty actioners go, this one is perfectly serviceable. The art department did their job, coming up with colorful explosions and terrifying disintegration animations. The trip through the spore-web apes Star Trek: The Motion Picture (which as aping 2001: A Space Odessy -- it’s turtles all the way down). And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t cool to see Michelle Yeoh busting out her martial arts moves a la Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

But good lord is it all so meaningless. Lorca, who after last episode’s reveal, is laden with complexity and intrigue in his motivations, turns into a generic antagonist, slinging boasts and swinging weapons like he’s Negan from The Walking Dead. Instead of the unyielding leader of a racist empire, Mirror Georgiou is cast as a generically tragic figure with a “you and me we got problems” relationship with Burnham. And Burnham herself becomes the standard action hero, playing tricks on the bad guy in control, getting into fist fights, and escaping certain doom at the last minute.

And for what? Lorca manages to take over Mirror Georgiou’s ship, and thus has control of the Terran Empire very suddenly? Plus what do you know, Stamets has come to just in time to realize that his Mirror Universe counterpart is the one poisoning the spore network, and not only does that threaten the entire multiverse, but it gives our heroes a chance to fix it by destroying the energy source that just happens to be on Georgiou’s ship. And what do you know! Destroying that energy source may just be the boost the Discovery needs to be able to make the jump back to the prime universe!

Look, I’m not averse to a fair amount of coincidence in storytelling. Every movie cheats a little bit for convenience and to give everyone something to do when the climax his. But this is just too much of a cliché, replete with it seeming like the Federation ship is doomed only for the science officer to spit out some tenuous Treknobabble that makes it possible for our heroes to win the day. “What’s Past Is Prologue” even beats the audience over the head with the “no-win scenarios” bit that has the writer practically shaking the audience and yelling “hey, ‘member the Kobyashi Maru?”

That’s frankly the worst part of disappointing end to Discovery’s Mirror Universe arc. The writing here, particularly the dialogue, is really really bad. It’s full of generic action movie pablum. There’s so much exposition -- both in characters explaining in unnecessary detail how the plan is going to work, and characters flatly laying out their motivations and emotional states -- that you can almost feel your hand being held from beginning to end.

It’s not that there aren’t mild high points. Saru completes his minor arc from this season, of learning how to become a captain and a leader, in memorable fashion. His speech about not sensing the approach of death, his belief in his crew, and his steely response to the mustache-twirling Lorca make him an absolute highlight in the dregs of this one.

But to enjoy those, you have to suffer through heavily underlined callbacks to Stamets’ finding “the clearing in the forest,” tepid conversations between Burnham and Georgiou that treat subtlety like an endangered species, and tons of perfectly serviceable but ultimately meaningless combat.

What’s frustrating is that these aren’t new problems for the franchise. Plenty of cinematic Star Trek outing took the thoughtful, layered, and clever qualities that the franchise is known for, and smushed them into a standard-issue blockbuster package, to where the only thing that seems truly Trek-y about the movies is the uniforms and chaps with point ears. (See also: Star Trek Beyond.) For some reason, when it comes to these climaxes, Discovery tosses out all the good work it’s done thus far in favor of the kind of flavorless action movie third act you can find in just about any dollar theater right now.

Yes, there’s the hint of thematic depth, between Lorca’s call for purity echoing T’Kuvma’s in the series premiere, and both Georgiou and Burnham fiddling with the old combages of their fallen compatriots. But it’s only skin deep, and instead, the episode gives over to contrivance, convenience, and conventionality.

The opening stretch of Discovery suggested a series that could potentially balance the thrills of interstellar travel, with the thoughtfulness of social and political commentary, and the narrative stakes that come from compelling characters. And yet, in a finale of sorts, the show resorts to one-dimensional versions of its central figures, simplifies and minimizes its thematic heft, and leans hard into undifferentiated combat and explosions. That sort of turn is, sadly, not at all unprecedented for Star Trek, but it’s not something worth emulating either.