2x05 Saints of Imperfection

Told you they won't show us Spock until the end. The whole episode did not strung a chord with me. Another step sideways instead of forward. I am not surprised Hugh is back, always suspected he would be. They never introduced another doctor. Can't say I care much for the fact or how they did it. The whole explanation was a bit too far-fetched. Plus they milked they whole situation a bit too much. The whole ship is falling apart but again and again they went into all-out "let's explain it to death mode". At some point I was yelling "get the f*** out of there already".

I am somewhat surprised that Section 31 is so out in the open. Tyler walks around displaying his badge to everyone and it seems obvious that everyone knows about them. Kinda weird for a covert ops unit. And I am not just saying that because of continuity. Maybe they were operating like that in this timeframe and where disbanded later, at least officially ?

And Giorgiou is so full of shit. Who in his right mind would ever trust her ?

Best character this season by a wide margin is Pike. He at least seems to be a chip off the old Starfleet block.

[6.1/10] I really don’t know what to do with this episode. It has a lot of the things I like from Star Trek: a weird and wild premise, an animating central theme, and a bit of pulling at the tension between the Federation’s mission and the realities of nation-building. But it is also full of speechifying, overblown drama, and more reality-stretching nonsense than you can shake a type 3 phaser rifle at.

The notion that Tilly has been transported in the mycelial dimension using an organic transporter pad is the kind of off-the-wall, loony premise that I really enjoy. And the fact that Stamets wants to use the Discovery as a “doorstop”, with the ship halfway between our universe and the mushroom verse, so they can rescue her, is even better. Sure, it’s kind of insane that Pike is willing to risk his ship and entire crew to rescue one ensign, but lord knows Kirk pulled the same crap all the time, and the show at least has the smarts to paper over it with a big speech about the central promise of Starfleet that helps distract from how dumb a move this whole thing is.

But hey, dumb moves that make for good stories is Star Trek to a tee. And it fits with the overall theme in this episode -- trust. That manifests between Tilly and her former brain spore, between Stamets and an unexpectedly alive Dr. Culber, between Pike and his old friend Leland who’s now running Section 31, and between Michael and the duo of Mirror Georgiou and Ash Tyler. This show is pretty loud about it, but people with different values and interests and priorities having to work together to solve a big problem is something at the core of the franchise.

But good lord, the dialogue in this one. Discovery has pumped out some thudding verbiage in the past (“Hello pot? This is kettle”) but man, this episode takes the cake. I know Captain’s ;ogs are a trademark of the franchise, but Burnham’s overly pat voiceover intro and outro made me roll my eyes so hard I think it changed the Earth’s rotation speed. Tilly had a few funny lines, but on the whole, the entire sequence with her, Burnham, Stamets, Culber, and May was chock full of clunky exposition, leaden statements about the characters’ emotional states, and cornball declarations of this and that. What’s more, for all the charged energy between Burnham and Pike on the one hand, and the Section 31 misfits on the other, the episode could have hardly been more clumsy in outlining the objections and connections between the two groups.

It’s also an action-heavy episode, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’d be lying if I said that the “big fireworks” setting for Star Trek was my favorite, but there’s a nice ticking clock here, real danger for the ship, and an assist from Section 31 that raises a lot of questions and heightens the stakes. There’s a lot of soaring music for the folks stalking through the ship caught between two worlds when there’s not really much of a threat, but the risk of the ship being eaten through provides enough tension for the hour, as does the back-and-forth between Pike and Leland. Plus, you can definitely see more of the special effects budget going to use in this one.

But what kills me here is how much you can feel the show straining to justify the resurrection of Dr. Culber. In a lot of ways, that feels unfair. Lord knows that the franchise resurrected Spock with minimal justification, and that crazy sci-fi stuff is par for the course. But the show spends so much time of the implausible mechanics here that it comes off like complete nonsense.

The fact that Stamets acted as a “lightning rod” that sent Dr. Culber’s unspecified “energy” into the mycelial dimension is, perhaps, no more absurd than Spock’s corpse landing on a regeneration planet and coming back to life. But at least The Search for Spock had the good judgment not to linger on that science-as-magic explanation and just deal with the results. “Saints of Imperfection” gives us extended discussions of this energy transfer, and a strange “I can’t exist in your world” twist, and to top it off, an even less-comprehensible declaration that if they just throw Dr. Culber’s DNA into the mix, they can use the talking human mushroom’s technology to send him back to our universe.

I try very hard not to get bogged down in these sorts of plot details. Despite the presence of our favorite Vulcan, Star Trek has never been especially logical or consistent in how its science works. As Futurama memorably pointed out, a heap of Treknobabble with a spoonful of analogy to help the medicine go down is par for the course. But this scans as just stretch on top of stretch, until you can all but feel the show straining to correct a move that angered critics last season, and using whatever nonsense it needs to deploy to make it happen.

It would help if I bought the emotional hooks of the episode more. Stamets having a reunion with his dead departed love should be a big damn deal. The dialogue just gives us a bunch of hamfisted monologues that the actors have trouble spitting out, and the whole enterprise (no pun intended) gets tripped up on those pointless and unsatisfying efforts to explain how all of this happened. The same goes for Burnham’s reunions with Georgiou and Tyler, which should be full of nervous energy and tension which dissipates as soon as it’s clear that rather than exploring that tension, the show just has them along for the ride in a regular episode.

This episode isn’t a total loss or anything. The whole concept of the mycelial half measure is cool and provides a great deal of both spark and danger throughout. The friction between Pike and the regular crew versus Leland and the Section 31 rulebreakers is interesting in concept, if not always in execution. And Burnham, Tilly, and Stamets having to make unique contact with alien life and solve an intractable scientific problem is bread and butter Star Trek. But between faux-science stacked on top of ever more baloney, false finishes that undermine the story, and reams and reams of painful dialogue that can’t deliver the impact the show needs it to, “Saints of Imperfection” botches what should be the culmination of many loose threads from last season and this one.