3x04 Forget Me Not

[5.8/10] For a show with so much promise, Discovery has a frustrating number of recurring flaws. But arguably the most hobbling of them is its dialogue. A series can make different story choices, or blow up its premise, or put its focus on different characters, but if it can’t get the words people speak to one another right, everything else falls down around it.

That’s a tough obstacle for Discovery in general, as there’s often a stage-y, almost declarative quality to most of its conversations and monologues. It’s rare to find a character saying something other than exactly what they mean. Too often those speeches or exchanges sound tin-eared and unconvincing, which makes it hard both to connect with the characters who are saying these things and also to buy into the situations, be they emotional or more plot-heavy, that the show wants to spin.

That’s especially true in an episode like “Forget Me Not”, which dispenses with much of the theatrics and plot-heavy developments, and instead focuses on more internal stories of growth and healing for Adira and Michael on the one hand, and the rest of the Discovery crew on the other. In an episode where the obstacles are more external, that might not be such a hindrance, but for an episode that hinges on the introspective and personal, the bad dialogue all but sinks this one.

It’s a shame, because at a high level, I really like both stories, each centered on a common ideal of needing to process and grapple with trauma, rather than turn away from it, in order to be able to move forward. The main one sees Michael journeying with Adira to the Trill home planet, in the hopes that Adira can unlock the symbiant’s memories of its other hosts in addition to her own lost memories, and that through that, Michael can learn where Senna Tal took what’s left of Starfleet.

It brings us to a familiar theme this season -- of formerly open communities that have become closed off and suspicious of outsiders, made open to possibilities once more through interactions with our heroes. There’s something that feels very traditionally Star Trek about Adira showing up as the first human-symbiant hybrid (give or take Riker), only to find that one Trill elder thinks she’s a bridge to the future of their species and another thinks she’s an abomination.

The problem is that all of the dialogue here is clanging and unbelievable. We get unnatural exchanges between Burnham and Adira that are meant to show them bonding over having both experienced trauma and strange developments, but which don’t have that emotional resonance. We get the aforementioned scene with the Trill elders (including Ronnie from Schitt’s Creek!), where every pronouncement traded feels stilted and strange. And even when they’re confronted by antagonists and helpers on the way to the magical Trill pool, there’s not really any life in the scene, weighed down by on-the-nose declarations of exactly how every character feels in a given moment.

The same problem afflicts the B-story here, which features Dr. Culber telling Saru that the crew may seem fine on the surface, despite all that they’ve been through, but that beneath it all, each of them is stressed beyond belief. It leads Saru to try to find away to foster a connection and community among his compatriots on the Discovery, especially since they’ve lost those connections to everyone and everything they knew before the time jump.

Honestly, I really like that idea. It’s a big deal to leap a thousand years in the future, and while it would be perfectly acceptable T.V. decorum to have your characters note the difficulty of it for one scene and then seemingly take it all in stride, it’s a canny choice to have our heroes exploring the hardships of that dramatic change in their lives.

The problem is that Discovery’s writers can’t craft a scene that actually dramatizes that in any sort of plausible or relatable way. The major sequence in this half of the episode sees Saru inviting his senior officers to a dinner which starts out friendly, but quickly devolves into recriminations and bitterness. It’s a good tack, but the problem is that this show doesn’t have someone like Amy Sherman-Palladino to write an awkward dinner scene, so the whole thing ends up playing like a high school production of a Tennessee Williams play.

None of the emotions or interactions feel real. None of the all-important connections between these people -- that are not only vital to underscore the message of the episode but to earn the audience’s goodwill overall for the series and its cast -- are palpably or viscerally felt. It basically dooms this chunk of the episode. That’s particularly true when it comes time for all of them to reconcile, where the setup is so weak that the payoff is no better.

(Don’t get me started on the fact that Saru seems blasé about the Sphere Data merging with Discovery’s computer systems, assuming without evidence that it’s only there to protect them, right after another digital intelligence recently tried to, you know, murder all of them.)

The same problem afflicts the resolution to the Burnham/Adira half of the episode. It turns out that the thing hindering Adira from accessing her memories and connection to the symbiant’s past hosts is that she obtained the symbiant after a trauma -- namely the untimely death of her Trill boyfriend. She must live through those moments again in the magical Trill pool (which Burnham gets to join her in for less-than-convincing reasons), and accept them in order to be able to move forward, both biologically in terms of her connection to the symbiant and more spiritually in terms of experiencing the “post-traumatic growth” that Dr. Culbler talks about.

That’s a good tack! Look, “I have to process this emotional trauma in order to unlock my abilities” is a well-worn trope, but there’s a good reason for that. It’s a sturdy type of character story. The problem is that the dialogue is, again, very blunt and tin-eared, which especially hurts the flashbacks/visions where we see Adira and Gray flirting and expressing affection before the terrible thing happens.

It’s laudable as hell to see the show unabashedly centering a love story (albeit a doomed one) between a non-binary individual and a trans individual. But the lines the actors are forced to exchange don’t sell the all-important sense of love between the characters at all, instead making me wonder if the writers have ever actually experienced romance or just seen it on T.V. There’s a cartoony, almost fake quality to their interactions, with recycled dialogue that doesn’t support the good story the show’s trying to tell.

There’s still something rousing when Adira does process her grief, and it allows her to connect with “the circle” of other hosts. She speaks all of her new names to the other Trills, and earns their acceptance. But the moment doesn't land as well as it should given how much the bad dialogue weakens the central relationship that’s supposed to motivate her hardship and eventual self-actualization.

It’s an unavoidable problem that hinders everything else Discovery tries to do. Plots where there’s little in the way of phaser fire and more in the way of soul-searching are great. Stories of having to gain cultural acceptance and foster openness are pure Trek. But if the things the characters actually say fail to convey the significance of these things in a believable way, if they make it harder to relate to them as human beings since they don’t talk like recognizable human beings, it’s hard to get anything else on your show off the ground.