If last week's penultimate episode was the show's dramatic peak, this finale is an elegiac send-off, with Mariko's loss really felt by all (and which Jarvis beautifully conveys that throughout). Sanada and (especially) Asano are really in top form throughout, especially during that cliff's climatic conversation. Great series.
This show is still as dumb as a bag of bricks. Absolutely shocking.
Oh no, we lost 11% of our energy reserves! Janeway's gotta give up coffee to save power, but using the holodeck is totally fine? (And apparently even more fine when that figure doubles.)
Convenient that Chakotay happens to have his medicine bundle even though his ship was destroyed in Caretaker, isn't it? I don't remember the Maquis crew members exactly getting a chance to salvage their belongings before that Kazon ship took their shuttle in the flank…
Based on the deck layout in Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force, Neelix turns left out of the mess hall right into a dead-end when he's heading off to argue with Janeway. Turning left got him out of the shot faster, I guess.
Someone in effects should have checked the script. Those nucleonic beams were very much not parallel to the ship's central axis.
OK, nitpicks aside, I'm of two minds on this episode.
On the one hand, it does a lot of great work establishing elements of the series that I really do love (if only for nostalgic reasons, in some cases). We get a hint of the Doctor becoming more independent ("A hologram that programs himself…"). We get jokes about Neelix's cooking. Tom is already establishing himself as a holodeck wizard of sorts (even if he does write his female characters like a chauvinist).
But we also get some of the bullshit. The whole premise is just a bit hokey, and the Neelix/Kes relationship is all the more awkward when you start the series already knowing that she's two years old and will be dead by age ten. (That kiss? So uncomfortable.)
Still, Voyager was my first Trek show. I can't help but like it despite myself.
[2.8/10] Woof. After having such a rough time with the first season of the show, I blanched a bit at the suggestion that the second season was a step down. “How much further could it go off the rails?” I wondered. How could it conceivably recede from the already paltry levels it had already hit. Well, there’s my answer -- ninety minutes of television that is 90% shlock.
But, as I always try to do when talking about something I don’t particularly care for, let’s start out talking about what’s good about this one. Full disclosure, the opening scene with the senile old room service guy doddering around while Cooper lays bleeding on the floor initially annoyed the hell out of me. The scene drags and drags and is almost excruciating in its duration. But I take that to be the point, and somewhere around the second time the guy returned just to give a thumbs up, it elicited a chuckle for the sheer rake gag-esque audacity of the scene, so that’s something.
We also get the who, if not necessarily the why, of the central mystery of the show. Cooper lays out the details of what he’s pieced together, and the episode reveals, or at least seems to reveal, that Bob, the guy from Cooper’s dream and Mrs. Palmer’s vision, beat up Ronette and seemingly killed Laura. Some of the scene veers into cheese, as nearly everything here does, but the quick, spliced together clips of that grisly final scene are legitimately chilling, and add a level of fright and severity that the show has had trouble establishing outside of myna bird mimics thus far.
There’s also some nice material involving Ed and Nadine. I’ll admit, I’ve come around on this portion of Twin Peaks, which I initially found bothersome. Ed offers a sad and exaggerated but believable tale. He and Norma were longtime sweethearts; he thought Norma ran off with Hank (where presumably there’s more to the story), and Nadine was there for him in a time of need. Ed was impulsive and distraught and married her, but she was so happy and so gracious and so devoted to him (never even blaming him for accidentally shooting out her eye) that he didn’t have the heart to leave her. It’s a little melodramatic, but it’s a good performance from Ed, and the look of wistfulness in Norma’s mind when she sees the husband and wife together adds another layer of pathos to the whole thing.
That said, the theme for this episode seems to be two-fold: 1. Baffling transformation and 2. Doing a collection of really stupid stuff.
The latter assessment may sound harsh, but I don’t know how else to explain some of what seems to be trying to pass for comedy or texture throughout this episode. While the senile room service guy has a certain anti-humor charm to it, the similar attempts at weird or wooly humor are painfully bad. The numerous, extended shots of Deputy Andy’s odd little walk and wobble were dumb as all get out. Leland breaking into a little jig and Ben and Jerry following him was a baffling effort at charm. And the “hospital food is terrible” recurring gags are the hackiest kind of easy crap. I think the show means to be funny here, but it never quite makes it above moronic.
And that’s not the only place where “Giant” be with you makes no sense (in a bad, rather than merely surreal, way). When Ben chases Audrey around the bed, why in the world doesn’t he recognize his daughter’s voice, or the other features besides her face? The whole bit is creepy (which is, in fairness, what I think Lynch & Frost were going for) but it feels like a cheap way to avoid the reckoning the show set up in the prior episode.
That’s not the only nonsensical parent-child scene in the episode. Major Briggs tells his son Bobby about a dream he had where they embraced as family in a wonderful house some time in the future. It’s meant to play as some kind of reconciliation or corner-turning moment for the pair, but it plays as ridiculous as all get out. Much of that can be pinned on the horrible acting from Bobby Briggs, who seems be trying to communicate being sincerely touched, but mugs and renders the reaction implausible.
Then there’s the strange transformations in the episode. Leland Palmer’s hair turns white after he returns from strangling Jacques Renault. So...there’s that. But he’s also happy now, singing songs and passing out during them. I’ll admit, there’s something funny about Ray Wise playing so chipper (and it’s a nice change from his awful cry-dancing routine), but it’s so exaggerated and over the top that it’s hard to take anything from it beyond mild bemusement.
The same cannot be said for Donna’s transformation here, as she seems to be attempting to step into Laura’s persona. Between taking Laura’s glasses, her meals on wheels route, and toying with Bobby, we get an entire change in her personality without the slightest hint as to why or how. Maybe the glasses are cursed or the ghost of Laura is possessing her or some crap like that? It’s weak sauce from Lara Flynn Boyle, and a direction for the character that feels entirely unmotivated.
Oh yeah, and then there’s a soothsaying giant. While this struck me as odd, it’s of a piece with the “people who seem like they’re from an old circus’s freak show give Cooper vaguely-worded prophecy” shtick from the first season. It didn’t do much for me (and certainly didn’t feel as formally audacious as Cooper’s first dream), but it didn’t really bother me either.
In total though, “May the Giant Be With You” may be a new low for Twin Peaks, which had already been scraping the bottom of the barrel for a while by this point. Plodding pacing, more awful dialogue and acting (with Pete joining Bobby as a particularly bad offender on that score), dumb attempts at comedy, and nonsensical character choices. This was a slog, but hey, at least we have Alfred back to voice my thoughts on the ridiculous of this all in-universe. Yeesh.
[8.0/10] Every Star Trek show does the “We just need to use science-as-magic to solve this life-threatening problem!” routine. I get tired of it sometimes, because it doesn’t require any actual ingenuity from the crew or the writers. Simply saying, “We could blow up the Protostar to stop the living construct, but if we [technobabble] the [technobabble-machine], we should be able to disperse the explosion and not hurt anyone!” is kind of a cheat. Sure, it ostensibly requires some in-universe cleverness from Zero and Rok-Tahk to drum up the solution, and from the rest of the team to make it happen. But nothing the show set up to this point really establishes why this would be a good or natural solution to the problem.
But there’s a way you can still make those nigh-magical solutions meaningful -- give them a cost, whether it’s practical or emotional (and ideally, both). In this instance, there’s the simple fact that Dal, Gwyn, and company would have to say goodbye to the Protostar, the ship that has been their home and their salvation after the events on Tars Lamora. That alone makes it tough and sad to let the ship explode, even for the greater good. (Hello Search for Spock fans!)
More than that, though, the destruction of the Protostar to prevent the construct from continuing to destroy Starfleet’s entire, er, fleet is meaningful because it comes with a human cost. For one thing, Dal is willing to go down with the ship, something that indicates how he’s grown into the role of captain. More importantly, it takes a sacrifice from Holo-Janeway.
She has been the den mother to these young officers-in-training all this time. She knows what this will cost her. But she’s also willing to make the sacrifice because she too has internalized Starfleet’s ideals. She wants to save these kids as much as she wants to save the universe. So she makes the choice, and doing the right and selfless thing means losing her with the ship. There’s something beautiful but melancholy about the fact that her time with the young heroes has caused her to grow, to the point that her program can no longer fit on an isolinear chip. The irony of her developing alongside these kids, to the point that she can’t join them in their escape, makes her sacrifice all the more poignant.
There’s also some synchronicity to the fact that the Protostar’s shockwave creates a wormhole that either is what took Chakotay and his crew fifty-three years into the future, or at least allows Starfleet to learn that's where he ended up. Frankly, I thought I understood the whole kit and kaboodle of Chakotay’s disappearance and the Vau N’Akat going back in time, but the “five decades into the future” threw off what I thought I knew. Still, it’s not that hard to get, even if it’s a little convoluted, and the fact that the Protostar’s self-destruction helps create a bridge there gives the adventure a certain clockwork quality.
This is also a strong outing for Admiral Janeway. I don’t know why, but there’s always something compelling about a captain (or, in this case, admiral) defending the actions of her crew to a stuffy Starfleet tribunal. Her speech to Starfleet command is a great one. She pushes back on the council’s ojbections to theft and other misdeeds on the part of the Protostar’s crew, and points out that they saved everyone’s butts with their courage and ingenuity. She rejects the idea that they’re not suited for admission to the Academy, arguing that the baptism by fire they’ve survived is a better indication of their fitness than any formal evaluation could be. And she stands up for objections to Dal’s status as an augment, noting that he’s not enhanced and, more than that, is a living representation of the bonds among Federation worlds. It’s a great stand for Janeway on behalf of what’s good and right, and a vindication of all the good works and maturation our young heroes have gone through.
That's why it’s so triumphant to see them show up on Starfleet’s doorsteps, after landing in the bay. (Shades of Star Trek IV!) Their hard work and good works pay off. They may not be able to attend the Academy straight away, but they’re permitted to become warrant officers under Janeway, thereby achieving their goal to become an official part of Starfleet. It’s a nice middle ground. On a practical level, the council makes a fair point that it wouldn’t be fair to fast track them ahead of other candidates. On a show level, this allows Dal and company to succeed in joining Starfleet, while still making it possible for the basic premise of the show to continue and evolve. I like the line that walks.
The exception is Gwyn, who chooses to go to Solum and try to prepare the Vau N’Akat for first contact. I have mixed feelings about the choice. Mostly, I hope this is a Saru thing, where the ostensible return to the homeworld is more of a pitstop than an exit from the show, since I like Gwyn’s presence. But I wish we got more time with her reconciling her feelings about her dad before just deciding to return to a planet she’s never known and a people she’s never been a part of, over her own found family, because it’s what her quasi-abusive father wanted. I’ve already said my piece, but suffice it to say, I’m uneasy about how the show’s handled this.
All that said, I dig the idea that she’s taken Federation values to heart, and wants to use her abilities to bring people together to help resolve the conflict her father wanted to avoid using more peaceful, progressive means. Her and Dal’s goodbye is suitably sad and sweet, with enough callbacks to their initial sparks to give them a sense of having come full circle.
So the first season ends on a high note. Zero gets a fancy new containment suit. Jankom impresses his fellow cadets with his engineering abilities. Rok-Tahk’s care for Murf and others is consecrated into the study of xenobiology. (I knew it!) And the kids get to join the real Janeway to be a part of her bigger plans. Despite some science-as-magic, the second part of “Supernova” gets the big things right and makes our heroes achieving their goal feel earned, which is what’s important.
Overall, I walk away impressed with Prodigy’s maiden voyage. The show still has cracks in its armor, like the janky animation and occasional bouts of overly broad humor. But it also reinvigorated the meaning and value of Starfleet’s ideals by showing them to us through the eyes of children and outsiders who need them more than anyone. It leveraged fifty years of Star Trek history in creative ways, bringing back concepts and characters, but using them to enhance this show’s main players rather than dousing us with simple nostalgia. And despite the more baroque qualities of its mystery box, the first season uses that plot to show why Dal, Gwyn, and their comrades grew and matured in dealing with these challenges, to where they deserve to be in Starfleet as much as anyone.
It’s nice to have something specifically aimed at a younger audience that helps deliver these concepts and stories in a way that fits their style and needs. As with Star Wars: The Clone Wars, it balances canon connections and grown-up ideas with accessible stories and age-appropriate adjustments. The reverence for Trek is plainly there, and it’s nice to see the show’s creative team move the ball forward, in a way that makes the franchise’s big tent even bigger.
Absolutely incredible, one of the most heartbreaking moments in the Breaking Bad universe. Never in a million years I'd have expected something like this - always thought Howard was the safest character.
Nacho's death was sort of easy to process since there was so much vindication and control about it, but this was the polar opposite - Howard gets ridiculed, only to then get offed basically for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
When Lalo looked at the cockroach, I instantly knew he'd look for Jimmy, just never expected it being so soon. Visual storytelling at its finest.
With this episode, I realized I also changed my perspective on Saul's future as Gene - where I used to feel sort of sorry for him after seeing how he thrives in his heyday, it more and more seems like where things were headed all along. Best character development on TV as always, and masterful storytellers all around.
[7.5/10[ In hindsight, it was probably inevitable that Rafa and Trace would intersect with the Bad Batch. They’re both a set of characters introduced in season 7 of The Clone Wars, and so since this crop of Bad Batch episodes feel as much like a sequel to those TCW episodes as anything, it makes sense that we’d see the Martez sister make an appearance here. While they aren’t my favorite characters in the franchise, I like positioning them as helping out the burgeoning rebellion (I assume?) and running into conflict with the Bad Batch who’s on the same mission for purely mercenary reasons.
There’s also some good setups and payoffs. The show isn’t exactly shy about Omega working on her bow-firing prowess. But there’s a tidy little arc to here inability to consistently hit a target, to her stand-off with Rafa leading to the dangerous situation at the Corellian droid disposal facility, to her good aim and ability to block out distractions to save Rafa’s Gammorrean bacon.
I'll admit that the action didn’t wow me here. The direction was largely indifferent and, while appropriate to the situation, most of the goings on at the droid disposal looked like one big gray mess. But there were some nicely staged set pieces even if I didn’t love the framing and editing of them. Omega getting trapped on a conveyor belt of doom is an old trick to build tension, but it still works. Wrecker’s big damn heroes moment while Tech is tinkering offers some minor excitement. And the combination of the Bad BAtchers and the Martez sisters figuring out how to use the vaunted strategy droid head to turn their old enemies against their immediate threat is a clever way to extricate everyone from the situation.
The game of hot potato between our heroes and the Martez sisters is a little rote, but it gives the two groups something to fight over and chase after, which serves the narrative’s purposes. We don’t get much in the way of ideological differences between the two sides, just ction, but it at least provides a means to show them working against one another when their interests in possessing the head conflict, and then the two groups working together when it’s a necessity to escape eh facility’s security droids.
In terms of little mmets, it’s troubling to see Wrecker’s headaches continue, to the point ath now he’s even briefly using the “good soldiers follow order” line. The poor lummox is a ticking time bomb, and I hope the Bad Batch (or somebody) figures out how to neutralize the chip (thereby giving them the knowledge and motivation to do the same for Crosshair) before it’s too late. On a different note, it’s a cheap gag, but I got a kick out of Rafa stealing Trace’s distraction idea, Rafa saying “Is there an echo here?”, only for Echo to respond, “Yes, I’m Echo.” Dumb, but funny.
Otherwise, the peak of this one is the end. I like picking back up the theme that Hnter and his comrades aren’t exactly sure what to do now that the war is over. Fighting for the Empire doesn’t seem right to them, and the notoriously transactional Rafa even admits that sooner or later you have to take sides, a late-breaking sign of character growth from her arc in TCW, and a hint that Hunter and company may eventually make the same choice. The conflict between protecting themselves and staying out of sight versus fighting against the successor organization to the one that trained and deployed them is an intriguing one. Hunter taking the head for himself, but giving the data download to Rafa is a nice middle ground on Hunter’s And I’m also curious as to who Rafa and Trace are working for. (My money’s on Bail Organa, but I’d like to be surprised!)
Overall, another good outing of The Bad Batch that once again connects the series to other Star Wars projects, but feeds back into the clones’ central story of finding their place in a post-Empire galaxy.
[8.0/10] So much more to say than this mini-review, but in brief, it’s almost shocking how much of The Simpsons is here right from the jump. This was not meant to be the first episode of the series, but it still works as such a great introduction to what the show is about.
For one thing, you have the table setting. Marge’s Xmas letter gives you the basics of the family. You have classic figures from Principal Skinner to Moe and Barney introduced right out of the gate. Homer’s combative relationship with his sisters-in-law and jealous relationship with his neighbor is firmly established. And even little character traits, like Bart’s hellraiser impulses and Lisa’s sensitive intelligence are sketched out here. Sure, our understanding of these characters will get deeper over the years, and the show will better define them, but the basics are there in a recognizable way.
At the same time, the show’s sensibility comes through so clear here. The satirical cynicism that fuels the series is firmly present, from the careful omissions or white lies in Marge’s Xmas letter, to Burns giving himself a bonus but withholding one from his employees, to Patti’s blasé “watch your cartoon” response to Lisa’s polite but legitimate grievance. That sort of wry take on how families present themselves and work and intergenerational interactions is true to Matt Groening’s Life in Hell roots.
Plus there’s the classic skewering of the institution of T.V. itself, long one of The Simpsons’s favorite targets. This episode tells you what kind of show you’re watching when Bart references everything from A Christmas Carol to The Smurfs to justify his belief that miracles happen to poor kids on Xmas, a belief that’s then shattered when he and Homer’s longshot bet, the one that could save their money woes and with them, Xmas, completely fails to pan out. Bart’s shock that T.V. lied to him is an amusing note for a show clearly trying to depart from the learning/hugging squeak clean mode of T.V. that was predominant at the time.
But this is, unexpectedly, also an episode of love and, yes, even a little hugging. This is a Homer episode, and it helps answer that eternal question of why Homer, who is consistently stupid, often selfish, and rife with poor judgment, deserves to have this loving family. Right from the gate, The Simpsons answers the question: because however ill-equipped he is to succeed, Homer continually tries to do right by the people he cares about. His efforts to preserve the joy of Xmas, and to keep his family happy during the holiday season, are ill-fated but noble, and the pathos in the poor sap from every time he deludeds himself into making him think he can pull it off is quietly heartbreaking.
Despite that, the dope wins the day. There’s something so poetic and beautiful about the dog who ruined their last chance at a big payday, who’s “pathetic and a loser”, is also the one who makes their Xmas its brightest. The kids are happy. Marge is happy because the aptly named Santa’s Little Helper is something that can share their love (and scare away prowlers). And you get a warm holiday embrace from this nascent series, tinged with the bits of cynicism that make it feel legitimate rather than cloying.
All-in-all, this is a hell of a start for the duly venerated series, one that sets up the basic premise of the show and its cast of characters, establishes the series’s sensibility right away, and better yet, tells a great story about Homer’s love for his family that would be the backbone of the series in lean years and in its golden years.
So they really did what Picard and Guinan were talking about in Measure Of A Man.
I like the Romulan angle as they are still a race that needs to be deeper explored given how long they are around in the ST lore. Is the Zhad Vash their equivalent to Section 31 ? Not sure where this Borg stuff is leading. I thought Star Trek was too over-borged at times.
This clearly isn't the federation of old if an admiral takes they position that they should decide a race's fate. I would have love to watch a show centering around that part in history and how Picard acted at the time. But I am OK with where this is at now.
Only thing I can't stand is the Abrams hommage lens-flaring. In the conversation between the Commodore and that Lieutenant you couldn't at times see them. Why does every Star Trek show have to look like that now ?
[5.8/10] Good lord, Kaz is just a complete idiot. How he continually manages to get hoodwinked and make bad decisions in any situation he comes across is beyond me. Is this supposed to be relatable? Are we supposed to empathize with Kaz missing blindly obvious clues that he’s being taken for a ride or that things are going to go pear-shaped.
At least he does something decent for once, fixing the Fireball for Tam rather than just riding it hard and putting it back wet as usual. It’s pleasant to see him be that considerate. And him pitching in for Flix and Orka so that Flix can see his mom is nice too (even if it’s to pay off the debt). But then things just completely spin out when an obvious thief and troublemaker tries to get him out of the shop so he can steal an expensive tool, and what do you know, Kaz falls for it.
The rest of the episode, with Kaz getting stuck in a shipping crate and BB-8 trying to thwart the thief, is more static, undifferentiated action and slapstick. There’s something a little amusing about Kaz having to contend with Flix’s pet “Bitey”, but otherwise this is standard, uninspired stuff. The bit with Flix and Orka being glad that Kaz let the tool go down with the ship than let a longtime competitor get his hands on it is solid, but the bulk of the episode is just not enough to sustain your interest.
I do appreciate the hints that the First Order is mining (presumably for kyber crystals to power Starkiller Base or so their weapon can tap into that planet’s core?), but it’s a lot of nonsense to get to that point.
Overall, kind of a waste of time.
[4.4/10] Thank goodness for Kyle MacLachlan as Agent Cooper. That’s about all I can say for the second episode of Twin Peaks. There is such a joie de vivre, a wide-eyed, confident heap of quirk to the character and the performance, that his presence instantly elevates every scene he’s in. From the Batman-like introduction in this episode, to his meticulous evaluation of coffee, pie, and various other breakfast foods, to his ability to sniff out that the Sherriff is seeing Ms. Packard, there’s the sense that Cooper is certainly eccentric, but also scrupulous and good at what he does because of it. It doesn’t hurt that MacLachlan can make Lynch and Frost’s dialogue sound believable in a way that no one else in the cast can.
The only other character in the episode who offers anything of note is Audrey. There’s parts of that I find unpleasant, because her role seems to be to titillate as much as she’s meant to be a legitimate character. But the other side of the coin is that there is an intrigue and an unassuming pathos that cuts through the way she’s uncomfortably cast as a teenager oozing sexuality.
That comes through in her apple cart-upsetting ways. Like everything in Twin Peaks, it’s absurdly over the top, but the scene in which she pulls her pencils out of the cup she just bored into, just to see what happens when the coffee spills everywhere, represents the way in which she is something of a wildcard, willing to stir the pot for the sake of stirring the pot.
But as much as it seems like adolescent nihilism, or causing trouble for trouble’s sake, there’s also the sense that it’s a cry for attention. It’s trite to have the wealthy parents with kids who make problems because they feel neglected, but it’s at least an interesting tack to take in the scene where her dad confronts her for scaring off the Swedish investors with the news of Laura’s death. It’s all a little silly, but unlike most of the characters in Twin Peaks (Dale Cooper excepted) she at least has a presence about her that makes her stand out in a show full of thinly-drawn, stereotypical characters. (It may help that she typically doesn’t have to spit out too much of the series’s abysmal dialogue.)
And no one in the show is more of a flat, stereotypical character than Leo, the abusive husband of Shelley. But before we get into that, let’s tease out the ridiculous, lumpy, love-dodecahedron that the show has going with its teen cast members at the moment. It starts with Leo, who’s married to Shelley, who’s seeing Bobby on the side, who was also dating Laura, who was having a dalliance with James (and possibly two other guys), who is not romantically involved with Donna, who is officially dating Mike. If that weren’t enough, there is Naomi (the eye patch-wearing nut obsessed with drapes), who’s married to Ed, who’s secretly seeing Norma, who’s married to a man in jail. And just to make sure there’s enough tangled romantic webs to really make things convoluted, the Sherriff is seeing Mrs. Packard, who is flirting with Pete, who is married to Catherine, who is schtuping Audrey’s dad. Phwew. Suffice it to say, this is a show where you need a diagram to keep up with all the romantic connections, and it’s utterly, utterly ridiculous.
Anyway, we get Leo’s homecoming with Shelley, where he is viciously jealous (over unfamiliar branded cigarettes in his ashtray) and willing to beat her with soap in a sock over a missing, blood-stained shirt. I’m willing to cut some slack to a show made in 1990, but I can’t help but wince at something as serious as spousal abuse being depicted in such a cartoonish, Halmark Channel-esque fashion.
Rest-assured, there’s plenty more crap where that came from, as we dig deep into a budding relationship between expressionless James and Donna. There’s the grain of something solid there, with the idea that grief provokes strong emotional states in people that sometimes forges unexpected connections, but there’s next to no chemistry between the pair.
It doesn’t help that James has all the ability to emote of a particularly dull Rock, or that Donna is saddled with the cringiest of bad dialogue. Her little monologue about this all seeming like a wonderful dream, but also a nightmare, is a noble attempt to capture the confused feelings that emerge around grief and comfort, but it’s written with all the nuance and eloquence of an episode of G.I. Joe.
That level of depth and subtlety carries on in the scene that Donna shares with Laura’s mom. As if the over-the-top acting the mom had already shown weren’t enough, we get some poorly-done special effects to superimpose Laura’s face on Donna’s to signify that the mom is delirious or out of it in her grief and grasping in vain for her daughter. The frantic screaming when she sees a random dude peeking from behind the couch is too much too, and it’s hard not to laugh when the show at least seems to be going for sincere, grief-stricken emotion.
The thrust of the episode seems to be a dichotomy of Laura as someone who was an upstanding young student on the one hand – dating the captain of the football team, volunteering at meals on wheels, and tutoring Audrey’s mentally-challenged older brother, and a doomed ingénue on the other, two-timing her boyfriend, doing cocaine, and getting lost in dark forests with mysterious people. But it’s a rote sense of duality, the usual Madonna/whore complex without any wrinkles in the early going beyond mystery thrown on top of mystery in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, it’ll all be going somewhere.
That’s the best I can hope for this rewatch of Twin Peaks, that eventually all this over-exaggerated camp and baroque plotting turns into something decent beyond its status as an intermittent showcase for Kyle MacLachlan. We’ll just have to wait and see.
[9.7/10] Most great Star Trek episodes do one or two things really well. A top tier installment might have a strong high concept premise. It might feature a strong emotional story. It could have a great sci-fi plot. It might advance the characters and their relationships. It could offer a piercing moral thought experiment. It might advance some of the major arcs of the show. It may be well-directed with engrossing visuals. It could say something worthwhile about the characters and about what’s important to us.
Do just a couple of these things with success and style, and you’ll end up with something superb. Do more than a handful, and you may have something truly outstanding.
“Children of Time” does them all. And it does them all brilliantly. It is a minor miracle, a true series highlight, and one of the best things Star Trek has ever done.
The idea is deceptively simple. Dax wants to explore a Gamma Quadrant planet with some typically atypical weird energy with the rest of the crew of the Defiant. When they get there, they find something bizarre and unexpected -- their great great great great grandchildren. Turns out that trying to escape the planet's peculiar field of temporal energy left our heroes stranded two hundred years in the past, where they founded this colony now run by their descendents.
It’s a brilliant premise, because it allows Deep Space Nine to do a clever sci-fi “What If?” story, one that provides us hints and glimpses of our characters’ futures, without resorting to alternate dimensions or dream sequences. Sisko and company learning who ended up with whom, who started this tradition or that one, who passed away in the centuries since the colony was founded, creates a stunning opportunity for them all to reflect on where their lives might be headed.
And like “The Visitor”, one of DS9’s other high water marks, it blends the engrossing science fiction premise with a series of deeply personal and emotional stories on that account.
The biggest of these is Kira meeting none other than a future Odo, who has survived those two-hundred years and is ready to share his feelings in the way our Odo never has. It is a truly stunning development that the show plays perfectly.
For the make-up team, Odo’s more refined features help us to visually distinguish the planet’s incarnation of Odo from the one we know and love. In terms of performance, Rene Auberjonois kills it, as always, conveying the sense of a more open-hearted, downright romantic version of the character who nevertheless feels of a piece with the Constable we know and love in his mannerisms. You get the sense of him simply allowing the things our Odo feels on the inside to reach the outside.
That’s an extra thrill because of the writing. This is a sneaky yet powerful way for Kira to finally understand how Odo feels about her. It allows Odo to confess his feelings in a true and vivid way without it being our Odo who quite reaches that breakthrough, without it ever feeling like a cheat. That’s because there’s a plain reason for the change -- not just the two-hundred years that the Changeling has had to evolve and reflect, but the fact that Kira is the only member of the crew who died in that temporal accident two-hundred years hence.
He’s had all these years to consider what he might have said if he’d only had the time, to imagine what their lives might have been if he found the courage to express his feelings, to plan for the day he knew Kira would return to him. Having this Odo deliver the earth-shattering news to her is a unique end-run around the usual narrative trajectory, but one that lets the show play fair, while still earning the emotion involved, given how much of the episode is founded on the unfortunate fact of Kira’s death in the time-defying crash that kickstarts the colony.
Because that’s one of the most fascinating parts of this episode -- the eternal question of how you weigh lives against one another, blown up to fantastical scale. The core dilemma at the heart of “Children of Time” is how you balance the lives of the eight-thousand colonists who’ve made their homes on the planet, versus the continuing lives of our heroes with their friends and family aboard Deep Space Nine, and the continued existence of Kira in particular.
But for that dilemma to have visceral weight, and not just be an academic discussion, you have to make the audience care about the strangers on the planet, and something they achieve in flying colors. It is a thrill to see the workaday workings of this community founded by the people we’ve gotten to know over these past five seasons.
There is an automated math program designed with Quark as its virtual guide. There are a line of Bashirs who revere Julian as their primogenitor. There is a child who has Benjamin’s eyes whom he holds with joy. There is a young O’Brien girl who has the Chief’s spunkiness and wit. Half the fun of this one is looking at this flourishing civilization, built on the ingenuity, kindness, and principles that the main cast has embodied since DS9 began.
And the peculiar joy of the situation, as Sisko and company are respected and admired as the equivalent of Founding Fathers, makes you want to hold onto these people and their society. They are the product of, and the inheritors of, so much good work following the example set by the Deep Space Nine crew. How would we not value and admire what they’ve built all the same?
The episode smartly forges connections between DS9 and the planet’s population. One of the most conceptually interesting are the Sons of Mogh, an order founded by Worf, that exists apart from the main group. It is populated partly by his descendants, but partly by those simply drawn to his way of life, regardless of their heritage. It is a wonderful tribute not just to Worf’s steadfast devotion to Klingon ritual and tradition, something which survives him in this branching timeline, but also his inclusiveness and willing to extend its blessings to those beyond his biology, much as similar blessings were extended to him by his human parents, Federation colleagues, and Trill partner. It’s hard to imagine a happier sort of ending for him.
That Trill partner survives to the present, after a fashion. We also meet Yedrin Dax, Jadzia’s descendent who carries on the Dax symbiont. It’s a clever choice from René Echevarria and the writing staff, because it gives the DS9 crew an honest broker who can substantiate what the colonists are saying, and it gives the audience an entry point character to represent the community in personal terms whom we know as well.
Guest star Gary Frank does terrific work as Yedrin, convincingly portraying that sense of familiarity with Benjamin, seeming connected to Jadzia in attitude and spirit, while also having a distinct presence all his own. What’s more, this character from “the future” also allows the show to comment on the Dax/Worf pairing, acknowledging that things will continue to be rocky, but that the couple will bend toward one another until marriage, and a beautiful life together, is in the offing. As with Kira and Colonial Odo, it’s a nice way for the episode to gesture toward what could be without having to pull the trigger just yet.
And yet, there’s part of me that wishes they would, if only because there is something magnetic about seeing Kira and (an) Odo together with open affections. This is a gorgeous episode to look at overall, but the cinematography is particularly eye-catching in bucolic, sunlit scenes of Colonist Odo and Kira in the countryside. Their shot in gauzy hues, with heartfelt dialogue that make these interludes feel the closest Star Trek’s ever come to a stately but passionate BBC literature adaptation.
Part of that vibe comes with the emotional attachment checked by what amounts to ideological disagreement. Odo is driven to forge a life he himself will never see, taking comfort in the mere expression of his love, even knowing that if his pleas work, it’s our Odo, not him, who’ll reap the benefits. The poignancy of that, of wanting the romance you imagined to take root, even if it’s not quite with you, being satisfied to simply have your feelings known, is wondrously romantic in ways I struggle to articulate -- a blend of self-sacrifice and satisfaction that moves the heart.
For her part, Kira is overwhelmed by all this: finding out that a dear friend is in love with her, worrying that her conversations about Bareil and Shakaar may have hurt him, having the surreal experience of praying over your own grave, wondering what it all means when your religion teaches you that the gods have but one path, and seeing a technological solution that seems to blasphemously create two. Who wouldn’t be affected by that?
And yet, therein lies the wrinkle. Yedrin promises our heroes that in the two-hundred years since their ancestors first landed here, Dax has been concocting a typical reverse-the-polarity-through-the-main-deflector-dish solution that will theoretically allow one version of the Defiant crew to head back to DS9, while another version continues through history as the colonists know it. A little visual flourish with Kira seemingly duplicating for a moment in the teaser helps give the idea credibility with the audience, not to mention Yedrin Dax’s status as a seeming honest broker.
The twist, then, is that he’s lying. And I love it because it makes this choice harder, not easier. Sisko and company can’t have their cake and eat it too. They must decide what’s right and which is worth more -- the eight thousand colonists who’ve made their lives here, or the forty-nine Defiant crewmembers who’ve made their lives aboard the Deep Space Nine. And there are no easy answers.
In the abstract, it’s a hell of a thought experiment. Can you just count heads and decide the interests of the greater number of colonists win out? Can you impose that choice when some of your crew might agree with it and some of them might not? Is making a choice where some people will never have existed the same as killing them? What responsibilities do the people alive now have to later generations, and what sacrifices should they be expected to make? How do you measure the right to pursue your own passions or projects against a moral obligation to see to the welfare of those down the line? There’s no good or simple answers to these questions, which makes for good conflicts and thought--provoking ideas.
But this is also a personal story, and what I particularly appreciate is how well-motivated everyone is in where they stand.
The people who have families, like Sisko and Miles, are reluctant, if not downright hostile, to the idea of abandoning their partners and children in favor of the colonists. I love the contrast between bachelor Bashir, who contemplates asking the recent transfer out since he discovers they eventually marry on the colony, and family man O’Brien who’s downright horrified at the idea of losing his wife and children and starting anew somewhere he’ll never be able to see them again. Yedrin Dax talks about having kept Sisko away from Jake, one of the most palpable connections that would be severed if they go along with Yedrin’s own plan to see that history continues as he knows it.
Yedrin’s position, however deceptive, is also comprehensible. Dax feels responsible for this colony, since it was Jadzia’s insistence that they check out the weird energy planet that got them stranded there in the first place. This colony is his baby, in some way, and part of exercising the guilt is ensuring that it wasn’t all for nothing, that they will build on these two-hundred years of progress and prosperity, not see it wiped away by a flourish of temporal mechanics. Jadzia herself feels betrayed, but also understands.
And then, most notably, the people who make the case for staying are those who are religious, and with that, believe in destiny and a universe where everything happens for a reason. Worf sees the Sons of Mogh as an honorable legacy. He believes that this is meant to be, and Kira agrees with him.
Kira’s agreement is the most powerful, because she has the most to lose. Yes, she believes in the same sense of fate that Worf does. When Miles rightly slates Worf’s blase attitude about severing family ties given Alexander’s conspicuous absence, Kira shoots back that the Prophets will care for him and for the O’Brien family on the station. She thinks this has been ordained, and more than that, would not credit her own life against the eight thousand who have thrived here. That is true faith, true devotion, true belief, and even in the humanistic world of Starfleet, it’s hard not to admire it in these terms.
But even if it’s a choice Kira can make for himself, it’s not a choice Sisko feels he can impose on everyone. So they resolve to leave. It is a hard choice, but an understandable one, which gives it extra force.
The decision provides one of the most powerful sequences in the episode and also the show. The colonists know they are doomed. Yet, they do not despair. They plant. They till. They work. They commune. They relish. This is a communal last meal, a tribute and triumph to all this society has achieved in the last two centuries.
It is some of the most lavish cinematography and touching scenes Star Trek has ever done. The vision of this community banding together against annihilation, hands meeting hands in the soil, parents reassuring children with the rhythm of the day, a Buddhist sand painting of labor destined to be washed away but that much more vital and vivid because of its impermanence. As Worf tells his sons, time is the enemy now. Let us band together and fight in vain against it.
When Chief O’Brien takes part in it, even he cannot deny the transcendence of what has been built here. He cannot destroy it, even if it means sacrificing all he knows and loves.
And that is that. In one of the most heart-rending choices of DS9 the crew collectively decides to recreate the accident that was the catalyst for this community, because it is too beautiful, too full of the love and values that they themself radiate, to rend asunder.
And then it is rent asunder. Our heroes record their goodbyes. They prepare to commit to this life. And at the last moment, the autopilot ticks them off the course, sending them free of the anomaly du jour, and blinking the colony from existence. “Children of Time” spends so much making us, and them, love this place and these people, and then it rips it away from both. It is devastating, in the best way.
I knew the who and the why from the moment it happened. The episode offers a feint, with Sisko voicing the notion that Yedric had a change of heart. But there was only one answer, what’s always been the answer. Colonist Odo loves Kira. He cannot endorse a choice that would kill her. He cannot allow a choice that would rob the universe of the possibility of love blossoming between her and our Odo. After two-hundred years of waiting, of holding onto that hope, it would be a loss too great to bear.
That too is a complicated choice. If you love someone, and want what’s best for them, does that give you the right to override their autonomy? To overrule what they themselves believe in? To let thousands perish for their benefit? Kira is rightfully aghast at it. Our Odo, who knows what his colonial counterpart knows thanks to a timely link between them, is understandably shaken by what he missed when bottled up to protect him from the local radiation, but he also realizes it isn’t so simple.
And even if it wouldn’t endorse Colonist Odo’s choices unreflectively, love is an awing thing, and in the right circumstances, or the wrong ones, it can make us willing to let the whole world crumble to pieces if it saves the ones we care about. That too is a kind of faith, a kind of a devotion, a kind of belief. I don’t know the right answer, but I understand why everyone here feels the way they do and makes the heart-rending choices they make. That is all I can ask from Star Trek.
“Children of Time” is not a perfect episode of television. The colonists seem pretty blase about whether telling their ancestors about the future might change it, in a way that seems un-Trek-y. Even if Yedric’s original “plan” was above board, none of the Defiant crew seems concerned about whether they or their sci-fi duplicates would be the ones returning to the station or the ones trapped on the planet. And there’s small shortcuts for convenience, like the forty-three others not at the debate table not really having a say in what happens, that require some willing suspension of disbelief at the shorthand.
But the episode does so many things right. It plays with our emotions, our loyalties, our intellectual engagement, our conscience, our sense of excitement, our empathy, our hearts, our minds, our eyeballs, so expertly. You can understand why Star Trek has returned to this sort of premise again (Enterprise basically does it twice), given the chance to deliver a vision of possible future and a meditation of what the present is worth.
“Children of Time” is the peak of that idea. It is a love letter to what the officers aboard Deep Space Nine represent and believe in, a vision of their perfect community lifted up and then ripped away, and an affirmation of the love between and among them in the here and how, that makes the choice to hold onto such possibilities as profound as it is heartbreaking.
How did Ford, who was leaning over the DHD, get shifted by momentum when the entire cockpit was submerged before the drive pod touched the gate? He would have been dematerialised energy.
Also, love the discrete units/only in one piece rule that suddenly applies to gate travel when SG-1 has shown dozens of cases of something being cut off by the gate. Usually staff weapons.
The worst episode of the season. They could have added a bit more humor to it , playing it straight it was really silly. Also, the idea that not a single person in that base is gay is a bit hard to believe, but it's a episode from 1997 so I get it.
It wasn't bad at all, but I read a few reviews that were praising this show like it's the best thing that happened to television in the last years, so my expectations were a bit higher.
Mostly I'm not a fan of Sabrina or rather the actress. She has a really unique way of speaking where she makes weird pauses and it just distracts me so much. I'm also not a fan of the blurry shots which make me feel like I need another pair of glasses and it just gives me a headache. And I'm not really feeling any of the characters, but unfortunately I can't put my finger on it. I guess they're lacking chemistry?
Overall it was okay, but I couldn't completely get into it. I'll definitely watch more episodes and I hope the next episodes will be a bit better.
Um, Tom, why wait until "morning"? If the weather on the planet gets nasty at night, just take the shuttle down to the day side. Unless this orchid species is specific to one region, that is (which wasn't mentioned on screen).
Looks like there's some kind of tape mark on the biobed that Janeway asks Tuvix to sit on. The camera panning makes it hard to tell (motion, especially horizontal motion, tends to blur in TV-sourced video because of interlacing, and DVD encoding doesn't make it any better) but there's something orange on that bed and it isn't present on the other two. Perhaps it's a spacing marker for where Tom Wright should sit so the following effects shot (in which he disappears and is replaced by Ethan Phillips and Tim Russ) will work.
I'd also like to know why Neelix came out of the separation procedure wearing a Starfleet uniform, when he went in wearing one of his trademark patterned jackets. I won't go as far as to call it a goof, because the writers most likely had a reason for not putting him back in his original clothing. But one must wonder why the clothing was merged in the first place, if the orchid's symbiogenetic properties worked on a genetic level. Starfleet uniforms have no DNA, so far as we know, and ditto for Neelix's clothes.
Most people who watch this episode probably have a similar reaction: The premise is creepy, but the ethical dilemma that it creates is interesting. I find myself agreeing with @LeftHandedGuitarist once more regarding the actor chosen to play Tuvix: Tom Wright didn't feel like the best possible fit for the role, somehow, despite solid acting work that he clearly put in time with both Tim Russ and Ethan Phillips to develop around some of their characters' mannerisms.
As much as I disliked the setup, I'm honestly not sure how it could have been done better, except for maybe changing which two crew members were fused. No doubt Tuvok and Neelix were chosen because the show has spent two seasons up to this point building on how much Neelix annoys Tuvok, but they didn't make use of any of that. Tuvix is perfectly happy as the fusion of two men who didn't exactly get along. Janeway can't be fused, unless we want to give the moral dilemma to Chakotay (boring), but that still leaves over a dozen other possibilities to consider. I really don't know which of them would have been better, but I suspect the writers also really liked having that girls' chat between Kes and Janeway.
Ultimately I can't be too hard on this episode. It might have been interesting only in the latter half, but I think this was a defining episode for Janeway. Unlike @FinFan, I don't think this finished her as a character. Rather, it illustrates exactly the kind of person she is, and what lengths she'll go to when the people she cares about are threatened.
One of the most captivating shows of the decade ended with this episode. I can’t sing Shogun enough praise. What an absolute masterpiece.
Maybe they’ll continue it, maybe they won’t. I know I’ll be following the crew to see what they do next.
I won't lie, I actually liked the previous episode more. It was a good ending, but it could have ended a bit further into the future, leaving the rest to our imagination isn't too much of a problem. I could listen to Lady Ochiba's speech for hours, she is magnificent. The conversation between Toranaga and Yabushige was really good too. Thank you for one of the best series of recent times. Here's hoping to see more productions that portray Japanese culture and history in such a high-quality manner...
I secretly wanted Fuji and Anjin to be together, I'm sorry Mariko-sama. (˘･_･˘)
"Why tell a deadman the future?"
I couldn't have asked for a more fitting finale for this "piece of an art" mini-series. The bar was set high. It could've been either like the GoT finale or Breaking Bad finale. So glad they stayed consistent from start to finish. Undoubtedly, this ranks among the greatest miniseries ever produced.
Many people may be dissatisfied with the finale if they expected to watch an all-out war, which contradicts the entire idea of the show.
Ohhhh I hated this episode so much! Not because it reveals anything we didn't already know about the Ferengi, but because it further tarnishes Quark's already shady character.
Yes, we know that he is written to be a misogynist, blinded by this Ferengi cultural stain, but we really didn't need a reminder. It casts a shadow on every positive thing he's ever said or done. Here we are reminded that he learned nothing from Pel and he learned nothing from his mother, yet, he is in awe of powerful (non Ferengi) women like Grilka, Dax and Kira.
All this episode does is remind us that Quark is a cowardly little man who holds firm to his cultural customs to hold firm to his latinum. He'll lose the lace to keep the profit every time.
Spoilers....
Merry-go-rounds and small trains in malls trigger me...memories of my daughter.
But, that was just half way through....
Ellie's commitment to her BFF...option two, "whether it's two minutes, or two days...."
Holy.
Now we know about her first time...fuck, so sad!
Wow what a great episode. The whole season is fantastic. After the lovely last medieval episode we now got a great alien episode. Really loved it except for the slow start. And I‘ll really miss those two (Hemmer and La‘an)
What I don’t understand is why there are so many low ratings for last and this episode. Are there really Trekkies that don’t like it? Or are these „new Trekkies“ that only startet with Discovery and now want that same crap everywhere else?
A good episode overall, and deeply relevant to the Tok'ra.
But I have to wonder, If Egeria was so opposed to the Pangarans using her young in the way they were, why did she not stop spawning? Surely she doesn't HAVE to spawn new symbiotes on a regular schedule.
Or for that matter, why leave them blank slates? One could have taken a host and then freed her, allowing her to renew the Tok'ra in earnest.
Instead, for sixty years, she continued pumping out brain dead slugs for the culture imprisoning her to run tests on and exploit.
I'm gonna miss Daniel's big dumbass energy. Also, add one to the Daniel death count :sob:
I was expecting Burnham to run around in a white tank top and yelling "Yippee ki-yay motherf**er" any time.
Patrick Stewart flubbed a line in the Sickbay scene, saying "Terellian" instead of "Talarian", and that made it into the final print. It also survived into the syndicated TV broadcasts, DVD release, and Blu-ray remaster.
It's odd that a message to Starfleet would take 48 hours to arrive on subspace frequencies, according to Riker, when the whole episode started with a communiqué from Starfleet asking the Enterprise to investigate a disturbance in the area. They wouldn't ask unless the request would arrive quickly enough for the ship to actually arrive in time to see what happened. Picard says to inform Starfleet the Enterprise will enter the Neutral Zone, which presumably won't take 48 hours to get back to Earth. You can't run a fleet of starships on four-day turnaround between order and acknowledgement… Riker's line had to be a mistake.
Speaking of communication issues… When Tasha reports a hostage situation on deck 17, which she later tells the Bridge to disregard, it's extremely fishy that no one acknowledged it, asked for more details, said they were sending another team… anything.
Worf's reference to the "Age of Inclusion" in this episode is the only time that term appears in Star Trek. In all future episodes that reference this point in a young Klingon's life, it is called the "Age of Ascension" instead.
And more Klingon-related writing flubs: Klingons use disruptors, not phasers, but everyone in this episode calls the weapon Korris and Kon'mel assembled in the security detention cell a "phaser". Oops?
I like this episode as a character study of Worf, though it's not that great overall. The important bits are acted well, and we get a nice bit where Data explains the Klingons' howling at the ceiling to Captain Picard. I do have a soft spot for Data being a smarty-pants.
It's a bit weird how the show was very slow in terms of storytelling all season, and goes into sprint in the penultimate episode. I'm a bit worried about the finale, there is just so much ground to cover.
Don't ever piss Mike off because he will never let it go. Good to see him starting to work with Gus. I went back and rewatched the opening scene after I knew what the shoes were about and a Los Pollos Hermanos truck was driving that route instead of one of Hector's trucks and the stop sign was all shot up. I wonder if we will see a shootout there later this season?
Jimmy is in a whole mess of trouble but I guess this is how he became a "criminal" lawyer. I loved the scene were Kim was getting ready, all the jump cuts and zoom ins were great. Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould are some of the best is the business.
[9.5/10] They got me. They really did. I believed that Saul would do it, that he would find a way to lie, cheat, and steal out of suffering any real consequences for all the pain and losses he is responsible for. I believed that he would trade in Kim's freedom and chance to make a clean break after baring her soul in exchange for a damn pint of ice cream. I have long clocked Better Call Saul as a tragedy, about a man who could have been good, and yet, through both circumstance and choice, lists inexorably toward becoming a terrible, arguably evil person. I thought this would be the final thud of his descent, selling out the one person on this Earth who loved him to feather his own nest.
Maybe Walt was right when he said that Jimmy was "always like this." Maybe Chuck was right that there something inherently corrupt and untrustworthy in the heart of his little brother. This post-Breaking Bad epilogue has been an object lesson in the depths to which Gene Takovic will stoop in order to feed his addiction and get what he wants. There would be no greater affirmation of the completeness of his craven selfishness and cruelty than throwing Kim under the bus to save himself.
Only, in the end, that's the feint, that's the trick, that's the con, on the feds and the audience. When Saul hears that Kim took his words to heart and turned herself in, facing the punishments that come with it, he can't sit idly by and profit from his own lies and bullshit. He doesn't want to sell her out; he wants to fall on the sword in front of her, make sure she knows that he knows what he did wrong.Despite his earlier protestations that his only regret was not making more money or avoiding knee damage, he wants to confess in a court of law that he regrets the choices that led him here and the pain he caused, and most of all he regrets that they led to losing her.
In that final act of showmanship and grace, he lives up to the advice Chuck gives him in the flashback scene here, that if he doesn't like the road that his bad choices have led him, there's no shame in taking a different path. Much as Walt did, at the end of the line, Saul admits his genuine motives, he accepts responsibility for his choices after years of blame and evasion. Most of all, he takes his name back, a conscious return to being the person that Kim once knew, in form and substance. It is late, very late, when it happens, but after so much, Jimmy uses his incredible skills to accept his consequences, rather than sidestep them, and he finds the better path that Kim always believed he could walk, one that she motivates him to tread.
It is a wonderful finale to this all-time great show. I had long believed that this series was a tragedy. It had to be, given where Jimmy started and where the audience knew Saul ended. But as it was always so good at doing, Better Call Saul surprised me, with a measured bit of earned redemption for its protagonist, and moving suggestion that with someone we care for and who cares of us, even the worst of us can become someone and something better. In its final episode, the series offered one more transformation -- from a tale of tragedy, to a story of hope.
(On a personal note, I just want to say thank you to everyone who read and commented on my reviews here over the years. There is truly no show that's been as rewarding for me to write about than Better Call Saul, and so much of that owes to the community of people who offered me the time and consideration to share my thoughts, offered their kind words, and helped me look at the series in new ways with their thoughtful comments. I don't know what the future holds, but I am so grateful to have been so fortunate as to share this time and these words with you.)
EDIT: One last time, here is my usual, extended review of the finale in case anyone's interested -- https://thespool.net/reviews/better-call-saul-series-finale-recap-saul-gone/
[9.5/10] This is what I have been asking for, not just from Discovery, not just from Star Trek, but from science fiction writ large. Here is an episode of television that is thought-provoking, epic, action-packed, personal, character-driven, tension-filled, socially relevant, imaginative, connected to continuity, and filled with craft and creativity. It’s not that “The Sound of Thunder” doesn't have flaws, but they pale in comparison to the ambition and scope of what the episode manages to achieve in a little over fifty minutes.
The episode features the Discovery driven to Saru’s home planet by the red flashes that have been drawing the ship across the galaxy. Having recently been disabused of the notion that his next people’s next evolutionary phase results in death for members of his species, Saru is pulled between his responsibilities as a Starfleet officer, his righteous anger on behalf of his countrymen at the hands of their oppressors, and his complicated relationship with the family he abandoned in search of a different life.
I frankly don’t know where to begin to sing this one’s praises, but I’ll start with Saru himself. Doug Jones delivers his best performance of the series, and maybe the best performance in anyone. While draped in prosthetics, Jones manages to convey Saru’s sense of having started a new, freer life, his utter indignation and revulsion at what his people have and are put through, his devotion and guilt to his sister, and his determination and courage to stand up to his captain, his enemy, and his old way of life. Jones is the feature point of this episode, and he earns every second of it.
But I also just love the confluence of themes and ideas and tension points in the episode. “Should we interfere in this society that seems organized around something we find repugnant, but which is not our right to disrupt?” is a well-worn Star Trek premise, but it’s well done here. You understand the push and pull between Pike and Saru, the former clearly not enamored with Ba’ul but also understanding that there is a diplomatic process and greater needs at play, and the latter appalled (and emboldened by his transformation) that his captain would negotiate with these monsters.
At the same time, this is a family story. Some of the material is a little rushed, or depends on you having seen the Short Trek episode featuring Saru’s past, but there’s the root of something strong in the bittersweetness of Siranna’s reunion. The joy of seeing one another is tempered by the angst that Saru’s absence caused his family, and the frustration Saru had with his old life and the lie it was founded upon. The relationship with Siranna is sketched quickly, but also has an impact from how the characters react and respond to one another.
And of course, this being Star Trek, there is a twist that complicates the situation. The deus ex machina space anomaly from a few episodes ago reveals that the Kelpians were once the predators, and the Ba’ul once the prey, until technology allowed the almost extinct Ba’ul to turn the tide and prevent their counter-species from reaching their predatory phase. The “great balance” is not just oppressor propaganda to them; it’s a method of self-preservation from there perspective, which gives the baddies in this one some depth beyond their snarling, hostile ways.
The episode also gives them some fantastic design work. Much of the episode, like much of the show, takes place in gunmetal hallways with various flashing lights and the occasional lens flair. But much of “The Sound of Thunder” can wow you from both a cinematography and production design standpoint. As in Saru’s episode of the Short Treks, the scenes on Kaminar are sumptuous and full of bucolic, alien beauty in the landscape and setting.
But the real fireworks come from the Ba’ul. For one thing, their ships are striking (mostly figuratively but occasionally literally). The geometric column design is unusual for Star Trek, and helps give them an other-y quality in outer space that makes them seem like more of a threat based on design and spacing alone. Still, the real coup de grace is the Ba’ul themselves, a set of inky black, oozing and disturbing creatures who seem of a piece with both Armus from The Next Generation and characters played by Doug Jones himself in Pan’s Labyrinth. The episode makes you wait for their appearance, but pays it off with one hell of a creepy introduction.
Of course, beyond the visual design, the episode steps up the evil by having them try to eliminate the Kelpians rather than deal with them in their evolved fearless form. But even that ties in to the red angel, and notions the episode toys with of whether this mystical-seeming figure is saving people from crisis or is actually the cause of the crisis, with hints that advanced technology and time travel are involved. That mix between mystery box storytelling, heady sci-fi mysticism, and politically-relevant subtext makes this development strong.
The episode does leave me with one and a half complaints. The one complete fly in the ointment is the underfed parallel between Saru and Dr. Culber in their “I don’t feel like myself/I feel like who I was meant to be” thematic mirroring. There’s a stage-y quality to the performances in the Culber/Stamets portion of the show that make it hard for me to connect with the emotions of the scene, and the subplot is a bit too brief to be meaningful anyway.
The half complaint is that Pike, Burnham, and the rest of the crew to inflict an evolutionary change on a whole planet of people with barely 30 seconds thought. It feels like the kind of thing that Picard and company would debate for a whole episode -- the upturning of an entire society, without warning or consent, with predictably dangerous results from a hostile species in charge -- but the Discovery’s crew has an attitude of “sure, why not?” It initially made me bristle a bit (and, if nothing else, feels a little convenient).
But then I realized that this move was basically Captain Kirk’s calling card. Every third episode of The Original Series, Kirk would encounter some society ordered in a way he didn’t particularly like, and so he would call upon the Enterprise to basically blow up whatever machine or god or robot-machine-god was keeping the old structures in place. There’s a certain trademark Starfleet hubris in that, upending a whole society on moral principle without necessarily thinking about what happens next, and it feels true to form even if it’s an action I might disagree with (or at least disagree with it being taken in this way). As long as the show addresses it, and the consequences of that choice, in the future, then I’m on board.
Beyond the heady science fiction and social commentary subtext, it’s just a well-structured episode. While things move a little quickly here and there, Saru’s actions are well-motivated, and there’s tension in the standoffs between the Discovery and the Ba’ul, in Saru’s rescue mission, and in the planet-threatening attack with a crewman captured that makes all of these situation that much more delicate. All the while, there is the mirroring of Saru’s new life and his old one: his surrogate sister meeting his real sister, the values of Starfleet conflicting with the values of his home planet, his loyalty to his crewmen being tested against his loyalty to the people. It’s the kind of thematic tug-of-war, rife with exciting incident, that makes for good and satisfying television.
That’s frankly what Discovery has been missing for me along the way. It’s had high points and low points, bits that feel like classic Trek and something different and new from classic Trek. But I’m not sure any episode of the show thus far has felt both so true to the spirit of the franchise while also feeling like such a modern and riveting interpretation of it. This is Discovery’s finest hour, and let’s hope it’s a sign of more to come, for Saru and for us.
