Review

It seems all that's left when you strip away the hyperactive manic pacing of Discovery's first two seasons is a boring, banal caricature of Star Trek. While the previous episode at least had some compelling exposition and a reasonably interesting new character for Burnham to bandy about with, this second introduction to the 32nd century mostly just repeated exposition we already knew for the benefit of characters that hadn't experienced it yet, except in a much less compelling way. While the manic pacing may be gone, the excessively contemporary slang is not. Here we're treated to such pseudo-witty dialog as "all I got was this lousy t-shirt" and "Brace! Brace! Brace!" along with "cleanup on aisle five." Plus Reno and Stamets spend basically the entire episode constantly trying to outdo each other's snide one liners. Starfleet is supposed to be an aspirational presentation of humanity at its best, but instead Discovery consistently portrays it as full of acerbic and at times downright obnoxious people that are hard to relate to because if you met any of them in real life, you'd hardly want to be friends with someone who acted like that all the time. It's certainly not unrealistic or unprecedented to portray Starfleet as having a few obnoxious people here and there like so many admirals of the week, or the occasional awkward misfit like Barclay, but while previous portrayals presented such characters as atypical and unacceptably unprofessional, Discovery seems to have nearly everyone act that way and the narrative celebrates such behavior as normative and acceptable.

Also out of step with the spirit of Star Trek was Saru's bizarre take on the Prime Directive somehow applying to this situation. Nhan correctly points out that nearly every society they encounter will be more advanced than they are, so how could the Prime Directive possibly apply? If anything, it's a violation of the Temporal Prime Directive for anyone from this time period to interact with Discovery's crew. But Saru seems to have it backwards, arguing that it would somehow contaminate the culture of future societies for people from the past to suddenly appear. He justified this by making the nonsensical argument that "we carry with us a knowledge of certain past events that we cannot share." In other words, Discovery's crew are living witnesses to ancient history. It's like saying we should not be delighted to meet a person frozen in stasis from ancient Rome and revive them so that we could get a direct recounting of history from someone who lived through those events because knowing more about our history from a living witness would somehow contaminate our culture. This kind of pseudo-moralizing has become alarmingly common on Star Trek lately with high-minded-sounding principles being spouted by characters in very confident, grandiose terms that are totally devoid of any philosophical coherence whatsoever, the most recent and egregious example before this being Picard and Data suddenly becoming death worshippers in the Picard show's first season finale. Besides, Saru violates his own dumb principle when immediately after his Prime Directive speech, he goes and interacts heavily with the locals up to and including divulging who they are and where they came from.

Another notably odd preoccupation of the story is its constantly contrasting Saru's instincts with Georgiou's, with the apparent narrative purpose to establish Saru's high-minded principles as being ultimately more beneficial to the marooned crew than Georgiou's ruthless pragmatism. To that end, Saru idiotically decides to make the landing party consist solely of himself and—of all people—Tilly, arguing—laughably—that Tilly would make a wonderful first impression in any first contact situation. Yes, it is clear that the narrative intent was to focus on Tilly's positive qualities, like her boundless enthusiasm, optimism, and eagerness, but those aren't the qualities of Tilly that are the most memorable. The most memorable qualities of Tilly are her incredible lack of emotional regulation and therefore her impulsiveness and unpredictability. That quality is so memorable in fact that Burnham immediately thought of Tilly when she was drugged in the last episode, insisting that it would be very bad indeed if Tilly's eccentricities were ever magnified by that same drug. As such, bringing Tilly into any high stakes, sensitive situation without proper supervision is a recipe to get themselves all killed, which Georgiou correctly pointed out is exactly what would've happened to them had she not disobeyed orders and followed them so she could save their lives just in time while Saru literally ordered Tilly to hide behind the bar during the fight because even he recognized her total uselessness in that moment. Meanwhile, perhaps the most irritating aspect of that narrative failure is how it requires us to praise Georgiou, who is a truly awful character concept because she glorifies Section 31, which should never be glorified. We should all want the narrative to convincingly portray Saru's commitment to Starfleet principles as always superior to Section 31's amoral cynicism in any situation, but in that the narrative completely fails to deliver in this story.

There are some bright spots in the episode though. Detmer appears to be experiencing either some sort of malfunction with her implant or perhaps much more interestingly a form of PTSD after the crash landing. Perhaps she's feeling some survivor's guilt and blames every injury and death that happened on her piloting skills. The episode doesn't get into precisely what's going on with her, but whatever it was it was presented in a compelling way that certainly piques one's curiosity. Another curious detail was Zareh referring to Saru as a "V'draysh" captain. The term "V'draysh" was used to describe the enemy that Craft had fought against in Calypso, which seems to imply that Craft had fought against some remnant faction of the Federation left over after The Burn perhaps. Also notable was Zareh being surprised that Saru doesn't know "pidgin," a language that the universal translator can't translate for some reason. Saru encourages everyone to speak "the common tongue" which is a lingual concept that would seem to be unnecessary in a world with universal translators, but whatever. It wouldn't be the first time the UT was presented as more than a little confusing conceptually. The ending of course was perhaps the biggest highlight of the episode. Having Burnham stranded for a whole year away from Discovery is a bold storytelling choice and a welcome one. Hopefully it means Burnham will be able to help along the exposition about what this "V'draysh" thing is exactly so we can keep the story moving in the direction of suspense rather than mystery.

Review

This is a fascinating episode given that its actual content is pretty good, but in the context of what has been an awful show up until this point, we can't just assess it on its own terms. If this were the pilot for a brand new Star Trek show set in the 32nd century where—for example—Burnham and the crew of an old ship wake up from stasis and discover the Federation had fallen in this manner, what we would have here is a very cool premise for a very interesting new Star Trek show. Indeed, if you just forget everything that happened in the past two seasons, this episode is pretty fun to watch! If we could rate this episode entirely on its own without the baggage of the previous seasons following it, then it would be worth considerably more points and an above average rating. A 7 out of 10 perhaps. But we can't do that. This isn't episode 1 of season 1 of a brand new Star Trek show, it's episode 1 of season 3 of a Star Trek show with a history that we have to take into consideration. And that history weighs down this otherwise interesting and well-made episode like an anchor.

For starters, rather than do something to take the implications of the time travel suit seriously or limit its superpowers in a way that is actually plausible, Burnham simply asks it to confirm the existence of life on the planet she crashed into—curiously without getting very specific about what kind of life, how much, or where—then inexplicably destroys the time travel suit, an extremely powerful piece of technology that could've helped her survive while marooned on a strange new world. It's as if the writers knew they couldn't keep such an overwrought device around for too long because it was too powerful a superpower, but were unable to imagine a clever way to limit its superpowers so they just blew it up and hoped we would forget about it. A better way to handle this would've been to say that the suit was damaged beyond repair. Then to fix the question of why they can't just build another one, they could perhaps say all the "time crystals" exploded right along with the dilithium crystals during The Burn. Or perhaps they were used up in the temporal war that took place a century or so ago. It's easy to button up superpowers if the writers are willing to put even the slightest effort into it. To their credit though, at least they did so with the portable transporter by making it require recharging time. Finally a limit to a superpower, at long last.

Another welcome development at long last is the narrative emphasis shifting away from mystery and towards suspense. We get a lot of exposition in this episode about why the Federation fell that is reasonably plausible and intriguing. Thankfully we won't have to spend all season this time piecing together just what is going on because the writers have finally figured out how to adhere to the principle of "show, don't tell." The specifics of the setting are well-conceived too. This takes place after the time of Federation timeships like from Voy: Relativity and after the time of Daniels from Star Trek: Enterprise, which could explain why the time travelers from that era aren't coming here to fix history. The temporal (hot) war that ensued after their time and the subsequent ban on time travel technology might preclude that deus ex machina, thankfully. Though it remains hard to understand why a ban on time travel technology would prevent a rogue actor from developing and using it anyway, particularly in a society as lawless and disordered as this one is, which makes Burnham's decision to destroy her time travel suit especially idiotic given that such technology would be an incredibly valuable thing to have in a time where it is rarer than expected or perhaps nonexistent.

A particular highlight of the episode was how well the writers thought through the consequences of The Burn, which they explain as a somewhat mysterious event that caused most dilithium everywhere to explode, killing countless people in a mass casualty event. We don't know if it was a natural disaster or some kind of terrifyingly-coordinated terrorist attack. We also don't know if it could happen again. But what was said to ensue was the complete collapse of the Federation and presumably most other governments as well—any nation that relied heavily on dilithium in their power reactors for ships or colonies. It is notable as well that not every ship or society is powered by dilithium, as we've seen quantum singularities power warp drives before, plus there's transwarp which may or may not be powered by dilithium, and quantum slipstream which is mentioned in this episode powered by benamite. Given that, plus not all the dilithium having actually been destroyed, what we see is a galaxy that has collapsed into considerable disorder, but is not fully crippled. Interstellar travel still exists, it's just a lot more expensive than it used to be. Though one annoying detail in how it's presented is when Book's ship is flying at warp, we get yet another new warp effect. This is especially frustrating given that the visual effect actually looks a lot like quantum slipstream from Voyager. Had they just replaced the lines referring to Burnham stealing dilithium on the commerce planet with benamite instead, the presentation of the visual canon would've been much more in alignment with past Star Trek shows. Though Discovery getting visual canon wrong almost goes without saying at this point...

Speaking of aesthetics, Discovery always felt like it was a story that should've been set in the far future to begin with. It's remarkable that the 32nd century doesn't look that much more futuristic than Discovery's first two seasons already did. Sure, we have some fancy new tactile computer interfaces, fancier portable transporters, some slightly different weapon designs, and quantum slipstream, once an unstable and experimental technology, now commonplace enough to be mentioned in casual conversation. But the differences being so subtle truly highlight what a mistake it was to set Discovery in the 23rd century at the start of the series. There are a handful of other aesthetic oddities too. Sahil appears to have the most boring life ever, living alone on an abandoned starbase getting choked up about flag-raising like a stereotype of someone's old, slightly unhinged, overly patriotic uncle. This came off less as reverence for the bygone days of a glorious era of infinite diversity in infinite combinations united under the Federation and more like a display of toxic nationalism or the rituals of a creepy cult. Burnham's dumb emotional scene at the start of the episode reciting her rank and serial number while she looked at her emergency rations pack had a similar vibe to it as well.

As a final and quite depressing note about this story, it's worth considering how the events of the "Short Trek" episode Calypso relate to the events of not only this episode, but this season and presumably the rest of the entire series. We know Calypso took place about 100 years after the time Burnham and presumably the Discovery crew now find themselves in, which means at some point in the future the Discovery will end up floating in space abandoned. It also means that even worse than that, memories of the Federation will have faded even further than they already have, given that Craft had no knowledge of the Federation and the future he came from remained quite dystopian 100 years after the events of this episode, this season, and presumably this entire series. That means unless something extraordinary happens to push Discovery even further into the future beyond Craft's time to give us a happy ending or Calypso is retconned, then the efforts of the crew of the Discovery since arriving in the future will have been all for naught given that just 100 years after their interventions in the timeline it is clear that they will have failed to restore the Federation or even the memory of it.

In essence, Calypso quite possibly foreshadows the end of Star Trek: Discovery as a story of a forgotten crew on a forgotten mission that served no purpose in the end since nothing they will do between now and 100 years from now will ever matter. It seems unlikely this was the writers' intent, but in some regards it's hard to imagine a more fitting ending for Discovery. Just as they unintentionally gave us ample reason to drop the series from the prime canon in season 2, now they're unintentionally giving us ample reason to believe that even in this alternate universe, none of what they're doing will age well, will be well-regarded by history, or ultimately end up mattering in any way whatsoever. Indeed, this was the predictable consequence of the lazy writing in the Calypso short itself, as was in fact predicted in the earlier Calypso review:

"[R]ather than give us answers to basic questions like who the unseen enemy 'V'draysh' is, how the Discovery was preserved perfectly for a thousand years but abandoned, or why so much of the Federation's history seems to have been forgotten by at least one human colony, the writers left all that intentionally vague out of an apparent desire to not 'get hemmed in by canon' or some other similar platitude that is often trotted out to defend stories with this kind of reckless disregard for the long term health of the franchise's canon."

"On the contrary, setting this story a thousand years into the future doesn't do a damn thing to prevent the writers from cornering themselves with canon. If anything, it's one of the worst settings imaginable for preventing future writers from being burdened by canon. Because of this episode, any Star Trek story set far enough into the future has to account for the apparent decline and possible fall of the Federation, or at least rationalize how Craft and his entire planet could be unaware of the Federation's existence."

"Constraining future Star Trek stories with this kind of baggage almost never goes well. We've seen what happens with poorly thought through exposition that saddles the franchise with long-term plot implications before. The 'warp speed' limit in TNG: Force of Nature was quietly forgotten. The absurd 'warp 10' drive that turns you into giant newts from Voy: Threshold was intentionally forgotten with prejudice. There are many examples. This episode's ambiguous proclamations about the Milky Way's future are not impossible to work into future stories, but will require future writers to be at least as clever as this episode's writers were lazy."

The ending for this Star Trek series has not been written yet, but it sure looks like the writers are on track to fail to be clever enough to reconcile past lazy choices with what will likely be yet another unearned happy ending, just like season 1's and season 2's. In fact, if Discovery does end without giving us reason to believe events after Calypso turn out well, then it will be quite reminiscent of the embarrassingly awful ending to Battlestar Galactica, which—among its many sins—argued that humanity settling on Pleistocene Earth circa ~150,000 years ago somehow constituted a happy ending when, as the review of it notes, "all our archaeological evidence suggests that the human race nearly went extinct not too long after our beloved colonists landed. The population may have even been reduced to a number as small as a few thousand. That means that along with the vast majority of the new primitive friends our delighted colonists made upon arrival, all the colonial survivors too were nearly wiped out not too long after they landed." It was a depressingly horrifying ending presented as a happy one by a clueless narrative. It sure seems like Discovery is walking that same path right now.

Review

There is so much to love in this wonderfully fitting season finale. We finally get to see the Titan after it was first teased way back in Star Trek X: Nemesis and a couple times on this show as well. Lower Decks is finally committing to its cameos! But we actually get much more than a cameo here. Riker and Troi get more than a mere bit part like we had with Q in Veritas or the DS9 appearance in Cupid's Errant Arrow. Plus it looks like we might end up seeing a lot of the Titan in the next season now that Boimler has transferred there. Could Lower Decks finally subvert the trope of the cool guest starship not sticking around for longer than a couple episodes the way Battlestar Galactica did with the Pegasus? Let's hope!

Speaking of subverting tropes, much of this story's narrative is taking deliberate aim at Star Trek's tendency to boldly go where no one has gone before rather than flesh out what's already there. Only on rare occasions like DS9, Enterprise season 4, parts of the Picard show, or the occasional episode of another series does Star Trek ever revisit a previous alien planet or alien species to deepen them further and build out the lore of the Star Trek universe in a way that plays nicely in the sandbox. The best fiction series build bigger and bigger sandcastles in the sandbox rather than continually starting new sandcastles off to the side or worse knocking over an old sandcastle to build another like Discovery did with its problematic relationship to canon; particularly visual canon.

Not so here. Lower Decks is showing us that its writers are capable of playing in that sandbox quite skillfully, building up and deepening previous episodes like TOS: Return of the Archons in the teaser, TNG: Samaritan Snare with the Pakleds returning as the antagonist of the week, and TNG: The Quality of Life by featuring an exocomp that has advanced even further beyond the sentience Data had proven they had attained in that episode. The Pakleds are in character trying to steal more technology and Peanut Hamper refuses to go on a life-threatening mission just as her predecessors did in their debut episode. Indeed, the exocomps developing enough to be recognized as people who can serve in Starfleet as equals to the rest of the crew delivers quite profoundly on Data's aspirations for them. You've got to wonder how they fared during the synth ban in the Picard show though. If they were all cowardly assholes like Peanut Hamper turned out to be, perhaps not so well!

This episode does more than just lazily reuse previous planets or aliens though, it also serves as a terrific commentary on the importance of reusing and deepening them. The inhabitants of Beta III reverted to worshiping Landru and the Pakleds became much more dangerous because Starfleet never bothered to check in on them often enough. Freeman even discusses this openly throughout the episode, almost as if she's criticizing Star Trek itself. When Freeman talks about the importance of checking up on these places or people more often, it's as though she's asking the writers of Star Trek to resist the temptation to do more "boldly going" and instead do some even bolder deepening of what's already there in the vast Star Trek universe, just waiting to be fleshed out better.

What a treat. We get a surprisingly impressive set of space battles and action scenes for the animated medium plus powerful, insightful, and effective meta commentary about Star Trek itself all wrapped in a neat little bow. One of Star Trek's finest (half) hours.

Review

This is best episode of Star Trek since Ent: In A Mirror, Darkly aired more than fifteen years ago. Mariner's holodeck adventure was an ambitious idea that could've easily devolved into a collection of banal canon references or mean-spirited jokes like some previous parodies have been, but instead what we got here was a classy pastiche of some of Star Trek's most celebrated episodes and films. Some highlights include the emotional flyby of the Cerritos similar to Star Trek I: The Motion Picture, Mariner quoting Shakespeare like General Chang from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and the Cerritos crash landing fusing elements from Star Trek VII: Generations, Star Trek Beyond, and Voy: Timeless.

Mariner's character in the holodeck adventure "Vindicta, vengeance personified" reflects the vengeance theme common to many of Star Trek's big episodes and films, such as Khan vs. Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Picard vs. The Borg in Star Trek VIII: First Contact, and Nero in Star Trek XI. In fact, even Admiral Marcus' ship in Star Trek Into Darkness is named the USS Vengeance. Rurtherford's remark that "you can do all sorts of beaming stuff in a movie!" is also great meta commentary about how Star Trek's transporter technology is too often abused by being given unfortunately unrestrained superpowers in big episodes and films.

A ton of smaller aesthetic details worked well as smart commentary too. For instance, the excessive lens flare and camera blurring plus the Cerritos getting a new and more intense warp engine effect reflected a common complaint about the Kelvinverse films, Discovery, and the Picard show: Not all the recent aesthetic "upgrades" have actually been improvements over previous aesthetics on Star Trek. In fact, the attention to detail on aesthetics was so good that the animators even inserted little dots and lines into the picture to imitate the flaws in film projected onto a movie theater screen, all in the name of making everything feel more film-like at the expense of it actually looking good, which was a nice touch. The fact that making it "feel more cinematic" requires degrading the aesthetics in numerous ways is itself one of the funniest and most profound meta commentaries of this brilliantly-conceived episode.

The story is also an excellent character study for Mariner, Tendi, and Boimler too. Mariner finally does therapy in her own bizarre way and processes a lot of her feelings as a result. We also finally get a chance to explore Tendi's identity as an Orion in a deeper way. She is sensitive to stereotyping about Orions, but also regards much of her people as "capitalist hyper-libertarians" which is a sentiment not dissimilar to how Nog must have felt about his people on DS9. It also echoes Worf's discomfort with some aspects of Klingon culture. And of course we get a bit more character development for Boimler here too as he finds a new way to obsess over trying to find ways to impress the captain, only to bumble into her family secret instead. Hopefully he gets in trouble for violating their privacy in the next episode.

Last but not least, this is a holodeck adventure episode where the plot isn't driven by a holodeck malfunction, instead focusing on using the holodeck as a way to allow our characters to express a side of themselves we hadn't seen before, which is a perfect symbol of how this episode could've taken the easy way out and delivered cheap thrills or cheap laughs numerous times but instead shot for something richer, deeper, and more profound. And in that they succeeded. The result is something truly wonderful, one of the best episodes of Star Trek ever made.

Review

While the Q cameos were charming and there are some nice moments of levity in Tendi's flashback, the rest of the episode is a jumbled mess. The surprise twist at the end inexplicably turning the tone from scary to goofy on a dime bends suspension of disbelief to the breaking point especially given that the episode opens with the characters being abducted and put into a cage against their wills and later threatened with "death by eels." There are countless intentional holes in the plot thanks to the numerous out of context flashbacks that aren't connected together in any coherent way making the whole story quite hard to follow. Yes, the story intentionally favored mystery over suspense, but just because it was intentional doesn't mean it was good idea. Moreover, much of the plot was once again driven by Rutherford's implant's magic superpowers and once again no attempt was made to explain why he has the implant, why it's so powerful, and why more people don't get them. Plus the marathon of references to previous Star Trek episodes reverted to the pilot's tendency to overload us will banal surface level one liners rather than anything substantive. A real clunker.

Review

This is a strong offering. Everything in the episode was quite endearing except for Tendi's dog plot, which was more weird than funny. One quite distracting detail about that is it further compounds Star Trek's incredibly complicated relationship with genetic engineering, which has long been established to be banned in the Federation and yet we see it used from time to time anyway such as when Voyager's doctor used it to correct a birth defect in B'Elanna's baby though it was strangely not allowed to be used to cure Archer's father of a terminal illness. Tendi uses this banned or perhaps not quite so banned technology to create a brand new life form which aside from the problems of questionable legality based on past canon also raises moral questions as well that the episode doesn't deal with in at all a mature way. It seems at the very least morally questionable for Tendi to just cavalierly create a brand new sentient(!) life form using a nominally banned technology like some mad scientist creating some kind of Frankenstein monster and then just dump it on some random hospital planet because she clearly didn't know what she was doing. This is serious stuff that the episode treats entirely unseriously.

That said just about everything else about the episode was terrific. The main plot exploring Mariner's clear competence but total unwillingness to accept promotions by contrasting her with a former classmate who's the same age who made it to the rank of captain puts Mariner's personal problems into much greater focus. It was both touching and an important piece of character development to have it said out loud that many people expected Mariner would be a captain by now as well as her admission that she still has some stuff to figure out and she's not entirely sure who she wants to be; that she's still finding herself. This was nicely done; indeed there are many people in the world who are still finding themselves even decades after finishing school. Not everyone has a perfect career trajectory with unbroken upward mobility. Many if not most people zigzag all over the place throughout their lives with various ups and downs with their careers, personal lives, and subjective well-being.

Many smaller details were delightful as well. For instance, Captain Ramsey wasn't just a vehicle to deepen Mariner's character, but a charming character in her own right, as was her Vulcan sidekick Durga. The copious references to TNG: Chain of Command were nicely done too and one of the best details of the episode was the introduction of a new character of the same species as Arex from TAS, the tripod alien. The Division 14 Medical Specialist was beautifully animated in a way that there wasn't budget for on TAS. The writing and voice acting for his character were excellent as well, ultimately leading him to be a standout character nearly as strong as Ramsey. All things considered, this is one of the strongest episodes of the series so far. If the writers had avoided the unfortunate Tendi missteps, this could've been the strongest episode so far.

Review

It was inevitable for this show to do a holodeck malfunction episode and they didn't disappoint! Badgy was hilarious and stole the show. The Fletcher main plot was unfortunately much less effective, as he was mostly just annoying the whole way through rather than funny. His best scene was bumbling into a promotion and a transfer to the Titan only be fired days later. But hot off the heels of the last episode's DS9 cameo, this was definitely a missed opportunity for a meatier cameo once again. This show needs to commit to its cameos more! If you're gonna have Fletcher get transferred to the Titan, then show a cameo of Captain Riker firing Fletcher! If you're gonna show a bar scene at Deep Space Nine, make it Quark's bar instead of the Quito's! Show Quark or other DS9 characters in the background or something. You don't even need to give them lines. With an animated medium, it should be trivial and largely costless to flesh out these cameos more.

The most unfortunate detail in the episode though was Shaxs' preoccupation with murdering the Drookmani, repeatedly asking for permission to fire on their warp core, which would've destroyed the entire ship. It's well-established on Star Trek by now that there are plenty of less than lethal methods of disabling a hostile opponent in battle. It doesn't always work, but it's at least worth trying. Apparently even Captain Freeman forgot this when she eventually broke down and ordered Shaxs to fire on their warp core. And the only reason it didn't work was because of a computer glitch. That scene did much to undermine both of their characters and ran quite counter to the spirit of Star Trek. It was perhaps the most dispiriting scene in all of Lower Decks so far. Sure, people might defend it by claiming it was just a joke, but it's important to remember this show is canon, not a parody, and murder is not funny. That scene was the closest thing this show has gotten to the atrocious Discovery short "The Trouble With Edward" so far, and let's hope that's as close as they ever get.

By and large though, this was a pretty entertaining episode. With fewer flaws, better use of cameos, and more focus on effective comedy ideas like Badgy, it would've been worth considerably more points.

Review

Mariner and Boimler were both pretty annoying in this episode, though at least Mariner had an excuse given that when she said before that she'd "seen stuff" she sure wasn't kidding! It was played off as a bit of a joke by the plot, but in all seriousness what she experienced while visiting Deep Space Nine would leave most people with a bit of PTSD. Also wow it was nice to see DS9 again, if only they'd given us a bit meatier a cameo. Oh well.

Beyond that there's not a whole lot to talk about with this one. The girlfriend A plot was a mixture of irritating and entertaining. The Tendi/Rutherford Vancouver recruitment B plot was mostly forgettable. And the diplomacy C plot was a bit more interesting but would've been a lot better if it had been fleshed out more. Fairly mediocre overall, but not bad.

Review

This one is mostly a swing and miss. Captain Durango almost got a bunch of people killed for no reason and nearly destroyed a priceless artifact. The whole thing was a petty manufactured conflict. The ascension subplot was annoying too. So apparently anyone can become an energy being now just by studying some alien religion? Plus it's entirely unclear why some replicators would have better food than others given that the whole point of replicators is to eliminate scarcity. Ransom's hysterical remark heavily implying people primarily use holodecks for sex is worth an extra point though. But one really good scene does not an episode make.

Review

This episode is both wonderful comedy and a fantastic commentary on workism: the cult of hyperproductivity that has afflicted modern society. Captain Freeman becomes obsessed with squeezing as much productivity out of her crew as possible, so she imposes the equivalent of an excessively rigid implementation of the Agile/Scrum-style management fad on the crew, complete with down-to-the-second time tracking like something out of bad Silicon Valley companies or the dystopian Amazon fulfillment centers.

This parody of modern surveillance capitalism might seem especially out of place in the socialist utopia of the Federation, but that's precisely what makes it such inspired comedy. Even in the real world, it isn't just low income people exploited by abusive employers who are worked to the bone. In fact some of the most strict adherents to the cult of hyperproductivity are the more affluent among us who put in excessive numbers of hours working out of a desire to appear as productive as possible since the image of being among the idle rich has long since become passé. As such, it makes sense that people in the Federation would struggle with this impulse too.

The story even peppers the plot with other delightful details that reflect modern commentary on micromanagement fads, such as Tendi's naive discomfort with juking estimates to get more break time, Boimler's bootlicker stance, and Mariner immediately blaming delta shift for the higher workload rather than punching up towards the real villain of management. Indeed, this is among the most class-conscious episodes of Star Trek ever written and the result is exactly what we see in the real world when middle managers mire us in micromanagement, multitasking, and continual interruptions. People get exhausted and the quality of their work declines. Crucially, the crew commits a serious and easily-preventable diplomatic error because they had been so overworked.

The conflict with the aliens could've been written better though. It is stated that they're new members of the Federation, but they also spend much of the episode trying to kill members of Starfleet. It's hard to imagine the Federation would allow a member world to have laws that punish diplomatic offenses with executions. Vindor even suggests reforming their legal system towards something less crazy at the end of the episode and his suggestion is quickly quashed in a glib joke.

The interplay between Mariner and Ransom worked much better, though. The begrudging admiration they develop for each other by the end of the episode was great character development for both of them. It is remarkable that Ransom's lack of scarring was neither because he fails to take risks, nor because he had the scars removed as it may have seemed at first. He is apparently just that good in a combat situation, much to Mariner's surprise and at times girlish glee. Last but not least, what a tease opening the episode with a captain's log outlining a mission to Cardassia Prime only to have it yanked away seconds later. It sure would be nice to see how that unfortunate planet is doing five years after the Dominion War. All things considered though, this is the best episode of the series so far.

Review

Another mixed bag with some effective comedy and some less effective comedy. While overall enjoyable, this episode featured some unfortunately problematic content as well. First, the opening scene with the energy life form had a number of conceptual problems. For one, why didn't Mariner or Tendi report an apparently hostile alien encounter to security? Also it seems not terribly in the spirit of Star Trek for Mariner to attempt to exploit its life force to replicate tools. And lastly, what happened to it when it collided with the captain? Did it possess her? Did it die? It's entirely unclear, but since it's not followed up on by the end of the episode, we have to presume it's either dead or this is a long term plot thread that will be followed up on in a future episode. Either way, it was a pretty tasteless joke to start the episode off with.

Another wrinkle is Rutherford's implant continuing to be a source of annoyingly unexplained superpowers. It now apparently imbues him with exceptional fighting skills which further compounds the question of why does he have the implant, why aren't more people getting them if they're so awesome, and so forth. But the writers apparently have no interest in that question thus far. The most annoying detail though was the little one liner at the end of the speed walking scene when Boimler quipped that "Section 31 does this." On the surface it may seem like an innocent jokey canon reference, but we have to remember that this show takes place only about five years after the Dominion War. Prior to that, Section 31 was a secret, shadowy organization that nobody knew about. Presumably in the ensuing five years Bashir and O'Brien have blown the whistle, so people knowing about Section 31 now is not nearly as problematic as Discovery's portrayal of Section 31, but similar to Discovery's problematic portrayal of Section 31, Boimler felt it was entirely appropriate to name drop them as though they were some kind of admirable organization; this admiring reference being made a short time after they attempted to commit a genocide against the founders of the Dominion. Like the energy life form scene, this too is in poor taste.

Annoying wrinkles aside, there is much to love about the main plots of this story though, not the least of which is the first authentic portrayal of Klingons since Star Trek: Enterprise. General K'orin looks, sounds, and acts like the Klingons we know and love from previous Star Treks, avoiding the rebooted downgrades we saw in the Kelvin films and Discovery. Mariner's affinity for him and her overall consistent success with thinking on her feet and fitting in with diverse groups of people with ease was a delightful running gag especially contrasted to Boimler's inferiority complex and overeagerness. The staged Ferengi encounter to make Boimler feel better at the end was quite touching and nicely done, as were Rutherford's rotations through different crew assignments for the most part with the bedside manner scene perhaps being the highlight of the episode, though the command training simulations might be a close second. While it would be nice if they would cut back on the canon references a bit if they aren't willing to use them more carefully, this is another solid episode of what's shaping up to be a consistently charming show.

Review

An animated comedy is a risky move for Star Trek. Star Trek has had a checkered past with animation. The 1970s animated series was mostly embarrassing, Star Trek: Discovery's "Ephraim and Dot" short was a mixture of pointless and canonically problematic, and Star Trek: Discovery's "The Girl Who Made the Stars" was reasonably well-made and charming but probably should've been incorporated into an actual episode of Discovery instead, since presenting it as a short makes it feel more like a deleted scene than a piece of its own.

When it comes to comedy, Star Trek has had a checkered past there as well, but less so. Some of Star Trek's most celebrated episodes are highly effective comedy, like TOS: The Trouble with Tribbles, TOS: Shore Leave, TNG: QPid, TNG: Hollow Pursuits, DS9: Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places, DS9: Trials and Tribble-ations, Voy: Message in a Bottle, Voy: Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy, and Ent: In a Mirror, Darkly, not to mention Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and of course countless funny scenes in countless episodes that were not primarily comedy episodes. Notably excluded from that list are episodes of Star Treks: Discovery and Picard though, which have delivered little to no effective comedy so far, which is harder to do with fully serialized dramas. Plus the older series had plenty of failed attempts at comedy peppered throughout their long runs too, so botched comedy is not a new phenomenon in Star Trek.

Star Trek: Lower Decks so far is no exception to that trend. Some of the comedy in this pilot episode is effective, some of it is not. Thankfully they didn't try to double down on the dreadful tone in the absolutely awful Star Trek: Discovery "The Trouble with Edward" short. While "The Trouble with Edward" and Lower Decks both draw comedy from characters behaving in awkward and at times reckless ways, "The Trouble with Edward" took it much too far, trying to present deadpan, vindictive cynicism as somehow a species of comedy as well whereas Lower Decks is more upbeat and goofy. Ensign Mariner—the standout character so far—is a screw the rules rebel not unlike Ensign Ro Laren from TNG, but more carefree about it like an even more unhinged Tom Paris from Voyager. The fact that she's serving aboard her own mother's starship in a remedial role adds even more fun texture to the premise of her character.

Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford seem less interesting so far. Rutherford in particular was a bit of a head-scratcher given his presentation as a "recent cyborg" which isn't explained all that well. Why does he have that implant? Why does it randomly suppress his emotions? Are we really to believe that because the implant was made by Vulcans that it has that severe a side effect? Hopefully that's a plot point that will be expanded on and buttoned up better in the future. Another aspect of the comedy that is less effective is the continuation of Discovery's trend of overly contemporary and usually hyperactive delivery of dialog, making the characters seem positively manic at all times, as though the mania is the joke. Fast dialog can be used effectively for comedy (Bojack Horseman was excellent at this), but the content of the jokes has to be funny too. Often the fast dialog existed solely to deliver rapid fire references to previous episodes of Star Trek for longtime fans to pick apart and giggle about, like "haha, she's talking about Martok!" The references are certainly amusing on a mostly banal surface level, but we need more than that.

That said, the references to previous Star Trek series do run pretty deep in places too. There are countless tasteful and well-placed visual and audio callbacks to old series, the most impressive being the setting and set designs. When Boimler fantasizes about being captain in his log entry, he cites the stardate as 57436.2, which translates to roughly the year 2380, about a year after Star Trek X: Nemesis and roughly 20 years before Star Trek: Picard. The visual design of the Cerritos, the starbase, and just about everything we see embeds this series perfectly in that era to a degree of accuracy that has a surprising amount of attention to detail, a sharp departure from the "visual reboot" trend we've seen recently. The computers have the LCARS design, the holodeck looks like TNG's, the ship design looks plausibly like TNG-era ships, the warp effect has been restored to the beautiful star flybys instead of the hideous hyperspace effect we get in Discovery and Picard, etc, there are too many examples to list. They even brought back the font from TNG.

It's worth noting that people so often complained about how the original series and TNG visual designs looked "dated" thus justifying Discovery's and Picard's visual reboot, but Lower Decks does much to undermine that notion. For example, Discovery and Picard didn't just take the original series' jelly bean button computers or TNG's LCARS displays and add more detail, they morphed them into a considerably less plausible "movie OS" holographic display that would be an ergonomic nightmare for anyone to actually use for serious work. It may look flashier on TV, but it's less realistic than the interfaces presented on both TOS and TNG, just as the Discovery/Picard hyperpsace-style warp effect is less realistic than the old stars flying by warp effect from TNG. In this sense, Discovery's and Picard's visual reboot is only "modern" in the sense that their aesthetics are currently trendy, not because those aesthetics are actually better. They're dumb fads, not improvements. Lower Decks, Ent: In a Mirror, Darkly before it, and Rogue One from the Star Wars universe have each shown us it's entirely possible to add a bit more detail to previous, timeless aesthetics to make them look more modern instead. That's the most updating the visuals ever needed. If only Star Trek: Discovery and to a lesser extent Picard treated canon with as much care as this silly comedy show does.

All things considered, while this may be a silly comedy show, it's an unexpectedly effective one. The writers would do well to pivot the comedy more in the direction of the smarter, subtler comedic style and tone seen in Futurama or The Orville rather than making it so reminiscent of Rick and Morty slapstick, but by and large this show works surprisingly well as-is and so far is a welcome and promising addition to the canon.

Review

Suddenly the synth ban that lasted for more than a decade is gone. Why? We don't really know. We see no public debate in the Federation. We see no media coverage of how others in Federation society perceived what went down on Coppelius. We don't see fearful conservatives on FNN (The Federation News Network originally shown in the pilot episode, remember that?) pleading with the Federation legislature not to sympathize with the synths since they clearly did have the power to destroy the Federation and indeed were moments away from pushing a button that would do exactly that. It all just gets hand waved away off-screen without a moment's reflection. While it's true that many of us may fantasize about the authoritarian right simply disappearing from political power wherever they wield it as soon as possible, the real world doesn't work that way. It ought to be obvious that a single dramatic event can't just magically overturn years of reactionary attitudes entrenched in the hearts of minds of an entire society overnight. Good fiction doesn't pander to our fantasies, it reflects the actual human condition. When Star Trek is at its best it lays bare who and what we are while also giving us a realistic taste of how much better we could be. This story was far from that.

And just what were those super synths anyway? Who knows. Clearly they were just a generic villain plot device. Nobody really cares about who they are and what their civilization is. So much for seeking out out new life and new civilizations, huh? Nobody's the least bit curious about a multi-galaxy synth civilization nor all that interested in possibly dissuading them from their apparent mandate to wipe out organics whenever they're summoned Ghostbusters-style. Just blow up the beacon, sweep the problem under the rug, and pretend it never happened. Likewise let's not at all concern ourselves with what happened to Narek who suddenly disappeared from the plot never to be seen again inexplicably after pleading with Soji to destroy the beacon. His sudden disappearance was almost as cheesy as the absurdly large copy-and-paste fleets of all precisely the same ship. Hundreds of identical ships is incredibly bland and feels like yet another cheap and unrealistic way to up the stakes artificially. DS9 showed us how to do this correctly with a bunch of different types of starships working together evoking a sense of real effort both on the part of the visual effects team but also the characters in bringing to bear whatever they could muster. It's also quite dumb that they all warp out as quickly as they warp in, without even a single ship sticking around to investigate this strange new world, establish diplomatic relations, or do anything remotely in line with first contact procedures. The whole thing felt incredibly rushed.

The laziness abounds elsewhere too. CommodoreGeneral Oh delivers generic evil mustache twirler lines constantly, including a cheesy order to use "Planetary Sterilization Pattern Number 5" along with the obligatory dramatic pause before ordering the fleet to fire, giving Riker's fleet time to arrive and intercede. The Deus Ex Machina: The Tool device from the previous episode turned out to be even more ridiculous a superpower than it seemed like it would be on two different occasions in this episode. Raffi and Rios even break the fourth wall when Raffi asks "What's happening?" after it's used for the first time and Rios replies "Nothing that makes sense." It was literally a plot device that we're supposed to just accept can do basically anything. The damn thing even wrecked what was otherwise a very charming scene when Agnes referenced the Picard maneuver from TNG: The Battle only for the scene to get overwhelmed by the magic of the all powerful space ocarina. Raffi and Seven of Nine get a bit short shrifted here too apparently somehow developing a relationship which is yet another important thing that happens off-screen. Seven does however have a touching scene with Rios shortly after Picard "dies" talking about how she promised herself she would never commit another murder but failed to resist temptation when presented with the opportunity to kill Narissa, but that is one of the only well-written scenes in the episode.

Of course the elephant in the room is the final death of Data and the death and resurrection of Picard, which while compellingly presented and incredibly moving to watch are utterly offensive in their implications. Picard and Data both essentially commit suicide in this episode (Picard's suicide merely on a time delay) while endorsing numerous platitudes about how mortality supposedly gives meaning to life. Data says that peace, love, and friendship are precious because we know they cannot endure and a butterfly that lives forever is really not a butterfly at all. What the fuck? This is pseudo-intellectual garbage on par with the ending of Battlestar Galactica having all the characters throw their technology into the sun. The whole point of people inventing technology for as long as civilization has existed is to prolong the length and quality of life. While the title of the episode loosely translates to "even in paradise, there is still death," that isn't necessarily true anymore. The advent of highly advanced androids that are nearly indistinguishable from humans to whom any human consciousness can be transferred is one of the greatest inventions in human history because it could effectively make anybody immortal. And you can sure as hell bet that the vast majority of people would prefer to have themselves transferred into one of those bodies without a ten or twenty year death clock on it as Picard did shortly before euthanizing his best friend for no coherent reason.

This of course isn't the first time that Star Trek or even Data himself has mused about the value of mortality. Recall this exchange from TNG: Time's Arrow, Part 1. Data: "I have often wondered about my own mortality as I have seen others around me age. Until now it has been theoretically possible that I would live an unlimited period of time. And although some might find this attractive, to me it only reinforces the fact that I am artificial." Geordi: "I never knew how tough this must be for you. [...] Knowing that you would outlive all your friends." Data: "I expected to make new friends." Geordi: "True." Data: "And then to outlive them as well." Geordi: Now that you know that you might not?" Data: "It provides a sense of completion to my future. In a way, I am not that different from anyone else. I can now look forward to death." Geordi: "I never thought of it that way." Data: "One might also conclude that it brings me one step closer to being human. I am mortal." At first glance, it might seem as though Data valued the idea of being mortal as far back as that TNG episode. But if you look deeper at the exchange, the thing Data is expressing the most discomfort with is being different from his friends. He didn't want to be special by being immortal while everyone else must age and eventually die. But what if everyone could be as immortal as Data? It seems in that case the discomfort Data expresses in that exchange would be moot.

Better episodes of Star Trek have also more tastefully dealt with suicide. In Voy: Death Wish we see a much better version of the supposed torture that Data was said to be enduring trapped in the simulation in this episode. In that Voyager episode, a member of the Q continuum—a race of beings who are immortal—is imprisoned, suicidal, and prevented from killing himself for the rest of eternity which he argues is a kind of torture. Janeway decides to grant him asylum from the Q, then pleads with him not to kill himself with his newfound freedom from imprisonment. But he does so anyway and the narrative correctly treats this as a tragedy, in direct contrast to how the narrative glorified Data's death and Picard casually endorsing a time limit on his android body in this episode. Once upon a time Star Trek was about seeking out new life and regarding every death as a tragedy. Now it's apparently about how death is beautiful or something. To add insult to injury, this episode that celebrates Data's death and moralizes about the supposed beauty of death aired during the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic. The writers should stop and think about how those dying in the hospital when this aired would've done anything to get an ageless android body and take that as a lesson to think through the implications of the stories they tell a bit more in the future.

At first this series showed a lot of promise, but it eventually fell into the same traps that too many TV shows do. The writers structured this story more as mystery than suspense. Then when we finally got answers to the mysteries they were unsatisfying because they were premised on overwrought threats to everyone everywhere that were quickly resolved with cheap reset buttons. A story that could've been a compelling exploration of the deeper systemic reasons why the Federation so often bans whole categories of technology in fearful, reactionary ways ended up just being 10 episodes that tried to make the same point that TNG: The Measure of a Man made 31 years ago, except in a considerably drawn out and dumbed down way. Hopefully the next season aims higher than this.

Review

This is a slow story that focuses mostly on table setting for what is likely to be a more exciting second half. There's nothing necessarily wrong with table setting episodes, but what we get here is a bit of a mixed bag. The return of Brent Spiner playing yet another relative of the renowned Dr. Noonian Soong is a welcome addition to the story. It turns out that Data's father had a biological child too who was a total afterthought by comparison to his life's work perfecting androids. This new character is a clever addition to the Soong roster, as it is quite consistent with previous material depicting the Soong family. We know Noonian Soong was married from TNG: Inheritance and it's entirely consistent with his character that he would care more about his androids than his flesh and blood son.

On this new synth homeworld we see a delightful mix of earlier model androids and later model more human-like androids, giving us a visual sense of the technological progression of Soong's and Maddox' work. We also get a lot of exposition about just what the "admonition" was which resolves some irritating problems with the story but creates some new ones too. The narrative has finally given us a barely adequate redemption for Agnes' character: it appears as though she was not in fact fully in control of her actions when she murdered Maddox. But instead of the more compelling explanation being that Commodore Oh used mind control on her, we get the idiotic explanation that she went off the rails because the "admonition" was meant for synth minds rather than organic minds, which is a quite problematic distinction. The idea that even once you cross the AI "threshold" (whatever that is exactly) that it's still possible to distinguish between an organic or a synthetic mind runs counter to the fact that the entire point of creating Data and the more advanced androids derived from Data to begin with was to make the synths as human-like as possible; to directly contradict prejudice that they could somehow be fundamentally different. Basically the whole point of creating super advanced androids is to erase the distinctions between human and android. Yet the super synth Federation relies on the continued existence of these distinctions in order for its "admonition" to be received and understood by anybody.

The main message behind TNG: The Measure of a Man—the brilliant episode this season is serving as a sequel to—was also that there are no meaningful distinctions between the personhood of androids like Data or people who were born of flesh and blood. The notion that even now androids and organics can be separated into "us" and "them" categories so cleanly that tools can be built that can deliver telepathic messages effectively to one group but not the other because there's something genetically (so to speak) different about them undermines the original moral of the story here that any differences between these groups are more surface details than substantive. The moral of the story now is we're all the same, except oh wait there's something fundamental about your body that makes you irrevocably different from me. Yuck. The writers would've done better to have taken a page from Battlestar Galactica which—while it had serious flaws in its own writing in places–did well to make the point that the Cylons were equals to humans to such a degree that the distinctions between them were totally erased by the end of the story. As such the idea that Agnes was under the influence of mind control would've been a much better way to deal with this than this incredibly dumb "only synths can process the message" nonsense. A shame.

Another painful though minor detail was Raffi being given a magic tool to fix the La Sirena with and being told simply that it "fixes things" as though no further explanation should be required. What a marvel! Someone tell the Pakleds from TNG: Samaritan Snare. This is a tool that's on their intellectual level. They look for things. Things just like this. Things to make them go. Raffi thankfully was interested in a bit more nuance than Pakled-level simplicity and asked "how?" She was then told "you have to use your imagination." After that Raffi got as tired of that scene as the writers clearly were, shrugged, and moved on. Want to know what magic powers that Deus Ex Machina: The Tool has to offer? Tune in next week and we might find out!

This episode also continues the sad trend of relegating anything Borg-related to weak tea subplot status. It's curious that there already was a Borg transwarp conduit just above the synth homeworld, which implies the Borg have been to this planet before. Did the planet have an original population many years ago that was swept up in some kind of TNG: The Neutral Zone-style Borg Ragnarok ("Borg? Sounds Swedish...") assimilating everyone on the planet sometime before Alton Soong arrived and established it as the synth homeworld? Unfortunately the episode doesn't get into this, nor does anyone in the story appear to consider that the existence of a Börg transwarp conduit just above that planet continues to pose an ongoing threat to its population. Worse yet, Seven of Nine's commandeered Bjørg cube got taken out before it could do anything cool.

Lastly now that we've gotten a full explanation of just what the "admonition" was, the trend of anticlimactic payoff is continuing. Aside from the aforementioned borderline racist undertones that there will always be something fundamentally different between synths and organics, the idea that there's some secret synth super Federation out there spanning multiple galaxies just waiting to appear from nowhere to rescue synths from organic oppression is incredibly overwrought and unimaginative. Once again we're facing a threat to everyone everywhere that comes out of nowhere and will surely be disposed of from whence it came in short order. The writers of Discovery and now Picard seem to think that just constantly amping up the stakes is a good substitute for actual substance, but all it does is tip their hands that they're more interested in writing comic book pulp—complete with mustache-twirling villains like Sutra and Commodore Oh—than more thoughtful, deeper stories. So while this is an improvement over the last episode—they mostly fixed Agnes and the introduction of another Dr. Soong is a clever and welcome development—much of the rest of the payoff continues to be unfortunately underwhelming. Hopefully the next episode steps up the writing quality.

Review

The various plot threads are starting to come together and paint a clearer picture of what this story is adding up to which is sadly a mixture of bad and possibly worse depending on what happens in the following episodes. First and most importantly, we find out here that the Zhat Vash were radicalized by a prophecy of destruction brought about by the prospect of AI advancing too far. This "admonition" warns against the advancement of AI, driving those who experience it to madness, literally. Back in Maps and Legends when Laris first described the Zhat Vash as keeping a secret "so profound and terrible that just learning it can break a person's mind" we had hoped this lame remark was simply hyperbole we could cough over and move on from. Apparently not. Here we see people kill themselves, smash rocks into their faces, tear off hair and skin, etc. All because of a vision they experienced from an alien beacon.

Making matters worse, this madness was somehow enough to break the collective mind of the Borg as well. It's explained that the Borg cube the Romulans commandeered was broken by the assimilation of Narissa's aunt Ramdha, whose mind had been broken by the "admonition." While this is not exactly unprecedented since something similar occurred when Hugh was reassimilated by the Borg after the events of TNG: I, Borg, it was pretty lame then, and it's even more lame now. The idea that resistance to assimilation just requires a sufficiently strong-willed or traumatized mind is difficult to reconcile with the fact that the assimilation process itself is traumatic and the Borg have undoubtedly assimilated billions of strong-willed people before. It simply isn't credible that Ramdha could break the Borg through the "sheer force of her despair" or that Hugh's newfound individuality would be so profound that it could somehow corrupt the cube that retrieved him entirely on its own.

To make it credible, there had to be more going on than just asserting that these characters had stronger feelings than anyone else who had ever been assimilated, so therefore they were immune to it. But the narrative seems to expect us to just believe that strong feelings was all it took. Damn it Magnus and Erin Hansen, if only you just had stronger feelings about being assimilated, maybe you could've broke the Borg and prevented Annika from being assimilated and becoming Seven of Nine, huh? Speaking of Seven, her return is a welcome one and one of the only bright spots in the episode. Her reticence regarding establishing a micro collective is a nice callback to her actions in Voy: Survival Instinct. But speaking of that episode, it sure is a shame that Lansor (Two of Nine), Marika Wilkarah (Three of Nine), and P'Chan (Four of Nine) didn't just have stronger feelings about Seven of Nine reassimilating them, huh? Maybe they could've broke her and gotten away like Hugh and Ramdha. It's bizarre that the writers didn't think through how obviously dumb the "strong feelings break the Borg" plot point was and give us a bit more to hang our hats on. To be fair, it's not an impossible problem to fix. Maybe Hugh had the Borg virus embedded in him against orders by a renegade Enterprise crewman. And Maybe Ramdha had something similar embedded in her after experiencing the "admonition." But it sure would've been nice if the episode established something like that as a fact rather than us having to offer up our own solutions to these problems, huh?

There is a similar problem with Agnes. The previous episode did nothing to convince us that the mind meld she had with Commodore Oh was at all coercive. It was strongly implied that Agnes assassinated Maddox entirely of her own free will because the visions she received were somehow sufficiently persuasive enough to get her to murder a man she loved. In this episode she continues to exhibit no signs of mind control and even deliberately chooses not to do any harm to Soji despite Soji being the literal personification of the threat she supposedly was so convinced was urgent that she would murder her lover. There is a way out of this plot hole too if we extrapolate a bit from the scene when she was asked why she did this and replied she "had to," that Commodore Oh had put "poison" in her mind, and a "psychic block" was put in place to keep her from talking about it. From that we could make a leap of logic that what she really meant was she was under the influence of mind control and the murder was something she did without consciously choosing to, like a sleeper agent. But that's quite a leap from the material presented to us which seems to strongly imply otherwise. She continues to refer to Maddox' work as "hubris" and seems to still genuinely fear the prophecy coming true. But again she doesn't fear it enough to take action against Soji. So it's all a jumbled mess. Agnes' motivations make no sense and this is becoming a serious problem that it seems more and more likely the plot won't resolve anytime soon.

Rios too is now a problem. Instead of just immediately telling everyone that Soji looks just like an android his former captain murdered, he decides to get all moody and hide from everyone for no coherent reason. But a bigger problem is how that development nudges this story away from a charming tale about a motley crew brought together for idiosyncratic reasons into a trite tale about everyone being linked together by destiny. It's a ridiculous coincidence that Picard just so happened to befriend the only person in the Federation to correctly predict Romulan involvement in the Mars attack and that she just so happened to be friends with a random mercenary pilot who just so happened to be randomly connected to the exact conspiracy Picard sought to unravel.

The worst thing about this episode though is how it undermines the promise of the pilot. The pilot offered up the possibility of a real reflection on the Federation flirting with reactionary anti-technology politics. It would've been nice to see more backstory showing us substantive public debate about this and how it intertwines with holograms and previous reactionary material on Star Trek regarding genetic engineering. But we got none of that. The ban was just the result of a Romulan conspiracy. No deep meditation on reactionary politics. The writers don't appear to have noticed the parallels between the AI ban and the genetic engineering ban. Nor did they notice that holograms are AI too. They must not have seen Voy: Revulsion where it's shown that a hologram that can fly a ship can be just as serious a threat as any android.

At the end of the episode Picard delivers a speech to Rios about how the Federation should not have given way to fear that the directing clearly emphasizes as some kind of profound moment; as if a few lines from Picard are the payoff on the deep meditation on reactionary politics we were promised. But the narrative didn't earn that moment at all. It fell just as flat as Burnham's speech at the end of Discovery's first season about how the Federation ought not to "allow desperation to destroy moral authority." You can't just trot out some high minded-sounding platitudes at the end of the story and expect that to serve as a reasonable substitute for narrative substance. Worse yet, Picard's whole point about how secrecy and fear are as ineffective as they are immoral is kind of ridiculous in itself given that secrecy and fear scored the Zhat Vash an AI ban in the Federation that lasted for more than a decade. Seems like manipulating people with secrecy and fear is actually pretty effective sometimes after all.

Overall this is a very disappointing offering. When writers build up something across a season of episodes, the payoff has to be worth it. We're seeing some payoff here and so far it's pretty damn anticlimactic.

Review

This is a sappy, sentimental story that doubles down on catching up with old characters and definitely delivers on that front. In Maps and Legends Picard said with considerable grief in his voice that he had hoped to avoid involving any of his previous Enterprise colleagues in any of this because he didn't want any of them to end up like Data. That context makes Picard showing up at Riker's doorstep unannounced all the more moving. Indeed, the portrait of the Troi-Riker family we get in this episode steals the show, particularly the charming scenes between Soji and Kestra. Soji's PTSD and dissociation were understandable and portrayed well, as were Troi's efforts to provide counseling. There are also some interesting parallels between this episode and Ent: Cold Station 12. Here we are told Troi's and Riker's son died because the technology that could've cured his illness was included as part of the synth ban. In Ent: Cold Station 12, Archer tells Dr. Phlox that his father died because the ban on generic engineering precluded a cure. Hopefully these nuggets of nuance are building to broader and more direct social commentary on the ethics of banning whole categories of technology to prevent immoral uses of it.

The subplots of the episode were not as well put together though. The flashback to Commodore Oh's mind meld with Agnes was clearly meant to provide context for why she assassinated Maddox, but it doesn't quite get us all the way there. It's hard to believe seeing visions of Earth possibly being destroyed some time in the future by some nonspecific threat would be enough to get Agnes to murder a man that she loved because his work—which she deeply believed in as well—might possibly some day indirectly lead to those visions coming to pass somehow. The only way to rationalize this is to assume that the mind meld was more than just visions; that it was also a form of mind control as well. Notably Commodore Oh did not ask for consent before melding with her, making it hard to consider it anything other than something akin to a rape scene given that Star Trek has established quite clearly by now that mind melds are acts of the utmost intimacy. While the mind meld mind control explanation does indeed work quite well to make sense of Agnes' behavior, the story's narrative does not endorse this interpretation on screen explicitly, undermining the potential dramatic impact of her suicide attempt. Also of note, the fact that Commodore Oh can perform mind melds implies that she is either a Vulcan rather than a Romulan disguised as a Vulcan as it initially seemed, or perhaps more interestingly a Romulan who can perform mind melds. This too is not made at all clear though, unfortunately.

The most disappointing detail of the story though is the tragic waste of Hugh's character. Killing characters for dramatic effect can certainly be done tastefully and well. Icheb's death in Stardust City Rag was an excellent narrative choice. Icheb's character had already been fully actualized by that point in the story and he had been a Starfleet officer for more than a decade after arriving at Earth with Voyager. While it perhaps would've been fun to see some flashbacks of what his life in Starfleet was like before he was tragically murdered, his death served to deepen Seven of Nine's character in significant ways without wasting any significant character growth potential for Icheb. On the other hand, Hugh's death serves no useful purpose to the story except to gin up some cheap shock value now and some cheap revenge drama later. Plus had he lived, we could've taken some solace in knowing that he continued to do good work bringing former Borg back into the fold in the finest spirit of Star Trek. Sometimes a character surviving a story is a more powerful ending than a shocking death.

The weakness of the subplots isn't enough to drag the episode down too far though because the main story with Picard and Soji visiting the Troi-Rikers was immensely satisfying.

Review

An episode with a slow start but a good amount of payoff. Hugh and Picard catching up with each other is the clear highlight of the episode, a reunion that was literally decades in the making both on screen and off screen after the ambiguous way they left things in TNG: Descent, Part 2. It's nice to hear that despite Hugh being from an unknown species, he was able to acquire Federation citizenship anyway after his misadventures with Lore. Picard's panic attack upon returning to a Borg cube was entirely appropriate and compellingly portrayed. We see all sorts of classic scenes in his post-traumatic stress flashback, including iconic scenes from TNG: The Best of Both Worlds and Star Trek VIII: First Contact. It was also a nice touch to see Hugh directly contrasted from his appearance on TNG to his appearance now visually on Picard's computer.

The ultimate message of Picard's reunion with Hugh was to portray the Borg more as victims than as villains. This is deeply in the spirit of Star Trek and one of the most fascinating contradictions that has always been at the core of the characterization of the Borg. Are they an enemy to be destroyed, or victims to be rescued? If xBs should not be held accountable for the crimes they committed as Borg, then who should? One might be tempted to say the Borg queen, but even she has never seemed to be a character with terribly much agency. More like a reflection of the Borg's collective consciousness given that whenever she's destroyed another appears. These are questions without obvious answers and Star Trek is at its best when it grapples with them as they do in this episode.

Another highlight of the episode is the terrific execution of Soji's dream sequences. The two actors playing child Soji (Ella McKenzie) and adult Soji (Isa Briones) do a great job of convincingly portraying the same person in the same emotional state across the cuts. This may seem like a minor detail, but it's very easy to get wrong. Star Trek in particular is infamous for numerous previous examples of child character performances that fall flat. Even high budget drama series get it wrong frequently too, such as the underwhelming portrayal of young Ned Stark on Game of Thrones. A particularly nice touch in Soji's dream was the abstract presentation of her construction being doll-like. This distinctly resembled Pinocchio; Data had been previously referred to as being like Pinocchio by Riker in TNG because of his desire to become human.

One more interesting reference to a previous Star Trek episode was when Hugh dug up a Sikarian spatial trajector to help Picard and Soji escape the cube. This technology was last seen in Voy: Prime Factors when the crew of Voyager was denied the use of it to help them get home faster by the Sikarian equivalent of the Prime Directive. It appears the Borg assimilated the Sikarians at some point After Voyager's visit, after which they improved upon the technology, removing the dependency on a planet with a thick tetrahedral quartz mantle to function. It was said the Borg only use this technology in the case of emergencies, but the reason for such a restriction is not clearly explained. The trajector is in effect a very long range transporter which if deployed en masse could be a very powerful weapon.

If the Romulans were to get their hands on it they could in theory use it to beam an invasion force across the galaxy in an instant, not unlike the fears that were stoked by the Iconian gateways in TNG: Contagion and DS9: To the Death. Indeed, whenever a technology this powerful is discovered on Star Trek, it tends to be quickly destroyed, concealed, or some fatal flaw is discovered in it so as to prevent the canon from being contaminated with too many superpowers. Hugh made attempts to conceal this technology from the Romulans, but hopefully some stricter limits are placed on it soon or it might risk becoming as ridiculous as something like Discovery's spore drive. The last thing we need is more ways for groups of people or starships to instantly teleport across the galaxy.

Review

Hey guys, remember Icheb? That adorable ex-Borg who Seven of Nine thought of as a son? After Voyager made it home, it turns out he became a Starfleet officer! Isn't that sweet? He put on a red uniform and... oh shit.

The horrific demise of Icheb is not the kind of closure for a previous character many of us expected from this show, but it is appreciated nonetheless. One of many loose ends left by TNG, DS9, and Voyager tied up now for better or worse. We even got an update on what Quark is up to, apparently running a bar on Freecloud, or at least franchising the brand out. Plus the line about Quark being "especially satisfied" with Rios' fictional alter ego's handling of his "trouble with the Breen" implies that Quark was either personally recruited by Raffi to participate in the scam in this episode, or at least that Raffi felt Quark was a reputable enough businessman in this community—such as it is—to forge his name to an endorsement to make it sound credible.

Of course the most notable closure we got in this episode is for Seven of Nine, who we learn has joined a group called the Fenris Rangers, a group that sounds very similar to the Maquis in the sense that both were outlaws trying to keep order as they defined it in a place where law and order had broken down to a degree. It would've been nice to hear if Seven's experience with so many ex-Maquis on Voyager played a role in her radicalization of sorts. A particularly sad omission was we got no mention of her previous relationship with Chakotay which is an omission almost as conspicuous as the continued extremely unfortunate lack of discussion about sentient holograms—Voyager's doctor in particular—and how that relates to the ban on AI.

Indeed, Seven becoming a vigilante is second only to Icheb's unceremonious demise in terms of the most depressing things about this show so far. Seven and Icheb come to the Federation with Voyager brimming with potential, but it is squandered in a tragic and empty way. Depressing outcomes such as this driven by the Federation being demoralized and divided is exactly what Picard is trying reverse in his somewhat loopy quest to save a far flung android. You can see how committed Picard remains to restoring the upstanding and merciful Federation from 15 years ago when he insists that Seven not take her revenge. Seven's decision to let Picard think he had convinced her was quite touching, but yet another tragedy of the story is Seven was actually right to take her revenge. Not because of the principle of an eye for an eye, but because as Seven had noted, Bjayzl operated in a lawless place. If Seven didn't take her out, she was just going to keep butchering more ex-Borg. Maybe Seven could've taken her prisoner or something, but it seems likely that the Fenris Rangers lacked the resources to run a maximum security prison. Besides, Bjayzl seemed like the sort of person who could organize a sophisticated jailbreak if need be.

Another tragic element of the story was the revelation that Raffi's drug-induced bouts of paranoia described in her first scenes were far from just a bit of dark humor as the early scenes implied, but in fact turned out to be a full-blown drug addiction that drove her son to cutting her off, regarding her as a toxic family member. Raffi trots out a slate of cliched stock phrases commonly offered up by struggling addicts about having gotten clean and about having changed and having become a better person. Anyone who knows a drug addict knows how difficult it is to trust such statements, so Hwang rejecting her is an entirely reasonable if perhaps wrong choice in this instance. It is likely Raffi truly did get clean since hitching a ride on the La Sirena and it is likely her wacky conspiracy theory will turn out to be correct as well. But even so, Hwang has no reason to believe any of that until Raffi produces extraordinary evidence for her extraordinary claims.

Speaking of Hwang, the fact that he was at a fertility clinic was a very interesting detail. It's been strongly implied in many previous Star Trek series that interspecies breeding—while possible—is often quite difficult to achieve at times, so adding more texture to that long established fact is appreciated. One detail that we seriously could've done without though was the cheesy holographic advertising scene when they arrived at Freecloud. If it had happened when they were on the surface in the streets or something maybe that would've been less objectionable, but the idea of fully interactive holograms appearing inside of people's ships in orbit raises lots of difficult to resolve questions, most alarmingly related to security. So once you enter orbit of Freecloud, people can just project holograms into your ship which can gather information via interaction or perhaps listen to conversations? Sounds like a good way to spy on people or steal their data!

Of course another shocking development was finally catching up with Bruce Maddox only to see him murdered by Agnes shortly thereafter. She wishes she didn't know what she knows. She wishes "they" hadn't shown her what "they" showed her. Whatever it was she learned caused her to become ideologically opposed to Bruce Maddox's quest to carry on Dr. Soong's legacy of building ever more sophisticated and human-like androids despite having previously been a full partner with him in that endeavor in more ways than one. Hopefully we find out what terrible secrets she learned soon and hopefully it makes her shocking murder of her lover at least somewhat sympathetic somehow.

Review

This episode starts off with a tone straight out of Firefly and closes with a green-blooded Romulan decapitation followed by a space battle featuring an old style Romulan Bird of Prey straight out of TOS: Balance of Terror; cliffhangering with Seven of Nine! Whew! Hopefully we get a good explanation for why she showed up at just the right time. Was she following Picard? In any event, the space battle was one of the best ones featured in Star Trek in quite some time. Yes of course Discovery and the Kelvin films have their fair share of action, but often their action is overkill and not well earned. Unlike those, this dogfight between the La Sirena and the old style Romulan Bird of Prey isn't overwrought in the slightest. It's just the right amount of action we needed to add a bit more fun to an already fairly strong story.

The exchange between Picard and Senator Adrev was also a highlight of the episode as a window into the Romulan feelings of betrayal by the Federation. It's understandable that the excessively secretive nature of Romulan culture would cause many of them to believe that the Federation totally failing to organize a competent relief effort in the face of both overwhelming logistical challenges and internal political turmoil might have been an intentional conspiracy to lull Romulans into a false sense of security so that they would end up in a significantly weakened position by placing undue trust in an ancient enemy, leaving Picard in the unenviable position of exclaiming something to the effect of, "It's not what it looks like!" And having Picard express outrage to Elnor about needlessly killing Adrev when presumably a non-lethal way of subduing him would've sufficed was also a nice and necessary touch. It makes sense that Elnor would do that and that Picard would react to it that way.

There are only a few wrinkles in this episode. Adding "Emmet" to the flock of Rios' holograms further compounds the annoying ambiguity about the status of sentient holograms relative to the ban on androids. Also while the ending of this episode is great fun, the pacing of the episode otherwise drags a bit at times. Even so, this is one of the stronger episodes so far.

Review

Another solid, if slow episode. In some regards the slowness is appreciated. It's nice that they took their time furnishing Picard with a ship, particularly after the previous episode establishing clearly that Picard can't just order up a spiffy new ship on demand. Instead he has to work connections to find shady people willing to go out on a limb for him. Another nice touch was the scene when Laris remarked that chateau life wasn't right for Picard and that his real home was amongst the stars. This was a touching echo of Picard's exchanges with his late family in TNG: Family.

On the topic of chateau life, it's fascinating to see Raffi express resentment towards Picard not just because he was indirectly responsible for getting her fired from Starfleet, but also because his retirement was considerably more glamorous compared to her comparative squalor. The continued existence of wealth inequality to some degree in the Federation might seem to run counter to the utopian vision of Star Trek, but it makes a great deal of sense. We can safely assume Raffi doesn't live in poverty as we know it today. She like any other Federation citizen no doubt has free, universal access to food, shelter, healthcare, and other basic needs. But some things even in the utopian Federation would undoubtedly still be scarce. One cannot simply walk up to the replicator and say, "Chateau, vineyard, France," or "Ship, warp capable, unregistered." For Picard to be able to live on such a vast estate, he clearly had to have some wealth, or at least significantly more social capital of some kind than Raffi did. The episode makes other references to the continued existence of money as well too, such as in reference to the cost of Rios' services.

Speaking of Rios, it is curious how his "unregistered" starship can just hang out in Earth orbit without setting off any alarms. An unlicensed ship could be a powerful weapon in the wrong hands. The warp core could be jury-rigged into an antimatter bomb, and an antimatter explosion on Earth could kill tens or perhaps even hundreds of millions of people. It has always been strongly implied that the Federation heavily regulates who gets access to starships for this reason, so it isn't entirely clear why Rios can just fly around with an unregistered starship like someone joyriding in a Ferrari without a driver's license without anyone seeming to be remotely concerned about it.

It is even more curious that his ship is outfitted with a flock of emergency holograms. It seems holograms are either inexplicably not banned as androids were, or the holograms on Rios' ship are illegal. The lingering still unresolved questions about the status of holograms relative to androids are starting to get pretty conspicuous and annoying. Though one detail pertaining to continuity that is quite appreciated was the little throwaway line from Laris about Romulans with forehead ridges being "northerners." This provides us with an in-universe explanation for why some Romulans have forehead ridges and some don't: it is has to do with ethnic groups among Romulans. This inconsistency was long considered by Star Trek fans to be a similar if less severe problem akin to the Klingon forehead problem created by the transition from TOS to the original series films. The Klingon forehead problem was fixed in Ent: Affliction and Ent: Divergence. Now the Romulan forehead problem is fixed here. A fantastic example of this show playing very nicely in the canon sandbox.

Another great example of this show leveraging canon was bringing back the character of Hugh, last seen in TNG: Descent, Part II in September of 1993, more than 26 years before this episode! We don't know too much about what he's been up to since taking over the rebel Borg faction left behind by Lore, but we learn that he's now the executive director of the Reclamation Project charged with "reclaiming" the Borg drones severed from the collective, now termed xBs. It is curious that Ramdha and a ship full of her fellow Romulans were the last people assimilated by this cube before it suffered a "submatrix collapse." This sounds strikingly similar to what might have happened if the weapon that the Enterprise crew devised to attack the Borg using Hugh in TNG: I, Borg had actually been deployed. Could the Romulans have stolen this virus from the Federation? Could they have invented a similar one of their own? Hopefully we'll find out soon.

Review

It turns out that bigotry towards androids had been on the rise over the preceding decades. The Utopia Planitia workers didn't regard their android coworkers as people. Their attitudes probably weren't that uncommon across the Federation. It turns out that Starfleet did exactly what Picard was afraid of way back in TNG: The Measure of a Man. They created a race of android slave laborers, not unlike the hologram slave labor race they created with the Emergency Medical Holograms in Voy: Author, Author. This progression of events is very similar to the backstory of Battlestar Galactica (2003). A quote from Commander Adama in BSG's pilot is on point here: "We decided to play god. Create life. When that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn't our fault, not really." That is the sentiment that Federation society is expressing right now. However, Adama went on to say: "You cannot play god then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore." That is the sentiment that the narrative appears to be expressing. The Federation refuses to take responsibility for all the awful things it has done to its artificial life forms. We still don't know precisely why the synths attacked, but treating them as a slave race just as Picard warned against decades ago probably didn't help matters.

Another nice piece of exposition we got in this episode was when Admiral Clancy explained that the Federation's decision to let the Romulans fend for themselves was due to political pressure from fourteen different Federation members threatening to secede from the Federation if the rescue mission was allowed to continue. This significantly clarifies why the Federation would consider abandoning a humanitarian mission and makes it easy to see both sides of the argument. On one hand, Picard is right that it is unconscionable to let people die needlessly. He was indeed right that we shouldn't refer to them pejoratively as Romulans, but instead simply as people. On the other hand, it's hard to argue with Admiral Clancy's logic that allowing fourteen members of the Federation to secede might destabilize the Alpha Quadrant to such a degree that abandoning the rescue mission could quite reasonably have been the lesser of two evils. What if a partial dissolution of the Federation led to a war that killed even more people? If members of the European Union threatened to secede if the EU offered medical relief to a geopolitical rival during a natural disaster, would the EU accede to this demand or let them secede? It's hard to know. It would probably depend on which members were making the demand, how vital they were to the union, and what the geopolitical repercussions of secession would be.

Meanwhile we learn much more about why the Romulans appear to be taking up residence inside the wreckage of a Borg cube. It seems they captured the cube after it was severed from the collective for some unknown reason, then used it to extract Borg technology and profit by exploiting it. They've had the cube for a very long time (more than a decade!), refer to it as "The Artifact," and consider it a research institute where they invite foreign scientists to work for them, though apparently only after a great deal of vetting. Former Borg drones are aboard, slowly being "reclaimed." The narrative seems to be strongly implying there's a lot more going on here than simply a salvage operation and a science project though, so we'll have to wait and see what else all this is all about. The whole thing is quite thrilling and fascinating though!

As for Picard himself, he doesn't want to reassemble the old TNG crew because he doesn't want any of them to end up like Data. He has developed the neurological disorder that was foreshadowed in TNG: All Good Things ("Irumodic Syndrome"). It is incurable and he will soon die. We see the full extent of his falling out with Starfleet in this episode when Admiral Clancy dresses him down in a powerful way. Her "sheer fucking hubris" line followed shortly by referring to Picard's request as "the pitiable delusions of a once great man desperate to matter" certainly make that scene one of the most memorable exchanges in all of Star Trek so far, mostly because it's justly deserved. He's burned far too many bridges to be able to just be handed a starship and a crew and fly off into the sunset again. Back in the day he could crash the Enterprise-D into a planet and Utopia Planitia would get busy building a brand new state of the art flagship just for him, but nowadays he can't even get the admiralty to commission him a garbage scow. It's very effective drama. That said, it does beg the question of just what Admiral Janeway is up to nowadays. It's hard to imagine her refusing to take Picard seriously given her affinity for Voyager's doctor, a form of artificial life that was oppressed just as the androids were. It's quite unfortunate that the story hasn't addressed this question yet.

Another unfortunate detail was nearly all the exposition concerning the Zhat Vash. While none of it is necessarily irreconcilable with canon, the amount of hyperbole used to describe them evokes the worst aspects of the overwrought storytelling style of Discovery or TOS. The Zhat Vash are referred to as keeping a secret "so profound and terrible that just learning it can break a person's mind..." Uh, okay. Whatever. Also speaking of Discovery aesthetics, holo communicators are apparently back in fashion after falling out of fashion during TOS and TNG, then briefly coming back into fashion during DS9, then falling out of fashion again... until now. Whatever. That's not necessarily irreconcilable with canon either, but it is an indicator that this show is more willing to embrace Discovery's visual language than perhaps it should be. More concerning was that little holographic original series Enterprise floating in the Starfleet HQ lobby which used Discovery's TOS reboot aesthetics. While a minor detail, this is a serious cause for concern because it implies that Star Trek: Picard endorses the "visual reboot" that Discovery proffered, which we should firmly reject. Instead, we should continue to hope that Discovery can be safely confined to a multiverse set apart from the main canon, like the Kelvin films for the sake of preserving visual canon. Hopefully this is the last time this topic needs to be discussed on Star Trek: Picard!

Overall though this is another strong episode. Not as strong as the pilot, but clearly there is a lot of potential in this story!

Review

Like The Girl Who Made the Stars, this is a reasonably charming little story, making better use of the animated medium than TAS. Unfortunately the framing device makes it impossible to reconcile with canon. There is no reason Starfleet would make an educational film about a technology that has been classified in order to be buried and forgotten.

Review

Unlike the previous season 2 codas, this one adds real if marginal value to a significant character by visualizing the fable Burnham told in Brother in a unique and stylized way. A charming little story.

Review

Another Discoveryverse Enterprise coda. Again fairly unremarkable. Again not bad, but not necessarily good either. Again feels more like the sort of thing you'd find perusing the deleted scenes of a film only to say, "Yeah, I can see why they cut this."

Review

While it was nice to see a brand new crew on a brand new ship, this is easily the worst Star Trek "episode" in many years, so much so that it deserves to be struck from canon and ignored forever. Aside from the fact that the details regarding tribble biology and history are hard to reconcile with the rest of canon, the "post-credits" scene (a newer fad in TV/film that we should hope dies a swift death) is obviously pure parody and clearly not intended to even be part of canon to begin with. The rest of the episode isn't much better though. It's basically an episode of Bob's Burgers set in the Star Trek universe, except Edward isn't even remotely as likable as Bob. Edward is awkward, antisocial, reckless, immoral, and vindictive. The narrative expects us to hate him and celebrate his needless death in the end, as though watching obnoxious people win Darwin Awards is somehow in the spirit of Star Trek. It isn't.

Review

This coda to Discovery's second season chronicles Spock's first day on the Enterprise, as portrayed by Discovery's visual reboot of the Enterprise. It is notable that this episode takes place prior to TOS: The Cage, making it even more inexcusable for Discovery to have not recreated the recap to TOS: The Cage in its new aesthetics during If Memory Serves. If they have budget to do random codas featuring Spock, Number One, and Pike, then they had budget for that too. Indeed, the issue was never budgetary most likely, but as noted in the review for If Memory Serves, the writers were most likely taken in by the absolute worst kind of selective nostalgia: rebooting visual canon, except for when they're feeling sappy and nostalgic and want to literally reuse old shots in a stupid and jarring way. As for this story, it is mostly unremarkable. It isn't bad. But it isn't that good either. This feels more like the sort of thing you'd find perusing the deleted scenes of a film only to say, "Yeah, I can see why they cut this."

Review

Well the surprisingly lengthy space battle was indeed fun as expected, but as usual with Discovery they put exponentially more effort into production quality than writing quality. As usual there are so many layers of incoherence and bad plotting to work through. For starters the absurd number of shuttles and "pods" (whatever those are, and who knows why they're never seen again...) hinted at in the previous episode is much greater than it seemed. They number at over 200! Seriously? Then we have super genius teenager Po who knows military tactics better than every trained Starfleet officer. Then there's the surprise allies arriving to save the day trope executed more sloppily than usual. Tyler somehow organizes and teleports everyone to the battle in the space of what, an hour? How does Tyler organize all that? When did he really start preparing it all? How did those ships get there so fast? Why couldn't Tyler have contacted Starfleet for help if he was able to reach the Klingons and the Kelpiens? There are no good answers to these questions. An even more awkward question is why didn't the Klingons look surprised that Tyler is even alive? Remember earlier in the season when L'Rell faked his death to keep her hold on power? The writers apparently didn't remember that.

Then there's that indestructible blast door on the Enterprise. That torpedo blows off a third or so of the saucer section but somehow leaves Pike untouched when he's standing just on the other side of a door. And why didn't Cornwell get one of those repair robots to pull the lever for her? A similarly embarrassing oversight has to do with the motivation behind transporting Discovery to the future to begin with. Set aside for the moment that they could've avoided this whole mess by using the spore drive to get out of range of Control to begin with. That was covered in the earlier reviews. What we need to talk about now is they've actually made it worse: Georgiou destroyed Control and nobody took a step back and realized, "Hey, wait, we won. We don't need to send Discovery to the future anymore. Control can't weaponize the sphere database if Control is dead. Hooray! No need to maroon a whole crew of people!"

But the writers didn't notice that either because they were utterly committed to sending the ship and her crew to the future at all costs because that was supposed to reconcile Discovery with canon. Except it doesn't. Not even close. It's an insult to expect the audience to believe that all the numerous tough things to reconcile that happened across these two seasons can be satisfactorily reset buttoned by making it classified. Too many people already know too many things. And making Discovery or the spore drive classified doesn't fix the numerous outright continuity errors, or the visual reboot. The only real solution is to dump Discovery into a multiverse like the Kelvinverse from Star Trek XI (2009) where it always should've been to begin with. It's quite remarkable that the writers saw the problem clearly enough that they were willing to almost totally retcon Discovery out of existence, but they didn't take it all the way. Thankfully they haven't yet precluded the conclusion that Discovery is in a multiverse. So we must continue to presume that it is and hope they never contradict it. Indeed, we should further hope they endorse Discovery being in a multiverse on-screen some day like was done with Star Trek XI (2009) for the long term health of the franchise's canon.

Looking to the future, Discovery's third season will have have some interesting plotting problems to solve internally. Setting aside canon concerns, the other half of Discovery's overall awfulness is its unwillingness to think through its innumerable comic bookish superpowers or the implications of the corners they write themselves into. They're going to be in the far future with an unknown political geography in an obsolete starship that has suffered from massive battle damage. Assuming they somehow survive, what do they do? This finale makes it seem like they're stuck there forever, but they still have the time travel suit. It just needs a new time crystal. And there sure seemed to be a lot of those on Boreth, so... yeah. Even if Discovery somehow delivers us the perfect fix to its canon-wrecking two seasons by endorsing the multiverse solution, it seems pretty clear we shouldn't trust them to tell a coherent story on its own terms any more than we should trust them to play nice in the sandbox of Star Trek's epic canon.

Overall, Discovery continues to be a massive disappointment and at times even a disgrace to the Star Trek franchise on many levels. Let's hope the writers start paying closer attention to the damage they're doing to the franchise and work to make repairs before it's too late.

Review

Discovery won't let itself be (easily) destroyed, so they decide to fight Control instead. It's pretty hard to take anything in this episode seriously given the absolutely absurd premise that it's impossible to run from Control even though they've got the spore drive which can teleport them instantaneously anywhere in the galaxy. Given that, the excessive number of tearful goodbyes in this episode is doubly annoying. They didn't earn them at all and even if they did it would still have been excessive to spend this much time on it.

Speaking of excessive, the return of Po is regrettable. She is so obnoxious. A child prodigy inventor queen exuding constant arrogance and snark which the narrative is clearly expecting us to find charming for some reason. Doubly annoying is Tilly and Po reveling in their little secret the whole time making in-jokes about Runaway while everyone else looks either confused or annoyed. Because puerile giggling is totally the proper way to prepare for war. Can you imagine Commander Adama and Admiral Cain acting this way preparing to attack the Cylons on Battlestar Galactica? Or Sisko and Dax acting this way preparing for battle with the Dominion on DS9? Even notoriously goofy Farscape reined it in more than this when the stakes got this serious. But not so on Star Trek: AvengersDiscovery.

Then once their preparations for battle are made, a completely ridiculous number of shuttlecraft appear from mallet space. People used to criticize Voyager for having a seemingly endless supply of shuttles, but at least you could explain that away as the crew rebuilding them. They're even shown to build a shuttle from scratch with the Delta Flyer. But here the Enterprise and Discovery somehow house a massive fleet of shuttles in their tiny little shuttle bays.

A few highlights: Sarek choosing not talk to Spock when he is aboard the ship preserves continuity with TOS: Journey to Babel, since that episode establishes that they have not spoken "as father and son" since before the events of Discovery. It also looks like the battle that will occur in the next episode will be pretty fun, for all that the setup is idiotic. Lastly the idea that Discovery may end up permanently in the future might give this show a place to go where it can do something new and original instead of constantly stumbling through canon making a mess as though it were in a drunken stupor.

Review

Another clunker in a season full of clunkers. After spending some time with L'Rell's and Voq's/Tyler's son (so much for those theories that he might grow up to be "the albino" from DS9: Blood Oath), Pike becomes convinced that the vision he saw of ending up confined to a wheelchair is inevitable for no clear reason other than being told that it is inevitable. It's entirely unclear how taking a time crystal and having a conversation with a time monk deprives him of all free will for the rest of his life, but that appears to be what the writers expect us to believe. Gone is Pike's agency to resign from Starfleet, change careers, or simply kill himself before the impending accident. Foreknowledge of it as a possible outcome doesn't render it merely a possible outcome, but somehow a certainty.

Bad takes on the philosophy of free will aside, the whole notion that the Klingons are sitting on rich deposits of natural resources that can be used to build powerful time travel technology that they simply refuse to use because it wouldn't be honorable or something is utterly stupid. Countless Klingons would have no such scruples, yet for some completely asinine reason we're supposed to believe that this power is never exploited across centuries of Star Trek stories. The tendency for this series to grant superpowers in a prequel that history never recorded and not think through the implications of how they would ripple across canon is an endless source of frustration and one of the principal reasons why this whole show ought to be struck from canon with prejudice.

And somehow, overwrought time crystals are not even the stupidest detail of this story. That honor goes to the cliffhanger. They're being chased by a fleet of 30 ships, can't outrun them with warp drive, and need to buy time to figure out how to use the time crystals to defeat Control. So rather than do the overwhelmingly obvious thing of using the spore drive to jump across the galaxy—say—to Terralysium where it would take the enemy 150 years to catch up to them, they just suddenly forget that option for no coherent reason and decide blowing up the ship is all they can do, which is especially incoherent given that they used the spore drive earlier in the episode to travel to Boreth. But hey, at least we finally had a scene with Linus where he wasn't used to make a body humor joke.

Review

This episode is a mixed bag. On one hand, the presence of Gabrielle Burnham giving a firsthand account of developing the red angel suit, being forced to use it, getting stranded in the 32nd century, and using time travel to prevent a galactic calamity is welcome exposition. It was also fantastic to finally see direct flashbacks to the moment when Burnham's parents were lost, which was a notable oversight in the first season's finale. Now they are finally adhering to the principle of, "Show, don't tell." All of that was great payoff, but it could've been worth a lot more points if there weren't so many terrible details dragging things down.

For starters, Leland's story eerily resembles having been assimilated by the Borg. We must pray that it's only a superficial similarity and that there is no actual connection between Control and the Borg, or that would likely be yet another continuity error that the series would have to clean up. Also the debate in the episode about whether to delete the sphere data is idiotic. Saru was right. Burnham, Gabrielle, and Pike were wrong. Knowledge is good. Deleting knowledge is bad. Destroying Control should've been their goal.

But even so, suppose for whatever godawful reason that destroying the data truly was their only option... okay, what's so hard about that? Sure, some kind of firewall or DRM prevents itself from being deleted. Whatever. It's unclear how that could possibly work, but let's go with it for now. Did anyone think to physically smash the computer it's stored on? Or blow up Discovery? It turns out they can transfer the data to the red angel suit (move it, not copy it; which itself implies deleting the copy from the computer it started on, but we digress), so instead of the bizarre plan of "send the suit to the future with the data" why not just transfer the data to the suit and then destroy the suit?

Speaking of the suit, its incredible superpowers are well beyond reasonable suspension of disbelief by this point. Gabrielle and Section 31 appear to have built it without too much difficulty beyond locating a "time crystal." Once constructed it possessed the power of time travel, flying through vast distances in space despite having no apparent means of propulsion, the ability to emit powerful signals that can be detected from across the galaxy, a "heal beam" that brought Burnham back to life, weapons that could effortlessly neutralize the Ba'ul in The Sound of Thunder, and "literally infinite" computer storage capacity. And who knows what else?

Perhaps its best superpower though is it provides the series a way to carve out Star Trek: Discovery as taking place in a multiverse, similar to the Kelvin films, which is a possibility we should not only start taking seriously now, but begin assuming is the case immediately for the long term health of the franchise's canon. We should now assume that 20 years prior to the start of Discovery when Gabrielle Burnham began traveling through time to escape the Klingon attack and began altering historical events, she contaminated the timeline which spun off the prime universe into a multiverse that now exists separate and apart from the main canon, just as Nero spun off the prime universe into a multiverse in Star Trek XI (2009).

Unless and until a future episode contradicts this conclusion, it will be official editorial stance of this publication that Discovery exists in a multiverse apart from the main canon for this reason. Hopefully the writers either 1. validate this on-screen at some point, or 2. at least do nothing to contradict it in a future episode. If so, this can fix all of Discovery's breaks with canon. Even visual canon. So perhaps this otherwise mixed bag of an episode is the greatest gift Star Trek: Discovery has given us so far. It gave us the tools to strike all of this from the main canon to undo all the damage that has been done to canon by this series. Hooray?