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

Well, they should have just named the episode Enemy Mine to complete the plagiarism! The alien makeup was similar to the movie, the premise was similar to the movie, and the plot was similar to the movie! Keeping the review a little more confined to Star Trek, the episode was also a bit like TNG: The Enemy. Despite the lack of originality, this was a very nice episode. Trip's compassion for his would be sparring partner is commendable. I like how he threw away his weapon, which started a fight, then after he barely won the fight he threw away his weapon again! Even when Trip had the ability to escape, he stayed to make sure that Zho'Kaan would be all right. This episode nicely demonstrates human compassion. Perhaps the lack of human compassion is why the Vulcans never established good relations with the Arkonians in the past. ;) While maybe not so original, the episode was most true to the spirit of Star Trek; nicely above average.

Review

I was kind of afraid this episode would bring us a Voyager equivalent to Data; thankfully it did not. What we have here is a robotic species which expresses a desire to procreate. They easily elicit the viewer's sympathy; they seem innocent enough. But as the episode progresses, the harmless, disadvantaged robots turn into genocidal megalomaniacs. Seems Janeway's gut instinct to uphold the prime directive was the correct choice. The robots who first pleaded for help are now willing to take it by force. The idea that the robots killed their creators reminds me quite a bit of Battlestar Galactica where the robots take the obvious place of the Cylons. They even look alike. Though from what I know of Battlestar, the Cylons didn't fight each other, and they never annihilated their builders (entirely anyway.) Overall a very high quality episode.

Review

This episode facilitates more bonding between Bashir and O'Brien, due to their being stuck on a desolate planet with O'Brien slowly dying. Unfortunately, the reason for their misfortune was terribly conceived. The plan to kill Bashir and O'Brien just because they possess knowledge of the harvesters was simply ridiculous. As Bashir and Sisko said, what's the damn point? Oh well, despite the annoying premise, the good moments between Bashir and O'Brien do well to brighten up the episode.

Review

Captain Kirk becomes Captain Ahab in this mostly charming story. While attempts to temporarily relieve Kirk of command seem to be becoming a cliche by this point, just about every detail of the story related to Kirk's personal quest had plenty of dramatic appeal, including Spock's and McCoy's perhaps too familiar conspiracy to relieve Kirk. The noticeable change in Kirk's behavior was well played. After having seen this many episodes we've seen a pattern to Kirk's typical behaviors which is clearly broken here. Kirk quite deliberately acts out of character in this story to service his incredibly unusual mood.

The suspense and build-up is well played too. It takes a full 14 minutes into the episode before we even have complete context as to why Kirk has instantly snapped into being such a mad man, during which time subtle clues are dropped in front of the audience, keeping us guessing. Normally it's annoying when the plot fails to get to the point and reveal to full nature of the danger to the audience, but this episode manages to succeed where similar episodes have failed. The audience has just enough information about what's going on to not be annoyed while still remaining curious about the full context of how Kirk could have such intimate knowledge of the evil entity of the week. It's clear Kirk is familiar with the entity from some prior experience with it, but we're fascinated to know precisely what experience Kirk is drawing from.

When the full context and origins of Kirk's obsession are revealed, the backstory delivers on its promise to substantiate Kirk's errant behavior. It makes sense that on Kirk's first Starfleet assignment that if he were to make a mistake that cost the lives of 200 people, that he would carry that guilt with him for a considerable time. Ensign Garrovick succeeds in acting as a metaphor for Kirk's past and the fact that Garrovick is the son of Kirk's old commanding officer from the very ship that suffered at the hands of this entity was a nice touch.

Garrovick was indeed a conceptually great character, but the execution could have been better. The facts surrounding who he was and what he represented were what made him compelling. Strictly speaking, nothing he actually did made him interesting. A better character would have been more than a window into Kirk's past. Likewise, both Garrovick and one or two of the other security officers had very clear shots at the entity which they didn't take. I wouldn't be as forgiving as Spock was. Their reactions weren't forgivably natural, they were incompetent. Either Starfleet's training of its security personnel is terrible or these officers haven't learned to suppress their fear in a combat situation. Either way there is a competence problem somewhere, regardless of whether or not phaser fire actually was effective.

Regarding the weapon that actually was effective, the antimatter bomb was perhaps the most annoying part of the story. The yield from an antimatter explosion triggered by a reaction of a single ounce of fuel would most certainly not produce an explosion of the magnitude the episode so explicitly and repeatedly goes out of its way to indicate. Worse yet there was no reason why both Kirk and Garrovick had to risk their lives by personally detonating the bomb or acting as bait, especially if the yield was large enough to leave a giant crater on the planet.

Strictly speaking, the ship should have been able to fire the bomb at the entity from orbit and there should have been no need for human lures with a bomb of that scale, given that it was clearly a weapon of mass destruction. Finally, they never even bothered to scan to see if the entity was really dead before trotting off back into the stars.

Review

The plot of this episode is extremely slow paced. A lot of sitting around, waiting for something to happen. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, as it's believable for sure. However the whole "out of phase" and "off the mark body clock" stuff is pushing what I consider acceptable technobabble. I also think that early in the episode Picard was acting extremely out of character. Though he improved quite a bit as the episode went on. The story concept is definitely intriguing but I can't help but feel empty at the end with the inconsequential ending. The whole thing seems a bit underwhelming.