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

This episode demonstrates more clearly than any other the vast differences in social structure on Vulcan compared to that of TOS and later. The two most shocking differences are the insinuation that mind melds can only be performed by certain Vulcans and not any Vulcan, and that the right wing Vulcans are practicing eugenics. I've said before that we've seen enough proof that the Vulcans are different than in the other shows. In a way, I found this episode redundant too. But it was also a nice idea, to show that T'Pol has incurred consequences due to the events of Ent: Fusion. This episode is also very clearly an AIDS allegory. Why find a cure when you can just let the infected die off? The disease is only transmitted by "undesirable" people anyway... Sound familiar? Despite my disagreements with the way Vulcans are being shown on Enterprise, this ended up being a nice episode. And at least the writers are being consistent with their portrayal of Vulcans. I just hope they finally get around showing us what changes them by TOS sometime soon. On a lighter note, the Denobulan subplot was much more successful. Phlox' second wife was just hilarious. I wonder how many times Trip (or Archer) has said the words "perfect gentlemen" on the show now? ;)

Review

This is the first of many episodes in which Chakotay tries to impose a cowardly or un-Federation-principles style solution to the current problem, something that (mildly) annoys me. Other than that, this episode is a thriller. End Voyager's isolationist stance in the delta quadrant. We also get some nice cultural information regarding the Trabe and their relationship with the Kazon. It's a nice plot twist to have the seemingly peaceful repenting Trabe attempt an execution of all the Kazon majes. Overall another decent offering by Voyager.

Review

A decent premise is slightly ruined, drowning under the weight of another conspiracy plot. The ending redeems most of the annoying aspects of the story, but I wish the plot twist was revealed a little sooner than the last two minutes of the episode. Though it is sometimes fun to watch O'Brien freak out at everybody and everything, it also gets old fast. A decent ride though.

Review

What started off as a fairly entertaining story about a murder investigation in the tradition of The Conscience of the King focused nicely on the underutilized character of Scotty turned out instead to be a flop induced by yet another non-corporeal entity, poor pacing, some awkward aesthetic choices, and some wonky writing. At the start of the story, the idea that Scotty while recovering from an injury could be committing murders he couldn't recall due to his injury was an intriguing idea. I question the medical ethics of allowing a concussion victim to galavant around in a strip club, but McCoy's always played it somewhat fast and loose. ;)

But it doesn't take long for the annoying details to kick in. What the hell is a psycho-tricorder and by what fantasy mechanism is it capable of determining without a doubt whether or not Scotty murdered anyone? Why was Scotty not confined until the murder investigation was concluded? Exactly how was Sybo supposed to receive "impressions" from inanimate objects? And then there's of course the annoying recurring issue of the aliens of this planet being yet another alien race which looks identical to humans without explanation.

The most annoying detail though is the Jack the Ripper connection. I suppose there's nothing fundamentally problematic with the idea that Jack the Ripper was in fact an alien entity which feeds off death, but aside from the fact that that idea is pretty silly to begin with, the plot logic didn't take the logical consequences of that premise very seriously. For starters, the way they used the computer to jump to this conclusion so quickly based on the lookup of a single name was silly, as was the ridiculous over-reliance on the computer in general. At one point they ask the computer to validate the hypothetical conclusions of five minutes worth of conversation, as if the computer is some kind of all-knowing godlike arbiter of truth.

They then spend another several minutes after this continuing to uselessly speculate on that very hypothesis in a painfully verbose fashion. All the while the entity sits and listens to all this while inhabiting Mr. Hengist. Why the entity waited so long to go hide in someone else's body is beyond me; it must not have been very smart. Were I an entity of such power, I wouldn't have inhabited the body of someone charged with performing the murder investigation. Instead, I'd have picked the most irrelevant bystander I could find and disappeared into the crowd.

Finally the episode reaches its climax of absurdity when they beam the entity into space while it's still inhabiting Mr. Hengist, killing Mr. Hengist in the process! I suppose you could say the crew was desperate to survive, but they didn't even try to save that poor, unfortunate man, nor did the plot make any excuses for why the characters may have been unable to do so. Overall a terrible episode.

Review

The game Riker played with his father was silly and the resolution of their problems was hastened too much. I also don't like how no real reason was given for Riker's last minute refusal of command. Not that I wanted to see him go, but the whole episode just seemed to end abruptly. I do like, however, how one episode after Riker bitched about his father to Pulaski, there's an episode involving him. I wonder if Pulaski blew the whistle on him. ;) On the other hand, the events leading up to Worf's "celebration" of his right of ascension nicely made up for the silly father/son adversarial plot.