Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x14 - "The War Without, The War Within"

I'd have to agree. They have a screaming need for think-pieces.... Trek isn't Trek w/o them. I'm about done with the war arc. I'm just not looking forward to a reset button.

 

T'Pol was a compelling character though .

 

sTolEN vaLoR!

 

But they didn't think it at the time. We were all there. We remember.

 

Yeah, friends I was watching it with groaned when I mentioned at the point Tilly was talking about Stamets' terraforming the moon and I said, "Yeah, and in 25 years or so, we'll do it even better..."

 

10 means on a score of 1 to 10, I gave it a 10 because I thought the episode was excellent. At no point has "10" meant to represent "Best episode of Star Trek ever made."

 

Trek critics work on a sliding scale

 

Decent episode. Some very good moments.

Lorca was missed, but Saru is a really good captian.

Loved the reference to Archer and NX-01

Noticed that Nick Meyer is no longer in the credits, and Joe Menosky was removed a few episodes ago. So the team that Fuller put together is broken up and this is now Harberts/Berg team in place.

Something I mentioned during of last episode may actually happen (though for maybe only 1 episode):

That's one way to replace Isaacs, with another elite actor. If this happens it means that both Discovery captains are mirror universe people.

The Tyler story line went as I expected. He will gradually be accepted by the crew and go back on duty but will have some aftershocks from Voq.

Good to see the Prime vesion of Andorian Shukar.

Even though Cornwell implied Prime Lorca must be dead, I still think he will show up eventually. I think this is something Isaacs & showrunners and fans would want, so it will happen.

I am not even trying to understand the spore technobabble any more. It's just some magic tech to do instantaneous travel and talk to dead people.

 

The last couple of episodes have been bad. The Voq/Ash thing is just dumb. So now sort-of human Voq who had his Voqness dialed down by Klingon lady for some stupid reason isn't even confined to quarters. And the "only the Emperor knows how to defeat the Klingons so let's have her lead the mission" thing is arguably worse. Hopefully this shit gets resolved in the finale and S2 can start with a somewhat clean slate.

 

Jumping in with first impressions, then I'll catch up with 14 pages of posts...

That was a big improvement over last week. (But then, almost anything would be.) The pacing was decent, while still building suspense. The characters actually took time to talk to one another about things that were going on, providing some good dramatic moments. Nobody did a radical 180 in characterization.

That said, there were some shortcomings that definitely caught my attention. In no particular order...

• "She deserves political asylum"? I literally paused the stream when Burnham uttered that line just so I could shout you've got to be fucking kidding me! Saving the Emperor in a moment of emotional stress last week is one thing; expressing ongoing sympathy for her once they're back to safety and everyone's had a chance to catch their breaths is quite another. She's a mass-murdering tyrant who's violated pretty much every precept of decency that exists; what she deserves is to be in a high-security cell awaiting indictment for crimes against humanity in whatever sort of interstellar court the Federation has. Basically, whatever shreds of relatability Burnham still had in my book after her glaringly irrational and foolhardy actions in the previous episode are now shot to hell. The fact that Cornwell and Sarek(!) also went along placidly with the "don't know what to do with her" line about Georgiou is an insult to the viewers' intelligence.
• The distances quoted by Stamets were bizarrely small. If Starbase One is indeed 100 AU from earth, that's less than two one-thousandths of a light year; it is most definitely "in Earth's backyard" as Cornwell put it later. That said, it's still more than three times as far out as the most distant planet, Neptune (which averages 30 AU); in fact it's just beyond the heliopause (90 AU)... so possibly a reasonable location, but what the heck is a planet doing in the background when we see it? Meanwhile, if the Discovery is all of one light-year out from SB1 at the time, that's frankly also in Earth's backyard — at least, closer to Sol than to any other star — and the thought that they would use any means other than warp drive to get there was ridiculous.
• It's hard to believe that the Klingons pulled off a successful attack that close to the very heart of the Federation, and harder to believe they stopped there once doing so. It's harder yet to believe the Starbase depicted on screen held anything close to "80,000 souls" as Cornwell put it; it didn't look remotely big enough. (I'm struck once again by the impression that the designers and FX teams for this show just aren't operating out of the same playbook as the writers.) It's bizarrely hard to believe that once discovering the base's status — occupied by only a few hundred Klingons, with no defending ships in sight — the Discovery didn't just destroy the place before warping away.
• Ash Tyler was great in this episode, coming across as someone genuinely haunted by what he'd been through. His conversations with Saru and with Stamets were highlights. Unfortunately, the exception was his confrontation with Burnham, where he came across as a wishy-washy jerk. For her own part, Burnham's complete lack of sympathy for him might have been a bit more understandable if we hadn't seen her extending unlimited amounts of it to a mass-murdering psychopath just a few minuted earlier. But like I said, at this point any trust I might have once had in her judgment is gone.
• Cornwell had moments of charismatic presence, but was unfortunately mostly reduced to operating as a plot device, largely for the sake of delivering exposition. Her confrontation with L'rell could have been good, except for the fact that she'd obviously had access to Starfleet's intel on the Klingons for the past several months, making the notion that nobody had previously grasped their motivations (as L'rell expressed them) frankly ridiculous.
• Even more ridiculous was the notion that Georgiou's reflections on how she'd confronted the MU Klingons were treated as such an insight — that in nine months of increasingly damaging war, apparently nobody in Starfleet had considered the idea "hey, maybe a counterattack against them might work!"
• Not merely ridiculous but offensive was the notion that not just Cornwell but Sarek — and per dialogue apparently the entire Federation Council! — were willing to countenance some obviously much more extreme (but as yet unspecified) plan provided by the abovementioned mass-murdering psychopath, and not just countenance it but indeed to cut a deal with her and provide a cover story and Starfleet captaincy in return. This is bad storytelling, letting plot beats drive characterization rather than the other way around — it treats other major characters like unprincipled idiots in order to let Burnham look better by comparison when she (inevitably) takes a stand on principle next week against whatever the plan involves.

Still, like I said, despite all this, far better than last week's godawful contrived treatment of Lorca and the MU arc. It's too early to tell if the show is on a genuine upswing now and can continue to improve and explore its (I still believe genuine!) potential, or if this is just a dead-cat bounce.

 

They didn't say they were going to destroy Q'nos outright; (if that were the case, they wouldn't need to scan it.) They said they were going to scan the surface to be able to find and take out every military installation and defense battery on the planet, in the hopes it would cause the various Houses to pull their Fleets back to defend the Home world.

My issue with that is HOW they plan to do that - by having the Discovery spore jump into a large underground cavern (possible because of all the Volcanoes on the planet for some reason ) - and send drones up to get the info that need...(again )

 

Ok, episode. Very soap opera this week.

 

The damn title of this episode stuck this song in my head

 

Why? MU Lorca in command of Discovery was almost single handedly winning the war for the Federation with judicious use of the Spore Drive. Starfleet is desperate. As Sarek stated in the episode: "Starfleet tactics aren't working..."

 

They can send her down the rabbit hole if they want---but until she breaks Federation law in their own universe, they have zero jurisdiction to actually try her. To try her under such circumstances would be arrogant in the extreme. "Our laws apply everywhere--even in other goddamn universes!"

Of course, the humans of Star Trek have always been arrogant fucks, so YMMV.

 

Funny - this isn't the Star Trek: Voyager forum...are you sure you didn't mis-post?

 

And now it's stuck in my head.

Thank you, friend.

 

It's kind of our jam.

 

Okay, I'm not reading 15 pages of this shit! Ugh. (J/K)

a few points before I give it a grade.

1) I sure hope Sarek mindmelded with Emperor Georgiou before they handed her the ship and mission hand over fist. Yikes. Still, I'm just very glad to see Michelle Yeoh back where she belongs.
2) So every time stuff gets boring, they'll either bring back Voq, or maybe Prime Lorca will be back.
3) I'm really hoping they get done with the war arc sooner than later. I'm about ready for DISCO to do some classic Trek think-pieces! Come on, writers, give us a slow think-piece... if not that, at least a bottle episode where a character grows through interaction, not action.
4) So now we've got a pretty multi-ethnic/gendered crew running the ship. This is me being happy

All in all, it's still enjoyable even when it's missing an essential Trekness. Gave it an 8.

 

In the book Control it says section 31 was created by a computer programme called URAEI.