Well, Discovery has never made me fear as much for their lives as it did at the end of this one. Good job. Don't be too hard on Tilly, she did her best, and even Saru couldn't do much else against how Osyraa's goons took over Engineering. I didn't have any problems with her being confident when facing Osyraa; when you have a spore drive as a safety net, or at least you think you do, there isn't much you really need to be afraid of. To be fair, I think this was a damned if they do, damned if they don't situation for most complainers: if Tilly was anxious or started babbling, it would've been a showcase of how Saru naming her as XO was idiotic. If she was confident instead, they would instead call it a sign of Mary Wiseman being too old to play someone in her twenties and the show trying to artificially age the character up. Of course, quite some of the twists, including that Osyraa will attack while Tilly had the conn, were quite predictable, but that's not a bad thing in itself, and I think they handled it well.
At first, I thought Saru would find himself in trouble for jumping into the nebula without telling Vance, so I was glad to see him being reasonable again and make it an official mission after finding a planet full of dilithium there. I don't know yet if I like the choice of making Su'Kal the source of the Burn, but the concept of dilithium getting destabilized throughout the entire galaxy in a chain reaction after a burst from a planet-sized chunk of it seems quite intriguing.
The holo-environment was the usual fare for Discovery's "mystery elsewhere" stories, reminding me a bit of Saints of Imperfection again. I kept wondering who the child and the monster were, my mind constantly racing with ideas up to and including a twist reveal where he would turn out to be a holo and the monster would turn out to be the child and a Kelpien-Ba'ul hybrid, or that he could shapeshift and the two were the same.
Weirdly, there were some developments that I liked and still worried me, simply because I've learned to be afraid of the reaction of the Mary-Sue Burnham crowd, like when Burnham was separated from the others and stumbled upon the child, or when she and Hugh agreed that Saru should stay behind to keep Su'Kal from going critical again, then Hugh decided to stay too. They worked and made sense to me, but I already know many on the internet will go ballistic about how the show is, to them at least, obviously going towards Burnham being named captain before Saru is rescued. Ultimately, at this point, I don't care. It looks like we're in for a thrill the next week, which I'm very happy about, considering I'm going to have my first ever New Year's Eve all alone because of the quarantine.
I love bullet points, why don't you?
At first, I thought Saru would find himself in trouble for jumping into the nebula without telling Vance, so I was glad to see him being reasonable again and make it an official mission after finding a planet full of dilithium there. I don't know yet if I like the choice of making Su'Kal the source of the Burn, but the concept of dilithium getting destabilized throughout the entire galaxy in a chain reaction after a burst from a planet-sized chunk of it seems quite intriguing.
The holo-environment was the usual fare for Discovery's "mystery elsewhere" stories, reminding me a bit of Saints of Imperfection again. I kept wondering who the child and the monster were, my mind constantly racing with ideas up to and including a twist reveal where he would turn out to be a holo and the monster would turn out to be the child and a Kelpien-Ba'ul hybrid, or that he could shapeshift and the two were the same.
Weirdly, there were some developments that I liked and still worried me, simply because I've learned to be afraid of the reaction of the Mary-Sue Burnham crowd, like when Burnham was separated from the others and stumbled upon the child, or when she and Hugh agreed that Saru should stay behind to keep Su'Kal from going critical again, then Hugh decided to stay too. They worked and made sense to me, but I already know many on the internet will go ballistic about how the show is, to them at least, obviously going towards Burnham being named captain before Saru is rescued. Ultimately, at this point, I don't care. It looks like we're in for a thrill the next week, which I'm very happy about, considering I'm going to have my first ever New Year's Eve all alone because of the quarantine.
I love bullet points, why don't you?
- I loved Vance's reaction to learning Tilly was the XO. If expressions could tell stories, his ones would speak volumes. Somewhere between "we're definitely discussing this later" and "I don't even want to know."
- It was supremely weird to see Doug Jones as himself. It might've been just the hairpiece... and his expressions were just so glorious. He totally sold Saru being as weirded out by the whole realization as I was.
- The stairs looked more like Escher's Relativity than a stepwell for me. It would've made sense for a holoprogram to play fast and loose with perspective like that.
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