I'm gonna do my best at notes here early. It's been rightly frustrating having real life interfere with spending a couple hours writing these up in a joyful ignorance of employment or family. :P
- "Previously on Discovery" in Klingon. Ha.
- The Klingon fleet poised to strike at earth at the top of the episode has all of six vessels, including a BoP. I realize that there’s no telling how many ships are BEHIND those six from the camera’s POV, but it seems almost odd not showing a massed armada of dozens or hundreds of ships as we did in the opener.
- To be fair though, at the end we see six ships peel away from Earth visual, but there were more BoPs in that shot.
- Yep, the opener of Earth orbit does indeed show what looks like the Spacedock mushroom from STIII et. al., under construction no less! The shot cuts to Qo’noS with a wipe-by of an intact communications satellite also from the opener.
- The Moon is NOT that close to the Earth. On the plus side though, on its dark side you can see quite a lot of colonization has occurred in the past couple centuries. Lunar schooners represent!
- However, I’m not at all convinced that the orientation of the moon and planets is at all correct. Jupiter for example matches the sunlight coming in from the shot’s upper left; however Jupiter has an axial inclination of just 3.3%, so there’s no way this could ever happen. On Earth, its acis tile is 23.4% but I’m still not sure that would result in the odd orientation of North America that we see.
- We start with Discovery at 12ly out from Qo’noS. Near or far, it sounds a lot like they should be pretty close to any number of Klingon forces. Even “running dark”, it’s not like they have a cloak of their own…
- Busting into L’Rell’s cell for a little bad cop – bad cop – Michael go away, Georgiou lowers the containment field AND zaps L’Rell’s outfit a bit. I was wondering I those accessories on her garb were functional or not… It seems to stun her slightly but doesn’t incapacitate her, perhaps tilting the interrogation field a bit in Pippa’s favour?
- Back in the conference room, as the gang scrutinizes what little information they have on Qo’noS, at one point Tyler points to a specific chimney and the hologram obediently highlights it without any context. It’s hardly the first time we’ve seen this sort of thing, but how intuitive are the computers in this era meant to be, anyway?
- Furthermore, Archer was there with his Enterprise at least twice by my reckoning, and NO ONE bothers to scan the planet? Maybe it was just considered rude?
- Hey, the conference room set is even less the same as the starbase version as I thought. The central table is completely different and smaller – the one on the starbase was also made of wood and had a sort of notch for one person to stand and pontificate. The chairs, walls and other elements are the same, though as previously noted they added windows to the Discovery set; and here the lights are more permanently moody instead of “purposely” turned down for Lorca’s sake (or are they? Were they just being nice for Pippa’s sake?).
- When Pippa summons Tilly, she enters from a directly-adjacent Discovery turbolift set. Is there another entrance to this conference room? Or is this a practical use of the turbolift car as both transport vehicle and hallway? The Starbase set door opened onto a generic wall with a big Starfleet symbol on it.
- Tilly is able to restore her straight locks in the space of a scene change. It’s a wonderful little touch but is it really the time for that kind of vanity? Or, it really is that easy, since the Emperor changed her hair length when she donned her doppleganger’s uniform.
- Upon sporing into the really, really big cavern (and I’m guessing no Klingon was spelunking that day), Detmer notes that the ship’s “stabilizer beams” are compensating for the local gravity. We know that Dicovery has a lot of TRACTOR beam emitters mounted externally, but are these categorically different? Are we ignoring other instances of tractor / repulsor beam tech in the franchise by having these so readily available for popping into huge caves?
- The same transporter operator from last week was at the controls again today, this time with a pal on the opposing console. He beams the party out, but no mention is made of his collusion from the top of the previous episode. Methinks it’s a simple member of giving an extra a line or two, which this production seems pretty nice to do. As it stands, Discovery has a fully enumerated and named bridge crew member for every station, and while their characters aren’t particularly fleshed out, it’s nice to see them maintain a constant Ayala-like familiarity on the ship instead of having random extras populating the bridge all the time.
- Zooming into the Orion outpost, we hear random TNG-era transporter SFX (before the landing party beams in). I’m guessing by this point the sound editors don’t know how this random use of sound clips can grate on fans who grew up on each era of Trek having a distinct sound effects environment.
- The writers, meanwhile, correctly acknowledge the use of the darsek as the unit of Klingon Kurrency from both the ENT and TNG eras. And yet still no one knows what the hell an isik is, possibly for another hundred years. :P
- Great use of the Orions in the context of the worldbuilding here. To me, it doesn’t make sense that a giant intergalactic empire would be so homogeneous in its makeup, nor would it forbid any offworlders to have a presence on its homeworld. Good to acknowledge this here – I’m guessing that O-town is a pretty strictly regulated place in terms of being one of few places non-Klingons can freely hang out.
- Pretty sure the Orion Hooters joint is a re-use of the throne room set. No wonder Pippa is so comfortable there.
But would Dax be? Those are certainly Trill spots… Or at least Kriosian.
- Whoever the spotted one is, assuming that’s her later, she’s covering up her attractive spotting with tattooage. Or is she? The ink seems to be deployable and possibly retractable at a touch. For those who enjoy hot springs in Japan, this is actually a good thing.
- Could they have come up with a better name than “hydro” bomb? For some reason I keep imagining those cherry bombs you put in the toilet.
- Qo’noS is correctly shown as having only one moon. We all know what happens to it.
- When Pippa draws her weapon on Burnham, we hear it charge up / prime / chamber / whatever in a familiar fashion as all energy weapons in this show. However, when Burnham subsequently grabs the pistol and pulls it to her chest, we hear it charge AGAIN.
- Once the Klingon fleet breaks away from Earth, we’re treated to a nice zoom in to Paris. On the way, we DON’T see spacedock, the Moon is in a different place (suggesting that maybe a week has past, but I really don’t think they were putting to much thought into it), and at least three of the “spire” type starbases we’re familiar with by now.
- We also VERY quickly zoom past several starships. I’m fairly certain the one that zooms directly overhead is a Crossfield-class ship oriented towards the camera. This COULD be Discovery, or not, as the timeline covered by this shot isn’t clear. Did the Klingons stick around for when Discovery came home?
- For those among us who have actually been to Paris and know the area around the Eiffel tower, it seems as though the place gets significantly remodeled over time! The park area is more or less where it is today, but the Seine river is comparatively tiny. I’m sure Paris was one of the many cities that is thoroughly nuked in WWIII and the Eiffel Tower is more than likely a replica, but there’s quite a bit of urban redevelopment that’s going to happen. Nevermind that Paris has (had) an ordinance decreeing that no building in the city may be taller than 590 feet – so THAT seems to have gone away too. For the record, the Eiffel Tower is 1063 feet tall.
- Burnham is in her usual silver for much of the episode, then changes to gold for her Big Speech (and the badge Sarek pins to her silver uniform is gold), then back to silver to take up her permanent (?) posting as science officer of Discovery. This makes a certain amount of sense, as her expunged record would therefore return her to her rank and position she was in before all this mutiny non-nonsense, and before she got re-assigned as Discovery's science officer.
- Get a good look at the hardware on the admiralty? It’s clearly based on the triangular badges we see on the TOS dress uniforms. Great little nod.
- Is Tilly's promotion a brevet rank? She seems to have skipped over the usual pomp and circumstance of graduation so she could slap on a proper Ensign's badge and continue on with Discovery's journey. In the Big Speech, she was still in Engineering bronze, though it was noted she was accepted to the command training program; she’s still in Bronze at the end of the episode.
- Hey, the main monitor displays on the Saru / Burnham bridge consoles pivot!
- Yadda yadda, Enterprise. Looks great. Everything we see in “The Cage” is clearly a fever dream of Spock’s video reconstruction in “The Menagerie”, and no one bothered to call him out on it. Moving on.
Mark
