Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x09 - "Into the Forest I Go"

That was my impression too. They asked him to come back the first time. He didn't go. So, now they're using the pretext of an award as bait. It would be pretty hard for them to make him go back if he doesn't do so voluntarily!

 

I loved it but didn't like how the last 10 minutes dragged on. Given what happened, I saw a few loose ends.

Weakness 1:
A random planet sends a signal out, causing the Klingons to send the leader of the empire on the rarest ship in the empire. Discovery starts doing random stuff and the Klingons never call backup or withdraw. Kol never lets his officers run the ship while he does an honor battle

They were 3 hours from SB46 at low warp. Did they stick around and jump because they wanted to wait 11 hours to transmit the algorithm. This is a big deal: if they didn't transmit the data and are lost for 6 months (6 episodes), the war could turn against the federation. The slowdown (in the plot) before the jump felt off. From replacing the holographic communicators (why) to the insistence on a jump, the show was able to do something mysterious because we don't have Lorca's perspective.

Lorca needs Burnham for something other than defeating the Klingons. There was a point post Jump when he debated destroying the cloaked ship before pausing and decided to wait to have Tyler and Burnham return first.

 

So Tyler is Voq ( K'Rell: I won't let them hurt you) and what we saw was the surgery to transform him and the trauma that went with it, not torture.
Fine, he's a sleeper. But since the rest of the Klingons are borderline incompetent, I guess it's safe to say the Spy house is not only way smarter, but has been infiltrating other cultures for a long time. How else could Tyler be so nuanced.

Now that the ship of the dead is destroyed, I guess we'll see the next iteration based on its tech (and shape), the K'Tinga.

 

I chalk a lot of it up to the dangers of serialization. They know where they need to get the pieces, but they're not so good at concealing their moves. The storytelling needs better slight of hand. I also think they overstuffed the pudding with too many ideas -- Burnham's elaborate back story, the Sarek connection, her mutiny, the two pilots over three episodes, the Klingon war, Tyler, the spore drive, the questions about Lorca, etc. They can't service them all appropriately in the time available. I hope things shake out next season.

Right now, they're leaning really heavily on ambiguity. That can be a fine storytelling tool in moderation, but ultimately it gets tiresome if we can't understand anyone's real motivations.

 

So this is my favorite episode of Discovery so far. 9/10
I was thinking about giving it a 10, but something feels like I should hold back a bit. Don't know what.

I loved pretty much everything:
- Lorca obeying orders, with caveats, in order to buy time
- Sending Stamets to sickbay (with a conversation very much like Spock/Scotty in STVI), with blowback that they figure out something is actually wrong
- Cornwell not being dead
- Tily being awesomely awkward still
- as for why they had to do all the jumps, I figured they could intercept the same signal at multiple points by jumping to intercept the actual physical signal, which is awesome, but I am not sure that is actually what they are doing
- Lorca still being ambiguous via his input of the jump coordinates, the possible tricking of Stamets into doing one "last jump", looking divided over Cornwell's survival
- where are they? I kind of hope it's not just the "Mirror Universe" as I would be more interested in a different parallel universe, but if they are in the Mirror (as is rumored), I hope they do something important and memorable with it (like "Mirror, Mirror" or "Crossover" and not like all the later DS9s or ENT).

Great stuff. Can't wait for January to be here.

 

It's ok, my discussion with you made me re-watched the Stargate episode Brief Candle and I quite enjoyed it. It's been a long time.

 

I guess this war's been...

*applies eye drops*

Kol'd off!



YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

 

Their plan is so subtle that they are going to wait until the Federation has won the war to make their move.

 

Obviously, it's another attempt by Lorca to get Cornwall killed before she can relieve him of command. As we have learned from so much Trek, traveling by shuttle is the most dangerous activity in the entire Federation. Odds are great that she will be re-abducted by other hostile aliens before reaching her destination.

I thought this exactly! On the whole, I love this PTSD story (they're handling it so well I'm even pre-disapointed it'll have to morph into something else when he's revealed as Voq), but I also wanted to hurl something at the TV when he kept using euphemisms during that scene with Burnham.

It was pretty bold to even embark on this story of male violation at the hands of a female violator. Now just take the last step and use the right words!

 

If they were smart they would leverage this into an inside joke where they issue red shirts to shuttle pilots, and shuttle pilots bite it at a higher rate.

 

Maybe Discovery takes place in a different universe from the Prime Universe which explains the inconsistencies. And maybe that’s where they ended up so we’ll see all the retro stuff in it.

And I guess that the gay spore guy got turned into a Gary Mitchell at the end.

 

If she grew up on Vulcan, which has thinner air and (I believe) slightly higher gravity than Earth, it's possible she's stronger than the average human.

 

Better than last week's episode. Decent cliffhanger for the 2nd half of the season. Looking forward to the Lost in Space/Voyager arc. The Klingon war just felt like zero stakes and unnecessary and moving on is good. I'll be back to check it out when it returns.

One of my biggest issues with this first half done is Burnham. She is the least interesting character on the show. The Vulcan stuff just feels like lip service. IMO she is at her best when she is being Human rather than playing Vulcan. She's just lagging behind the others.

For their little jump plan I thought they said earlier that the Discovery could do that on its own. I thought Stamets and previously Ripper's function was about making long range jumps. It seemed crazy to risk Stamets in there given his unicorn status.

Oh, and sci-fi shows do this all the time, but why do their secret, concealed devices always have to be opposite of sensible?
"We need to place and hide two scanners in dark corners of the ship for this covert stealth mission."
"Take these. They glow brightly when activated, talk to you and then will make continuous techy noises."
"Seems perfect!"
Don't get me started on why they always use speaker mode on their comms as well!

 

Or then has a cardiac condition and a somewhat underdeveloped brain, for having grown up in conditions hostile to her body.

But yeah, Klingons have never been "strong" in dialogue. "Ferocious", "cruel", "fierce", "warlike", "treacherous", but not strong. Indeed, when we do see one strong Klingon in ST3:TSfS, his strength impresses the bejesus out of his own men!

Dueling with knives wouldn't reveal this yet. But Klingons duel with those parrying swords of theirs, and that is a test of pure upper body strength. And Klingons barely manage against folks like the Albino's bodyguards or the Jem'Hadar or Jadzia Dax. All of whom in turn are bested by standard human(oid)s in fistfights.

As for the noisy scanners, every shot of them going active or whatnot actually cuts to Saru commenting on this, with a continuous soundscape. Perhaps all the whirring and bleeping is on the Discovery bridge?

Timo Saloniemi

 

If Dax and Dr. Basher can fight Klingons then so can Burnham I don't see the issue people are having with that. It wasn't unrealistic in past shows. Just seems like people are hunting for things to bitch about.

I think Admiral Cornwell was very impressed with Burnham. As for officers being happy at the destruction of the ship of the dead, it makes perfect sense as that ship was responsible fo the war and the deaths of thousands of officers.

 

I'm also wondering how much tension we're still picking up from the fact that this was originally conceived as a one-season anthology story. I know this was a very early notion, but it still seems deeply woven into the DNA of what we're seeing. Obviously we need to cover everything if we're going to wrap this arc after 15 episodes and never see these characters again, so let's rush rush rush and do it all right now!

I like that they haven't gone FULLY serialized and that most episodes still have their own thru-line for the week. My general complaint about TV for the last year has been too many shows going full-serialized, and I've always been bringing up the seemingly forgotten pleasures of TV that balances the serialized and the episodic (with DS9 and X Files being my go-to examples of this)

So that Discovery is using that style has been great to see! But it also feels they haven't thought enough about how to make the serialization work in this context. Or just how much story it can hold -- you can't do an overarching story this complicated in this number of episodes, and have much room left over for anything else.

The best example of this is the L'Rell story in episode 8. Each scene was just a reversal. Now she's switched sides, and now she's switched sides again, and again, and again, and now the episode is done and we have no idea what was supposed to be going on there, because it was so fixated on keeping it all mysterious that they didn't actually tell any sort of coherent story.

 

Agreed. I'm really invested in the PTSD storyline and the Burnham/Ash romance so I'm going to be sad when it takes a left turn with the presumed Voq reveal. I kind of wish Burnham had just used the word when Ash danced around it. I think she was trying to be pretty gentle with him, which was sweet, but I still think the word 'rape' should have been uttered by one of them.

I was really surprised they actually showed the rape, too. Those flashbacks were pretty graphic.

 

NOOO!!!!

Starfleet officers can't be happy. Or mad. Or in conflict with each other. Or in ANY WAY human or flawed. They must take the restrained high road at every opportunity...including feeling emotional relief with regard to a massive victory.

They should have mourned the terrible loss of life that the destruction of the Ship of the Dead represented...and further mourned the loss of an opportunity to speechify Kol about the virtues and ethical superiority of the Federation. A huge missed opportunity there if you ask me.

 

What? Someone being forced to have sex against their will under penalty of death isn't rape because of their gender? I'm from the UK too and that just sounds insane to me.