In another thread, I said "Point of Light" would go down as a "love it or hate it" type of episode. Looks like
Jammer came down
the middle-ish. This is my first time commenting on Jammer's Reviews on TrekBBS, even though I've both been posting here and reading his reviews since the '90s.
One thing I agree with is that the different storylines all moved at varying paces. I
personally like this because that means not everything is moving at the same tempo. When I'm listening to a song, I don't want it to be to be all one note or one rhythm, sometimes it applies to episodes too, like here.
He also brings up how much ground is covered is the Klingon storyline. Quoting a paragraph from his review:
On the other end of the spectrum we have the Tyler/L'Rell/Klingon storyline, which tries to cram several episodes of plot into a fraction of a single show. We have (1) Voq/Tyler's split identity being used against him politically; (2) the revelation of Voq's and L'Rell's baby, which is revealed to Voq/Tyler for the first time here; (3) an attempted coup d'etat against L'Rell perpetrated by one of her many enemies in this fragile new unified Klingon Empire, leading to a big stabby bat'leth fight; (4) L'Rell attempting to put down a larger insurrection by pretending to have killed the political liability that is Tyler and their son, as she casts their (fake) severed heads into a chasm. All this is partially orchestrated within this story's third major plotline spun out from item (5) in this this plotline — Emperor Georgiou's mission as a newly minted agent of Section 31 (acting as her allegedly-somehow-survived Prime Universe doppelganger, though I fail to see how that works or why it's necessary) to make sure L'Rell stays in power so the Klingons don't resume hostilities against the Federation.
There's a lot of ground to cover because we haven't been following the Klingons during the previous two episodes, so we have to be brought up to speed. The situation with Tyler is something where it wouldn't make sense that he's accepted. And, as I've said before, L'Rell rising to power wasn't the end of anything. This episode is proof that the Klingons would not all automatically fall into line. And she had to do something drastic.
The baby's not a surprise. With L'Rell and Voq coupling,
something had to come out of that. And a baby is a weakness, like Kol-sha's kidnapping him showed.
Some circumstances are conductive to events happening fast. Others aren't. Burnham being removed from the thick of what's going on with Spock means she's at the mercy of what Pike tells her, what others are at liberty to say, and what she herself can do, which isn't much because she's on Discovery and not on speaking terms with Spock. So you can't get a lot of movement in that type of situation. It's also exactly the reason why Amanda has to be the one to do something. But there's really nothing else Burnham can do at this point. She's at a stand-still.
With the Klingon situation, there's no way that can stand still. That's constant movement. Things happen fast and you have to act fast. Kol-sha isn't going to settle for L'Rell being in power. They probably think she doesn't have the stomach to ever use the bomb. But L'Rell showing what they think are the severed heads of Tyler and her own baby would make some of them think maybe she
does have the stomach to use that bomb. Follow her or you'll die. It doesn't have to be true. They just have to think it. And by becoming a Mother to them all instead of just one child makes her Larger Than Life.
Just let him be. He's not causing any problems.
