Trekathon 765: Light and Shadows (DIS)

Discovery is still boldly going. Spoilers.

After seven episodes of tease, finally we get Spock. Ethan Peck is now the tenth person to play Spock (although seven of those are ‘younger’ versions from flashbacks or Star Trek III). It’s hard to judge, but it’s a performance that at least feels to me like it has some continuity with the past.

The episode itself is a bit patchy. There’s a lot of ‘moving from A to B’, and not a lot of interesting story. The Spock stuff moves very quickly (Discovery to Vulcan to Section 31), but the motivations all get lost. The main conflict is between Amanda and Sarek, which is represented only as a fight. There’s never any real sense of Michael making choices through any of this.

The B story back on the Discovery is a more conventional ‘crew members trapped in strange anomaly’ story, which thankfully is kept pretty technobabble free for the most part. My main concern here is that the TyVoq/Pike conflict is a bit forced, and so its resolution feels ultimately hollow.

Overall an improvement from the past two episodes, but nowhere near the strength we’ve seen earlier in the season.

I’m not looking forward to the ‘Lt Cmdr Airiam has been suborned by the probe’ plot. And throwing in ‘Leland is responsible for the death of Burnham’s parents’ is just answering a mystery that no one cared about for the purpose of creating conflict.

Quick hits:

– I really hope that Burnham didn’t put that phaser loose into her travel bag. That’s very poor gun safety.

– “Everything sounds cooler when you put time in front of it” – hard disagree Tilly, but I suspect that’s a bit of direct writer communication.

– ‘Periodic chart’? Really>? No one has ever called it that…

– I know this goes without saying, but Georgiou is up to no good when helping Burnham this episode.

– Oooh, Talos IV next episode. First seen in the first pilot for Star Trek. I think in the time line Spock and Pike have already visited, so this is going to be an interesting episode.

765 down.


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