Trekathon 830: The Examples (DIS)

Discovery setting some more examples. Spoilers.

Burnham once again is risking her life on a mission that does not justify the risk. And with many other alternatives available. She appears to have little or no ability to learn or listen to others about this. No one even bothered to push back this time.

As for the rest – it all feels like a bit too much padding, like they don’t really know what they’re doing. The individual stories aren’t that interesting. This week we have ‘complex ethical issues for rescued prisoners’ and ‘complex genius who is a bit of an arsehole’. It’s the worst sin of TV – it’s all just a bit boring.

The Burnham story isn’t even that interesting – everyone’s favourite Wesley episode, *Justice*, did a lot of the ‘disproportionate punishment’ stuff. And then there’s a bunch of ‘solve with technobabble’ ups and downs in the story where people just poke at consoles and solve the problem while people say ‘you’re crazy’. The false jeopardy isn’t engaging (also a problem with the Stamets B-plot). And there’s also a lot of ‘let’s spend five minutes diverting from the urgent mission to talk about things’ undermining any sense of momentum in the episode.

Every element of production is working well, and the performances are fairly strong. The problem for me is the stories that are being told.

Quick hits:

– USS Janeway and NSS T’Pau, some nice call backs. But I don’t know that a Vulcan would say ‘what the hell’.

– Oh, they remembered they have a super intelligent ship’s computer.

– I thought the Iconians were super extinct?

– This new ‘instant transport’ tech just feels rude – can’t you at least transport into a waiting room or something? People must get really good at stopping the awkward-to-overhear sentence mid-stream.

– Uh oh. Cdr Rhys is getting backstory. He better update his will.

– The super genius with no socialisation and a thing for mashed potato is a very annoying trope.

– Why can’t they just wait 10 minutes before they run the experiment? It would help if we even understood what they were trying to achieve?

– A little bit of Les Mis in the prisoner’s story.

830 down.


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