Captain Burnham must consider breaking the Prime Directive when a local tradition in a pre-warp society threatens Tilly’s life. Culber tries to connect with Stamets and Adira steps up when Rayner assigns them a position on the bridge.
Captain Burnham must consider breaking the Prime Directive when a local tradition in a pre-warp society threatens Tilly’s life. Culber tries to connect with Stamets and Adira steps up when Rayner assigns them a position on the bridge.
Not a strong episode, but it scratches the itch about exploring “strange new worlds”. Giving us a new alien culture was nice, but not quite going all the way.
The Deus Ex ending wasn’t satisfying either.
I will say, however, the effects of the alien world were gorgeous. I think we might be taking the effects quality in these new Star Trek series for granted.
I enjoyed that episode. I loved the sci-fi of having a pre-industrial civilization, that they still had the methods to deal with dust [spoilers]doing exactly what Starfleet would, just low tech. That also includes how they communicate over distances in a low tech way. I liked that they didn’t pretend the machines would have just worked forever, and that most had failed. I liked that the 20% chance they happened to be in the right one wasn’t just glossed over, and they weren’t.[/spoiler]
I didn’t feel like the ending was Deus Ex, but I did think it needed more time to be elaborated on.
The world they were on was great, and I’d have loved to seen more of it, but you’d need a slow, eight hour episode to really simmer in it, and I don’t think that there’s a real market for that. It just seemed like a world I would want to take a day trip to and hang out to get away from the rigors of Starfleet life.
I did want to see something a bit more alien to non-humans, though. The most alien we saw was Raynor’s ears. I had originally praised Disco for Saru and Linus and how non-human they were, but it feels like they tapped out lately, and most of the non-humans could pass without any effort. My daughter draws on herself enough that she was more different from a baseline Terran than Halem’nites were. (This is a minor complaint, by the way. Like complaining that my favorite restaurant doesn’t have a large enough size of coffee.)
I also want to really praise what they did with Tilly. She shone this episode, and I loved that Burnam looks way more athletic than Tilly, and by Hollywood standards Tilly barely would qualify as healthy, but they let her show off her endurance. She was great in so many ways this episode, I hope that she gets to headline Star Trek: Starfleet Academy to keep that up.
Oh yes. Tilly being the one to finish the race was a huge subversion of expectations. Loved that little part.
I hope the Academy series is more ensemble with her as the mentor.
Most of the regular cast (not just Saru) have gone missing this season. I know this wasn’t planned as being the final season, but it sure feels like they’re finding excuses to keep them out of episodes. Maybe cost-cutting?