#star trek: discovery spoilers

[soulerflaire]

Binged all of the last season of Star Trek: Discovery today. Thoughts under the cut.

Very mixed feelings on it. On the one hand, I'm glad they were able to go into the season knowing it would be the last, and write an actual send off to the show instead of rushing some half-assed ending in two episodes, or just cutting off completely with no ending at all. On the other hand, I have a lot of complaints about how things went.

First off, the Progenitors storyline did not interest me in the slightest. I was fine with their tech being the macguffin to drive the plot forward, but once we actually got to it, I just didn't really care about the fancy facility or the Progenitor lady in it. It was obvious Michael was going to either hide it again or destroy it, so all the time spent with her deciding that and learning about the Progenitors' motivations or that they didn't build the tech either was just wasted to me.

I was completely baffled by Dr. Culber's character arc this season. I don't really understand what they were trying to do or say with it. He has a weird experience with a temporary personality transplant, and it affects him deeply but he doesn't understand why or how. People tell him it was clearly a spiritual awakening for him, but they never explain that. Maybe it's because I'm not a spiritual person, but "feeling weird about the world after having your brain taken over by someone else for a few hours" doesn't equal spiritual awakening to me. Regardless, he just becomes kind of weirdly serene for the rest of the show. And then at the last second, when they have the chance to actually make it something spiritual, they provide a rational (for Star Trek, anyway) explanation for all of it, by saying he somehow had access to residual memories from the other personality. But he doesn't acknowledge it as a rational explanation, he still acts like it's some mysterious spiritual thing. I don't know. I just didn't get it. It felt like they were trying to say something about "not everything has a rational explanation" but they didn't follow through, so I really just don't understand what the point of his character arc was. Were they just trying to give him mental/emotional peace after all he's experienced? 'Cause doing it this way was completely unsatisfying if so. This was a magic button fixing his trauma, not actual healing.

But my biggest gripe is the treatment of Zora. This whole season, I was thinking "Man, Zora isn't really in this show at all anymore, is she?" She does nothing beyond acting like the computer, and the crew pretty much just treats her like a normal starship computer. We spent a lot of time previously focusing on Zora and her development as a person, only to have her barely exist as a character this season. And in the last 15 minutes of the finale, we find out why: that damned animated short. A while back, someone wrote an animated short where the Discovery (and thus Zora) has basically been abandoned in a nebula, and a guy ends up on board, and Zora falls in love with him (because he's the only person she's talked to in decades/centuries), but eventually he leaves because he has a family. And god forbid that stupid little short not be canon, so what do we do? We order Zora to go sit in a nebula, alone, while everyone she has ever known, her entire family, grows old and dies without her. Where? Classified. How long? Classified. Why? Classified.

That is an unimaginably cruel thing to do to a person. Which is why we didn't treat her like a person this season, in the hopes that everyone would forget all that stuff and go "Oh, yeah, I remember the animated short!" and clap. And the worst part is they didn't even bother to make up a reason! They couldn't even do a "Michael told her to stay there during a mission, and things got messy and they lost track of her, and now they're searching for her" thing. We get no explanation at all, Michael literally just tells Zora that her clearance level isn't high enough for her to know why she's being put through hell. And of course because we've decided Zora isn't a person, since that would get ethically messy, Zora just accepts that and does what she's told. For my own personal happiness, I am just pretending that was a nightmare Zora had and it never actually happened.

The season wasn't all bad, though. I enjoyed Saru and T'Rina's interactions. I think Tara Rosling did an excellent job with all of T'Rina's little mannerisms, especially the slightly stuttering head turn she does when something is bothering her. That combined with Doug Jones' acting with Saru really helped create the chemistry between their characters. I also liked seeing a relationship where both people were mature, reasonable adults who talk things out instead of blowing up at each other or almost breaking up at every minor disagreement. Also I loved seeing Tilly pretty much all the time. I desperately hope that we'll see her in other shows, she's such a great character.

I think I would have really liked Rayner's character arc and growth...if it had happened slowly over the course of a couple seasons. It definitely felt rushed, and his place among the crew didn't really feel earned to me by the end. I liked the parallel between him with the Breen and Michael with the Klingons, though I would have liked to see Michael acknowledge that more in the moment, rather than after the fact. I'm chalking that all up to rushing to get it into one season and just not having the time to flesh it out properly.

Also there were several plot holes and things that just didn't add up, but I don't feel like nitpicking those right now. It's Star Trek, you're gonna get stuff like that.

Definitely not Discovery's strongest season, and pretty bummed to see it end like this. Overall a good show, just has a weak finish.

And Zora definitely wasn't abandoned in a nebula for centuries for no reason, and instead was granted full personhood and made a member of Starfleet, and I refuse to acknowledge anything to the contrary.

[scientific-tricorder]

Overall, I've been enjoying Discovery season 5, but is it just me, or was yesterday's episode "Erigah" just kind of bad?

[avoicefromthestars]

Star Trek: Discovery Michael & Book

[ambassador-saru]

Doug Jones and Tara Rosling on the set of 'star trek discovery season 5'

[startrekuniverse]

Star Trek Discovery

So many memories.

[itberice]

Are you ready, Zora? I am.

[t-rina]

space aunt and space dad

5x4 Face the Strange

[evviejo]

STAR TREK: DISCOVERY - S5E2 Under the Twin Moons

[whatelsecanwedonow]

You don’t trust us, I get that. And from what I know about you, I wouldn’t expect you to.

STAR TREK: DISCOVERY S5E04 | Face the Strange

[eruptedinlight]

THEY

[sevnofnines]

MICHAEL BURNHAM in STAR TREK: DISCOVERY

5.01 “Red Directive”

[scientific-tricorder]

Honestly, I feel that the title "Lagrange Point" was kind of wasted on the most recent Disco episode. To quote Memory Alpha: "A Lagrange point was a point in space where the gravitational forces of two larger bodies, for example stars or planets, and the centrifugal force of a third, smaller object at that point cancel each other out." Which has a lot of metaphorical potential! Such as some entity forced into a point of stasis/equilibrium due to two large and competing forces, or finding multiple methods to the same compromise between multiple forces (since there are a number of Lagrange points for any given system).

Yet, in the episode itself all we got was Tilly briefly noting the cylinder being in the Lagrange point, and while not mentioned by name, we see the USS Discovery travelling to a Lagrange Point to avoid falling into one of the black holes. And maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't see any metaphorical parallels. It's basically a heist episode, plus the Saru subplot.

(Also, I wish we had gotten a bit of gravitational-related dialogue when they were piloting the shuttle to the dreadnought, just because Science (and it would help with consistency with regards to the effects on the Discovery earlier because it is kind of weird seeing the much smaller and less powerful shuttle essentially fly free when the Discovery was almost destroyed))

[avoicefromthestars]

Star Trek: Discovery Labyrinths

[xspuhurax]

For Anton

[startrekuniverse]

Star Trek Discovery

Let's fly.

[itberice]