Finally! An episode of actual Star Trek. Although it was far from perfect, this episode was the best showing from STD so far.
For those who may have thought I was just using this as a forum to slam STD, this is not the case. I really want to like this show and, with this episode, I finally have a reason to. For me, at least, this is the first solid episode of the season.
THE GOOD: 1) MORAL DILEMMAS: the landing party has to confront a number of moral dilemmas after beaming down to the planet Pavan and making contact with the Pavanins.
2) GROUP EFFORT/CONFLICT RESOLUTION: Our captain and crew actually seem to get along and solve problems rather than snarkily shouting epithets and threatening one another. This started in a smaller way in the last episode and has carried over here. Whether the conflicts were Burnham-Saru, Burnham-Tyler, or Tilly-Stamets, they were legitimate conflicts that all parties tried to solve together.
3) OPTIMISM: Meeting up with a race that thrives on and wants to transmit universal peace and harmony... we're finally home, baby.
4) STAMETS: Anthony Rapp is an incredible actor and still deserves better than what has, so far, been written for his part. That said, they gave him enough so that he had a chance to nail it this week, and he did. I'm not really fond of where the Stamets thing is going but Rapp is handling the character well.
5) BURNHAM WAS TRULY HEROIC: Underutilized, perhaps, but heroic this time. Oh, and this week she seemed to understand the chain of command.
6) CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: we're starting to see some humanity from the characters. I think in past episodes the writers confused backstory with character development. Now that our heroes are actually interacting meaningfully with each other, they are starting to develop some depth.
THE BAD: 1)THE PLOT: The main plot to this one struck me as more akin to a Star Trek Animated Series episode than a mainstream, live- action episode. The idea of a living/breathing planet where all life forms sing a song together was both flimsy and a little Kumbaya for my tastes. Worse, the objective of the landing party--to get the Pavanins to allow them to harness the power of their of their incidentally important bio-inorganic, 'natural,' space beacon--was weak and contrived. I figured how the whole thing would go down with the landing party on the planets' surface once Saru made contact with the alien life form. On the positive side, at least the plot (this time) was original.
2) LAME-O SIDE PLOTS: They really didn't flesh out the Stamets mood-swing thing. Tilly is perceptive but still way to gawky to actually believe that she was a Starfleet Academy graduate; the authors still don't know what to do with the Klingons. Was L'Rell, the female torturer Klingon, actually trying to help Cornwell escape or just trying to extract information. It's still not clear... If there was some deliberate misdirection, things need to be clear enough so that the audience is actually misdirected. At this point, it's not clear to me that the authors know where they were going with this.
3)THE KLINGONS: Yeah, they're supposed to be bad, but I still have no idea how Klingons this disorganized and back stabbing could ever have developed the technology for interstellar travel let alone the cloaking device. Their costumes are still Game-of-Thrones-meets-Pennywise and so stiff that it's hard for the Klingons to walk. Again, the full facial make up makes it impossible for the actors to emote except by rolling their eyes or moving their jaw.
4) KLINGONESE: I'm not a fan. They hobble the actors' expressions by near-total, facial prosthetics and clothing so stiff that they can hardly gesture. To top it off, they have the actors break their teeth over Klingonese, causing the actors to speak slowly and making it even harder for them to express themselves. Once again, Romans in all TV miniseries seem to have British accents, but I don't think any of us actually believe that the Romans spoke to each other in the Queen's English. A few words here or there, fine. Or in front of human characters, okay. But if Klingons spoke in English to each other, we would suspend our disbelief enough to imagine that they were conversing in Klingon.
5) FULL FACIAL MAKEUP: Again, this hobbles the actors from expressing themselves. In the present episode this caused major problems for Saru. Doug Jones expressions cannot be seen behind all the plastic and this was an episode where his emotions were important. Ditto for the Klingons. It would be better to have less alien looking aliens and allow for more acting.
6) RETURN TO EPISODIC TV: the overarching story is getting subordinated by self-contained episodes. That said, I'd take an episode like this over anything that preceded it so far.
7) THE TITLE, HMMM: To his or her credit, someone must have majored in classics in college. However, I don't think the episode really reflect the sentiment of the Latin adage, 'If you want peace, prepare for war.' Maybe they were trying out some irony or it will become clear later on...
THE UGLY: 1) SURPRISE: I don't have any 'ugly' this week. I do, however, have something to say about CBS.
I am still genuinely ticked off that even after paying you need to sit through commercials. Some may get added value from CBS All Access, but there's really nothing here I want to watch other than STD. So the rest of it is a wash. And if I'm paying, they really need to fix their streaming problems.
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