Matt and Sean talk about tying salvation to science in this episode of Star Trek Discovery. Does this episode succeed at feeling like classic Trek?
YouTube version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/trekintime
Audio version of the podcast: https://www.trekintime.show
Get in touch: https://trekintime.show/contact
Follow us on Twitter: @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
At the time, original broadcast. So we’re also looking at the year 2019. Who are we? Well, I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I’ve written some sci fi, I’ve written some stuff for kids, including my most recently released, The Sinister Secrets of Singe, which is available everywhere. And with me as always is my brother, Matt.
He’s that Matt of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And Matt, how are you doing today? I’m doing
great. Oh, well, I’ve been being tired from the move, but. Everything’s good. And, uh, how are you doing? I know we’ve talked about this on our other podcast, but to kind of ask you again, you’ve sounded like you’re a little, uh,
congested there, Sean.
Yeah, I’m a little froggy today. And scant moments after we’re done recording this podcast, I will be heading upstairs to the bedroom and taking a COVID test. So fingers crossed that it turns out to be negative, or maybe it’d be better to know that it is if it is, but covid brain.
So we’re going to be talking today about New Eden. But before we get into that conversation, we always like to share comments from the mailbag. So Matt, what have you found for us today?
That’s a couple of comments. Um, one from Kindred’s girl, uh, she wrote, I lost control when I started watching discovery a month or so ago, and I just kept watching.
I’ve gotten way ahead. This is my second watch and I love it even more the second time through. I love the move towards. lightness and humor in this episode, but it didn’t feel like a break in any kind of continuity in the show to me. And that was from the episode 109 brother, um, where the whole, it was basically the kickoff of season two.
Um, I just, I, I like this comment cause you and I have said that numerous times to in the podcast of like the rewatch of this show is actually so much better for us than the first time through. It’s, it’s sad that it worked out that way, that it wasn’t a great first watch, but it’s a great second watch because most people are not going to give it a second shot, but it is a, it is a better show than I think we give it credit for.
And especially in season two, it is much lighter and it’s got a little more of that Star Trek vibe back into it. It’s not as dark and gritty as season one was, which is a nice change of pace.
Agreed. Thank you
for the comment. The, uh, yeah, the second comment was from Jason Dumb. He wrote. I totally agree regarding centering Spock and Burnham in this story.
It’s disappointing. Very Marvel, very Star Wars. All new Star Trek has to engage with some threat to the galaxy. It’s exhausting. Great performance from Anson Mount. He is still killing it. Nice addition to the Trek Captain Pantheon. New Eden? I don’t know. I suspect the bridge crew will be naked.
Ah, a return to Eden, everybody wearing little fig leaves.
Eating apples, which leads us directly to that noise in the background, which is, of course, the read alert. Matt, best of luck with this one. Wikipedia is back to its old magic. Oh no.
Confronted with the log entry, Pike reveals Spock committed himself to a psychiatric unit one week after taking leave and requested Starfleet inform neither Burnham nor their parents.
Discovery detects another signal and uses it. It uses its experimental spore drive to travel to it, finding a planet with a previously unknown human population. A looped transmission suggests the population departed Earth during World War III. Pike and Burnham lead an away team to the surface, finding a primitive society with a religion combining multiple faiths.
As the investigation continues, an anomaly produces an extinction level radiation shower. Ensign Sylvia Tilly, acting on a fellow ensign’s advice, uses a sample from the asteroid’s non baryonic matter to avert the catastrophe. Tilly later recognizes the ensign as May Ahern, a high school classmate who died five years earlier.
Pike reviews footage from a helmet camera belonging to a founding member of the Society, which shows the Red Angel bringing the pop Hang on. I’m having trouble because I’m on my iPad and the text is like, that’s like I’m doing an eye test.
Can you read this? No idea. Better neither. Better? Worse. Better? Worse. Definitely worse. Pike reviews footage from the helmet camera belonging to a founding member of the society which shows the Red Angel bringing the population to Terilisium from Earth. That was a work for me, Sean. So anybody
who was trying to follow along to Matt’s review of the Wikipedia description, it is as poorly written As it was poorly read.
As my reading. Yes. Yes. It starts with the phrase confronted with the log entry and it ends with a sentence which is so out of place in their overall summary that you forgot that there was a red angel at all because they didn’t mention it previously in there. Synopsis. But anyway, we will get into all of that in our discussion.
This is season two, episode number two, directed by one Jonathan Frakes. If you’re not familiar with that name, I don’t know why you’re watching this podcast written by Akiva Goldsman. and Sean Cochran Teleplay by Vaughn Wilma and Sean Cochran. The original air date was January 24th, 2019. The main cast as always, Sonequa Martin Green is Michael Burnham, Doug Jones as Saru Anthony Rapp as Paul Stamets.
Mary Weisman as Sylvia Tilly. Guest appearances include Wilson Cruz’s, Hugh Culber, and Anson Mount s Christopher Pike and guest stars include Sheila McCarthy as Amesha, Andrew Moodie as Jacob Bahia Watson as May Ahern. And co stars include Hannah Cheesman as Lieutenant Commander Airiam, Emily Coutts as Lieutenant Keyla Detmer.
And Detmer is becoming a favorite of mine. We’ll talk about her more as we get into this episode. Patrick Kwok-Choon as Lieutenant Reese, Oyin Oladeja. as Joann Owosekun, Ronnie Rowe as Lt. Bryce, Raven Dauda as Dr. Pollard, Julianne Grossman as Discovery Computer Voice. Noah Davis as Lieutenant Karajou, and Rose Claire Coote as the Teen May Hologram.
As I mentioned before, the original air date, January 24th, 2019. What was going on in the world at this time? Well, Matt, you were lining up to go see Glass by M. Night Shyamalan, which made 40 million. This movie is of course the third of the trilogy, which would be Unbreakable, Split, and now Glass, concluding the storyline.
It included the original cast of each of the original movies. So it’s quite a star studded event and at 40 million, it would stay in the number one spot for the next three weeks, losing every week, but maintaining its number one spot. So we will revisit this movie again in the future. And on television, we’ve been revisiting the most streamed series of 2019.
Last week, we talked about how Lucifer was the number one show this week. We’re going to reveal that Stranger Things was the number one stream show. Not too surprising, given the zeitgeist popularity of that program when it emerged. And in the news, from around the world, various news stories, including that the United States had lifted sanctions on three Russian companies.
These companies have been sanctioned for their ties to an oligarch named Oleg Doripska, but the sanctions were lifted due to a deal that reduced his ownership stake in the companies. And of course, the removal of sanctions of three companies back in 2019. And ever since then, things with Russia have been great.
It’s been great. Fantastic.
That news story was from CNN. From the BBC, reportage on a dam collapse in Brazil that killed at least 58 people and left hundreds of people missing. The dam, which held mining waste, collapsed in the state of Minas Gerai and caused widespread damage. And from the New York Times, Juan Guaido declared himself interim president of Venezuela, leading to a political crisis.
Guaido, the leader of the National Assembly, declared that President Nicolas Maduro’s re election was illegitimate, and that he would hold new elections. Multiple countries, including the United States, recognized Guaido as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. Now, on to our discussion of this episode. There are, as always, a couple of different plot lines and an overall.
Wrapping of these elements into one coherent, connected storyline. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And in this case, we have Tilly investigating Dark Matter. She has the guidance of an Ensign aboard ship who seems somewhat familiar to Tilly. Tilly keeps giving a sort of like, do I know you sort of response to this, to this Ensign.
Until finally, at the end, she figures out who this individual is, and then discovers that the person had died years earlier, which raises a question of what is she in fact seeing? Meanwhile, on the planet that they have, they have reached, they discover a community of humans, which are clearly a melding of a bunch of different faith communities that have all created one unified faith and worship a red angel, which resembles.
The image that Burnham saw when she was at the crash site where they, they found the, first of all the dark matter, they also found Reno, and it was the. Source of the, the red angel mythology that they’re now exploring and how it connects to these spheres of light that have been seen around the galaxy.
So these two storylines come together in the form of Tilly’s research leading toward the solution. For the radioactive fallout that this community of humans is going to experience big picture. I we’ve in the past couple of weeks been talking about, um, plot lines, character development in isolation from one another this time.
I want to kind of invert it and take a big picture approach. First, what do you think about the overall episode? as a whole before we break it down into the component parts.
Unfortunately, I have a, kind of a big shoulder shrug to this episode because My big issues, which we’ll probably get into in a little bit, but it’s basically that A plotline, the thing about the planet, and what’s going on on the planet, just did not grab me, it didn’t quite resonate, um, the stuff with Tilly did, I thought that stuff was interesting, um, the, the thread it was starting to pull with her, I thought it was very interesting, um, But on a whole, I thought this episode, even though, even though people were great, like Anson Mount, there were some great scenes with him and the bridge crew and the quick, very quick kind of like whip smart dialogue banter between all of them, I thought was phenomenal.
Um, there were moments on the planet that were great, but it was just like the whole idea of the plot was just kind of didn’t click. And I’m not sure if it worked for you, but for me, it just, it
didn’t. I feel like this is an episode where they were relying on the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
Because for me, the plot was a fairly big negative. Cause there were things about the events on the planet that. We’ve talked about this before, when does Star Trek feel most like Star Trek? When does Star Trek, what makes Star Trek, Star Trek? And this is a comment, this is a question that I would love for people to jump into the comments and share their thoughts on this.
When does Star Trek feel like Star Trek? Is it when it most resembles the original series? Or is it when it does things, regardless of when the episode or story is being made, is it just about elements of how the original series approached things in its era? In other words, is Discovery in 2019 exercising some of the same muscles as the original series, or is it actually trying to look like the original series?
This is an episode where I think they fell a bit into a trap of it being okay to look like an original series episode. Because… Ultimately, the A plotline in this is very thin, and it’s a little goofy. It’s a little goofy. It is very hand wavy. It’s a little bit like Kirk visiting the planet of gangsters based on the 1950s or 1930s image of gangsters because an alien civilization found a novel that was left behind by…
An explorer or them finding the planet that looks like ancient Rome. And when the original series did these. It was all due to cost cutting. By the third season of the original series, the cost per episode had been slashed in half twice, from the first season to the second slash, from the second to the third slash, so they were Production bound to using existing sets and costumes from other places on the Paramount lot.
And they would just pull things from other places and construct a story to utilize what do we already have. This had that feel while clearly not being in that position. So. Yep. For me, this looks very much like an original series episode. We found a planet. It’s inexplicable. They have a population, which are clearly humans living along human guidelines, but they are a very rudimentary pre warp civilization.
So, What do we do about it? How do we talk to these people? Like, all of that felt very original Trek, but it also felt original Trek in a kind of hand waviness of, did these things even make sense? Would these people actually… Or matter? Does any of this actually have… An impact beyond forcing what’s happening on the ship to matter.
And to me, it didn’t quite, like what you said, it’s just doesn’t click. And it felt a little bit thin to the point of being distracting. And we’ve talked at this point, we just shared a comment at the beginning of this episode, how. Well, this series holds together in a second watch. This one did not hold together for me on a second watch.
When the episode started, I was like, Oh, I remember this episode. I remember I liked this episode. And then I was, I was rewatching. I was like, I don’t like this episode. It’s not doing it for me. Uh, so
I think, I think you, well, can we get to that? The point of it doesn’t matter what’s on the planet. It just clicks for me
just now.
Why don’t you jump off and share
your thoughts about that. It’s, it’s, it’s because what’s all happening on the planet is only there as a plot device to help move the season’s storyline forward, and it has no impact to what’s actually happening on the planet, it has, there’s no weight to it, there’s no exploration around, if they really kind of break the prime directive here, it doesn’t really matter, You know what I mean?
It’s like there was, there was never any kind of like, there was like a surface level explanation of we can’t break the prime directive here, but it was, it felt it was there for show and didn’t really have anything new to say. So it wasn’t like the original Trek, like you’re bringing up, they would have created an entire episode around this.
And it would have been focused on the planet and the ramifications of the planet of these people of the care, how it affects the characters from the ship being on this planet and having this happen. That’s what it would have done. And that was not done in this episode. It was purely there to move the plot forward for the season story.
So it’s, it felt very empty. That’s kind of, it just felt empty. Yeah, and it felt
like it was two storylines, either one of which could have been its own episode. Tilly experiencing the assistance of a person. If they, if the story of this episode had been, they find themselves at a planet where there is a pre warp technology group of individuals that they know are going to die as a result of a catastrophic event.
And there is the wrestling of the prime directive in, do we have a ethical obligation? to save people who don’t even know they’re in danger. And if they die, that is their natural progression coming to a conclusion, or do we technically in some technical way, break the prime directive in order to save these people, despite the fact We can’t even go down and visit them when we’re done saving them.
This is just, do we just save people to save people? Is that our role? Do we have time? Is that our responsibility? Do we have some sort of ethical call to being superheroes for the galaxy? What does all that mean? That would have been a possible episode, which would have been a lot of talking, a lot of philosophical.
Chewing. And Tilly’s experience could have still been within the episode. Her helping come up with a solution as a result of the assistance of this person who turns out to be Tyler Durden to her. And yeah. So you end up with that potential story. You could also have inverted the other way, disregard the radioactive fallout storyline.
You could have had that just be gone and have a group of people from the discovery visit a society that is, they’re trying to figure out where did these rescued humans come from? Why are they here in this quadrant? And then. Be discovered and once they’re discovered, there was zero fallout from them being discovered.
But what if the story had been, they were identified as heretics by the leadership of the society. Yes. And there is one scientist in the community who was like, I don’t think they’re heretics. And he’s quietly to his daughter saying, I think they’re from Earth. I think they, I think they’re from another planet, but he can’t talk in those terms because this is a completely faith-based.
Civilization at this point, they do not believe in science because for whatever reason, the group of humans who were rescued from earth during World War II, once they were planted on this planet, took the approach of, that’s, we got to World War III because of science, so we will reject it. Who was rescued?
People in a church. Why were they rescued? Because they had faith to hide there and ask for help from God. And they have melded together all of these different religions into one unified religion, but they are now a theocracy and they are a theocracy to the point of actually burning witches and making science vilified.
And it could have been an exploration of these were originally 21st century humans. But once they got here, they reverted to a 16th century approach to science and to the idea of evil, and they actually began to turn on their own, and there is a history here. They could have had that Bible include that a third of the original rescued people were killed by the other two thirds for heresy, because they were trying to find a way.
Like what you just, but what you just said, what you just said, two episodes,
it could have been, I would argue it could have still been one, what you just described gives the planet real stakes because then the crew is in danger, they’re heretics. And that feels, that feels very Star Trek to me. It feels the original series.
It feels next generation to me. It reminds me of the episode where Data is alone on that planet with the whole, you know, the water. Aqueduct thing. Um, it reminds me
of that. to people that his science is true. Right.
Correct. So it’s like, it would have felt very Star Trek y and it would have had weight to it and it would have had meaning and characters would have been in danger and there would have been all this conflict and it would have explored that.
And you could have still had the ship being like, we can’t beam them out because of this radiation that’s actually about to destroy everything. And we need to get that radiation out of there so we can get the crew back. So it still could have had that. And still, but it’s like, they, the choices they made short changed all of it.
They kind of cut themselves off at the
knees. Yeah, I felt very frustrated by the character of Jacob, uh, who is portrayed as the one with the science background. But again, with the very hand waviness of all of this, his understanding of science and technology. Is never really explored. Like they had access to light bulbs and electricity in some rudimentary form, but they have no means of producing anything.
So how much of a scientist is he? What kind of a scientist is he? He seems more just a tinkerer than anything else, but he is portrayed as basically the only person in the community to have any of these questions. And I don’t think that that fits if he’s not. It’s not a scientist who is on the outside of this community because he believes in a process of understanding that is separate from faith.
Why aren’t there more people saying, Oh yeah, like what did happen to earth? And how come he is so easily placated with confirmation alone? Like he sees them teleport. He’s revisited by Pike in what is supposed to be a wrap up scene. But Pike makes a statement. about I was trying to save you from a moment of uncertainty.
Like, where did that come from? That felt very, like, and I could not, like, is that a reference to Pike’s deeper background from the cage? Is that a reference to him questioning, like, should I stay with? with Mina. If that is that reference, if that is what it is referring back to, it is way too thin to like stand up on its own.
And I found myself thinking like, this is a very, very well done bit of acting. The dialogue, like you mentioned, I love some of the scenes. The, some of the dialogue between the characters, uh, is fantastic. You have two scenes of Burnham and Pike sitting down together. Both of those scenes are fantastic where it starts off with him saying like, if you’ve got anything to share with me, you know, my door is open and I’m ready to hear it.
And then she withholds information. And then she shares it at the end to say, I was scared to reveal to you this truth. And they’ve got this nice scene where they’re exploring Spocks. Log, and then Pike reveals, like, I was duty bound to keep Spock’s desire for nobody else to know where he was because of his right to medical privacy, but now we’re dealing with a galactic level event that supersedes his privacy.
So now I have to tell you that he’s actually in a psychiatric ward. It lays out all of these elements in really interesting ways and in very sort of heart wrenching ways between these two characters as they’re getting to know each other. And we know Pike as the captain of the Enterprise even if you’ve never seen The Cage, you are shown he is the Captain of the Enterprise which means he is one of the top Captains in Starfleet.
So these scenes matter. We also get to see some brilliant stuff around Saru as a captain where he is giving directions to the people around him and it has, and it’s laying out a very good argument for like, if Pike left today and the show was just about Captain Saru, you’ve got a good captain and Saru, he clearly understands how to get the best out of the people around him.
And he’s, He’s putting himself in a position and saying to people constantly, as the only person, he says to Tilly, again, in a nice bit of writing, as the only person of my kind to reach the levels that I did, I taught myself 90 different languages because I thought I had to excel in that way, and Tilly’s response is like, really?
Like, like she’s floored by this. Great, great
moment. There’s so many characters. There’s so much. There’s so much about Saru in this episode that catapults him even further in kind of like the, oh, he’s, he’s like real captain material, like between the last episode where Pike said, this is going to be a co captain thing with me and him, it’s temporary.
He’s, he’s still going to be there and he’s going to be giving me a lot of input. So he’s kind of be behind the scenes running the show. While I’m in the front seat running the show and it’s interesting to see how Saru is seems kind of comfortable with that. He understands that this is not going to be a permanent thing.
He’s not going to make it a little like a kind of a cat fight of like territory grabbing. He understands this is a temporary. I’m here to support him. I will support him every way I can, but there’s so much like that’s dropped about him in this episode in one off sentences and one off like little comments that it shows that he is like.
Wow. Not only is he big and strong, it’s also, he knows 90 languages and he did that to kind of show off. Yeah. And it’s like, it’s insane of like, he’s, he’s, he’s incredibly smart. He’s incredibly talented. He knows the crew. He understands the emotional kind of like makeup of everybody knows how to kind of tap into that.
And you know, that he’s going to be the next captain. Like, you know,
his ganglia come out and yeah. His officer is like looking at him and he looks at the guy and says, you’re surprised. Yeah, we all know that this happens to me and it’s, and it’s developed a nice shorthand for the audience. They aren’t re explaining everything again and again and again.
They know that you know who these people are. If you’re watching, they’re expecting you are informed like the ganglia means he’s detecting danger. That’s. They’ve said that before. They’ve said it multiple times before, so they don’t rehash some of this stuff. And I, just to jump on to something you said before about the relationship between Pike and Saru is it really seems to me like they’ve forged very quickly an understanding that for me, emotionally resonates like the relationship between Picard and Riker, where there are moments in Next Generation, by the time you get past season four, season five, You are watching that program with an understanding, at least I did, that the Enterprise effectively has co captains.
That Picard? Mm-hmm. is the big picture captain. He’s the one everybody understands. He makes the final call, but if Picard is not available, there is zero hesitation to rely on Riker. Everybody understands? Mm-hmm. and a command from Riker is a command from Picard and that there is no buddy pulling the rug out from underneath the other person.
Brilliant episodes in next generation that revolved around. Why is Rikers still there? The, you know, recreation of the relationship between Spock and Kirk, where Spock says, my best destiny was to be at your side. Those kinds of relationships are constantly utilized in Star Trek. They forged one out of necessity in this episode, in this show, but they made it work really beautifully to kind of reflect that.
They, nobody’s trying to take anything away from the other one and Saru, being the kind of person he is, is willing to operate within these confines of. There’s another man who’s gonna walk in and give a command and everybody’s gonna have to follow it. But, I also know what I’m doing.
There was subtlety in the storytelling because it was like he was always in the room.
And he was always kind of like off to the side or in the background. Just standing there. And you could tell that there’s probably been conversations between him and Pike. Where he’s been giving him guidance and stuff like that. You get this sense that there is, there’s a relationship there already. And something’s happening behind the scenes.
Because he’s just very kind of, not, I don’t want to say he’s part of the background. But he is. kind of part of the background. And he’s kind of an essential part of that background. And it kind of also links back into, once again, the writing, the quick dialogue. In this episode, it made me think of, there’s a, like with Anson Mount, who is so good with his comic timing and his delivery.
There’s a moment where they’re getting ready to use the spore drive. It’s the first time he’s ever done it. And there’s like a whole bunch of quick dialogue happening between Saru, Burnham, the whole crew. And somebody says something to Pike of like, Alluding to like, are you sure you understand what’s going on here?
And he said, if you’re telling me the ship is going to skip across the universe on a network of mushrooms, I’m going to have to go on faith with that one. It was like this delivery of that. It was like this one. And then it went immediately cut to something else. It was like, it has you laughing because it’s like, it’s just, he’s just going, he’s.
Going with it. It’s like, you guys know what you’re doing. I’m just going to go on faith. I’m not even going to question what’s going on right now. Black alert. You guys do what you do. It was kind of like, that’s kind of the sentiment of what happened in that scene. And it was kind of fun to see him leaning into the crew and just trusting everybody.
You guys know what you’re doing. Just do it.
We also have some nice moments with Stamets and Tilly where Stamets reveals the heartache of going back into the network. Uh, he’s willing to do it. He does it without hesitation at the end of the episode. He even suggests that he can do it in such a way as to allow them to use the dark matter asteroid to pull the radiation away from the planet, but his hurt and going back in and knowing there’s something in the mycelial network, which is my dead husband, it is this kind of haunting, painful experience for him.
And he says it, it goes beyond it being my memory. It goes into, it is essentially. an essence of him because of the way the mycelial network taps into the myriad of multiverses. So you end up with Tilly effectively going off on her own, getting hurt as a result of her research into the dark matter. She’s trying to figure out a way to utilize the dark matter as a way to tap in navigationally through the mycelial network so that Stamets doesn’t have to be the pilot, but the navigator in the way he is.
So she has good intentions. She ends up hurting herself. She’s hurt rather severely and then begins to have these conversations with this vision of the Ensign. By the end of the episode, we know that this vision that she is having is of a person that Tilly knew when she was a girl. They were in school together.
And this girl did not grow up to become the Ensign that Tilly has seen, she has in fact died five years earlier, so Tilly is in a position of now having seen a ghost, and that storyline is Hauntingly told, but told with a bit of humor because Tilly as a character, the, the actress playing her, again, the comic timing there is terrific.
There is a moment in the episode where she runs full speed out of sickbay to go to do the work that she knows she has to do. And then the sickbay doors remain open and she runs back the other direction. That was actually an improvised moment. by Jonathan Frakes. So it was very funny. Akiva Goldman said of that is like, that’s something only Jonathan Frakes could bring to Discovery.
The level of humor, the leaning into the humor and the fun of the show.
We talked about how Saru was kind of like elevated in this episode because of some of the nuggets they released about him. Same thing for Tilly. It’s like, this is another one of those examples of she’s not just a sidekick. She’s not just there for the punchlines and comic relief.
She’s a genius at what she does. And they showcase that. And that scene with her pulling the piece out of the, that meteor, like, like the asteroid, like. It was very tense because it was very clear this is dangerous. They don’t know how this works and she’s pulling it out and that little piece falls and like it’s like weighs like a ton like it leaves a dent in the floor and it’s like okay she’s doing something incredibly dangerous and so they built the tension really well which I think goes to the writing and the directing for like Jonathan Frakes that little scene with her Changing directions in the background.
Jonathan Frakes, it’s like his fingerprints are all over this and using her as that. She’s a genius, but she’s still comic relief and she’s still fun and she’s still Tilly and it was like her on the bridge also basically in her medical gown. was great. Um, and
the, the, and then, and then and scene there by saying like, and I’m about to pass out.
Like she’s still telling, she’s still funny.
That, that, uh, girl, the woman that she keeps seeing, I thought they ratcheted that up just right because the first time you see her, you’re like, well, who’s that? I’ve never seen her before, but you notice there’s something a little off because she’s like in the middle of the medical bay.
She’s in the middle of the room. Her hands are clasped. She’s not moving. She’s only talking. It’s like, well, that’s kind of a weird thing. Kind of thing. And she does that every time you see her and it gets weirder and weirder than each time. And one of the moments, one of the final scenes that you see her in, she says, your mind is so much fun.
And so that one line kind of sends a view, sends the message to the viewer. She’s not hallucinating. This is something that’s happening and it’s something that has its own intelligence. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a thing. There’s something in her head. And it really, and especially when Tilly like leans forward and the turbo lift as the doors are closing and says to her, like, wait, wait, what?
She realizes that something is off. And it was just, I thought that was brilliant directing in itself as well.
Yeah. The, the. Like I said before, I feel like they were relying on this adding up and being greater than the sum of its parts because one of the parts, the plotting, was very, very thin, but all the other pieces, I think, were big enough to create a structure to hold its shape to get through this episode because ultimately, if this episode is anything, it’s a bridge Between the start of the mystery, what are these galactic events?
How is Spock connected to it? This is supposed to be them firsthand experiencing one of those events. Up to this point, the Enterprise, Pike in particular, had not been able to get to any of the events while they were active. The first episode with Pike on Discovery, they almost got to the event. They get there and the event, the light is gone, but they are left with just the dark matter.
Asteroid. Now here we are, they finally got to one. And what they discovered was something that didn’t make any sense. And something that tied directly into the Red Angel. So, this episode is about taking big… Season long plot lines and bridging them to the next episode. So unfortunately for me on a rewatch, I was left a little bit like, this isn’t the best episode.
Is that it really doesn’t do a lot while also doing a lot. So it left me in a weird sort of Nether realm of it both worked in some ways and didn’t work in others and so, kind of a mixed bag but
like I said, if this is about leading us forward, then what it’s leading us toward is next week’s episode, where we’re going to be talking about the, the episode point of light. So I enjoy, I invite everybody to jump into the comments. Let us know what is point of light about, but wrong answers only. As always, we enjoy the comments.
Let us know what you thought about this discussion. Let us know what you thought about this episode. And like I said earlier, let us know what you think about when does something feel most like Trek? Is it when it resembles original Trek or wasn’t it when it flexes muscles, regardless of when it was made in a way that.
touches on some of the ideas and idealism and philosophies that original Trek exhibited. Let us know in the comments. Before we sign off, Matt, is there anything you want to share about what’s going on on your main channel? Yeah,
actually, at the, at the very beginning of September, it’s the first week of September, I think it’s September 8th through 10th, I’m going to be at Fully Charged Live in Vancouver.
Um, if you live out in the northwest of North America, it’s a great, uh expo, fan event for, EVs.
Home tech, all that kind of stuff with electrification. I’m going to be on a couple panels talking about how to hack your home for reducing costs, being more energy efficient. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. So if you do go to that, um, I do have a link. I’ll put it in the description of this episode. Uh, it will save you, I think it’s 20 or 25% off your ticket price.
And, uh, if you see me say hello.
You’ll recognize Matt because he’ll be the very tall, bald man. Yes. As for me, you can check out my website, seanferrell. com, or you can just go to wherever it is you buy your books and look for my books and ask for them there. That includes everything from Amazon and Barnes and Noble to your local bookstore or public library.
My books are available everywhere. If you’d like to support the show, please consider leaving a review wherever it was you found this episode. So that could be Apple, Google, Spotify, YouTube, wherever it was you listened from. Go back there, leave a like, don’t forget to subscribe. And please do share this with your friends.
That really does help support the channel. You can also become a direct supporter by going to trekintime. show. Click the become a supporter button, and it allows you to throw some coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts and we make the podcast understanding that you didn’t mean to hurt us. You just wanted to help us.
And when you support us in that way, you automatically become an Ensign, which means you become an automatic subscriber to our spinoff show, Out of Time, in which we talk about things that don’t fit within the confines of this program, so it might be other Star Trek, it might be Star Wars, other sci fi, fantasy, horror, whatever it is that’s catching our eye.
All of that really does help support the show. Thank you so much, everybody, for listening or watching, and we’ll talk to you next time.