"Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow"
From Romeo and Juliet
By William Shakespeare
***
Beware
Spoilers
Ahead
***
And so the Disco Season Two two parter was named, "Such Sweet Sorrow" as there were many partings in the season finale.
The Disco crew records emotional farewell messages to their loved ones as they prepare to take their ship to the future.
Fans say good-bye to Pike, Spock, Number One, and NCC-1701.
Burnham is separated from Spock, Amanda, Sarek, and Tyler, perhaps forever.
Additionally, Cornwell sacrifices herself to save the Enterprise. And as the show takes a new direction, Chancellor La'Rell will no longer be bringing her unique flair to the proceedings.
As I've been saying all along, the acting and character development has been solid as has the production design. In this two-parter, we get all the character moments of the rah-rah variety as well as the tear-jerker ones in good measure.
Some observations and complaints in no particular order follow .....
It was a delight to see the Klingons and the Baul ships riding to the rescue when things looked bleak. My "canon complaint" is that the Klingons in Disco season one and season two seem vastly more powerful than the more evenly matched "Cold War" analog foe we saw in ST-TOS.
As for the Baul Fleet, let's hope that Saru's people didn't wipe out the Baul in an uprising and that the Baul fleet led by Saru's sister Saranah was a Joint Mission that united the two long time enemies of Kanimar.
Though the writers did toss in the line that munitions engineers were all busy when the photon torpedo got lodged in the Enterprise, it is rather strange to have Admiral Cornwell and the First Officer Number One play unexploded bomb technicians for so many minutes only to be followed by the Captain Pike joining Cornwell in trying to figure out "which wire to cut" in the torpedo. Of course, all of this was to set up the send off of Cornwell in a blaze of self-sacrifice and for Pike to reflect on his own future as he could have been the one to sacrifice himself.
Pike does have an interesting problem "knowing his fate." When faced with a dangerous decision, does he take the view that he will survive because he knows his fate that leads to death lay elsewhere? Or will he be more cautious? It was an interesting plot move to "lock his fate" as the price of obtaining the time crystal. But as a matter of story telling, the writers backed off this idea rapidly as everyone else who touched the time crystal saw much more limited views of the future and the perspective of those visions was that they represent only one possible future.
Some quibbles about the Control AI residing in Leland. The whole point of artificial intelligence is that it can reside in a dispersed fashion; thus, the shut down of the section 31 attack fleet when Leland died was a little too easy.
The biggest story hole though is the 7 red bursts and the 7 red signals. At the beginning, when Pike is authorized to take charge of Discovery, he talks about observing 7 red bursts that could not be accurately located. Eventually, there are 7 red signals seen one by one through the season that can be located that are consistent with the locations of the red bursts.
We find out the red signals are generated by Burnham as she uses the time suit. After each jump, she sends out the signals as a spatial-temporal bread crumb trail.
But what about the red bursts?
What are those?
Are the red bursts the wormhole openings?
If so, Mama Burnham made HUNDREDS of jumps so there should have been hundreds of red bursts!
And of course, as I noted in the very first episode, are these red bursts-red signals light based phenomena? If so, the writers failed to recognize that the distances of galactic space are hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of light years. The writers treated the red bursts and red signals as largely instantaneous events, a major science boo-boo.
Overall the Disco writer's room sending Discovery and crew 950 years into the future was the easiest way to free the show from "canon constraints." One wonders what the show would have been like if they made that choice up front in season one? Did they feel they needed to link themselves to the TOS timeline to collect fans for the first two seasons? And after doing so, they then felt free to move to their own world building?
There have been nice "easter egg" moments a TOS fan like myself enjoyed. I think the most effective use was things in and around Captain Pike. Anson Mount was fantastic as Captain Pike. Would the Star Trek franchise have been better served if the series was based on Pike-Spock-Number One? During season one of Disco, I thought the show might have been better served being based on Georgiou-Burnham-Saru.
Besides a Pike based show, how would a Georgiou led show have been received? Instead, what we have is the noble prime Georgiou killed off in season 1 episode 2 and the Terran-evil with a some good Emperor Georgiou transferred over to the Prime universe. Perhaps the latter character would be more interesting to write for in some ways but look at how much fan support there has been for Captain Pike's unambiguously good role model captain! Wouldn't there have been great stories to mine for the noble prime Georgiou?
Instead, the show runners opted for the long arc of season one's convoluted war with the Klingons which had the Mirror Universe diversion! It felt a bit like the show 24 where the main arc of the threat that Jack Bauer had to deal with gets "padded" out with some sometimes silly side tracks to get the show out to the full 24 episodes.
In this regard, season 2 was better managed where some what at first glance appeared to be "side tracks" turned out to be part of the bigger arc. Indeed, even the "short Trek" preseason episodes plugged in some narrative points picked up in the season.
Overall, I think season two was better than season one. Will see how they take the show in season three untethered from any timeline of prior Trek!
Live long and prosper!
#StarTrekDiscovery
No comments:
Post a Comment