I have to say, I actually liked the episode overall. I find that I’ve accumulated so many negative judgments about the characters and the show itself that it’s hard to judge any individual episode on its own merits, but when I take a step back, most of the stuff in this episode worked. I mean, it was kinda stupid not to inter the bridge officers in the brig, each in their own cell, but rather leave them in some room with access to the ship’s systems behind a couple of overturned chairs (?), and Osyraa’s wanton killing of the Andorian seemed too obviously just a way to get Future Hawking to realize that she’s, like, evil (I bet he’s not gonna inject Book with the truth serum or whatever, but gives him a placebo), but other than that, it seemed mostly solid to me.
I knew when one of Osyraa’s crew mentioned something about a bit of code that’s hard to delete that the sphere data would play some role, and I liked that Tilly and the other officers actually showed some non-Michael focused agency. Plus, Michael actually seemed to manage to choke back her tears when ejecting Stamets! And both the flushing out of the regulators and the bit with Stamets were actually not stupid—at first, I thought that a fire regulation system that just vents out a section into space wasn’t the greatest idea, and I was wondering why they didn’t have the force field thingies they had on TNG, but perhaps they just didn’t get around to upgrading that on Discovery, plus, I suppose those Jeffries tubes are typically meant to be empty. Still, you’d think there’d be some sensor checking for life signs first…
But these are minor quibbles, ultimately, and I can’t think of many Star Trek episodes free of those. I’m not quite sure what Osyraa’s ultimate plan was, though—I got the feeling that getting the admiral to sign the accord/present it to the president was just subterfuge (her ‘greatest gamble’), but I don’t know to what end.
I’m not sure she’s the dominant party - she’s got a momentary advantage, but the Chain doesn’t seem to directly oppose the Federation. If they had the ability to, the Federation wouldn’t exist any more.
I mean, could be that that’s all there’s to it, but then, why this whole operation in the first place? Why not just ring up the admiral? It seems to me getting to an agreement with the Federation wasn’t in any way made easier by hijacking Discovery, and doing so gave her nothing of any real value to bargain with. At least not with respect to brokering a treaty—it could’ve been used as leverage for blackmailing them or something, but as is, she approached the admiral with a treaty he’d have just as much reason to consider (if not more) if she’d simply got it to him via holo-mail, or whatever.
Besides, Book was saying something about how she’d used that strategy before, getting let into some castle only to then blow it up. So here, she now goes to an elaborate scheme of getting into the Federation headquarters—for something she didn’t actually need to get into Federation headquarters for? I mean, I’m not going to argue that the writing on this show is better than that, but if that’s really all this amounts to, then that seems a new nadir.
She would never have gotten the face to face with the admiral from the ‘outside’ - so her gamble was using discovery to get ‘inside’ to do the deal. I don’t recall any statements earlier in the season that the Federation had taken any steps to negotiate with, what to them, are terrorists.
The chain has set up quite an infrastructure - but its not stable because of they way its been done - they need the federation ‘idea’ to be more mainstream.
Book saying they had done this before (to destroy someone) was to allow the twist to the audience that maybe she wasn’t so bad. But the reality is, had the Admiral/president signed off on this deal - the Federation would have been destroyed from the inside since she clearly wanted to be the face of it.
Well, what I don’t get is why the face to face was necessary, though. They’re clearly a powerful presence, there should be some way to set up some channel for negotiations—and if they’re trying not to be seen as terrorists, hijacking a ship carrying a priceless technology and holding its crew hostage is a funny way of doing so.
It does peeve me that Osyraa is the only one to think “hey, duplicating this magic drive would be a good thing” - were I the admiral im not sure I’d let that ship out of my sight until I knew exactly how to make another one (a century old mystery can wait)
A Da Vinci drawing of one, in an opening most people have probably fast-forwarded through since the second or third episode? Oh, well, that should cover it.
I still think they’re somewhat under-shown to be suddenly a plot point. There should have been a recent reference to/appearance of them if they were going to do this. Even if they did that, it doesn’t take away from the ridiculousness of the sudden appearance of the obedient, saluting, conveniently merchandising-friendly little bots.
They’ve been shown several times in establishing shots throughout this season, including the Mirror Universe where they have glowing red eyes instead of blue. Which I guess makes that like the evil twin robot version of a Van Dyke.
Also, the dots were shown last season. There was some stupid setup like an unexploded torpedo was stuck in the Enterprise during a fight but it was going to blow up soon and the only way to save the ship was to lower a blast door but the lever for the blast door could only be pulled from inside the room where the torpedo was so the admiral sacrificed herself by staying inside the room with the torpedo and pulled the lever which closed the blast door and saved the ship but blew her up.
And the reason I recount that bit is because everyone was like “Why the fuck didn’t you just send one of those WALL•E bots to pull the fucking lever?”
OK, WRT the DOTS, I guess I need to pay closer attention. If I liked the show better, I’d rewatch some of the episodes to see what nuances I missed. I think I’ll just take your collective word for it.
