Jesus W. Christ, that was atrocious.
The show as 45 minutes long, give or take, and I would guess no more than 12, 13 minutes of it actually advanced a plot. The vast majority of it was just emoting, and virtually all of it was empty. The show has everything upside down; good drama works because the events of the plot have an emotional impact on the characters, and therefore on the audience. You need STORY and then to let the emotion come out in bits. You can’t just have emotion because it’s formless; emotion coming from nowhere can’t move you.
To use an example, the scene with Leslie Crusher and the Trill boyfriend - you need that to advance the plot, sure. They’re in love, asteroid hit ship, slug goes out of dying boyfriend and into Leslie. Got it. But those flashbacks just dragged on and on and on and on; they had to be ten percent of the episode, at least, and stuffed 90 seconds of story into five minutes of screentime. I was being asked to believe this love story between a couple of teenagers (which right there is difficult for an adult to take seriously - not that teenagers don’t feel love intensely, but come on, they also break up every couple of months) was incredibly deep and meaningful and I should burst into tears at any moment, but fuck’s sake I JUT MET THEM. I know little about Leslie Crusher and nothing about Bluehair Boy. There is no depth of emotion here; you have to construct it, and the only way to do that is with plot. Show them on the ship, show them sharing a kiss, exchange gifts, asteroid, boom. 90 seconds.
Anyone remember “The Imitation Game”? Spoilers ahead. Look away if you must.
Over the course of the movie you learn, gradually, that Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is gay. You learn that as a youth he fell in love with another boy, and the boy, sadly, fell ill and died, devastating him; when you find this out, yoiu realize why Turing had named the codebreaking computer “Christopher,” because that was the boy’s name.
This story is tremendously heartbreaking - in all honesty it’s the only part of the movie I thought was really good. (It is not entirely true but that’s another issue) And in the course of that two hours movie, it takes less time to tell it than they spend on Leslie Crusher and Bluehair Boy in that TV episode. Certainly no more time - five, six minutes, tops. That’s all they needed, because they built it up with PLOT, with learning about the character of Alan Turing, what he is like, how he works, his single mindedness, conflicts and cooperation with other characters. When the tragic story is finally told it means something to you, because it’s in the context of a story that was competently built up to something. You CARE about Alan Turing, because you have been shown who he is and what he does and events he lives through, so these moments of revelation land hard.
In Discovery this kind of shit is just hurled at you, scene after scene, often with no setup. BE EMOTIONAL!
That’s only a smidgen of everything wrong with this episode; as usual, Burnham was front and center for no good reason. Detmer’s weird thing at dinner about blood didn’t connect logically to later just “I’m sad” being her issue. On and on. But really it’s mostly just the lack of story.