Star Trek: Discovery, Season 1, Episode 8: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum
So a show that has to straddle self-contained episodic entries and serialization like Star Trek: Discovery needs to have some balance in them. As someone who largely reviews superhero shows, it's a balance that many other TV shows have tried so hard to juggle themselves on and failed. And this episode... was honestly another weak entry. Not so much as the previous one, whose absolutely shit attempt at 'romance' was more disastrous than anything, but this one was pretty disjointed as well. All the different subplots running through this episode make it feel more like a collection of scenes stitched together to build up to episode 9 more than anything.
After the fun misadventures last episode, where the only mentions of war are the brief mentions of the Klingons as Mudd's buyers, we return in relative full force as we get another sub-plot driven mostly by the Klingon side of the war. Except it's not actually that interesting. We get L'Rell returning to the big Klingon war-band thing, and since L'Rell is probably one of the more interesting Klingons, her attempt to kinda-sorta-maybe undermine Kol's authority by her attempt to bring Admiral Cornwell to her side in attacking Kol, and her moment of grief of seeing what I assume is her slain comrades-in-arms, are all good, but again, there's kind of a lack of context in what we're seeing, and Cornwell herself is reduced to a bit of window-dressing before being killed off. I'm not sure it's worth the amount of screentime they got, if there's not really much of a payoff beyond reminding us that, hey, L'Rell exists. Oh, and hey, Cornwall dies. I really, really hope the death was a little fake-out that L'Rell and Cornwall planned-out offscreen, otherwise this whole subplot of the episode just kind of went nowhere.
There's also constant reminders of how Stamets have apparently became a bit jumpier compared to his previous incarnations. I mentioned how much more interesting he's been since he's gone from 'grouchy science douchehole' to 'happy scientist man', and now he's back in douchehole mode and I'm not a big fan. It's at least meant to be a plot twist of sorts, though, with Tilly pointing it out and Stamets pouring his heart out onto Tilly. I guess he can see through time or some shit, because he addresses Tilly as 'captain' once?
There's this battle scene in front that's long and elaborate, and seems to just set up for Lorca to get pissed off at the inept bridge crew (there was this one dude who took like 10 seconds to actually get to press the 'fire' button after the order leaves Lorca's mouth) but after spending a whole bunch of time for that... apparently that whole scene is just there to tell us that, hey, this cloaking device thing that the Klingons have? Big problem. Did we need such an elaborate action scene to get that across, considering it literally has no bearing on the rest of the episode? Probably not. We did get the name of the cool white-skinned cyborg lady, though: Auriam.
The bulk of the episode is mostly focused on Burnham, Ash and Saru as they go onto the planet of Pahvo, to find... some new technology to bypass the Klingon cloaking devices. The plant-crystal-living-planet thing has some frequency.... which manifests in... glowing spore-spirits... that sort of takes over Saru's mind except not really, it just shows him 'bwaaaa the true harmony!' like some mind-controlling hippie. I've always wanted Saru to get more screentime, to explore how his businesslike attitude and his rather complex history with Burnham would impact them serving on the same ship, but this particular episode just made me groan. It would be something if the writing was a bit stronger, but it's not. There were moments that are just kinda dumb, like Ash and Burnham literally doing nothing after Saru starts talking about 'you will see!' and crushes their communicators. Saru's sudden changes in attitude from one scene to another also makes him feel fairly inconsistent as a character, even if the character is mind-controlled by weird peacenik spore-crystals who can't really comprehend what the shit a 'war' is.
At least it sets up the cliffhanger pretty well, which is the plant-crystal dudes of Pahvo calling in both Klingon and Federation frequencies because it's naive and it thinks that the way to stop this war is obviously to bring both parties to the table to sit and talk it out, like a misguided school counselor. That's a neat plot twist, sort of. Hopefully the next episode we'll be better.
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