Star Trek: Discovery S01E09 Mini-Review: Climax

Star Trek: Discovery, Season 1, Episode 9: Into the Forest I Go

I completely forgot about Star Trek: Discovery for a while, as you can tell. So last night I had to look up a way to find episode 9, last year's mid-season finale, and watch it. And, well... it's... serviceable? It's clearly meant to be a mid-season finale, and perhaps it is a bit too action-heavy for a Star Trek episode compared to what True Trekkies expect, but this is one that finally tries to give us an actual climax with a showdown between the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery and the Klingon forces of Kol. I think the previous episode set up the climax with the crystal hive-mind alien beings trying to get the Klingons and the Discovery to talk things out. The crystal beings don't actually end up being relevant beyond setting up the premise of the episode of how the crew of the Discovery has to intercept the Klingons and not retreat as ordered.

And don't get me wrong, this episode offers a pretty cool climax. Burnham and Tyler teleport into the Klingon ship to do some goobledeygonk and obtain a way to see through the Klingon cloaking technology. Stamets has to help the Discovery pull off 133 spore drive jumps, taxing both him and the Discovery to the limits. Tyler faces off against his former torturer (and implied... rapist?) L'Rell and has to deal with PTSD. Burnham fights Kol with those cool sickle-blade things and gets Captain Georgiou's insignia back. But it all happens in the same rapid sequence that is far more interested in setting up one fight scene after the next, one confrontation after the next, and it kind of makes the characters feel far flatter than they really are. Kol gets blown up with the ship and he never got the chance to be interesting, L'Rell gets captured because of course she does, Tyler has to deal with his PTSD and all that jazz. And the episode ends with the cliffhanger that using the spore drive with Stamets basically overloaded everything and plopped them in a ship graveyard that is implied to be one of the many mirror dimensions that Stamets noted he 'saw' while connected to the spore drive. 

Perhaps the fact that the Klingons ended up being so flat after the first episode is really what makes them fail as antagonists beyond 'rawr war aliens!' with a layer of politics thrown into them between L'Rell, Kol and Voq without actually really developing them as characters. Hopefully the back half of the season will address some of these problems and make our main heroes be a bit more interesting in its process.