Star Trek: Discovery, Season 1, Episode 4: The Butcher's Knife Cares Not For the Lamb's Cry
Okay, this one is a bit neat. From my limited knowledge, Star Trek has always been more of diplomacy and science instead of war and shooty stuff, and this episode works pretty well. I mean, I still find the idea of weird space-travel fungus to be a bit weird, but I do like how the episode basically revolves around Burnham trying to find her way to basically understand the unknown, befriend Ripper the big giant alien tardigrade and basically figure out how to not slice it up and turn its body parts into weapons, but rather to use Ripper to become the ship's navigational center, allowing the Discovery to rescue a burning colony by shooting a bunch of Klingon warships, and then use the instant-teleport to smash a bunch of ships into each other.
Of course, we have an asshole disposable officer who's all like "shoot the animal in the head!" and "Captain Lorca only needs weapons, you damn science hippie!" and stuff who proceeds to get mauled to death by the big alien waterbear, which I felt was a bit inelegant.
I did enjoy the episode. It solves the mystery of Ripper from last episode (I assumed Lorca put it there, he just retrieved the creature from the USS Glenn), and builds up on the two main players here, Burnham and Lorca. Lorca in particular is interesting in how he interacts with Stamets, a different interaction of "science for war" and "science for knowledge" deal that disposable officer and Burnham argued about. Stamets only wants to use his science for knowledge, and yes, Lorca's manipulative and more war-hungry than is healthy, and is pressuring Stamets than what's healthy... but Lorca was trying to save the Corvan colony and Stamets just walking away from that all. That was a pretty cool scene when Lorca played the screaming HELP ME AAAAAAH video for the entire ship to hear... it's pretty neat and makes him so much more than just a warmonger.
Burnham does seem a bit static, though obviously I need to cut the show some slack considering this is the only the fourth episode. She does look sullen and broody anytime she's not doing science stuff, but this episode gives her a couple of neat scenes to look more introspective beyond those two -- looking at her Starfleet uniform being synthesized, and finally, under her chipper roommate's urging, gained some closure as she sees the final message from Captain Georgiou. Saru gets some scenes in this episode interacting with Burnham as well, a bit more antagonistic than he has been in the past few episodes which I felt worked somewhat better for the character, I think?
We do also get a bit of a subplot for the Klingons, which is interesting. Considering I know next-to-nothing about Klingon culture, the show does help display Klingon culture relatively well enough to understand what's going on without inelegantly go "As you know, in Klingon culture..." like lesser shows would. Voq, Son of None and his new staunch ally L'Rell have a neat little sub-plot as they discuss T'Kuvma's sacrifice, the purity of the Klingon race, and being betrayed by the dude with the face paint, Kol or someone, with L'Rell pretending to betray Voq before warping back and aiding him.
So yeah, pretty cool stuff that keeps me interested enough to come back for more.
No comments:
Post a Comment