Star Trek: Discovery, Season 1, Episode 7: Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad
Not actually my favourite episode, most assuredly. The concept of the episode is fine. A Groundhog Day time-loop episode where our characters try to figure out how to fix things before everyone dies is one of my personal favourite realms of fiction, what with my love for Majora's Mask. But this one wasn't particularly done well. And, hell, Harry Mudd's a fun little returning villain, even if I'm not the biggest fan of how they just handwaved how he has this portable time-travel device. It's not horrible, but I just... didn't really care. Maybe it's the huge injection of rather forced relationship shipping between Ash and Burnham... Part of it is already kind of difficult since Burnham herself is pretty much near-emotionless, making any emotion-led plotline relatively difficult to tell... but the fact that it's thrown into the time-loop episode in addition? Yeah. The concept is sound, but the execution is honestly kind of blah. I did like how the episode sprung it on us without much warning, going from 'antisocial character has to socialize, oh no!' to 'save the space whales!' before finally going into the main plot... but again, it's not done particularly well.
The plot twist, after the initial shock of the existence of the time-loop wears off, is honestly very mundane, and it feels like more attention is forced to Stamets trying to play love doctor, insisting that Burnham dancing with Ash is going to be the important thing they do to get them all on the same page. Did they even have more than two lines of conversation last episode? And I thought Arrow handled shipping badly! Like, actually show them interacting beyond suddenly deciding that Burnham has this deep, deep burning love that she has for Tyler that she doesn't know how to express, because introvert reasons. Also, of course the secret she has Stamets tell her about the time-loop is "I have never been in LOOOOOOVE" which is where I think I pulled out my phone and started playing Hearthstone instead of paying full attention to the episode.
The only real good character beat in this episode, honestly, is Burnham walking up to Mudd and basically forcing him to blow himself up and reset the timeline with promises of a bigger bounty, which is very well-done. And then the episode sort of undercuts it all by randomly deciding that the best way to defeat Mudd, who has been shown to be devious and has all of this planned out... is to teleport his wife and father-in-law on-board? It feels so dumb, honestly. Like, I know this is Star Trek and not all episodes can end in a phaser shootout, but this is honestly just pretty stupid. I dislike this episode the more words I talk about it, actually.
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