Star Trek: Discovery S01E10 Mini-Review: Earth-2

Star Trek: Discovery, Season 1, Episode 10: Despite Yourself

It  has been some time since I've last watched Star Trek: Discovery. Since I've watched half of the season, I suppose I could watch the rest of it? Having lost some interest during the mid-season finale, I still remember enough to hop right in. Discovery is a show that's plagued by an inconsistent main plot -- we're supposed to deal with the whole Klingon War and the spore drive teleportation thing, and here we've got a bit of a weird mini-arc heading up as our crew finds themselves trapped on an alternate universe, the Mirror-verse -- a staple in Star Trek fiction that even I, someone who's not versed in Trek lore at all, know about it. 

And overall, it's just the crew of the Discovery trying to figure out what's going on -- which they actually do pretty quickly. They've swapped places with the Discovery of the Mirrorverse, and end up being forced to impersonate their Mirrorverse counterparts. Tilly playing the ruthless captain to fit into her alternate-universe counterpart is fun, while Burnham is forced to kill Mirror-Connor to maintain her cover as the missing captain of the Shengchou. It's all told rather competently, but so much of the episode is just inelegant info-dumping that I'm just waiting for something interesting to happen. There's too much that's just introdumping about this brand-new Terran Empire that just feels clunky and inelegant to me, someone completely new to the setting.

The B-plots are... eh. Tyler is increasingly nuts, nearly freeing his torturer L'Rell, and when confronted by Dr. Culber, Tyler snaps Culber's neck -- and it's an episode where he's got a significant amount of screentime talking to the comatose and seemingly prophetic Stamets. Okay, so Tyler's hiding a second, dangerous personality? It's not my favourite part of the episode, and Tyler's weird... torture-slave-Stockholm-syndrome bit with L'Rell is just intensely uncomfortable to watch. I dunno. 

Overall, it's an... okay episode. It just doesn't have much going on for it beyond its concept -- something that it doesn't really do much with beyond having a "let's impersonate our dickish counterparts to get the plot device" bit.