Star Trek: Discovery, Season 1, Episode 13: What Is Past Is Prologue
Star Trek: Discovery's thirteenth episode finally gets us out of the Mirrorverse world. I'm still somewhat confused by everything that's going on, really -- I get that this is a Star Trek thing, and that the Mirrorverse is like a pre-established setting, but it really feels like a hurricane of exposition and random revelations that's not quite handled as well as it should. And talking to a bunch of Star Trek fans about this, some of them have apparently disavowed this show entirely because it's too dark and too full of explosions to really carry the banner of Star Trek.
This episode is the conclusion of both the Gabriel Lorca and the Mirrorverese storyline, and it plays out like the ending of a video game level, or the ending of the most generic sci-fi story you could think of. It's flash and neat, there are a lot of great visual effects for a TV show, there are a lot of neat action scenes and shooty-shooty moments which I do appreciate in the basic sense, and everyone gets something to do. But as part off a serialized TV show it really feels lacking. It's still watchable, of course, but there's a distinct sudden whiplash of tone when the Starfleet people talk about preservation of life and community while they fucking blow up a gigantic space station in the climax.
The big revelation that Lorca is apparently his Mirror-world impostor was done well, but after that revelation? He ends up just pontificating like a "mwa-ha-ha I'm so evil" villain. Again, it's not uninteresting, but it's pretty disappointing. Burnham and Emperor Georgia end up working together to take down Lorca, and Burnham barely bats an eyelid when the Emperor stabs Lorca in the back with a sword, dropping him down into the core of the space station and causing him to disintegrate. Lorca's a character who we've followed through for the past 12 episodes, and the subject of a huge plot twist, but while I'm sad that we're going to be bereft Jason Isaacs' performance for the next two episodes, I also don't really care that the character died.
Burnham and the Emperor's relationship is perhaps the only real saving grace of this episode that doesn't make it a whole pile of blandness (it's not a bads tory, just really, really going through the motions) because the two actresses involved really do sell two people from two different and contradictory universes seeing a woman with the same face and behaviour as their adoptive mother/daughter but acts so horribly different from their counterparts. I get that the two of them would work together, but at the same time... the Emperor is the one who caused so much devastation in the Mirrorverse, and also cut up a member of Saru's race for dinner last episode. So while I understand Burnham wanting to save the Emperor from her 'last stand' (those pesky human emotions!) the show does a... decent job of building up to this point?
Overall, though, the Discovery returns to the real world, and apparently they time-skipped 9 months and the Klingons have won. It's vaguely interesting, but at the same time the Klingon War has never been the focus -- always there in the background and mentioned by everyone, but never really brought up to the forefront. We'll see what the return of the Emperor will mean for the last tweo episodes of the show, but at the same time, I'm not quite sure if I'll ever be continuing the second season.
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