The Sound of Thunder

In its latest episode, Star Trek: Discovery served up the story I wanted to see a week earlier, one revolving around Saru and his relationship to his people.

When one of the Red Angel's beacons appears at Saru's homeworld of Kaminar, the Discovery is quick on the scene. Though their primary mission is to investigate, Saru has another agenda in mind: reconnect with his people and reveal to them the truth about the Kelpian relationship with their predators, the Ba'ul.

This episode made required viewing of the Short Treks installment "The Brightest Star," going so far as to even include "flashback" footage culled from it. There were wonderful payoffs for that short story, with links so key that it feels like both must have been conceived by the writers at the same time.

Though no one is able to be quite as expressive in the Kelpian makeup as Doug Jones, the character of his sister Siranna (played by Hannah Spear) was nevertheless a great asset in the storytelling. What a whirlwind for her, having her brother returned to her one moment, and having the total annihilation of her species threatened the next. I might have liked to see Saru have to work harder to break through her doubt of the truth... but you can make the case that the extreme circumstances made that unnecessary.

One of the reasons I was eager for a fast follow-up on the Saru story line was that I wanted to see what a post-fear Saru was like. We got all I would have wanted this week, from physical changes to more intriguing behavioral ones. It was demonstrated just how much Saru's senses depend on awareness of fear, when he didn't even realize he was supposed to get out of the captain's chair for Pike. We saw that without fear as a limiter, Saru is essentially incapable of backing down from any confrontation, with anyone, over any issue -- he challenged everyone from Pike to Burnham to the Ba'ul themselves. Saru really is a different character now, and it's a fun transformation.

The episode did manage to focus on Saru without dropping altogether the story line of Culber's return last week. The portrayal of Stamets in this is quite interesting. Culber is sending every kind of signal that he is not feeling okay right now. Stamets is completely oblivious to it. On the one hand, Stamets should be more in tune to Culber's feelings and needs than anyone else. On the other hand, Stamets is certainly overwhelmed with his own joy to have his husband back, so much so that it's not unreasonable -- for now, at least -- for him not to notice anything is wrong. We'll see where this all leads.

But as enthusiastic as I was about parts of the episode, much of it didn't make such a strong impact. The scale and scope here was so inflated here that it felt vaguely ridiculous. (SPOILERS about the ending here.) Within the span of a single episode, we went from uncertainty whether a Starfleet ship could even contact the pre-warp Kelpians to triggering a metamorphosis in their entire race. Not one village, not a few people at random. All of them. Everywhere. It felt like the science fiction equivalent of a big, dumb action movie that has to blow up the biggest thing possible for thrills -- too big an idea to wrap your head around, in too short a span of time. And more than was necessary to serve the plot, I think.

The Ba'ul were quite cool in visual concept, a truly scary and alien species (and, frankly, what Armus would have looked like on The Next Generation if today's technology had existed in 1988). But the audio design on them was terrible. Their dialogue was so processed and modulated that half of it was completely unintelligible. It would have been preferable to haul out the awful looking font Discovery uses for subtitles and just give us a completely alien language of clicks and groans.

We learned more about the Red Angel.... and what we've learned isn't exactly promising to me. First, it's starting to feel rather like the "Temporal Cold War" plot of the less interesting seasons of Enterprise. A time-traveling humanoid is coming back to influence this time for mysterious reasons -- reasons I hope will actually be explained on this show. Another explanation I'm really going to need: why is the Angel bread-crumbing Discovery into doing work for it when its own capabilities in this time are so vast? (The Angel saved the Kelpians, not the Discovery.)

Overall, there was plenty to like in this episode. But it was also totally overstuffed, both in the amount of material and the scale of it. And if the breakneck speed didn't leave you feeling confused, the unintelligible alien dialogue would do the trick. I give "The Sound of Thunder" a B-. Not bad, but it felt to me like it could have been much better.