Discovery arrives at Starfleet headquarters, but doesn't really receive the warm welcome they'd imagined. Overcoming suspicion and doubt, the crew manages to be assigned a mission to prove their worth: rendezvous with a "seed ship" to collect a sample needed to cure a deadly disease. But that mission turns out not to be so straightforward.
(And we're getting SPOILERS right out of the gate here...)
Star Trek: Discovery did not invent the TV trope of "saying goodbye to a character by making them the focus of an episode." But I feel like it has spawned a version of that trope in: "tell you nothing about a character until the episode where you make them the focus and write them off the show." This happened with Airiam in season two (in an episode that's a key part of this week's "previously on"), and now they tried to do it again with Nhan.
But it's a heavy lift to make an audience invest deeply in a character and sad that they're leaving all in just one hour of television. Heavier still here, when I feel like the only thing I knew about Nhan was that she seems weirdly into torture. ("Yum yum.") And that her performer, Rachael Ancheril, had just been promoted to the main credits at the start of season three. (Psych!) So it fell on this episode to convey to me the depth of family connection felt by Barzans generally, and the depth of homesickness Nhan in particular was feeling. Which somehow was supposed to add up to a powerful goodbye that I just wasn't feeling. The magic trick the writers pulled off last week in investing the Adira/Gray story line with genuine emotion just couldn't be repeated twice in a row.
Part of the issue may have been that amid this personal journey for Nhan, we got a Russian nesting doll of technobabbly problems. Discovery was there to get a seed to cure a disease. But upon arrival, they found that first they needed to solve the mystery of a phasing family. It felt like side quests upon side quests, and all those layers distracted for me from the efforts to build up Nhan's personal attachment to the situation.
But... the rest of the episode was pretty good. Our first glimpse of the new Federation was great. We got a lengthy, almost "Star Trek: The Motion Picture-like" introduction to the headquarters, but our gawking heroes helped make it all seem as wondrous as we were meant to take it. At the same time, the progressive technology was paired with regressive people, made distrustful by the hardships they've endured.
Oded Fehr was solid as Admiral Vance, a decisive and cautious leader. His point of view made perfect sense; if someone from the year 1200 showed up today offering to help us with our coronavirus problems, how warmly do you think they'd be greeted? (OK, I admit, the "how did you get here from the Dark Ages" part would be fairly compelling.) Vance nevertheless was not fixed in his attitude, and slowly warmed to our heroes over the course of the episode.
Even more fun was the mysterious character of Kovich, played by... David Cronenberg. (?!) Perhaps taking a casting queue from The Mandalorian's use of director Werner Herzog, Discovery enlisted a director known for the profoundly disturbing to be a menacing foil to Georgiou through calm reserve. And it was perfect. Georgiou is used to thinking she's the smartest person in the room, and is usually probably right. This extended scene of her debriefing gave the strong impression: not this time. I don't know how much this material will prove important here in Discovery, or how much of it is starting to lay track for the Michelle Yeoh Star Trek spinoff that's in development, but either way, I want more of these two!
The humor was working well too, with Stamets, Reno, and Tilly being a wonderfully geeky comic trio. It's probably best that Jet Reno isn't showing up in every episode, probably right to use her sparingly so we don't tire of her dry wit. (Could I get tired of it, though?) It was wonderful here to take the serious edge off a run of technobabbly scenes.
Overall, I give "Die Trying" a B. The "A plot" may not have really done it for me, but everything else was just great.
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