Discovery has a chance to learn more about the Dark Matter Anomaly by venturing inside a subspace rift it has left behind. But the ship finds itself in an empty black void, threatened by a force they can't detect, and unable to find an exit. Escape depends on dealing with the newly emerging emotions of the computer Zora.
I commented about the previous episode that while Zora's sentience has been an ongoing concern for a while now, the escalation to emotions felt sudden and unearned. That was all in service of getting to this episode, it seems. The writers are interested in exploring Zora as a character (perhaps even more than they are in the secondary bridge officers), giving her an arc in this episode of learning about courage in the face of danger.
There are interesting aspects to that story here, though I'm not sure they're developed as fully as they could have been. Gray is an interesting character to interact with Zora, as both are dealing with "new experiences" right now -- though I feel like they could have been more explicit about this connection. Instead, the episode focused more on how Gray, as a non-Starfleet person aboard a Starfleet vessel, feels a bit adrift. I feel like that should put him more in common cause with Book than anyone else; perhaps that's a relationship that will get explored at some point, in what seems so far to be the "season of Book."
The Zora plot culminates in a final stand with her and Michael Burnham alone on the ship. I love giving Sonequa Martin-Green another great scene to argue for "what Star Trek is all about," and she once again delivers here under difficult conditions (her only scene partner being on off-screen voice). But if the story here is about Zora learning true courage, wouldn't the fullest exploration of that idea have involved Burnham also needing to retreat to the pattern buffer at the end, leaving Zora all alone? You could even have the scene exactly as written, but just ended it by Zora taking it upon herself to save Burnham's life. And it would have cleaned up a big question: how did Burnham survive what was declared to be unsurvivable?
(Side note: I really think they should have lost a crewmember or two in the pattern buffer, even if only people we've never met. Pulling off this scheme without risk or consequences feels to me like it puts in play a too-easy fix for many conceivable situations. The writers will just have to ignore this in the future.)
The interactions with Zora were good (especially in that climactic Burnham scene), but felt to me like they only scratched the surface. Even given Star Trek's boundless optimism, does no one perceive any potential danger in her emerging intelligence? (Perhaps that's a topic for a future episode.) And once again, I really felt the absence of Tilly -- who better to talk with Zora about doubts and uncertainty, and dealing with major things for the first time?
Still, the episode satisfied for me on a number of other fronts. I very much like the way they continue to explore Book's trauma, this time in the form of taunting hallucinations from his father. Arguably two or three episodes now have already "resolved" Book's feelings of loss -- at least, in what would have been a more than satisfactory conclusion for almost any other Star Trek series (except perhaps Deep Space Nine). But Discovery is engaging with the truth that loss like that is ever-present and is not easily "gotten over." Even when you think you've dealt with it, you haven't. In that way, Book's arc feels compelling and real to me.
Jonathan Frakes always incorporates great visuals in his episodes, and this time he got a lot of support from the effects department. On-set fire, combined with CG additions (and epic exterior shots) served to make the danger in the final act seem very real. And while I personally found it rather jarring, only Frakes would get to employ wipes, in an early sequence that felt like "Star Wars by Brian De Palma" more than Star Trek.
The big revelation of the DMA plot in this episode was that it apparently comes from outside the galaxy. That feels to me like it probably means an all-new threat, as the franchise hasn't established much as originating from outside the Milky Way. Discovery does like its connections to past Trek, though, so perhaps we're looking at a return of the Kelvans from the original series' "By Any Other Name?" Their paralytic fields and ability to transform people into crushable, fist-sized "dice" were certainly advanced for classic Trek, as this "DMA" is for this era.
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