Discovery: Rosetta

Catching up with last week's (not yesterday's) episode of Star Trek: Discovery...

Hoping to gather sociological information on Species 10-C to help in their coming first contact, Burnham leads a small away team to a planet that may have been the aliens' former home world. Meanwhile, aboard Discovery, Booker and Tarka conduct a stealth operation that will allow Book's ship to travel with Discovery undetected.

There are two distinct aspects to Star Trek: Discovery that I think are diametrically opposed to one another: the show wants to engage deeply with the personal problems and feelings of its major characters, and it wants every season-long story to feature a massive, galaxy-threatening problem. I do find the show is often able to keep these two elements in balance with each other... but as each season approaches its conclusion, this becomes harder to do: even though human emotion is always, rightfully, the heart of the show, when the stakes become so high, it increasingly strains credibility to stop and talk about feelings.

The episode "Rosetta" is the most literal illustration of this unfortunate tension that the show has ever presented. With less than a day before the civilizations of Earth, Titan, and Ni'Var will be annihilated, the Discovery crew paused to literally bask in feelings. In other words, I found it hard to disagree with the characters at the start of the episode who were saying, "why again are we doing this side quest right now?"

The flip side, at least, is that the mission to the 10-C's former homeworld was tantalizing in what it suggested about this species. Discovery sure seems to be teeing us up for the incredibly rare Star Trek alien that won't be a human actor in prosthetic makeup. The implications are that they're huge, live in a gas environment, and communicate through a method that's neither linguistic nor telepathic. If even one of those things actually turns out to be true, Discovery will have done a good job using modern television technology and storytelling to give us something we truly haven't seen before in the franchise. I'm all for that.

But the "stop for a side quest" main plot was not the only element of the episode that strained logic. As Book and Tarka's infiltration mission transitioned into "appeal to General Ndoye," the why of it all confounded me. What exactly is Book going to ask Ndoye to do? Even he didn't know, as all his cloak-and-dagger culminated in a vague warning to basically "be ready for when we think of something for you to actually do." Plus, Book hasn't even finished cleaning the egg off his face from the last several times that Tarka double-crossed him, so he forfeits any place to be surprised when Tarka shows up with a captive Jet Reno at the end of the episode. And yet, I continue to enjoy the emotional journey Book has been on this season. (Again, emotions are something Discovery does very well.) But does he have to be so dumb?

There was also interesting emotional content in Adira's small subplot -- some sort of hero worship (or budding crush?) involving Detmer. But this too depended on Adira not being very "smart" -- that is, not as emotionally mature as I feel we've seen her in the past. Par for the course in this episode: the writers had a compelling emotional arc mapped out for the characters, but didn't really build an episode that comfortably held or justified it.

Always great to have Tig Notaro back, though. And the end of the episode certainly confirms that she'll be in at least one of the remaining two episodes of the season.

I really wanted to like this episode more, but it was unfortunately doing a lot to trigger my "unsuspension of disbelief." And yet, even as parts of it seemed so dumb, others were so effectively tugging on the heartstrings that I couldn't hate it that much. Average that all out to something like a C+? I certainly hope that the last two episodes pull out of what's been feeling like a bit of a spiral to me, to deliver a solid conclusion to the season.