Discovery: Species Ten-C

The second-to-last episode of Star Trek: Discovery's fourth season felt to me like two episodes in one. One of them, I truly loved. The other? Well, it basically kept falling short in the same ways that the last several Discovery episodes have fallen short for me.

The Discovery crew attempts to make contact with the mysterious 10-C aliens, but are at a loss to find any basis for communication. Meanwhile, Tarka is taking genocidal steps to destroy the 10-C power source; only Book is in a position to stop him, and only a captive Jett Reno may be able to convince Book to do so.

The whole "first contact" part of this episode? Truly excellent. Yes, it was a little bit Arrival, a little bit Contact, a little bit The Abyss... but it felt to me like a good take on those ideas rather than a straight-up copy of any. I thought it actually captured the sense of grandeur and wonder that the original Star Trek: The Motion(less) Picture was clearly trying for, but couldn't reach through some combination of bad writing and the limitations of 1979 visual effects.

Trying to make sense of alien thoughts, trying to render human thoughts in a mathematical and truly universal way... this is great stuff, and frankly, Star Trek doesn't explore it often enough when clearly it could. (I can't think of an example nearly as effective as this since "Darmok.") It made me wish that Star Trek would try this more often, even as I realized that this probably wouldn't feel as special if it were more frequent.

But alas, this was only half of the episode -- and the other half wasn't nearly as compelling. Book continued to be as dumb as can be, falling for Tarka's lies yet again. General Ndoye's unjustified impatience paved the way for cheap jeopardy. A slow burn effort to figure out "what's wrong with Zora" turned out to be fruitless, as Culber and Stamets figured out the answer about 20 seconds too late to actually do anything about it.

The thing is, I feel like there are ways to have improved at least some of this. It's just that the Discovery writers' room may just be failing to "show their work." Setting aside the fact that Booker could just be blinded by simple, relatable grief, there might be a sci-fi explanation here: his empathic abilities could be overloaded by Tarka's feelings of loss, or his own loss mirroring back on itself inside his mind, to a degree that he just can't tell that Tarka's deciving him. Elsewhere, we viewers may have been conditioned by decades of film and television teaching us that you run a doomsday countdown to 0:01, but General Ndoye hasn't been. With stakes this high, it's not unreasonable for someone to be impatient and act drastically -- we just don't always get that character in our fiction. If only the audience had been given a little help understanding these justifications, maybe character behavior wouldn't seem so strange.

But then, justifying why people behave the way they do during a crisis is not Discovery's strong suit -- not this season, at least. Take as an example: I actually enjoyed the scenes between Burhman and Saru, where she gave him advice on relating to a Vulcan, and he shared some "primal scream" therapy with her. And I know that in theory, they did have time for those conversations, as other people were preparing things for their mission. Yet are we sure that there was absolutely nothing Burnham or Saru could be doing to help in those moments? If true, best to make that overwhelmingly and explicitly clear to the audience, lest it look like they're behaving wildly inappropriately with extremely limited time.

Another scene that I liked from the B plot (even if it too felt a bit tonally jarring amid the action) were the stories exchanged between Jett Reno and Cleveland Booker. Reno has usually been the prickly, comic relief character. In having her speak about her late wife, she had to both relate to another person and be very serious -- big gear changes for her character (which Tig Notaro delivered very well). Book's side of the exchange did help explain why an alien is named Cleveland Booker... which I didn't really need to know as much as "why is he being so dumb right now?"... but it was an interesting tidbit (and also delivered very well by David Ajala).

The "warts" in this episode were rough to look at. But "warts and all," there was a lot I did like about this episode. I think I'm going to call it a B.