The Enterprise tries to stop a comet from striking an inhabited world, leading to two surprising discoveries: the comet seems to be artificial in nature, and a powerful alien species regards it as a divine arbiter of life and death in the galaxy. Amid all this, Cadet Uhura goes on her first away mission, and is forced to face uncertainties about herself and her Starfleet career in the process.
Discovery and Picard have already been showing us how slick Star Trek can look with cutting edge visual effects techniques, but it's really something to see that brought to bear on a "problem of the week" story. The use of an "AR wall" to create the comet interior is simply stunning; from how the reality of the set helps the actors to the way that the real light interacts with their sleek spacesuits. Two new alien races each look great: the Deleb on the planet using a more conventional (but highly textured) makeup, and the "Shepherds" with creepy CG to distance their eyes and make their brains seem to "breathe." (Edit: It turns out the Shepherd was not CG! It was mechanically-puppeted devices incorporated into makeup worn by a live actor!) As a Star Trek fan who for decades has just learned to overlook the fact that "sometimes, it looks pretty cheesy," the fact that I no longer have to is a revelation.
But more important than the look is the content, and this episode gets a lot of that right too. Even though the population of an entire planet is at risk here, the stakes are -- as they should be -- on one of the main characters. Indeed, the first 10 minutes of the episode are pure character development, to an extent that almost made me worry whether they'd have time to fully explore whatever sci-fi problem the Enterprise might eventually stumble upon.
Of course, which character was in focus meant a lot to any longtime Star Trek fan. Part of me is sad that in one episode, Celia Rose Gooding was probably given more to do as Uhura than Nichelle Nichols had in decades of playing the character. Still, the importance of Nichols would be hard to overstate, and it's her performance that made made me care enough to appreciate this expansion now. The central role of music in this story, while unavoidably evocative of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, was also a very appropriate homage to one of the few things we already knew about Uhura: her skill as a singer.
However, I did feel as though the episode laid on elements of the new Uhura backstory a little thick. I found her conflict in this episode a bit jarring -- not so much her uncertainty about her place in Starfleet, but just how open she was in speaking about it. I wish that this had been more subtle, more polished... though if you're going to magnify a narrative conflict, I'd certainly rather it be at this kind of personal level.
Plus, it helps that Captain Pike's ship is being presented as an environment where this kind of openness is encouraged. He's on a first name basis with his crew, and vice versa. He hosts dinners, he solicits input. He sets a different tone with his command. I found myself thinking of the Next Generation episode in which Captain Jellico's replacement of Captain Picard upsets the entire crew; I couldn't help but imagine that if Captain Picard somehow took over for Captain Pike for a week, this crew would react similarly. (The change in degree of formality feels similar.)
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