Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 5x04 - "Face the Strange"

That was never going to happen. Jason Isaacs has said he'll only come back to play Prime Lorca. And indeed, he already refused to appear in Terra Firma back in S3 because it would have been Mirror Lorca, which is why it's one of Lorca's underlings who ends up getting captured instead.

 

I had the exact same thought. Imagine Lorca being there instead of Airiam, and she got him to do what she wanted by revealing who he REALLY is. That would have been cool.

Actually, I kind of liked that. L'ak kicking that guy's hand away made even my wife chuckle, and she's far more critical of this show than I am.
There IS a huge disparity in the acting quality between the two, though. Moll is great, you really feel like she loves L'ak, but the guy playing L'ak...eh. He's not doing it much for me.

 

I gave the episode a 9/10. My favorite episode of Disco since, I think, Terra Firma.
I really enjoyed Moll and L'ak. It was a pleasure to see Season 1 Burnham again. There were a few things I wish they'd added in, like Lorca or Ash, but oh well.
My biggest complaint is that, despite early assurances to the contrary, we've now explicitly put the fate of the Federation on the line. Yawn. It was one thing to opine about the possibility of what could happen, quite another to blatantly say "Hey, if you fail, the Federation will be destroyed!" I mean, come on, we all know that isn't going to happen. It doesn't raise the tension even a little bit. And it's become a Discovery cliche at this point.

 

I have never thought the Federation would fall, even with the Borg.

 

On a meta basis, sure. Although, Ira Behr DID toy with having the Federation lose the Dominion War (But Berman said no).
It's more like, having the stakes raised so high every single season is just exhausting. It doesn't give the characters room to breathe. When was the last time we saw them all just relaxing and hanging out together? All the way back in season 1? It's a pretty rare occurrence regardless.
Here's the thing: Telling me that, once again, the fate of the Federation is on the line does not raise the tension for me, as a viewer. But it does raise the tension for the characters in-universe. Suddenly it becomes true life-or-death, and any deviation from "the mission" seems even more superfluous than it would normally.

 

Is that important? And I'm pretty sure this season opened with it.

Ok. Still works, since this mission has been special since the beginning. Not really seeing a problem now. I feel like episode 1 set this up.

 

I've never watched Star Trek expecting the Federation to fall. They'll never do that. The Burn was the closest they ever came.

While watching DS9, I never expected the Federation would fall, because it was sharing space with the TNG Movies. They'd never open Insurrection or Nemesis with, "And the Federation fell in-between movies!"

"But now we know the Federation lasts!" That ship already sailed a long time ago too. Blame Voyager, not Discovery. Captain Braxton and the Relativity in the 29th Century. "The Federation endures for centuries" is something I've known for almost 30 years. Discovery letting us know the Federation survives even further isn't exactly some terrible sin.

 

Do I ever love the game of IDing the streaming Trek background aliens.

When I first saw this guy, I loved that he seemed to be half Hunter and half Tosk. The Hunter facial patterns and the Tosk green, I thought that was such an extraordinarily clever detail, and such a nice Star Trek sentiment, these these antagonistic races would have intermingled and become one over the last thousand years.

Kind of a letdown, but also funny, that it wasn't a clever new idea of the Discovery writers or makeup department, but one of the kitbashes from late season Voyager, when it felt like all the new aliens were just partial prosthetic pieces from earlier designs stapled together in a slightly altered way.

 

I have to agree. The constant one-upping themselves on stakes year after year gets tiresome. The current DOCTOR WHO was very guilty of this... season 1 ended up being the end of Earth, season 2 with two Earths, season 3 with Earth and the timeline, season 4 with time itself, season 5 with the universe. It got ludicrous after a while. And while I did enjoy those seasons, the stakes just don't feel great because they became TOO great each time, every time.

Even SUPERNATURAL, for as much as I love that series, had this as a flaw. But they at least has the presence of mind to make the season stake more personal once in a while... instead of being the apocalypse like season 5, in season 8 it was simply closing the gates of hell. That was more a side quest that will help a lot of people instead of it being an absolute necessity to prevent a disaster. Season 12 was a possible war with the Men of Letters, but it wasn't world ending. It was more personal. And both seasons are, I feel, among the very best of the show.

The phrase 'less is more' really holds true. The quest at the beginning implied a major, potential change or situation. Now it has become a requirement to stop the Federation being destroyed.

Once again, everything hinging on Discovery. It is tiresome.

 

You're right, it did. But that's, what, 2 in five years? The importance lies in the fact that that's where meaty character development takes place. Part of the reason I feel like we haven't gotten to know these characters too well is because all they're doing is bouncing from one universe-destroying threat to another with hardly any room to breathe. We're not getting any character-building moments like we see in, for instance, "Spock Amok" or "Subspace Rhapsody".

Episode one set up the chase, and the possibility that there are great things to find. But seeing a whole "Well, the Fed will fall if you fail!" thing just adds nothing, absolutely nothing, to the narrative.

 

I feel I'm watching two different shows. I never felt I needed these breaks with characters to know them.

But Kovich already implied such. I feel.an issue is being made over something that already existed.

 

Understandable, but you do realize you're kind of in the minority there. One of the common recurring criticisms of Discovery is that the characters don't get as much development as you see on other Trek shows. Picard Seasons 1 and 2 had the same issue.

Kovich was worried about what might happen with technology they don't understand the scope of being in someone's hands besides the Federation. Which is a reasonable concern to have.
Like I said before, one of the things people were looking forward to was a more relaxed season where the fate of the universe wasn't at stake. But that apparently was never in the cards, and I'm bringing it up now because of how it was blatantly illustrated in this episode.

I feel like Michelle Paradise doesn't know how to create tension without these crazy, world-ending scenarios. And it can be difficult. I'm struggling with that on my current novel as well. But making the threat be a Federation-destroying catastrophe does not have the effect, I think, that Paradise was hoping it would have.

 

I never once claimed otherwise. But, then I'm odd in that I prefer TOS and the on mission dialog and such that sheds light on characters by what they do rather than a random hang out scene.

Dude said I threatened the Federation. He was cagey, and secretive to the point he wouldn't let Vance share details. He was pissed off when Burnham opted to let them go. Nowhere did I feel this was not a massive danger to the Federation.

I feel like nothings changed for me.

And again, maybe I'm jaded by TOS, but the Enterprise was the "only ship" a lot. The films doubled down on this. I guess it's overstayed it's welcome for some, but it works for me.

 

The issue existed prior to Michelle Paradise. Season 1 had two different world-ending scenarios (the throwaway line about all life in the multiverse dying due to the ISS ship, and the Klingon threat to the Federation). Season 2's Control arc almost certainly predated Michelle Paradise having a major say as well. And let's not forget that every single season of Picard also featured an existential crisis of a similar level. This is on Kurtzman, not her, I think.

In the end, I think the issue is threefold:

1. Modern Trek has (much to my chagrin) stuck to plot-based writing rather than character based writing. The best stakes in any story are personal, but when interpersonal conflict is limited, it's hard to really leverage those personal stakes.

2. There's no sense of long-term planning from season to season. Whereas something like DS9 had semi-serialization and a long-term plan regarding the Dominion War, Discovery seems to have never planted the seeds for a multi-season arc, meaning it's not building towards anything, but more of the same.

3. As a story with galactic-level scope, setting the stakes of an entire season as something smaller (survival of the ship, saving a colony planet, etc.) can feel underwhelming.

So it's just wash-rinse repeat. And as a result, there's a bit of a "boy who cried wolf" issue across Trek series now.

 

I think you're pretty on-point there.
I'd have liked season 1 of Picard more without the Robot Arms of Doom, that's for sure.
Disco, I think, never got a chance to establish an identity for itself, and I think that's because it was never intended in the beginning to carry over from season to season. It was initially envisioned as an anthology series.
If it IS Kurtzman who's pushing the universe-ending storylines, I hope he stops. I can only imagine how frustrating it will be if season 1 of Starfleet Academy revolves around a threat to the Federation that only the cadets can stop!

 

I'm not 100% sure there's no massive deliberate misdirect with that possible future. We know the Fed falls, but how sure are we that it was the tech itself that causes it? Without seeing the lead up, it might be Mol and Lok hyping up the tech enough to get loads of other factions mad enough to rain hell on the Federation (because that is where they were pointed at).

Slim hope, I know, but I will cling to it.

 

Disco was what I term a "zombie show." Bryan Fuller not only didn't get his original plan okayed, but he was fired before a single shot was filmed, and his original plan for the series from Episode 3 onward was basically totally pulped. If Trek wasn't an established IP and so important to their plans for (then) CBS All Access, they would have scrapped the show and handed the reins to someone new to come up with another show which might be ready 1-2 years later. Instead they passed it on to Berg and Harberts (who were only brought on because they were worked with Fuller in the past), essentially telling them to figure it out with the help of Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman. It's honestly surprising Season 1 came out as coherent as it did, only stumbling badly in the last three episodes, given Hollywood "writing by committee" usually leads to awful dreck.

Then Season 2 had essentially the same problem all over again, with Berg and Harberts fired after Episode 5 finished filming, forcing Kurtzman to take total control. The Control arc came out of nowhere soon after, likely because they wanted to avoid continuing whatever the former showrunners had planned for the Red Angel for reasons of story credit and/or compensation. Then, Kurtzman handed it over to Michelle Paradise, who's done okay with it since.

To be fair, SNW has learned from these lessons. It has spent two seasons building the Gorn threat, but it's still at a much lower level than anything from DIS or PIC.

 

To be fair to the L'ak actor, it's probably harder to act under heavy make-up like that. We can't all be Doug Jones.

 

Speaking of, this episode really lacked for Saru. Which is a shame.

 

They must have faked his appearance in some way, no way they put him in makeup just for that.