A Warping Good Time
(Spoilers for this episodes and previous episodes)
As far as midseason finale’s go Star Trek Discovery’s midseason finale really takes the cake. For the past nine episodes, I’ve been mentioning about how the show feels fresh and enthusiastic and how fans are slowly becoming accustomed to the show and what it is. The show isn’t like Star Trek Series of old but more like the new films, which put a lot of people off because whenever we get nice things some people have to be against it. At this point, though I believe that the show has turned it’s negative fans around and this midseason finale will be the episode that they say made them like it so much.
The episode, Into the Forest I Go, continues on from the last episode where the USS Discovery was researching the planet Pavho until they accidentally called the Klingon’s to their location. The Discovery crew in this episode have to find a solution to solving the Klingon’s cloaking technology so that they can destroy the vessel and save the day. This solution puts everyone on the Discovery at risk and especially Burnham and Tyler, who board the Klingon ship, and Stamets who has to put his life at risk by making heaps of jumps.
Firstly I’d like to say that last week’s episode didn’t exactly look the best in terms of visuals and special effects. It was obviously a TV show that seemed to be squeezing out its budget. This week is a drastic change to that as the show hasn’t looked this good since the premiere episode which I hailed as stunning. The visuals of the space and inside the ships, production design, as well as the general cinematography visuals, are the best yet as the events of the episode actually feel connected to shots being used.
Then there is this episode’s story which leaves quite a few quality breadcrumbs to go over for the next two months while the show is on break, still should’ve been released all at once. Despite the whole episode moving at a very fast paced the episode only contained a few surprises and they really just moved the story into what will happen for the rest of the season. We have Stamets who is stuck in some sort of state because the final jump didn’t work correctly and he is saying he can see everything. Then you have Tyler who has been brainwashed by the Klingon prisoner in which he had that extremely strange scene with and he had to tell Burnham subtly that they had sex and it was awkward and upsetting for everyone…poor Tyler. Lastly, we have Captain Lorca, my favourite character, who is back doing shifty things and this time he might have done the most shifty thing of all. Earlier in the episode, Lorca mentions to Stamets that he’s been researching the jumps and making a map which goes through time and space. This was a mention that got me very excited as it would be a fantastic way to connect this series to the new films as the Discovery dimension hops. I now think that it has a different purpose and that maybe Lorca is from another dimension and he has been searching for a way to get back there. We won’t know how it’ll pan out until January but a number of directions the show can go is extremely exciting, we do see him put the coordinates in for the first time which is interesting.
Overall this first half of the first season of Star Trek Discovery has been a hit, not just for me but for a lot of fans. The show’s relentless energy and excitement have been used to its advantage and created a show that Star Trek fans should be proud of. Nine episodes in and it’s still surprising that we have this show and that it exists. Star Trek Discovery is a show that hopefully people will catch up on while it’s on a break and hopefully the show continues its energetic path in January. If you’re not watching it then you should and if you know someone who isn’t then recommend it to them because Star Trek is back and it’s better than ever.