I'm not gonna lie, I really liked this episode. Definitely one of my favorites this season.
Whether it meant to or not, this episode canonizes a few things from Star Trek Online. The first of which is that the Prime Federation becomes aware of the Kelvin Timeline at some point. Here, we find out why: A Starfleet officer from the Kelvin Timeline's TNG era crossed over into the Prime Universe at some point. Interestingly, the uniform and date given by David Cronenberg (Yay!) do not match up, but that's okay. The Kelvin Timeline is its own thing.
Lots of Michelle Yeoh fanservice this episode; as we not only see her in the white catsuit from the last episode again, but we see her in a solid black version of the skintight workout outfit we've seen on Disco before.
The Burn plot thickens as we find the ship broadcasting the distress signal from the Burn's source was Kelpien. Dun dun DUN!
I'm liking Vance more and more as this season goes on. Definitely a Reasonable Authority Figure, as TV Tropes would say.
Georgiou shows how far she's come by not only shaking Saru's hand as she's leaving, but accepting a big hug from Tilly. Aw.
I really enjoyed the character of Anubis Carl. Very charismatic, but very mysterious. Very TOS, in a good way.
So most of the episode is Georgiou reliving events in her Emperor days revolving around Lorca and Mirror Burnham's initial betrayal. If you pay attention, Rekha Sharma reprises her role of Mirror Landry. She sure loves her some Star Trek; she's been doing VO work for STO for a while now.
Also STO-related, Mary Wiseman gets to play 'Killy' in live-action, and it is glorious. Wiseman previously voiced 'Killy' in STO. The STO folks really need to get back to her at some point; she's been a dangling plot thread for a while now.
The episode ends as Georgiou decides not to kill Mirror Burnham this time and see where it goes. I guess we'll all find out next week.
Posted by Spike (Member # 322) on :
I still don't understand why the crew is so enarmormed with Georgiou. I understand why one might like her as a character on a TV show. She's snarky and all her crimes are abstract. But it feels fundamentally wrong that she is treated like a quirky mildly annoying grand aunt by the crew.
And I don't understand why they waste two episodes on the MU instead of exploring the future given the reduced episode count.
Posted by Shik (Member # 343) on :
This was absolutely horrible writing. Trying to link all the universes together & solidify DSC's place as Prime canon was a half-assed job & completely unnecessary.
Posted by Spike (Member # 322) on :
Cudos to the writers. Mirror Burnham is even more annoying than Prime Burnham.
This was probably the most cringeworthy trip to the Mirror Universe. My eyes rolled back whenever they started shouting pseudo Latin phrases.
It seems that Starfleet of the Kelvin timeline doesn't change its uniforms as often as PU Starfleet. And apparently they don't use rank insignia. And their replicator technology obviously sucks. The uniform looked like a cheap fan convention piece.
So who is Carl? A Q or the Guardian of Forever in Human disguise (given that he was reading the Star Dispatch, which also had an article mentioning the USS Jenolan).
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
Given our current tosspot Prime Minister, I’m curiously immunised to the random spewing of Latin phrases at this point. But even then the overdoing the Romanic Imperial flourishes felt weird given perceptions of the MU born of the original TOS source material.
Hopefully things will make more sense after next week when we can perceive this episode as a (feature length) whole rather than a two-parter, which as it stands is a disservice. It’s been a long time since there was a feature length event episode (Dark Frontier? Not counting the VOY finale and ENT premiere), they don’t seem to do the anymore...
Posted by Brown_supahero (Member # 83) on :
Impressed at Yeoh's acting as a Emperor
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
I did not feel like we needed another visit to the mirror universe. But it seems like we’re setting up a story to show that for all her abrasiveness, Mirror Georgiou has grown in subtle ways that she hasn’t yet acknowledged, much less accepted. Once she was back in the MU, she seemed taken aback by things that she probably wouldn’t have spared a second though for just a couple years ago, and protecting Mirror Saru was just the most obvious example. Yeoh’s unusually subtle acting here was well done.
Mirror Burnham annoyed me, but I have to admit seeing Captain Killy was kinda awesome.
I also love how this episode has basically canonized a variation of Krenim’s theory about extensive time travel messing with your brain. Now, there’s enough wiggle room with the “only two people have both travelled through time AND crossed universes” explanation that I think we can hand-wave why we didn’t see this effect on screen much before. Though come to think of it... it’s actually somewhat similar to what happened to Spock in “All Our Yesterdays”!
...Wait! That’s what they need, they need to get Georgiou prepared by the Atavachron! Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
Begs the question, which is less long-term damaging, time travel or dimensional displacement, and which therefore exacerbates things? The evidence isn’t strong either way. I can’t think of any long-term dimensional displacees (1) who then time-travelled, extensively or not. Nor do we see any long-term/permanent temporal displacements (2) who subsequently moved between universes.
1. e.g. Prime Spock; (Mirror) Lorca... 2. e.g. Dr. Gillian Taylor; everyone from that planet in “All Our Yesterdays” (though actual time-travel would account more neatly for Spock’s mental degradation than “Vulcans in the past were more emotional,” a nonsense explanation frankly); the future NX-01 crew in “E2”; the future Defiant survivors in “Children of Time”; Mollie O’Brien in “Time’s Orphan”.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)