Discovery, Season 3: Terra Firma, Part 2

 Discovery, Season 3
"Terra Firma, Part 2"
Airdate: December 17, 2020
36 of 36 produced
36 of 36 aired

Introduction

Emperor Georgiou tries to effect a different outcome to the coup attempt on her, one in which her daughter Michael Burnham survives. Back in the "prime" universe, the Discovery crew tries to convince the viewer that they all have relationships with Georgiou and are sad to see her go.

 

Pictured: Emperor Georgiou, being more interesting than the last 3 seasons of Discovery.

  

Writing

Kevin: This is going to be a brief review for me. Just as I have become bored of having the same problems, I have likewise bored of talking about them. Just insert everything I've said about Discovery thus far as if I said it here. Good. That was easy. My specifics for this episode actually are on the more positive side. Even more than last week, having a single focus helped the story land with something that was almost resonant. In a weird way, if this were the only episode of Discovery I had ever seen, I might actually like it a lot. If I was left to infer from context what relationships these people must have, I think I would have been pretty interested in watching all this play out. When set against the actual development we got, the flaws become more glaring. On paper, while it is a little repetitive, I don't mind the "Federation values rub off on the mirror universe" story since, except for Enterprise, it's the arc of every encounter with the mirror universe. The only problem is that this many times going to this well, it just starts to really show the shortcomings of the mirror universe as a longer term story rather than a neat one-off idea.

Matthew: I definitely want the "why is the Mirror Universe different than the Prime one?" story. This episode almost hints at it. As far as the Georgiou character goes, the hints are interesting ones. She grew up in a hard world in which personal attachments led to weakness. She had to make sacrifices to succeed. I can dig it as a character story. But what of the whole universe? How are children reared in this universe? Are they the products of rape or very-nearly-rape? Is there a pair-bonded set of gamete donors who share in the burden of raising them? Is it more like Tasha Yar's gangland war colony planet, Turkana IV? What was the government system of Earth and/or its countries before this absolute monarchy? Was the history of Earth parallel to the Prime universe, or had it always been divergent? Was it a feature of biology? The answer this episode seems to hint at is... odd. If Georgiou can learn to care about other people and see the utility of fellow feeling, why hasn't anyone else in the history of this civilization? If she can change then it seems more down to circumstance than biology, nurture as opposed to nature. Anyway, as far as the story itself went, I do have logic questions: If Burnham was planning a double cross, why did she kill so many of her allies in order to convince Georgiou? It seems like she could have won this thing if she had been a better planner. And there were too many fistfights, and the whole thing felt very small, since it all transpired on Discovery. But things happened, characters actually saw development, and the story felt complete. Untethered to the Big Dumb Season Plot, scenes actually received room to breathe, threatening me with caring about their outcomes. The firefly scene might be the single longest dialogue scene the show has ever had.

Kevin: If they had just cut to the credits after Georgiou walked through the Guardian, I actually would have been pretty happy with the episode. I was annoyed when Michael suggests she shares a closer bond with this Georgiou than the real one, but I let that go. It was the ten minutes of wrap up after that that just drove me bananas. She wasn't your sassy friend with no filter, Culber, she was a literal genocidal monster who casually delighted in mutilating people. The lack of either shading the emperor in her original presentation or giving her some actual redemptive work in the season just made all of it so tedious to sit through.

Matthew: I did not let that go. Everything after Georgiou left was absolute trash. Burnham could not possibly have a deeper relationship with Emperor Georgiou than with the actual woman who served as her mentor, confidante, and surrogate parent for YEARS. It's insulting to us to suggest otherwise. Do they think we can be so easily manipulated? The scene in the mess hall may be the worst scene in the history of this show - worse than the severed baby head. As is typical of this show, they don't know when to quit with their attempts at heartstring pulling garbage - they double, triple, and quadruple down on them. They should be toasting her departure and celebrating it, not mourning it. She was a shitty person who made each and every one of their lives more difficult. Instead, we get teary missives and sappy music.  Just putrid.

Kevin: I remain ambivalent on the inclusion of the Guardian. I don't object per se, but it feels like the same incomprehensible decision to call the episode Unification III. The only people who get that reference are the people most likely to be annoyed by it. Who is it for? I was talking about this with a friend earlier this week about Lower Decks and that show really nailed the fan references in a way that made me deliriously happy and I think it's because LD was consciously giving 90s era fans 90s era Star Trek so the references were part of that world building rather than just ticking off a list.

Matthew: It's a retcon, is what it is. The Guardian was never revealed as some sort of... wandering dude with a sense of humor, who cared a whit about political or military conditions in the galaxy/universe it was situated in. The Guardian was a gateway created perhaps a million (or 4.5 billion) years prior by a race of people who also built Greek-ish temples and who had waited nearly that long to answer a question. How and why the "Sphere Date" should reflect its existence is also questionable, since the Sphere collected 100,000 years of information, which is not nearly as long as the Guardian had gone without contact by sentient life. It's just fan service, and not the good kind (that which expands continuity in ways that are coherent - such as the Enterprise B scenes in Generations).

Acting    

Kevin: Whatever they are paying Michelle Yeoh, it's not enough. I actually felt things in this episode through sheer force of will on her part. She is a gifted actress who has unparalleled control of her face and body to infuse the tiniest act with meaning. It is a sin that is has been squandered on snark. And she's good at snark too! She was the evil mother-in-law-to-be in Crazy Rich Asians and portrayed a similarly imposing and dismissive figure and she was fantastic. So let me be clear that all my problems are with the words the writers put in her mouth than the manner in which she delivered them. Honestly if the more nuanced character she gave us this week is the actual centerpiece of her spinoff and not the two dimensional insult dispenser, I may actually watch and enjoy her spinoff, even if I won't understand how it actually fits into Star Trek.

Matthew: Yep. Michelle Yeoh made this episode fun to watch for 30 consecutive minutes. The gap left by her absence was positively yawning by the end.

Kevin: Martin-Green is also a good actor and I willing to chalk up the Joker performance last week to directorial or writing choices. She did a better job of keeping the intensity inside the lines this time. Also, for some reason this week, Killy made me laugh several times. All the little choices landed for me. Again, Wiseman is a good actress, that is not up for debate. It's only whether the material takes advantage of it or not. And honestly, evil but still kind of too-enthusiastic Killy actually rounds out the parts of Tilly's characterization I have always found too much.

Matthew: I was far more pleased by Sonequa Martin-Green's performance in this episode. Now, half of it was her being unconscious, so make of that what you will. But it wasn't as comically over the top as last week.

Production Values

Kevin: The Guardian of Forever was well rendered. My increase apathy (antipathy?) for the show does not prevent me from clocking good work when I see it. It was a good update of the model that felt like a good riff on the original. Speaking of hauling out the old decorations from the attic, the agonizer booth was well done too, riffing on both the TOS and ENT versions.

Matthew: Yeah, I was pretty pleased with the visual representation of the Guardian. The sound effect when they melded the actor with the "Guardian" voice? Less so. It sounded silly, and then made me question why the Guardian would do it in front of the people present. They don't know who the Guardian is. The Guardian won't be discovered by actual Federation/Star Trek personnel until TOS season 1. So was he doing it for us? Does he know we're watching? Freaky.

Kevin: I loved Killy's hair. It felt like a nod to like Yeoman Rand et al. and I thought it was extremely flattering. My only real critique this week was the slooooooooow moooooo of the tossing of the emblems. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to be spared that many murders but ughhhh.

Matthew: Speaking of murder, there was an effect in the big fight that was totally laughable - when Georgiou "stabbed" Burnham with her big sword, it was on the level of a Video Toaster effect from the late 80s. They added some digital blood, too. I actually chuckled, which I rarely do when watching Discovery.

Conclusion

Kevin: The first two thirds of the episode are a solid 3, flirting with a 4. The question is whether the pointless, baseless grief in the back third was dumb enough to destroy that. Maybe it's the spirit of the season, but I'm just barely going with a 3. The bulk of the episode clearly defined its central character and what she wanted and we watched her deal with almost but not quite getting it. That, folks, comes perilously close to being what we used to call "a story." Now the lead up to it was comically disconnected from that story, but judging this episode for itself, all the essentials were pretty much there, and while it doesn't clear the hurdle of an episode I will watch again, I think it still manages to land in "good" if certainly not "great" territory.

Matthew: I think the first two thirds are a 3, and the last third is a 1. So I'm stuck at a 2, for a total of 5. I will say that I was actually sad when the Mirror stuff was over. Not because it was particularly good, but because it wasn't boring, and it had a good central performance. Oh well, back to the Sisyphean hellscape that is being a Trek fan post-2009.