Yes, there's a tonal shift. The show has spectacular scenes that feel like Guardians of the Galaxy or Star Wars. Lots of cool moments supported by world-class SFX. Unfortunately the connective tissue supporting those scenes is incoherent at best.
The entire conflict of this episode is that a pair of scavengers have looted something from a derelict Romulan ship and are trying to sell it. Meanwhile, the Federation wants it more than anything.
But at no point does it occur to anyone to offer to buy it from the scavengers.
Instead, when Burnham and her team of 2 bridge officers and no security backup become aware of the scavengers, they pull a Han Solo and shoot at the scavengers before even trying to talk to them. Only when Burnham is outgunned and outnumbered does it occur to her to say "let's talk about this". Because the writers apparently think that Star Trek is a show where we shoot first and ask questions never.
The scavengers blow a hole in the Romulan hull and to their ship while Burnham is ejected into space. I guess she forgot that she has a personal transporter and could just follow them, because she engages thrusters and lands on the scavenger ship's hull. The ship takes off and she begins trying to drill through the hull with a hand phaser to take out the engines. Then another ship shows up with a tractor beam.
Because this is the "only Michael Burnham can ever be right or succeed" show, for some reason the tractor beam is going to destroy not just the scavengers, but also a whole Starfleet vessel. Michael convinces its captain, Rayner, to disengage the tractor beam. But then instead of going back to her original plan of taking out the engines with her phaser, she just... gives up? Like she forgot what she had been doing before Rayner came along. Then she asks Saru to beam her to the ship, because, again, the writers apparently forgot that they gave everyone personal transporters.
Her boss, Kovich, angrily confronts her about her failure. Now we're at the part of the episode where, if this were Star Trek, the captain would gather her officers around a conference table and ask for ideas. They'd go over what they know, throw out a few ideas, pick one, and go solve the problem. Instead, Kovich delivers the line that unintentionally serves as a satire of the entire 5-season run of this show: "This is the part where you tell me you have a brilliant idea."
This is how you know that all of the fan complaints about this show are falling on deaf ears. Or maybe they hear them and they're just rubbing it in our faces. "Yes, this is the Michael Burnham show. Yes, she is the ONLY ONE in the ENTIRE GALAXY who can solve problems. Deal with it!" It's like a giant "F you" to lifelong Star Trek fans.
In any case, Burnham thinks about this for 4 seconds and then answers that she knows someone who can find them. This is just a plot device to bring Book back onto the show, and Book is a much better character than any of the Discovery crew, so this is fine.
Another reviewer pointed out that Discovery could have found them easily. There were 20 warp signatures to check, and Discovery can teleport, so this should have taken, like, 20 minutes? An hour or two at most if you wanted to be totally sure?
The scavengers, meanwhile, go to a planet that is definitely not a copy of Tatooinne to meet a Soong model android to sell the Romulan thing. He does the camera speed-up thing that Data used to do and it's cool! For unexplained reasons the deal goes south and the android, who is over 600 years old, allows himself to be killed by the scavengers, despite having disarmed them and having two security officers on his side and being able to move at superhuman speed and with superhuman strength.
Burnham, Book, and Rayner come to the surface and pick up the scavengers' trail. They determine that the scavengers are taking landspeeders to their ship (why not transport?). They determine they want to beat the scavengers to their ship (why not transport?) They get on landspeeders - ah, that answers it. They all forgot they have transporters because the writers wanted a scene where Michael Burnham rides a landspeeder across a desert planet, just like Anakin Skywalker.
So anyway, Rayner gets on his landspeeder first, and Burnham is mad that he didn't wait for her. But like... why would he? They're trying to beat the scavengers in a race. Why handicap himself? Book says "we'll just beat him there". How? Do they know a shortcut? Or is Rayner just not going as fast as he could... for some reason?
Then they catch up to Rayner, have a conversation, and Rayner takes off ahead. So this implies that none of them were going full speed on these landspeeders. But why not? Don't they want to catch the scavengers? Are the writers aware that dramatic events need to flow logically from the motivations of the characters, rather than from the motivations of the producers who decided to make a season of Great-Value Star Wars?
At this point we reach the high point of the episode. The scavengers cause an avalanche that might destroy Mos Eisley. The team toss around ideas for saving the city and they come up with the coolest thing I've seen yet in Discovery - they're going to bring the ships to the planet's surface and use the ships' shields to block the avalanche. The idea is great, the FX are great, and the imagery is great. There's this beautiful moment afterwards when Discovery teleports directly from the planet's surface to its spacedock, and the dust and sand from the planet wafts off into space. It's a scene reminiscent of the Space Western roots of this franchise and I wish the rest of the show lived up to it.
Unfortunately one high point can't quite make up for an episode full of incoherent moon logic and stubbornly clinging to the paradigm that Michael Burnham is the only person in the universe that matters.
I understand that Star Trek has painted its writers into a corner with technology. There are only so many ways that you can contrive to render transporter or communications technology temporarily inoperable in order to increase dramatic tension. But at least the other shows do contrive a reason why the transporters don't work. "We just forgot we had them" isn't an acceptable reason for the characters or the writers to make an episode like this.
And that gets to a more fundamental point about Star Trek. This isn't an action movie franchise. If teleportation makes chase scenes obsolete, the answer isn't to handwave it and do the chase scene anyway and hope the audience just turns off their capacity to watch critically. The answer is to tell stories that aren't about chase scenes!
But apparently the whole season is going to be "like Indiana Jones". A franchise set in the 1930s with the premise that ancient artifacts had supernatural powers, and that's your "science fiction" hook. Marvel, Star Wars, Indiana Jones - it seems Discovery wants to be everything but Star Trek.
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