What an Incredible Way to End Star Trek: Discovery for the Season

If you haven’t been watching Star Trek: Discovery, then you’re certainly missing out. And, if you haven’t seen last night’s episode, you need to immediately.  It gave us the story-line that we’ve kind of been waiting for all season.  What we’ve been seeing until now, is a lot of character development.  Which is great in terms of the longevity of the show, but it doesn’t give us that immediate climax that we’ve been missing.  This means that there is some great potential moving forward with both the remainder of the season and even next season.

The remainder of this post may have some spoilers, so please don’t read any further if you haven’t seen the episode.  Discovery was my foray into the world of Star Trek.  I had watched a little bit of The Next Generation when I was a kid, but I don’t remember a lot of it.  I watched the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery as I wanted to see what all the hype was about.  CBS had been raving about the costumes and the set design for months.  They had even pushed back the release date several times, so I had to see it for myself.  I haven’t been disappointed.  In fact, I’ve been pleasantly surprised.  But I was a bit confused.

Given the fact that I’m “new” to the world of Star Trek, I thought maybe it was just my ignorance.  But no, the entire storyline changes the typical Star Trek formula.   The previous series in this franchise have made do with substantially fewer changes. The Next Generation’s premise was basically the same as Star Trek’s, and the difference between the two was mostly in the temperament of the crew, particularly the captain. Deep Space Nine, probably the biggest rebel of the family, decided to send the ship on a mission of exploration and seated itself on a space station, and the rest of the major differences flowed from that choice. Voyager sent its crew into the unknown accidentally with a mission of getting back, instead of looking for adventure on purpose. Enterprise was a prequel set before there was a Starfleet but still set on the most recognizable starship name in fiction.

But, all of those shows still kept the foundation established by the original series.  Discovery had all the makings of a Star Trek show, but it didn’t really seem to understand how to play them out.  But it was last night’s episode – “Into the Forest I go” that embraced those things that make Star Trek, Star Trek.  In order for this episode to work, it needed to build up those characters.  So we knew exactly who the players were and what they were after.  Perhaps this is why the episode worked so well.  In fact, it’s everything that we wanted from a big Star Trek episode.

Will the rest of the season look like this?  Or was this just the way they wanted to end the “season”?  You might remember a post we did a few months ago, where we said that originally this episode wasn’t supposed to air until January.  After seeing it, I can’t imagine why CBS would have let it wait until then.  Yes, we are left with a bit of a cliffhanger, but we also have some interesting information on the direction that some things are going to go.  We also may have got some resolution related to the Klingon situation.  So why would they have left it an episode before?  Other than to entice us back to see what happens with the Klingons, it doesn’t make sense.  But the previous episode wouldn’t necessarily have been enough to entice me back in January.

Did anyone else notice the reference to La Bohème?  Normally, I like these kinds of references in shows, but this one didn’t seem to fit.  At first, I thought it was a coincidence, given this reference to Rent but it wasn’t.  It was intentional.  It wasn’t overly subtle, and I don’t think it really “fit”.  Let us know what you think of the series so far.