Star Trek: Discovery

“Life, Itself”

Air date: 5/30/2024
Written by Kyle Jarrow & Michelle Paradise
Directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi

Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan

Review Text

So, here we are. The season finale that — unexpectedly, for the show's producers and actors — became Discovery's series finale. "Life, Itself" is a decent encapsulation of the series at large, showing its various strengths, weaknesses, and sensibilities. It's hard for me to get too worked up about any of it, because, at this point, the season — and series — has been running in place for a while. The show is what it is, the structure and formula are what they are, and the writers have stayed the course. It's not a surprise that it's any of these things. The result is ... fine, I guess? I don't know. Whatever.

I'm not a Discovery hater by any stretch. There are things this show does well and I'm willing to recognize those things. Nor am I a Discovery apologist. With the profligate resources and technology this series has usually had at its disposal, it's a shame that it couldn't find a way to live up to its potential and be less milquetoast in its mission and singular (to the level of monomania) in its point of view.

Michael Burnham — always the alpha and omega on this series. The show's narrow focus on her POV has been at the expense of the rest of the ensemble, who all serve as supporting characters to orbit the star. Meanwhile, the series' stubborn attachment to its "one serialized storyline per season" structure has meant there are few opportunities for the show to branch out and vary the formula or offer up unique character stories. We follow the breadcrumb trail from A to Z in a fairly predictable, linear way. Sometimes we get some useful character insights along the way.

"Red Directive" promised that we would find the Progenitor TECH by episode 10, so we find the Progenitor TECH in episode 10. We were introduced to Moll and L'ak at the beginning, and here we have Moll as Burnham's main adversary at the end. (L'ak is dead, which might be the least predictable thing to have happened this season.) Now they enter the Progenitor's technological realm and engage in a battle for its secrets. But the universe, on the whole, is too small. "The Chase" at least had more than two parties chasing the prize.

One of the strengths of this series has been the occasional brilliantly imagined setting, with top-tier visuals and production design, and within the Progenitors' realm we get an example of that, with a broad entrance corridor featuring expanses of light, and gravity that sometimes follows the rules of Inception (including a fight in three-dimensional space between Burnham and Moll), and massive windows that serve as portals to other worlds. These worlds range from the stormy (a rocky, rainy environment in harsh light in the middle of a hurricane) to the strange and colorful (a planet with aggressively purple vegetation) to, well, volcanic fire. When we get to the final Indiana Jones challenge, it takes place in a field of bright yellow flowers lit with light bars under a dark sky. It's both beautifully serene and eerie. Discovery is good at creating visually distinctive places when it decides to do so, which can evoke a mood simply by existing on the screen, in the way some of the best filmed science fiction does.

So, full points for the visual imagination. What gets substantially fewer points is what happens in this realm, and most of the blame can be placed on the weak antagonist for the season, Moll. There's little Eve Harlow's one-note performance can do with such a one-note character sketch. Moll loves L'ak obsessively, and adamantly refuses to trust anyone else, to the detriment of everyone, including herself — and us in the audience. And that's it; that's the character.

The writers have steadfastly refused to give this character a millimeter more depth or insight, which means revolving the entire season around this stupid conflict was a massive blunder. (Even Book's mission to connect with her over their shared father/mentor — set up as a major thread — has gone nowhere.) Moll's actions here are predictably idiotic, and every time it looks like Burnham has talked her off a ledge into trusting her, there's another Moll double-cross just around the corner. (I mentioned last week that Burnham would probably reveal the final hidden clue to Moll just in time to be betrayed again, and that's pretty much what happens. Fortunately, Moll isn't smart enough to even use the clue once she has it.) Moll is simply an infuriatingly tiresome character on a repeating loop that brings down everything around her.

The rest of the cast remains involved through some subplots, although the results are mixed. Saru and Nhan volunteer to take on the diplomatic mission to contact Breen Primarch Tahal, who's on a collision course with the big showdown between Discovery and the Breen ship formerly led by Primarch Ruhn. The whole thing comes down to a bluff that Saru sells with all his might, but the logic of his bluff's premise doesn't hold water, and it's really hard to believe Tahal would buy it. (Nhan has a line about reminding her never to play Ferengi rummy with Saru, which plays like the oldest recycled line from the TNG-era playbook.) The whole subplot builds to this one bluff scene, and it's a pretty implausible anticlimax. Tahal is ultimately irrelevant to the larger plot; I'm not sure why they even spent time building up to this, except maybe to give Saru something to do.

Meanwhile, Book and Culber take a shuttle to try to grab the portal before it gets pulled into one of the black holes. Culber tags along (much to Stamets' chagrin, given the danger involved) because he just knows he needs to, because his newfound faith in a higher power, or whatever changed him in "Jinaal," is telling him this is surely his key moment. And that moment is ... knowing exactly the right frequency (based on a buried memory of Jinaal's) required to allow the tractor beam to lock onto the portal. It would be positively divine, if it weren't so clearly and perfectly scripted around such a mundane detail. I dunno: Wilson Cruz sells the wonder and amazement of it all, and I see what they were going for here, but it's still a letdown that Culber's season-long spiritual journey is reduced to a standard technobabble plot thing. Maybe it wouldn't feel like a letdown if we hadn't spent so many episodes leading up to it, but that's the problem with Discovery's serial plotting structure overall: Lots of time spent arriving at middling conclusions.

Meanwhile, Rayner commands Discovery through the crisis on the bridge, as the Breen deploy fighters that chase after the ship, which Rayner intends to defeat by igniting a plasma cloud. Later, an ingenious tech plan (if blatantly and conveniently conjured in an instant) is devised to separate Discovery and use the spore drive to jump the Breen ship tens of thousands of light-years away — a clever way of disposing of them without resorting to wanton destruction. By this point, the writers have pivoted to Rayner being the competent leader on the bridge, for which I'm glad, as it's something that would've worked better throughout the season, rather than wasting so much time on all the forced silliness involving his abrasive personality.

So, everyone does their part. As a matter of editing and construction, "Life, Itself" is nicely put together, cutting between all these threads and making sense out of most of it. Olatunde Osunsanmi (despite not resisting the urge to do a 720-degree virtual camera rotation), along with the editors, skillfully weave together all the pieces, underwritten as they may sometimes be.

It all leads up to Burnham's entry into the Progenitors' room of final secrets, but first there's the matter of that last clue. And for some reason, by the time we get to this moment, with the nine triangles and the pattern that needs to be constructed from the riddle of the "one between the many," with Burnham and Moll trying to figure it out, I was reminded of Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson running around Manhattan solving riddles in Die Hard With a Vengeance, and Willis complaining about playing kids games in the park. It's a good metaphor for this season. We have the mystery of life itself, and here we are arranging plastic triangles on a goddamn tabletop. Predictably, Moll botches this, too (after knocking Burnham unconscious because she can't wait two more minutes to save L'ak because Starfleet is going to fail her!), which looks like it's going to get her killed Indiana Jones style, but naturally Burnham continues to try to save this loser, because We Are Starfleet and yadda yadda. Sigh.

When Burnham solves the mystery and enters the secret area, she's greeted by an ancient Progenitor in a realm that transcends time. The Progenitor tells her she will have the opportunity to learn how to use the TECH, but if choosing to do so, she must remain and replace the Progenitor as its steward (again, much like the Holy Grail at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). I know Sonequa Martin-Green has taken plenty of flak for her overly emotional performance on this series, but let it be said she really nails it here and carries this finale, with a modulated balance portraying grace, trepidation, and awe.

The biggest piece of new information here is that the Progenitors didn't create this TECH themselves, but merely found and used it, all those billions of years ago. So even their seeding of the universe was part of a larger, mysterious cycle. (The Progenitors give Burnham a history of life in the galaxy in 30 seconds, an experience akin to touching creation itself. But the plot reveal here is mostly that the whole thing is and always was just a MacGuffin to drive the season.) The possibility that the TECH could resurrect the dead is quickly dispensed with, which makes Moll's efforts the past few episodes into even more of a fool's errand. Surprisingly (or more accurately, because the story has no more time), Moll actually believes Burnham when she tells her there is no magical cure for death.

With the season out of time, Burnham decides (not unreasonably) the technology is too dangerous to leave in the hands of one person or group, so she decides to push it beyond the event horizon, never to be retrieved again. (Representing the perspective of scientific discovery, Stamets is dejected; thankfully someone is.) Much like with "The Chase," it's about what we learn about ourselves in reaching this destination, not what we learn from the destination itself. So, really, we used 10 episodes to learn what we had already learned in the original episode more than 30 years ago.

The rest of the episode is wrap-up, and it's a simple matter of tidying up the season's loose ends — most notably, Saru and T'Rina's wedding, and Burnham and Book's romantic reconciliation. Nothing spectacular or unexpected, but nicely enough done, I suppose. Moll continues to live, for reasons beyond my grasp, and gives a halfhearted smile to Book in a conclusion to their vaporware of an arc. The writers triple down on Moll's supposed usefulness as a character and suggest that her tenacity is worthwhile, and Kovich announces to Burnham that he might recruit her for a future mission. (Why? She sucks.)

Perhaps the most interesting of the season-closing bits is Kovich himself, who has on his office's shelf a bottle of Chateau Picard wine, Geordi's visor, and Sisko's baseball. He reveals his true identity to Burnham as "Agent Daniels" from the "USS Enterprise, among other places." It's a solid reveal, given all the timeline shenanigans and how he's mysteriously played into this show since our arrival in the 32nd century. The Temporal Cold War during Enterprise's run was a mess, but having Kovich tie into that mess given his strange nature makes a certain amount of sense.

That all closes out the season the way it would've before the series was canceled. But because the series got the axe, and the studio allowed the producers to go back and film a coda, we get an extra 15-minute sequence to permanently turn off the lights. This coda is also an apt representation of the season and series at large. It's laser-focused on Burnham, and none of the other characters (aside from Book, and their adult son, Leto) have so much as a line of dialogue. (Okay, Zora does.)

Taking place decades later, we join a much older Burnham at her rural cabin, which is hilariously filmed like a Folgers commercial. (Book should be singing, "The best part of waking up, is melted wax in your cup.") Their son has just been given his own command, and there are some pleasantries and wisdom about leadership exchanged between mother and son. Meanwhile, Admiral Burnham herself is brought out of retirement to see the Discovery off for its final mission — one which will leave Zora in deep space in total isolation for centuries until the arrival of "Craft" — thereby closing the "Calypso" loop.

I suppose "Calypso" is the biggest WTF-level question mark left unanswered by this series, and I can see why they might've wanted to answer it. But no rationale is given for this mission (beyond a generic "red directive"), and the connection provides not so much insight as merely obligatory reference. It's somehow typical of this series to end by addressing a mystery without actually answering it. This series has always been about skipping over the compelling details to dutifully check off the next plot point. I futilely hoped this final season might do some world building in the 32nd century, but, alas, they didn't. All three seasons in this century were myopically devoted solely to their season-long plots, and somehow never managed to build a larger sense of what this galaxy is actually about. (The literally faceless Breen were certainly too generic to count.)

And, of course, we get the cloying and Discovery-clichéd final minutes, which I'm labeling Star Trek: Dis-hug-very, where Burnham remembers all her friends on the bridge. Everyone is hugging and smiling. They even bring back Owosekun and Detmer for the final hug-fest, despite previously and unceremoniously writing them off the show. If this chokes you up, I guess you're the target audience. As for me, I wondered why the writers couldn't figure out how to give any of these people something worth saying, or catching up with where they are now. Discovery ends on a note of greeting-card emotions and no substantive content. I have no problem with wanting to end on nice feelings. But there are less schmaltzy ways of doing it than this.

So, we end on a sigh. Discovery may go down as a strange duck — a series of split personalities between its 23rd-century and 32nd-century eras. It started its run being accused of being too dark. It goes out on a saccharine display of the feels. There's perhaps a place in Trek where these aspects meet in the middle, and have a more intellectually cohesive current running through it. But Discovery never figured out how to grapple with either tone in a satisfying manner. Two things are certain — they didn't crack the code of the serialized narrative, nor the omnipresent protagonist.

Previous episode: Lagrange Point

Like this site? Support it by buying Jammer a coffee.

◄ Season Index

Comment Section

215 comments on this post

grey cat

Thu, May 30, 2024, 4:26am (UTC -5)

Finally this series has been put out of it's misery. It's hard to imagine Star Trek will ever have another series as bad as this again.

0 Stars for series 4 and 5. Pure undiluted trash (1 and 2 had their tiny moment and 3 was vague tolerable).