(courtesy IMP Awards)
While treasure hunts are lots of fun and give a competitively frenetic sheen to birthday parties and even weekends away with friends, they’re not the most efficient way to find things. But then, a party host is not trying to fill a streaming season’s worth of episodes which is precisely what Star Trek: Discovery season five has to do for its final instalment of edge-of-the-seat stories. In “Jinaal” the next step of the puzzle takes everyone to Trill, which gives everyone a chance to go all woo-woo spiritual; while it’s all mystical and grave, it’s also makes you wonder how on earth anyone on Trill gets anything done since every statement must be oblique and measured, every action slow and steeped in all kinds of thoughtful thoughtfulness (and yes, that word was used twice quite deliberately). Still, on Trill we are, where it turns out that the eponymous character of the moment still has his symbiont alive and kicking after 800 years which is super handy since no one else is alive from that period.
Not sure it was the wisest move to hide the next clue to where the Progenitors’ tech ultimately lies somewhere only one very mortal symbiont knows but that’s where Captain Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), Booker (David Ajala), Dr Culber (Wilson Cruz) and Adira Tal (Blu del Barrio) find themselves in an episode where Jinaal temporarily takes over Culber’s body to lead everyone to the hiding spot. Turns out Jinaal quite a bit of mischievous though wise fun, and while he might have been a tad more direct taking Burnham and Booker to where the clue lies, it did give Booker and Burnham a chance to chat a bit more and work together to stay alive when some rancorous beasties attack them (yes, hide the clue in a predator’s breeding colony – genius! But maybe tell them what they’re walking into haha). The next stop on the treasure hunt is eventually obtained, all while the new number one, Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie) badly gets to know the officers under him – he’s angry and surly and it takes an exasperated Tilly (Mary Wiseman) to knock some sense into him – and Tal and Gray (Ian Alexander) realise that maybe a long-distance relationship may not be as viable as they thought. The bumpy connective road continues with Saru (Doug Jones) and T’Rina (Tara Rosling) having their first argument which is scary because these guys are couple goals and no one wants to split up.
VERDICT: While “Jinaal” is a little over-stuffed and a tad too busy, and the Adira/Gray and Saru/T’Rina storylines don’t get quite the narrative oxygen they need, it largely works, re-emphasising that Discovery has been and will always be about connection and how that powers so much of what goes on in the show. The good news is we do get the next stop on the treasure hunt map and the storylines of a number of key characters do get advanced so on the whole, a solid effort that lets us spend time with the characters we love while we still can.
Now we’re talking! While “Jinaal” was a good, if not exactly great, episode, “Face the Strange” – the title alone surely is worth the price of admission – is a classic Star Trek done very, very well. While Moll and L’ak (Eve Harlow and Elias Toufexis respectively) aren’t actually in the episode, they directly impact events on Discovery by inserting, via Adira when she’s on Trill – yes our favourite bad guy twosome made it to the woo-woo planet and surreptitiously got up to no good as is their way – a timey-wimey (thanks to Doctor Who for this piece of time-twisting jargon) spider-y thing that inserts itself into the ship’s inner workings and plunges almost everyone into a time bubble. When we say “almost”, the good news is that, by virtue of being in the midst of some personal transporting at the time, Burnham and Rayner were kept outside of the bubble’s effects as is Stamets (Anthony Rapp) thanks to his tardigrade DNA. Which means, of course, that it’s up to these three to save the day which is a lot easier said than done when the ship keeps jumping back and forth in space and time, taking everyone on a greatest hits of Discovery past, present and to come (which is where Burnham and Rayner discover, via disconsolate Zora (voiced by Annabelle Wallis), what will happen if Burnham et. al fail to get to the Progenitors’ tech before Moll and L’ak do).
They eventually manage to meet up and much of the fun of the episode comes from them trying to troubleshoot solutions and enact them when they are only in each time reality for anywhere between eight to 13 minutes. It’s not really long enough to do much of anything, and it relies on convincing skeptical other crew members that they should listen to out-of-time Burnham, Rayner and Stamets, but it all means that we got some intense, often quite emotional storytelling that is as much about the characters as it is about the events they are trying to influence. For instance, Rayner gets to know many of the crew reasonably well in his various timehops and it’s the little snippets of info he begrudgingly picked up in “Jinaal” about each officer that has a direct impact on how he and Burnham fare. While Rayner is learning a lesson about getting to know people and the power that connection brings (Michael’s a huge proponent of connection leading to greater crew effectiveness), he and Burnham bond finally as they work together as a team with Stamets to escape the delaying bubble Moll and L’ak have thrown them into. They do escape, naturally, but only after six hours have elapsed, and Moll and L’ak have, uh-oh, made themselves scarce. Thus are the stakes ratcheted up, setting season five’s final six episodes up for an even more tension-filled race to the season’s and series’ finish line.
VERDICT: What a lot of fun “Face the Strange” – the title comes, says Trek Movie, from the David Bowie song “Changes” – is, giving us chronologically complicated action and adventure, some deep dive characterisation and a lesson in the power of connection to push through where sheer brute force can’t go. It’s the emphasis on character and connection that elevates and adds real emotional heft to the episode and which reinforces that Discovery has always been about people more than events or things, and as it began it most definitely means to end.
Star Trek: Discovery streams on Paramount+