![]() ![]() How Star Trek: Picard Keeps Its Trek Continuity Together By Shamus KelleyĪfter communing with vaguely sentient dust particles, Michael is predictably gung-ho and optimistic about the Federation’s ability to convince the 10-C to stop killing billions of other species with its mining death machine, and I suspect she is likely correct, but I love Discovery for at least giving equal weight to the idea that she is not. ![]() (Sidebar: Does anyone else feel like we learned more about Detmer in this episode than we have during the previous three seasons put together?) From the hydrocarbons that seem to nonverbally communicate group memory and emotion to the general coolness of the structure they somehow managed to build in a hostile environment to protect their young, it’s enough to make me wish we’d spent some more time on this kind of storytelling than some of the political arguments from earlier in Season 4. Since the Discovery crew now has an artificially imposed external deadline before billions of people will be killed, we can only spend so long exploring the ruins of the 10-C’s space nursery, but it’s all fascinating to contemplate. I want Star Trekto show us more stuff exactly like this, is what I’m saying. Aliens are (and should be!) really weird! It’s truly the height of hubris for us, as humans, to assume that other intelligent life in the galaxy-both our own and in the ones beyond it-would look or think like us, or generally exist in a way that’s easy for us to understand. The few glimpses we get of them-or from them, really, as the fear-based memories imparted to the crew on the planet’s surface seem to show their final moments before death-are deeply alien, creepy almost Kaiju-esque creatures that don’t look anything like the Star Trek aliens we’re accustomed to seeing.Īnd I don’t know about you all, but this is the sort of Star Trek I love, the hands-on, mission-based exploration stuff that reminds us all why we thought it’d be cool to go to the stars in the first place. Apparently, thanks to the crushing pressure that would have existed on this planet’s surface, the 10-C evolved to live among its gas layers, floating with bendy, cartilage-like bodies and somehow building reinforced structures to serve as nurseries for their young below. ![]() The best parts of this episode are far and away the bits that hint at what sort of creatures the 10-C might be and show us our faves exploring what was once seemingly their homeworld. ![]() And though she finds some useful clues-albeit not quite in the way she was expecting-none of them are a guarantee of success. Michael is desperate for some sort of cultural context about these creatures, a guidebook or a Rosetta Stone, if you will (ba dum tiss), that might help crack the mystery of who they are and what they value. In “Rosetta,” Michael, Saru, Detmer, and Culber head down to the surface of the dead gas giant that orbits just outside the 10-C’s hyperfield dome, in the hopes of learning, well, anything at all that might help first contact go more smoothly. Much like “Rubicon” before it, this Discovery installment wears its purpose on its sleeve (er…in its episode title) in a terribly literal sense. And perhaps the imposition of that framing is almost entirely artificial, but it does add some much-needed tension to proceedings that this story has been lacking during its midseason run of episodes. Smartly, the episode also puts a firm countdown clock on Earth’s impending destruction, and now we’ve got less than two days to convince the 10-C to call off the DMA (or at least change its course) before billions of lives are lost. ![]()
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