Kobayashi Marie Ongoing Series

Kobayashi Marie #22: Star Trek Discovery Sn. 2 Ep. 7

Kobayashi Marie

Kobayashi Marie continues its adventure into the second season that is Star Trek Discovery with Episode 7 – Light and Shadows

“We’re always in a fight for the future”

Just when episodes of Discovery seem to be moving along nicely, along comes one which is little more than a filler. A decent filler, but filler nonetheless.

Light and Shadows is one such episode.

A few snippets of information are dropped in or teased, but the essential story is actually quite slight, and feels like it has been packed out to fill the required running time. In my opinion.

The important facts appear to boil down to this: Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) discovers that her mother Amanda (Mia Kirshner) is hiding Spock (Ethan Peck), and manages to take custody of him. She works out that his babblings are the co-ordinates of the planet Thalos IV – significant in Star Trek lore due to its appearance in pilot episode The Cage and subsequent episodes The Menagerie.

All the scenes featuring the space/time rift seemed only to justify a small, readily resolved bit of needle between Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) and Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif). It may well come back into play later, but in this episode it just felt a little too disconnected – after all, we’ve been building up to the whole encounter with Spock for six weeks, and when we finally meet him, why would we want to spend time elsewhere? It doesn’t make sense.

We learn that Leland (Alan Van Sprang) is clearly up to no good but has been thwarted this time around by Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) for her own ends – the information shared here will clearly be important later on, but again has little connection with Spock right now and I could have done without it.

We see something strange happening with Airiam (Hannah Cheesman) as a result of contact with the rift, and this definitely must come into play at a later date.

I will admit however that the fisticuffs between Burnham and Georgiou were very good to watch.

But surely The Episode In Which We Finally Get To See Spock shouldn’t have been such a disappointment?

Kobayashi Marie will be back on Friday with an all new column for Season 2 of Star Trek Discovery

You can catch up on the prior columns here!

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