Kobayashi Marie #37: Star Trek Discovery Sn 3 Ep 10 – Terra Firma Part 2
It’s not food, it’s candy. It’s practically an accessory.
In the mirror universe, everyone has trust issues – and this viewer does too.
Picking up from where we left off last week, Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) is desperate to get her ward Mirror Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) onside to prevent previous events from occurring and presumably try to live in a universe where she doesn’t constantly have to watch her back for coups and assassination attempts.
It gets very complicated through, because it seems that nobody can be trusted. And while this might make for interesting and exciting viewing, it also makes things a bit difficult to follow – mainly because we’ve just been dropped in the middle of the mirror universe and haven’t been able to follow the machinations of where loyalties lie.
So many people are dispatched in a short space of time that the only familiar faces remaining at the end are actually Owosekun (Oyin Oladejo) and a post-vahar’ai Saru (Doug Jones) – although of course this Kelpien doesn’t have a name as he’s a mere slave to the Emperor. But he’s one who has found physical strength and moral courage having passed through vahar’ai, and makes short work of Dr Culber (Wilson Cruz).
And then, just as Philippa looks as though she’s also on her way out – she wakes up back in the frozen wastelands with Michael and Carl (Paul Guilfoyle) looking on.
This viewer’s first thoughts were to get immediately angry because “I woke up and it was all a dream” was so disappointing. But this feeling was immediately replaced with “Is Carl a Q?!” Taking people elsewhere in time and space to test their response in various situations or even put them on trial is something Q (John de Lancie) did on a regular basis with Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart). However, Carl announces himself to be The Guardian of Forever who is in hiding, but still able to create a portal which will resolve Philippa’s ailment. Viewers of The Original Series will recognise the portal from the Star Trek episode City on the Edge of Forever, the first time we ever encountered The Guardian. Then, he was a disembodied voice. Now he’s Carl. Because this softer, changed Philippa doesn’t fit in the mirror universe, and can’t stay in the 32nd century, she’s off to who knows where (well, we do know where but let’s not dwell on that for the time being). The one thing we do learn about her destination is that it’s a time before the mirror and prime universes diverged – but we’ve yet to establish when and where that might be. Watch, as they say, this space.
Philippa gets an admirable send off, with each crew member sharing their reminiscences of her, and it felt like a proper goodbye to Michelle Yeoh too. For once I can say I’m satisfied with the way a female character was removed from Discovery.
Back on Discovery, people appear to be bending rules all over the place. Saru chooses not to report immediately to Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) – perhaps a first step outside of rules and regulations? Booker (David Ajala) is retro-fitting Alexa-type objects to Discovery to help locate the stranded vessel (which is probably next week’s storyline), and Reno (Tig Notaro) whom we haven’t seen in several episodes, is eating in the science lab. It’s all going on.
Incidentally, if you are a person who presses ‘Skip’ when the title sequence appears, then you’ll have missed that this week, it’s blue and backwards to indicate the mirror universe. Back to normal next week, we presume.
Kobayashi Marie #37: Star Trek Discovery Sn 3 Ep 10 – Terra Firma Part 2
It’s not food, it’s candy. It’s practically an accessory.
In the mirror universe, everyone has trust issues – and this viewer does too.
Picking up from where we left off last week, Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) is desperate to get her ward Mirror Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) onside to prevent previous events from occurring and presumably try to live in a universe where she doesn’t constantly have to watch her back for coups and assassination attempts.
It gets very complicated through, because it seems that nobody can be trusted. And while this might make for interesting and exciting viewing, it also makes things a bit difficult to follow – mainly because we’ve just been dropped in the middle of the mirror universe and haven’t been able to follow the machinations of where loyalties lie.
So many people are dispatched in a short space of time that the only familiar faces remaining at the end are actually Owosekun (Oyin Oladejo) and a post-vahar’ai Saru (Doug Jones) – although of course this Kelpien doesn’t have a name as he’s a mere slave to the Emperor. But he’s one who has found physical strength and moral courage having passed through vahar’ai, and makes short work of Dr Culber (Wilson Cruz).
And then, just as Philippa looks as though she’s also on her way out – she wakes up back in the frozen wastelands with Michael and Carl (Paul Guilfoyle) looking on.
This viewer’s first thoughts were to get immediately angry because “I woke up and it was all a dream” was so disappointing. But this feeling was immediately replaced with “Is Carl a Q?!” Taking people elsewhere in time and space to test their response in various situations or even put them on trial is something Q (John de Lancie) did on a regular basis with Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart). However, Carl announces himself to be The Guardian of Forever who is in hiding, but still able to create a portal which will resolve Philippa’s ailment. Viewers of The Original Series will recognise the portal from the Star Trek episode City on the Edge of Forever, the first time we ever encountered The Guardian. Then, he was a disembodied voice. Now he’s Carl. Because this softer, changed Philippa doesn’t fit in the mirror universe, and can’t stay in the 32nd century, she’s off to who knows where (well, we do know where but let’s not dwell on that for the time being). The one thing we do learn about her destination is that it’s a time before the mirror and prime universes diverged – but we’ve yet to establish when and where that might be. Watch, as they say, this space.
Philippa gets an admirable send off, with each crew member sharing their reminiscences of her, and it felt like a proper goodbye to Michelle Yeoh too. For once I can say I’m satisfied with the way a female character was removed from Discovery.
Back on Discovery, people appear to be bending rules all over the place. Saru chooses not to report immediately to Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) – perhaps a first step outside of rules and regulations? Booker (David Ajala) is retro-fitting Alexa-type objects to Discovery to help locate the stranded vessel (which is probably next week’s storyline), and Reno (Tig Notaro) whom we haven’t seen in several episodes, is eating in the science lab. It’s all going on.
Incidentally, if you are a person who presses ‘Skip’ when the title sequence appears, then you’ll have missed that this week, it’s blue and backwards to indicate the mirror universe. Back to normal next week, we presume.
You can catch up on the prior Kobayashi Marie columns here!
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