One of the many reasons I dislike Star Trek Discovery (for others, see here) is perhaps not entirely fair, since this is something entirely outside the control of anybody involved with the show. Because Star Trek Discovery premiered on the day of the disastrous German general elections of 2017 and my Twitter feed that night was half furious and terrified Germans talking about the elections and half Americans chatting about Star Trek Discovery, which means that I was not exactly positively inclined towards the show before I had even seen it. Though the show itself managed to surpass my worst expectations.
Ever since then, Star Trek Discovery has been something of a bad luck charm for me, since bad things tended to happen, whenever it aired, e.g. we were struck by a family crisis on the day of the last episode before the winter break aired. So when the Social-Democratic Party announced that they would hold their special party convention to take a vote on whether they could be bothered to govern on a day when Star Trek Discovery aired, I feared the worst. Because Star Trek Discovery is not just a bad show, it brings bad luck and the SPD is too wrapped up in their Germanness to notice, since they probably don’t even know what Star Trek Discovery is. Maybe someone should have pointed out that bad things tend to happen whenever a new episode of Tatort airs, since that also runs on a Sunday and is exactly the sort of German made programming these people will watch.
Alas, the SPD voted (narrowly) in favour of taking responsibility and actually governing rather than throwing yet another temper tantrum (though there are plenty of backbenchers indulging in temper tantrums of their own), so Star Trek Discovery might be shedding its status as a bad luck charm. Unfortunately, that does not make it a better show. Indeed, it’s as much an unholy mess as it ever was. Again, I’m not the only one who feels that way. Here is Katharine Trendacosta at io9 metaphorically hurling the show against the nearest wall.
A few episodes ago, I felt like Ms. Trendacosta, just furious at this pile of crap pretending to be a Star Trek show. But this week, my reaction is basically a version of the eight (or ten) deadly words: “I don’t give a fuck what happens to these people.”
Because I honestly no longer do. The few characters I actually cared about are either evil, dead, badly damaged or whatever once made me care about them is gone. And the characters still standing are pretty much the ones I didn’t care about in the first place. Star Trek Discovery prioritizes plot over character (and they actually had several interesting characters), only that their plots are neither original nor interesting and their shocking twists (TM) are telegraphed from a mile off. However, I largely follow serialised media like comics, TV shows, superhero movies, because I care about the characters. You can get me to follow a story purely for a cleverly constructed plot, but even then I tend to drop out, when there is just one stupid twist after another, unless I have become attached to the characters. And most of the others had better twists than Star Trek Discovery.
What is more, one thing that was constant across Star Trek in all its incarnations was that Star Trek was always character driven. You sat even through dreadful episodes (and every Star Trek had its share of those), because you liked those people and wanted to hang out with them and explore the universe. Star Trek Discovery, however, never gives you a cast of characters you just want to hang out with. It came close a few times just before the winter break, e.g. in the time-loop episode, but it always fell back again into its bad habits of just piling on shocking twists (TM) and emotional drama for the sake of it.
Star Trek Discovery isn’t Star Trek, it’s Dynasty in space, just like Game of Thrones is Dynasty with sword fights and dragons. Which can be fun for a while, but eventually gets tiring when the shocking twists (TM) are all there is.
Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!
Last episode ended with the shocking twist (TM) that the faceless emperor of the mirror universe actually does have a face and it is that of Philippa Georgiou who seems to have raided the wardrobe of Ming the Merciless. Is there any reason why the emperor of the mirror universe has to be Philippa Georgiou of all people beyond the fact that this will shovel even more emotional pain onto poor Michael Burnham? Of course, not, but at least Michelle Yeoh seems to be having fun strutting around her command ship in preposterous outfits.
Meanwhile, Michael Burnham is still posing as the captain of the mirror Shenzhou. However, the Empress is not pleased, because Michael failed to exterminate the rebels she was told to exterminate. She also demands to see Michael, so Michael beams over to the command vessel together with Lorca to present him as a gift to the Empress. She also slips Lorca some painkillers, since he will presumably get tortured some more. One wonders why she didn’t do this before, considering that Lorca spent most of the past two episodes getting tortured. By the way, it’s quite telling that Lorca, who is still nominally the captain of the Discovery, spent five of twelve episodes so far (and Lorca wasn’t even in the first two episodes, so make that five of ten episodes, i.e. half the show) getting either tortured or killed over and over again. Now I can’t stand Lorca – and this episode vindicates my dislike for him – but torturing the character for half the episodes he’s actually in is still excessive even by modern grimdark quality TV standards. But it’s also very indicative of what sort of show Discovery is that it seems to find sadistic joy in torturing one of its main characters (and the other main characters don’t fare any better).
Empress Philippa the Merciless accepts the gift of Lorca and has a gift of her own for Michael. She gets to pick a member of Saru’s species. Since Michael has met mirror Saru as a slave aboard the Discovery, she naturally assumes that the Empress wants to give her another slave and picks one at random. However, when the Empress asks Michael to have dinner with her, Michael realises that she did not pick a new slave after all, but her dinner. Because the main course is… roasted Saru!
Yes, this really happened. Star Trek Discovery really had a cannibalism scene featuring a sentient alien. Okay, so Saru isn’t particularly likeable and I’m quite harsh on his character for much of the time (because he’s written as an unpleasant, passive aggressive and jealous prick), but that doesn’t mean that I want or need to see our heroine eat him or rather someone very much like him. Okay, so there is something darkly funny about Empress Philippa the Merciless picking up the roasted Rubberhead’s threat ganglia (apparently a particular delicacy) with her chopsticks and popping them into Michael’s mouth, while Michael tries very hard not to throw up onto Empress Philippa’s impressive golden cloak. And yes, I may have made some jokes along the lines of, “Well, if Saru ever behaves like a jerk again, then Michael has a good way to make him stop.” But still, this is a cannibalism scene. In Star Trek! Worse, it’s not even the first cannibalism scene in Star Trek Discovery – after all, Voq, L’Rell and the rest of the Klingons revealed that they had eaten the dead body of the Philippa Georgiou from the regular universe in a previous episode, though thankfully we were not forced to watch it.
The two entirely unnecessary cannibalism scenes, featuring lifeforms (Klingons and mirror universe humans respectively) who have never been shown in indulge in eating sentient beings before*, are an excellent example of how Star Trek Discovery is trying to be shocking just for the sake of being shocking. And we get more of that in this very episode. Cause with the reunion of Michael and mirror Philippa Georgiou, the show also heads full tilt into soap opera territory.
For you see, Empress Philippa the Merciless was also mirror Michael’s adoptive mother. It seems Michael is an orphan in every universe and unlucky in her choice of parent figures in every universe. Mirror Michael, however, was doubly unlucky in her choice of parent figure, because her foster father was none other than Gabriel Lorca. Except that Lorca – who is a sleazy arsehole in every universe – did not stop there. Instead, he seduced Mirror Michael. At this point, I could almost hear the writers room shouting, “Incest! We need some incest. After all, Game of Thrones also has incest and that’s hugely successful.” Okay, so actually it’s pseudo-incest, since Michael and Lorca are not related by blood, but that doesn’t make it any less icky.
It also turns out that Michael is unlucky in her choice of partner in every universe. Regular Michael had a relationship with Ash Tyler who turned out to be a traitor, murderer and also a surgically altered Klingon named Voq. Meanwhile, mirror Michael had a relationship with Lorca, who was not just her foster father and an all-around arsehole, but also a traitor, since he staged a coup against Empress Philippa. Worse, he persuaded mirror Michael to join him. And some of the things mirror Lorca told mirror Michael, as recounted by Empress Philippa, sound eerily like some of the things regular Michael has been told by the Lorca she knows. Hmm, that was a very big clue… or was it?
Though Michael hasn’t much chance to ruminate on the implications, because Empress Philippa the Merciless hurls all of that into Michael’s face and is about to execute her. Whereupon Michael does the first sensible thing she has done since the series began – she tells the Empress that she had nothing whatsoever to do with the coup against her, since she’s not even from the same universe. Michael also shows her Captain Georgiou’s insignia, which she got back from Klingon-dude-who-is-not-Voq before the winter break. Amazingly, the Empress believes her – remember, Discovery takes place about ten years before “Mirror, Mirror”, though after the Enterprise episode that featured the mirror universe. Though the Terran Empire does know about the USS Defiant, which will get caught in “The Tholian Web” and travel back in time to the mirror universe. Via the Defiant‘s records, the Empress also knows about the Federation and Starfleet, though she thinks very little of either (well, after having watched Discovery, my opinion of the Federation is not exactly high either, though for different reasons) and gives a little speech about how freedom and cooperation with people not like oneself is dangerous and destructive, that is worthy of every rightwing wannabe dictator. Indeed, if you swapped out the terms “Federation” and “aliens” for “European Union” and “refugees”, you could probably hear a speech very much like Empress Philippa’s at every convention of every far right party in Europe, though rarely delivered with as much style.
However, while Empress Philippa the Merciless may have no use for the Federation, she is fascinated by the concept of parallel universes, because that means just so much more to conquer. However, the Empress has a tiny problem. The crew of the Defiant was dead by the time they reached the mirror universe (actually, they were already dead in “The Tholian Web”) and so no one was left to tell the Empress just how to reach parallel universes. But luckily, she now has Michael who should be able to give her the relevant info. So Empress Philippa offers Michael a deal. If Michael gives her the tech specs for the magic mushroom drive of the Discovery, the Empress will let Michael and presumably Lorca (since Michael insists that the Lorca currently being tortured is not the one the Empress is after either) go. After some hesitation, Michael makes the second sensible decision since the series began and accepts.
Some people complain that Michael chose to hand top-secret Starfleet technology to a ruthless dictator, but I still think it was the best decision she could make given the circumstances. Besides, I have found Michael’s continued loyalty to Starfleet and the Federation frustrating and outright baffling, considering how badly they screwed her over. Cause Michael doesn’t owe any loyalty to the Federation and Starfleet after what they did to her and I for one found it refreshing to see that she’s finally started looking out for number one.
Another one who is an expert at looking out for number one is Gabriel Lorca. Of course, he’s busy getting tortured some more, but then an Imperial officer shows up who seems to have a particularly beef with mirror Lorca, because of something unsavoury mirror Lorca did to his sister. And now, the Imperial officer is eager to get Lorca to say the name of the sister. Which Lorca theoretically should not be able to do, cause he’s not even from the same universe and has never met this guy and his sister before. And so Lorca stays stoically silent, while the officer kills one of mirror Lorca’s followers by injecting him with something that causes him to explode. Which thoroughly messes up the cellblock, but still does not persuade Lorca to talk. So Lorca gets tortured some more, until he collapses, pretending to be near death. Whereupon the officer, who’s really not the sharpest knife in the mirror drawer, promptly storms into Lorca’s cell, because he doesn’t want to let Lorca die without having said the name of his sister at least once. Of course, Lorca has only been feigning and so he kills the officer and – as a final twist of the knife – whispered the sister’s name into the man’s ear. “She was nice”, he says, “But I found someone better.”
“But how…” a gasping chorus from the audience declaims, “…can he possibly know her name? Unless…?”
Okay, to cut a long story short, the Gabriel Lorca we have been watching these past ten episodes is from the mirror universe. Which is a shocking twist (TM) that absolutely nobody saw coming, just like the equally shocking twist (TM) last week that Ash Tyler was really a Klingon named Voq.
As shocking twists (TM) go, the Lorca twist has been set up somewhat better than the Tyler twist. After all, Lorca never behaved like any Starfleet captain we have ever seen and is a horrible person all around. Plus, his (well, regular Lorca’s) lover Admiral Cornwell noticed scars on his body that he did not have before. Finally, the fact that Lorca and mirror Michael were lovers also explains why Lorca keeps oozing sleaze all over regular Michael. Hell, I even got rapist vibes from him. Honestly, whatever they do, I hope that Michael/Lorca doesn’t become a thing, because that would be just ugh and not just because of the pseudo-incest (Does anybody ship them?). If they want to redeem Lorca, pair him off with Admiral Cornwell, since she is at least of a similar age. And the fact that Lorca was shown having sex with an age appropriate partner rather than with someone young enough to be his daughter was one of the very few things I liked about that character. So of course, Discovery had to ruin that, too. By this point, I’m beginning to suspect that they intentionally ruin the few things about Discovery that actually worked. Coincidentally, the officer whom Lorca killed happened to be black (Discovery is really not a good show for people of colour, since they keep getting killed off left, right and centre), which suggests that his sister was black as well. So does Lorca (I’m not going to call him mirror Lorca, because he is the only Lorca we’ve seen) have a thing about black women?
Of course, the Lorca twist would have worked much better, if the Federation and Starfleet shown in Discovery had been even remotely like the Federation and Starfleet we’ve seen in previous incarnations of Star Trek. But considering that the Federation seems to be a horrible dystopia now that thrives on slave labour and hands out life sentences for fairly minor offenses, the fact that a Starfleet captain was a horrible person didn’t seem all that unusual. Not to mention that we have seen horrible or flat out insane Starfleet captains before, they just weren’t the stars of the respective shows. Finally, the fact that Lorca is from the mirror universe and no one noticed that anything was amiss for months, even after Lorca murdered his crew and blew up his ship (though to be fair, we don’t know if mirror Lorca was the one who did that), once again proves that Starfleet is not just dystopian now, but also bloody incompetent. Remember, it took Spock about five minutes to figure out what was up, when faced with some denizens of the mirror universe who looked like crewmates. However, no one in Starfleet noticed anything off about Lorca at all with the possible exception of Admiral Cornwell, who is supposed to be a highly skilled psychologist and Lorca’s lover. And Admiral Cornwell never gets around to alerting anybody regarding Lorca. So yes, more proof that this Starfleet is completely incompetent, something it has never been before either, at least not on this scale.
Another thing that makes the Lorca twist work somewhat better than the Tyler twist is that the audience (ignoring those who figured it out long ago) and Michael find out the truth about Lorca at almost the same time (unlike with Tyler, where the audience found out one and a half episodes before Michael did), though in different ways. Because while planning to hook up Empress Philippa with the tech specs for the magic mushroom drive, Michael accidentally discovers that the Empress is extremely sensitive to light. And doesn’t that remind us of someone? When Michael asks the Empress about this, Philippa the Merciless replies that her extreme sensitivity to light is due to a genetic difference between humans in the regular and the mirror universe. Just how the Empress can know this, considering all they know about the regular universe is what they learned from a wrecked starship, is never explained. Nor is it ever explained why this crucial genetic difference between regular and mirror universe humans has never been mentioned before. Okay, so the mirror universe was pretty gloomy in the respective Deep Space Nine episodes (I’ve never seen the Enterprise mirror universe episodes), but I put that down merely to the “low lighting = drama” convention of the 1990s and beyond. And the mirror Enterprise in “Mirror, Mirror” was just as brightly lit as 1960s TV in general. Still, this aspect is just a minor irritation on the “playing fast and loose with Star Trek canon” scale.
So Star Trek Discovery has now served up two huge, if not exactly surprising twists (Lorca and Tyler), in the space of three episodes, plus a couple not quite so huge twists (Culber’s death, Stamets’ coma and near death, the identity of the Emperor, Captain Killy, “Look whom we’re having for dinner”, etc…). It’s enough twists to give any viewer whiplash and in fact, they keep coming so hard and so fast that the impact barely registers anymore. Worse, most of those twists don’t actually serve the narrative, they’re just for the sake of being twisty and shocking. Putting Stamets in a coma makes narrative sense, if only to give the Discovery a reason to stay in the mirror universe, but there was no real reason to kill off Culber, absolutely no reason to eat Saru and also no real reason for the Emperor to be revealed as Philippa Georgiou.
The Lorca twist actually does make some sense – and if they had dialled down the other twists, people would probably be a lot more positive now. Though the show never really gave us a reason to care about Lorca. He was a deeply unpleasant person most of the time, and while the show finally gave us a reason for this – he’s horrible, because he’s from the mirror universe – I still don’t give a flying fuck about what happens to Lorca, because I never got invested in his character. Lorca might not even be all that bad a person by mirror universe standards – after, all, Empress Philippa the Merciless is clearly an awful person and so Lorca who tried to overthrow her might actually be a good guy of sorts – but the show never gave us a real reason to care about him. Besides, this is the second time Discovery has pulled the stunt of giving us a captain and then yanking them away, first by killing off Philippa Georgiou (and early publicity pretty much focussed on her as the captain character) and then by revealing Lorca to be a universe hopping fraud who seduced his foster daughter. Add to that the premature deaths of Dr. Culber and the horrible woman security chief who became tardigrade fodder as well as the fate of Michael and the Tyler reveal and the Discovery showrunners have pretty much trained their audience never to get invested in a character again, because they will only get killed or turn evil anyway. And if your audience isn’t invested in the characters, then shocking twists and space action are the only things that keeps them watching. And you no longer need to watch Star Trek to get your dose of TV space opera goodness, since plenty of other shows fill that particular void, e.g. The Expanse, Dark Matter, Killjoys, The Orville, the occasional episode of Doctor Who, the occasional episode of Supergirl or Legends of Tomorrow, at least one Black Mirror episode, etc…
Unlike Lorca, I actually cared about Ash Tyler, because he was one of the very few genuinely likable characters aboard the Discovery. And unlike the Lorca twist, the Tyler twist serves no real narrative purpose except pouring even more emotional drama onto Michael. Tyler is basically a fridging victim, turned evil just to cause the protagonist anxiety. And indeed, there are signs in this episode that the showrunners are aware that they royally fucked up with regards to Ash Tyler. Because Tyler still oscillates between his Ash and Voq personas, screams all the time and appears to be in great pain. Saru, at a complete loss regarding what to do with him, finally consults L’Rell. L’Rell reveals that there was a real Ash Tyler once and that they implanted his personality and memories into the surgically altered Voq (so the sympathetic Ash Tyler we met was at least a real person, though stuck in the wrong body), but that something went terribly wrong with the process, cause apparently these Klingons are almost as incompetent as Starfleet. However, beyond that L’Rell refuses to help, until Saru simply dumps the screaming Tyler/Voq into her cell, probably because Saru has decided he is L’Rell’s problem now. Whereupon L’Rell cradles Tyler/Voq, puts her hands onto his body (I sincerely hope Voq was in control at that point, knowing how Ash feels about L’Rell touching him) and Tyler/Voq indeed calms down, whereas L’Rell lets out a Klingon mourning wail. So is Tyler gone for good now? Is Voq gone for good now? Has L’Rell somehow managed to integrate the two personalities? We don’t know, though the most common guess is that she exorcised Voq from Tyler and sort of mercy-killed him, hence the mourning wail.
By the way, am I the only one who finds L’Rell’s harness cum prisoner uniform extremely disturbing? Okay, so L’Rell is a horrible person, but those restraints are still pretty extreme, especially considering she is locked up in a cell. Beides, Michael was forced to wear a stereotypical prison outfit in a garish colour that is apparently so identified with prisoners in the US these days that even futuristic space prisons have garish day-glo uniforms in US films and TV shows (also see the prison scenes in Guardians of the Galaxy), because apparently Americans cannot imagine a prisoner dressed any differently, even though the garish overall is a pretty recent development that came up in the past thirty years or so. And coincidentally, in the prison novella I’m writing for the In Love and War series, the prison uniforms are based on the ones worn in this 1930s chain gang movie.
Now I would be very glad to have Ash Tyler back, since I actually liked him and don’t give a fuck about Voq. But if they’re going to put Ash back together again after two and a half episodes, what exactly was the purpose of the whole “Tyler is Voq” exercise in the first place? The Klingons weren’t even willing to listen to Voq in Klingon form, so they sure as hell won’t listen to him in human form. And where will the character go after this? Can he ever redeem himself? Considering the ridiculously harsh treatment of Michael, who did nothing except a single nerve pinch, what will Starfleet do to Ash Tyler who actually was a Klingon spy and who actually did kill somebody? Okay, one could argue that Ash was not himself and therefore not responsible for his actions, but frankly Michael wasn’t exactly emotionally stable either when she nerve-pinched Captain Georgiou. Okay, so Captain Jean-Luc Picard was never blamed for anything he did as Locutus (and the Borg wiped out half of Starfleet), but that was a different time and a different Star Trek. So in short, the Discovery showrunners ruined one of their few good characters and one of two romantic relationships that worked for the sake of yet another cheap twist.
As for the other romantic relationship that the Discovery showrunners ruined for the sake of a cheap twist, last time we saw Paul Stamets, he was in a coma and near death, while his mind went walkabout in the magic mushroom forest, where he met his mirror universe counterpart. Apparently, mirror Stamets has been working on a magic mushroom drive as well (which begets the question why exactly Empress Philippa the Merciless is so eager to get her hands on the tech specs for the Discovery‘s magic mushroom drive). But something went wrong and mirror Stamets got trapped in the mushroom spore network that links the various universes together. When mirror Stamets happened upon the regular Stamets, he tried to get his attention, hence the lingering reflection and Stamets’ gaffe in addressing Tilly as Captain. And now mirror Stamets has regular Stamets’ attention, he drops a bombshell. For apparently, mirror Stamets’ experiments caused the magic mushroom spores to wither and die, threatening the entire spore network and also coincidentally, the Discovery‘s way back to the regular universe.
The glowy psychedelic magic mushroom forest quickly gives way to the familiar Discovery corridors with extra dramatic lighting, probably to keep the show on budget. And within those Discovery corridors Stamets finds no other than Hugh Culber, his recently killed life partner. Apparently, Culber is some sort of ghost trapped between planes of existence now (So ghosts and the afterlife are a thing now in Star Trek? The departures from established Star Trek lore are so frequent by now that I’m no longer bothered, I merely roll my eyes). But in spite of the eye-rolling “meet the ghost of the recently departed” gimmick that I’d be happy never to see again in any TV show ever, the reunion between Culber and Stamets is still very sweet. Basically, Stamets just wants to stay inside the magic mushroom network with Culber forever, but Culber wants him to go back and wake up. We learn that Stamets, being rather brusque and not overly emotionally expressive, is worried that Culber didn’t know he loved him (Don’t worry, Paul. He knew) and that he enjoyed the quiet domestic bliss of brushing teeth and talking about their day together, before they go to bed. And so Stamets and ghost Culber share their nightly routine once more and Stamets even puts on Culber’s favourite aria (which Stamets hates). They kiss and Stamets wakes up, only to find that whatever infected mirror Stamets’ magic mushroom drive has infected the Discovery‘s, too, so they still can’t leave the mirror universe.
Now the Stamets and Culber scenes were a bright spot in an otherwise grim episode. But considering that the production team assured us two weeks ago that we should trust them and that they know killing off gay characters is a harmful stereotype and that we haven’t seen the last of Culber yet, having Culber return as a magic mushroom ghost only to assure Stamets and everybody else that yes, he really is dead, doesn’t really make things any better. Okay, so Stamets got to say good-bye to Culber, but Culber is still dead and for no good reason, either.
Regarding the production team and their repeated “Please trust us, we know what we’re doing” statements, I’m almost as fed up with them as Katharine Trendacosta is. Because frankly, by this point, I don’t trust the Discovery showrunners any further than I can throw them. I don’t blame the actors, not even when they were forced to lie about the show, because what else should they do? But I definitely blame the showrunners for the unholy mess that is Star Trek Discovery. Particularly, I blame Bryan Fuller, Star Trek Discovery‘s creator and initial showrunner (before he left/was made to leave), since he has a history of leaving/getting fired from shows he’s working on (he left/got fired from American Gods since and it happened a few times before, too), while shows that Fuller does not leave (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies, Wonderfall) tend not to last long. And besides, Fuller was the one who said, way back when Discovery was first announced, that Star Trek Discovery would not be boring old Star Trek and that it would be darker and fully serialized, which was a huge big red flag right there. Cause it seems to me that Star Trek Discovery combines everything that is bad about “the golden age of television” (and regular readers know how I feel about that), the over-serialisation, whiplash inducing plots, being shocking for the sake of being shocking, the senseless character deaths and the relentless darkness with none of the good aspects. Not to mention that Star Trek doesn’t mesh with what passes for “quality” TV these days at all.
Apparently, Bryan Fuller also wanted to tell a different story with a different cast every season, much like those American Whatever shows. CBS nixed that, since they clearly don’t want the hassle of dealing with a new cast and new sets every season, but Discovery‘s alarming tendency to treat its characters as disposable probably stems from Fuller’s original plan. But if Fuller’s plan was such a mess, why didn’t CBS nix it earlier, before the show went into production? And why did the people who succeeded Fuller not try to turn around the mess he created earlier, since Fuller was only credited as writer for the first three episodes? Or maybe the hugely inconsistent show we’re seeing is the result of Fuller’s successors desperately trying to turn the ship around?
At this point, we can only speculate just how the hell Star Trek Discovery could go so wrong? The question is: Can they still turn the ship around and give us a Star Trek show worthy the name? Everything is possible, of course, but at this point I don’t see how they want to turn the show around with only three episodes left. We can’t even blame Bryan Fuller for the mirror universe episodes with their many senseless twists and deaths, since he was long gone by that point.
I will continue to watch until the end of the season, if only because it’s just three more episodes. But I can’t see myself coming back for season 2, unless things drastically improve, and I suspect many others won’t come back either.
*Okay, so we have never seen Saru’s species before, but I’m still pretty sure that Kirk or Picard, whether from the mirror or the regular universe, aren’t secretly feasting on roast Rubberhead.
sending...