Life, Itself is the final episode of Star Trek Discovery, and lord almighty was it a proper Disco experience. A pointless action slog that culminates in no change to the status quo, and all antagonists killed. Things happen for an hour, you feel nothing, and it’s over. A true sendoff for this series.
I’ve been chatting with a guy on another forum about Discovery, and he loves this series. I gently asked what it was specifically that he likes, and his answer was this:
I kinda approach Disco like a Marvel film, you know? It’s a series that has really good production values, awe-inspiring set-pieces, and is generally pretty fun. If one wanted to start nitpicking it on source material accuracy, or things like plot holes, or are expecting prestige-TV-level writing, you’re gonna have a bad time, but most people don’t go to Marvel movies for that - and they probably shouldn’t for Disco either.
It’s also a show that is very obviously only interested in showing a very limited POV. It’s again, very much like Marvel stuff where we really only dig into one or two characters at a time, and the supporting cast are kinda just there to further the character/plot development of the main characters.
Some people lament that the characters in Disco are a little too emotional, but honestly I find it refreshing. The insistence on stoicism in Berman-Era Star Trek is borderline toxic and is mostly informed by outdated toxic-masculinity, and it’s also not really true to the original series/Gene’s worldview either. Learning to experience, live, express, and thrive with the broad spectrum of human emotions has low-key been a delightful aspect of Discovery, even if a handful of times it doesn’t quite do enough legwork to make its emotional moments fully resonate with its audience.
So, in that light, I am happy that there are people out there that like Discovery on an action movie level. I have tried watching it high to see if that would fix anything and it’s just like, I need something to make the action have weight. I’m reminded of Falcon and the Winter Soldier, where I liked a few scenes from it, I liked several ideas from it, but it becomes a big dumb mess as it moves forward, exactly like Discovery does.
There is something that causes shows to continue being made like this, stuff like Picard and Secret Invasion and what have you, just shovelware TV, and I am incredibly curious what specifically happens. Studio meddling? Rushed scheduling? Endless watering-down for mass-market appeal? Do the writer’s not interact with each other for some reason, is there no outline for the season, are these things not done? It feels like these are written in a vacuum, then some references are later sprinkled around later in the game. It’s just such baffling thing that continues to produce trash content, content for the sake of content. It must simply be cheaper, and story must not matter, from a cost-saving perspective, that’s all the makes sense.
Anyways:
Thoughts on Discovery as a whole
Looking back on the past 5 seasons, Discovery is not a show that aims to tell stories. What storytelling there is, is a little bit like improv, where it starts with an idea, then each writer takes that premise in a different direction, and it never really coheres or builds towards anything. Ideas are introduced within an episode, explored briefly in that episode, and then left as a dangling thread, never to be tied up. This actually makes Star Trek’s tendency towards canon an ill fit for what this show is trying to do, it’s more in the spirit of something like Sliders or Quantum Leap, an adventure action series where there’s very little continuity between episodes. If Discovery was some kind of multiverse-jumping premise it might’ve fit its intent more.
There is no single episode of Star Trek Discovery that I can recommend to people, because it doesn’t work like that - every episode of Discovery is one part of an incredibly aimless season-long improv sesh. I think the closest I can get is season 1’s Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad, a serviceable time loop story that was as close to a contained story as the show ever got.
I can’t quite articulate how wild it is that I have seen every single episode of this five-season series and cannot recall a single episode where a good story cohered and was told in a satisfying manner. This series defies satisfaction of any kind. It is content to be churned out and binged, to keep the viewer on the hook until it disappears with the money.
That said, this is the show that brought Star Trek back, and because enough people watched it, we got Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks. That is something. It’s also just very good seeing the majority of scenes being all women or queer characters, it is new and different for Trek and Trek needs genuinely new shit in it.
I also have to hand it to Discovery for never going back to the Romulan or Borg well, and largely creating newish stuff. This is a low bar the other Treks can’t really clear.
Ultimately, I’ll remember this show for the cool spore network idea and Doug Jones’ Saru, one of the most Star Trek-ass characters the franchise has ever made. Everything else is fading from my memory as I write these words, destined to disappear from my mind and the world as quickly as that one Total Recall reboot.
Thoughts on 'Life, itself'
You could not possibly have more clearly demonstrated why this show got cancelled that this season finale.
For some reason, the camera does not stop shaking for this entire episode, even in scenes of just regular dialogue between two characters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MwNvX1JFXA
Michael, having hurled herself into the literal mystery box, finds herself in another dreamscape.
In here, she sees a big glowing point of interest in the distance. She goes towards it and then the set changes and she’s in a hurricane in a rock quarry. A faceless breen arrives and she does protracted battle with it, until hurricane force winds hit and the two of them somehow hold onto a sheer rock face while being pulled horizontally by the rain. Michael Burnham punches the breen until he loses his grip and flies into the abyss to his death.
When the gust dissipates, she asks “the computer” (?) when the next gust will arrive, then jumps as it hits, flying into the air and grabbing onto this floating platform/building. The breen from before then returns (!) but is instantly gunned down by Moll, despite the fact that the breen are 100% loyal to Moll and would have obeyed her every order. To summarize, Moll ordered this thing to go into the mystery box, which it did without question, then she followed it in, then shot it to death, I think just because it’s an alien.
Michael and Moll then team up (?) meaning all that drama from before was pointless.
Outside, the breen dreadnought does not instantly erase Discovery, and instead sends out 60 fighters (???)
Back inside the mystery box, Michael says that the Federation should have the progenitor tech, and Moll says she doesn’t trust the Federation and instead trusts the breen. Michael says she isn’t going to let the breen have it, and so they go back to fighting, this time doing an Inception floating zero-g fight thing where they somehow know where and when the gravity changes and in what areas.
They then fight for another 15 minutes, with jets for fire appearing around them, briefly going into a purple forest, then they go into a volcano area. They don’t say anything really they just punch each other aimlessly.
The volcano area is WILD
Outside, the fighters have reached Discovery and are constantly missing as the ship goes forward. They decide that the ship is going to distract the fighters while Booke gets into a shuttle and goes for Michael. They then state that the shuttle can’t survive all that space radiation so there’s an insanely fast engineering scene where Stamets presents an already-made shield booster that makes the shields better, which they didn’t already have installed on every ship in the fleet for reasons that aren’t stated.
Inside the mystery box, Michael asks Moll to stop fist-fighting and they do then stop, making that entire battle another completely unnecessary waste of 20 minutes.
Outside the mystery box, the Discovery decides to do that thing Riker did in Insurrection where they ignite a random cloud of plasma that is floating unaffected next to these dual black holes (???) which they call “genius”. There’s then this kickass BLAST of fire from one of the fire jets, which everyone on the bridge DODGES before it hard cuts back inside the mystery box.
Inside the mystery box, Michael makes this pretty insane leap to saying that because the progenitors have control over gravity (which the Federation has had since the Enterprise days) they must think “beyond three dimensions, to find what’s beyond what we can see”. She then points to a shadow near a random light that has nothing to create it, and puts her hand there, and that reveals the next part of the dungeon.
They then find this table full of triangles:
With this clue to “make the one from the many”, Moll then puts all the triangles together like a four year old would. We’re led to believe by Michael that this will kill everyone, and that it’s more complicated than this.
IT WORKS
THE MACHINE ACTIVATES AND SUCKS UP SUN POWER
Outside the mystery box, they blow up the plasma and kill all the fighters.
Inside the mystery box, Michael rearranges all the triangles like this, and that seems to also work? This time she’s sent to a dreamscape within a dreamscape, where she meets a progenitor hologram.
The progenitor states for the first time what their technology can actually do. This is, as you’d expect, just cloning, which they used to seed the galaxy.
They then say that the progenitors had progenitors themselves, who may have also had progenitors, etc, and that this technology wasn’t actually made by the progenitors, it was made by someone unknown in the distant past.
Michael states that this makes the technology too dangerous because the breen “could clone an army”, and decides to have the tech hurled into a black hole.
The breen dreadnought is then wrapped up in a spore drive field and warped to the galactic barrier, stranding them there forever.
This seemed pretty fucked up because all the breen left on that ship were the ones that were loyal to La’k, and had overthrown the bad guy breen and were following Moll’s every order, and it thus doomed them.
Saru and Lyrell get married, Michael and Booke get back together.
We then get an absolutely wild scene with Cronenberg’s Kovich, the Section 31 guy, where he tells Michael that the Red Directive is over.
He then reveals to her that is true name is AGENT DANIELS, FROM ENTERPRISE, THEY’RE BRINGING BACK THE TEMPORAL COLD WAR BABY
He shows off his collection of Star Trek funkos, including GEORDI LA FORGE’S VISOR AND BEN SISKO’S BASEBALL (!!!), meaning that this time traveling motherfucker stole important historical items from the rightful families and keeps them on a shelf.
END OF SEASON
We then get what seems to be the one thing they made after learning the show was cancelled:
First, an epilogue showing old Michael and old Booke in their home in the future, where Michael takes a shuttle up to the Discovery, where the go to the old Discovery that is having all its future tech removed (?), where Michael boards, dusts off the captains chair, and talks to Zora, the computer. Now it seems like Zora has been just sitting on this ship for 30 years, alone? Even though she’s a sentient being?
Michael then states that she got another Red Directive, and it is that Zora will have to take the Discovery into an empty region of space, and wait alone for thousands of years for “Craft”, setting up the events of Calypso in the most baffling way possible, to tie up a loose end that didn’t really need to be tied up, but probably fans kept bringing up. Now putting aside the incredibly immoral act of sentencing Zora to this fate, Calypso also shows Craft offering to stay with Zora, but Zora tells him she can’t, because she has a mission (so I guess the mission wasn’t Craft then), and Craft leaves, so like, that can’t possibly be the mission? Also why didn’t Daniels just time travel Disco there?
Aw fuck it
