Star Trek: Discovery just handed us a time travel episode and a bottle episode in the same hour, two things that are very near and dear to the Star Trek lover’s heart, and it’s a filler episode all day.
I wasn’t prepared for either one. And what’s funny is, as much as I’ve found a new set of eyes when it comes to watching Discovery, and a new appreciation for the series itself, once in a while you get something like this that kind of muddies the water. Not in a bad way, per se.
This is Star Trek: Discovery, season 5, episode 4, “Face the Strange.”
A Whole Adventure, Stuck in the Middle of a Season
Bottle episodes and time travel episodes are very, very much part of the Star Trek DNA. Normally this would be, in and of itself, an entire adventure. What they’ve done here is literally stick it into the season as what is essentially a filler episode. These kinds of episodes are designed to make room. They’re designed to make room for the budget, because clearly something bigger is coming.
They’re also very much part of the episodic nature of this franchise. I could totally see a bottle episode of temporal stuff happening on Strange New Worlds, just like I could see it on The Next Generation back in the day, or on The Original Series itself. So when you see it in this context, the episode feels out of place as a chapter in a book. I don’t know that I would ever see an author write a chapter that felt like this, that felt so clearly lumped in.
I feel like once they first got into the 32nd century, you would’ve seen them encounter something along these lines earlier, and it potentially would’ve been an entire season’s worth of retrospective. Because the concept is that every one of these seasons is an entire adventure unto itself. Back in classic Star Trek, The Next Generation or The Original Series or whatever, every one of these seasons would’ve been its own episode.
A Literal Bug
Last week, while they were chasing an 800-year-old lead to the Progenitors’ technology on Trill, Moll managed to slip something onto Adira that looked like a bug. What I thought was a bug, as in some sort of listening device, was actually a literal bug. A time bug. You find that out from Rayner.
The episode sets up the way you saw in the trailer. Rayner’s heavy, and he’s rubbing other crew members the wrong way during the search. They come to the coordinates the Trill information sent them to last week, and there’s nothing there. It’s empty space. They sit there, they start running different kinds of scans, and that’s when the temporal bug kicks in.
Before any of that, Burnham is trying to explain to Rayner that he needs to get to know the crew. He tells her familiarity makes them lazy. She comes back with: it’s about us becoming closer, and understanding that we’re more like a family. And that’s when all the time shenanigans happen.
So now Rayner and Burnham are both hopping through time on Discovery, and every time they do, they reset back to the ready room. The way out runs through Stamets. Because of the tardigrade DNA he’s been spliced with, he has an extrasensory perception of time, so he’s hopping into his own body through time, and he wants to help them. That’s how they end up figuring out the solve.
Three Things Standing in the Way
There are three instances they have to deal with to get out of trouble, and the first is Michael dealing with Michael.
They end up in the past during Lorca’s era, when he’s in charge. So basically season 1. She runs into herself, and the first thing out of the younger one’s mouth is “Who the hell are you?” They did a really good job with it. Sonequa Martin-Green has to play herself on two sides, with the older hairstyle and the older uniforms, and I think they did a wonderful job, especially in the context of the episode. She ends up having to nerve pinch herself. It’s pretty clever.
The second is the bridge. Burnham has to go up there, explain to everybody what’s going on, and they have to believe her.
“Specialist Burnham, you’re not authorized to be on the bridge. And why are you out of uniform? And what did you do with your hair?”
Love it. Her answer: “This is going to be hard to understand at first.” And she has to stand there and let all of them know. You really do see the contrast. How does a mutineer become captain someday? Everyone is incredulous about it, and it’s like, wow.
We also got to see some lost friends from past seasons, who should be more important to me than they are. After this season I’m most likely going to do a rewatch, and I’m probably going to do a re-review of those seasons, because I really, really want to watch seasons 1 through 3 with the same amount of understanding that I have now.
The third is Rayner in engineering with Stamets, and here comes Michael. The young Michael. Rayner has to make her understand and believe. He has to make them both believe.
“You don’t trust us. I get that. And from what I know about you, I wouldn’t expect you to.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know that the first day that you stood on the bridge of this ship, you wanted to run, ‘cause you felt you didn’t deserve to be here. You told me that.”
You see him have to dig deep. He has this really good conversation with Stamets, and then later on with Burnham, and he begins to understand the value of the way that crew does things.
The Future Is Very Dark
Of course they’re going to solve the problem. But they didn’t solve it before seeing the future, and the future is very dark.
Come to find out, the Breen are the ones who, in the future, buy the Progenitor tech. You get to see a destroyed Starfleet command, and it’s rough. It’s 30 years in the future from where Discovery is, and Zora is alone. She explains what happened, and she hopes that they solve it, finish it, and fix things.
It’s a bottle episode, but it’s also a very fun and very interesting time travel episode. It’s the classic time loop scenario. They even make that joke in the episode. And it’s so funny seeing all these characters and how they’ve grown.
The Verdict
Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Episode 4, “Face the Strange,” lands at a solid 8 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
It’s a filler episode all day. But that’s not bad. It’s funny, there was a debate online yesterday about whether filler episodes are real, or what they are, or whether they’re bad or good. I was pleasantly surprised by this one. For a filler episode it kept itself engaging, and it moved the character development the way you expect from Discovery.
Drop a comment on the video above and let me know what you think of the episode. Do you agree with me? Do you like bottle episodes? What are some of your favorites? Let’s have that conversation down there. And if you need to get caught up, the playlist for the whole Discovery season so far is on the channel, along with a retrospective that’ll tell you where my new eyes are coming from.
