The final season of Star Trek: Discovery is the ultimate callback, and I don’t know that I expected them to go here. It’s the adventure of a lifetime, and the only place we’ve ever seen one like it is Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Progenitors are back.
Big spoilers for both episodes. What starts in “Red Directive” and culminates in “Under the Twin Moons” is a treasure hunt, and I’m so excited I’m beside myself. I asked Zora what she thought, by the way. She said the best part was when the computer aboard Discovery helps save the day. Fair enough.
Surfing a Starship, and Why the Volume Matters
Out the gate, we start with Burnham surfing a starship. It’s the same scene you’ve seen in all the trailers, where she’s literally outside the thing at warp.
If you’ve seen any of the BTS or the featurettes, they filmed that on a type of volume, and I think that’s really great. The actors are given the ability to genuinely behave like, oh my gosh, I see space streaking around me, I get it. Instead of a big blue screen or green screen, they get something to feed off. Plus all of the reflections on the ship and the reflections on her are genuine, and I love that. It adds so much that’s tactile.
Where This Show Shines
Going into this season I posted a video about what I thought season 5 was going to have, and I said something in it that absolutely applies here. I feel like the series shines its most when it understands that it’s telling a story that fits into the grander narrative. The times they’ve mentioned Picard’s name, Q, other people from the past. How cool is that?
That’s where this season lives. One of the best scenes in the entire series, I feel like, is Kovich and the Admiral having a conversation with Burnham, where he lays out for them that it was the Progenitors. It’s an amazingly exciting adventure, and these two smuggler types they’re chasing are a total callback too.
I’m getting way ahead of myself, because I’m so excited.
Red Directive
After the surfing, we flash back to what looks like some sort of dignitary get-together aboard Discovery, and you find out Saru’s been offered an ambassadorship. “President Rillak would like me to serve as the Federation Ambassador.” That means he’d leave Discovery, and that’s the beginning of where a lot of this adventure takes place.
Burnham gets called away and sent on a priority mission from Kovich. An 800-year-old Romulan ship has been found, and that ship is what starts this entire venture. There’s another ship helping them, the Antares, led by Captain Rayner, a character who becomes more important as the series continues. They send Discovery because of the spore drive. There’s a lot of no information being given to Burnham, other than the fact that she’s got the fastest ship capable of making it where they need to go.
When they arrive, the two salvagers Rayner has been chasing have already gotten there. Rayner knows who they are. A firefight ensues, and as their ship is about to get away, Burnham gets sucked out into space. Her programmable matter EV suit shows up and she manages to magnetically connect herself to the ship. Boom, it takes off, Discovery chases, the Antares is close behind, and that’s how we get back to where we started the entire episode.
The Antares has latched on with a tractor beam, and hull integrity and warp integrity are dropping fast. The warp bubble’s collapsing, the ship can be torn apart, and Burnham is trying to talk a captain we haven’t even met yet into letting go. At the end of the day they have to release it. As soon as they do, there’s what looks like hundreds of tiny little rocket things, all of them going to warp in different directions. They’ve hidden which warp signature is actually theirs.
I’ve always thought to myself, why can’t they just say, well, we saw the ship go that way, so ignore all those other ones and go that way? I know that’s not how it works.
Book Is Back
There’s only one person Burnham knows who might be able to quickly detect which is the real warp trail, and that’s Cleveland Booker.
Book is back, and I’m so excited to see him, because if you remember from my previous video, I was worried he wasn’t going to be. Even if it’s just for this last adventure, I’m glad. The thing I jumped on is that there’s an awkwardness between him and Michael, and they don’t really know what to make of it.
He tracks them down to an antiquities dealer named Fred. Fred is a synthetic. He’s an android, he’s a Data: the gold eyes, the makeup, the whole hair. It’s cool seeing that again, and whoever the young man is that they got to play Fred, he did a wonderful job being that kind of a synthetic. Fred looks through everything quickly and wants to offer them three bars of latinum, because he understands what they’ve got even if they don’t. They kill everybody, including him, and they take all their stuff.
Michael, Rayner and Book arrive a little too late. They get Fred’s body back up to Discovery, and the three of them jump on what I guess are discount sand speeders. They call them runners. “How did you get here so quick?” “Shortcut through the spice market.”
The ship is clearly going to get lost in a network of caves. So Rayner, against Burnham’s wishes, has the Antares shoot down and stop up the hole where they’re going to go. That gives the two of them the idea to distract Starfleet by causing an avalanche. Now the Antares and Discovery have to go almost saucer section into the sand and generate their shields to protect the village. It’s a big political mess back at Starfleet. Rayner gets in trouble and ends up being asked to retire, and that comes back around in the next episode.
Burnham is realizing there’s more and more going on, so she contacts Tilly. Tilly, by the way, home girl’s getting her groove on. She’s met this young man and they’re all nervous around each other. It’s so funny, because we’re like protective parent fans. I don’t know, what are this young man’s intentions with our Tilly?
She helps out, because that’s what she does. She hacks some stuff, Starfleet security shows up, the Admiral gets in the way because he don’t know nothing either, and what comes out of it is that this is the road map, if you will, to the Progenitors. With the help of Stamets, they pull the last ocular video from Fred, and it turns out he did see a lot of the journal. One of the things he saw was the location of the very first clue in this whole Indiana Jones space adventure: a specific place with two moons.
Under the Twin Moons
They’re going to a necropolis for an ancient race that’s long since dead, and this ancient race had heck of security.
Book is being added to the Discovery crew temporarily for this mission. Tilly joins for it too. And this is Saru’s final mission.
Zora is working on translating the diary and finding out more about it. She figures out what a symbol they find is, and she makes a programmable matter relief of it so they have at least something visual to go from.
Down on the planet the defense systems are in place and there’s an EM field. Tilly comes up with the answer with Rayner’s help, because Rayner shows up from far away and says, I’ve been monitoring your stuff, I know what you need to do, you need to think it through. And that’s when I began to realize they’re setting up Rayner to be the new first officer. Nobody had to tell me. He’s way too good at helping everybody suss out what’s going on. I could see it coming from all the way over here.
Saru, because he’s super fast, keeps the drones busy while Burnham does the thing, and they trigger the pulse that turns everything off. They make it to where they have to go, and the thing has been destroyed, because obviously Moll and L’ak have gotten there first. The thinking is that the inscription on the stone was a clue, the next step, and that’s why they destroyed it.
Back up on the ship, Book uses some dark web type stuff. I say dark web, you get the idea. He communicates with them, only to find out that Moll is the daughter of Cleveland Booker IV. Book is Cleveland Booker V. He took his name from his mentor, who taught him everything he knew about being a courier. So according to Book, she’s the closest thing he has to a family.
At the necropolis, at the very last second, they find the inscription. It implies they’re going to Betazed. But it’s written like a Romulan haiku, and there’s a stanza missing. They’re looking around, time is crunching, and when the big stone gets moved to the side, underneath is the bottom part of the inscription, which tells them where they actually need to go. They’re going to Trill.
Underneath that obelisk they also find a little piece. Back on the ship, it slides right into the relief Zora made. When they find all the pieces, the idea is they’ll come together to create some Progenitor tech. They say it several times, and they’re leaning heavy into the adventure of it: it’s the power of creation.
Okay. I’m in. It’s an adventure, and I’m ready for it.
Saru Gets His Moment
Sidebar, character moments. T’Rina admits that they’re in love. “I mean to say that while we may love one another deeply, the logical choice is to remove our relationship from consideration, so you may clearly evaluate which is more meaningful.”
I was like, bro, good for you.
When Saru gets back from the mission, he agrees to join as an ambassador, and he espouses his love for her. And she says: “I do believe it would be only logical, given this development, for us to codify our mutual commitment in a more official capacity.” “Are you asking me to marry you?” “I believe that is the language some cultures use.”
They’re going to get married. That’s so cool. I’m so excited for Saru. As characters go, he’s one of the cool ones I’ve genuinely loved watching grow.
They’re leaning heavy into the nostalgia and the feels. I know they’d said that once they found out they were canceled, they went back and filmed some buttons and things. I have to believe some of this storyline was only strengthened by that knowledge, because they were able to wrap some things up really nicely.
Rayner, Number One
At the very tail end of the episode you find out Rayner was asked to retire early because of the incident. He was also kind of disrespectful with the president. And that’s when Burnham, who’s feeling nostalgic after talking to Saru some more, offers him the position of Number One. First officer. She tells him somebody gave her a second chance once. He kind of zips up his jacket, and it’s like, all right.
I don’t know how realistic it is that a person who was just fired, who just lost their ship as captain, would be okay being a first officer. Now I’m thinking, if you’re career Starfleet, and this is your life, this might feel like a lifeline to not fully lose what you thought you’d lost. So in that respect, I guess I can kind of see it.
The Verdict
The Star Trek: Discovery season 5 premiere, “Red Directive” and “Under the Twin Moons,” is a solid 9 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index. I’m lumping the two together, since it’s essentially a series premiere, and giving that score as one thing.
This adventure is underway. They wasted no time jumping right in. They have a lot of ground to cover and they know it. Things are speeding along, and even the moments where they stop and have conversations feel like they’re taking a breath. At the end of the day they’re ready for the high adventure that’s before them, and I’m excited for it.
It’s a great start. They seem to be wrapping things up while giving us enough intrigue and enough questions to get us through the rest of the season. I can’t wait to see where they go with this.
Are you excited for the return of the Progenitors, and what that could possibly mean? I thought it was weird that it’s been literally 800 years and nobody’s explored this thing that’s supposed to be so special, so hopefully we get answers to some of those questions. Tell me what you thought of the episodes, and where you think they’re going, in the comments on the video above.
