*(1 point of light out of 5)
4000 throats may be cut in one night. Unless you have to saw through that web of sinewy throat armour Klingons suddenly grew in the mid-2250s.
Oh, Klingons. The war is done! Deflate your heads to half-mast… AND DON THE WIGS OF PEACE! And build a ship of war! And fight amongst yourselves in grim, dark Fire Caves until we can find a dragon or a white walker... Oh, what luck! L’Rell had an out-of-wedlock, out-of-uterus, secret albino baby and this is apparently a threat to her reign, as is her human-looking lover Voq (Ash).
Spock’s mother Amanda has impulsively stolen his medical files and brought them to Michael to decrypt. Michael wisely gets Pike involved, who calls Spock’s hospital. Captain Diego Vela of Starbase 5 teases Pike & his bisabuela Nena as the only ones in the quadrant who still communicate on screens. Are we sure the patients aren’t running this asylum? Screens are a Starfleet standard for decades in the past, present, and even centuries to come. Screens are cost-effective and a lot less distracting than Star Wars holograms. But do go on, tell us how everyone’s been using holograms forever in this tiny window of future history and Pike’s the weirdo.
Anyhoo, speaking of weirdos, Spock was diagnosed with “Extreme empathy deficit” and they say he killed his doctors while escaping. Amanda and Michael each think this could be their fault. In childhood, Michael was pursued by Logic Extremist terrorists who bombed her school. In an attempt to keep Spock safe she drove him away from her with cruel words that are still hanging between them. The mysterious Red Angel was also involved because none of this is complicated enough.
May Ahern, from Tilly’s junior high, is long dead but big as life. Tilly stops dead for not less than 40 seconds to scream at her noisy hallucination during a footrace, then she catches up to and surpasses the other runners in moments. On Take a Cadet to Work Day, Tilly also yells at May in front of Pike. Stamets conducts a space exorcism revealing May as a Multidimensional multicellular fungal parasite. (Which I can’t say twice or spell once.)
Section 31’s Georgiou arrives on Ko-Nosh in a technologically advanced whirl of destruction, killing L’Rell and Ash’s foes. She insists on Mother L’Rell strengthening her rule by faking Ash & the baby’s deaths using some icky cloned heads and dumping the kid on the Boreth monks. “The freaks are more fun,” says Georgiou (to eat, she does not add).
For no reason I can determine, Emperor Georgiou is claiming to be “Retired Captain” Georgiou to the very people in whose digestive tracts Captain Georgiou “retired”.
I could have gone the rest of my life without more of the Giger-style people-eating isolationist Klingons and I’m sure not thrilled by the approach of even more Section 31 stories. That said, Chieffo, Yeoh, and Latif are very talented and lovely performers.
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