This week on Star Trek: Discovery, Captain Burnham is just a girl,
standing in front of a boy, asking him not to blow up a big space thing.
This is a review of “Rubicon,” the ninth episode of Star Trek: Discovery’s fourth season. If you’re
watching this before you’ve seen the episode, don’t worry: this review is spoiler-free.
Well, I say it’s spoiler-free, but I did just tell you the title of the episode,
and if you’re familiar with history — or the meaning of idioms — that’s kind of a spoiler
in and of itself. Why’d they have to spoil the episode with a thematically relevant title? GOD!
Anyway, this was a good episode. Not as good as the best episodes of this season so far — which
I’d still say are “Anomaly,” the second episode, and “Stormy Weather,” the sixth episode — but
better than last week’s acceptable but listless exercise in treading water.
There’s some forward progression of the plot of the season-long story arc here,
there are some important character beats for a few members of the cast,
and there are a couple of hooks dropped at the end that set things up nicely for the next episode.
One problem this episode dealt with, which I was very glad to see, was the character of Tarka.
When he was introduced earlier in the season, Tarka was positioned as kind of a wildcard.
Yes, he’s the asshole genius, which is a character type that can wear out its welcome very quickly,
but his appearance in the show was of interest because he seemed to bring a destabilizing
presence. His plans were big and bold and carried the potential for disastrous fallout. His motives,
which we know a little something about but most other characters in the show don’t, are
mysterious and personal, and his loyalty seemed to be, ultimately, only to himself.
And yet, in the last episode, and for most of this episode, Tarka’s just kinda been there,
standing to the side while Book and Burnham navigated through their story.
I was sitting there watching this week’s episode thinking, “Tarka’s got to do something,
Tarka’s got to do something” — and, lo and behold!
Tarka does something! He throws a wrench in the works! He turns the whole thing upside down!
Actually, what he does isn’t that shocking — it’s pretty much what you were probably
expecting him to do at some point if you’ve been watching the show. But the point is, he does it!
It disrupts the other characters’ plans, it pushes the story forward, and
it has unintended consequences for Tarka himself, which is great. Because,
he’s wanted to do a thing so he could get a thing, and he finally does the thing,
but doesn’t get the result he expected, which leaves him at a point of uncertainty
at the end of this episode. What’s he going to do next? That’s a very good place for that character
to be at this point in the season. So, well done to the writers for getting Tarka back.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for all of the characters in the show.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, including more than once in my reviews for this season,
but we really don’t know very much about most of the bridge crew of Discovery,
and whenever the show does decide to turn its focus on those characters, it only highlights
how little we know about them. In this episode, there’s a brief scene where Rhys and Bryce have
an argument, and it just feels like two randomly selected characters fighting about nothing.
And it’s not because what they’re fighting about isn’t important — they’re arguing over one of the
central moral dilemmas of the season, or at least of the last few episodes — the subject of
the argument matters. But, until this scene, we’ve had no sense that either of these characters have
felt any sort of way about that subject, or had any reason to feel any particular way about it.
All of a sudden, in the middle of a mission, Rhys is like “Man, I’m not into this — Starfleet is
fuckin’ up!” And Bryce comes back at him like, “No it’s not! What Book and Tarka want to do,
that’s what’s fucked up!” It feels like they were each assigned a side of the argument
right before the scene started. And it feels that way because we don’t actually know them.
It seems like the writers of Discovery recognize that the lack of characterization for most of the
bridge crew is a problem, which is good. But, they keep trying to take shortcuts to develop
those under-served characters, with scenes like Rhys and Bryce’s argument, or with the random bits
of backstory characters have blurted out in a few episodes this season, and that’s just not gonna
do it. On a series like this, with a big ensemble cast, characterization takes time, especially for
characters like these who aren’t the stars of the show. We don’t need them to be as deep or
as fully realized as, say, Saru, but we need to at least have a sense of who they are. And we don’t.
The only exception to that, for me, is Detmer, who actually got a character arc
last season that enabled us to get to know her a little. Of course, she’s done nothing of note
this season so far, but as I said, this is a consistent problem with the show.
Speaking of Saru, we get a couple of scenes with him that are not directly connected to
the main plot, that serve to remind us of a side-story he’s involved with. I appreciated that,
because it’s a side story I’m intrigued by. Nothing new really happens, nothing is moved
forward, but it’s just a couple of scenes in there to make sure we don’t forget that
this is a thing. I’m fine with that. The thing about serialized storytelling is
that you don’t need to devote a big block of every episode to every ongoing storyline.
Sometimes — usually, in fact, for secondary stories like the one I’m talking about — all
you need is just a scene, to nudge things forward a bit, or at least to keep that story
in the audience’s mind, to let us know it’s still happening, that there’s still a pay-off coming.
The setup for this episode’s main story felt very TNG-like. The plan was to
engage with Book and Tarka, not to attack, not to overwhelm, but to de-escalate.
It’s a very Captain Picard plan. Sometimes, when you have your characters lay out a plan,
you do that so they can encounter obstacles but eventually overcome those obstacles and
carry out their plan successfully. Other times, you have your characters lay out a
plan so you can then have that plan completely derailed, leaving your characters in a position
of having to figure out what they’re going to do next. Either way can work if done right.
I’ll just say that I was pleased by the choice Discovery’s writers made for this episode.
We have four episodes to go in this season. It feels like something big should happen in the
next episode or two, which would still leave a couple of episodes before the end of the season.
Hopefully that means this season won’t suffer from the “save everything for the very end”
problem that has affected it in previous years. But, we’ll see! When this episode was over, I
was interested in what happens next, and as I’ve said many times before, for me, that is the most
important thing, because it means I’m invested. Am I dying to see what happens next? Am I on the
edge of my seat with anticipation? No. But I’m interested. I’m there. And that’s important.
Those are my thoughts about this episode. Let me know what you thought, but remember:
my review was spoiler free, so if you’re going to include spoilers in your comments, please include
a spoiler warning so that folks who haven’t seen the episode yet can avoid spoilers if they want.
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Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next week for a review of episode ten!