Ah, the perils of serialized storytelling.
What happens when a show makes a great episode . . . at the wrong time?
This is a review of “Rosetta,” the eleventh 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.
This episode took me on a ride. I’m not talking in terms of its plot — though it
did that a little bit — I’m talking in terms of my emotional reaction
to the episode. It starts out slow, with a lot of recapping and table-setting and throat-clearing,
and that was frustrating, because as I mentioned in the previous review,
it feels like the show has been spinning its wheels narratively speaking for the
last couple of episodes, and I just want things to start moving, for Christ’s sake!
And by the way, when I say that I’m not talking about the episodes themselves being more
action-packed. I’ve gotten a few comments on my reviews from this season where I’ve
wished things would move a little faster from folks saying, “Well, I like a quiet episode,
I don’t want it to be wall-to-wall action.” That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking
about narrative progression. The show is telling a serialized story, and the last few episodes
feel like they’ve been moving that story forward by tiny little baby steps, and it’s frustrating.
So, I felt that way at the start of this episode, as well. It took a long time to
go a short distance, narratively speaking, and I was starting to lose patience with it in the
first act. But then, something wonderful happened: the episode won me over. It turned into, I think,
one of the best episodes of the season, maybe one of the best episodes the show has ever done.
Allow me to enumerate why, in a spoiler-free fashion:
First, once the A-plot gets going, it gets really good. And, in what has become a recurring theme
for the times when Discovery is really working this season, it gets good in a way that is
reminiscent of Classic Trek. Captain Burnham leads an away team down to an apparently abandoned
planet, and while down there, the team begins to experience a mysterious phenomenon that seems
inexplicable at first, but that could also lead them to what they’re looking for. “Crew puts their
heads together to solve a problem” is always a solid basis for a Star Trek story, if you ask me.
Another thing I liked about the A-plot of this episode is the production design. The planet
the away team visits feels like something out of a 1950s sci-fi magazine cover. There’s a point
where they enter this cavernous structure, which has outcroppings of rock that curl up
out of the ground like tentacles — or maybe they were fossilized tentacles, I dunno — but the look
is fantastic. And you’ve got the crew wearing space suits, and they’re in the middle of some
classic Star Trek shit — I mentioned 1950s sci-fi magazine a moment ago — it also feels like a story
out of one of the Gold Key Star Trek comics, which I adore. So, very high marks for all of that.
The B-plot, which once again centers on Book and Tarka, is excellent, as well. After their role in
the last episode felt like an afterthought intended to pad out the running time,
it’s nice to see them back in the thick of it with a story that is engaging and suspenseful. While
Captain Burnham and the crew of Discovery have an officially sanctioned mission to carry out,
Book and Tarka are still pursuing plans of their own. And in this episode we see those plans evolve
and expand in ways that feel natural and logical, but that also make things more complicated and
perilous for everyone involved, and that make me more interested in what’s going to happen next.
Tarka has a very general goal in mind, but how are they going to actually accomplish it,
particularly after the events of this episode? And how will their pursuit of their plans affect what
Captain Burnham is trying to do? It’s all good stuff, and as I said in the previous review,
despite my frustrations with the pace of the storytelling in the season-long arc — which
I’ll have more to say about in a minute — I’m on the hook, I want to see what happens next.
We also get some very well done character moments in this episode, and not just between
major characters — although we get a few of those, too, and they work very well. We get interactions
involving important characters who don’t always get much screen time, and characters who feel like
they should be more important who also don’t get much screen time. And yes, inevitably,
hilariously, we get another character blurting out a snippet of backstory at a crucial moment, but
we also get some much better and more naturalistic characterization from them in the episode as well.
In fact, that instance of Sudden Backstory Emesis
aside, the characterization throughout this episode is really good. After a slow start,
this entire episode is really good. It’s everything I want from this show, really.
And yet, when the episode ended, I returned to that feeling of frustration
that I started with. Because for as good as this episode is — and it’s really,
really good — it still only moves the larger story of this season forward about this much.
Just a baby step. We are really late in this season. We only have a couple of episodes
left. And at this point, the overarching story feels like it has slowed to a crawl.
I’m treading dangerously close to doing what I often say a critic shouldn’t do,
which is to rewrite the thing they’re reviewing, so bear with me here. But,
I feel like if this episode had been the last one before the midseason break, or maybe the first one
after the break, I’d feel better about where the show is. Because we have two episodes to go,
and thanks to the show running in place for the last few episodes, it feels like we’re
going to be rushing through a ton of really important stuff in those final episodes.
And that has been exactly the problem with Discovery all along. And it was the biggest
problem with the first season of Picard, as well. Season two of Discovery had this problem to the
least extent, which might be why it’s still my favorite season of the show so far, but every
season of the show, along with the first season of Picard, has been plagued by atrocious pacing.
It’s not always a problem with individual episodes. Sometimes it is, but often it’s
not. Like this episode. The pacing of the story of this episode is pretty good — slow start,
like I said, but once it gets going, it’s paced really well,
it cuts back and forth between plots really effectively, it doesn’t feel padded,
it doesn’t feel like it’s dragging or rushing, nothing feels like an afterthought. It’s solid.
I only wish I could say the same for the story of the season as a whole. Once again,
while there have been some very good individual episodes, the season-long story of Discovery
has seemingly been backloaded, so that very little happens in the few episodes leading
up to the finale, and then in the final episode, or perhaps final two episodes, we sprint through
story beats that are probably going to be very interesting and creative, but that won’t
land quite as solidly as they should because there won’t be room for anything to breathe.
I don’t know for sure if that’s what’s going to happen, I hope I’m wrong,
but I’m basing that prediction on the fact that it’s what has happened, to one degree or another,
in every single prior season of this show, and in the first season of Star Trek: Picard.
That’s frustrating. And to be clear, it’s frustrating because I like the show.
I’ve noticed that whenever I give one of these episodes kind of a mixed review,
I get comments from some of you saying “I’m sorry you don’t like the show” — and if I’ve given you
that impression, I apologize, because that is not the case. I do like the show. It’s far and away
my favorite of the current crop of Star Trek shows. I like Star Trek: Discovery very much.
When it works, it really works, it’s great. That’s why it’s so frustrating that, on the season-long
scale at least, the writers keep making the same mistakes year after year after year.
Writing well is hard. Writing well for TV is especially hard. Writing well for TV on a show
that’s telling an ongoing story throughout the season is even more particularly, especially
hard. And it’s the easiest thing in the world for some fan/self-appointed critic such as myself
to sit here and point out things I think the obviously very talented and dedicated people who
write this show are doing wrong. But, it’s — and I know I keep using this word — frustrating to see
a show I genuinely like continue to get the same things wrong, in the same ways, after four years.
Like I said, writing well is hard — successfully executing a story you’ve come up with that sounds
amazing in your head is really, really hard. But, in theory, addressing pacing issues like
the ones that have affected the current crop of Trek shows, is not that hard. Actually doing it
is not easy, but figuring out what to do? That’s not nearly as challenging.
Whenever I bring up these pacing issues, I invariably get comments from folks who say that
the problem is the number of episodes. Older Trek shows had longer seasons, twenty-two, twenty-five
episodes, sometimes even more. But that’s not the problem. More episodes won’t fix it. Neither will
fewer episodes, as the first season of Picard demonstrates. The problem isn’t the number of
episodes. The problem is how those episodes are being used to tell the larger story.
If you get an order for thirteen episodes,
and you sit down with your writing staff and you come up with a story arc for that season,
and then when you break that story you realize you’ve only got enough for,
let’s say, nine episodes, there’s a fairly simple solution to that problem — again, in theory — that
doesn’t require you to fuck up the pacing of the season in order to fit thirteen episodes.
You can structure the story in phases — in fact, chances are it probably already falls roughly
into something like a three act structure. So, you build the story to have a resolution at the end of
each act. You close a narrative loop, to give that part of the story a sense of completion,
while still leaving enough unresolved so that you can pick it back up and continue the story. But
before you do that, instead of immediately moving ahead into the next phase, because you
have reached a point of some resolution, some closure, now you can afford to take a breather
from the larger story, and in that breather, you can do a stand-alone episode or two.
And those episodes can be slow-paced, or fast-paced, quiet and character driven,
or rip-roaring and action-packed — whatever you want, as long as they’re mostly self-contained.
Develop some of your characters, tell that perfect one-episode sci-fi
story you’ve always wanted to tell. And drop in a few lines, maybe a short scene or two,
referring back to the larger story so we in the audience know that’s still a thing,
that there’s unfinished business there, but focus on the standalone story of the episode.
Then, pick up the larger story and begin the next phase in the episode after that. Or
two episodes after that. Or whatever. But, by structuring the season to move forward in
phases, with partial resolutions, followed by a breather, then the next phase, you can solve
a lot of the pacing problems that have afflicted these new Star Trek shows from the beginning.
Again — and I cannot stress this enough — in theory. I’m not an expert,
I’m not a writer on the show, I’m not presuming to know better than the actual writers,
and it’s entirely possible that they could structure a season in the manner I’m suggesting
and it would not work out for the better. But it would be nice to see them try something different.
Anyway. Those are my thoughts about this episode, and also a little about this season to date.
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.
If you want to support my channel, go to patreon.com/steveshives
to become a patron or click the join button to become a member. Thanks for watching,
and I’ll see you next week for a review of episode twelve!