1) I wish this show was genuinely brilliant. I'd settle for merely good.
2) Focus on Detmer in the intro, so maybe they'll do something with all that foreshadowing now.
3) Adira was joined with the Trill symbiont who was once part of Admiral Senna Tal. So should we be referring to them as Adira Tal? Or even Tal? Both Jadzia Dax and Ezri Dax mostly went by Dax in Starfleet operational situations, and even some social ones.
4) The Discoball looking distinctly second-hand. Hooray for continuity! At last.
5) Still riffing on SW with the repair robots.
6) Culber narrating a log. Something that this show has missed for a while now.
7) Get yourself someone who looks at you the way Owosekun looks at Detmer.
8) 'A crew of over-achievers'? With achievements in what, precisely? Have this lot ever succeeded at anything yet?
9) Oh good. Adira Tal is in the hands of Dr Pollard, Starfleet's least competent physician. So that's the end of the Tal symbiont then.
10) Exposition and backstory from...technically, I'm going to say Adira at this point since they don't have their memories all sorted yet.
11) Hasperat getting a name-drop. Hooray for continuity! (Coming back to this. Hasperat was shown both in a soufflé and in a kind of burrito on DS9. The prop burritos were flour tortillas stuffed with cream cheese, red and green peppers. It's fabled in-story for being spicy, the hotter the better.)
12) Aw, Culber's not going to experiment on them. What a pity.
13) To Trill then.
14) Well, that's the stakes laid out.
15) Tedious intro is tedious.
16) Spore drive jump complete.
17) Trill (the planet) not looking much like in DS9 IIRC.
18) Though that could just be the colour palette this VFX team is inordinately fond of.
19) God, Burnham just sucks the life out of every scene she's in.
20) Holo-communicator.
21) Yep, there's Burnham. Just stood there with that gormless, spaced-out look on her face.
22) Just made the Trill peoples' day. Assuming that Tal's memories aren't all lost forever, that is.
23) Scene with Saru and Stamets. Scenes like this make me think that there's a decent show somewhere in here, fighting to get out from under the shonky premise and Burnham and all the other crap. Hey ho.
24) Switching straight into Stamets and Tilly, with Stamets dismissing her idea out of hand. Maybe he's right, maybe he isn't. A better-written show wouldn't have tried to leave the viewer with the impression that he's the one solely in the wrong. Hey ho, again.
25) Burham working on Burn info. Culber dropping in for a chat. Bit like last week, I'm struggling to see where this 'band of brothers' stuff has popped up from. This was never an Enterprise-D kind of a crew.
26) Culber wants Burnham to go with Adira because it's less a medical problem and more Adira needing emotional support. SO WHY SEND BURNHAM?! You send
Tilly if you want emotional support. You send Burnham if you want the whole job ******* up six ways from Sunday.
27) Witless dialogue.
28) Continuing witless dialogue.
29) Well, thank God that scene's over.
30) Adira with pertinent question.
31) Bored.
32) Bored.
33) Bored bored bored bored bored.
34) Did I mention that I'm bored yet?
35) Call back to opening scenes, Culber was doing a health-check on the crew.
36) Quite right Saru, he did indeed not say 'healthy'. Because they aren't.
37) The crew are stressed. Gosh, how profound
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38) "They need to feel connected." Oooh, please say that we're going to see teambuilding exercises! That won't make me want to kill myself at all!
39) Down on the planet.
40) Made them walk to the honour guard greeting them. Bit rude, but what the hell.
41) Welp, now they're worried. Especially at the whole 'speak your names' and only getting Adira back.
42) Trill not a member of the Federation. And it was never explicitly said to be a member world in TNG or DS9 either. Hooray for continuity! Mind, if you want to see how much discussion that one throws up
check out the Memory Alpha talk page on the Trill article. Hoo boy.
43) Caves of Mak'ala name-dropped. Hooray for continuity! Again!
44) Oh good. A Burnham speech. Just what I wanted.
45) 19 minutes in, and told to leave Trill. I'm blaming Burnham's speech, and taking credit for calling it at point 26).
46) Except they won't be leaving, of course. Someone will defy orders, either to help them or more likely try and kill Adira to recover the symbiont, because this is STD.
47) And yep, they're not being led back to the shuttle. But...they walked from the shuttle down to the meeting unguided before. So...
that's weird.
48) Yep, yellow guy wants the symbiont. God, this is all too predictable.
49) Diplomacy, Burnham style.
50) Red guy wants to help. Again, all too predictable.
51) See, that was amusing. Computer listing for Saru all the ways that he could help the crew de-stress. "Therapeutic colouring books." Someone must have sent Silvestri and Maranville to writing classes. That, or Alan McElroy wrote the line.
52) And finally, the start of what will eventually lead to the Short Trek episode "Calypso". The ship's computer is merging with the sphere data and gaining self-awareness. Hello (what will be) Zora.
53) Saru not recognising it as much of a problem. Because this is Star Trek, and computers going rogue is just a Tuesday for Starfleet officers.
54) Meanwhile, in the caves.
55) Which do at least look vaguely like they did in DS9. Hooray for continuity!
56) Maybe it's just me, but having stunned (hopefully!) a bunch of Trill earlier I think I'd be doing what I was going to do with rather more urgency. But then, this series has never particularly understood pacing.
57) Red guy now remembering what they did on the surface.
58) "Say something inspirational". No, Adira, don't let her get started...
59) Talking of pacing issues - let's bring the episode to a momentary shuddering halt for the B plot as Saru invites the bridge crew round for dinner
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60) Honest to God, Trek (and DS9 in particular) used to be able to string multiple threads together in a coherent 42 minute episode without slamming on the brakes.
61) Red guy providing some exposition.
62) Adira changed and ready for the water.
63) Isoboramine (a neurotransmitter in Trill physiology) getting name-dropped. Three...two...one...*deep breath* HOORAY FOR CONTINUITY!!!
64) Modern Trek really has an obsession with changing up a character's eyes to show they're being taken over by an outside force.
65) Back with the dinner party on the Discoball. For some reason.
66) Linus stealing the scene again.
67) Detmer losing it.
68) Tilly attempting to be a voice of reason.
69)
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70) Shame I'll never get to a 420) on one of these. Anyway, party's over because Stamets is storming back off to work.
71) Owosekun trying to stick up for Detmer, who is having none of it and also storms off.
72) Saru left alone and confused.
73) A welcome return to the A plot then, even if it does involve Burnham.
74) And another fine Burnham plan founders on the rocks of reality.
75) Adira gone from the pool. That, or Burnham is just crap at hide-and-seek.
76) Oh, okay. So they're going to dip the stabiliser things into the pool in order for Burnham - a human - to go bring Adira back. Rather than send a Trill in. Because the writers have a pathological need to make Burnham the hero.
77) Not enough rolleyes emojis in the world.
78) Metaphysical trippiness, Trill-style.
79) Burnham speech. At least, I think it was. It whipped me into a light coma.
80) Lots of optical fibres.
81) Memory of the joining.
82) Or, what the previous (?) joining was. Her boyfriend, Gray.
83) More memories.
84) It's a fair question raised here with the joining of host and symbiont, so pausing a minute. In TNG when they were first seen, the symbiont's personality overwrote the host entirely. When Riker briefly hosted a symbiont, he was gone for the whole time that they were joined. DS9 changed that up some - the host is the personality for the most part, the symbiont providing the memories and experiences. Though obviously no-one's personality stays exactly the same after joining, you can't gain the memories of multiple lifetimes over potentially hundreds of years and come out the other end exactly as you went in. But it's why Ezri Dax was wildly different from Jadzia, and Jadzia was different from Curzon before that, and so on. YMMV on how to explain away the difference from TNG to DS9 with Trills - I believe background info from people involved in the show was some are from the North and some the South, because that's always the catch-all (see the Romulan forehead thing that was explained in STP).
85) If it wasn't already obvious because of...*gestures*...this conversation makes it absolutely clear that Gray is dead meat.
86) Still say Tilly would have been the better choice down here.
87) Boxes and tapestries as metaphors.
88) I'm kinda certain that ships have warnings regarding stuff like rogue asteroids. And navigational deflectors for stuff like rogue asteroids. Maybe the Burn did away with everything useful like that.
89) Anyway, that's the whole story. Her boyfriend died, and all she got was a lousy slug in her abdomen.
90) Presumably that's all the memories headed towards reintegration now. Must make for some strangeness, remembering dating their own self.
91) Time to go, and move the plot forward rather than back.
92) I hope Burnham's dreads survived the dip. Actually, that's a lie. I couldn't give half a solitary ****.
93) Adira is now Adira Tal. And all the Tals.
94) Apology from Yellow guy.
95) Leader lady wants Tal to stay.
96) Tal still going with the Discoball, because otherwise they wouldn't be in the series.
97) Tilly back to give Saru a pep talk.
98) And with a Tuesday joke as well.
TV Tropes alive and well in the Trek universe.
99) This episode is sure running on long.
100) Stamets back with an apology.
101) Detmer checking in with Culber, and admitting that she's not right.
102) TOS sickbay sounds in the background make me happy.
103) Shuttlebay has been turned into a Holo-cinema. Stamets and Detmer hug it out.
104) Saru explaining to Culber that it was the sphere data wot did it. So that'll be him booked in for psychiatric examination! But explains his utter lack of surprise at 53).
105) Tal already did the math re: coordinates to look for the Federation. Burnham will be peeved that she didn't get to be the one to save the day. Maybe she'll find a way to take the credit.
106) Tal can still play the cello then.
107) And they can still see Gray. There were certain Trill ceremonies that put hosts in touch with former selves, guess something similar is going on there.
108) All that effort on VFX, to spend it on making a ship that ugly
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109) "Next time..." "Let's show them who we are." What, a bunch of galactic screw-ups?