“Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” So goes the quote from famed naturalist John Muir that inspires the title of this week’s episode. This half-season of Discovery, which is being promoted as “Chapter One” by CBS, has been all over the place. Even though individual moments have worked, Discovery’s narrative threads have often failed to cohere, and attempts at standalone storytelling have often functioned better than “arc” episodes. But with “Forest,” Chapter One climaxes in satisfying, clear-cut fashion. It doesn’t solve all the show’s problems, but it does deliver the first bonafide great episode of Star Trek: Discovery, a show that has often lost its mind, but may have finally found its soul.
The Big Bad
Now that we can see the whole picture of this half-season, it looks similar to a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with a Big Bad (or main antagonist) whose rise and defeat provides the season’s narrative backbone. My biggest complaint about the episode, which really reflects on the season as a whole, is that Kol is revealed to be a pretty boring villain. All he wanted was to use the Ship of the Dead to rule over the Klingon Empire blah blah. And we never found out what the Ship of the Dead actually is. Oh well. It was satisfying to see them both blow up.
On a plot and action level, “Forest” clicks better than any episode of Discovery so far. The stakes are clear: saving the peaceful planet Pahvo from annihilation. The conflict is clear: Discovery vs. the Big Bad Klingons. And the tactics are clear. In a series that has often struggled with clear explanations for its pseudoscience, “Forest” is based on a cool tech concept: that to calculate a way around the Klingons’ cloaking ability, the crew must plant two sensors on board the Klingon ship, then make 133 spore jumps around it to calculate the ship’s position from various vectors. This is not only explained clearly, but depicted clearly through some cool effects shots of the Discovery warping around the Klingon ship like a buzzing insect.
What’s even better is how this action scenario puts pressure on the characters, testing them in unique ways. Stamets must endure the physical hardship of coordinating all those jumps, with the agony of knowing that his lover Culber must watch him suffer. Tyler must fight the psychological impact of encountering his tormentor L’Rell on the Klingon ship, struggling through the shock and PTSD symptoms. And Burnham must fight Kol and recover the insignia of her beloved mentor Georgieu. The tension created by all these conflicts playing out at once makes for a nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat second act.
The Director’s Touch
Except for last week’s baffling L’Rell subplot (indeed, it’s quickly confirmed that Admiral Cornwell did not die), the directing on Discovery has been solid. But “Forest” is the first time that certain effective directing choices really jumped out at me. Director Chris Byrne brings a stylish flair to the action that elevates the episode. (Impressively, this is his first directing credit, after serving as AD or Second Unit Director on Hannibal, 12 Monkeys, and American Gods.) Great directing can only do so much with bad material, but in this case, the directing elevates good material to great.
Among the episode’s standout directorial moments:
- The deliberate blurring of the hallways when Tyler and Burnham first sneak around the Klingon ship, an innovative way to convey a sense of danger and disorientation.
- Two match-cut visual effects transitions: the image of the second sensor fading into the computer graphic on Saru’s console, and the planet Pahvo fading into a close-up of Stamets’ eye.
- The jagged, visceral flashbacks to Tyler’s torture and abuse.
- The depiction of the universal translator and well-handled shift from Klingon subtitles to English.
- Finally, the episode’s biggest “look-at-me-this-is-cool” moment: snapping into slow motion when the Ship of the Dead explodes. Lorca and Burnham both get “badass-slow-motion-walk-away-from-explosions” shots! It works because the slow motion is used for a specific purpose: letting us feel the impact of events that would pass by too quickly in real time.
How a story is told is just as important as what’s being said. Byrne’s work on this episode demonstrates the enhanced tension and excitement that inspired directing can bring.
Tyler Cam and a Predictable Zap
After four episodes of dancing around, “Forest” finally, finally deals with Tyler’s abuse at the hands of L’Rell in a powerful, emotionally resonant way. The flashbacks place us in Tyler’s head so we can feel his pain, confusion, and panic along with him, an intimate view into a character’s perspective that was sorely missing with Saru last week. The episode make a choice that I certainly did not expect by actually showing flashes of (horrifying) sex between L’Rell and Tyler. This verges on exploitation for shock value, which was my original complaint about this storyline in “Choose Your Pain,” except that the episode provides a powerful scene where Tyler opens up to Burnham about his experiences. The dialogue directly acknowledges L’Rell’s sexual abuse of Tyler, and the performances hit home. Arguably, it took the series too long to get to this point (it’s a little disingenuous to brush aside Tyler’s trauma for the sake of the romantic hijinx in “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad”), but in the end, it makes the brave choice to confront it directly. When Tyler visits L’Rell in her cell, there are hints that L’Rell still has power over him, and she still has an agenda to enact. Though L’Rell’s motives remain frustratingly unclear, at least the series has acknowledged the L’Rell / Tyler power dynamic.
In the end, despite a few innovative stylistic choices, “Forest” has a very traditional plot structure. The crew works to solve a single problem, there’s a climax, then a resolution. But in a series that has twisted and turned narrative structure with such mixed results, it’s a relief to get a dose of the traditional. The denouement scenes are what you’d typically expect from a season finale, such as a nice scene where Lorca offers Stamets Starfleet’s highest commendation for his work on the spore drive. However, when Stamets and Culber started talking about the nice long vacation they’re planning to take, I instantly knew something would go wrong (another old, old action trope). Sure enough, Discovery’s attempt to make one last jump with the spore drive zaps them into the unknown. Season 1.5, or Chapter Two, or whatever you want to call it, seems to be going in a new direction, with Discovery lost in space much like Voyager and various Enterprises before it. But with the series’ uptick in quality lately, and especially this satisfying mid-season finale, I look forward to seeing where it will take us in 2018.
Miscellaneous Notes:
- The way Discovery is zapped into the unknown reminded me strongly of the video game Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force (still the best Star Trek game out there). Even the debris field looks almost exactly the same, only with purple clouds instead of the game’s blue clouds! Though “lost in space” is a common sci-fi trope, if the similarities continue, I might have to cry foul.
- After Lorca talks to Starfleet, he picks up a fortune cookie. Missed opportunity to have him open the cookie and the fortune is something ironic: “Your journey will soon go on another path,” “Your past will catch up with you.” The possibilities are endless.
Previous episode: “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum”
Next episode: “Despite Yourself”