Written by: Dana Horgan & Davy Perez
Directed by: Marja Vrvilo
I think the Doctor Who reference was more in the writing than anything else, in the sense that it really pushed the suspension of disbelief where no-one has gone before. It was kinda weird for Star Trek, but i’m also a whovian, so I accepted that. The dream sequence was cute, and i thought the overall rhythm of the episode was okay. Still, it would have made a lot of sense if Batel travelled into the past to fight the Vezda and become the Beholder in the past.
Batel regenerated into the statue. Including glowy regeneration energy hands.
She’s the Doctor and the statue is a portal to another universe, on the other side of which Tecteun finds her. And then, MUCH later, she comes back to spend time with Pelia. That was her in the Tardis in The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail, trying to watch over Pike.
I’m going to stop headcanoning now.
Don’t, i like it!
The plot moved so quickly here! I have so many questions about what happened but the episode seemed to not want me to ask myself those, and instead focus on how important the stakes were…not a huge fan of that.
Yeah, the whole discussion about Batel’s combined genetic memories just happened way too quickly. I might have been on board with the explanation, but it really took me out of the episode to see how they rushed through figuring out everything. No time for untangling a mystery, let’s dash off to the next bit.
Looking back, it felt like some of Discovery’s bad habits leaked into SNW this season and I’m a little underwhelmed. Still love the show, but I hope the remaining seasons are better.
Removed by mod
Pike got his “that’s rough buddy” moment.
I am very glad we got to revisit this storyline. There was a lot left to explain in that dimensional prison, and using it as a finale to neatly wrap a lot of different plot threads was great. I was really interested in that guardian figure from the earlier episode, knowing now that it ended up being Batel in a kind of asymptotic time loop is pretty crazy, but it is a very poetic ending. She can’t really live a life with Pike, and this is an ending that gives her meaning.
When Batel’s hands started glowing for a moment I genuinely thought she was going to regenerate à la time lord. And in the end I guess she kind of did! I half expected her to start babbling about some cosmic koala when she had stars in her eyes, I’m glad she didn’t. The ending took a serious tone, and that worked very well.
This episode uses what is effectively a dream sequence and those you have to be careful with. It works well here because the concept of time, cause, and effect have already been established as in play here so even if it never turned out as the actual in-universe outcome, it still feels like it has meaning. I note that the show giving us Pike’s alternate future had he not (will he have had not? tenses are hard with time travel) got in the accident for me cements the fact that he really is going to end up as his future vision told him. There’s no avoiding it now.
I am not sure I really followed a lot of the treknobabble in this one. I don’t get how the entity managed to reconstruct itself, nor why there was a whole debate about phasers being complementary instead of additive. But as a plot device to get things moving it was serviceable. Also, just a note, if you’re firing a stream of ANTI protons into the atmosphere, one would expect the antimatter to annihilate on impact with the upper atmosphere. I did find it hilarious that there’s two massive red lasers with the same power as a star beaming in through the balcony and none of the natives there were bothered by it enough to get out of their seats!
The planet design was really cool, the big floating churchey architecture was giving me Halo vibes. It’s interesting that the planet has no warp travel but still makes contact with alien races. I wonder if then the Feds would bother to help them out in the aftermath, or if they just left them to it. They kind of should take responsibility, given it was them that unleashed the evil in the first place. Even if it’s just to loan them that eye regeneration thing for a few hours.
Overall, this was a nice finale, and given it didn’t end on a pointless cliffhanger, and wrapped up most of the threads well, one of the better ones as TV dramas go.
I liked the little suggestion by Pelia at the start of the episode that she spent time with a time travelling doctor. The rest of the episode the writing felt a bit too rushed.
I’m happy that Pike got the chance to live a happy life, but Batel’s story felt pretty weak and quickly thrown together.
This season has been -okay-, weakest season so far, but still better than Discovery.
Didn’t liked much the episode, best parts the Kirk-Spock interactions, and Im not a TOS guy.
The Pike finale with Batel was bad, also it was annunciated before, so no surprise when it happens which does it worst.
Worst SNW season so far. Not terribly bad, ,but definitely not good
Kirk-Spock interactions
I don’t know, it reminded me a BIT too much of how Supernatural handled (or didn’t really) two certain characters.
Loved SNW so far
But yeah, this season was overwhelmingly mediocre
Though I am deeply grateful that there is no cliffhanger.
You and I had a mind meld, because I was thinking exactly that
In a season of genre experimentation they couldn’t decide whether to end with a Doctor Who episode or a Doctor Strange episode, so why not both?
2/10
Worse sequel to the season’s so-far worst episode.
Felt like the writers were like “wouldn’t it be cool if we do this… and that… and this again…”
“science so advanced it might as well be magic”: yeah, pretty much, this was more of a D&D campaign (bad one) than a good sci-fi episode. Even the silly Prophets / Pah-wraiths arc of DS9 was preferable to this.
I thought that the way they came to understanding what was going on was a little rushed and a bit too speculative, not being based on actual evidence and it was just convenient that they happened to be right that Batel was the Beholder. That entire bit of exposition sounded like it was out of Doctor Who rather than Star Trek: rapid fire vaguely plausible assertions that you just gloss over to get along with the plot and treating concepts like evil not as abstract but actual entities. There was none of the tension of putting things together from actual clues.
Are we meant to believe then that there is a degree of time travel or simultaneity going on? Because aside from the glib “effect before cause” thing which is the equivalent of “shut up, just run with it”, how precisely does Batel become the Beholder? How does three sets of DNA in her - Gorn, Human and Illyrian - translate to having all the abilities of all races that have faced evil?
It would have made more sense to have her go back in time after defeating Gamble (which is what I was expecting) or to say that the prison existed in non-linear time or something. As it is, it’s left pretty much up in the air and we are asked to accept it.
Are we also meant to believe that she was the one who left the messages for M’Benga and La’An, and why leave them in Swahili and Chinese respectively? Why not just put them in English? And how did Batel learn those langauges?
There were good bits, and heartfelt bits, but mostly it was kind of meh for me as finales go.
How does three sets of DNA in her - Gorn, Human and Illyrian - translate to having all the abilities of all races that have faced evil?
That bit right there is like a glob of glue along the seam where this Beholder plot was glued to the gorn cliffhanger.
Is any of this Beholder stuff foreshadowed before Batel fights Gamble the first time? I try to be a careful watcher, but it came outta left field for me.
Wish they would have leaned harder into reimagining Inner Light and less into boring chosen-one-stuff.
The Beholder stuff is left as a dangling mystery in SNW: “Through the Lens of Time” but any idea that it’s going to involve Batel is not.
I wanted to sleep on this one too see if there would be anything I would appreciate after some reflection, but…no, not really.
I thought that the way they came to understanding what was going on was a little rushed and a bit too speculative
I think this is a big part of what didn’t work for me. They really wanted to get to the fireworks factory, and sidestepped most of the interesting potential in order to get there.
The extended fantasy/hallucination was the strongest part of the episode, but…it seemed to be entirely about Pike. Did Batel even experience it? The episode seemed completely uninterested in what she might be going through as she prepared to sacrifice herself.
And the conflict itself suffers from the “pah wraith problem” - I’m fine with the idea of a conflict between primordial good and evil…but it’s hard to make it interesting. All you can really do is focus on how it affects the people involved, and they were only semi-successful at that.
I keep finding questions coming up in my head. Why would her chimerical DNA make Batel and the Vezda recognize and attack each other? Is it some kind of genetic memory, in which case any race that had encountered the Vezda would have the same reaction, and does that mean a Gorn or an Illyrian would have the same reaction? Or is it only a combo thing?
I was expecting, given what happened in “Through the Lens of Time”, that it was actually the Gorn part of her that reacted. And that could have led into a revelation that the Gorn were created or designated as Vezda killers, a predator species to rid the galaxy of them. Which would then explain why they turned their predator instincts on the rest of the galaxy once the Vezda were apparently gotten rid of for good.
Or, the ancient race that imprisoned the Vezda created this telepathic alphabet that would send a message to the descendants of the people who helped them the first time around - so M’Benga and Uhura would read the messages as Swahili, La’An in Mandarin (which means La’An, despite being related to a Sikh, is ethnically also Chinese), maybe Scotty would read it as Gaelic, who knows? That would certainly make more sense than the random inscriptions somehow being related to M’Benga for whatever reason.
Or Batel would actually travel back in time to be the Beholder and we see her setting up the messages in a sort of bootstrap paradox - the messages were there because they were always meant to be there. A bootstrap paradox is hinted at in Batel’s dialogue but never quite explicated.
I don’t know. The more I think about the flaws in the plot the more I think it could all have been fixed with a little bit of thought and effort.
You are thinking it over way more than the writers did. This hole-ridden plot is just there to justify the action scenes. But I think it’s implied that Batel left the messages. Why were they vague and in those other languages? Just because!!
Or is it only a combo thing?
That seemed to be the implication. In which case, I think it might have been better to have Batel get more fully “possessed,” and take the angle that she knows exactly what’s going on, and what needs to be done. It would take her agency out of the episode, but…the episode didn’t really give her any agency as it is.
@ValueSubtracted Closure… Now Pike can catch up with his ex on Talos IV.
I don’t like destiny episodes. It makes it feel like nothing matters. Like in ENT’s Shockwave, the crew just follows Daniel’s plan it and it all works out.
I feel this was not a very strong season, but I did enjoy it and that they experimented with the shows formula a bit. But over all, I feel this is the weakest of the 3 seasons we have so far.
Also, what’s up with all the mind melds? I went back and watch Dagger of the Mind, the first time we see an onscreen mind meld, and Spock says that he never mind melded with a human before. I guess he could always be lying, as that is definitely within Spock’s ability, but it seems like a trivial thing to lie about. But I get it, don’t be a slave to canon when we got a story to tell.
But to be realistic, it’d have been easier to make a program that could fire the phasers at the same time rather then a mind meld. And at the same time, there are many times in Star Trek where literally basic cyber security or actual computer programming could have saved the day, and at the end of the day that’s just not good compelling story telling.
I’m also a bit disappointed that they did not find a contrived techno babel solution to save Gamble. But I get it, he’s not bridge crew, so is expendable.
It was nice that Pike and Batel got to experience a happy ending that we know will never come.
I don’t think I much like this episode though.
I think Discovery handled Pike’s “destiny” in the best possible way by rooting it in character.
Pike grabs that time crystal because he’s dedicated to the mission, and to Starfleet. He will eventually save those cadets for the exact same reason. There doesn’t have to be anything metaphysical going on there - he affirms that that’s the kind of person he is, and that’s why he’ll end up in that situation one day, even knowing it’s coming.
It makes me sad that SNW has been diluting that.
Overall an okay episode but hats off to whoever snuck their D&D campaign storyline that they cribbed from for this story arc. Nice touch to write out Batel but also give Pike an Inner light happy ending. Only major critique I had was the villain was kind of one-dimensional like you’d see in the D&D campaign so would have been nice if they fleshed out that more before bringing it to the screen.
Annotations for 3x10 are up at: https://startrek.website/post/28867268
I kept thinking of “The Reckoning” the entire episode.
