probabilitysurfing

I love Star Trek and have since the original series first aired when I was a kid. I have loved the work of Michelle Yeoh since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. So I take no joy in speaking plainly about Section 31, a terrible Star Trek Movie. This movie is Guardians of the Galaxy meets bad writing, bad editing, and bad directing. The ridiculous juvenile and faux-insulting banter between the characters made me dislike them all. It also telegraphed how the film would end: "Hey this is a funny movie folks, any dramatic tension is strictly for show!" Much of the film seemed cartoonish and never did it assume that the audience might be intelligent. Skip this film if you haven't watched it yet.

Lots of dialogue with soft piano music...this should clue you in as how this season will end. They will save the known universe. There's no tension building except for Star Trek fans who want some action instead of chit-chat dripping with fake authenticity. The usual idiocy the writers give us is when Michael and Tilly beam to the planet's surface and immediately begin to chit-chat like high school girls without first engaging in a quiet moment to ascertain a situational awareness. In what direction are we heading? Are any predators about? Were we observed beaming down? I love Star Trek and always have. But the writing for Discovery is so horrible that I will never ever watch any of these episodes again.

This is a time travel episode that does not move the plot forward at all. It takes up time and space for a chase story that is simple and needs some filler episodes. The real story is that Rayner is perceived as a toxic male and Tilly and Michael are tasked with fixing him. (Tilly in the previous episode). The time-travel technobabble uttered to explain how they will save the ship/Federation/universe was eye rollingly silly, but since there was no phony earnest teary-eyed breathlessness during those scenes, I liked it in a relative sort of way. Also, there was very little of the Tilly character is this episode, which is why I gave it 5 stars instead of one.