Lethe

I will admit that as much as I am enjoying STD (What a crappy acronym...LOL) it didn't really pan with the ST vibe: Far too dark, too much politics, too brooding and selfish for Roddenberry to enjoy, I'm sure..

And while episodes up 'till now were fine, as a modern, "trendy" gritty and dark Sci Fi series go, this episode finally brought Gene's ideas of gallantry and selflessness to the table.

Here we see a crew acting far more like their counterparts on the other series than in episodes up until this one.

An all-round pleasing episode.

This one was quite interesting from a character perspective with focus on Burnham, Sarek and Lorca.

The most compelling element of the plot was the development of Lorca. There wasn't a great deal confirmed but there were many hints that there are big secrets to be revealed, particularly during his interaction with another character.

Sarek and Burnham's relationship and katra connection was heavily in focus, with some psychological themes around parent-child relationships addressed. This for me was okay, but done in a fairly uninspired way with more heavy exposition. I don't have a problem with this revisionist approach to the Sarek/Spock family history but it needs to be for the sake of something special, which so far it isn't. The flashback sequence where Sarek fights the telepathic connection and to visualise it, they show a physical fight between the two characters that feels very forced. I might be wrong but I have a picture of the film crew in my head shooting the scene as nothing but a dialogue sequence before someone pipes up and says "you know what would be really cool, if they actually fight right here" and nobody had the courage to tell them it's actually a bit silly.

The Klingon scene near the end felt very Game Of Thrones and done in a way to maximise shock value. For me it didn't add enough to the story to justify losing the potential family audience, but I think that ship had sailed in the previous episodes.

On a positive note all the performances were great as always, along with the visuals and effects.

This episode's title reminds me of a character from "Dagger of the Mind", played by Susan Wasson: "Lethe" - a word that means either the name of a river in Hell, that drinking from can cause you to forget everything, or it simply means "oblivion" or "forgetfulness".

In that TOS episode, Dr Tristan Adams (Played by James Gregory of the appropriate film "The Mancurian Candidate") says this while the blank expression of the woman "Lethe" stares at us from the background:

(A Toast) - "To all mankind, may we never find space so vast, planets so cold, hearts and mind so empty that... that we cannot fill them with love and warmth."

And this exemplifies Sarek's current condition. He is in an empty place, a Lethe place. His ship was damaged by an attack from a "Vulcans Only" terrorist group, the same group that tried to kill Michael when she was a young girl, when Sarek used the Mind Meld to share his Katra with her and bring her back.

A mind meld that works both ways, now his Katra is calling for Michael.

This episode was very difficult for me to watch. From within Sarek and Michael's Meld, there is a rich history of things that happened, some of which we know about, regarding why Sarek, in TOS, had a strained relationship with his own son. We already knew that Sarek wanted Spock to serve in a more Vulcan way. In TOS, Spock did not attend the Vulcan Science Academy. But here, it is the Vulcan Expeditionary Force. Details are not important, the reasons why are.

So we see here that it was Sarek's intent that both Michael and Spock be involved with Vulcan endeavors. But the Vulcans gave him a choice, and the results of that choice directly relate to the original story of Spock and Sarek.

Masterfully done, and it was done from within a rescue mission for Sarek, while he is drifting away both literally and figuratively in the "Yridian Nebula" (Another reference to "Yuri", there were many references to "Kei and Yuri" in Next Generation, care of artist and designer Rick Sternbach).

Meanwhile, it's revealed here and Lorca has some real issues, he carries a Phaser while having sex with Admiral Cornwell (Jayne Brook, who I did not recognize from "Kindergarten Cop"). She wants to do something about it, but is sidetracked by having to resume Sarek's mission in his stead. And now, she is in a Lethe place. The question is, what's Lorca going to do about it?

Everybody seems to recomnend this series to DS-9 fans,but as a HUGE fan of DS-9, i recommend to my mates to stay away from this dreadfull Star Trek (..visual only ?!?..) remake,because the Klingons and their everything and the new Starfleet uniforms are absolutely WRONG.Probably the producers and the staff were drunk when they created all those things (lol).I want to ask them if they watched even one of the 4 TNG era series before starting the production of this show.

Must we do this? Whoever thought it would be a good idea to have actor Mary Wiseman run around the ship's corridors (people are working here, don't they have a gym?) and then get a lesson in nutrition from MB was obviously asleep at the wheel. She's a big girl. Ok, not as big as she's going to get a couple of seasons down the line but this scene is deliberately provocative. It's as if the writers want her to be ridiculed. If its just done to prove a point then it's unworthy of all concerned.

The whole Michael Burnham-was-adopted-by-Vulcans thing never really made any sense to me. She has already been given superhuman powers of.........well, you name it, she's got it, so maybe it was intended somehow to excuse her perennial insolence. Again, the suspicion forms that we are being challenged to dislike her.

I flicked through the rest to remind myself that it was as bad as I'd remembered and checked in with the good folks at Memory Alpha so as to be sure I had not overlooked anything important. I hadn't.

One thing I would love to be able to expunge from my memory, however, was the World's Least Charismatic Love Scene. Jeremy Isaacs and Jayne Brook as Admiral Cornwell manage to hop into bed together while exhibiting less shared chemistry than two strangers discussing the latest football score. It was so bad it desrves some sort of award.