Time travel episodes are always fun, and "Face the Strange" is no disappointment there. Even though this is very clearly a bottle episode designed to recoup some of the money spent on the big flashy openers (and no doubt even bigger, flashier series end), it uses its limitations well. Given that Trek has done a lot of time travel episodes before, including a number that saw a central character jump back and forth through their timeline, there was inevitably a sense having seen this before. However, the episode embraced that, referencing a number of the time travel episodes from the past, but in a natural way. There's a bunch of references in this episode that make the die-hard fans go "aha!" but just sound like extra colour to the less obsessed viewer, which is exactly how it should work.
In the past, when we've had a character thrown back and forward through time, it's generally just been them alone, struggling to convince the rest of the crew of what's going on: Picard in TNG "All Good Things;" Kes in VOY "Before and After;" and Chakotay in "Shattered." The last of these is perhaps the most similar to this, as there the ship had been thrown into different points in its timeline, while here, Discovery itself is being thrown back and forth, along with its crew. The difference here is that we have two characters working together, able to rely on each other, with Burnham and Rayner unaffected thanks to being mid-transport at the very moment the time bug activated. (I love that: time bug. Such a simple, silly sci-fi idea, and such a simple name. On Voyager they'd have called it a "chronometrically disaffected ambulatory arthropod" or something.)
As much as the central idea of shifting everyone else along the timeline doesn't quite make sense (where do all the crew in the future when they're dead? Where does Airiam come from when it goes back to the past?) it's a fun conceit. It's also a good opportunity to finally have Rayner work closely with Burnham and adjust to her way of doing things; had he carried on being an immovable object much longer, he would have become tiresome.
The episode is focused on the theme of change, and it works so well as a final season instalment it's surprising it was written before they knew the series was ending. Like "All Good Things," this works well because the series has changed so much since its first series. Having Rayner there, who wasn't present for the earlier episodes, underlines this, as he can act as an external observer to remark on this. In this regard, it works better than Voyager's "Shattered" or the quite similar-in-approach "Relativity" (down to the scene on the ship pre-launch), where, in spite of characters coming and going, the series still felt much the same throughout.
It's gratifying that the writers remembered that Stamets exists slightly outside of time, calling back to the previous (and somewhat better) season one time loop episode "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad." This allows a third character to take part in the time-jumping proceedings, but in a different way, affected by the jumps but aware of them. (Really, what the hell happened to him while they were all dead?) It was nice to have Hannah Cheeseman back as Airiam one last time, and frankly they should never have killed off a character with such potential. Ultimately, the time jumping was worth it to see today's more measured Captain Burnham face off against her angry, chip-on-her-shoulder mutinous younger self. (A touch of the Captain America fighting himself there; she could do this all day, I bet.)
Other bits to like: breaking the warp bubble, with a (fairly solid) conception of what suddenly falling out of warp would do to time relative to the ship's frame of reference when back in normal space; a fun, gruesome intro that shows us just how much Moll and L'ak aren't to be messed with (and that L'ak seems to be the more timid and weary of the two); the jump forward to a ruined Federation being genuinely eerie and foreboding. The only disappointment there was that it really looked like we were getting a glimpse at what led to the situation from the Short Trek "Calypso," when Discovery has been abandoned and Zora has continued to evolve into a sophisticated but lonely being. While clearly that scene was meant to evoke the mini-episode, it can't be related, showing instead a different future that, presumably, Burnham and crew will avert.
A fun, standalone adventure then, but it'll be good to get moving with the main storyline again after treading water for an hour.
Looks back and forward:
- Pretty clear now that the Breen are set to be the big bad this season, being the main bidders for the Progenitor tech and out to take down the Federation.
- We get the briefest of glimpses at a 32nd or 33rd century Breen ship.
- Kind of nice that we see the Golden Gate Bridge out the ship's window while it's still in drydock, seeing as it was the Breen who destroyed it 120 years later during the Dominion War.
- I thought the lizardy guy who sold Moll and L'ak the time bug looked familiar, but couldn't place the species. Apparently he's an Annari, from the Voyager episodes "Nightingale" and "The Void." It makes sense that this far in the future, species from all over the galaxy can turn up.
- Also from the Delta Quadrant, the time bug is Krenim technology left over from the Temporal Wars. Again, it makes sense that the Krenim, who used time as a weapon, would have been involved in that.
- This might be the first time travel episodes that sees someone jump into the middle of an earlier time travelling trip.
- We got some great Linus and Reno moments in this episode.
- The title's a nice nod to the episode's theme: a line from Bowie's classic "Changes."
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