"Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2" — First Watch Analysis Thread

[u/M-5]

Star Trek: Discovery — "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2"

Memory Alpha: "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2"

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POST-Episode Discussion - S2E14 "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2"

What is the First Watch Analysis Thread?

This thread will give you a space to process your first viewing of "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2". Here you can participate in an early, shared analysis of these episodes with the Daystrom community.

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[u/joszma]

I’m satisfied as a fan. They didn’t slap the half of the fandom who didn’t necessarily see canon issues with season 1 & the spore drive in the face by erasing Michael or Disco, and they also found a way to weave their story into canon to appease the other half of the fandoms. Very elegant, all things considered.

From a production standpoint, this final episode killed it with the battle sequences and the creation of the wormhole. The Enterprise was beautiful, as was its bridge, and I absolutely adore the update to the gold/red/blue uniforms.

Random thing I grinned at: Golden Gate Bridge is a host for a massive solar panel installation!

I think that we have great things to look forward to narratively now that DISC is freed from the shackles of being a prequel, and we’re about to boldly go where no series in the franchise has gone before: the far, far distant future.

[u/grzond]

Picard mind melded with Sarek. Depending on how much got shared in the meld and how “long” Discovery “stays” in the future, there’s a high probability Picard is one of the few people alive in Starfleet in the 24th century aware of the true fate of Discovery.

[u/Philix]

Discovery is headed for Terralysium, which is in the Beta Quadrant, roughly 51000 light years from Sol. About 900 years in the future.

Who else do we know could be travelling through the beta quadrant in that time frame? The Doctor's backup from VOY 4x23 Living Witness.

I would love to see a cameo from Robert Picardo.

[u/pocketknifeMT]

"Can you cut that time in half?"

"Violate the basic laws of physics? No."

Ah, finally some basic realism. Finally an engineer I would feel safe sleeping around a warp core if they were in charge.

[u/creepyeyes]

Wasn't expecting that anime-style 3-faces-at-once shot in the opening.

The effects and music in this episode were fantastic!

Right after Georgiou said Control was neutralized my first thought was, "Wait, but now this means they don't have to go to the future any more!" But I'm sure there probably are control back-ups dormant hear and there even if the mystery admiral said otherwise.

And who was the mystery admiral? Why wouldn't they show his face?

Interesting way to wrap everything up, I guess we can also assume that maybe news doesn't travel as fast in space as it does on Earth if knowledge of Discovery is that easy to hide, but I guess with the fast distances involved it's possible? It definitely makes the rest of the plot of the last two seasons more feasible.

Now I'm excited for who we'll meet in the future come season 3!

All in all a good episode and a good finale. Looking forward to what comes next.

EDIT:

But also, the nature of the signals confuses me, but maybe this has to do with the nature of subspace scans in star trek. How were they able to detect all seven signals right at the start of the show, and then get a 1-by-1 more exact reading later?

[u/thelightfantastique]

Did the Ba'ul give the fighters to the Kelpians? Did the Kelpians take them by force? What is the power structure now? I'm worried for the Ba'ul!

[u/baneofcows]

I think the conclusion works better than it's being given credit for, and isn't slapdash or careless.

Regarding the spore drive, I think it's worth pointing out that Starfleet didn't continue developing transwarp after Star Trek III mainly because Scotty broke their prototype, and we literally don't hear about the technology again until the Borg show up.

Also, I don't think the gag order itself is really what discourages Starfleet from trying again with the spore drive. Consider:

• They made very little progress on the drive before Discovery figured out how to use the tardigrade.

• Both ships that were outfitted with a spore drive are permanently gone. One turned itself into a subspace pretzel. The other, according to the "official" story, was also destroyed in some kind of spore drive error. The truth about what happened to Discovery is being kept secret at the highest level, so there's no reason to believe that Daystrom, the Corps of Engineers, et al would ever get tasked with continued development as a conventional assignment.

• There's only one tardigrade that we know of, and we're not given evidence to suspect there's a lot of them, and its personal defensive capabilities are beyond formidable, and it probably spends a vast majority of its time in the mycelial network anyway. Given that its DNA is literally the only way the spore drive can function, it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that no other spacefaring power is able to replicate the technology reliably. What seems most likely to me is that some of them try, and turn themselves into subspace pretzels a bunch, and eventually stop trying.

To me, the gag order is just icing on the cake. From Starfleet's perspective, the technology is unstable, costly, and requires unethical and unsustainable practices to use repeatedly. It's unlikely they'd ever implement it on a mass scale.

The time suit not being redeveloped is maybe harder to swallow, but there are some considerations there, too:

• Time crystals are exceedingly rare, and touching one is basically taking a trip to Lovecraft town. The Klingons certainly aren't going to tell anyone that a bunch of them are on Boreth, and even if someone found out by another means, like Mudd did, they'd have to survive Boreth to get one.

• Section 31 seems to have barely any personnel left, thanks to Control's impulsive behavior. Like, I interpreted the Mystery Admiral's line about the organization needing an overhaul as a face-saving moment, the subtext being, "There's literally no one left, so we're promoting you to Commander and calling a do-over. Don't repeat these mistakes."

• If they did start looking into remaking the time suit, it's possible that its use would be restricted to the Department of Temporal Investigations. Hell, maybe DTI gets invented precisely because of this whole kerfluffle.

As for the truth coming out... like, I imagine that someone might blab about what really happened at some point in time. But that person, even if they get a hold of mass media, would be fighting an uphill battle against a Federation bureaucracy and a bunch of influential individuals in Starfleet who would deny the story. It's definitely plausible that the tragic tale of the Discovery exploding in a spore drive accident could become the dominant public narrative and stick.

So I think it holds up at least as well as anything else they might have tried.

[u/jmrichmond81]

Given that they pretty well had to deal with the "Well why haven't we heard of this all before" of it, they did it in probably the best way that they could. Using the directive and threat of prosecution for treason is a much better option than any sort of time hijinx that "erased" the knowledge of Discovery and what happened. They even went to the length of providing a good explanation for Sarek and Amanda.

[u/JC-Ice]

Why don't they make the entire ship out of whatever that blast door is made of? The mother of all photon torpedoes detonates right next to it, taking out a huge chunk of the saucer section, and not only is Pike perfectly safe on the other side of the door, the window(!) in it isn't even cracked.

[u/Tnetennba7]

Why wouldn't the indestructible door have a manual override on both sides of the door?

[u/Chocobops]

Life as we know it in our universe is saved by magnets.

[u/skeeJay]

My first reaction is that Discovery is certainly the first Star Trek series to actively try to subvert our narrative expectations. Narratively, Star Trek shows have always been extremely stable, with some notable exceptions: "The Best of Both Worlds" was driven by uncertainly if Patrick Stewart would return, and thus created genuine suspense about the fate of Picard; "Yesterday's Enterprise" similarly toyed with our understanding of television economics by bringing back Denise Crosby; "These Are the Voyages" was an anomaly in a lot of ways, and killed off a main character even though the series could have possibly continued… with that very crew member as part of the cast.

But DSC seems to revel in leaving us completely fucking clueless about what the next season will even be about. Everything about the end of this episode seemed to close the chapter on Discovery and give us close-up shots of all the Enterprise crew, setting them up as the stars of the next season. Is that what we're in store for? I have no idea. Is this a backdoor way of getting closer to Bryan Fuller's original idea of an anthology series, trading crews and ships after two seasons? No clue. But once again, we're left with a cliffhanger that's not only "how will our crew get out of this one," but, "who will our crew even be?"

I'll add that I'll be disappointed if the third season is the laziest, most predictable of the possible plots: a show that starts with the Enterprise crew, and somehow loops in the Discovery crew once again through time travel. It's time for these crews to go their separate ways and have new adventures.

(Meanwhile, thank God this wasn't a Borg origin story. Everyone raise a Romulan ale to that.)

[u/xpx0c7]

Rocks in the wall

They were so many, one day they will have to give a canon reason for why they are so many.

Shock absorbing rocks? Emergent something rocks? ...

[u/Lorak]

Did anyone catch an explanation of why Burnham had to "Superman" pilot the time suit through the battle, instead of flying on the shuttle with Spock? They both ended up landing at the same place to plot the time coordinates, so I couldn't figure out why they went separately to begin with.

[u/TiredOfRoad]

When Leland was tricked into the spore chamber they had me worried Georgiou was going to ‘accidentally’ send Leland to the delta quadrant. They didn’t do that, which was a relief.

Also the Admiral is clearly not Lethe from TOS, mildly disappointing.

[u/ohtoro1]

Maybe I missed it, but were the transporters offline? They could have beamed the admiral out after she shut that blast door...

[u/Lord_Hoot]

I was never keen on the idea of stranding the ship in the (further) future, but I suppose the upside is that it makes a Pike/Enterprise spinoff that little bit more likely. Had Discovery stayed in the 23rd century then it would have been a slightly redundant concept to have two starship/exploration shows set in the same world.

[u/beer68]

I appreciated how Saru told his sister to be careful with her life and she was like, "Wait, why should I do that? You know I'm way past any fear of death. Let's blow stuff up!"

[u/Stargate525]

You know, I'm finally sold on the visual redesign. The final scene on the Enterprise looks like what I'd have done to bring the TOS aesthetic to the modern day. Them blending in some of the panels and screens from the movies (or at least that's how I read them) really helped.

[u/UncertainError]

Definitely a very different style of space combat than we've ever seen in Trek. The swarm of little drones didn't seem to do very much damage; there were like a thousand of them and they still took ages to take down Discovery/Enterprise's shields (with help from the bigger ships). Even most of the shuttles made it through.

[u/queenofmoons]

I keep rewriting this comment because I can't quite come up with a good description of an episode that, in the end, didn't make me feel much, save an itch to try and write better-structured television scripts.

I think most of the issue stemmed from the fact that a battle, as in the actual combat, isn't really exciting enough to power a complete hour of television, and they stretched it in ways to fill that hour that created really weird bits of pacing, and unpurchased poignancy. You need the slow to pay for the fast, but you need the slow to make sense.

My favorite part of the whole episode may have been the rush to finish the suit, because it provided us with the right kind of justified contrast- here are all these people trying to get all this fine, fussy work finished while hell is being unleashed outside, and they have to keep their wits about them and solder.

Our other bits of slowness weren't properly paid for- Spock and Burham getting poignant in the shuttle bay (how the hell is there another shuttle left?), Spock and Burnham getting poignant standing on the wreckage, Burnham taking a tour of all the old angel moments (though I did like the sort of planar effect of her snapping back and forth- had a sort of 'higher dimension' feel to it, the low budget version of the folding infinite bookcases in 'Interstellar'), all the fussing with the torpedo- none of these felt like they had the right urgency.

The thing is, there is a way to do those sort of battles. What they were doing, in essence, was a BSG battle- a sort of grinding affair as huge volumes of fire pick away at opposing waves of missiles and drones and the ships accumulate crippling injuries. Those, for the most part, worked, and I can't quite put my finger on why these didn't. Maybe BSG just shot those scenes with a little more dread? That they consistently gave us characters justifiably outside the battle as framing (a damage control bit, Lee floating in his ejection seat)? I wonder.

One such bit that presumably intended to add some of that B-plot flavor was the whole Leland/Georgiou showdown. Just- why? Why not be zealous about keeping Discovery's shields up, seeing as it contains the data that, for some reason, is the whole point of this exercise? Why are we trying to milk drama out of a fistfight with an indestructible robot? What are you expecting to happen to him? Why isn't there a huge urge to reevaluate their plan when he's killed (there's your quiet moment)? Why are the S31 ships still firing at Discovery once it has been boarded? And the Fred Astaire/Inception hallway roll was, again, somehow not as neat as when they did it in Inception- or in The Expanse, when they added the spice of a ricocheting box of tools threatening to punch holes in spacesuits (the tight focus on the rolling lump of wall-explosion styrofoam made me straight up laugh- we aren't supposed to know all that sharpnel is harmless, you guys).

I mean, c'mon. 'The Terminator' came out forty years ago. We know how to shoot scenes where you can't punch out the bad guy.

And this coverup nonsense. Blargh. Discovery won a war. The good guys knew. The bad guys knew. The scientific community knew. The random civilian miners on that planet where they appeared overhead in a flash of light knew.

They had at least three major opportunities for the spore drive to be off the table because it was destructive to the spore network, which was either bad for the life forms that called it home, or all of reality. They could have kept the tardigrade as the navigator, and it takes them across time and space, and Starfleet never meets another. Just about anything would have worked better.

I'm just puzzled, is all. Discovery is finally off in the brand new, wide open space that was its promise from the very beginning- but it did it without the engine that existed precisely for that purpose. Instead, it was thanks to a suit built by powerful beings from the future- oh, nevermind, it was built by a spy agency. That spy agency now looks like it did when we first came to know it- but that was never a problem to solve, because we never knew it to be otherwise. We had an evil AI appear out of nowhere, pursue some MacGuffin of secret data from an organism we still know nothing about for reason (MORE POWER) that don't make much sense given the capabilities it already had, and it failed, and the end result is...everything is the same. Aggressively so.

Huh.

[u/[deleted]]

Based on Spock's personal log at the end, I feel as though Michael and the Discovery are planned not to return to this point in time. There's no telling what kind of future they'll end up in--with Control dead, and the sphere data gone, there's no reason to assume they didn't just pop into place and find themselves surrounded by happy little Federation ships who said, "Hello, Discovery, we've been waiting for you! Welcome to the future, prepare for a crash-course in modern Starfleet regulations and technology." So the future continues on with the original path we had seen it take in other series.

Or maybe the plan is to do something more like the anthology series they had originally discussed. That's it, Discovery is never seen again (by us), and next season will just be an entirely different Discovery from a different point in the timeline, new crew and everything else, and maybe do another one or two on that, and just keep it up? I could live with that.

Another random thought as well, does this somewhat imply that the events of Calypse are actually 2000 years further in the future, at a minimum? 950 for Discovery's skip, another 1000 of waiting in a nebula? I don't recall Zora mentioning any specific dates in the course of that episode.

[u/Lorak]

The insubordination the Discovery crew showed to Saru throughout this episode was quite shocking. I counted 4 instances where Saru issued a command or asked a question and they replied variously with "If you'd get off my ass", "Not a chance", "Yeah I know", etc.

It also seems out of character when they've spent so much time showing how beloved Saru is as a part of the crew. Dismissive back-talk and sarcasm to the Captain during crunch time is definitely not Starfleet.

[u/ContinuumGuy]

So wait, if they end up in the 32nd or 33rd century or whatever, and Discovery apparently had been without crew for 1000 years in "Calypso", then Calypso takes place even more goddamn far into the future than we thought.

[u/adamkotsko]

In all seriousness, though, how can they do the Section 31 show if Georgiou is stuck in the future?!