Right, This Is the Moment on Star Trek: Discovery Where Everything Has to Go Sideways

We’re getting close to the end of Star Trek: Discovery, which means we’re getting close to a season finale. And if there’s one thing Star Trek: Discovery loves—more than love, more than time travel, more than being deeply unsubtle—it is presenting you with a scenario of hope that then has to come crashing down, because you remember this is happening in episode seven of a season and not episode 10.

Usually, this has been a problem for Discovery in the past—because our heroes can’t help but feel like they have to be compromised out of nowhere or blindsided in some silly manner as the stakes of a grand finale to the season come crashing down around them. Any good they do, whether it’s sitting down and talking with their foes, or making a breakthrough on a mystery, has to be upended, because structurally they were doing too well too soon. And while “Erigah,” the seventh episode of Discovery’s fifth and final season, does have that problem in some ways, it’s not actually all that impactful on the main plot of the episode—which delivers a strong, tense game of politicking and aggressive negotiation over spectacle in a very satisfying manner.

Image: Paramount

“Erigah” smushes together three simmering plotlines from across the season—the hunt for Moll and L’ak; the hunt for the next clue to the Progenitor tech puzzle; and the simmering threat of the Breen Imperium—into a pressure cooker it opens with Michael suddenly learning that Starfleet has managed to capture Moll and L’ak, bringing them both into custody at Federation HQ. There’s a problem though: the Federation and the Breen have not really yucked each other’s yum for nearly a millennia now, and the wounds a dying L’ak sustained running into Michael on the ISS Enterprise can’t be treated with their limited knowledge of Breen physiology. On top of that, Moll and L’ak were doing the open comms equivalent of screaming “please, come find me, I have a very obvious targeted painted on my forehead” when they were captured, which is how Starfleet found them... and how the Breen and L’ak’s uncle know exactly where they are now, too.

It’s a fascinating race against time, as Dr. Culber has to try and mitigate L’ak’s injuries long enough for Michael to find out any information he has about the current power dynamics of the Breen Imperium before Primarch Ruhn—tense not just because L’ak is on the verge of biting it for most of the episode, but also tense because it’s rare to see Starfleet and the Federation absolutely shitting their own pants with fear like they do here. Remarkably, it turns out the Federation and the Breen haven’t directly interacted since the latter entered the Dominion War, about 800 years prior—and when that happened, the Breen became the first species in hundreds of years to directly assault Earth, leveling San Francisco in the process. That this is the next time they’re meeting—for a volatile hostage exchange and attempt to try and talk the Breen down from just blasting their way into getting what they want—just dials up the pressure on everyone here (that being mostly Michael and Rayner, Admiral Vance, and T’Rina, who steps up to act as the Federation’s representative while President Rillak stays way the hell away on a different diplomatic mission, which is an incredibly funny way for them to frame the fact that Chelah Horsdal didn’t come back for a few scenes). And it’s a good pressure, that gets people to crack in very interesting ways.

Image: Paramount

The first is Rayner, who, even for as gruff as he’s been trying to balance his personal axes to grind over the hunt for Moll and L’ak with integrating into Discovery’s command structure, gets decidedly fiery in a sit-down meeting with Vance and T’Rina. It’s clear to us and Michael alike that there’s something more to his biting commentary here than his usual irascibility, as Michael learns sitting him down afterwards to try and get him to cool: another Breen Primarch was responsible for invading Kelleran and subjugating Rayner’s people, leaving him the sole survivor of his family. To him, the fear the Breen represent isn’t some long-ago dustup in Federation history like it is for T’Rina and Vance, it’s his life. But having lived in the face of Breen aggression, it’s Rayner that gets our heroes to realize that they have to play hardball with Ruhn in order to make it out of this in one piece—they can’t back down in the face of his warship towering over Federation HQ, they can’t capitulate, they can’t show their fear: Starfleet has to come prepared to play, and throw down if necessary.

What follows is a genuinely fantastic scene—perhaps one of the best in Discovery. Making full use of the circular Federation HQ set, Ruhn and a cadre of Breen soldiers beam in to meet T’Rina, Vance, Rayner, and Michael—and T’Rina of all people goes on the attack. She matches Ruhn word for word, never backing down, never hiding behind the cool facade of Vulcan logic. T’Rina knows what she has to do to buy Culber as much time to keep L’ak alive, and using the info on the rival Primarch that Rayner revealed discussing Kelleran’s history, the Federation makes its demands, rather than it being the other way around: they keep L’ak in custody and off the board from the Breen’s ongoing power vacuum for the Imperial throne, the Breen back the hell off, and no one has to blow a hole in the side of anyone else’s starship today. This shouldn’t work. It’s a Vulcan, not exactly known for their fiery demeanors, going up against a Breen, who are all rage and bluster but also locked behind a big old mask. But Discovery sells the hell out of it, even if it has to just be a bluff on T’Rina’s part, and it’s just captivatingly tense and triumphant—and rooted in these characters having to step up and take on what they’ve learned about the people they’re confronting and carry the day with words rather than phaser bolts. It’s great! It’s so great.

Image: Paramount

Alas, like we said, this is episode seven, not episode 10. So while T’Rina’s bluff works, back over at Discovery’s medbay things have to go terribly wrong, and Moll and L’ak try to stage a breakout... largely involving L’ak killing himself by pumping himself full of drugs. While Moll gets away briefly, Book and special returning guest/premiere phaser pointer Nhan get her to realize that it’d be much better trying to spend L’ak’s final moments with him, instead of running off... just in time for her to be there just as Ruhn and a Breen medic beam in to try and save L’ak, only to see him die. Naturally, Ruhn is pissed—he just lost his leverage and Starfleet just lost its bargaining chip—and so is Moll (turns out, people die when they try to kill themselves as a distraction!). Now, the two are teaming up, with Moll using herself as the bargaining chip by revealing that the Federation have been lying about the real game at play here—the hunt for the Progenitor tech, powerful enough to completely level the Imperium’s power vacuum and grant them even more dominance in the galaxy. With nothing left for her to lose, there’s nothing left for the Federation to bargain with, and much to an incredibly hypocritical Book’s condemnation—yes, people learn from their mistakes, but my guy, you did detonate an incredibly illegal bomb a season ago after engaging in a lot of crime!—they have to let Moll go with the Breen, whisking them away to find the last piece of the Progenitor puzzle.

So yes, the finale stakes are here, but at least this time around they relied on a rash decision by our antagonists, rather than our heroes, to come crashing in here. And in Moll and L’ak’s decision, that rashness works: they were desperate to do anything, even die, because the thought of being puppeted in the Breen’s power plays and politics was worse than anything else. The plan was stupid—very stupid, even—but it was driven by their desperation and their love for each other. It’s much better than having our heroes’ hard work undone in a blink just because they needed to not quite succeed yet in the structure of the season.

Image: Paramount

Alas, that does bring us to the bit of “Erigah” where that has to happen—the B-plot about the next clue in the puzzle, which basically involves Tilly and Adira walking around the ship and having to pretend that the very basic discoveries they make about the Betazoid doctor’s clue they found are astonishingly revelatory. They discover that the doctor wrote a manuscript that is now very rare and out of print (“discover” here being they put the title of the manuscript, written on the clue, to the ship’s computer and ran a search). Then they discover that the original work might be kept in a rare galactic collection that occasionally moves around the universe (by having a completely random Jett Reno walk-and-talk in between fiddling with bits of the set, so Tig Notaro can read off a little exposition with a tone that really is nothing more than “I am reading some expository-ass expositition here”). Then, they finally figure out that the moving galactic archive is moving in pretty much a slightly curved line (they draw a holographic line on the map), aided by Book using his empath powers on the clue (another revelation treated as unthinkably clever, but the revelation is “Betazoids are telepaths,” which is basically the thing we know about Betazoids) to chart out potential systems.

All this is very simple puzzle work but it is drawn out across the background of the entire episode, and it not only distracts from the thrilling tension of the main plot, it’s the bit where our heroes are forced to look stupid because each of these simple steps is treated like they’ve just made a Holmesian breakthrough that no one could’ve possibly ever thought of. They did the Star Trek equivalent of googling for 45 minutes! Thankfully, it’s all just a means to an end compared to the part of “Erigah” that really works—and the stage is set for a high-stakes finale to Discovery as the Breen and the Federation alike race towards the final piece of the puzzle. Hopefully, as things inevitably go from bad to worse the closer we get to the last episode, we’ll chart that rocky path in a manner a bit more akin to the A-plot we got this week, rather than the B-plot.

Star Trek: Discovery is available to stream now on Paramount+.

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