1x11 The Wolf Inside

I really liked that episode. They are putting in some interesting things and we finally find out what´s up with Ash althought it's not a huge surprise. But that is no complain. They showed those flashbacks so that everyone knew what has happened and figure it out, now they brought it to light. Prolonging that would be useless. That´s good writing from where I stand. And Tilly mentioning that Stamets called her captain once ? I don´t remember that but they seem to be pretty certain in what they are building up.

I´ve read some weird theories about what is going on here but the one thing I'll always come back is Lorca. Is he from the Mirror Universe in the first place ? Trying to convince Burnham to bomb the rebels, his hesitance to go back to Discovery and finally that look on his face when he saw Georgiou. Plus if you go back to episode 10 when they made all those jumps you can see Lorca entering OVERRIDE, LORCA, G. SPORE JUMP 133— UNKNOWN. I did not notice that I found it online. And I just remembered that Hoshi Sato declared herself Empress in ENT which should be chronologically before this. Does this mean she and Georgiou are related ? Lot´s to consider but I must say I'm intrigued to find out where this is going.

[5.8/10] When watching Discovery, the easy route is to compare it to prior Star Trek series and films. Between the continuity nods, the classic characters popping up here and there, and some of the usual Trek rhythms, it’s natural to think of the latest show in the franchise in relation to its predecessors.

But “The Wolf Inside” is one of those episodes that reminds you that no matter how many familiar sound effects we here, no matter how neat it is to Mirror Sarek with a goatee like his son would eventually sport, Star Trek Discovery is a show that’s taking its cues from the most buzzworthy hits on cable television -- The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones -- more than it’s pulling from its space-bound forebears.

As I often say, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that necessarily. Despite rumblings about ousted creator Bryan Fuller’s ideas for the show, it was likely a pipe dream that CBS would revive Star Trek and keep it the same as it was when the franchise last left the airwaves. (Though perhaps the existence of The Orville suggests it wasn’t impossible.) Star Trek was very likely going to need to be updated for a new era of television, and it’s understandable, if not terribly original, that the powers that be, and the studio bankrolling it all, would want a show that emulated the biggest hits of its competitors.

Selecting Sonequa Martin-Green as the lead character is a canny choice, but also a clue where the show’s braintrust was at. One of the biggest issues with The Walking Dead is clunky, overwritten dialogue that spells out the theme for anyone not paying close enough attention to get the show’s otherwise flashing neon signs of theme.

In this instance, that’s “how do you hang onto who you are when the world around you is harsh,” a very Walking Dead theme. You have it in Burnham’s voiceover in the beginning of the episode, you have it in overdone exchanges between characters, and any number of other scenarios designed to let you know that this is what they’re getting at.

And hey, it’s not a bad theme for a Star Trek episode where you’re trying to infiltrate the Mirror Universe undetected. The notion of becoming the mask, of having to pretend to be someone for so long that who you’re pretending to be seeps into who you really are, is a good concept. It’s just dramatized in a blunt, tedious, and even dumb way.

For example, Burnham is ordered by the Terran Emperor to destroy a rebel colony. When told by Lorca that she needs to do it to maintain their cover, Burnham pushes back, and says that no matter who she’s pretending to be, she’s still a Starfleet officer, and she doesn’t want to kill people if she can avoid it. That’s admirable, and an interesting dilemma to play.

The problem is that her solution to this is to try to infiltrate the rebel camp, hoping she doesn’t get killed on sight, and bringing her friend who’s been acting erratically for a while now. It’s a stupid, stupid, stupid plan, one that only works because the plot needs it to work. Sure, it’s cool to see rebel leader Voq, and get our first look at Discovery’s Andorians and Tellerites, but mind meld or no mind meld, it’s a big dumb risk to take, especially when Burnham has the info on the U.S.S. Defiant she needs.

Her reason for taking that risk is even dumber -- she wants to ask Mirror Voq how he managed to unite different species, especially the Klingons. Sure, maybe that’s an interesting question, but it’s not like he’s going to have some magic formula that will tell her how to get the Klingons in the prime universe to accept the Federation. (Right now, my bet is that eventually they take Mirror Voq back to the Prime Universe, where he manages to start the movement of Klingon tolerance for the Federation.) True to that, when pressed, Voq basically says, “we united because we had to -- the Terrans were wiping us out.” It’s not especially complicated, and certainly not information worth risking your life for.

It doesn’t help that we’re only two episodes in and the show is already stretching the Mirror Universe concept a little thin. Let’s be honest, the Mirror Universe was always a kind of silly concept, and the problem is that Discovery wants to be a more serious show than the outsized Original Series was. That means it’s harder to write off convenient coincidences like that everyone Burnham knows is in some plot-relevant, position of significance.

Bits like the reveal that Georgou is the Emperor, or the convenience that Voq is the rebel leader, don’t really hold up to the scrutiny of the law of unintended consequences, where one significant change would beget others, rather than just leaving things mostly the same but with an evil flip here and there. That sort of tack is forgivable, even enjoyable, in the four-color tones of the original Star Trek, but feel goofy and convenient here.

That might be easier to swallow if the nuts and bolts writing were better. Again, the dialogue here is repetitive and often painful, full of banalities and pseudo-philosophical ramblings that fail the smell test. The episode is also aping Game of Thrones and its big twists and betrayals and reveals. There’s a fake out with Lt. Stamets’s death under Tilly’s care, with the hint that Stamets Prime being injected with spores just gave him an invitation to the Interdimensional Council of Reeds (or Ricks, if you prefer), which comes of cheesy rather than cool.

The most significant reveal is that Ash Tyler is really Voq prime, having been made human a la “The Trouble with Tribbles.” In principle, it’s a perfectly fine twist. The show set it up well enough; there’s past precedent for it in the franchise, and there’s juice in the notion of Burnham having to balance out someone she loves with someone she hates. But the show had just been hinting at this reveal for so long now that it comes off anticlimactic. The stilted Klingon Speech doesn’t come off well when Tyler has to speak regular english instead of denture-assisted roughian. And overall, it’s just underwhelming when all is said and done.

It’s not all bad. While a little predictable, the episode sets up “death by transporter” well enough to subvert it in a clever way with Tyler at the end of the episode, and transmit the Defiant info in the process. The interactions between Burnham and both versions of Saru are more revealing and emblematic of the show’s themes than all the hamfisted dialogue in this one. And Lorca admitting that his judgment may be impaired by his torture, and his sense of someone who’s putting on a steely facade but just barely holding things together.

But overall, “The Wolf Inside” is too on the nose with its themes, too skimpy on using those themes to craft a story that’s compelling and makes sense, too committed to clunky dialogue that drags the whole enterprise down (no pun intended), and too enamored with those wild twists that keep Game of Thrones in the news. I’ve enjoyed Discovery so far, but this episode was a reminded that it could use a scaling back of its efforts to ape its high-class genre show brethren, and more efforts to just be Star Trek.