Review: Star Trek: Discovery, "Jinaal" | Season 5, Episode 3
Burnham solves a riddle and Tilly gets annoyed
It’s just two people. Burnham (and Book, and Rhys, and everyone else) spends most of “Jinaal” insisting time is of the essence, responding to every fresh setback with an intensely humorless “but we have no time.” But what I keep coming back to is this: the entire Federation is running a race against two people. This isn’t “The Chase,” where Picard was vying with multiple civilizations in a search for a prize none of them really understood. This is just Discovery already a few steps ahead of a couple of Star Wars-esque rogues, and it’s supposed to be suspenseful somehow. The show is so determined to convince us that we should be worried that it has nearly every character insist on the danger, but as of yet, there is no danger. Would it be bad if Moll and L’ak got their hands on the Magical MacGuffin Tech? Sure. Probably. I don’t know. But as of right now, all the yelling and demanding just feels like so much of Discovery’s usual manipulation tactics: present the signifiers of conflict without the actual details of it, and pretend you’ve got yourself a stew.
Thing is, I should be sympathizing with Burnham this week, because the setbacks she runs into are extremely annoying. I’d hoped the series might come up with something new for its final season, but it turns out we’re just running the hits—once again, we’ve got a big mystery thingie, and once again, we’ve got to watch our heroes running through various hoops until the actual important event happens. This week, it’s a morality test run by a Trill symbiont. Next week, maybe we’ll have a Romulan put them through a Double Dare obstacle course. It’s all because some scientists eight hundred years ago decided that the only way to make sure powerful tech landed in the right hands is to make it incredibly irritating to uncover.