Star Trek: Discovery - Season 4

★★★★☆

I just finished my second watch through Discovery season four. On balance, I liked it about as well as season three. I enjoyed seeing Burnham come into her own as captain, and continuing development among the secondary cast. Zora’s evolution toward the self-aware being seen in “Calypso.” The Stamets/Culber/Adira family. Saru and T’Rina sort of awkwardly dancing around each other.

I’d hoped to see more of them rebuilding Starfleet and the Federation, but that kind of took a back seat to the main storyline of the Dark Matter Anomaly.

On one hand, the DMA (not to be confused with Direct Memory Access or the Direct Marketing Association) was an interesting scientific disaster: What do you do about a black hole that moves around in ways you can’t predict and has been known to tear up planets? On the other hand, I’m tired of galaxy-level threats. It got old in comics, it got old in earlier seasons of this show, and wow did it get old in Picard.

Getting back to ship-scale (and even just planet-scale) stories again in Strange New Worlds was a relief.

Starting the season off with a cosmic-level fridge event kind of set things off on the wrong foot for me. And I got so frustrated with some of the characters over who they decided to trust. Though I guess that’s part of the point: grief and fear can lead to bad decisions, really bad decisions, when someone tells you they know how to fix it, or when you’ve latched onto one particular solution as what you have to do.

Spoilers re: Tarka's plan.

Ruby slippers. Ruon Tarka has a spore drive, which can cross realities. And Oros powered his interdimensional transporter using a warp core and a regular generator. With dilithium plentiful again, he should be able to just overload a couple of warp cores and *boom*! (Pun not intended. But it is now.) That's not even getting into the almost casual hopping between prime and mirror universes back on Deep Space Nine, though you could handwave it as having needed less power because the two realities were "closer" at the time. But Tarka's the kind of guy who, because he's been right about a lot of things, assumes he's right about everything else. Including whatever course of action he's decided to take. And to hell with the collateral damage.

Spoilers re: Gray.

I'd been wondering how they were going to follow up. The physical part was a nice callback to Picard. The psychic part seemed pulled out of nowhere when I watched it the first time, but since then I've re-watched all of Deep Space Nine...including the Trill episodes that establish the precedent for placing a former host's personality into another physical body.

As with season two, the second half of the season got bogged down in the main story, but the last few episodes felt more like Star Trek again. Some interesting xeno-archaeology, and a really fascinating first contact with an alien species that has a decidedly non-human psychology and ways of communicating.

(I also appreciated that the character who had been dealing with PTSD was able to handle the psychic trauma echoes because she knew how to handle it.)