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Nice little cameo in the penultimate episode of Ahsoka's first season.

Sad we will likely not see any more of the little turtle Ewok stand-ins and their covered wagons. They were adorable.

For all the hype surrounding Thrawn's "Night Troopers," they prove to be every bit as incompetent and inaccurate as regular Stormtroopers.

Patrick Stewart's memoir, "Making It So" has just come out and I'm not one to read much nonfiction but I may pick that one up. Especially since the audiobook version is narrated by Sir Patrick himself.

Here's an excerpt regarding an infamous meeting that has been touched upon by various cast members (there should be a YouTube video of Brent Spiner doing a spot-on impression of Captain Picard somewhere addressing this very event) that left Stewart enraged and stomping off to his dressing room. Can't imagine the adorable old goof who attends Pride events with Ian McKellen being this stodgy but apparently that was the case back in 1987.

https://ew.com/tv/patrick-stewarts-stri ... -trek-set/

Oh shit I completely forgot about Morgan Elsbeth on The Mandalorian. That was her wielding the spear!

That wasn't a bad ending, but again, I just wasn't terribly connected with any of these characters, this is probably analogous to someone trying to get through Picard season 3 without ever having watched Next Generation.

They haven't said whether or not Ahsoka will continue with a season two, or if Dave Filoni's planned feature film will be the next chapter, apparently that one's gonna star everyone from the live-action Star Wars TV shows.

Hunh? I thought Discovery was no more.....and all of a sudden....poof S5 new episodes.

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Nope, this final season was always planned. Would've been kind of a bummer to have ended it with season 4, that one was pretty...meh.

Minor spoilers follow.

Very interesting that they're mining both TNG and DS9 for major plot points here. The entire "quest" this season is centered around technology left over by ancient beings who were revealed in the TNG episode "The Chase" to have seeded the galaxy with the same DNA, which was a pretty creative way to ultimately explain why, in Star Trek, all the aliens look very similar to humans. Strange that the Federation chose not to make this information public, I assumed they did, but since the revelation comes as a surprise to Captain Burnham and her crew, they obviously did not.

Also, the new character they kinda shoehorned in, Captain (but I assume he's gotten knocked down in rank) Rayner, I assumed was a Vulcan or Romulan based on his ears, but he's not. He's an alien called a Kellerun, who only made one appearance in a mostly-forgotten DS9 episode "Armageddon Game." Those guys along with some other pointy-eared people called the T'Lani, had brokered a peace they were so dead-set to keep in place they conspired to kill Chief O'Brien and Dr. Bashir since the two of them were helping to dispose of some particularly nasty biological weapons. That one-note mentality appears to be reflected in Rayner's obsession with catching S5's villains. Beyond that, there's speculation the whole Kellerun/T'Lani thing will somehow play into this storyline, possibly linking Rayner and one of these bad guys. Who knows.

Wondering what they do with Saru going forward. He's officially done as a member of the crew, handing off 1st Officer duties to Rayner, but there's no way he doesn't play a major part in the final season.

Also, I really like David Ajala as an actor but Cleveland Booker seems like a guy who should've only hung around for one story arc and then been sent on his merry way. And now the coolest thing about him, his ship, is gone. The writers have forced a tenuous link between him and Moll, one of the villains of this season, and frankly it makes no sense to me. Whatever, Ajala is a charming enough guy that no scene with him is ever boring but I don't quite understand why he's still around.

At least the showrunners know a good thing when they see it and brought back the best character the show ever produced, David Cronenberg's Dr. Kovic, and gave him a pivotal role once again. I love that he's representative of this somewhat dark underbelly of the Federation, kinda like a CIA spook, but not in a villainous way. At least I sure hope they don't try and make him into one, it would be a huge misstep if they do so.

Lastly, we learned that two starships crashing into the desert sand with shields on high can indeed stop a rockslide! That was kinda cool.

Three other minor complaints.

One, WTF, we meet a guy who I assume acts as a fence for criminals, an android named "Fred," who is a spitting image of Data, which is to imply he's extremely old since it's now the 32nd Century and he's a model from the 2300s. Still, we've seen Data able to dodge phaser beams and take out entire crews of a ship, yet Fred can do little more than clumsily handle a firearm to wing one of the villains (uh no I don't think he'd miss) before getting his chest blown up by the other big bad. Camaaaaaaaan you could've done a ton better than that, writers. It's been established how easy it is to disable Data (they used some beeping whirlygig in Star Trek: Insurrection to momentarily paralyze him, wouldn't have cost your SFX guys a dime). The writers obviously wanted him to be an android (or a "synth" as they call him, a term I absolutely hate) so Discovery could mine his memories later. But to make him so ridiculously easy to kill off was just plain lazy.

Two, this complaint has been my beef with Discovery from Day One--so much of the writing has been centered around Burnham, Saru, Stamets, and Tilly (and now Dr. Culber, Book, and Adira) that we know almost literally NOTHING about the rest of the crew. I seriously had to look up their character names outside of Detmer, the pilot, and I only know her because she's got the cool cyborg eye and shaved head. This was supposed to be by design I believe since they told us the stakes would be higher and minor cast members had no guarantee of making it to the series end. Well...here we are and all of them but one (or maybe two) are still here. They even swapped out one of them and no one noticed. The one who got killed, as I've mentioned before, was because the actress could no longer wear the prosthetic makeup for the role, and literally replaced herself as a new, fully human crew member. We'll see if any of them get picked off now but it seems anticlimactic at this point.

Three, no fucking way in HELL would the Federation just up and abandon the "spore drive" program. They'd be doing everything possible to get that shit going again. The whole mushroom warp drive thing has been problematic to say the least. It also doesn't make any sense to me that even in the 32nd century they still haven't figured out how to travel faster than warp speed, but I'll admit that's a tad nitpicky.

I will say I do love the whole "programmable matter" thing, turns out, not only can you flex your hand and a phaser magically appears, but you can also turn it into a rifle, and if you gots to blow it up in order to take care of a few nasty ancient drones, you can flex your hand again and get another one right away!

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

Five episodes in and I'm still entertained by this final season of Discovery, though not all that enthralled.

In a fun bit of "let's re-use existing sets" Discovery finds the Enterprise, except it's the Enterprise from the Mirror Universe, where they meet up with this season's Big Bads, Moll and L'ak. We also finally learn what species L'ak is (he's a Breen, aliens introduced as villains in Deep Space Nine and who remained largely mysterious, faceless beings who looked a lot like Prince Leia's bounty hunter disguise from Return of the Jedi) and why they're on the run. I'll admit they're interesting villains, clearly not overtly evil, just very desperate. We also learn (because this era of Trek simply cannot avoid disaster porn) that their actions will lead to the wholesale destruction of Starfleet and the Federation.

I am curious as to why they decided to sideline by far their most intriguing character of the entire show in Saru. He doesn't even make an appearance in this last episode and the new guy, Commander Rayner, is getting the most screen time outside of Captain Burnham herself. Did Doug Jones not commit to the full season? He's said in interviews that after nearly 40 years (he's 63 now) that he doesn't really want to be a "creature actor" anymore.

The storyline has been reasonably good, certainly better than last year's.

Aaaaaaand this perfectly sums up why I've checked out of the current Trek generation. DS9 took years to build up to the Dominion War. Now Starfleet is constantly a errant asteroid from total annihilation. Bland American (sorry) storytelling: everything's scary out there so we should just bludgeon it to death.

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I've long been critical of how stodgy Trek got trying to chase the ghost of Gene Rodenberry around, treating his utopian ideal as scripture. It was Deep Space Nine that showed you can bend that ideal (and even break it) in ways that make sense. The current iteration is a lot more clumsy with it, and that doesn't sit right with me. The setup for the first season of Picard that saw the Federation get all racist and shit after one terrorist attack was just horrible.

I will say I think Strange New Worlds is largely avoiding the pitfalls that have plagued both Discovery and Picard. That's probably mostly because they've avoided the whole season-long story arc thing. It's a lot more open and fun, they're just presenting us with interesting characters IMO instead of cranking the stakes up to (literal) astronomical levels.

I don't know about Burnham's character....it just seems they went way too far with her. Now they are trying to turn her into some wise matriarch this season that has every answer in the known universe in about 40 seconds (in addition to being the saviour). With the Shattenkirk...it was so hokey it was stupid funny but Discovery seems to try too hard sometimes to cover all the bases. I miss Philippa Georgiou!

The episode with the bug time loop was dumb. I am still watching but I could easily drop this one off at the curb and find something else. The only thing that has me here is the Star Trek name.

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I just don't like how consequences don't stick to her. She gets stripped of rank (COMPLETELY, she ain't even an ensign) to start the show, then gets her commission right at the end like nothing ever happened, like she wasn't literally the first Starfleet officer to commit mutiny, which they mention multiple times. Then she loses her spot as Discovery's 1st officer, and at the end of THAT season, she gets a PROMOTION to Captain!? Meanwhile, Rayner does something that, admittedly, was dumb, but he loses his ship and commission in one fell swoop. It's telling that past Burnham didn't buy the notion that in the future she'd be a captain, because I sure as hell don't either! The whole point of Discovery was to show us Star Trek through the eyes of someone other than the captain. But then they just up and decide that Burnham has to be a captain. Meh.

I'll give Sonequa Martin-Green credit, she's had the carry the weight of this character and show through its uneven run, and I don't blame her one bit for any of it's shortcomings.

Anyway, I have really loved the SFX and visuals. The whole schtick of a phaser just magically appearing in your hands is pretty effing cool, not to mention saying screw the turbolifts, we can just transport around the ship!

I guess we won't have to wait too much longer to see Georgiou, the Section 31 movie should be out soon. Personally I don't love what they've done with the whole Section 31 concept since it was introduced in DS9, it's now basically the CIA of Starfleet, but it was a far more secretive and insidious organization than that when Dr. Bashir first learned about them. But whatever, Michelle Yeoh can make anything work.

I just watched ep 5 a moment ago.....and watching discovery is like watching your highest paid player scoring with 10 seconds left to win a playoff series....over and over again. It loses its appeal after awhile.

This series needs more of this:

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That is a very apt analogy.

And I agree. I've seen that musical episode like, five times.

Ah, now we know why Doug Jones has been absent--he answered a fan question on Twitter, apparently when they were filming this season in 2022 (geez I didn't realize it was that long ago, I assume the strike delayed the release) he took time off the show to do press for Hocus Pocus 2, where he promoted his second-best-known role. He says he'll be back for later episodes and of course the finale.

One other thing that popped up is that they had to do some rewrites/reshoots because they didn't find out until later that Discovery wasn't coming back for a sixth season.

Last episode was actually not as bad as I had thought it was going to be, though it treaded on yet another overused Trek Trope: Clear and brazen violation of the Prime Directive. Just once, I'd like to see a Starfleet officer sacrifice their life in order to preserve the Prime Directive. We've seen them come close. Just do it, just once. It would be such a dramatic, tragic change of pace.

I'll say one scene I really liked, can't remember if it was this episode or last one, was Dr. Culber speaking with his long-since-deceased Abuela via hologram. I don't know where in hell this weird "spiritual awakening" thing is going but Wilson Cruz is doing an effective job of keeping me interested. I wonder if it ends with him leaving Discovery (and Paul Stamets) in order to do something bigger, which may tie into the whole "Progenitors" thing that is at the heart of this year's storyline. We'll see I guess.