WHY WE LIKE IT: The direction.
WHY WE DON'T: The writing.
REVIEW: I love a good scientific mystery. Not so much the mystery, but competent characters exploring and solving such mysteries procedurally. And as a team. The scientific mission soon turns into one of survival with lots of desperate gambits that fail or backfire, though ultimately the crew walks away with crucial information on the DMA's origins, placing it on the other side of the Galactic Barrier, so truly unknown. But such a story comes with important challenges that it mostly manages to cover up, if not exactly overcomes. Chief among the problems is that getting the ship trapped in a weird part of susbpace is a technobabble problem that must be solved with more technobabble. What we get is a bottle episode with a lot of talking, so it was a very good idea to get Jonathan Frakes to direct. Either he's bolder than most, or he's allowed to be bolder, but either way, his episodes always look good. He uses wipes, tips the camera to disabuse us of there being an "up" in space, and makes excellent use of music. But these are largely distractions to put lipstick on a weak script.
I suppose chief among the writing problems is that the final escape doesn't really track. The ship's shields are failing and all the power has to be diverted from life support, so Burnham has everyone beam into the pattern buffer (à la Scotty in Relics) while she sits alone on the bridge and directs the ship's A.I. Zora in an EV suit. Fine, but need she do this alone? There can't be just one suit on board, nor is Booker's ship plugged into the same power supply. It might have been useful for crew to keep scanning or whatever (this IS a fact-finding mission into the Eye of Sauron, after all), even from Booker's bridge. When the ship starts to burn up and break up, Burnham asks Zora to take the crew out of the buffer herself once they're out of the rift, but then doesn't go into the buffer herself. Instead, we're supposed to believe she could be sacrificing herself and not wake up in sickbay as she does later. Is there just no power or too much interference to transport herself at that point? I could no-prize it, but they undersell it. The way it reads is that the ship can fly itself, so Burnham's big play is holding an insecure Zora's hand through the process. The net result is my disliking Zora. (I'm not alone; it gets addressed in the next episode.)
Zora's emotional awakening is something we know must happen based on her first appearance in Short Treks, but it's a hell of a time for the ship to start struggling emotionally and not be able to do her job. Like Data in Generations, except not as erratic, she's a danger to the mission because she lacks any kind of maturity. So it's a lot of "I'm afraid" and making bad decisions, etc. She gets help from Gray who, sad to say, has no real role aboard ship since he was given a body. The character's on track to become a Guardian on Trill, so it seems he won't survive as a series regular now that he's no longer a complication for Adira. Not unless Culber decides to share the counseling load with him, which I could see happening. But Gray running to the bridge to reveal something that's only barely justifiable - when coms and personal transports exist - or Zora singing the "Stormy Weather" are just weird or trite.
In terms of subplots, this one's practically wall-to-wall cheese. The weightiest has Booker experience a hallucination of his brow-beating father, which eventually gives him comfort, hoping against hope that it might really be his spirit. Given his survivor's guilt, his mention of his father earlier in the episode, the fact that it's the man's birthday, and his people's particular brain chemistry, it pretty much HAS to be a hallucination though. Then there's Burnham's "family tree" (and Zora's), which just reminds me of those kitschy things with pictures of your family on every branch (children of the 70s, you remember this?). Owosekun's false conflict with Saru and having to explain herself with some expository sob story (when there's not a minute to lose). Even Saru sharing how he still has anger towards the Ba'ul with Booker comes off as cheesy somehow.
LESSON: The Captain burns up with the ship.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-Low: Better than a lot of shows' Medium-Lows, but if it achieves better, it's really only because of the fancy direction and the fact that every chapter counts in these seasonal arcs.
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