I get the themes they were going for (that the familiarity the Discovery crew has with each other is what saves them from tough situations), but the execution was... not good.
I've said multiple times how much I hated the first two seasons (really first three, but I felt season three was at least heading in the right direction). While I thought season 4 was pretty decent and season 5 is off to an ok start, the big problem I have is that in order to make the last two seasons make sense, you pretty much have to ignore the first two. This episode was a perfect example of that.
Burnham and Rayner's argument in the opening is BS. She tells Rayner, "We do things
my way here," like we haven't seen her butt heads with four different captains, at least two admirals, the Ni'Var science council, and the fukking president of the Federation
The second half of the episode is just cliche after cliche. Burnham meeting her past self and of course they have to fight.
Even if past Burnham believed future Burnham was a shapeshifter, I don't buy that she would be that incredulous or dismissive of the fact that her future self would become captain. Season one Burnham very much had faith that she would eventually find redemption, so the real reaction she would have had to future Burnham would have been one of
. They only wrote her like that so that Rayner could have that character moment at the end, which he absolutely needed after last week's episode, but not at the expense of writing Burnham like this.
When future Burnham decides to go to the Bridge to speak to the past Discovery crew, Rayner tells her they won't listen to her in this time period because she's a mutineer.
That shyt only mattered in like one or two episodes of season one, and even though this is implied to be right after Burnham went to Discovery, she still acted like she had rank, and Tilly actually idolized her.
And we have to that tired ass trope of, "I know some random fact about you, so I must be the real me and/or the me from the future!"
I've mentioned before how the Bridge crew is largely inconsequential, so in addition to being cliche none of these random facts about them had any emotional weight to it besides maybe Tilly and Airiam's, since Tilly was initially
about sharing quarters with Burnham for like half an episode, and Airiam's dead. And if she was gonna do that with them, she could have done that with her past self, but like I mentioned they wanted Rayner to have that moment.
I don't know. I'm still liking this season, but this episode was super mid compared to last week's which I thought was pretty fun.
