Star Trek: Discovery Just Pulled Off the Heist of the Century
Star Trek: Discovery has always had a bit of a problem with the penultimate episodes of its seasons—episodes that have to come to some sort of juddering climactic halt for whatever’s happening that week, to set up the dire stakes coming in the finale episode the week after. At long last, as the series looks to its very last episode, it’s managed to at last pull it off: an episode that feels great as it is, while also effectively setting that final stage.
“Lagrange Point” is a deceptively simple episode for one that ultimately has to leave a lot on the table for next week’s final send off for the show. The tension is non-stop, as the Discovery finds itself failing in a race against time and Moll’s Breen forces—themselves being chased by fleets of rival Breen ships, who’ve learned of Primarch Rhun’s death after last week’s shenanigans—and failing, when they both manage to make to to the seeming location of the Progenitor tech, only for Moll’s ship to scoop up the mysterious package before Discovery can. But that means one thing and one thing only can help our heroes: heist time? Heist time.
For as beloved a Trek trope as infiltrating enemy bases and heists are, Discovery’s not actually done anything quite like this before, but it clearly has a lot of fun in doing so here. There’s a great little scene in Burnham’s ready room where they lay out the plan of action—two teams of two, Alpha (Reese and Adira) and Bravo (Michael and Book), will sneak aboard the Breen flagship disguised as foot soldiers, with one team planting a transport tracker on the Progenitor tech, and the other infiltrating the bridge to lower shields in time for everyone and their prize package to transport-poof-out in an instant. But aside from the heisty vibes, what makes it so fun is something we get to then see throughout the episode: Star Trek is, at its core, a series about competence porn, and beautiful people being smart and doing things they’re extremely good at, extremely well. Everyone in this room, from Adira all the way up to Michael, knows that they can do this, and instead of simply being told that, we get to watch them prove it over the next 40 minutes or so.
And it’s exactly that: a fun heist! Throughout, aboard Discovery, we get to see Rayner lead the bridge crew in preparing for any eventuality, a nice little release on his season-long arc of not entirely being sure he belongs with this crew. Back at Federation HQ, we also get to see Saru’s return, as he’s thrust into the Federation’s last-ditch diplomatic effort to try and get the chasing Breen forces to not engage Moll and Discovery. And then of course, on the Breen ship there’s all the heisty action. We get some great little moments of each team having to try and pretend to be aggressive Breen to fit in; Michael and Book even manage to sneak in a quiet moment together to look back on their relationship just in case everything’s about to go to hell; and of course, there’s inevitably a good couple of scraps when their cover is nearly (and then actually) blown. There’s a lot of tension that there perhaps otherwise wouldn’t be if this wasn’t the penultimate season of the entire—where we might safely assume that everyone will be fine, because there’s another season of Discovery around the corner. There’s no season around the corner this time! Everyone might not be fine! Well, except for the fact that like we said, this is a bunch of people who have, after five seasons, assured themselves and the audience alike that they’re really good at their jobs, and everything goes off damn near perfectly.
For the most part. After all, this is the penultimate episode of the season, and not a regular one, so it would be a pretty bold move for everything to go perfectly for our heroes with one episode still left to go. After Michael and Book get discovered planting the tracking device, the action ramps up even further as Discovery has to get involved as a distraction, decloaking from its vantage point to launch a hail mary charge at the Breen ship’s shuttle bay, in the hopes it can essentially ran a hole in its shielding structure and blast the Progenitor package and the captured crew out into space, picking them up there. Again, fun! Again, tense! Again, people who are good at their jobs being good at them! You can’t really ask for more than that, but at the same time, again that would make for a very dull set-up for a series finale if everyone just got what they wanted without a hitch.
So, in a final act of desperation, Moll—who has been sending Breen after Breen into the opened package to try and investigate the mysterious portal within, with none of them returning no matter what they try—leaps inside the Progenitor package/portal too. And Michael being Michael, she cannot help but leap in after her, hoping that whatever’s in there isn’t immediately lethal. So, even as Discovery slams into the Breen shuttlebay, beams everyone but Michael back aboard, and makes it out in (mostly) one piece, the Progenitor package cracks open to reveal a mysterious portal... and seemingly no signs of what could be beyond it or even if Michael is alive. The stage is set for our final episode on this cliffhanger, but again, it’s set up really well across this whole episode, instead of feeling like a cliffhanger that slams in out of nowhere on an otherwise loosely related adventure. Again and again, “Lagrange Point” hits home to us that our heroes are good at what they do, regardless of the odds, and so we get that again in another cathartic release on the Discovery bridge to end the episode: Rayner, no longer dancing around it, but sitting in the captain’s chair with a rousing message to the team—his team—that they’re going to save the day and get their captain back.
We’ll find out next week just how they do it, but given the confidence on display here? There’s very little doubt they’ll send themselves, and Discovery as a show, off with anything but an extremely competent bang.
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