Star Trek: Discovery The War Without, The War Within Review
Star Trek: Discovery: Season 1, Episode 14: The War Without, The War Within. This Star Trek: Discovery The War Without, The War Within review finds Sunday night’s episode to be talkier than previous entries but it works well.
Funnily enough, this dovetails neatly into a criticism frequently thrown at the JJ Abrams Star Trek films. While many critics claimed that the high-octane action of the movies felt more like Star Wars than Star Trek, the weightier, more dialogue-driven nature of War Without calls to mind any number of cerebral conversations to say nothing of heated back-and-forths on TOS, TNG, and the rest of the series’. Considering that some fans have complained that Star Trek: Discovery doesn’t feel like Trek either, it will be interesting to see how said fans receive this aspect of the program.
While we’re on the subject of the other series’, I thought it was nice that the episode acknowledged Enterprise, with a brief-but-potent reference to Captain Archer and his crew’s attempts to navigate the Klingon homeward of Qonos. Readers who have been following my coverage of the show might remember that I noted the uniforms worn by the crew of the Discovery are somewhat reminiscent of those worn on Enterprise, making it even cooler (at least for me) that the writers went out of their way to make this connection between the two shows.
Moving on back to the dialogue, some of the exchanges here stand out in how much they emphasize the friction between the characters. Stamets’ (Anthony Rapp) confrontation with Tyler (Shazad Latif) is a strong, if not the best, example, struggling to balance his outrage at Tyler’s killing of Culber with his understanding that Tyler was not Tyler when he murdered his partner. The frustration is clear in Stamets’ eyes, but it turns to bitter resignation when he tells Tyler “maybe you’re still human after all” when the latter describes the guilt he feels.
I still find it weird that they killed off Lorca (Jason Isaacs) so easily in the preceding episode. Considering how big of a role he played in driving the story, it’s just strange to me that they would dispose of him so soon into the show’s first season. Then again, I was taken aback by Captain Georgiou’s (Michelle Yeoh) death in the first episode, and they brought her back in Terran form, so who knows, maybe Lorca will return in some other form.
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