Luckily, there’s cause to believe that Burnham’s decision to allow him to die will have more interesting repercussions on the ongoing story arc. Michael Greyeyes gives a charismatic performance as the weary Felix, but we don’t spend enough time with him for his death to hit as hard as the direction implies that it should. Later, Burnham fulfills Felix’s dying wish by returning a precious family heirloom to the daughter of the man he robbed and killed, completing his penance. Felix perishes when the DMA’s gravitational force pushes the entire Radvec asteroid chain into its sun. Burnham could force him to come back to Discovery, but chooses to respect his decision. He believes that he belongs behind bars, and neither Burnham nor Book can convince him to step out of the prison’s transporter jamming field. But after the first batch of them is beamed away, the prisoners’ leader Felix confesses that, unlike his comrades, he’s actually a killer. Burnham’s limp assurances of Federation political support are parried, and she eventually promises them all asylum aboard Discovery. Otherwise, they’d rather make a run for it and take their chances. Once they’re inside, the prisoners’ leader Felix (Michael Greyeyes, Wild Indian) demands that Burnham promise not to return them to the prison if the colony survives its brush with the DMA. To get to the prison, Burnham and Book have to fight their way past a horde of giant robotic beetles that shoot spinning saw blades at them, and that’s good fun.
That’s not to say that there are no interesting wrinkles to the story. In short, it’s an easy call and it costs nothing, which I think is a missed opportunity. Do they all go, do they all stay, or does Burnham become the arbiter of who deserves a pardon and who doesn’t? What might that say about the very nature of retributive justice? The effort to save the examples also doesn’t add any cost to the grander mission, which goes off without a hitch under the offscreen supervision of Lt. Suppose the examples were not, as we’re initially told, all the perpetrators of nonviolent, borderline victimless crimes, but a range of offenses both excusable and heinous carried out under a variety of circumstances. On the other hand, the Radvec justice system being so obviously cruel that no reasonable viewer could support it robs us of a good Star Trek ethical dilemma. Let’s face it, Jean-Luc Picard would have spent half the episode considering whether or not to break Radvec’s body of laws and might very well have left the prisoners to die in the name of the Prime Directive. On the one hand, this is a cool bit of vintage Trek heroism straight out of the James T. If the DMA continues along its current heading, they’ll be killed.Ĭaptain Burnham will have none of this, and immediately sets off with Book to break the examples out of prison. In any case, this sets up a classic Star Trek culture clash, as the magistrate demands that Discovery leave the prisoners behind. This is imagined as a deterrent against crime in general, though it’s not really clear how that works, particularly given that Radvec has about the same size population as a suburban high school. The colony’s magistrate (Jonathan Goad, Reign) informs Captain Burnham that these are “the examples,” a group of criminals sentenced to life in prison regardless of the severity of their crimes. Naturally, there’s a complication - Discovery learns that six people are trapped inside a security field, unable to reach an evacuation zone. It should be a simple race against the clock, with a small fleet of Starfleet ships beaming up the settlement’s 1200 citizens and getting out of range before interference from the anomaly makes transporters inoperable. When the planet-destroying gravitational anomaly nicknamed the DMA threatens an inhabited asteroid chain, Radvec, Discovery is sent to lead an evacuation effort. There’s still not quite as much meat on the bone as I’d like, but “The Examples” succeeds where the past two episodes failed, portioning out ample time to its “problem of the week” while also upping the stakes of the season as a whole. For the past few weeks on Star Trek: Discovery, the storytellers have struggled to deliver self-contained adventures while still dedicating time to advancing the season’s ongoing character arcs and mystery plot.
0 kommentar(er)
