rating: **
the story: The crew find out what Earth is like in the far future.
review: I don’t know, this is the second episode that feels tepid and lethargic to me, all the more alarming because the season premiere was so filled with energy.
“People of Earth” at once dives right into the arc and meanders. As can be the danger of serialized storytelling, it feels very much as if the writers are concentrating on “what we need to see” without understanding how to make it compelling.
It feels blandly inevitable. Burnham and Saru have a perfunctory discussion about captaincy; Burnham puts on a Starfleet uniform for the first time in a year; she convinces Book to wear one as part of a ruse; we meet the human hosting a Trill symbiont; she has a conversation with Stamets that suggests she’ll be interesting.
And it all just happens. Earth is represented by a new governing agency, at conflict with marauders from Titan. This part of the story is given minimal attention. I saw hot takes that called the resolution a Scooby reveal, but it’s not worth dwelling too much on, as we’re given little reason to care about either faction except as an example of how things have changed.
The pacing of the season is totally off. We had one episode of Burnham adapting to her new life, and then here it’s supposed to, theoretically, feel as weird for the viewer as for Burnham to adapt back into her old life. This is an even bigger problem when Burnham’s new life looks even better in hindsight, and everyone just going through the motions in her old.
So for now I will just keep hoping things become...interesting.
criteria analysis:
>franchise - A bold statement on the fate of our favorite planet! This is what happens when the good guys aren’t around. It’s like Picard if Picard never went back into action.
>series - It’s a good bit for the arc, however ultimately handled.
>character - No one really gets a decent spotlight here.
>essential - The kind of episode that could be omitted from a viewer’s itinerary not out of poor quality but out of general blandness.
notable guest-stars:
Michelle Yeoh (Georgiou)
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