rating: **
the story: Burnham must track down and neutralize a rogue member of the Qowat Milot who has been stealing dilithium and has just murdered a Starfleet officer.
review: This one's a difficult review to write, because "Choose to Live" is both an important episode and yet so strangely inert, the execution so drained of life, it's tough to admit it's just not as good as it should be.
The biggest news for fans is that Gray now has a body! Gray's character arc, so brilliantly begun in "Forget Me Not" last season, has degenerated into the worst kind of serialized storytelling the modern era has given us, things that linger and kind of creep along episodes and seasons, seldom receiving a spotlight. It's particularly egregious for being such an important moment, worse even, for me, than "Project Daedalus" from the second season that suddenly thought Airiam was worth exploring, even as she was a secondary character in her own episode. "Choose" doesn't even give Gray secondary status. He's third, behind Burnham, behind Book, arguably behind even Tilly, meaning he ranks fourth in such a dramatic moment for his development.
Getting to have his own body again.
It's poor juggling on the writing side, and sluggish editing even with all those elements to feature in a single episode. The liveliest moment comes from Vance using a hammy metaphor to help assuage Burnham of her need for control (itself a theme of the season) when Burnham lightly agrees to the wisdom. Saru has some nice moments with Tilly, whose arc this season is trying to figure out why she feels so out of place (which seems like it probably would've made more sense last season, when she an' everyone else literally skipped ahead into the far future and away from everything they'd known outside of their shipmates).
(It occurs to me that Gray plays fifth fiddle; even Stamets, in science hero mode once again, has more to do.)
Much of the episode trades on franchise elements recently established in Picard, which Discovery made use of in its third season already, and again draws on here. This would be fine if the episode draws as deftly on them as Picard itself had. Picard doesn't get near enough credit for how gracefully it played out in its first season. Discovery can sometimes hiccup when trying to find the vibe of a season, skipping on the record player even when it has something interesting to say. "Choose" is so busy trying to explore four or five different plot points it doesn't give enough breathing room to any of them. Book, for instance, is supposed to be distraught and devastated, and rightly so, but in this episode he really behaves no differently after a restorative mind meld than he did before it. You could infer differently if you'd just watched the previous episode, but in this one no real grief is visible, only conversations implying it. I don't know if it's the acting or that the whole episode was filmed without really figuring any of it out.
We see Burnham's mom again, and this time, unlike "Unification III" last season, I again see her as the lifeless injection she was in the second season. That's the whole episode, as close to a real bummer as this series has yet produced.
But it is nice for the Gray arc to have reached this point, no matter how badly executed. He has a body. He can live again. This has so far been a season where characters are finally moving on, and symbolically, amidst the lethargic chaos of an episode, we have a vantage point from which to pinpoint an exact moment in time for which to pivot the overall arc. I don't think that's why "Choose" plays out the way it does. But it doesn't hurt to view it that way.
criteria analysis:
- franchise - For fans of the modern era, the episode serves as a refresher course for new mythology.
series- However much I want to read into things, the overall effect of the episode is also to drag on rather than enhance the season arc.- character - It's a huge moment for Gray, even if he plays at best fifth fiddle in achieving it.
essential- I don't know if the writers thought they were going to merely duplicate Gray's debut from last season by doing it any other way, but as far as I'm concerned this moment was almost blown.
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