[Faithful Reader]

What a great showcase for Mary Wiseman. She has a firm grasp on the character of Tilly and has a lot of fun doing it. I don't know which lines were improved, but she completely sold a lot of fun moments unlike any other character. She got more into it as the piece went on.

Po didn't fare as well. The writing is credited to two people, did they have one of them write the first half and the other write the second because Po goes through some huge swings. She is a feral warrior in the first half and suddenly talkie in the second. It's Dawn all over again!

Was this a little short on time and they threw in a scene with her mom? It didn't seem that connected to the rest of the work and we didn't get a good shot of her mother. In fact, it was pretty much one static shot for most of it. We didn't get a good look at her mother, so they could easily pull one over on us later.

The writing ... yeah, not all that great, but these are apparently meant to be character pieces, not reaching out into the main arc. These will rise or fall on the acting and writing and here we had half good half a little less so. We've got someone new next week with a lot of screen time, so we'll see how it goes.

I really would have liked them to have a better understanding of what these were before seeing it, but I'm ready for November.

[BCSWowbagger]

I basically agree with the above.

This was very flawed. Someone pointed out that it plays like a fan film, but there are a good few 15-minute fan films that know to how to use the short format to make the stakes clear and have the action decisively pivot on discrete human choices. This... didn't. It was crowded, muddled, and it's not really clear to me why Poe changes her mind (her conversation with Tilly doesn't really make sense either before or after you find out she's queen).

I rather think, budget aside, the Aaron Vanderkley productions did better work in the short format than Runaway. (I'm thinking of The Fall of Starbase One, or maybe Good Men would be a better parallel because it's even talkier than Runaway.)

But this is the first time since Burnham put on the thruster suit in "The Vulcan Hello" that Discovery felt like it was trying to make Star Trek (rather than Edgy Space Adventure #74). As such, it was Discovery's best episode to date. It didn't hurt that Tilly is so darned likable, and Poe was pretty neat, too. The translator trick was a good one; I couldn't figure out how a humanoid could be so primitive (almost bestial), and then BOOM it turned out to just be the language barrier. Like people say, some Trek is better than no Trek, and I've been waiting 13 years for it.

I give it a grateful 6.