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Paramount+’s Star Trek: Discovery returned from over a month-long hiatus as the U.S.S. Discovery is tasked to apprehend our two fugitives: the brilliant overambitious scientist Ruon Tarka (Shawn Doyle) and Cleveland Booker (David Ajala), who lost his homeworld Kwejian to the Dark Matter Anomaly in “All In”. The two stole a prototype based on Discovery’s spore drive that allows for instantaneous travel across the galaxy as they intended to neutralize the threat instead of confronting Unknown Species 10-C as was voted upon by the Federation council. Capt Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) tracks the two to the planet of Porathia taking Owosekun (Oyin Oladejo) with her.
The planet Porathia is located outside of Federation jurisdiction and the parties eventually cross paths adding to existing tension to their motivations and past relationships. The place is a gambling house called Karma Barge, which is run by Haz Mazaro (Daniel Kash), where suitors can bet on anything regarding currency- or in this instance, a specific item of interest. Aside from the layout, it gets pretty mundane from here as we see writer Sean Cochran and directors Christopher J. Byrne and Jen McGowan find things for the principal characters to do and stretch out time. The tension in the gaming sequences is virtually non-existent. It felt more like they needed to fill space in the episode to make up for the lack of anything actually going on.
It breaks down to a card game that Burnham and Book find themselves in, not looking to budge on their respective positions and playing to their own (and off of) each other’s emotions. The other item of note is a contrived sequence to make Owosekun useful by showing her fighting prowess in the ring. It felt like it was shoehorned in simply to give her something to do and again, fill time. I think you’re probably noticing what my biggest problem was with the latest chapter. The fighting didn’t even have any place in the story other than to fulfill the standard elaborate gambling house clichés we see everywhere. Aside from what happens at the barge, we get a throwaway sequence on Discovery that again adds nothing to the plot but reminds us that Culver (Wilson Cruz) is frustrated (as if previous episodes didn’t already demonstrate that). It’s easy to nitpick at what happens (or rather, what doesn’t happen) in this episode but it was an odd one that they chose to return back from break on because it did very little to hype viewers for what’s to come.
Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 Episode 8 “All In”
Review by Tom Chang
3/10
Checking back in after its midseason break, Paramount+’s Star Trek: Discovery should have folded on its latest fourth season episode, “All In.” Riddled with gambling cliches & feeling like there was a lot going on but not much actually happening, I expected something a bit more inspired- especially from the first episode back from the midseason break.
Director
Christopher J. Byrne & Jen McGowan
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