Star Trek: Discovery 3: Fulfilling the Promise

Checking in with a review of Star Trek: Discovery season 3, which was on CBS All Access now Paramount+ nearly a year ago, but I just had a chance to binge-watch the past few days. 

The first 10 of its 13 episodes were a mix of good, ok, and very good.  The final three episodes were pure gold, with outstanding hand-to-hand combat, and some of the best personal stories and trials and tribulations in any Star Trek, of whatever vintage, on whatever kind of screen.

First, it was ingenuous to move the storyline in this season from before the start of Star Trek: The Original Series to further in the future than any other Star Trek narrative has been located.   I won't give away too much of the plot in this review, but I will say that although we've seen plenty of time travel in many a Star Trek season, the goal of Discovery in staying in this far future -- what it must do -- is original, unexpected, and sufficiently cosmic to motivate all the twists and turns and surprises in the story.

The continuing characters, especially Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Saru (Doug Jones), really come into their own.  And lots of memorable new characters this season, too.  My favorites were Booker (David Ajala), Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr), Osyraa (Janet Kidder), and Kovich (David Cronenberg -- yes!).   There was good integration of Vulcan and Romulus into the story, and a nice shout-out to "City on the Edge of Forever," with Paul Guilfoyle (CSI's Jim Brass) playing the Guardian of Forever.

I've come to realize -- and I may have said this is in an earlier review, but it's worth repeating -- that the Star Trek franchise is more than a superb one-of-a-kind series of television series and movies.  It's a blueprint for our future, a blueprint which is helping that future come into being, by being such a continuing inspiration.  Or, as I said my essay, The Missing Orientation, published late last year, "my lifelong commitment to doing what I could via writing and speaking to help lift our species off this planet was baked in for life by Star Trek in the mid-1960s."

The third season of Star Trek: Discovery amply continues that inspiration.  I'll be back here with a review of the fourth season, which will start on Paramount+ on November 18, and everything Star Trek that comes after.

See also Star Trek: Discovery 2: Tour de Force Story and Characters ... Discovering Star Trek: Discovery ... Star Trek: Picard: Non-Pareil

The Third Returns with Exits

Emon Hassan's The Third returns with its second episode - "Exits" - this Tuesday, May 1.  If ever there was a medium is the message movie, ala Marshall McLuhan, "The Third" would be it (even though McLuhan liked tetrads better than triads).   This is because the story, quiveringly, quietly terrifying, is told with not much content.

But I'll tell you a bit about the content, anyway.  An old woman is stretched out, eyes closed, in bed.  I thought she was dead, until she smiled.   Her son kneels by her bed, and cries.  Maybe she was dead, after all.

There's not much of the emotive actor Philip Willingham in this episode, except that haunting face, at the beginning.  But there's a guy who looks like an elderly Buddy Holly, or maybe Elvis Costello, if he'd continued with his Buddy Holly look.  And the woman and son.


The music by Kevin Mahonchak is superbly eerie and unsettling, as is the cinematography by Hassan.  The second episode of The Third premiering on the first (you knew that was coming) is just five minutes or so, with four more episodes to follow.  In case it's not apparent, there's a kind of music of the spheres, mathematical synchronicity to The Third, not only in its name but its presentation.


Reviewing last week's episode of Mad Men, I said it felt like it had been directed by some David - Cronenberg or Lynch.  The same could be said of the shot of other-worldliness to the cortex that is The Third.  You can catch the start of Exits (a rearrangement of exist) only on the Web, on Tuesday, over here - where you can also see all six episodes of last year's pilot, right now.  Click on the label "The Third" below to read my reviews of three of those.

Mad Men 5.6: LSD Orange

Mad Men 5.6 ... LSD, break-up shake-ups, diced-up sequences out of time, and anachronisms galore ...

Focus groups in 1966?  I don't think so.   Intimate encounters with total strangers in movie theaters?  Always possible, not very frequent. LSD parties?  I guess so, possibly, technically yeah, but not very likely.

Was that Timothy Leary at that little party with Roger and Jane?  I dunno, maybe, or maybe Roger was just addressing Leary in the abstract.

It was that kind of episode.  It was sad and good to see Roger and Jane break up, courtesy of their acid trip (and now the path is more open to Joan).  It was not so good and also sad to see Don and Megan at such odds, and Megan's statement that every time they fight like that, it takes a little of their love away, did ring true for them.

Peggy's been a wild card, since the very first episode of the series, when she slept with Pete.   She was that way tonight, drunk and stoned in the movie house, after she runs into more trouble with client Heinz.   "Beans, beans, the magic fruit  ..."

So, I don't know, it's like David Cronenberg or Lynch directed this episode, or maybe Tarantino.  Did it work for Mad Men?  Well, the orange Howard Johnson certainly did, and I don't blame Megan one bit for for not liking the orange sherbert, it had artificial written all over it, and that worked just right, too.

See also Mad Men Season 5 Debut: It's Don's Party  ... Mad Men 5.3: Heinz Is On My Side ... Mad Men 5.4: Volunteer, Dream, Trust ... Mad Men 5.5: Ben Hargrove

And from Season 4: Mad Men 4.1: Chicken Kiev, Lethal Interview, Ham Fight ... 4.2: "Good Time, Bad Time?" "Yes." ... 4.3: Both Coasts ... 4.4: "The following program contains brief nudity ..."  4.5: Fake Out and Neurosis ... 4.6: Emmys, Clio, Blackout, Flashback  ... 4.7: 'No Credits on Commercials' ... 4.8: A Tale of Two Women ... 4.9: "Business of Sadists and Masochists" ... 4.10: Grim Tidings ... 4.11: "Look at that Punim" ... 4.12: No Smoking!  ... Mad Men Season 4 Finale: Don and -

And from Season 3: Mad Men Back for 3 and 3.2: Carvel, Penn Station, and Diet Soda and 3.3: Gibbon, Blackface, and Eliot and 3.4: Caned Seats and a Multiple Choice about Sal's Patio Furniture and 3.5: Admiral TV, MLK, and a Baby Boy and 3.6: A Saving John Deere and 3.7: Brutal Edges ... August Flights in 3.8 ... Unlucky Strikes and To the Moon Don in 3.9 ... 3.10: The Faintest Ink, The Strongest Television ... Don's Day of Reckoning in Mad Men 3.11 ... Mad Men 3.12: The End of the World in Mad Men ... Mad Men Season 3 Finale: The End of the World

And from Season Two: Mad Men Returns with a Xerox and a Call Girl ... 2.2: The Advertising Devil and the Deep Blue Sea ... 2.3 Double-Barreled Power ... 2.4: Betty and Don's Son ... 2.5: Best Montage Since Hitchcock ... 2.6: Jackie, Marilyn, and Liberty Valance ... 2.7: Double Dons ... 2.8: Did Don Get What He Deserved? ... 2.9: Don and Roger ... 2.10: Between Ray Bradbury and Telstar ... 2.11: Welcome to the Hotel California ... 2.12 The Day the Earth Stood Still on Mad Men ... 2.13 Saving the Best for Last on Mad Men

And from Season One: Mad Men Debuts on AMC: Cigarette Companies and Nixon ... Mad Men 2: Smoke and Television ... Mad Men 3: Hot 1960 Kiss ... Mad Men 4 and 5: Double Mad Men ... Mad Men 6: The Medium is the Message! ... Mad Men 7: Revenge of the Mollusk ... Mad Men 8: Weed, Twist, Hobo ... Mad Man 9: Betty Grace Kelly ... Mad men 10: Life, Death, and Politics ... Mad Men 11: Heat! ... Mad Men 12: Admirable Don ... Mad 13: Double-Endings, Lascaux, and Holes

20-minute interview with Rich Sommer (Harry Crane) at Light On Light Through

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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