Pike got his "that's rough buddy" moment.

I am very glad we got to revisit this storyline. There was a lot left to explain in that dimensional prison, and using it as a finale to neatly wrap a lot of different plot threads was great. I was really interested in that guardian figure from the earlier episode, knowing now that it ended up being Batel in a kind of asymptotic time loop is pretty crazy, but it is a very poetic ending. She can't really live a life with Pike, and this is an ending that gives her meaning.

When Batel's hands started glowing for a moment I genuinely thought she was going to regenerate à la time lord. And in the end I guess she kind of did! I half expected her to start babbling about some cosmic koala when she had stars in her eyes, I'm glad she didn't. The ending took a serious tone, and that worked very well.

This episode uses what is effectively a dream sequence and those you have to be careful with. It works well here because the concept of time, cause, and effect have already been established as in play here so even if it never turned out as the actual in-universe outcome, it still feels like it has meaning. I note that the show giving us Pike's alternate future had he not (will he have had not? tenses are hard with time travel) got in the accident for me cements the fact that he really is going to end up as his future vision told him. There's no avoiding it now.

I am not sure I really followed a lot of the treknobabble in this one. I don't get how the entity managed to reconstruct itself, nor why there was a whole debate about phasers being complementary instead of additive. But as a plot device to get things moving it was serviceable. Also, just a note, if you're firing a stream of ANTI protons into the atmosphere, one would expect the antimatter to annihilate on impact with the upper atmosphere. I did find it hilarious that there's two massive red lasers with the same power as a star beaming in through the balcony and none of the natives there were bothered by it enough to get out of their seats!

The planet design was really cool, the big floating churchey architecture was giving me Halo vibes. It's interesting that the planet has no warp travel but still makes contact with alien races. I wonder if then the Feds would bother to help them out in the aftermath, or if they just left them to it. They kind of should take responsibility, given it was them that unleashed the evil in the first place. Even if it's just to loan them that eye regeneration thing for a few hours.

Overall, this was a nice finale, and given it didn't end on a pointless cliffhanger, and wrapped up most of the threads well, one of the better ones as TV dramas go.

I liked the little suggestion by Pelia at the start of the episode that she spent time with a time travelling doctor. The rest of the episode the writing felt a bit too rushed.

I'm happy that Pike got the chance to live a happy life, but Batel's story felt pretty weak and quickly thrown together.

This season has been -okay-, weakest season so far, but still better than Discovery.

Didn't liked much the episode, best parts the Kirk-Spock interactions, and Im not a TOS guy.

The Pike finale with Batel was bad, also it was annunciated before, so no surprise when it happens which does it worst.

Worst SNW season so far. Not terribly bad, ,but definitely not good

Though I am deeply grateful that there is no cliffhanger.

In a season of genre experimentation they couldn't decide whether to end with a Doctor Who episode or a Doctor Strange episode, so why not both?

2/10

Worse sequel to the season's so-far worst episode.

Felt like the writers were like "wouldn't it be cool if we do this... and that... and this again..."

"science so advanced it might as well be magic": yeah, pretty much, this was more of a D&D campaign (bad one) than a good sci-fi episode. Even the silly Prophets / Pah-wraiths arc of DS9 was preferable to this.

@ValueSubtracted Closure... Now Pike can catch up with his ex on Talos IV.

I don't like destiny episodes. It makes it feel like nothing matters. Like in ENT's Shockwave, the crew just follows Daniel's plan it and it all works out.

I feel this was not a very strong season, but I did enjoy it and that they experimented with the shows formula a bit. But over all, I feel this is the weakest of the 3 seasons we have so far.

Also, what's up with all the mind melds? I went back and watch Dagger of the Mind, the first time we see an onscreen mind meld, and Spock says that he never mind melded with a human before. I guess he could always be lying, as that is definitely within Spock's ability, but it seems like a trivial thing to lie about. But I get it, don't be a slave to canon when we got a story to tell.

But to be realistic, it'd have been easier to make a program that could fire the phasers at the same time rather then a mind meld. And at the same time, there are many times in Star Trek where literally basic cyber security or actual computer programming could have saved the day, and at the end of the day that's just not good compelling story telling.

I'm also a bit disappointed that they did not find a contrived techno babel solution to save Gamble. But I get it, he's not bridge crew, so is expendable.

It was nice that Pike and Batel got to experience a happy ending that we know will never come.

I don't think I much like this episode though.

I thought that the way they came to understanding what was going on was a little rushed and a bit too speculative, not being based on actual evidence and it was just convenient that they happened to be right that Batel was the Beholder. That entire bit of exposition sounded like it was out of Doctor Who rather than Star Trek: rapid fire vaguely plausible assertions that you just gloss over to get along with the plot and treating concepts like evil not as abstract but actual entities. There was none of the tension of putting things together from actual clues.

Are we meant to believe then that there is a degree of time travel or simultaneity going on? Because aside from the glib “effect before cause” thing which is the equivalent of “shut up, just run with it”, how precisely does Batel become the Beholder? How does three sets of DNA in her - Gorn, Human and Illyrian - translate to having all the abilities of all races that have faced evil?

It would have made more sense to have her go back in time after defeating Gamble (which is what I was expecting) or to say that the prison existed in non-linear time or something. As it is, it’s left pretty much up in the air and we are asked to accept it.

Are we also meant to believe that she was the one who left the messages for M’Benga and La’An, and why leave them in Swahili and Chinese respectively? Why not just put them in English? And how did Batel learn those langauges?

There were good bits, and heartfelt bits, but mostly it was kind of meh for me as finales go.

Overall an okay episode but hats off to whoever snuck their D&D campaign storyline that they cribbed from for this story arc. Nice touch to write out Patel but also give Pike an Inner light happy ending. Only major critique I had was the villain was kind of one-dimensional like you'd see in the D&D campaign so would have been nice if they fleshed out that more before bringing it to the screen.

Annotations for 3x10 are up at: https://startrek.website/post/28867268

I kept thinking of “The Reckoning” the entire episode.