Quote Originally Posted by BRC View Post
Season (Potentially Series? Reception hasn't been great, and this didn't feel like setting up for much of a second season) Finale came out and

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As much as I consider myself a fan of the show, I can't say I loved the finale.

Like, the first bit is some quality character-drama with everybody finding out about Mariner being the Captain's daughter. Which...would be solid ground for an episode, but they way they handled it didn't really work for me.
Like, they go the route of "Everybody starts kissing up to Mariner, and she hates it". Which 1) Doesn't work with how the show has portrayed any of these characters so far. They seem to respect captain freeman, but they don't brown-nose her except to get her off their backs so why would they suddenly start making a show of trying to impress her daughter?

Anyway, that doesn't really go anywhere except to get Mariner to a point where she decides to clean up her act so she can get transferred off the Ceritos, because everybody trying to make her like them succeeds where administrative tedium failed. Fine, solid enough.

Then we get to the big Crisis Setpiece, with the scrapper aliens. Which serves to set up Freeman throwing the problem to Mariner so she can think of an outside-the-box solution which comes down to...a pretty standard star-trek solution of "Tell the Engineers to whip something up". It's less than pure technobabble because it's got the starting point of "They integrate a lot of different tech into their ship, so their system must be pretty willing to accept a wide variety of code", which is neat, and brings back Badgey.

It's hardly "A brilliant solution that only Loose Cannon Ensign Mariner Could Think of!" It's pretty standard star-trek fare to be honest, but it's a solid action setpiece with a heroic sacrifice at the end.


...Then a bunch more alien ships show up solely so they can get saved by Troi and Riker aboard the U.S.S Cameo-Ex-Machina.

And you end with, returning to the idea from the first episode, that Mariner's disregard of Starfleet regulations comes from a genuine desire to do good. And kind of an agreement for the two of them to unofficially work together.



My Gripes
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"Everybody Kisses Mariner's Ass" is neither an especially entertaining bit, nor does it make a lot of sense as a reaction. Also, that sort of thing really could have deserved it's own episode. I would have gone the route of "Everybody stops hassling Mariner for goofing off because they assume her Mother is just going to cover for her anyway", which would work because 1) You can get some good humor out of Mariner reacting badly to people letting her get away with things, and 2) Character growth, as Mariner is offended that people think her mother is protecting her.

I get that you're excited to have some TNG actors do cameos, but this is the season finale of YOUR series. It should be about YOUR characters. Don't suddenly invent a problem so the Cameo characters can solve it. That's just lazy screenwriting.

The resolution of having the captain acknowledge Mariner's perspective, and methods is a good one...if that was more of a theme across the season. Besides the first episode, most of what Mariner has done has been goof off when she can get away with it, occasionally pulling out her hypercompetance to save the day. "Beckett Does Good Things By Breaking the Rules" has barely been a plotline, in fact, in THIS episode it's kind of a tacked-on rehash of the first episode (Beckett handing out supplies).
I guess there was that one episode where she overthrows a despotic government. In general, the conflict hasn't been Beckett Wants To do Good but Starfleet Won't Let Her, so building the resolution around that feels odd.

Ya know, I started off the first season markedly lukewarm on it and I finished it a big fan. The last two episodes were the best, with 9 getting the top spot IMO.

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I didn't much see any issue with the crew's treatment of Mariner - Ransom's initial encounter with her and Freeman is almost identical to Boimler's, so we have both a junior officer that is close friends with her and a senior officer that more or less indifferent to her react awkwardly on knowing her familial status. It's a pretty good indicator that the rest of the crew would feel similarly awkward. Plus, that they don't suck up to a seasoned captain doesn't mean they wouldn't to a particularly well-positioned ensign; any captain would be able to tell immediately what the deal was with possible brownnosing, but newish barely-out-of-Starfleet kids who were cadets in recent memory? It'd probably pass Boimler by, for example, and while Mariner is significantly sharper and more seasoned, there's no reason to think everyone would know that, let alone think it differentiates things.

I also am hesitant to call Riker and the Titan a DEM, since the Cerritos crew earned their victory. The Titan only saved them from the three new aggressors that were exactly as foreshadowed and relevant to the story as the Titan itself was (less so, actually, since they mention the Titan in the first few minutes and Boimler moves in at the end). The three additional ships come in solely for the Titan to come in, sure, bbut there was hardly any time for the danger to even exist, so I'm fine with that. The main characters solved their own problem. The other ships were an afterthought and dealt with like they were an afterthought. Though I would have liked a line about the Cerritos now knowing if their distress call got through the jamming or something to foreshadow the Titan a bit more.

Plus, I unabashedly love Enterprise (or at least the parts of Enterprise that didn't deal with the Temporal Cold War or the Xindi), so I also loved the callbacks to it. Even the callback to that stupid ****ing title song.