6 Ups & 3 Downs From Star Trek: Discovery 5.10 — Life, Itself

As I mentioned in the introduction, all of Life, Itself, and especially its coda, is bound to be compared to These Are The Voyages… The latter, in its entirety, was a coda, a hasty flash-forward in an attempt to wrap up. It wasn't an episode of Enterprise, however, but the deleted scenes for one of TNG.

For different reasons, and for different circumstances, Star Trek: Discovery has avoided all that. This is an epilogue done right, on their own terms. As we've noted before, the good fortune was that season five was always leading back to the beginning (of all things… of "life, itself" via the Progenitors). The symbolism of Doctor Kovich/Daniels' closed, infinite loop was ever more prescient when it and the Red Directive became the beginning of the very end. In that sense, they only had to add to what was already there. They could wax lyrical… with a little wax.

Whilst the beach could have been ending enough, and no doubt originally was, I personally found the time-jump coda to be deeply moving and particularly poignant. It was deceptively simple, but beautifully executed, with nods to the past, present, and future — from a telescope, to Alice, to tenure. Memories… all alone in the bridge light might have been a little maudlin, but not saccharin, and surely the best they could do at short notice. To quote something that will come up in about a thousand years or so — " 'S Wonderful"!