9 Ups & 1 Down From Star Trek: Discovery 5.8 — Labyrinths

Pausing amongst the more high-octane, although things were still moving and shaking (and exploding) around them, to discuss the finer points of positrons is a bit of a risk in the climax of the drama. Then again, there is nothing more Star Trek than allotting time for technobabble when the ship, when the world, when the galaxy is falling down around its protagonists. Labyrinths gives a full minute or so to team Stamets, Adira, and Reno to find a workable solution to the Breen shield tunnelling super tech, and their conversation is up there with the best mid-battle babble put to screen.

The nod to the Trek trope, not in a negative sense, comes also only at the end of the scene. Over the comm, previous UP on this list, Commander Rhys, replies to Stamets' quintessence of an engineering assessment, i.e. the giving of a vague timeframe, with the brilliantly sarcastic, "We'll do our best to survive that long". Before that, our trio were simply left to get on with their figurings-out.

At one point in all the tunnel tech talk, Stamets and Adira are so gloriously in-sync in their thoughts that they can't help but express them out-loud in unison: "…To match the archive's shield frequency!" Reno gives the only reply possible, and one we were all thinking: "I love when you two do that!" They do have a history of it, in season four's Kobayashi Maru, for example. "Geomagnetic compensators!"

We've had perfectly timed twosomes of technobabblers before in Star Trek. In the Voyager episode Parallax, B'Elanna and Janeway are so in-time with temporal mechanics that their speech patterns merge, finishing each other's sentences, until "BOTH: Warp particles," to quote the subtitles.

More on a Reno résumé reference later, too!