#Notevember
Warm
“Fireflies” by Jeff Russo
This may seem like an odd choice since I’ve said several times that I’m not a big fan of the two-part episode “Terra Firma” from Star Trek: Discovery‘s third season1, but really do like Jeff Russo’s music for this sequence in Part Two.
Having been thrust back to the Mirror Universe for plot reasons, Emperor Georgiou finds that she no longer feels a part of that world. Yet, to maintain that facade she must torture Mirror Michael Burnham, with whom she has a complicated history as we learned back in Season One. At the same time, Georgiou thinks that, because she has changed due to her experiences in the “prime universe,” this version of Michael can do the same2.
Ultimately, Georgiou goes to Burnham’s cell in the night and tells her the story of how, when Michael was younger, she used to have night terrors and would sleepwalk to a field full of fireflies to calm herself down. She then leaves a sort of “firefly snow globe” at Michael’s bedside before leaving. Jeff Russo scores this sequence with a lovely cue featuring low strings3 that more than makes up for any deficiencies I might find with what is happening on screen. One of Russo’s strengths in his Star Trek scoring is finding these sorts of emotional themes for key moments, and he does it again here.
A very minor side note, but the first five notes of Russo’s theme here sound a lot like Bear McCreary’s Boomer theme from Battlestar Galactica. It’s certainly a coincidence, but it’s something that strikes me every time I listen to it…
The episodes themselves are decent, I just wish they had spent two more hours on the Osyrra storyline in lieu of an unearned rehabilitation episode for Georgiou that’s an obvious backdoor pilot to a show that never happened↩
I don’t buy any of this, but that’s a discussion for another time.↩
Something he does a lot in Discovery particularly in the latter seasons↩
