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After some very plot-driven episodes focused on getting right to what’s happening, “The Stars Our Destination” feels like a necessary cooldown. It’s a proper later episode, slowing down to assess where everyone is at psychologically, but also a pivot point to set up the final two episodes of this season.
This is what I was looking forward to most: some time to sit and process everything. A trip to Will’s beach hut is a good way to put the Oxford Four (RIP Jack) back in the same place, doing their best to decompress even though there are plenty of reasons to be… well, compressed. For one thing, Will is still dying of pancreatic cancer, with an imaginary countdown ticking in his head that’s much more real than the one Auggie hallucinated. He also has a huge crush on Jin, which seems to cause him almost the same pain. But it’s nice to spend some time with Will when he’s normally dealing with those problems in his own universe.
The love triangle aspect of this story still feels a bit forced to me, but Jess Hong and Alex Sharp are good actors who are very capable of conveying a hidden well of longing beneath their interactions, such as in the beach scene when he is a couple fall. of little paper boats in the water that represent the two of them. This is the part in the romantic comedy where the best friend (Saul, in this case) says, “Go get her, man!” And the stakes are even higher for Will, who has little time to be true to what he feels. Eventually, Saul and Auggie manage to get him on a train to London to intercept Jin after his trip home to work.
Will has good reason to be skeptical of this plan: it would be unfair to expect Jin to leave Raj for him, even if she does I love him too, and crossing that line could make the last few weeks of their friendship pretty awkward. But I still rolled my eyes when he backed away at the last minute after seeing Jin and Raj hugging from across the street. The two may not be in the best place after Raj forgot to tell her about the Doomsday mission, but they are still in a relationship. If you’re going to take a risk like this, friend, you should be prepared to see them together.
In the end, Will opts for a more anonymous gesture: spending the millions he inherited from Jack to buy Jin a star through Stars Our Destination, a charity raising funds for planetary defense. Now I have to agree with Auggie on this. That money has many practical uses that could help people today instead of helping in some imaginary interplanetary war 400 years from now.
Still, I like the moment when Will tells Auggie that she is the one Jin needs right now, not a man. This is a good episode for Auggie, even if Eiza González is still easily the weak link of the cast. She’s the only character who really struggles with the thorny ethics of what she’s doing, drinking excessively to forget about all the families she helped massacre with her nanofibers. When she finally decides to work with Jin and put those nanofibers to questionable use again, she does so because she loves and has faith in her friend, not because she herself fully believes in the goal.
And what is the objective? Oh, just launch a reconnaissance probe into space at one percent the speed of light to meet San-Ti’s fleet halfway. Wade tasks Jin with making that impossibility a reality, so he uses her skills as the greatest physicist of all time to prepare a proposal to present at Wychwood Manor, their new off-grid base of operations. The science here is simplified so that we can easily understand it: by detonating a series of 1,000 nuclear bombs throughout the probe’s journey through space, they can accelerate it to the necessary speed. Sure, it’s obscenely expensive and untested, but that’s no problem for Wade. He even wants to send a human to the probe to be picked up by the San-Ti during their extremely brief point of contact.
Some of the stakes here are a bit abstract, and we just have to trust that what the characters are discussing makes some basic sense. As far as we know, these magical Sophons are all-powerful, with no real parameters for how much they can accomplish at a time. “The Stars, Our Destiny” makes an effort to mitigate that vagueness, especially with Wade’s clever idea of firing up the particle accelerators and keeping the Sophons distracted. It’s just hard to define what these elections really mean for the story. What constitutes half omniscience? That No Will the San-Ti be able to sense if one or both Sophons are busy?
But I like the character focus in this episode, which extends to Wenjie, whose faith is sufficiently shaken after the attack on the summit and the massacre at Doomsday. Jin’s visit is especially hard; she calls her old aunt a traitor and criticizes her for letting her own daughter die. Wenjie has long taken pride in her ability to value the Lord’s great plan over any individual human life, but the accusation still has an obvious impact. As she later tells Clarence, Vera committed suicide at some point after finding Wenjie and Mike Evans’ correspondence. She never mentioned it to her mother or left a note.
Wenjie describes to Jin a poster he once saw that said, “Destroy the old world. Forge the new world.” She says this was the only time she agreed with the Red Guards, and you feel how much it would crush her to recognize that similarity in philosophy, to become the thing she hated most. The Red Guards killed her father, but now her actions may have led to an eventual loss of life that will make the Cultural Revolution seem meaningless.
It’s hard to know exactly what Wenjie is up to at the end of this episode, once he returns home and talks out loud to the San-Ti about his change of heart, saying he has an idea or two left. Even if the San-Ti were able to “forgive” her, would Wenjie ever be able to get over what she caused? Faith is a conscious choice; Sometimes people only hold on to their beliefs because considering the alternative means facing the horror of their mistakes.
• “The English really stink on the beaches.”
• Saul calling Auggie “beautiful in a boring way” is definitely one of the funniest moments on the show, especially when he says she would be “the bad girl in Speed 3.” That’s also very accurate for González (who starred in Ambulancea film not entirely different from Speed).
• The show has a lot of fun ridiculing Raj, like when he thinks Wade is testing him with an impossible task, only for Wade to easily open the window himself. Raj learns that the new ship assembly base is on the moon, so perhaps this is the last external obstacle that will put distance between Jin and her clown boyfriend. (Okay, I appreciate her sincere apology and words of encouragement from her once they get back to London.)
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