Thank you for the help and suggestions everyone. I think I'm going to go with doing an EVA to collect the science and decouple the labs. I was worried that I would mess up the EVA but I guess I have to practice it at some point.
This is on re-entry after getting science from orbit so I have no fuel at this point, this is all that's left.
I didn't think about CoM before but it makes sense, since it's quite high up in this case.
I'm trying to re-enter Kerbin's atmosphere after orbiting, and I can keep my heat shield facing the right way for the majority of the re-entry heat, then it will suddenly flip over for seemingly no reason and my ship will explode almost instantly.