Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×12: Through the Valley of Shadows

Well, now it is time, I suppose. On the one hand, this story element doesn’t go here; it’s the ghost of a future that falls outside Discovery‘s domain, and the implications will take some unraveling. But equally, it was inevitable. You just plain can’t tell a story about Christopher Pike without this hanging over it. You could not reasonably ask Discovery to avoid it. Perhaps they could’ve delayed it, but it is what it is. Before we get started, this ghost of the future is going to require an essay…

Just who is Christopher Pike? I guess that’s a question we ought to address. And the answer is a bit conflicted. On the one hand, it’s very easy to dismiss the question and just assert that he’s just Captain Kirk if he were played by Jeffery Hunter instead of William Shatner. But on the other hand, that’s a ridiculous assertion right on the face of it, because if you untangle “Captain Kirk” from “William Shatner”, what’s even left? There’s been attempts, to be sure. Chris Pine, James Cawley, Vic Mignogna (Who I’d be remiss in omitting despite the fact that I don’t wanna). Cawley has the best claim to be playing Kirk as something other than a broad caricature of Shatner, but his portrayal is still fairly thin. And besides, Pike is not simply a prototype of Kirk. Putting on my Faction Paradox skull-mask for a second, Pike is that precisely that which Star Trek chose to explicitly reject in order to become itself. And if Discovery at its heart truly is a vision of Star Trek as the place where the flawed work to become better and the broken work to heal, it was inevitable that Christopher Pike, Star Trek‘s first casualty, should come here.

That’s all very deep and fanboy, you might say, but come on, we all know he’s just Kirk with the serial numbers rubbed off. And yet. If you watch “The Cage” in its original version, the first thing you learn about Pike is that he’s seriously considering retirement. And the only canonical Pike story for fifty years is heavily oriented around the fact that Pike is a man who gives a lot of thought to other paths his life might have taken. He’s a man who’s considered other options.

Star Trek is often described, based on an early pitch, as a sort of “Wagon Train to the stars.” There was an early draft of the opening narration that played that up, emphasizing the Enterprise’s role in settling border and trade disputes. But really, Star Trek as it aired was far less of a space-western than the meme implies. Those space-western themes and motifs were progressively downplayed from the first pilot to the second pilot to the series proper. Even the episode that’s explicitly a western is stylistically and thematically far more surrealist and existentialist than it is a western. The “space western” feel is at its strongest in “The Cage”, and Pike is more far more cowboy than jobbing spaceman. Shatner plays Kirk in several modes over the course of the series, but “cowboy” is one of the lesser ones (It is a small but nifty point that we know Pike had horses as a young man. And while we know that Kirk, later in life, tried to retire to a farm to raise horses, that’s the specific life he rejected to return to Starfleet). (And I’m not saying Kirk is devoid of “cowboy” traits, but they tend to be magnified in popular discourse well above what’s actually in there.) They both feel drawn to fly off out into the great unknown, explore strange new worlds, but Pike approaches it as a cowboy: maybe an old soldier with some regrets in his past, who heads out west looking to start something new – Pike is looking for a place to settle down out there in space.

Kirk, on the other hand, is fundamentally a sailor, not a cowboy. The command of a starship is, unquestionably, Jim Kirk’s first, best destiny. That’s a lot less clear for Pike. Kirk is the sort of guy whose job defines him. He bristles at retirement, always looking for an excuse to get back out there. He’s not looking for a new place where he can settle down and build a new life. He’s the sailor who tells Brandy she’s a fine girl, but his life, his love and his lady is the sea.

And Jim Kirk’s single defining character trait is that he’s got a hyperdeveloped sense of responsibility (I hope Discovery locks in on this and gives us a path to see that this sense of responsibility is what prompts Spock to form such a strong bond to Kirk – that he reminds Spock of his sister). Pike is hardly irresponsible, but we learn from “The Cage” that the responsibilities of command weigh heavily on him. He doesn’t want to be responsible for the lives under his command. It’s not a natural fit for him. Where Kirk seeks out things to be responsible for, Pike longs for freedom from those responsibilities (This trait is utterly lacking in the Kirk of the JJ Abrams-verse, with the result that Chris Pine’s Kirk is pretty much a smarmy, entitled git. And I’m fine with this! So much of the characterization in the Abrams movies boils down to broad caricatures of the canon characters, I like having one specific thing we can latch onto and say, “Here is a place where the changes to the timeline have left a character superficially the same but have radically changed his character in very deep ways.”). This fits in with the notion that Kirk is a sailor and Pike is a cowboy: the life of a cowboy is one of solitude (Note also that Pike is a former test pilot, another solo gig), with only his trusty horse for company, while a sailor is always defined in relationship to a ship and a crew.

Kirk can not be Kirk anywhere other than in command of the Enterprise. When Kirk left the Enterprise for the Admiralty, he immediately began concocting plans to get back to it. Pike can be captain of the Enterprise, but he doesn’t have to. He could be a rancher in New Mexico, or a trader on Orion, or a teacher on a class J training vessel. Or Captain of Discovery. Kirk could never move on. Pike could. That makes Pike’s accident as revealed in “The Menagerie” all the more tragic: Pike was a man with possibilities, which are now denied him. This also sets the tone for the meaning of Pike’s ultimate fate. For a man like Kirk, living out his remaining years in a fantasy would be a cruel joke. Kirk could certainly sympathize with Pike in the sense that for Kirk, being rendered utterly impotent (heh) by a disability so profound that it stole even his ability to communicate would be the worst sort of hell. But Kirk would surely reject the offer to retire to a world of illusion. This isn’t speculation: we actually got to see Kirk have a go at retiring to an illusory world in the Nexus and ultimately reject it for not being real. But it’s clear that we’re supposed to interpret the end of “The Menagerie” as a good end for Pike. Pike’s burden is physical, Kirk’s is a control issue stemming from his all-consuming belief that he is responsible for every bad thing that happens in the universe (Indeed, after Michael, if there’s one character in Discovery who would seem to be most like Kirk, it’s probably Leland). For Pike, having his disability rendered non-burdensome (Importantly, Pike is not healed. Neither is Vina. What the Talosians offer them is not magical erasure of their disabilities. Star Trek calls what they offer instead an “illusion”, but it might be fitting to call it a kind of assistive technology) in the context of a constructed world serves to give him back what the accident had taken: a life of infinite possibilities. And for Pike, a life where he no longer has responsibility over the lives of other people is a life where his choices are freer and more his own. When Pike objected to the Talosians, his objections centered around being locked in a cage, on display for their amusement like a zoo animal. We know Kirk would object first and foremost on the grounds that the illusion, however nice, wasn’t real, but for Pike, the objection is not to the illusion, but to the cage.

How does this vision of Pike fit with Discovery? Imperfectly, as it turns out. Fleshing out Pike to fill the role of “Captain of a starship in a Star Trek series” necessarily involves a certain regression to the mean. So all the common denominators we’ve seen in Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway and Archer have to project onto Pike just to make him work in the role. He’s noble, he’s dedicated, he’s loyal, he’s determined.

But still. We can see that Pike isn’t married to Enterprise the way Kirk would be in how quick he is to abandon his own ship when it’s crippled. Pike’s first duty is to his mission, not his ship. And he does rub a bit against the established grain of captains in other ways. He’s hinted to have a much stronger spiritual side than any captain with the possible exception of Sisko, though this angle hasn’t really been explored since “New Eden”. He’s also extremely decisive, almost cavalier in his disregard for rules in the name of his mission. Though that’s as much a trait of Discovery overall as of Pike personally – this is not a show that embraces the TNG-era model of “The actual solution presents itself immediately and the bridge officers spend all of act 2 agonizing over whether or not it is ethically acceptable to do it.” Pike is the sort of man who believes that the rules must serve the underlying moral principles, and will break the former to protect the latter. And this is a point of contrast with wartime Starfleet, which fails to make that distinction and threatens to undermine their own principles in the name of victory.

But the main trait which Discovery adds to Pike is a big helping of survivor’s guilt. It weighs heavily on him that he missed the war, and that would seem to undermine my thesis about Pike lacking Kirk’s hyperdeveloped sense of responsibility. Still, though, the fact that Pike is uncomfortable at being kept out of the war points at something else: he is more at ease placing himself in harm’s way than other people. This would be reflected on Discovery by his eagerness to take on dangerous missions personally. Pike has a harder time than his franchise counterparts with ordering others to undertake dangerous missions, something which TNG once explicitly called out as the qualifying trait of a commander. At the same time, though, it reinforces the trend of Pike being defined first and foremost in terms of what he is not. He is the Enterprise captain who wasn’t in Star Trek and he’s the Enterprise captain who wasn’t in the war.

Years ago, while talking about JM Dillard, I mentioned her book The Lost Years, where I felt that the Spock’s feelings of betrayal at learning that Kirk had accepted promotion rather than returning to another tour on the Enterprise served as a metaphor for the wound inflicted on the audience by Star Trek‘s original cancellation, just as Russel T. Davies used the Doctor’s guilt and pain over the Time War as a metaphor for the wound inflicted on Doctor Who‘s audience by its 1989 cancellation. I think we can similarly view Pike’s absence from the Klingon War as a metaphor for Pike’s absence from Star Trek. So it seems Pike is fated to remain a character whose life is defined by a multitude of possibilities denied him.

Which brings us to this episode, whose capsule summary, as befits a time travel arc, would be misleading if I presented it in chronological order. So we’ll lead off with the elephant in the room. This week, Captain Pike touches a magic time crystal, is granted a vision of his future injury, and rejects the chance to avoid that future in exchange for the chance of defeating Control. Long story short, we get to see Discovery‘s visual reboot of wheelchair-bound (I would not normally use “bound” here. It’s impolite and wrong for actual real-world wheelchair-users. But in Pike’s case, he actually seems to be both physically and metaphysically bound to it in the sense that he is welded into the thing and also that this fate is a fixed point in time) Pike. Predictably, it is rather long on body horror.

So, another red signal shows up over the Klingon monastary of Boreth, which happens to be where Tyler stashed his son when he had to fake his own death and return to Starfleet (long story). Michael has given up on the red signals and wants to go chasing Control, but everyone reminds her that they’ve still got the other half of the sphere data and maybe they should avoid taking that to the omnicidal computer. Turns out that Boreth is also where Time Crystals come from, so Klingon chancellor L’Rell gives Pike permission to go down and see if he can talk the monks into giving him one. While he’s down there, Michael detects something odd about one of Section 31’s ships and Saru lets her and Spock borrow a shuttle to go investigate. Pike meets the son of Tyler and L’Rell, who’s magically an adult now because of timey wimey, and gets permission to do the Scary Potentially Soul-Crushing Ordeal that lets you have a time crystal. He pokes one, has a vision of the future in which he gets his face melted off, and is told that if he still wants the crystal he can have it, but that commits him to the future he saw. Pike takes the crystal. Spock and Michael find a Section 31 ship that’s ejected its crew, but there’s a dude in space who’s not quite 100% dead yet and he turns out to have been an extra from the series premiere. Only he’s been possessed by Control just like Leland and this whole thing was a setup to assimilate “reconstruct” Michael. They narrowly survive and escape, but the entire Section 31 fleet, presumably now p0wned by Control, shows up to take Discovery. With no clear hope of long-term escape and unable to delete the sphere data, Pike sends a distress call to the Enterprise and gives the order to prepare to destroy the ship.

Some points:

• So, the monastery of Boreth is charged with guarding the time crystals. This is a weird and wonderful thing and points to a potential vision of the Klingons that is so much more interesting than TOS’s “They’re thinly veiled Yellow Peril shifty foreigners” or later-Trek’s “They’re space-samurai”.
• At first, I was like, “Um. It seems kind of random and out of character for the Klingons to be doing this whole Holy Protectors of Time thing.” But then Tenavik mentions that the time crystals are the namesake of the Klingon homeworld. So if you ever wondered why the Klingon home planet is called Qu’onoS and not “Kling” (as it is referred to in pre-TNG-era stuff), it’s because it’s deliberately meant to sound like “chronos”.
• More of Discovery‘s campaign against idiots plots that would resolve in a second if people would just fucking talk to each other. Tyler immediately tells Michael about his son when she asks, and L’Rell likewise immediately tells Pike about him to explain why neither she nor Tyler can go to Boreth.
• Pike is an inherently tragic character. Part of his “cowboy, not sailor” nature is that he is oriented toward the goal rather than the journey. So of course he becomes a man beholden to a vision of his own end that he can’t change. He’s clearly still shaken by it even when he returns to Discovery at the end of the episode.
• And his speech when he decides to commit to his future injury by taking the time crystal. “You believe in service, sacrifice, compassion, and love.” It’s very classic “Big Star Trek Speech,” but ending on, “And love” gives it an element of weirdness that is incredibly delightful.
• So, the assumption is that Pike’s injury was a big heroic sacrifice. And yeah, we are told that he “went in, bringing out all those kids that were still alive.” But the way it’s depicted, it’s really not a Big Hero Moment. He’s not dragging people out; he appears to have gone in there to order them to leave. He doesn’t make it out in time because one of the cadets tarries, desperately trying to prevent the explosion. And he doesn’t save everyone. Yet somehow this works for Pike. His fate is still heroic, but he’s denied going out in a blaze of glory with a huge hero moment.
• To drive this home just a little more, the end of this sequence is a very deliberate homage to Spock’s death in Star Trek II, with the gravely wounded Pike pressing his hand to the glass that’s sealing him off in the irradiated compartment. But Pike is denied even Spock’s heroic death; he gets to survive with horrific injuries.
• They’ve never mentioned it in Discovery, but “The Cage” indicates that Pike has had a lifelong fear of being burned alive, which may serve to amplify his horror at learning his fate is to be, y’know, burned alive.
• I love the irony in how Control’s plan backfires. Michael isn’t interested in pursuing the red signals at the beginning of the episode, because she’s lost her faith in the prospect of changing the future. Control repeats that to her as it tries to inject her with nanomachines. But, as Spock points out, the very fact that Control has gone to all this trouble to possess her specifically shows that Control considers her specifically a threat – she is, as of course she had to be, the one random element that Control can’t account for, and restores her faith that she can stop it.
• Spock’s apology for taking so long working out the current to magnetize Control’s nanomachines before they could possess Michael is the first time Ethan Peck has sounded legitimately like Spock. He’s playing Spock at a time in his life where he’s going through a serious mental heath crisis and his character is very different from the Spock we’re used to, so I don’t consider it wrong that this version of Spock is largely unrecognizable. But I have missed any sense of familiarity from this Spock.
• L’Rell’s acknowledgement and acceptance that Tyler isn’t Voq is a nice character touch. In fact, the Klingons in general are just wonderful this time, which is not something I expected to ever feel about the Klingons in Discovery.
• After complaining last time about the disappearance of Tig Novaro’s Jett Reno, she’s back this week, for the purpose of shaming Hugh into reconciling with Stamets by talking about her dead wife. I do hope they have somewhere to go with her character though, because there’s not much too her beyond her (admittedly wonderful) grumpiness.
• Seems like I was right last week about Control still being beholden to its programmed objective; it justifies its plan to exterminate all life on the grounds that the sphere data will make it the “purest form of life in existence”, and therefore the thing which its own directives require it to defend from any possible threat at any cost.

And the peeves:

• I am glad we got to see Discovery‘s take on wheelchair-Pike. But the melting face and synchronized screaming was a bit much.
• If Control can just shoot nanobots out of Gant’s chest, why was it bothering with the eye-stabbing syringe?
• We get our first look at the D-7, the classic TOS-era Klingon ship in its Discovery form. But we only see a tiny little corner of it for a fraction of a second. Tease.
• So… Discovery magic mushrooms itself into orbit around the holiest place in Klingondom after getting the blessing of the Klingon Chancellor given the weighty cirumstances. Cool. Fine. Great. Right way to handle it. Then Michael and Spock fuck off halfway across the galaxy in a shuttle, and then Control has 30 Section 31 ships surround Discovery. So apparently anyone can just fly a massive battlefleet to Boreth via conventional warp without the Klingons doing anything about it?
• So the argument for blowing up Discovery at the end is that even if they run from Control’s fleet, they’ll just find them again. Have we forgotten that Discovery’s spore drive can take them literally anywhere? Like, Terralysium is 150 years’ travel at maximum warp. This is possibly a broader complaint: the second they found out that Control wanted the sphere data, why the hell didn’t Discovery magic mushroom itself to the opposite end of the galaxy and let Enterprise (which apparently will be fixed by next week) take point on fighting Control?
• Taken together, those last two points undermine one of the big things about Discovery. The spore drive serves as a plot facilitator in that it lets us do stories where we don’t have to bother wasting screen time on bullshit about what’s the only ship in the quadrant or who can get where in time; Discovery can zap itself anywhere the plot needs it to be. It’s like the sonic screwdriver in Doctor Who – often mistaken for a “drama destroyer” that denied us the tension of locking the main character in a room when it’s really a “drama facilitator” that spared us the wasted time of having to explain how the main character got out of the locked room. That’s what the transporters were for in the first place, remember, to spare us the wheel-spinning of working out the logistics in moving people from a ship to a planet twice per episode. But when anyone can basically show up anywhere at any time, you start to wonder what’s the point. (For comparison, Gene Rodenberry’s Andromeda did not have transporters. People used shuttles to get from ships to planets. But they didn’t bother showing this happen 99% of the time and just did a jump-cut to the heroes being on the planet. And it was fine. Well, as fine as anything in Andromeda ever was.)
• For those keeping count, 100% of the same-sex marriages in Star Trek canon have involved the violent death of one spouse.

And the future:

• At this point, it would be more surprising for Michael to not become a second Red Angel. They cozied right up to saying that maybe the red bursts are related to someone other than Gabrielle Burnham who has exactly the same kind of technology as the Red Angel.
• From the Time Is Warped And Space Is Bendable department, since the previous episode, Section 31 has tried and failed to purge Control from all its ships and had something approaching all of its personnel either murdered or possessed, Georgiou and Tyler have recovered from their near-fatal injuries. Discovery has consistently played hard and loose with the time between episodes, giving the sense that the characters basically go from one episode to the next with no intervening time in their emotional and personal arcs, while the universe actually takes a week off between episodes to fix things up and send people around space.
• It seems like, dramatically, Pike’s arc has nowhere left to go. His potential is now fully realized. The trailer for next week shows him back in his TOS-style Enterprise uniform, which seems to confirm that Pike’s not going to be sticking with Discovery past this season. We all knew Pike couldn’t stay on Discovery indefinitely, but there wasn’t any reason until now that his sabbatical from Enterprise couldn’t span an indefinite amount of on-screen time, given that the show is only depicting a few weeks of real time. But the Pike Who Knows His Tragic Destiny can still work as a guest star, but not really as a regular character.
• You know what would be cool though? If Pike, knowing that his fate is sealed, just took full advantage of it and was like, “Oh, hey, I can just walk through this inescapable death trap since I know that no matter what, I’m still going to be alive and kicking until I get a face full of training vessel engine backwash,” a la Arthur Dent looking for Stavromueller Beta.
  • Could that be related to “Calypso”‘s revelation that Discovery is going to continue to exist all the way to the thirty-third century? An aspect of Discovery I like is their willingness to take things that don’t really matter off the table instead of insulting our intelligence by pretending they’re still realistic. I often hear fans complain about stupid things like, “A prequel is a bad idea because there can’t be any suspense when we know that Spock, Pike, and humanity have to survive until TOS.” But come on. We know that they’re not actually going to destroy the ship which the show is named after, so it doesn’t really destroy our tension if “Calypso” reveals that Discovery still exists in a thousand years. The reason we know Earth isn’t going to be destroyed in Discovery isn’t that it still exists in TOS; it’s because Star Trek isn’t the kind of show that does that sort of thing. Spock has plot armor. Discovery has plot armor. Pike has plot armor. But now, Pike knows about his.
• Will Pike reveal his vision to Spock? Possibly via mind-meld? As I mentioned before, I won’t be upset if it doesn’t happen, but I’d really like Discovery to give us a hint at why Spock risks his own life to take Pike to Talos IV. One problem with “The Menagerie” is that while showing clips from “The Cage” serves to explain what Spock is doing, it does very little to explain why: all it shows us is that as a junior officer, Spock served under Pike and had almost no direct interaction with him. This does not really feel like sufficient cause for a dude like Spock to hijack a starship. This doesn’t have to be the story of why Spock feels such a debt to Pike, but it would be a good thing if it were. “Spock has known this was coming for years and knows that it happened because Pike sacrificed his own future to get the time crystal we needed to save the galaxy,” is a better justification for Spock’s actions than, “Oh, Spock’s just super loyal to his captains well beyond the bounds of what even begins to make sense.” Also, there’s a nice angle in there if it turns out that Spock worked out that only what Pike actually saw was fated, and spent the next ten years working on a plan that would give Pike a happier destiny without contradicting the vision.

Never thought I’d be this impressed by a Klingon episode. Next week: Enterprise is back, and it looks like things are coming to a head with a big space-battle pitting Enterprise and Discovery against Control’s fleet.

And here’s a small reveal: we see the name “Xahea” on a viewscreen in the trailer for next week. One of the interseason minisodes involved Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly meeting the fugitive queen of Xahea, who had invented a technology to recrystallize dilithium. Recrystallizing dilithium, you may recall from Star Trek IV, was not possible in the TOS era, but Spock works out a way to do it using 20th century nuclear reactor byproducts, and it seems to be a solved problem in the TNG era since no one ever talks about resource struggles over access to dilithium post-TOS. I almost brought this up in one of my previous blunders, because I had been wondering if it would come up. Discovery currently has no way to render their time crystal usable – the Burnhams used a supernova. So I had been wondering if Po’s dilithium recrystallizing technology would be somehow involved in replacing the Red Angel’s time crystal. Looks more likely than ever.

Edit: 6:20 PM: It occurs to me that one path they could take is to have Spock erase Pike’s memory. We know Spock can do that, and has done it to help Kirk through emotional trauma. So it would be reasonable if Pike is sufficiently messed up by knowing his future that Spock might erase that memory to help him. If Spock had hoped that making Pike forget might give him a chance to avoid his fate, that might also explain his extreme actions when it goes ahead and happens anyway.