Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 4×01: Kobayashi Maru

Ahem. We’re back.

Discovery’s fourth season premiere, “Kobayashi Maru” sure does a bunch of things! Some of them it does well! Not all of them!

Okay, the oddly-long pre-titles scene I just kind of love, because I have reached a point in my life where I no longer care for ’90s Trek’s pursuit of Respectability and just want my Star Trek to go fucking nuts. And the oddly-long pre-titles scene gives us a planet of butterfly people. And not even the remotely-sane-but-still-nuts “People in butterfly suits like a poorly-advised modernization of the Doctor Who episode with the butterfly people”. These are humanoids who are culturally butterfly and who can summon swarms of alien butterflies which form into wings for them. Holy shit. That is insane and wonderful. It’s also another one of those planets with floating mountains, and it’s got trees that glow from within and a wow it’s all just lovely. And they actually thought through this premise? Check it: the butterfly people are having trouble navigating because of the natural shifting of their planet’s magnetic poles. Okay. But they recognize that a spacefaring civilization would not have something like natural shifts in their magnetic poles just sneak up on them. So the butterfly people actually have taken steps to compensate for the magnetic shift using technology. It just doesn’t work because they don’t have any dilithium. The problem encapsulates what the post-burn galaxy is like and what issues it faces: they’re technologically sophisticated and highly intelligent, but there’s one specific resource that they lack and their problems derive from it. It’s a problem that calls specifically for the sort of solution the Federation can provide and doesn’t rely on the butterfly people being too stupid to handle an entirely natural part of their planet’s normal life cycle which it has been doing since the dawn of time, not does it cheat on the timescale over which natural geological processes can happen by declaring that the magnetic poles on this planet flipped overnight like in every other sci-fi piece featuring a magnetic pole shift. There’s very good “Let’s science the shit out of this” in the sequence, which sets a mood for additional sciencing the shit out of stuff later. And the bit where Book’s ship morphs around Discovery? That’s damn cool. Got to admit, morphing starships are kinda doing it for me.

The negative, of course, is that it doesn’t have much of anything to do with the rest of the plot. And that Michael is jaw-droppingly terrible at this. Flies down with her boyfriend rather than any of her actual crew, brings a cat to the butterfly planet (If this were a Golden Age scifi story, the punchline would be Grudge eating their emperor or something), awkwardly fumbles into using the Q-word (Also, “They’re butterfly people so obviously they have an aristocratic structure led by a monarch, because that is now insects are, despite the fact that butterflies are, in fact, solitary, and also it’s not like insect queens are actually “in charge” in some kind of organizational sense; they’re baby-factories. Also, the whole thing is probably just because there’s a species of butterfly called a “monarch”), and why do they not use the transporters to get away? I’d have assumed the planet had some kind of beaming mitigation, but they do use their personal transporters to beam from the outside of Book’s ship to the inside, and once they’re done, they beam the dilithium straight down to the planet.

I’m bothered by the diplomatic faux-pas. Less because “It’s just a dumb faux-pas” – after all, the one time we ever see Picard try to shake a stranger’s hand, it’s the time he’s met by the ambassador from the planet of people who really hate to be touched, because we needed an expository scene, and tbh that’s a dumber mistake for the “seasoned diplomat” Picard to make than Michael not evicting Grudge from her home. I’m bothered more because “Michael is not experienced at diplomacy,” isn’t really what they’re going for as her character flaw to be explored this season.

So on to the actual story. Kudos for trying for some starship porn with the reveal of Archer Station and the new shipyard dominated by the new Intrepid Class…. But it’s just not great. The way it’s shot is, like every look we get at 32nd century starships, kind of dark and muddy and small and the Big Ass Future Voyager Ship we see doesn’t even look like the CGI is complete. It’s not terrible, but it’s closer to a StarFox 64 model than I really expect out of my Prestige-Class Streaming Premiere.

I dig that Michael is completely wrong about the motivations of the president. I was worrying that this was going to get all political (Not “political” in the usual sci-fi fanboy sense of “It includes minorities”, but in the sense of “About political intrigues and in-fighting”, which is a fine thing to put in a sci-fi show, but not when it’s a low-episode-count streaming action-adventure series that has already committed 1/3 of its runtime to Soniqua Martin-Green crying), but really she’s there to decide whether Michael has the emotional maturity to be put in charge of the Big Impressive New Ugly Ship  (With a name-drop of the “Pathfinder” drive. Possible Voyager reference, as that was, I think, the project to establish communications between Starfleet command and Voyager in the delta quadrant). Spoiler: she does not. I said back in season 2 that Michael’s character is centered on a overweening sense of responsibility: its explicit that she is like Kirk in this regard, and she was called out for it by Spock. Here, they get more explicit about the extent to which this is pathological: she endangers the entire ship because she’s not willing to sacrifice Adorably Goofy New Lieutenant Tilly and Adorably Enby New Ensign Adira. I mean obviously she couldn’t; they’re in the credits. But still. Also, I like that they namecheck the Kobayashi Maru without anyone mentioning the two people who beat it. Michael explains the lesson of the test correctly, but doesn’t seem to have internalized it. Unlike Kirk, she hasn’t realized that if losing is a sin, cheating is a sacrament. (And I dig that the president is apparently part Cardassian). I would complain about the fact that Michael isn’t even savvy enough to hide her smug contempt for the president, but she was raised on Vulcan, so, I mean, unwillingness to hide one’s smug contempt is probably a cultural thing.

(Incidentally, why is this episode titled “Kobayashi Maru”? Sure, they mention it and it does seem thematically relevant, but no one actually faces a no-win scenario in this episode; they just face situations where they don’t win. Even the big centerpiece of Michael showing her personality flaw by not giving up on two crewmembers isn’t a Kobayashi Maru scenario; it’s just, y’know, tough.)

As usual, we spend too much time with Michael and not enough with anyone else, though we get some hints at character development. The rapport between Owo and Detmer feels stronger, and it seems like they’re trying to grow Rhys and Nilssen as characters, but it’s early days for that. Tilly is very forthright about the fact that she’s finally noticed that she has literally nothing in her life beyond her career – I assume the fact that Michael is no longer in a position to be her bestie is taking a toll. Adira’s insecurity about their new position is cute, and Gray using the word “encorporated” to refer to getting a body is awesome. (No one seems to notice Adira talking to themself on the bridge. I assume they’re used to it by now). It seems like Stamets has gotten more secure in his parental role – he asks after Adira when they’re in danger but it doesn’t lock him up the way it did at the end of last season. Word of God is that he hasn’t fully forgiven Michael from throwing him off the ship, but time has softened it. No Reno, which sucks. She is, remember, the nominal chief engineer, so really it would’ve made more sense for her to be handling the “The bridge calls down to engineering asking for more power” scenes.

I really like a lot of what they are trying to do in this episode. Discovery’s overarching theme has been of healing, and they do seem to want to show this as a process. They make a big point of how far Su’kal has come, and juxtapose it with the Kelpiens and Ba’ul living in harmony. They show the healing relationship between Book and his family. And everyone on Disco just seems a lot happier and more comfortable with each other.

But… Just so much of it doesn’t quite work. Su’kal’s inspirational speech to Saru feels a little flat because he’s still being played like what TVTropes would call an “Inspirationally Disadvantaged” guest star. The death of the high strung station commander is visible from orbit, as is the extent to which Book’s adorable nephew is doomed (He is not a good child actor, tbh, which softens the blow. But still). Adira is nervous when they start, but there’s very little for them to do once they’re on the mission. Tilly’s slow nihilism is just sort of abruptly dumped on us.

And there’s the decision to film the space station scenes upside-down, because they are all about the nauseating camera tricks for interior shots, but sexy space ship tracking shots, not so much. And we get what, four spore jumps, but none of them do the awesome blacklight rave transition through magic mushroom space.

I can’t get behind the visual decisions so far. The station looks like crap. The new Voyager looks meh at best. Archer Station is just the same “Big metal ribcage” as every other spacedock in the franchise – it’s clearly meant to be much, much bigger, but it’s not filmed in a way that gives you a sense of scale. The underwater city on Kaminar is fine, but not as good as the surface city we saw in the distance last season. And the “big bad” this season appears to be… a fisheye lens. Okay, it actually does look like the thing we so far know about it: a massive gravitational disruption. But…. Television is a visual medium. Lens effects aren’t going to cut it. Unless this all turns out to be a clever dig at JJ Abrams and the enemy this season is lens flare.

Credit where it’s due: destroyed Kweijan is well-done. You’d normally expect a generic debris field, but they managed to show us a mangled planet that is still clearly a planet and clearly devastated beyond all hope. The place has been trashed, but not pulverized. I just wish they had managed to land the emotional weight of it. Book is, quite reasonably, too deeply in shock to emote about what he’s seeing, so the emotional weight of the loss falls, as usual in this show, to teary-eyed Michael Burnham. And… It’s just the scale of it. The scale of that devastation is a hard thing to sell, but Teary-Eyed-Michael-Burnham not only isn’t successful in conveying the scale of the tragedy, it’s the entirely wrong thing to try.

But I’m optimistic. Like I said: they’re trying all the right things. I just want them to actually succeed next time.

Oh, and one more thing… Is the ship still alive? That was kind of a deal last season, but then the Chain reformatted the hard drive, and the Sphere Data transferred into the Dots but the Dots all got killed except the last one but she sacrificed herself to save Owo, and then Burhnam had to roll back the OS, so… Is the Sphere Data still around? If the show doesn’t want to pursue that, it’s their prerogative I guess but Zora was totally my favorite character who isn’t played by Tig Notaro.