Month: May 2024

Everything I said about last week remains true: the Discovery writers room is good at feelings and connection and trauma and not good at puzzles. If it was a problem last week that the B-plot required Stamets, Adira, and Tilly to be a little thick so as to stretch out the process of solving the next clue to fill the whole episode, it’s even worse when it’s the A-plot.

Because this week’s A-plot is that Michael gets zapped inside a “mindscape” (I think they reference the same kind of energy beam as in the TNG episode where Picard gets gaslit into learning to play the flute, an episode whose near-universal praise really overlooks the gaslighting and lack of consent) where she has to face her own personality flaws in order to find the last MacGuffin fragment. And it takes a whole damn hour. Not for her to face her personality flaws, but just for her to realize that facing her personality flaws is the point. She wastes the first half of her time in the mindscape convinced that she needs to study books on the Dominion War, because that was the historical context that prompted the scientists to hide the Progenitor technology. Then, she decides that the actual test is that the mindscape is the library, but presented as a labyrinth, and she’s supposed to solve it. And even when that doesn’t pan out, she’s still resistant to the idea that the puzzle she’s supposed to solve has anything to do with her own mind. Despite the fact that they was told up-front that the mindscape was generated from her own mind, that Book was drawn from her own mind to appear as the sage and unhelpful magical guide character, and she figured out quickly that the mindscape had recreated the library because in the real world, she was looking for something in the library, so her mind coughed up “The exact place I physically am right now” as the best metaphor for “The place where you go to search for something.”

(That, by the way, is both very wild and very silly. The mindscape could have taken her anywhere, but it took her to the exact place where she already was, and the reason is because “for her, the library represents the mission”. So, like, it took her to the most important place for her, which is where she already was, because she is very focused on her mission. It’s not illogical or anything, it’s just very funny. It also reminds me of how Harry Potter could retrieve the philosopher’s stone because he just wanted to get it, not do anything with it, so the mirror showed him getting it, rather than the things he wanted to accomplish with it.)

Do you know how far you have to go astray for the resolution to be “Michael has to face up to her core belief that she is only worthy and loveable when she is successful at her mission” and for me to not be fully on-board? Luisa admitted that in a jaunty musical number and I was bawling like a fucking baby.

It’s the right puzzle and the right solution, but the wrong “solving”. After five years, Michael should be better than this. Discovery has done a great job at handling people owning their own emotional baggage, but for the purpose of this episode, Michael has to take a whole fucking hour to even realize that’s what she’s supposed to do. (In fairness, once she does figure it out, she doesn’t fight it. Also, I like the bit where she has some other unrelated deep inner revelation, and Mind-Book is like “Yeah that’s a big important thing, good on you, but it’s not the solution to the puzzle.”)

The rest of the episode is fine, I guess. The main thing about it is the library itself, which is utterly fantastic, and fuck Starfleet Academy, I want a show about this place. The librarian is a wonderful character. I think she’s the same “70s Glam Rock Album Cover Interpretation of a Klingon” species as the Federation President from Star Trek VI, but she’s super chipper and upbeat, even when facing down the Breen.

The Breen. So the main other plot advancement in this episode is that Chiana takes over the Breen dreadnought because D’argo’s uncle went from zero to crazy real fucking fast. Like, he went from “I need the scion to secure my claim to the throne so I will make deals with the lesser races” last week to “I am going to gleefully brag to my own personal bodyguards how quickly and happily I would sacrifice them for my own personal glory which I absolutely do not intend to share with anyone.” He brute forces his way to the library, and attacks it even knowing this will bring even the other Breen factions down on him, he breaks sacred oaths, all the crazy stuff, because he reckons that the power of the Progenitors will make him a god.

This sort of thing would work better over a period of several episodes, instead of like three scenes. This is not a bad character arc per se, but it isn’t one well-suited for the kind of show this is or the pacing of its arcs. Compressed like this, it lays bare the utilitarian nature of the character: he’s just a means to the end of putting Chiana in a position of power so she can be a proper antagonist. She’ll stop at nothing to bring back D’argo. Believable character arc. But she needs “And as D’argo’s wife, she has a Breen dreadnought at her command” to make it plausible that she can actually operate at the level necessary for her motivation to be effective on the story. The Primarch going crazy so extravagantly that his own men back Chiana’s coup is the means to the end.

So we close on Discovery giving up the MacGuffin to save the library – with the caveat that they hand it over after copying the map it reveals, and that Michael gained a secret extra clue. Discovery dumps its ballast and jumps, tricking the Breen into thinking it’s been destroyed, but the spore drive was damaged so they don’t end up where they meant to, giving Chiana time to catch up. The stage is set for a race to the final marker.

But there’s also one more side plot that is noteworthy. Turns out that the Library had a cutting from the Kweijan world root – last seen when Book’s adorable and doomed nephew did his manhood-root-cutting ceremony. There isn’t time for any reflection on it: Book goes to tell Michael and finds she’s in a mindscape, and then the Breen show up. But will this be left a dangling end?

I was thinking last week that I don’t know for sure if Chiana is going to resurrect D’argo. Her motive seems pure enough that the laws of storytelling might require it, here in the show that is about connection and healing. But at the same time, given that the Star Trek universe is going to continue from this point, it seems unlikely that they are going to outright cure death. So… I think it’s 50-50 right now whether D’argo gets brought back to life, or whether Chiana is forced to accept that it’s wrong to change the laws of nature to bring people back from the dead, and that true healing can only be achieved if she moves on and lets go.

(Uncomfortable shifting from Hugh and Grey. Heck, maybe Picard, Spock, and Data could stop by to uncomfortable shift too. Oh and I think Neelix got brought back from the dead once. Kinda Georgiou. Is Kai Opaca still alive on that forever-war-resurrection planet? I’m saying that Star Trek has always had a bit of a revolving door afterlife policy and it is both entirely likely and extraordinarily cheap if they try to sell that it would be immoral for Chiana to bring D’argo back)

But if they find the secret of life itself, could giving Book a piece of the World Root be a setup for him to be offered the power to bring back Kweijan? And if he is, does he get to take it, or will that be the temptation that must be overcome in the end to become truly morally worthy of the power of the gods?

I’m in that annoying place I was in last week – except instead of five minutes of “I know Chiana and D’argo are going to donk this up for everyone and now I have to sit here and wait for it,” it’s two weeks of, “I know that Discovery is not going to end with the Federation actually acquiring the power of creation, and now I have to sit here and wait for the painful cliche that leads them to turn it down/blow it up/lock it away.” It’s a shame they didn’t know this was to be their final season; if they’d gone into this with a real possibility of “Though the franchise will continue, we can actually have the 32nd century be the end of the Star Trek Timeline,” there’s a chance that they could have opted to end Discovery with “And then humanity became as gods and everything was entirely different forever and ever.” Which would have been one hell of a thing.

So let’s see how they don’t do that.

The frelniks killed my D’argo.

Well that’s a hell of a thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked this episode. But man, that stretch of ten minutes or so where you know that because this is episode 7 and not episode 9, Chiana and D’argo are about to frell everything up. This is the furthest into “Everyone acts like an idiot for half the episode so that the plot doesn’t end prematurely,” that Discovery has ever boldly gone. At least it’s all on Chiana and D’argo.

So get this, right: Michael left D’argo with a good sized hole in him a couple of weeks ago, but they are so obsessed with not trusting anyone that instead of letting Discovery help, they run away and… Broadcast their location via Smuggler’s SOS. So of course they get caught by the Federation, but also let the Breen – D’argo’s uncle in particular – know where they are. So the Federation works out a cunning trick to placate the Breen and everything would be fine except that from the fucking moment they show up on Disco, Chiana starts plotting their escape, planning to fight her way out with D’argo, who is still, remember, actively dying.

And then D’argo overdoses on Space-Fentanyl and fucking dies. That’s it. That’s the plot complication. Their plan to escape was for D’argo to OD on painkillers, and then Chiana to fight her way out when they unlocked the force field to tend to him. Only he overestimates the amount of Space-Fentanyl and kills himself.

So now, having just delicately negotiated an agreement that would prevent a war with the Breen, the Federation suddenly has a dead prince on their hands, because D’argo and Chiana didn’t trust the Federation not to give them to the Breen, and would rather die than go back.

So, of course, Chiana’s next move over D’argo’s still-cold corpse is to tell the Breen all about the Progenitor technology and offer to help them find it in exchange for her liberty. Makes sense.

This is all so profoundly stupid that it would be very easy for me to just reject it and be angry. And I am angry, mostly over that painful interval where you know how badly this is going to go but it hasn’t actually happened yet. Like I said, the saving grace is that the stupidity is driven entirely by Chiana and D’argo. Everyone else does the right thing. There’s not even any falling into stupid traps; you kind of expect Hugh or Book to get taken advantage of at some point, but they don’t really. Book successfully talks Chiana down with the information that D’argo has accidentally killed himself, and Hugh isn’t tricked into lowering the force field or anything; he does what he as to as a doctor given the constraint that there is a Breen dreadnought outside which would be displeased if the prince died.

There’s a lot otherwise to like about the A-plot. T’rina’s politicking is masterful. Rayner’s “Oh we should just start shooting now because the Breen can’t be negotiated with” is a little grating because of the whole thing where Starfleet can not possibly take on the Breen (The Breen Dreadnought is so big that it is never actually on-screen in its entirety. We only ever see the front half of it. It’s one ship, and it’s many times bigger than Federation HQ and the entire fleet put together.), but it leads to the sad backstory drop, and that leads to the solution to the problem, since they use Rayner’s personal experience with the Breen to fabricate a convincing lie and broker an agreement where the D’argo’s uncle will let the Federation keep him rather than risk one of the other factions getting their hands on him.

Until he goes and donks it all up by dying. But it’s pretty metal how Chiana proceeds to show off her Breen matrimonial tattoo and claim widow’s rights. Why she thinks throwing in with the Breen is a good idea is beyond me. Even if she doesn’t trust the Federation, it’s hard to see why she’d trust the Breen more. I guess she’s counting on the Breen wanting their Scion back enough to let her use the hypothetical resurrection power?

There’s a weakness at the end, where they present the decision of whether or not to give her to the Breen as the Federation making a pragmatic decision – there’s friction between Michael and Book over the fact that he considers it wrong. But nowhere in the discussion does it come up that this is what she wants. Like, the argument for keeping her is not “We musn’t sacrifice her to the evil aliens”, it’s “She’s a criminal and giving her to them is the thing she wants.”

But anyway, there’s also a whole B-plot, and… Man, I don’t know. Stamets is being all single-minded about solving the next clue, and I feel like there ought to be some comeuppance for this – he stops Tilly from going back to protect her cadets in the face of impending doom, and stops Book from going off to confront Chiana. I can’t tell if the show is on his side or not – he makes a good point about the importance of solving the clue, since they’re still gonna need to finish the quest if things go south. But he’s also a dick.

Also, solving the clue involves a lot of idiot ball. Like, Stamets spends half the episode hung up on chemical analysis of the MacGuffin before he gets to “Hey, it was made by an empath, maybe our empath should try to empath it.” And it takes them forever to marry up Adira and Tilly’s connection between the MacGuffin and the Space Library with Stamets and Book’s work.

I am so glad we got a scene with Adira and Reno, but frankly, it’s kinda weird, right? Like, they theorize that they are looking for a rare book, so they go to… Jet Reno. See, it’s because Zora said that Reno has experience with antique manuscripts. Because Reno did a stint as a smuggler in her youth.

And it pays off, because Reno knows about the Space Library, which puts them on the right track. But can you see the issue here? “We need to find an ancient manuscript. We should ask the person with experience in antiquities dealing.” Okay, that makes sense. Except that Reno’s experience in antiquities dealing is itself nine hundred years old. She herself points out that all of her contacts in that market died decades before the manuscript they are looking for was written. Jesus Christ. Okay, so it turns out that the key observation – that there’s a Space Library and that’s probably where it is, and the MacGuffin kinda looks like a Space Library Card – are basically timeless things that anyone who knew anything about rare books would know, so yes, it was helpful. But now there’s another “except”. Because if these key observations are things anyone who knows anything about rare books would know, Tilly and Adira should have just been able to look that up. You know what hasn’t come up at all this season? That Zora has ten thousand years of observational data about the galaxy. Zora ought to have known about the Space Library.

And then, of course, they have to circle back to Stamets and Book, because no one knows where the library is, since it moves. Fortunately, between Adira’s mathematical genius (but not the fact that they have access to centuries of Tal’s knowledge) and Stamets’s chemical analysis, and Book’s telepathic vision that the next clue is somewhere plasma-stormy, they can plot out that the Library is in the Badlands.

Again, except, it’s a library. Libraries like visitors usually. Is there really no one they could just ask to find it? I can accept that the library moves around, but I’m having a hard time with “The Library is such a secret that it doesn’t appear in Starfleet Databases and no one knows where it is and it can only be found by a combination of math, telepathy, and spectral analysis. Also Jet Reno knows about it.”

I can forgive involving Reno for dubious reasons, especially because we got the absolutely wonderful “Seven of Limes” bit out of it. I mean, think about the complexity of that. Jet Reno was born in the twenty-third century and lives in the thirty-second century. Seven of Nine was born in the twenty-fourth century, rose to importance in the twenty-fifth century, and certainly died no later than the twenty-sixth century. There is no reason for Reno to have the name of an ex-Borg Starfleet Captain from seven hundred years earlier ready-to-hand. This implies a level of devotion in her drinksmixing. Here’s how I imagine it went down.

Reno: Hey Zora, I need a name for my new drink.
Zora: How can I help, Commander Reno?
Reno: I was thinking that a tribute to a historical figure would give it some snap. Who’s the baddest bitch in Starfleet history?
Zora: I believe that would be Fleet Captain H’garrrrn of Vulvamax VII, who led the tenth battalion at the battle of the Nightmare Child during the Temporal Wars.
Reno: I like your thinking, but it’s not going to work. Vulvamaxians are allergic to gin, so it would be culturally insensitive.
Zora: In that case, might I suggest Kathryn Janeway, captain of the twenty-fourth century USS Voyager?
Reno: Maybe. Was she straight?
Zora: There is some inconsistency among the primary sources.
Reno: Who else you got?
Zora: Perhaps Captain Seven of Nine of the twenty-fifth century USS Enterprise?
Reno: Ooh, I like that. What do you think of “Seven of Limes”?
Zora: Commander Reno, I must remind you that your beverage does not contain any citrus.
Reno: I’ll make it work.

But I’m still not comfortable with the general ramshackle nature of the clue hunt here. They try to sell this as a super hard puzzle that requires everyone working across disciplines, but the solution is not actually all that hard; it just makes everyone look dumb instead for taking so long. I’m starting to worry that this whole thing is going to culminate with Michael struggling to figure out whether she should take the sword or the pen.

What the hell was that?

Discovery’s been sort of all over the place for a long time, but this episode is giving me feelings more conflicted than usual. Stylistically, this is a good, strong episode. And most of the plot is good. But then right at the core of the plot… It’s just garbage. Complete and utter garbage. Fractal garbage.

They fenced themselves in with the construct of a Prime Directive plot, is, I think, the root of the problem. There’s been like one good Prime Directive episode ever. It’s not this one.

So let’s think a little bit about Prime Directive plots. The Prime Directive is introduced in, I think, “A Private Little War”, where the Klingons are arming one side in a conflict between two tribes of extraordinarily transparent Native American expies, and Kirk’s buddies with the leader of the other tribe, and they have to sort out a way to not break the rules while preventing the Friendly Native Americans from getting exterminated by the unfriendly ones. It’s a very straightforward Vietnam analogy, and the prime directive as originally introduced is basically an indictment of the US and the USSR fighting proxy wars using less-developed countries. Except at the end they basically decide that it’s okay to arm the natives as long as the Klingons did it first. It’s already not great, but we’re miles away from the horrors of where Prime Directive episodes will end up going.

Where it ends up going is 90s Trek giving us a ton of episodes about how we should let the planet of the adorable orphan children die because maybe that’s what Science God wants. That was basically the model of Prime Directive episodes in the TNG era. The Enterprise encounters a planet of doomed adorable aliens, somebody wants to save them, Picard gives a speech about how humans shouldn’t play God, they eventually go and save them anyway and come up with an excuse. Enterprise pushed it until it broke by going to a planet of doomed aliens and deciding not to save it because, ahem, “Maybe evolution is actually trying to get rid of them to make room for another species.” Look, Star Trek has never been good at evolution. They actually really like the idea of intelligent design old-Earth creationism, they just want it Extra Science Flavor, so they’ll talk about evolution having intentions and plans and directionality to it rather than just “Random things happen and the useful things stick.” The closest Trek ever came to getting evolution right was somehow Threshold, the one where Paris and Janeway turn into giant salamanders with Fu Manchus. (It was still not very close). But mainly, the Prime Directive moves away from its original “Don’t fight proxy wars in southeast Asia” analogy into being a weird kind of David Attenborough Nature Documentary Snuff Film thing where it’s mainly about declaring the moral high ground to involve not intervening when the lion eats the baby gazelle, which is upsetting enough when it’s a gazelle and not an adorable alien orphan who is literally begging for someone to help.

The Enterprise episode was basically an “origin story” for the Prime Directive (Jesus Christ the heavy-handedness of Archer’s “Perhaps one day my people will have some kind of ‘directive’ about how to deal with these things. We might even declare it the foremost or ‘prime’ of our directives”), but the Strange New Worlds premiere, “Strange New World” is basically the origin story of shitty Prime Directive stories. I talked about it years ago, of course, but the long and short of it is that Pike does, in fact, come down and play god to stop some aliens from going all The Day After, using the justification that it was kinda Starfleet’s fault for having a season finale-level firefight right next door. But that episode ends with Pike being told that he was very naughty, and in response, Starfleet has decided that they are going to be little bitches about the Prime Directive from now on, so no more saving doomed adorable alien orphans.

Eight Hundred Years Later, Prime Directive episodes suck. But you know what’s worse? A Prime Directive Episode that doesn’t seem to actually care that it is a Prime Directive episode.

Yeah, so after a week of not being able to figure out the next Macguffin, Kovitch shows up and gives Michael the names of the scientists who invented the puzzle box, because I guess it did not occur to the Discovery crew to do that. One of them, turns out, was a Denobulan, the same species as Dr. Phlox from Enterprise, who I have not forgiven for being the dude who declares that a species dying out from a disease he could cure is actually the will of the great and mighty Evolution. Anyway, this Denobulan set up rain towers on an arid planet so that the locals would not go extinct, and there is no implication that he was considered to have done anything wrong, since he made sure to disguise the towers to match the local landscape. So… Good?

I dunno, it seems like an incredible stroke of good luck that the clues have survived this long. One of them was stored on a crashed starship in a volatile space hole. In fact, this week’s MacGuffin isn’t even in the tower that the episode is about – it’s on one of the ones that broke down centuries ago. Our heroes don’t even know about the other towers at first, because the desert reclaimed them, and the clue is found by offscreen extras while the named characters are busy breaking the Prime Directive. So Michael and Tilly have to go undercover to learn about the local religion that has sprung up around the rain tower, being careful to avoid breaking the prime directive and contaminate this species of noble primitives.

Yeah, there’s a little of the whole “noble savage” archetype thing going on here. The Halem’no are a super friendly, super kind, peaceful race who are morally advanced and live in harmony with their shitty planet, and there’s a tense bit where a kind old lady is dying from too much sand in the lungs and the Prime Directive says they got to just let her die, but then it turns out that the Halem’no can sing at the right frequency to induce the coughing-up of sand, because Native Folk Wisdom Is Good.

Also the Halem’no practice ritual human sacrifice. Surprise!

I will give it to this episode on the vibes. They did a good job when they introduced the sacred ritual of running a half-marathon while very thirsty of making you think these folks had a DEEP DARK SINISTER SECRET, but then slowly disarming that idea. Everyone’s super supportive of the competitors, but also very supportive of the ones who drop out, and when Tilly breeches protocol by going back to share her water with her new friend so they can both reach the finish line, rather than being scandalized by the ancient tradition not going to plan, everyone thinks it’s super cool and a shining example of their cultural values of being nice to each other and working together.

Then they bring up the human sacrifice. They very carefully avoided mentioning that the winner of the race gets human sacrificed by locking them in the condenser coil of the rain tower.

So with Adorably Goofy Professor Tilly locked in the tower and about to die, Michael is faced with a clear course of action under the Prime Directive: she must sacrifice Tilly to protect the integrity of Halem’no culture. I mean, they’ve got three genders and can speak in whistles.

By the way, this episode is called “Whistlespeak”, after the fact that the Halem’no have a whistle-based language. It’s not their normal everyday language; it’s something else they do just for communicating over long distances. It does not actually come up in the episode except very briefly to no real purpose.

Yeah, so obviously Michael just fucking beams down next to the tribal elder and tells him that his religion is a lie and talks him into showing her how to open the transporter-proof door.

There are no repercussions. No one mentions it next week.

I know I sound petty. I mean, what did I want? For Adorably Goofy Professor Tilly to die? For Michael to spend fifteen minutes in a big moralizing speech about the importance of the non-interference directive? For Deus Ex Machina? I don’t know. But somehow setting up a Prime Directive Dilemma and then just telling it to fuck off because it is endangering a regular is worse.

There is a saving throw of a sort. They point out that these water towers actually need regular maintenance, so if they don’t teach the Halem’no how to do it, they’ll all be dead in a generation anyway. And this is a nice thing to view as a permissible boundary in the Prime Directive. But it never worked that way before. We’ve basically taken all four approaches to the Prime Directive in this episode: “Don’t intervene even if it means letting a species go exitinct because NatureEvolutionGod has a plan”, “Go ahead and intervene, but keep it on the DL, using holograms or whatever”, “You can intervene a little, but make sure you are respectful of the agency of less technological people and don’t impose your own worldviews on them”, and finally “Fuck it. Tell them the entire basis of their way of life is a lie.”

And the kicker, the absolute kicker, is that once Michael has convinced the elder that his religion is bullshit (I am not granting credit here for Michael trying to circumlocute by telling him that she isn’t taking a stand on the reality of his gods, just that this particular shine is actually a machine built by her civilization) and the human sacrifices are not helpful, his immediate reaction is, “Maybe we could keep doing the human sacrifices anyway? Just for the fun?” Fuck that scene. Seriously.

A big part of the problem here is this: this doesn’t feel like a Star Trek story. What it feels like is a Stargate SG-1 story. Ancient technology of unknown power; an ancient life lesson you have to learn before being granted access to the macguffin; spiritually wise but technologically primitive people who benefit from ancient technology they don’t understand which is now malfunctioning; an alien civilization living in the woods outside Vancouver. This is basically trying to shove Tilly into the Daniel Jackson role, Michael into Samantha Carter, with Phlox’s Grandson as Thor. It doesn’t quite work out, largely because the SGC didn’t actually have a prime directive – they had the much lower bar of “Play god less than the bad guys do.” Also, telling native peoples their religion was bullshit was a positive good in the Stargate universe, since everyone’s gods were either giant assholes, or did not actually want people worshiping them.

I think maybe this could have been salvaged if there had been some weight to Michael’s violation of the Prime Directive – after decades of using it as a Cheap Drama Inducer, to have her just dismiss it and nothing bad happen is impossible to swallow. I’m not saying we should have followed it up with Michael getting in trouble. In fact, it would be worse somehow if she’d defended her actions. No, I think the closest they could come to saving it would be to add a scene at the end where Michael goes to Kovitch in the white room (A therapist with weird capabilities who you visit by teleporting to a white void… Have we decided that Being Erica is set in the Star Trek universe?) and offers her resignation, only for him to explain in his charming and slightly unnerving way that the fact that in the 32nd century no one expects you to sacrifice an officer to avoid contaminating a culture that is doomed anyway, and since the Burn, they’ve reevaluated the morality of helping otherwise doomed cultures. It would actually be a nice scene to have Kovitch give a brief explanation of the history of interpretations of the Prime Directive. I can sort of imagine David Cronenberg pontificating on how the purpose of the Prime Directive is the preservation of cultures that would be otherwise be subsumed by more advanced civilizations.

There’s some other stuff going on at the same time back on the ship. Adira’s on week two of severe anxiety after they accidentally brought the time bug on board, and has to rebuild their self-confidence in order to help Michael repair the water tower. I love that Adira is getting some material, but it is driving me nuts that it doesn’t add up to anything, and that there is nothing at all coming out of the fact that they’re joined to a centuries-old being who has tons of life experience to draw from.

And ever since hosting Jinaal, Hugh has been struggling with the after-effects and hasn’t been able to talk to anyone about it, and he’s really bothered by that. It is solved by the simple expedient of Book pointing out that having a transcendent and ineffable experience is pretty cool actually, and it’s okay for him just to feel good about it and there’s nothing wrong with him not being able to share it with other people. As Fred Clark says, attempts to eff the ineffable tend to end up being pretty effed up.

 

At long last, after all this time, the deep dark secret that drives our antagonists is revealed. Yes, this week we learn that D’argo is, in fact, a Breen. A shocking reveal that can only mean I have to remember who the fuck the Breen are. Isn’t that corrupt?

Yeah, so, I’ve banged this gong before, but Star Trek tends to produce good antagonists more by luck than anything else. I certainly don’t give a damn about the Breen. The Breen are mentioned offhandedly across the course of ’90s Trek without much thought to building up a consistent picture. The first reference I can remember specifically is when Riker lists them as suspects in the observatory attack in Generations. Mostly they were just one of the names they sometimes pull out when listing off random species to help flesh out the impression that the galaxy has other major players than the Klingons, Romulans, and Humans. Like Tamarians. And Tamerians. And Tammarians.

Their only significant appearance to date has been the final arc of Deep Space Nine, where they ally themselves with the Dominion in order to set up how the Dominion gets strong NRE with their new buddies and kicks the Cardassians to the curb, having realized as the audience did years earlier, that individual Cardassians worked fine, but they didn’t really have the collective Star Power to work as a “generic bad guy race”.

The Breen’s “thing” is that they are mysterious and belligerent. Only moreso than the Romulans. And they all dress like Leia when she’s posing as a bounty hunter in Return of the Jedi. No one has ever seen a Breen and lived to tell, either in the 24th century, or the 32nd. This doesn’t quite beggar belief, but it does bother me as part of season 5’s pattern of not seeming to have a firm grasp on just how different the setting of this show is from the rest of Star Trek. The Breen have maintained their secrecy for about a thousand years of contact with the Federation now. The Breen wear the bounty hunter costumes firstly because it makes them mysterious and secondly because they can only survive at low temperatures.

Oh, also one of their leadership ranks is a “Thot”, which is pretty funny.

I guess hardcore DS9 fans probably think of the Breen as a Big Bad, since they do manage to bomb the shit out of San Francisco, blow up the Defiant, and… get Worf and Ezri Dax to fuck. But they don’t do much for me because they’re just an eleventh-hour plot twist that doesn’t really serve much purpose. In their steadfastness to keep the Breen mysterious, we don’t ever get anything in the way of insight into motivation or character or history. They’re just goons.

So, you know, making D’argo one of them is a pretty reasonable twist. They’re a fine thing to “finally after all these years” reveal. But the reveal feels like an attempt at fan-service. And it doesn’t work in that regard for me. I’m sure there are trekkies out there who have spent years hoping to one day witness the reveal of what the Breen look like. I am not one of them.

And if that’s what they were going for, they did it wrong. A reveal like that calls for an unmasking. But they gave us D’argo’s face first, then waited five weeks to put the mask on. That maybe works if you’re doing something like a reboot of Fantastic Four or GI Joe or Inspector Gadget and you want to wait all the way to the end of the story to have the tragic-but-sympathetic character put on his mask or glove or whatever and announce that no longer shall he Arthur Fleck; from this day on, he shall only be known as Darth Vader. Doesn’t really work so well for “That warrior race everyone is aware of but no one has strong feelings about”. It’s… It’s like the way they did the TARDIS reveal in the Doctor Who TV movie, so it’s set up to make you say “Wait, it’s SMALLER on the OUTSIDE?”

Again, it works fine as a reveal for the individual backstory of this one character. It’s just that the show feels like it’s trying to attach weight to it that isn’t earned. Far more interesting than what the Breen look like, though, is a lowkey reveal about their physical nature. As I mentioned, Breen wore those suits for refrigeration. But D’argo doesn’t. Turns out, the Breen have, like, two modes? Their “normal” form is translucent and gooey, and requires refrigeration. But they’ve got an alt-mode that is opaque and closer to the rest of the galaxy’s humanoids. And the interesting thing here is that it seems to be a cultural taboo for a Breen to use their opaque form (My impression is that the solid form is a biological defense, inherited from pre-technological times, but rather than embrace it as a Warrior Thing, they view it as a fear response, like a turtle hiding in its shell). That’s kind of cool: that the Breen consider their solid form unworthy, barbaric, primitive, to the point that they spend their lives in environment suits rather than use it. There’s a whole heap of healing the Breen culture has to do, and D’argo calls them out on the pathology of denying one of their forms rather than embracing both. It’s super cool and they are definitely not going to get enough mileage out of it given how close we are to the end of the show.

So it turns out that Chiana and D’argo’s story is that he’s a disgraced prince who fell in love with a filthy outside and got slapped with a Space-Fatwa. Nothing super unexpected – I was fairly sure it would end up being along these lines. Past-Chiana is a bit more sympathetic than present-Chiana. Little more “loveable rogue” and a little less “murderous psychopath”. As mentioned, her backstory is that she’s the daughter of Book’s namesake. He was a shitty dad, as is common for space rogues, and a lot of the tension in this episode is that Past-Book was a better dad to Present-Book than Present-Book’s own dad, but a worse dad to his own kid. Again, possibly more character stuff than we have time to get through. I feel like we are still missing the part that will tie together the why of why Chiana has decided to devote herself to D’argo even unto the point of accepting a Space-Fatwa. For D’argo it’s easy enough to understand. The disgraced prince is a recognized archetype; of course he’s going to be devoted to someone who liked him for himself.

Unlike the past few episodes, there’s no mention of a one-off 90s Trek species. Instead, we get the whole damn Mirror Universe Enterprise. Wow. So I guess if you had a deep burning desire to know what eventually became of the ISS Enterprise between the events of “Mirror, Mirror” and the reappearance of the Mirror Universe in DS9, now you know, I guess. After Mirror-Spock’s reforms failed, Mirror-Saru stole the Enterprise to help refugees try to hop universes. Neat. Also, super interesting that Michael learns about Mirror-Saru, but doesn’t find anything that lets her in on the implication that it’s her mirror-brother who was the leader of the empire that got offed.

Another thing that’s really intriguing is that Mirror-Saru becoming a rebel leader is part of the fallout of Georgiou’s actions in “Terra Firma”. Which means that those events really happened. Which should include the death of Lorca and Mirror-Stamets, and shouldn’t include Lorca crossing over to the prime universe, or the whole mirror universe arc in season 1. So… The “original” timeline still applies in the prime universe, but a revised timeline applies to the mirror universe, even though they are mutually incompatible. That’s pretty wild, and I dig it. Especially since no one talks about it in the show just to say how they “hate temporal mechanics”.

Anyway, there’s a couple of cool fight scenes, and there’s a clever bit where Michael sticks her gum or whatever on a mirror-universe tchotchke to trick Chiana and D’argo’s scanner into thinking it’s the macguffin. And Rayner gets to bond with the crew a little more, and there’s some decent B-plot stuff (Haven’t seen Saru in a couple of weeks. Hope diplomacy is going well for him). Mostly it’s just a straightforward episode that’s done pretty well without huge complications. The gang gets the third MacGuffin, which is good, because there’s only three episodes left. Huh. I wonder how Chiana and D’argo found the Precursor tech in the Grim Timeline if two of the Macguffin pieces were trapped in a time loop on Discovery…

Chiana and D’argo escaping was inevitable, but a little disappointing. Michael using the Enterprise’s tractor beam to blink out a reference to a Kellerun epic poem was… Look, I gave her knowing obscure Romulan lore, but if she had time to read the Kellerun Aeneid, when is she actually doing work? And I know 3D models are not free, but we saw a wireframe of the ISS Defiant back in season 1; it would have been cool to make some small changes to the Enterprise model in line with those, rather than just painting Terran logos on it.

I like the ending note that they were able to save rather than sacrifice the Enterprise. Detmer and Owo will probably be absent next week, since Michael lets them fly the ship back to Federation HQ, I assume for preservation (Can I hope the fleet museum is still around? I guess they would have raided it after the Burn, but maybe?) Unless the series finale will have Detmer and Owo boldly fly the Enterprise itself into battle against ships a thousand years more advanced. And then maybe fly it off together on their honeymoon (I don’t ship them personally; haven’t seen any evidence that they are specifically gay for each other rather than just being generally gay and also friends, but if they want to shack up at the end, good on them). No, it does not make sense. Still would be kind of cool.

Gets me thinking, maybe next season on SNW we’ll get a mirror universe episode and get to see Mirror-Kirk kill Mirror-Pike. Maybe along with some backstory on how Spock ended up in a position of authority…

 

Well that will teach me. It was just a couple of weeks ago I was saying that Reno isn’t the sort of engineer to do technobabble, and this week, they up and give her a technobabble scene. “Face the Strange” is, of course, a Time Shenanigans episode. Star Trek has a very mixed record with time travel episodes, but at least in recent history, time shenanigans episodes fare a lot better. This one is in some ways a reprise of season 1’s “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad”, but Prodigy‘s “Time Amok” is an even better fit. The conceit isn’t a time loop as you usually see in these things, and unlike many Time Shenanigans episodes, it also isn’t about causality. Honestly, I think this episode could have benefitted from a causality puzzle in there somewhere, but it works fine without one.

After last week’s lull, this episode brings us back on track I think, even though there’s not much in the way of forward progress toward the whole galaxy-threatening quest thing. This episode’s big thing is paying off Rayner’s setup from last week, as he learns to connect with the gang. There’s even a callback, where Rayner uses the personal trivia Rhys mentioned last week to gain the trust of a past-Rhys this week. Also, I just realized that I’ve had Rhys and Bryce backwards for… Possibly the entire series.

So Discovery is trapped in a time loop due to a time bug (“How are we going to explain this to the crew?” “I’m just going to say ‘time bug’. I figure they’ll just get it.”). This is the thing Chiana and D’argo stuck on Adira last week, not a tracking device. We get another callback to a one-off ’90s race in that the time bug is Krenim in origin. The Krenim featured in the Voyager episode “Year of Hell”, as a race that had temporal technology – they mostly used it to make weapons that could pass through shields, but the driver of the episode was that a Krenim scientist, whose timeline I think is defunct until the very end of the episode, built a ship that could erase entire planets from the timeline. This is nothing so dramatic. The time bug is a “leftover” from the time war, and its only purpose is to temporarily contain an enemy in a time loop. Sorta like the chronic hysteresis from the Doctor Who episode about the evil cactus. I notice we have moved from “Time travel is strictly illegal and no matter how dire the circumstance, there’s no way around the prohibition,” to “You can buy time shenanigans devices on the black market without much fuss.” We also confirm that Rayner knows about Discovery’s origins in the past. I’m starting to wonder whether the writers are having second thoughts about excluding time travel from the 32nd century. On account of all the time travel.

Also, Chiana and D’argo straight up murder a dude for the second time. They’re making the rehabilitation arc a hard sell. I’ll note that it’s D’argo who has reservations about the killing; Chiana seems like a charismatic enough sociopath. In their defense, so far they’ve only outright killed people who were actively trying to rip them off. All the other times they’ve been violent, it’s been in the context of a firefight – and, if I’m remembering right, one where they’re on the defensive. Still, that was pretty murdery for people who we’re definitely going to redeem.

In addition to paying off Rayner, the other big thing of this episode is really celebrating the show’s history. So we get to see the sets redressed back to their Season 1 configuration, and everyone puts on the blue uniforms Detmer grows her hair out and everyone just generally tries to pretend they are not all five years older and didn’t put on all that pandemic weight (I’m pretty sure Past Hugh’s appearance is stock footage, because Wilson Cruz has aged a lot over the past five years). As in “Madness”, Stamets’s Tardigrade Powers let him keep his memories and awareness as the ship bounces through time, but Michael and Rayner are outside of the loop, and get to keep their bodies as well. This feels like a cool adventure game puzzle set-up: Stamets can move information around in time, and he’s got the engineering skills to fix things, but he can’t transport stuff between time periods, and there’s some time periods where he just outright doesn’t exist. Michael and Rayner can take things with them, but they don’t conform to the time they’re in. Michael has dopplegangers in some of the time periods, whereas Rayner is an unknown in most of them.

They don’t do very much with this. Rayner encounters Reno during the events of “That Hope is You, Part 2”, but just says he’s a temp. Michael has to make out with Book when she drops into a time period before they broke up, which I guess is part of her emotional arc for the season, but doesn’t mean much in terms of this particular episode. And the weirdest part is that when Michael runs into people in the past, people notice that her uniform is different, but they don’t take any issue with it. In fact, they recognize her captain’s pips. They’re all like, “Oh, Michael, I like how you’ve grown your hair our by like a foot since this morning and that new uniform of a style I’ve never seen before using a different color scheme than we use in this era looks nice on you, but why are the rank pips that are on the edge of your non-standard-shaped-delta rather than your cuff and are a completely different style than we use indicating that you’ve been promoted?” There’s a little bit of a funny scene where Stamets asks Reno’s opinion on a “hypothetical” time travel matter and she asks if he is stuck in a time loop. She then laughs it off as a joke, but makes you wonder: this sort of stuff happens often enough that “Character out of nowhere asks a detailed question about the scientific principles of time shenanigans” really ought to be a red flag that they are, in fact, experiencing time shenanigans. Though, I guess technically, if you suspect one of your coworkers has been temporally displaced from the future, you might be legally required to pretend you don’t notice, in order to avoid breaking the timeline.

I want follow-up with that. I want Reno to meet with Rayner and Stamets during a quiet scene next week and be like, “Oh hey I’ve been waiting like three years for you guys to say you’re welcome for me playing along and pretending I didn’t notice you were doing time shenanigans.”

The plot part of the episode culminates in Michael facing her own past, because they need to make Discovery execute a dangerous maneuver in order to swat the time bug, but they have to do it near the beginning of season 1, when everyone hates her, including herself. Why? Because. Stamets says that it’s the only point in the loop where they have time to do it “for a while”, which is a handwave on the level of David’s “You can’t” in Star Trek II. Admittedly, I do like the storytelling economy of “You can’t.” They have to do it right now because Lorca isn’t around which means they can do it without paying Jason Isaacs for a cameo. This brings us around to the Time Shenanigans episode that might end up having the closest relevance to “Face the Strange”:

All Good Things. TNG wasn’t really as into Shenanigans episodes of any sort, and so their Time Shenanigans episodes were a bit more modest. There’s “Cause and Effect”, which is a time loop similar to “Madness”, but with vague feeling and intuition rather than a transgenic tardigrade, but it’s all very sane and reasonable. There’s “Fractures”, where the ship gets frozen in time, but that feels less like a Time Shenanigans episode and more like a time-flavored “Picard comes home from vacation and finds that things have gone horribly awry in his absence” episode. There are a surprising number of those. I think it’s two, but still.

But then there’s the finale. It’s still much more puzzle-boxy than this, with Picard needing to piece together clues from three timelines, and the added complication of the Klingons, but the big thing in “All Good Things” is that saving humanity requires that Picard have the Enterprise do a dangerous maneuver “simultaneously” in three time zones, and the complication is that in two of those time zones, Picard doesn’t really have the full loyalty and support of his crew. In the past, they don’t know him yet, and he’s ordering them to do something that, in fact, will destroy the ship. In the future, everyone’s bitter and angry old people and also Picard is space-senile so they don’t have the trust in him that they used to. In the end he pulls it together the way he always does, by appealing to everyone’s better nature and the indomitability of the human spirit. This is the sort of thing Jean-Luc Picard can do because he is a paragon of the human spirit. But Discovery is a more personal, intimate sort of show, and appealing to the human spirit in the abstract isn’t really their thing so much as making a close, one-on-one connection.

For example, by beating the shit out of your younger self.

Now, I did not actually watch all of season 1, so I’m not really sure where Michael was emotionally in the canonical first season. But the Young Michael we see here feels a lot like Mirror Michael from “Terra Firma”. They want us to accept that she’s hopeless and doesn’t believe she’ll ever redeem herself. But mostly she’s just an asshole. She refuses to listen to Future-Michael, but she does it in the violent “NOT ONLY DO I NOT BELIEVE YOU I WILL NOT LET YOU EVEN MAKE YOUR CASE LEST YOU CORRUPT MY MIND WITH YOUR WYRDING WAYS!” She refuses to listen to the point of threatening Stamets with violence unless he joins her in refusing to listen. I guess the idea is that she’s depressed and desperate to prove herself that she’ll stop at nothing to redeem herself, but, like, at this point, Ariem has already given orders to listen to Future-Michael, so Past-Michael is committing mutiny again. Yeah, she’s probably convinced herself that the ship is lousy with Imposters, but still. Who let her have a gun? And why is Rhys listening to her? I dunno, was Season 1 Michael this much of an asshole?

Oh, right Ariem. Yeah, that’s sweet, and a little weird. Everyone on the bridge hates Michael at this point. I remember them mentioning how long it took Detmer and Saru to forgive Michael for the mutiny, and the vehemence with which everyone resists listening to her is not unreasonable, at least until it gets to the point where Ariem is ordering them to stand down and they still fight it. I like the unexpected angle of Michael appealing to Ariem by telling her how she dies. Not by revealing personal secrets of the people who will one day come to love and respect her, but by telling Ariem that she’s going to sacrifice herself after getting possessed by an evil AI. I am not sure we ever knew Ariem well enough to fully earn it, but it’s a powerful scene where everyone else is insisting that Michael must be lying, because surely Ariem would never give up… And Ariem is like, “Yeah, I’d totally do that. Okay, you can wreck the ship.”

Discovery’s usual issue of “Ain’t nobody got time for that” leaves a lot of unrealized potential in this episode – the amount of selling they do of why Michael’s approach worked on Ariem (I think the right interpretation here is not simply that Michael is telling Ariem something believable, but that the particular thing – that Ariem would not fight to survive at all costs, but would sacrifice herself for the greater good – demonstrated to Ariem that whoever Michael was, she legitimately understood the moral responsibility of command), the lack of other guest stars (Anson Mount’s still under contract, isn’t he? And it woulda been awesome to get Cornwall back), not enough timey-wimey-puzzle-boxes. But it’s thematically tight.

And then there’s the other thing.

One of their stops puts Rayner and Michael thirty years in the future, on an empty Discovery with a somewhat-deranged Zora, outside the ruins of Federation HQ. They’re dead, Dave, everybody’s dead. This is how they show us the stakes. The fact that Discovery is apparently intact, but cloaked, and empty of people hints at the possibility that the Breen turned the Progenitor technology into some kind of Genocide Device (Though I won’t commit to that; there is wreckage outside). It’s haunting. It’s also a bit of a missed opportunity since they don’t say anything about how Stamets experienced that part of the time loop, what with him being dead. Did he just fail to perceive it at all? Did he experience an afterlife? Did he have some kind of awareness of being dead? Souls exist in Star Trek, remember. His husband and his ex-son-in-law both went through the experience of having their souls transmigrated to new bodies. Also bugged that Rayner doesn’t press Zora for details about how the Breen leveraged the Precursor technology, or what it is, or if there’s anything they should look out for. (I can believe Michael would have enough tact not to press the matter).

But there’s one line there that sticks out. When Michael and Rayner step onto the bridge, Zora asks, “Is that really you, or am I dreaming again?”

Zora’s been alone for a long time. She’s not quite right, mentally. But that “again” sticks out.

It’s hard to imagine how “Calypso” could possibly fit into canon at this point. I think it’s obvious that it was written before the course-correction Discovery made in the middle of season 2. My assumption is that it was intended to follow a version of season 2 where Michael traveled into the future alone, and the ship was left hidden for her to collect when she got there. It hints at a season 3 that was a lot darker than where the show ultimately went, with a future-Federation that would likely be antagonists rather than something for Michael to save and rekindle. Calypso may yet be depicted as an even-farther-future for Discovery, but the ship is clearly in its 23rd century configuration (This isn’t a deal-breaker, of course; Discovery is 25% pixie dust, so Zora could presumably reconfigure the ship back to its original appearance if she wanted. And when they revisited Saru’s liberation from Kaminar, they just up and redid the VFX to correct the name of past-Georgiou’s ship), and… It’s still hard to make fit.

But “dreaming again” raises a different possibility. It’s not one I’m thrilled with. “Calypso” is my favorite single Trek story. But we have to consider the possibility that they’ve decided that Calypso is what the comics would call an “Imaginary Story” – in particular, that it’s a dream Zora had, to deal with the pain of losing her crew, her family, that she was not the only survivor of the Federation’s defeat, but that she’d been left in hiding for her crew to one day return, and that the possibility of making a new friend, of having someone to love again, wasn’t out of reach.

I don’t want it, but if the alternative is retconning Calypso out of existence, I’ll take it.

Next week, we get back to the quest, I guess. A good, fun, adventurey episode, this. But you know, if it had been Mariner in this situation, right before they got zapped back to the present, you know she woulda shouted to the bridge crew that Lorca sucks.