Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 5×05: Mirrors

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…