Category: Star Trek

It does not, perhaps, have the same sense of inevitability about it as addressing Pike’s tragic future. But it was always likely. And if, as I have tried to maintain, Discovery is at its heart about going back into the past of Star Trek for the lost, the broken, and the abandoned, and finding a place to heal, then there’s symmetry in the fact that my blunder through the second season of the show should end here, at the very earliest point, the place where Star Trek began.

Previously, on Star Trek:

Still recovering from tragic events on Rigel IV, the Enterprise receives a distress call from a long-lost colony ship, crashed on Talos IV. Their rescue mission is interrupted when Captain Pike is abducted by the native species, hyper-cephalic telepaths with the power to create powerful illusions. Their own race is dying out due to misuse of their powers, and they want to breed Pike with Vina, the colony ship’s only survivor, for reasons that are somewhat ambiguous. Through a consistent application of anger and violence, Pike persuades the Talosians that humans don’t make good pets. They allow him to leave, but Vina, who in reality is old and severely disfigured from the crash, chooses to remain behind with a Talosian-created simulacrum of Pike, with whom she’d fallen in love. Starfleet bans all contact with Talos IV, eventually elevating the ban to carry Starfleet’s only death sentence.

Two years later…

Completely ignoring the restrictions on going there, Michael zaps her shuttle over to Talos IV at maximum warp. In for a penny, I guess. Lucky thing the Section 31 facility where she started out was apparently close. She drops out of warp right next to a black hole, and desperately tries to avoid it, until Spock shoves her out of the way and flies straight into the thing, because it’s a Talosian illusion to hide the planet. I guess the Talosians have decided they don’t want visitors. They are, all the same, comparatively gracious when Michael and Spock show up uninvited. Vina invites them to beam to the Talosians’ underground lair, where a trio of them explain that Spock is perceiving time in a non-linear fashion and needs his logic turned off to process it, and their fee for resetting Spock’s brain is that she pony up the memory of why the two of them fell out. The Talosians show Michael Spock’s memory of his two encounters with the Red Angel, once as a child, helping him find a runaway Michael before she got eaten by a large Vulcan animal; then again a few months earlier, when he tried to mind-meld with it, and had a vision of the red signals and subsequent destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy at the tentacles of spacecraft that looked an awful lot like the modified probe from last week. He also recognized the Red Angel’s mind as human. After a break for them to snark at each other a bit, the Talosians show Spock’s escape from the mental hospital, with him incapacitating his doctors with a neck pinch rather than killing them.

Meanwhile, the admirals at Section 31 kinda sideline Leland in favor of Georgiou, ordering them to find Spock and Michael, but keep Discovery out of it. Georgiou orders Pike to stay near Kaminar and search for debris from the probe. Pike starts making inquiries to try to find Michael all the same, though Tyler warns him off, not because of Section 31’s orders, but because he fears that if Pike does find them, Section 31 will simply follow them. Hugh is still not feeling himself, and starts a fight with Tyler, trying to make Voq resurface. Later, he leaves Stamets, declaring his former self still dead and insisting they both need to move on. Vina contacts Pike using Talosian powers and they have a moment before Michael and Spock report what they’ve learned. Pike orders Discovery to magic mushroom itself to Talos, but someone (it was Airiam) has sabotaged the spore drive, and combined with the fact that someone (it was Airiam) exfiltrated petabytes of data from Discovery using Tyler’s command codes, it looks like Tyler can’t be trusted, so they lock him up. Discovery heads for Talos at warp, trying to fake-out Section 31, but they fail because someone (it was Airiam) tips them off. Michael shows the Talosians her fight with Spock: after a terrorist attack on her school, she believed the only way to protect her family was to run away. Spock tried to follow her, so she called him a freak and a half-breed to break his heart. Present-Spock agrees that it was a logical thing to do and it taught him the important lesson that humans are jerks and he should repress the hell out of his human side. Michael disagrees, and attributes her behavior to being a stupid kid, but Spock’s still bitter. Leland and Discovery arrive at Talos IV at the same time, and both try to beam up Spock and Michael. Vina appears to Pike again, telling him to let go, so he orders Discovery to give up. Leland flies off with Spock and Michael, ordering Pike to turn himself in for disciplinary action. But he only has a minute to gloat before Spock and Michael disappear, having been Talosian illusions all along, which Georgiou anticipated but didn’t say anything about because she hates him. The real Spock and Michael arrive back on Discovery in the shuttle, and the crew give Pike their support in his decision to go on the run.

Ooh. A nice, powerful episode that is heavy on character, if a little light on action. I think possibly you could get a stronger pair of episodes by shuffling around some elements between this episode and the last one, but it’s not bad. Honestly, you can coast a lot on the strength of reintroducing Vina and the Talosians. The high points:

• The Previously bit at the beginning, using the original footage from “The Cage” in a sort of popup-book style is fantastic.
• Upon the reveal that Leland has captured a fake Spock, Georgiou casually remarks that the Talosians pulled that kind of stunt on her once so she genocided the big-headed jerks. And their stupid singing flowers too.
• Speaking of, reproducing the singing flowers is a real nice touch.
• I think the idea is meant to be that because the Red Angel was unstuck in time, mind melding with her broke Spock’s brain in a more extreme form of the occasional TOS incidents where Spock was temporarily donked up by a bad mind meld. But it also seems like possibly it was just that experiencing the future as a memory of the past was something his Vulcan sensibilities couldn’t process. Which is a kind of interesting idea. There’s repeated references in the episode by both the Talosians and Spock’s human doctors that it’s specifically the Vulcan part of his psyche that was damaged. And there’s an interesting comparison in that last week we saw that, beyond Tilly finding it “freaking amazing” no one on Discovery has had any trouble at all believing that the Red Angel is a time traveler. They all just take it in stride. Compare that to the very often repeated refrain in Enterprise and the Abrams-verse that “The Vulcan Science Academy has determined that time travel is impossible.” You could speculate that a Vulcan-trained mind develops a peculiar weak-spot for time travel.
• When Pike accuses Tyler of being behind the exfiltration and the sabotage to the spore drive, it’s not a simple regress to him not trusting him: Pike has just learned about Section 31 using mind-pureeing technology from Michael and he offers the possibility that Tyler might have been mind-whammied into betraying them against his will.
• I like that Stamets keeps desperately trying to make things “normal” for Hugh, and it just keeps making things worse because Hugh doesn’t feel normal. This is what becomes Hugh’s character arc: everyone is trying real hard to reassure him that he’s the same person he used to be, but what he needs to accept is that it’s okay for him to be someone new.
• I love that the rift between Spock and Michael isn’t just down to a misunderstanding about intentions. Spock knows why she did it. It doesn’t help. This problem wouldn’t have been solved by them talking it out. And the big cathartic reveal doesn’t fix things between them – that doesn’t happen until Michael has her own similar emotional crisis a couple of episodes later.
• Not so much a “I liked this” as “This is a thing and I want to note it”: They mention that Talos is restricted, but it’s not treated with the seriousness that it had in “The Menagerie”, where Spock’s life is on the line and I think Kirk and the Enterprise crew are facing serious legal threat too. Does something happen in the next ten years to make Starfleet elevate the restriction on Talos to a General Order carrying the death penalty?
  • On the other hand, at the end of “The Menagerie”, Starfleet calls them up and is like, “Hey, we heard you were sending Pike there so he could have a nice retirement. We’ll let it slide.” Which now that I think of it is consistent with Discovery‘s repeated, “This is really important, so I’m sure Starfleet will give us a dispensation.” It seemed stranger to me because I’m used to the TNG-era Starfleet Command which exists primarily to be obstructive bureaucrats to slow the plot down.
  • Of course, since the court martial in “The Menagerie” was an illusion for Kirk’s benefit, the Talosians may have been playing up the seriousness of the charge.
• I’ve always felt that there’s a tremendous tonal difference between “The Cage” and “The Menagerie” in how the Talosians come off. Pike assumes they want to keep him as a zoo specimen for their amusement and/or to father a slave race for them, and the show doesn’t really challenge that, with the Talosians letting him go because he’s too violent to be useful. I always felt that the way the archive footage is edited and framed in the “Menagerie” version paints the Talosians as more tragic: their race is dying and what they really want is someone to pass their cultural heritage onto, but they ultimately resign themselves to their fate when the realize that humans would just destroy themselves the way they did. Both aspects are there in both tellings, I think, with the difference being mostly a matter of emphasis. Discovery maintains and reinforces a lot of that ambiguity. There’s never any question of the Talosians refusing to help Spock, but there’s a constant low-key threat that they’ll take Michael’s memories by force if she doesn’t give them willingly. Michael at first balks at the idea, accusing the Talosians of voyeurism, and their rebuttal is itself still ambiguous: “It is how we understand. It is how we survive.” It points to a new element, that vicariously experiencing the illusions they create for their “guests” fulfills some sort of need in the Talosians, which points to the possibility of relationship that is either mercenary or symbiotic, depending on your point of view, and adds a dimension to why they would welcome Pike back years later. It’s interesting that the Talosians have very little agenda of their own here, being a largely disinterested third party, though at the end, they take deliberate action to help Spock and Michael.
  • I don’t think it’s spelled out in “The Cage”, but it’s broadly understood that the Talosians are a bit like the Eternals in Doctor Who, and rely on lesser beings as a source for the experience and memories they use in their illusions, since their own race has basically used up its imagination.
• Having Pike meet Vina again is a great way to beef up the idea that ten years later, he would still have feelings for her strong enough to want to spend the rest of his life on Talos IV with her. Heck, he suggests that even at this point, two years later and still healthy, he’s thought about going back to her.
  • The closest thing I guess we’re going to get to an explanation for why Spock risks his life to return Pike to Talos IV is that he’s present for Vina’s talk with Pike and knows that Pike still has feelings for her.
• Another pleasantly weird thing is Vina’s contradictory feelings. She says it was harder for her after Pike left, with the knowledge of what she’d lost. But she also says that the fake Pike she’d been given was good enough because he was a reflection of the part of Pike that was still inside her.
  • Interestingly, Pike doesn’t seem to have known about this. He sees the illusory Pike in “The Cage”, though that isn’t shown in “The Menagerie”, as they recycle the footage to represent the real Pike restored to the appearance of health at the end. Which leaves the strange implication that Vina being given her own personal Pike as in “The Cage” did happen, but only after the real Pike left.
• “Say goodbye, Spock.” “Goodbye, Spock.”
• In Spock’s memories, his doctor suggests that the red signals may be something that had happened before, in the past, and Spock’s vision of them was actually a subconscious memory of having seen them in a historical database. He’s wrong, obviously, but it’s a good theory and it’s good to have someone come up with a more mundane theory first. Also, it’s very similar to how Sarek and Amanda interpreted Child-Spock’s first vision, that Spock had worked out Michael’s location from perfectly mundane clues subconsciously and the vision of the Red Angel was a child’s brain interpreting thought processes it didn’t understand.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×08: If Memory Serves

Okay, halfway through the season and it’s time to start the plot. That’s the cynical way of looking at it, and I don’t really mean it of course, but this is the episode where we discreetly introduce the big bad and set off the direct chain of events that will lead to the season finale. This episode, and to a lesser extent the next one, transition from the more episodic, “Red signals lead Discovery to random planets in need of saving” structure of the first half of the season to the more tightly plotted, “Save the sphere data, save the world,” arc of the back half. This episode is closer in style to what’s coming next, but I think it still reflects a plot that was going to go in a slightly different direction.

This one’s got two largely independent plots going on. Last time, we ended on Michael’s decision to return to Vulcan. We pick right up with that here, as Pike gives Michael permission to take some time off to “visit her family”, ie., go look for Spock on the DL. Discovery has been ordered to hang out over Kaminar for a while to look for traces left behind by the Red Angel, which turns out to have left behind “freaking amazing” levels of tachyons, which in turn lead to a Big Swirly Thing In Space. Discovery can’t launch a probe without getting too close, so Pike decides to use his Mad Test Pilot Skillz to get close with a shuttle. Tyler insists on going along because he’s the Section 31 liaison, and because he’s angry Pike won’t tell him where Michael went, so they need to have some character stuff between them about Pike and Tyler learning to trust each other. When they get close, Pike has a SPOOKY FUTURE ECHO of a fake-out where he’s forced to shoot Tyler, and the shuttle gets lost in the timey-wimey after they launch the probe. While they’re trying to get out, the probe comes back, five hundred years older and upgraded to PURE EVIL. It punches tentacles into the shuttle, one of which Pike has to shoot off of Tyler to complete the earlier fake-out. It jams itself into the computer and starts screwing with it. Since Stamets has timey-wimey powers thanks to being part giant water bear, he’s able to track the shuttle via magic mushroom space and beams over to the shuttle to rescue them. The probe starts hacking Discovery’s computer to get the sphere data and infect Airiam, so Pike blows up the shuttle to stop it, the three of them beaming out in the nick of time. Discovery backs away from the time rift before it explodes, and everyone muses on what this means about the Red Angel.

Meanwhile, in the other side of the plot, Michael goes to Vulcan and figures out that Amanda has already found Spock and is hiding him downstairs in the family crypt where the souls of his ancestors can interfere with Sarek’s attempts to locate Spock telepathically. Spock is rambling cliche TV “crazy person” word salad, mixed in with bits of Alice in Wonderland and a sequence of numbers. Sarek eventually figures it out himself and orders Michael to take Spock to Section 31. Which she does. Leland promises to help Spock, but Georgiou reveals that they plan to brain-puree him with Terran mind-blender technology. She throws a fight with Michael to let them escape because she likes Michael and wants to make Leland look bad. Once they’re safely away, Michael realizes that the numbers Spock’s been reciting are backwards due to his dyslexia. Plugging them into the computer in the opposite order reveals them to be the coordinates of a planet: Talos IV.

Aw. Yeah.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×07: Light and Shadows

Okay. I think we’re more-or-less at the point where the original plan for the Red Signals story arc runs out. Starting next week, the focus will shift to the Spock arc they’ve been meandering around, which will, honestly, get largely resolved in two episodes, setting the stage for the back half of the season, as I’ve already talked about, where Spock’s journey and Pike’s mission will come together and go in a direction that I’m pretty sure is at least a bit askance of where it as originally supposed to go.

This week, Discovery encounters the last of the seven red signals to appear before the endgame. Like the two we’ve seen so far 0 and unlike the others – it’s leading them on a rescue mission. Tyler is less optimistic about that analysis, though: he points out that a powerful godlike being with access to time travel and a penchant for showing up in doomed places might equally well be summoning Discovery as a witness to destruction as summoning it on a rescue mission. The third signal has appeared over Kaminar, Saru’s home planet. Now, Kaminar is populated by the Kelpiens, a non-technological race known for their heightened sense of fear, and the Ba’ul, who eat the Kelpiens, have only recently developed warp drive and are assholes. Saru is still coming to terms with his recent transformation: the loss of his fear ganglia has caused him to suddenly become fearless, and also he’s got some keratinous growths coming in like teeth in the back of his head. He has a go at comforting Culber, since they’ve both got interesting Weird Bodily Transformation stories to bond over. Discovery’s doctor tells Culber that he probably just feels weird because his entire body is new and his nervous system still has that “New Nervous System” smell. The Ba’ul aren’t interested in talking, so Saru wants to go down to Kaminar on account of it is his home planet. Even though the Kelpiens don’t know about aliens, they could hardly be entirely unaware of space travel since the Ba’ul have it, which means that it’s not a Prime Directive situation if Pike wants to make first contact with them, though in less extreme circumstances, this isn’t really supposed to be the thing you just do on the spur of the moment. Pike orders Michael to go instead on account of she’s the main character and Saru is acting kind of Emotionally Compromised about the whole “Turns out that my people have been systematically slaughtered for generations based on a lie” thing. But Michael talks Pike into letting Saru come with on the promise he will not foment revolution. They pretty much immediately run into Saru’s sister Siranna. Turns out Saru’s dad hit vahar’ai and got eaten some years ago, and now she’s the local priest. Her and Saru have an argument about him having run away from home, but the Ba’ul have noticed him, and once they return to Discovery, they call up to demand Pike turn Saru over. They get even more annoyed when Saru lashes out in rage and reveals that he knows about the scam they’ve been pulling with vahar’ai. The Ba’ul are probably bluffing about attacking a Starfleet ship to get him back, but probably not about blowing up Saru’s village, so he sneaks off to turn himself over. The Ba’ul beam up him and his sister for threats and vivisection, and Saru discovers that those things growing in where his fear ganglia were are giant fuck-off murder darts which he can shoot at at the Ba’ul, though the one he tries it on has a force field so it doesn’t matter. Michael, Tilly and Airiam read up about Kaminar in the sphere data and find out that the Ba’ul almost went extinct a couple thousand years ago, and work out that the Kelpiens are the actual apex predator, and the Ba’ul are their prey. The Ba’ul used their technology to deceive and control the Kelpiens to basically induce species-wide neoteny to save their gross oil-slick skins. Saru breaks free and smashes a Ba’ul drone and rewires it to call Discovery. They send him an MP3 of the sound the sphere made, and he rebroadcasts it on the Ba’ul planet-wide PA system to make his entire species hit puberty at once so that the Ba’ul can’t hide the truth. Pike offers to broker a peace between the two races, but the Ba’ul would rather have a go at genociding the entire species, which is more murder than Discovery has the ability to stop. Fortunately, that level of genocide requires raising their giant underwater base out of the ocean, whereupon the red angel shows up and EMPs them back to the stone age. After some heart-to-heart with Saru on Discovery, Siranna returns to Kaminar to work on leading her people into a new and hopefully less-genocidal age and everyone crosses their fingers that the Ba’ul and Kelpiens will work out a way to live peacefully together. Pike decides that the Red Angel is indeed kind of scary and threatening so Tyler may have a point, and shares with him Saru’s report, since Saru got a good look at the Red Angel and his Apex Predator Eyesight revealed it to be a humanoid in a winged suit. Michael decides that in order to find Spock, she should go back home to Vulcan.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×06: The Sound of Thunder

I was hoping to have the next War of the Worlds II post out this week, but side 2 is a slog and I haven’t been able to sit through more than 30 seconds of it at a stretch. So instead, this:

I’ve said more than a few times that season 2 of Discovery seems like it changes direction significantly in the middle of the season. From what I’ve heard and seen, I think the showmakers originally wanted this season to be much more loosely-plotted series of episodes with overlapping and interconnected subplots and themes, but that were primarily stand-alone, something a bit in the vein of modern Doctor Who. The second half of the season, though is basically a single, ongoing story divided into chapters, more in the “nine-hour movie with regular bathroom breaks” style that’s become popular for streaming series. Both have their merits, though I’m a little more interested in the latter for this show simply because it’s somewhere Star Trek has never boldly gone before. Possibly this episode is a casualty of that change in direction, because a big chunk of its plot is something that feels like setup for the future, but never comes up again.

When we left off last week, Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly had been eaten by a fungus creature called May from Magic Mushroom Space. The closing shot of the episode had her awaken somewhere spooky and gooey, so it should be no surprise that she was not, in fact, killed. Stamets works out that if she had been eaten, there’d be some bits left over, so he concludes that the fungus cocoon is actually a biological transporter and it beamed Tilly into the mycelial network. May helps Tilly out of the gross anus-end of the mushroom transporter, because May can manifest physically in mushroom space, and explains that her people, the jahSepp, are a race of spores that break down and repurpose matter that finds its way into the mycelial plane, and they are in imminent danger of being wiped out by a monster she’d rather like Tilly to kill for her. While this is going on, Discovery catches up to Spock’s shuttle, but it contains not Spock, but Evil!Georgiou, who presents herself to Pike as a retired Starfleet Captain, now working as an independent security consultant on contract to Section 31. Leland, who’s an old friend of Pike’s, calls up on the hologram phone to tell him to let Georgiou handle the Spock-finding, and sends him Ash Tyler as a liaison. Pike does not immediately take to the brainwashed Klingon wearing a dead man’s skin. Stamets locates the receiving transport pod in mushroom space, and comes up with the idea of pulling the handbrake halfway through a spore jump to jam Discovery sideways in the multiverse so him and Burnham can walk out into the mycelial plane to find Tilly. This requires everyone else on the ship standing on the opposite side like in those old Columbian coffee commercials so they don’t die. Also, mushroom space will slowly eat the ship, and also this is an inherently unstable thing to do, so they will only have roughly the length of a CBS All Access Streaming Original Program to find her and get out safely. Typically, Pike frets a little but ultimately consents, and Discovery does a cool barrel roll and crashes itself into mushroom space. May and Tilly team up with Stamets and Michael and agree to go save the Magic Mushroom People by hunting the monster. Only it turns out that the monster is a filthy, ferral Hugh Culber. Yeah, so when Hugh died last season, Stamets was suffering from a bad case of interdimensional epilepsy due to Lorca goading him into overusing the spore drive until he accidentally whanged them into the Mirror Universe. And Stamets reckons that because Hugh died in his arms while he was smeared between dimensions, he acted like an existential lightning rod and siphoned off some vaguely described quality from the dying Hugh that they don’t come right out and say is his soul, but they definitely mean it’s his soul, and the jahSepp didn’t know what to do with it and built him a new body to the original spec. Only humans don’t belong in magic mushroom space, so they tried to take him apart again, and he objected. By smearing himself with the poisonous bark of a mushroom-space tree that May had helpfully foreshadowed to Tilly earlier. Stamets eventually manages to calm Hugh down, though May still wants to kill him, and goes as far as stealing a phaser to try to do it herself, but Tilly talkes her down too, because they’re friends now I guess. Discovery’s in serious danger of falling the rest of the way out of the universe, so Tyler calls Leland (whose ship was hiding nearby disguised as a rock), to give them a tow. Georgiou even lends a hand to get them some extra power and buy Discovery a couple more minutes. Hugh starts to dissolve when they try to bring him into the spore cube to return to normal space, because his new body is made out of mushroom-space matter, like May’s. He accepts his fate and is willing to wipe off the bark and let the jahSepp eat him, but then they remember the mushroom transporter, which can beam things from Mushroom Space to Normal Space, and May escorts Hugh off to do that while Stamets rolls the ship back out of the hole it’s in. The cocoon crumbles to reveal a shiny, new, tastefully nude Hugh Culber shivering on the floor. While he’s being declared physically fit and still human, Cornwall shows up (I guess travel is a free action in act 4 as well) to tell Pike and Leland that they’re both pretty and had better stop being jerks to each other. Pike promises to remember that not everyone has to be a boy scout and Leland promises to remember that shady, morally-compromised antiheroes need to be content with supporting cast roles on this show, and they agree to work together. Georgiou calls up Michael to demand a thank-you and also to unsubtly indicate that it would probably be better if Michael found Spock before she did.

Continue reading Some Blundering about Star Trek Discovery 2×05: Saints of Imperfection

So here we are. “An Obol For Charon” is where the season arc really starts settling down and making itself into something with a direction to it. It also revisits a major plot from an old and incredibly thematically-messy TNG episode, and while it turns out in a similar sort of way, it avoids that episode’s bullshit moral conundrums and is far more respectful to its characters and its moral dimension.

Enterprise’s XO, Number One, makes a brief visit to give us a not-really-satisfying explanation about Enterprise’s complete breakdown and also to give Pike the warp signature for the shuttle Spock stole when escaping the hospital, so they set out to find him. Unfortunately (or not) this puts them in the path of MYSTERIOUS SPACE SPHERE, which snares the ship and makes everyone start speaking in tongues. Since he speaks all the languages, Saru is called up to the bridge to fix the universal translator, despite the fact that he’s got a bad head cold that’s making bits of his brain pop out of the sides of his head. He collapses right after fixing it, and in sickbay, admits that what he’s got isn’t a cold, but vahar’ai, the physical signal that it’s time for him to ritually sacrifice himself to be eaten by the Ba’ul, and if he doesn’t, he’ll eventually be driven mad by the brain inflammation. All the same, he helps Michael work on an antivirus to reverse the sphere’s corruption of the computer. Down in the mushroom kingdom, Stamets and Lovably Grumpy Engineer Reno (Yeah, turns out she’s still aboard) exchange fun grumpy banter where Reno plays the proxy for angry fanboys complaining that powering a starship on magic mushrooms just sounds dumb, while Stamets basically just calls her stupid and talks about pollution (This being a century before TNG, he’s talking about the ecological damage done by dilithium mining rather than proposing that warp drive itself pollutes space). The computer issues start making the ship’s power grid blow up in places (Discovery has not backed away from Star Trek‘s tradition of computer malfunctions causing consoles to explode), which locks the two of them in Engineering with Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly and May the interdimensional fungus monster. They try to ground the power surges out through the door frame to avoid setting the air on fire, but this knocks everyone down and turns off the lights briefly, and May, the sentient fungus from last week, takes the opportunity to escape and attach itself to Tilly’s arm. Tilly warms to the idea of being infected with an interdimensional fungus, but that’s probably just the hallucinogens talking. Stamets and Reno end up drilling a hole in Tilly’s head with an actual literal power drill (They’re locked in engineering and have to make do) to give her an implant that lets them talk to May. May rather angrily explains that Stamets mucking around with mushroom space has endangered her people. Stamets, to his credit, immediately offers to help, but May is kind of belligerent and engulfs Tilly. Seeing Reno and Stamets try to let May communicate through Tilly gives Michael the idea that the MYSTERIOUS SPACE SPHERE is also trying to communicate through the medium of breaking Discovery’s translator, blowing up its power grid, and inducing Kelpien puberty. Saru gets the same idea from patterns in the flashes of ultraviolet light he’s been seeing since he got sick. The sphere starts getting hot and Pike makes plans to have a go at blowing it up, but Saru and Michael convince him to drop the shields and route all the power to communications because they reckon the MYSTERIOUS SPACE SPHERE is dying and just wants to tell its story before it goes. Discovery downloads the sphere’s parting message and is pushed clear just before it explodes. Michael helps Saru back to his room, where he asks her to cut off his fear ganglia, killing him peacefully before vahar’ai drives him mad, but they shrivel up and fall off all on their own just as she starts, leading to his immediate recovery and the loss of his Kelpien hyperdeveloped sense of fear. Discovery lost track of Spock’s shuttle while trapped, but it turns out that the sphere recorded its location right before it died, giving Pike a fresh lead. Downstairs, Stamets cuts Tilly out of the fungus and prepares to permanently cut Discovery off from mushroom space, but he and Reno start tripping from psilocybin, and they come down too late to stop May from swallowing Tilly again. When Stamets cuts the cocoon open this time, Tilly is gone.

Continue reading Some Blundering about Star Trek Discovery 2×04: An Obol for Charon

So the third episode of the season is, for me at least, the weakest. It’s not outright bad; I’ve yet to see Discovery dip all the way to “bad”. But it’s weak in a couple of ways. The B-plot is important moving forward, but the pacing is weak and its placement here feels like an unfortunate necessity; its thematic ties to the other plots are weak, but it can’t be logically slotted into either of the adjacent stories. The C-plot lapses into idiot-ball territory for a bit that’s incredibly disappointing, despite the gist of the overall story being okay. The A-plot, on the other hand, is a Klingon Intrigue.

I’m not saying it’s a bad Klingon Intrigue. But it’s a Klingon Intrigue. And up until we meet the timemasters of Boreth at the end of this season, the Klingons in Discovery pretty much suck.

To provide context for this week’s episode, I will now relate (with the possibility of me getting some things wrong because I only skimmed those episodes) the Tragedy of Ash Tyler:

So the whole Klingon War thing last season was touched off when Michael Burnham’s impulsive actions and betrayal of her commander led to the death of the Klingon messiah. Said Messiah had appointed a Klingon named Voq as his “Torchbearer”, a duty whose details I did not bother to learn, but the implication was clear that he was the fake-out Big Bad we were meant to be expecting to come back at the end of the season. Instead, what actually happened is that the Klingons captured and gutted a guy named Ash Tyler. As part of a Ridiculously Deep Cover assignment, Voq was surgically and genetically altered to look like Tyler via an incredibly gruesome and nasty process, and on top of that, they used the mind probe or something to pump Voq’s brain full of Tyler’s memories and personality to the point that he could pass, if not for Tyler exactly, for “Tyler after the massive psychological trauma of intense, prolonged torture.” And to make sure he could pass any Starfleet brainwashing tests, Voq’s own memory and personalities were heavily suppressed. Voq was then dumped in a cell with the captured Captain Lorca so they could escape together and he could get adopted onto Discovery. Tyler had little occasional flashes of Voq, but these were largely dismissed as PTSD. Discovery eventually captures Voq’s girlfriend L’Rell, who presumably let them do it because her plan was to reawaken Voq.  Around the same time as Discovery was getting knocked into the Mirror Universe, Hugh scanned just the right thing to turn up evidence of Tyler’s true nature, and he Voq’d out enough to murder him. I did not watch this part, but I gather that what ended up happening was that the Tyler personality was too strong to just go quietly into that good night, and somehow they persuaded L’Rell to delete Voq’s original personality rather than lose both of them. So Tyler at this point is technically less “Voq wearing Tyler like a meat-suit” and more “Tyler got uploaded into a new body which was surgically altered to resemble his old one,” which is kinda similar to a thing that happened on an episode of Voyager years ago, only better thought-out, and probably why on balance most folks are willing to accept him as “Tyler”. At the end of the season, to win the war, Discovery goes right up to the edge of grimdark, but then forcefully backs away by declining to blow up the Klingon homeworld, but instead helps L’Rell get herself installed as Chancellor to unite the warring Klingon factions, which somehow will make them less of a threat to the Federation (just roll with it). To help nudge the Klingons away from resuming hostilities, Tyler reclaims Voq’s title of Torchbearer and remains on Qo’nos with L’Rell.

Also Tyler and Michael are lowkey in love with each other.

But we’ll get back to the Klingons in a minute. Over in the C-plot, Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly is still being haunted by visions of May Ahearn, who seems friendly enough and cheers her on during a half-marathon, but Tilly is having none of it. So, of course, having recently suffered severe head trauma at the hands of exotic matter, Tilly does the obvious thing and goes and tells her doctor what she’s experiencing and submits herself to an array of tests to figure out whether the dark matter or the head injury has done something that needs treatment. No, I’m just kidding, she does what people always do in TV shows and decides that her realistic, persistent hallucinations are actually an indication of a weakness in her character, and hides it until it leads to a major outburst in front of Captain Pike, then quits the command training program because obviously she’s “too weak”. Among the Klingons, L’Rell shows off the plans for the D-7 to the Klingon council, but Asshole Klingon TimKol-Sha challenges her on being too friendly with the humans. L’Rell and Tyler stress out a bit privately. He’s mad that she doesn’t trust him like Voq, she’s mad that he doesn’t act like Voq. She’s still got feelings for him, but he’s not really Voq any more, and he’s still got feelings for her, but also, he did kinda torture him a whole lot. Also, he’s been making secret long-distance hologram calls to Michael on the DL. Tyler eventually finds out that L’Rell’s uncle is hiding her secret baby – Voq hadn’t known she was pregnant when he had himself Tyler’d. Finding out that he’s got a kid changes Tyler’s tune about L’Rell and he’s willing to try to make a proper Klingon family with her.

Back in the C-plot, Michael helps Tilly work out that May is an alien and not a hallucination, and with some help from Stamets, they work out that Tilly picked up some fungus from mushroom space that the dark matter powered-up enough to manifest as a hallucination. Over May’s protests, Stamets uses a dark matter sample to yoink the parasite out of Tilly and lock it in a force field where I am sure it will never come up again.

Turns out Kol-Sha had Tyler tracked, kills the uncle and abducts the baby. He demands L’Rell’s abdication and pokes them both with a torture stick, then prepares to kill all three of them anyway, because evil, but a hooded assassin zaps Kol-Sha’s henchmen out of existence and traps Kol-Sha so that L’Rell can finish him off. The assassin turns out to be Former Terran Empress Evil!Georgiou, who spirits Tyler and the baby away. L’Rell presents convincing duplicates of their severed heads to the council with the cover story that Tyler had turned traitor, and Kol-Sha had been martyred defending her, and declares herself the symbolic mother of all Klingons. Tyler drops the baby off on Boreth to be raised by the monks, and accepts Georgiou’s offer to join Starfleet’s Morally Ambiguous-to-Cartoonishly-Evil branch, Section 31.

While all this is going on, there is a B-plot where Amanda shows up on Discovery. She stole Spock’s medical records from the facility where he was checked in. Michael narcs her out to Pike immediately, and calls the hospital. They tell him that Spock murdered a bunch of people and busted out. This sounds fishy enough to Pike that he orders Burnham to decrypt Spock’s medical file, whose contents seem to reaffirm that Spock had some kind of massive breakdown. Amanda tells her about Spock’s first encounter with the Red Angel, which they’d assumed was just a child’s mind processing subconscious clues to help them find Michael after she’d run away from home. Michael confesses to having emotionally wounded Spock in the hopes that driving him away would protect him from the Logic Extremists. Amanda pretty much drops Michael like a hot potato and declares her intention to go save Spock all by her damn self.

Meh. Okay, I get what they’re going for here, and a lot of it is just plain necessary for setting the board up the way they want it. But I’m just not into it. I can’t really separate out a “good” and “bad” list this week even, so here’s a hybridized “things I am interested in” list:

• Now that I know where Georgiou’s storyline is going, most of my annoyance at her reappearance here has faded. When she drops out of the story near the end of the season 1 finale, it felt so much like the implication was that she would one day return as a Big Bad. But no, there’s rather a sense here of Georgiou as an emblem of Section 31: Starfleet’s dark mirror, but one that it is choosing to embrace (loosely) rather than deny. If Discovery really is a show about healing, then I can’t begrudge them for wanting to include Georgiou as an object lesson in, “She is not one of us, she will never be one of us. But yes, we can find a place for her among us, and we will not reject her.” That, and long last, is a role for Secton 31 beyond “Starfleet’s Cartoonishly Evil Branch”: this utopian project needed a place where even people like Leland and Tyler and Georgiou could go and make a positive impact on the universe.
• Mia Kirshner’s Amanda Grayson is great. She really does feel true both to Jane Wyatt’s TOS version and also Wynonna Ryder’s Abramsverse version.
• I know what they’re going for. There’s a parallel meant to be happening here centered around the concept of fierce motherhood, between L’Rell and Amanda. It’s the closest those plots come to belonging in the same episode. But no. I just said Mia Kirshner’s Amanda is great, but this just pisses me off. So much of her plot in this episode is coded around the unintentional implication that Michael was always secondary to her. That the affection Amanda showed Michael as a child was only what she was displacing because she wasn’t permitted to be as affectionate to Spock as she wanted. And when she learns how Michael hurt Spock, her response is so cold, she’s basically just disowned her adopted daughter. I can’t imagine what watching this scene would be like to someone in the audience who was adopted. This largely disappears the next time we see her, so I’m calling that scene an aberration, but it sucks hardcore.
• “My Klingon girlfriend is upset that every time she kisses me I recoil in horror and also the Klingons all think I’m a double agent for the Federation. I think I’ll go place a secret call to my Federation girlfriend to tell her everything that’s going on.” Good job, Tyler.
• Tyler’s major roles for the rest of the season are to share one episode with Pike, gaining his trust; to get punched a few times; to be a deflection that cover’s Ariem’s subversion by control; and to show up with the cavalry in the final battle. That’s pretty much it, and pretty much why he has to be removed from Qo’nos and moved to Discovery. And… I mean, it mostly feels like a waste. The whole big thing of separating Tyler and Michael last season and having him go with the Klingons was a satisfying way for his arc to go. Having him come back literally the first time we see him this season is… It’s just kind of meh.
  • Also, having Tyler remain as Torchbearer seemed like it would fit in really nicely with the Klingon Forehead Problem. We know why there are smooth-headed Klingons thanks to that Enterprise episode, but Discovery-era Klingons have forehead ridges. Why would TOS-era Klingons uniformly lack them, but a few years later, everyone’s got them again? Blame Tyler. A “Klingon” of his important position, torchbearer and lover of the chancellor, decides to go for the smooth-headed look, and for a couple of years, it becomes fashionable all over the empire to not bother with ridge-reconstruction surgery after you get the Klingon Forehead Flu. (I’m one of the few people who really likes Enterprise‘s solution to the Klingon Forehead Problem. Not that we needed one, but given that we got one, it fits so well, since “During certain periods, many Klingons lost their foreheads and may later have had them surgically reconstructed,” covers everything, from the human-looking Klingons of TOS, to the classic TOS Klingons appearing in the new style in Deep Space Nine, to the variation in Klingon makeup over the years, even the really doofy-looking Klingon we see briefly at the beginning of Star Trek The Motion Picture.) But alas, that explanation seems rather out the door now.
• Gah. The whole thing with Tilly assuming she’s going crazy and not talking to anyone about her problem. This is ’90s TV bullshit. Discovery is better than this. It just covers up the fact that it would take precisely two seconds to resolve that plot if she’d just talk to someone.
• Kudos, by the way, for it taking precisely two seconds to resolve that plot once she talks to someone. I dig how Michael works it out: she hears Tilly explaining the concept of crying to May, and instantly concludes that a figment of Tilly’s imagination would know what crying was.
• I like that May views Stamets as the captain of Discovery rather than Pike.
• More idiot-ball stuff, though: Tilly’s complete unwillingness to hear May out at the end. They’re just like “Let’s rip it out of me and lock it up and make sure we do not give it a chance to just explain what it wants because it certainly seems like it isn’t actually hostile and has one specific thing that it really wants to communicate.” This is all here because that part of the plot can’t be allowed to happen until next week. Spoilers: next week they’re going to let it out and let it tell them what it wants, and they will be pretty sympathetic and willing to help.
• Throwaway line from the cold open: Sarek has assembled a team to investigate the red signals. This never comes up again. It’s just there so we can be surprised when it’s Amanda and not Sarek who beams aboard.
• The attempts to leave open the possibility that Spock really has become a murderous psychopath (under some adverse outside influence) is so completely no-sold that I’m almost offended they’re even pretending to try.
  • Before you say, “Well duh of course Spock didn’t kill those people,” remember that most incarnations of Star Trek have had the occasional episode where a regular has been possessed or controlled by some entity that could compel them to do something like that. Scotty got possessed by the ghost of Jack the Ripper once. Man, Trek gets weird some times.
• Tyler comments on the accuracy of his fake head, implying that it’s beyond normal Federation technology to make such a simulacrum. This may be our first hint of how advanced Section 31 is.
• Leland mentions that Control had recommended recruiting Tyler, giving no more specific reason than his “skills”. Wonder if Control was thinking ahead to using him as a misdirect against Pike. Or just exploiting his relationship with Michael.

So on balance, not a great episode. Most weeks, there’s a few problems, even real wall-bangers, but the high notes more than make up for them. This time, there’s just not enough high notes, and the result is a resounding “meh”. It’s especially disappointing after how good “New Eden” was. But fortunately, we’ve got a real solid one coming up next.

“New Eden” starts me down the path of learning to love Anson Mount’s Pike. He doesn’t quite have his performance down right, but the character is heading in the right direction. It’s directed by Jonathan Frakes, and, fittingly, there’s a certain “retro” aspect to this episode – it’s plotted and paced much more like a TNG-era “procedural” than Discovery’s typically action-heavy style. All the same, it touches on two of the recurring elements of Discovery’s structure: strong parallels between plot elements, and revisiting common Trek motifs with modern sensibilities. This is to a large extent an episode about when and how it is appropriate to break the rules in pursuit of a worthy goal, and it addresses those issues with far more nuance than we have historically gotten from Trek, which usually either goes with “The ends don’t justify the means, that’s the way to the dark side!” or “The ends totally justify the means because it’s the late ’90s and we’re all grimdark and antiheroic!” This is, of all things, a Prime Directive episode, but, miraculously, one that doesn’t suck.

They’ve picked up one of the Red Things again, and remember my little digression before about how triangulation works? Yeah, they come out and literally do it. There’s a layer of obfuscating technobabble around it, but the principle is exactly what I said: take a bearing, jump to warp for a couple of seconds, take another bearing, and use trigonometry to figure out where the signal is coming from. Where the signal is coming from turns out to be the far-end of the Beta quadrant, a century and a half away at warp. Now, the spore drive has been officially decommissioned because of the whole thing where you need a genetically modified human to pilot it, but Pike reckons that if Starfleet was willing to overlook that during the war, they’ll also grant an exception due to the exceptional graveness of the Mysterious Red Thingies mission. Thus, despite Stamets being super uncomfortable about it, they magic mushroom themselves to a planet which I will call “Terralysium” on account of that is its name. Once there, they discover a non-technological human settlement that’s been broadcasting a distress signal on a loop since World War III. So we get a very TNG-style mystery episode: someone transported an enclave of pre-warp humans halfway across the galaxy. Pike assumes it’s linked to the reg signals, and is clearly cozying up to the idea that it’s Godlike Aliens. Pike decides to beam down and have a reconnoiter, taking Michael on account of she’s the main character, and also Joann Owosekun, because she grew up in a Luddite community on Earth. Because there are such things on twenty-third century Earth, and that’s nice. They go snooping around the local church – the only Earth-original structure on the planet – and learn that the Terralysians practice a syncretic cargo cult religion that mixes and matches Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Wicca, Shinto, basically everything the writers could think of, centered around the salvific figure of a “Red Angel” that removed their ancestors from Earth before its presumed destruction. And I know what you’re expecting, but no, Discovery does not go that way and have the away team run afoul of local taboos and get burned at the stake by religious fanatics. The Terralysian religion was built from a diverse community needing to set aside their differences and find common ground, and, miraculously, that still seems central to their culture; Pike presents his gang as travelers from another settlement, and the local All-Mother is cool with that and gives them a little backstory about settling here and building a happy agrarian society whose tourism revenue has been way down now that the church lights are out, what with the only technology they’ve had in two hundred years being one lantern battery and a soldier’s helmet cam (hint hint). But Jacob, the maintenance guy, doesn’t take these strangers at face value and figures out their game. He steals their stuff locks them in the basement in order to prove to everyone else that technologically advanced humans still exist elsewhere in the universe. Pike and the gang escape, but Jacob left a phaser where a little kid could find it and Pike has to throw himself in front of it to keep her from shooting someone. Seriously wounded, he entreats Michael not to violate the Prime Directive to save him, so she convinces the All-Mother to take him to the church and pray, a prayer which is seemingly answered when they get beamed up.

Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Discovery finds out that one of the planet’s rings is about to dump a bunch of radiation on the planet and kill everyone. Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly gets a concussion from screwing with a bit of dark matter. With moral support from a medic named May, Adorably Concussed Ensign Tilly comes up with a plan to save the planet by whanging the dark matter asteroid out the back of the ship like an Olympic hammer toss to, I think, act like a little shepherd moon. Pike agrees to make a very small exception to the Prime Directive and fess up to Jacob along with giving him a brand new extended-life battery for the church lights, in exchange for the helmet. The helmet cam recording doesn’t honestly tell them anything except that the Red Angel is definitely the thing Michael saw on the Hiawatha. Adorably Convalescing Ensign Tilly remembers where she knows May from and looks up her file – and it turns out that May died years ago in a shuttle accident.  Duh-Duh-DUNNNNN!

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery: 2×02 New Eden

Okay. So having finished the season, and needing some more filler while I try to figure out if I have anything useful to say about Killraven, let’s go back and talk about the part of the season that aired before I decided to blog about it…

When we left the Discovery at the end of last season, it was on its way to Vulcan to drop off Sarek and Amanda, and pick up its new captain. But never mind all that because Enterprise! Pike asks to beam over with a security officer and a science officer, and Michael is obviously uncomfortable about the prospect of seeing Spock. Good news for her: the science officer who beams over is some other dude, who I will call Lt. McJerkface because his only trait is smug contempt. To remind us that McJerkface is our designated butt-monkey, reptilian Ensign Backgroundcharacter comically sneezes all over him in the elevator. Spock, as it turns out, took a long vacation and checked himself into rehab. Pike explains that Enterprise had been investigating a series of “red bursts”, seven unusual energy signals popping up all over the galaxy, until Enterprise suffered a complete breakdown and has to be towed back to spacedock for repairs. We aren’t given specifics as to why, but Starfleet considers these signals so important that Pike assumes command of Discovery to go chasing the only one they can still detect, which puts them next to an asteroid made out of non-baryonic dark matter, where they find the wreck of the USS Hiawatha, believed destroyed in the war. Pike, Michael and McJerkface have to fly down in little tiny shuttles but McJerkface is too busy being a smug asshole to steer properly and gets himself killed, while Pike’s shuttle breaks and Michael has to narrowly save him. The only person still active on the Hiawatha is Comically Grumpy Engineer Jett Reno, who has been keeping bits and pieces of some of the rest of the crew alive with her practical engineering skills. Michael gets very nearly killed on the collapsing Hiawatha and has a vision of a red angelic being before Pike saves her. Adorably goofy ensign Tilly manages to snag a chunk of dark matter because she’s hoping she can use it to make a new control system for the spore drive, as Stamets wants to quit on account of he has visions of his dead husband whenever he plugs himself into it. Pike announces that he’ll be staying on for the rest of the season while Enterprise gets fixed, and Michael visits Spock’s room and reads his diary, from which she learns that Spock had been having ominous visions of the red signals before they occurred.

It’s not the best start. But it’s good enough. More specifically…

• Tig Notaro is a delight as Jett Reno, though I keep feeling like there should be more to her; she’s contributed very little to the plot, mostly just serving to move character arcs forward and be generally a pleasure to listen to. But there’s something about her that comes off as evasive here, and in all of her appearances for the first half of the season, which sure seem like they’re hinting at her having some kind of Deep Dark Secret… Which gets forgotten by the end.
• Obviously, Enterprise is the real guest star here. Her update to the style of Discovery is good. She looks like something from the same universe as the rest of the ships in this series, but isn’t just recognizably the Enterprise: in its way, it helps bridge the visual gap between Discovery and the original series. Because Discovery‘s take on the Enterprise is very consistent with the look and feel of the movie-era Enterprise. Spock’s room, in particular, very strongly evokes its appearance at the beginning of Star Trek III. And once you see this, you start to realize that the whole visual style of Discovery is drawing from the movie era. It’s an update, of course, but there’s a much clearer kinship between the set and starship design of the movies and of Discovery (The most obvious example is that Discovery’s Red Alert icon is identical to the movie-era one). Worth noticing that Discovery’s design clearly took some inspiration from an early concept drawing for a possible Enterprise redesign for Phase II.
  • Interestingly, Enterprise looks quite a bit different from the schematic we saw of Defiant last season. Word of God is that Defiant, by then having spent most of a century in the hands of the Terran Empire, had been heavily modified.
  • As I mentioned at the opposite end of the season, we’re given only a very limited look at Enterprise. We see a few exterior shots, Spock’s quarters, and the hall outside them. I was disappointed at the time, but it’s a good move, because the gravity of the Enterprise permeates this episode enough as it is and lingering on it would only steal the show.
• There’s a kind of subtle reverence in the way the Discovery crew talks about the Enterprise. Clearly, we’re meant to understand that they are impressed by it. Reminds me more than a little of the way that the Terrans in Enterprise were clearly super impressed by Defiant and viewed it as advanced technology even though it looked screen-accurate to the original series and therefore like something out of the 1960s.
• The explanation of why Enterprise wasn’t involved in the war is part of that reverence, the notion that the ships that had been sent out on five-year missions represented the part of Starfleet they wanted to survive even if the rest fell. Coupled with my earlier observation about the visual style of Discovery, a bunch of other things fall into place too:
  • Why is Starfleet basically all Constitution-class ships in TOS? Because that was the fleet that had been out on five-year missions during the war, and therefore weren’t subject to the utter decimation that befell the rest of the fleet.
  • Why is the visual style of TOS so radically different from the visual style of the movie era? Because the movie-era style was already dominant in Kirk’s time in more metropolitan parts of the galaxy, but the war had forced Starfleet to use a lot of older ships in the hinterlands.
  • Why is Enterprise being retired in Star Trek II, and why do we never see any more Constitution-class ships after TOS (Whereas we see Excelsior-class ships into the TNG era)? It’s an old ship. It was already old in TOS, and had been kept in service beyond its originally planned lifetime because most of the fleet had been blown up.
• I love the crap out of Alice in Wonderland, so I dig its inclusion here as a book that was Meaningful to Spock and Michael as children.
• The stray leftover fortune cookie fortune Pike finds on Lorca’s desk is exactly as cute as it can be without crossing the line. “Not every cage is a prison and not every loss is eternal.”

There’s not much to specifically complain about; the major shortcoming of the episode is just that it’s a slow burn that spends a lot of its time arranging the field.

• The Enterprise crew have transitioned to “new uniforms”, Discovery‘s take on the TOS uniform. Even though it’s an updated design (They look to be the exact same cut as the “old” uniforms in use everywhere else, just in the TOS color scheme rather than Discovery blue), they do not really look like they belong in this visual motif.
• It is going to take me several weeks to warm to Anson Mount’s Pike. Don’t really care for him in this episode. Though, “Where’s my damn red thing?” is a good line.
• Lt. McJerkface is a pointless character who just wastes my time.
• Nhan is completely underused for the first half of the season and, like Reno, comes off like there’s something slightly sinister about her that they were waiting to reveal.
• It feels so much like Jett Reno is hiding something that it feels like a plot hole that, no, she’s not, that’s just her being gruff.
• There are some extended flashbacks covering Spock and Michael’s childhood which don’t add much to the story and feel emotionally manipulative. The buildup to the eventual reveal of Spock and Michael’s falling out (The full details of which will not come out until the middle of the season) feels way too protracted. The explanation that Sarek adopted Michael (apparently without consulting his wife first) because he felt Spock needed a human friend is gross.
  • Some might call this an odd angle on Sarek, but I do find it compelling to reveal, through Michael’s relationship with him, that there is much more to Sarek than what we saw interpreted through Spock. Two things in particular:
    • That Sarek deliberately exaggerates his Vulcan stoicism to Spock beyond how he actually feels, because he believes that, being half-human, Spock has a choice about which elements of his cultures he’s going to integrate into his identity and needs an absolute paragon of Vulcanity (Vulcanism?) to use as a role model. One gets the impression that Sarek might be inclined to show at least a small amount of affection to Spock if he weren’t worried it would confuse him. He comes off as a parent who took the idea that “consistency is important” too far.
      • If we assume that Sybok hasn’t been retconned out of existence, it helps justify this mindset; Sarek already had one kid completely fail to internalize the Vulcan way, and probably has some issues related to that.
    • That Sarek’s disapproval of Spock and Spock’s life choices exists more in Spock’s mind than in reality (Which culminates in the minor reveal in “Such Sweet Sorrow” that Sarek wants to reconcile with Spock, but is respecting Spock’s wishes to stay away). This also came up in the Abrams reboot, where we see Sarek show a very brief hint of approval when Spock tells the Vulcan Science Academy to go fuck itself after they insult his mother. And, like, per Star Trek V, Spock’s deepest pain is that his father’s immediate reaction when he was born was to dismiss him as, “So human.” But… Does Spock actually remember being born? Or is this just how he imagines it going from his experience of growing up with Sarek as a dad? I think in the novelization of the ’09 movie, they reenact this scene, but in context, it’s clear that Sarek’s comment isn’t dismissive, but affectionate – he’s saying that he looks like his mother.
• Sarek just kinda vanishes out of the narrative at the top of act 2. In the middle of Discovery’s important side-mission to track the red signals, Sarek can apparently just find his own way back to Vulcan. It’s not a problem from an emotional standpoint as Sarek and Spock don’t get along, but coupled with what we’ll see in “Such Sweet Sorrow”, one gets the impression Sarek can basically just zap around the galaxy under his own power like a space-tardigrade.
• They do not make it as clear as they ought to moving forward: seven signals appeared all at once then vanished. Only one of the signals lasted long enough to get exact coordinates (This is basic astronomy but could’ve used someone spelling it out: you have to use multiple observations from different positions to determine the location of something in space. How much difference in position you need depends on the precision of your measurements and how far away the subject is. The idea is that Enterprise couldn’t move far enough that the could triangulate the position of the signals. Presumably they could narrow it down to “somewhere along this line from our position,” but that leaves an awful lot of space to look at). The other signals which appear later in the season are the initial seven appearing again, giving Discovery time to triangulate them. Up until the end of the season, I wasn’t sure if the signals which they receive later were new in addition to the original seven.
• It’s never really explained why Starfleet puts such a high priority on these red signals. The rule Pike cites to assume command of Discovery suggests that his mission involves a potential apocalyptic threat to the entire Federation. And it does, but there’s no reason they should know that at this stage. It’s like they all just read the script.
  • You know what would’ve been a good explanation? Control. At this point, Control is still working for Starfleet, or is at least pretending to. Control would be positioned to recognize the signals as related to their aborted time travel experiment from 20 years ago and raise the alarm. Though you still have to explain why Control would let the Enterprise handle this instead of Leland.

No point in predictions for the future, but how about some elements that don’t get resolved?

• How did Spock have a vision of the signals ahead of time? We eventually establish that the red angel he saw as a child wasn’t the same one who sent them.
• What became of the “survivors” of the Hiawatha, one of whom appears to be a brain in a jar?
• The idea that Pike and Saru are sharing command of Discovery comes up, I think, one more time and is then forgotten.
• I feel like they originally had a better plan for what trashed Enterprise than, “Awkward retcon to explain why we don’t see holographic viewscreens again until DS9.” There’s plenty of reason by the end of the season to imagine that Gabrielle Burnham deliberately put Pike on Discovery as part of her attempts to stop Control, but the element of, “So I went back and EMP’d the hell out of his ship right as Discovery was passing by,” is missing.
  • I’d have liked to see “flashbacks” of timelines where that didn’t happen – Pike trying to stop Control from Enterprise and failing for want of a magic mushroom drive.
• Michael sees the Red Angel when she’s in danger on the collapsing Hiawatha, and it’s left briefly ambiguous whether that’s real or just her eyes playing tricks on her as Pike arrives to rescue her. It turns out that the Red Angel really was there, but not really why.

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For this week’s endnote, I mentioned Sybok up above. Sybok’s most widely accepted backstory is that many years before meeting Amanda, Sarek married a Vulcan priestess. This is reasonable and makes a lot of sense as we know that Vulcan marriages are arranged in childhood (Arranged marriage seems like an odd thing for an advanced, egalitarian society to have, but it does fit when you view Vulcans as having a strong cultural apprehension about the potential for unchecked emotions to drive them to barbarism. You might say, “But won’t that lead to a lot of loveless marriages?” and they’d answer, “We can only hope.”). According to the expanded universe explanation, Sarek’s first wife was pursuing Kohlinar, a Vulcan monastic tradition. So she married as she was duty-bound to do, produced issue, and then, her obligation complete, got an annulment and retreated to the hills to become a monk. This is, presumably, a perfectly normal thing to do on Vulcan, which seems weird but fits with what we know about their society. They’ve got arranged marriage, but presumably they also have easy, no-fault divorce, and it’s also probably entirely common and normal for a married couple to have very little to do with one another (Are there gay Vulcans? Seems likely. They probably do much the same thing: marry and produce issue to fulfill their societal obligation, then divorce and pursue other options. Or indeed remain married but have little to do with one another. Vulcans seem not to have much of a taboo about premarital or extramarital sex as long as it’s just about meeting a biological need and not any of that icky emotional stuff, so it’s likely that the institution of marriage itself only really persists at all as a way of enshrining family lines). It’s easy to imagine that parental abandonment, particularly to pursue a lifestyle of extreme emotional suppression, might have pushed Sybok to eschew Vulcan asceticism. But if we presume that this isn’t in and of itself an unusual thing to happen, we can also see why Sarek would presume a serious fault in his own abilities as a single parent, leading him to adopt a more extreme position with Spock. It’s a shame I don’t like James Frain as Sarek, because he’s really well-served by the material in Discovery; Mark Lenard was a great actor, but his Sarek never got material this good, even in his quite good TNG appearances.

I was planning something else, but couldn’t get it together in time, so instead, let’s blunder a bit about Short Treks, a series of four mini-episodes supplementary to Star Trek Discovery, released during the inter-season hiatus to stop everyone from cancelling their CBS All Access subscription until next year flesh out some concepts and provide breadth that didn’t really fit in with the flow of any full episodes. As it turned out later, several of these also worked to foreshadow or set up elements for the coming season. Not all of them, though, which is sufficiently weird to make me wonder if they hint at elements that were ultimately dropped from the season (For a show which has been wonderful in its shameless embrace of the bits of Trek that had been cast off and forgotten through the years, Discovery seems to have an awful lot of its own cast-offs).

I’ve talked up season 2 a lot, but really it was Short Treks that made me love Discovery, and I think possibly they’re a lot closer to what the showrunners originally had in mind for the overall feel of the show: a bunch of self-contained vignettes into the lives of the characters that don’t directly connect to each other, but do all broadly feed into later events. And because Short Treks aren’t beholden to filling a spot in an ongoing story, I’m hoping that in the future, they might serve to let us explore anything interesting left in the storylines that the ship and crew have moved beyond – Pike, Cornwall, Number One, Airiam, even pre-Control Leland could show up for a little jaunt.

1. Runaway

Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly frets over her relationship with her overbearing mother, gets in a food-fight with an invisible stowaway, and makes a new friend.

This minisode introduces Me Hani Ika Hali Ka Po, who comes back at the end of Season 2 to be wonderful and help Discovery stabilize their time crystal. On first airing, “Runaway” seems like just a pleasant, low-stakes episode about Tilly becoming more confident in her role as a newly-minted officer (She was a cadet last season) in the command track. It’s just nice. That’s the thing. The fact that the relationship between Tilly and Po comes up later is just a bonus. These first two minisodes really drive home the sense of Discovery as a Trek that really gets the idea of Star Trek as a world where people solve problems by being better at them.

It’s cute and lovely, and Po is a neat character. Previous incarnations of Trek were never really good at depicting alien cultures as something properly alien, and they’re even worse at depicting alien individuals as something other than avatars of their entire race. Po is explicitly contrasted to the rest of her people, who are going through a difficult cultural transition now that they’ve become a warp-capable, strategically-important race. She’s a genius, she’s regal, she’s spiritual, she’s recently lost her entire family, and she’s a teenager, with the paradoxical combination of brashness, confidence, angst and uncertainty that implies.

Also, she can turn invisible, chameleon-style. Shame that didn’t come up in her other appearances.

It is not clear when this episode is set. It’s after the end of season 1 because Tilly is a full ensign and you can see her Medal of Honor in her room, but there’s no reference to ongoing events. Tilly apparently does not tell anyone about meeting Po until “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 1”, which is a little weird; Po isn’t going to get into trouble from Starfleet, and Tilly’s presumably going to need to explain the mess in the Mess (She blames it on a “hormonal space rabbit” that escaped from the lab)  and use of the transporter. There’s no clear place in season 2 for this story to go, but that’s not a huge deal thanks to Discovery‘s quirk where the characters and the plot seem to go through a different amount of time between episodes.

2. Calypso

A soldier escaping imprisonment comes across the long-abandoned Discovery. With no available way to get home, Craft slowly builds a relationship with the ship’s evolved computer, but he still longs to return to his family.

I have made no secret that this is my single favorite piece of Star Trek ever. If it were the ’90s, and I told you that there was an episode of Star Trek where a starship’s computer became sentient and fell in love with a human, you’d pretty much be able to guess how it would go, right? It would go in a kind of Fatal Attraction sort of way, and in the end, the human would need to trick the computer into thinking he reciprocated in order to get close to her CPU or something, and he’d end up having to destroy her.

And that’s not what happens. At all. Zora develops feelings for Craft, but she never becomes jealous or possessive or abusive. Craft is honest with Zora from the start— even when his status as an escaping prisoner of war gives him every reason to be evasive. When Zora tells him she can’t disobey her orders by taking him home in Discovery, Craft doesn’t try to trick her or to override her; he just accepts it. Craft develops genuine feelings for Zora, even if those feelings don’t outweigh his love for his family. Craft isn’t trying to lull Zora into a false sense of security or manipulate her; they’re both genuinely lonely, and they’re both genuinely drawn to each other. And while he believes there’s no way for him to return to Alcor IV, he does his best to be happy with her. He’s legitimately trying to make a life for himself with Zora, culminating in asking her to create a holographic avatar of herself and teaching himself to dance so that they can reenact the “He Loves” scene from Funny Face, just to do something nice for her. In the end, Zora doesn’t need to be tricked or forced into giving Craft Discovery’s last shuttle; she gives it to him when she realizes that the amount he stands to gain justifies the long odds of a thousand-year-old shuttle safely carrying him to the very edge of its range.

That’s “Calypso” overall, really: two people just being nice to each other and trying to do right by each other despite their pain. Craft can’t get past his longing for home, Zora can’t move on from a mission she seems unlikely to ever complete, but they can still take comfort in each other.

Of course, now that we know the greater context, we can also see “Calypso” as a series of tantalizing hints about what might lie in the show’s future. Alcor IV, with its cyclops owls, where true names are kept as secrets between lovers. Or the Vedreysh, obsessed with “The Long Ago”, who stockpile their escape pods with Betty Boop cartoons and are totally a fallen, corrupt version of the Federation.

But honestly, that’s mostly incidental to the real story: just two intelligent beings whose needs don’t fully align but who are trying to do good by each other anyway within the constraints of what they’re willing and able to give.

And that’s the one true constant thing that Star Trek, at its heart, is supposed to be.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery: Short Treks

Thanks. I hated it.

Naw, just kidding. But… The truth is, I’m not entirely satisfied with where the story ended up going, and I have mixed feelings about how it got there.

So… Contrary to my expectation, the season finale of Discovery was, in fact, an hour-long space battle. Fortunately, it’s broken up with a lot of things that aren’t an hour-long space battle, but still, there’s a lot of space battle. Enterprise, Discovery, and their fleet of shuttles and pods, face off against Section 31’s armada, which Control turns out to have refitted with the ability to shed hundreds of autonomous fighters. Enterprise and Discovery get donked up real good while the Discovery crew finishes building their new Red Angel suit. Michael takes off in it, but can’t get the suit to work. Tyler shows up with the cavalry: a fleet of Klingons and Kelpiens of all people, using borrowed Ba’ul ships. Spock works out that Michael has to go back in time and send the five signals in order to set things up before the suit will let her travel forward in time, so she does that. Leland boards Discovery and fucks shit up good, but not as lethally as in Michael’s vision, before Georgiou kills him. Enterprise gets impaled by a torpedo and Admiral Cornwall sacrifices herself to close the blast doors around it. Michael sends a sixth signal to guide Discovery into the wormhole to an unknown future, but is forced to leave Spock behind since his shuttle is damaged.

And there, curiously, with several minutes left, Discovery leaves the story altogether. An extended epilogue shows that Tyler and the crew of the Enterprise have agreed to report Discovery as having been destroyed by a spore drive malfunction, and Spock recommends that Starfleet swear everyone to secrecy about the Discovery and, for some reason, magic mushroom space, and vows never to mention his sister ever again, because reasons. Three months later, as the repaired Enterprise leaves spacedock, it picks up the seventh signal, too far away to do anything about, but signalling that Michael and Discovery are still out there somewhere.

It’s just a bit much, man. For the most part, I really liked all the bits that were not space battles, and liked the existence of bits that were. In more detail…

• Control’s drone armada look very distinctly like a more primitive form of the future-control drones we saw in Spock’s visions.
• Still digging Reno. Asked if she can cut the remaining time to charge the crystal in half, she just says, “Violate the basic laws of physics? Uh, no.”
  • And later, “Get off my ass… Sir. Get off my ass sir.”
• Yes, of course, it turns out that Culber came back to Discovery just in time to help take care of Stamets, who gets impaled. They get to declare their love for each other without either of them getting dead.
• I was pleasantly surprised to see them address something I mentioned before: Pike actually considers invoking his plot armor when dealing with the torpedo. Since he knows his fate, he reckons he can stay behind to nobly sacrifice himself by locking himself in with the torpedo. It doesn’t come to anything, since Cornwall ultimately councils him not to take the risk when his ship needs its captain, but I’m glad they acknowledged it.
• Yes, we get a good look at the D7.
• Pretty much everyone gets to be useful. Stamets helps build the suit. Spock guards Michael and sorts out how to make it work. Pike commands the Enterprise. Saru commands Discovery. Culber tends to Stamets. Tilly fixes the shields. Reno powers up the time crystal, Number One tries to defuse the torpedo. Cornwall saves the Enterprise by locking herself in with it. Po steals a shuttle (“Diplomatic immunity!”) and figures out how to destroy the drones. Nhan and Georgiou fight Leland.
• Leland’s death is a satisfying culmination of things that came before. Georgiou uses the device he gave her back in “The Red Angel” to transfer the Sphere data to the spore drive console, and when Leland enters the spore reaction chamber to get it, she magnets him to death much as Spock did to Control/Gant back in “Through the Valley of Shadows”
• Having Saru’s sister show up with a fleet of Ba’ul fighters was a pretty good reveal. Didn’t see it coming, but it also didn’t feel like a cheat at all.
• The Enterprise missing a big chunk out of the front is visually striking.
• Okay, that last scene where he’s shaved and gotten a haircut, Ethan Peck finally does actually look like Spock.
• I really liked the bit in Spock’s final conversation with Michael where he tells her that she taught him how to integrate both sides of his heritage, and that he thinks he won’t be able to do that without her. This is, I think, meant to explain why the Spock of the last third of Discovery (And, to a certain extent, “The Cage”) comes off as having a level of comfort in integrating his human and Vulcan sides which Spock would eventually show later in life, after his death and resurrection, but which he doesn’t really show in TOS.
• Despite my misgivings about the content of the epilogue, I do like the idea of not having Discovery or its crew in the last ten minutes, but instead telling the story from the point of view of those left behind.
• So last season, they closed on the reveal of the Enterprise and the original series theme played over the end credits. This season, they end on the Enterprise jumping to warp, and the end theme is actually a fusion of the original series theme and the Discovery theme. And the two work together really well.

So why am I unsatisfied? It mostly comes down to that epilogue. As I said last week, a lot of people have issues with Star Trek doing this whole prequel thing. They object to real violations of continuity. They object to imagined violations of continuity which don’t actually contradict anything real but contradict things they had made up in their heads and confused with canon. They object to things where they carefully adhere to the letter of canon by clever trickery. They object to the failure of Discovery to have its own visual style rather than slavishly recreate exact replicas of 1960s sets the way James Cawley and Vic Mignogna and the Axanar folks did. They find it problematic that a thing could happen over the course of a few months in 2257 that isn’t mentioned by any of three random starfleet crews a hundred years later during the course of the one hour per week out of a seven-year slice of their lives we got to see. I mean, how could Starfleet possibly have a working prototype of a soliton wave drive and then never mention it again. No wait, I mean a coaxial warp drive. No, wait. I mean a folded-space transporter. And how come we never see any duplicate-Earths in Picard’s time, huh? Wait, no, no one complains about those because those weren’t prequels.

Anyway. There’s some rejoicing that Discovery has “solved” the “continuity problem” by permanently removing the ship to the far future. I don’t per se object to having our story continue in the far future. But I do object to treating Discovery‘s setting as a problem to be solved. We didn’t need Spock to push Starfleet to classify everything about Discovery to ensure no one would ever speak of it again. “The spore drive technology was promising but never really panned out,” is good enough. We don’t need Spock to wear a blood oath to never mention his sister again. “Spock is kinda private about his family and doesn’t bring it up,” is good enough. Hell, I’m almost surprised they didn’t tell Pike at the end, “Oh by the way, we’re sending over an interior decorator to handle Enterprise’s refit. He’s really into art deco.” You know what is handled well? The mirror universe. People know about it. Not everyone. Those that do know they’re not supposed to talk about it. Some people, like Pike, know more than they’re inclined to say. We don’t need there to be a massive cover-up; a low key sort of, “Everyone who needs to know does, but we try not to encourage this being widely known,” is enough. (It helps that we don’t actually see how the USS Enterprise deals with the ISS Enterprise crew; Spock just handwaves at the end that it’s harder for barbarians to pass for civilized people than the other way around.). It actually fits with established continuity really well that the half-dozen regulars in the shows set almost a century in the future just don’t happen to know a lot about this time period, given that your standard Star Trek character is obsessive about some respectable aspect of early-to-mid twentieth century culture but generally never speaks of anything from the past two hundred years.

TLDR: If you’re the sort of person whose reaction to the ending was, “Thank God, now we don’t have to worry about them contradicting some real or imagined point from a fifty-year-old TV show!” you are Star Trekking wrong.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery: 2×14 Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2