Category: Star Trek

Last Week’s Discovery centers itself around a big action set-piece. It hits a couple of sour notes, but none so sour as the previous episode’s, “Non-vanilla sex is strictly for evil folks.” While there’s a lot to recommend it, though, its high notes are a bit muted and there’s a bit more bullshit than I’m used to from this show in a way that is reminiscent of ’90s Trek.

As predicted, Leland gets possessed by Control, though it actually happens in the cold open of this episode, not when he got eye-stabbed last time. Control/Leland claims to have seen Dr. Burnham’s body years ago, and proposes that the Red Angel is a clone or impostor or something, possibly planted by Control, so Section 31 should go steal the Sphere MacGuffin to make sure she doesn’t trick Pike and Michael into handing it over. We learn that Michael’s mom tried to save her family by using the just-barely-completed Red Angel suit to jump back in time an hour and warn them before the Klingons showed up. Instead, she got zapped 950 years into the future, and is now anchored to that time, unable to remain in other times for very long. They’ll explain later. Or maybe they won’t. The future’s trying to pull her back even now, and Discovery only has roughly the length of an episode of a CBS All Access Streaming Original Series before the force field holding her will fail. Discovery tries to dispose of the Sphere data by dumping it into the Red Angel suit, and also comes up with a plan to hold on to Dr. Burnham while they send the suit off to the end of time, but Control/Leland interferes, very nearly murders everyone, destroys the suit’s Time Crystal, and steals half the data before Dr. Burnham and the now-useless suit get zapped back to the far future.

• Control is kind of fantastic here. It possesses Leland because while it’s very convincing as a hologram, there’s nuances it can’t get down, and Leland is specifically a good choice because he’s ruthless and willing to do morally questionable things in the name of the greater good, so when Control uses his body to order people to do morally questionable things in the name of the greater good, they won’t find it out of character.
• I think part of Control not being “fully sentient” yet is that it is still bound by its original mission, so it, very honestly, tells Leland that being possessed by an evil computer that wants to take over and control the universe is not a betrayal of his oath and values, but the fulfillment of them, because Leland is a terrible person and his values are “bringing a dangerous universe to heel at all costs.”
• As a villain, Control is very Palpatine. He manipulates Georgiou and Tyler by being very careful to always pursue its own agenda in a way that aligns with what Leland’s agenda ought to be. It wants the sphere data, so it orders Tyler to steal it. But the story it gives makes a compelling case that it’s dangerous to leave the data with Discovery. When Tyler ultimately refuses, instead of arguing, Control/Leland backs him up, saying that he made the right call under the circumstances. Control then manipulates Georgiou pretty expertly, trying to get her to steal the sphere data and blow up the Red Angel. If Control’s story about Dr. Burnham being an imposter were true, Georgiou would be protecting Michael by killing her; if he’s “wrong”, Michael’s mother is competition for Michael’s affection, which is itself motivation enough for murder.
• Critically, neither Tyler nor Georgiou trust Leland/Control, but it’s not like they fully trusted him when he wasn’t possessed either. They also both seem to intuit that something’s wrong with him once he’s possessed, but again, it’s not a matter of them being too dumb to realize he’s acting oddly – even if there’s something wrong with him, they haven’t been offered any alternatives that make more sense than the orders he’s giving them.
• More good examples of Discovery setting up an idea ahead of using it: They plan to use dark matter to enhance the transporter in order to beam Dr. Burnham back into normal space-time so she won’t keep getting yanked back to the future. In any other Trek, this would be some out-of-nowhere technobabble. But in Discovery, there’s an analogy already set up: the recent resurrection of Dr. Hugh Culber. He’d been reincarnated in Magic Mushroom Space, but couldn’t return to regular space since his new body was made out of Mushroom Space Matter. They recover him using a form of “organic” transporter that the Mushroom People (long story) had built on Discovery to convert him back into normal matter.
• Dr. Burnham knows about Pike and warns him that he wouldn’t like to know his future.
• The ultimate reveal of why the Red Angel chose Spock to communicate with? Yes, because he’s half-human and half-vulcan, but there’s one other element: Spock is also dyslexic. Again, good setup-payoff on Discovery; they introduced that several weeks ago as part of Spock’s baggage – the Vulcan educational system effectively misdiagnosed it as an common childhood disorder that Vulcan children grow out of with only minimal intervention. Because of being unstuck in time, Burhnam was only able to communicate with someone who had the particular combination of logic, emotion, and learned experience with processing mis-ordered symbolic information.
• They are not evoked by name, but Leland’s possession by Control has heavy shades of Borg. A VFX shot shows him being pumped full of nanorobots. He shows enhanced speed and strength and a resistance to phasers. We also see him “hulk out” a few times, with dark lines appearing on his face when he thinks no one is looking. He’s actually erupted in full blown techno-bits sticking out when Tyler confronts him. Also, Control rather emphatically almost-but-not-quite tells the restrained Leland that resistance is futile.
  • One imagines this sticks in the crawl of a certain kind of Trekker, as, “Nobody knew about the Borg until TNG Season 2! And that technology is way too advanced for a TOS prequel” I answer that:
    • We’ve already established by way of visual motif that Section 31’s technology is not simply more advanced than the rest of Starfleet, but it’s more advanced specifically to the point of being TNG comparable. This is quietly conveyed in a way that’s clear but doesn’t call attention to itself: Section 31 uses commbadges rather than communicators, the UI on their computers looks more similar to LCARS, and they’ve got TNG-era hologram technology.
    • This whole “nobody knew about the Borg until TNG season 2” thing is nonsense. Elaurian refugees had been living among the Federation for decades before TNG, and the Hudson family were doing research on the Borg a decade or so before Voyager. What we actually see is just that the crew of the Enterprise doesn’t know about the Borg, which is consistent with them being effectively cryptids at the beginning of the TNG era – stories about them have made their way to Starfleet, but no formal contact, so they’re mostly known only to fringe researchers.
    • Starfleet has encountered Borg nanotechnology (Without the details of its provenance) before, back in Enterprise, so it’s entirely reasonable as a callback that Starfleet’s evil branch that is cool with using stolen evil technology might have repurposed some.
    • Also, shut up.
• I think it’s nice that we open up with Michael waking up in sickbay thinking that her mother had been a near-death hallucination because that was a more reasonable assumption than the truth.
• When Dr. Burnham doesn’t want to speak to Michael and Pike chooses to respect her wishes, Michael doesn’t go around his back. Later, when she expresses to Spock how important it is that she see her, Spock agrees to help her… By talking to Pike, not by going around him. In any other Trek, she’d have decided she knew better than anyone else, snuck in to see her mom, donked something up in the process and made things way worse.
• The actual shining character bits in this episode are actually between Dr. Burnham and Evil!Georgiou. I guess we do have to concede that, yeah, Georgiou’s a legit antihero now. Burnham reveals that she’s witnessed timelines where Georgiou sacrificed herself to protect Michael, and even speaks to her, “mother to mother”, which legitimizes Georgiou’s maternal connection to Michael far more than she’s actually earned it yet.
• There’s a thing Star Trek fans always complain about where computers are kinda magic, particularly, in that copying data and moving it are depicted as pretty radically different. That happens here. When Pike orders the sphere data deleted, the data “protects itself” by partitioning itself in memory using encryption in a dead language and it all sounds like nonsense, but apparently they can still get rid of the data by moving it to the Red Angel. Which sounds like complete bullshit, except that it’s 2019 now, and they use the magic word: the Red Angel suit computer is a quantum computer, and actually, yeah, quantum computers work like that. The act of reading data out of a quantum superposition is destructive, so okay, it’s actually plausible that transferring data between two quantum computers would be fundamentally different from deleting it.
• Spock quotes Hamlet. A slightly ironic choice because Hamlet’s main character flaw is that he sits around angsting over what he should do rather than taking action, and one of the delightful things about Discovery is the way they avoid the common TNG wheel-spinning of “We spend 3/4 of the episode debating the ethical implications of whether or not it would be right to save those kitties from that burning building.” It’s incredibly rare in this show for anyone to be paralyzed with indecision.

And some points of contention:

• The whole plot thread of “Dr. Burnham is cold and doesn’t want to talk to Michael because after seeing her die in hundreds of timelines, she’s moved on and only cares about the mission,” thing is tedious and smacks of exactly the sort of “People lie about and conceal their feelings for no good reason because CONFLICT!” bullshit that has plagued Trek forever.
  • That said, it does tie into Discovery’s theme of people who are broken and need to heal.
• Much as I appreciate the execution, the explanation for why Spock can communicate with the Red Angel is a little too “Disabilities are actually superpowers” for my liking.
• You know who we haven’t seen in a while? Tig Notaro’s character, a gruff engineer they rescued from a ship that crashed on a dark matter asteroid the first time they went chasing the red signals, and who seems like she might be hiding something. Like, she had a major role about 6 episodes ago, and the story continues directly into the next episode, but she’s gone. Seemed like that character was going somewhere.
• Hugh gets reinstated off-screen between episodes. Seriously, they mention that he hasn’t been reinstated in the previous episode, and mention that he has in this one.
• The excuse they give for their mistake about the Red Angel’s identity is that mothers and daughters have the same mitochondrial DNA. But… Hadn’t they identified Michael as the Red Angel because of a brainwave analysis?
• I know I said that Section 31’s technology is more advanced than Starfleet’s, but it’s hard to justify the capabilities of the Red Angel suit without something more than this. We know it can:
  • Travel in time.
  • Travel in space with similar range to Discovery‘s spore drive. That is, distances that would take decades to reach by warp.
  • Produce an EMP strong enough to paralyze a global civilization.
  • Transport a church full of people halfway across the galaxy.
  • Store an effectively unlimited amount of data.
• But apparently it can’t survive a shot from a phaser rifle through a force field.
• The church thing. Burnham zapped a church full of refugees halfway across the galaxy on a trip to World War III. Discovery met the descendants recently. She did this to establish whether or not she could change history with the suit. Turns out she can, but for some reason she can’t prevent Control from getting the sphere data. There had better be a reason for this that isn’t just “Grandfather paradox handwave!”
• Having Leland hulk out on the bridge when everyone is looking away was a bit too much.
• Tyler gets shanked the moment he discovers Leland in Borg-mode. We used to call this “The Worf Effect”, where an alien baddie casually tosses Michael Dorn across the set to demonstrate that he’s so formidable. But it doesn’t sit especially well that Leland dispatches him so easily given that Tyler is a Klingon, while Georgiou holds her own against Leland in hand-to-hand combat for several minutes
• There are other people on that ship besides Tyler, Leland and Georgiou. We see them in the background. No one else questions any of this? Tyler, we learn in the epilogue, is able to drag himself to an escape pod before Leland’s ship flies off. No body noticed him crawling out of Leland’s office with a giant gut wound? I suppose it’s possible Leland killed the rest of the crew before beaming down for the big fight scene, but if they turn up alive later, I’m going to be annoyed.
• Leland’s ship does not have a name. This annoys me greatly.
• No one seems especially interested that the sphere data apparently has intelligence and agency all of its own and can manipulate their computer. In a plot arc about an evil computer.
• “Perpetual Infinity” is not an especially good title.

Things to look out for in the future:

• I think it’s as good as confirmed that Michael will be donning the Red Angel suit later. The whole “Oh we mistook it for you because you have the same mitochondrial DNA” bit isn’t a legit explanation: it’s part of a setup. When Georgiou admires the suit, Burnham warns her that it’s DNA encoded so that only she can use it. Yeah. They’re fake-establishing that only Dr. Burnham can use the suit in a way that leaves a big bright shiny loophole that Michael can probably use it too.
• Also, Dr. Burnham doesn’t know anything about the red signals. No one mentions the obviously telegraphed explanation that the Red Angel they caught is from before the signals were sent.
• Implication, by the way, is that it’s the future version of the Red Angel with whom Spock mind-melded, not Dr. Burnham, since he saw the red signals in his vision.
• This could also explain the suit’s abilities, if it gains them after being repaired in the future using the sphere data. Though moving a group of 21st century humans to Terralysium is probably the most impressive thing the Red Angel does, and that was explicitly an early mission.
• They’re not setting up Leland as Borg Patient Zero, are they? Please don’t let that be what they’re setting up.
• The gap between the seasons gave us a series of mini-episodes called “Short Treks”. So far, one of these has been directly plot-relevant, giving the backstory of Saru’s home planet, which became relevant a few episodes back. Another, “Calypso”, is the finest piece of Star Trek ever made, and is set about a thousand years in the future. Which would place it a few decades after Gabrielle Burnham’s anchor point 950 years in the future, though in a timeline where humanity has survived. Significantly, that episode featured a fully sentient benevolent AI. Is there a connection here? I’m reminded a bit of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which seemed to be edging up to the idea that the appearance of a sentient AI in that time period was inevitable and the best humanity could hope for was to guide its evolution along a benevolent path. Perhaps Zora is presented as a benevolent alternative to Control.

Looks like next week will be a bit of a downshift. If the trailer is indicative, it’s a bit of a, “Control has gone into hiding so Discovery goes back to investigating the red signals for want of anything better to do,” episode centered around the Klingons. I don’t especially like the Klingon stuff, but they may surprise me yet.

And we’re back on track, I guess. Last week’s Star Trek Discovery is more of a high note than last week’s in many ways, and it does a lot to recast and redeem things the few things I hadn’t liked this season.

So our quick recap: Discovery being crippled right next to the evil base of the evil all-powerful AI while being on the run for harboring a fugitive is quietly resolved off-screen, and Adorable Goofy Ensign Tilly loots Airiam’s corpse to find a file which reveals Michael to be the Red Angel. Of course, given that everything seemed to be building up to Michael being the Red Angel, the fact that they reveal this as the cliffhanger before the opening titles means that she’s totally not.

Quasi-Antgonist Section 31 Captain Leland and Evil Former Empress Georgiou come over for shocking revelations and plotting. Turns out that the Red Angel suit is actually experimental Section 31 technology, and what’s more, it was Michael’s birth parents who built it. This is a big deal because a couple of weeks ago, we found out that Leland was responsible for their deaths, and it turns out that what that means isn’t anything so banal as him having killed them For The Greater Good, but rather that he was in charge of the mission and didn’t do a good enough job at protecting them.

Since it seems like Skynet is chasing the Red Angel through time, Section 31 has a technobabbly plan to capture her, and Spock comes up with the bright idea that if they just up and murder Michael slowly and painfully, the grandfather paradox will require the Red Angel to show up and save her. And this works! Except that at a key moment, Skynet shows up and murders Leland. The revelation we end on, though, is that the Red Angel isn’t Michael, but her mother.

So, the good:

• I’ve developed a very low tolerance for wheel-spinning bullshit in TV. So I like that the mystery behind Project Daedalus is revealed immediately — soon as they show up, Leland explains that Project Daedalus was Section 31’s time travel program.
• I was worried where they were going with Section 31. Section 31 has always been a bit of a millstone around Trek’s neck ever since it was introduced in Deep Space Nine as Starfleet’s Evil branch, serving as a betrayal of Trekkian optimism with a pragmatic “But sometimes we really do need a Lawful Evil branch of crypto-fascists to keep us safe.” It seemed at first like Discovery was backing away from that and depicting Section 31 as being genuinely good and genuinely believing in the Starfleet philosophy, but operating in areas where right and wrong were more ambiguous. However, with the reveal that Leland was responsible for the deaths of Michael’s parents on top of the whole “Attempt to puree Spock’s brain” thing, it was starting to sound like, no, that was just a line and they really are Grimdark. But they’ve turned it around again now: their most evil acts were under subversion by Skynet and Leland’s culpability is of the “It was my duty to protect them and I failed,” sort.
• Apparently Admiral Cornwall was a therapist before getting into Being In Charge of Starfleet. I mentioned weird career paths last week. This one is weird and delightful.
• Also delightful is her advice to Hugh, who, you may remember, recently left his husband on account of he doesn’t feel connected to his old life ever since he died. She tells him that love is a choice, and one that’s made continuously. Reminiscent of the Doctor’s assessment that, “Love, it’s not an emotion. Love is a promise.” It’s also very cool that she talks about the life he lived before his death in the past tense, acknowledging, without being prompted, that he is a different person from who he was before he died. Everyone else has tried to play that down: you’re the same person, you just grew a new body. But Cornwall acknowledges what Hugh himself feels: that he’s not the same person he used to be.
• I started out this season expecting Georgiou to be an antagonistic character, but I’m increasingly confident that she’s on the level. She legitimately seems to care about Michael, whose counterpart had been Georgiou’s adopted daughter.
• So much of “conflict” in TV shows centers around people obstinately refusing to believe things or talk about things. But in Discovery, people actually do talk about their issues and believe each other, but this doesn’t neuter conflict and tension; it just relives it of the bullshit factor. Take Spock and Michael. Years ago, Michael broke little Spock’s heart by saying some very cruel things to him because she thought their closeness put him in danger. Spock has held a grudge ever since. But Spock knows and has always known (Or at least has known for a long time) what she was doing and why she did it and that she didn’t mean it. But the fact that he knows didn’t make it hurt any less. His sister called him a half-breed freak. It doesn’t matter that she didn’t mean it; she still did it. He’s only able to forgive her once they’ve both gone through experiences where both logic and emotion failed them— for Spock, mind-melding with the Red Angel, and for Michael, learning the truth about her parents.
• Nhan apologizes for airlocking Airiam and is deeply moved by her eulogy. Up till now, Nhan had come off as being kind of a jerk. Not evil or anything, but brusque and detached. It’s good to see that she’s not so cynical as to completely compartmentalize her role in a crewmate’s death.
• Hugh, Georgiou, Pike and Leland each try to abort the mission when it looks like Michael is going to die for real. Not a single one of them is actually willing to let her die. Who is? Spock. Spock holds them all at gunpoint on the presumption that Michael’s dying flails are her telling them not to interfere. It has to be Spock who does this because anyone else would be sacrificing Michael for the Greater Good – Spock’s the only one who can do it out of pure faith that things will work out.
• A nice sort of Discovery thing to do: after setting up a complex science-fictiony explanation of how the Red Angel appears in order to protect Michael because of the Grandfather Paradox, it turns out that actually it’s just a mother protecting her child. Aww.
• The Red Angel suit is powered by a Time Crystal. What a wonderfully non-bullshit explanation. No one even bothers to explain what a time crystal is.

And the less-good:

• Okay, there’s no place for it in the narrative and it would screw up the pacing. But we open on an intercut between Airiam’s autopsy and her funeral, with no mention of how Discovery managed to destroy Control and Section 31’s base or convince the rest of Starfleet that they hadn’t just up and murdered the covert ops division, and this seems like a dramatic weak-spot.
• Pike’s reluctance to consent to Michael’s plan to commit controlled suicide is in character, but leaves a bad taste in my mouth over how quick he was to order Airiam’s death.
• Also, “He’s willing to ignore the rules in the name of the mission” seems to be becoming Pike’s main personality trait. Which is a shame because when they first introduced him, there was a kind of otherworldliness to him, a sense of him being very balanced between reason and instinct, that I was hoping would be his main trait.
• Leland is killed when Skynet takes control of a retinal scanner and stabs him in the eyes with it. This is super gross and yucky. Why does the retinal scanner even have murder-spikes built into the eyepieces?
• Georgiou flirts with Paul and claims that his mirror counterpart was pansexual (as Evil Georgiou herself seems to be), which continues Trek’s unfortunate tradition of linking pansexuality with evil, and also is just a weird scene overall. I think maybe the idea here is that she’s actually trying to help here by making Hugh jealous and therefore rekindle their love? Or maybe it’s just that she’s looking for a three-way with the two of them. It’s just weird.
  • Are you allowed to have sex with your own parallel universe counterpart? Is that masturbation or incest?
• To reframe, “good” Paul Stamets is gay. He even asserts that he would be gay in “every universe” he cares to imagine. Evil Stamets was pan. This is the first time any Trek has ever used the term, and they draw a very explicit connection here that it’s Okay To Be Takei, but nonbinary sexuality is associated with being from an unimaginably evil universe.
  • This is not a mitigation, but for the sake of completeness, there are several instances in the franchise where this whole “Their mirror universe counterpart is bi/pan” thing seems to have been intended to mean “Actually everyone’s at least a little bit bi, but in the prime universe, they’re too repressed to acknowledge it.” In fact, Georgiou’s flirtation leads off by claiming that Stamets is more brilliant than his counterpart, but also more neurotic. This makes me view their shitty views on sexuality in a frame of them trying to communicate the message, “Evil is liberating because you get to do fun things like have threesomes, some times with aliens.”
  • This whole thing is so damn boneheaded that I think I would’ve hated this episode had the rest of it not been so strong, and if you don’t have a high tolerance for Star Trek Being Boneheaded About Sexualities That Aren’t Extremely Vanilla And Heteronormative, this would probably be cause to ragequit.
• You know, I still haven’t seen anything in the relationship between Pike and Spock to justify why Spock takes the tremendous risk he does ten years later to let Pike retire to Talos IV.
• One thing I’ve never been crazy about in Discovery is the cinematography. Too much shakeycam and weird angles.
• When Saru sings at Airiam’s funeral, that’s clearly not his voice.
  • (Except that technically, it is, since Doug Jones really is singing.)

And wild-ass speculations for the future:

• Well, Airiam seems to be dead in a permanent sort of way I guess, but Leland is still on the fence. We hear his voice on the intercom after his murder, which is probably Skynet faking it as it did with the Admirals, but there’s something odd about his eyes when he falls down after being stabbed. Maybe those weren’t murder-spikes but rather some kind of cybernetic implant and now he’s possessed?
• I’m thinking that Airiam’s file that led them to identify Michael as the Red Angel isn’t a complete red herring. As of the end of this episode, Discovery and Section 31 have the Red Angel suit, which means that she could still end up donning it for some of the Red Angel’s appearances. Possibly Michael is the Red Angel associated with the Red Signals, while her mom is the one that appears without the signals.
• Oh shit, they’re setting up a reset button, aren’t they? Michael goes back and saves her parents and paradoxes the entire show out of existence and ensures no one will ever wonder why Spock is now up to 2 siblings he never talks about. (I am holding out faith that Discovery will avoid this. But only just)
  • Sybok seems to have just been erased from canon altogether. There’s a strong attitude in Trek that “Star Trek V didn’t happen it wasn’t very good,” which upsets me greatly not because I think it is good, but because if you’re going to use that as your excuse, there’s a lot of Trek that has to unhappen.

So yeah, I’m liking this one a lot. Things are coming to a head…

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Stuff I forgot to say last week…

• Airiam mentions that she’s disabled her helmet so that she will suffocate when ejected into space. How? Why did the virus controlling her motor functions let her do that? Why didn’t it just un-disable it? Why do their space-helmets have a “disable” feature anyway? They could’ve easily sorted this out by having her helmet break in the fight with Michael.
• Speaking of helmets, I guess Nhan’s suit produced human air rather than Barzan air? It’s not a plot hole or anything, but that seems like design flaw. I’d think you’d want to adapt the suit to the occupant’s needs just for the added safety. Again, if you need the excuse to keep her sidelined, have Airiam break her helmet after ripping out her implants.
• So… It’s a bit awkward now that I think about it more that of the regulars we’ve killed off, there’s:
  • Hugh, half of the first regular same-sex couple in the history of Trek
  • Not!Evil Georgiou, the first Malaysian character in Trek
  • Gabriel Lorca, Mirror Universe Guy
  • Airiam, cyborg
• Admittedly, half of those people did not stop being regulars just because they died, but two of them are minorities relative to the target market, and one of them has a disability (Two if you count Lorca’s photophobia). Despite its first season taking place during a war, Discovery has a pretty low body count, and it’s skewed toward people who aren’t able-bodied white men (Though they did kill off Pike’s asshole science officer in the episode that introduced him).
• Though the upside of this is, of course, that Discovery has far and away the most diverse cast Trek has ever had, both among the fictional diversity of its characters and the real diversity of its actors.

 

I should’ve started doing this nine weeks ago, as it would’ve given me something easy to write about. The long and short of it is: I really dig Star Trek Discovery. At least, as of season 2. Season 1 didn’t really grab me that much, I think because it was a war story. Season 2 is not a war story so far, and I hope it won’t become one. Discovery is, to me, Star Trek unabashedly being what it was really meant to be all along but often lost sight of: a story about the work of utopia.

See, some people don’t like Star Trek because they think it’s too clean and sanitized and utopian. But the thing about the world of Star Trek is that it is not utopian in the sense of being set in a utopia; it is utopian in the sense of being oriented toward utopia. The fundamental thing that makes something Star Trek is not that the world or the people are perfect, but rather that they view perfection as a reasonable thing to shoot for. They are aiming at utopia, without cynicism or even pragmatism. A Star Trek person goes into a situation not asking, “How do I win?” or “What’s the safe thing to do?” but rather, “If this were a perfect world, how would this situation play out?” In Discovery, even antagonistic characters are, for the most part, trying to be better — you don’t have conflict based around people being arbitrarily jerks to each other or people being greedy or people being shortsighted or people being assholes; rather, they’re people who have conflicting goals, and conflicts aren’t resolved by holding someone down and forcing them to do the right thing, but by finding a solution that gets everyone what they want. Hell, even during last season’s war arc, the Klingons’ basic motivation was outright stated as them wanting to be better Klingons rather than having their own identity subsumed by the Federation’s, like, niceness.

So, quick recap to get you up to speed: Discovery is a science vessel whose main claim to fame is that it’s got an experimental new engine which lets them travel through “magic mushroom space” (To make a very long story short, the superstructure of the entire multiverse is made of a kind of dimensionally transcendent fungus. Yes, that is a lot to swallow. Hey, remember the episode of TOS where they meet a giant floating space-Abraham Lincoln? Trek is weird again) to cross great distances instantly, and the special effect for it is unspeakably beautiful. Their current mission is to investigate the “red bursts”, a series of unexplained signals linked to a being called the “Red Angel”, now known to be a time traveling human from the far future wearing a high-tech suit, whose indirectly-pursued agenda seems to be linked to stopping the destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy at the tentacles of what look to be Sentinels from The Matrix.

(There appears to be some color-symbolism going on as well; the angel and its signals are red, while the sentinels are blue. It may or may not be relevant that Discovery itself has a blue color scheme, while the brief look we got at the interior of the Enterprise showed lots of red.)

We left off last week with Discovery on the run from Starfleet. Section 31, Starfleet’s cartoonishly evil covert ops branch, has framed Spock for murder because they want to use Terran technology to puree his brain, since he mind-melded with the Red Angel. Captain Pike (yes, that Captain Pike) has defied orders to protect Spock and his sister Michael.

Let’s unpack that a bit, for the sake of people who have some Trek background but not Discovery:

• Captain Pike (the captain of the Enterprise from TOS’s original pilot, best known for the “Beep once for yes, twice for no” meme) is the acting captain of Discovery. The cliffhanger at the end of season 1 was Discovery being summoned to rescue the Enterprise after it suffered a catastrophic system failure that will have it in drydock for the rest of the season.
  • I didn’t mention, but I should get it out of the way: Enterprise was not involved in the war, ordered to remain out in deep space and continue its five-year mission. Pike has pretty bad survivor’s guilt about this.
• Michael Burnham, basically the main character of Discovery, was adopted by Sarek and Amanda after her parents were killed. She and Spock were once close, but they haven’t spoken in years.
• “Terran” refers to the Terran Empire an evil version of the Federation from the mirror universe. The penultimate arc last season revealed that Discovery’s previous captain, Gabriel Lorca, had been replaced by his mirror universe counterpart and was manipulating Discovery’s mission in order to get home. Discovery returned from the mirror universe with the Terran Empress, the counterpart of Captain Phillipa Georgiou, Michael’s former commander, who’d died in the inciting incident of last year’s war. Evil Georgiou now works for Section 31 as a consultant, but may possibly have legitimately turned over a new leaf from “evil” to “antiheroic”. She’s apparently getting her own spin-off.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery: 2×09 Project Daedalus