Twenty-five years ago last night, this girl I knew had a birthday. And I did not know that at the time, but by a remarkable coincidence, I happened to get up the nerve to ask her out to dinner and a movie that night.
Things went pretty well from there.
This is a scheduled post, because I got a bottle of champagne and a bottle of draino, so I’ll be ready to toast either way. Anyway, I haven’t been writing much as you can tell, but it’s because I’ve been putting a lot of time into my art. I finally built up the nerve to start working with resin. Results are mixed.
Good luck and god speed.
An unattributed list of how I think about various media figures who believe themselves qualified to pass judgment on what it takes to be manly and expect me to follow their advice lest I will be considered no-true-man:
I’m not going to say who’s who, so if you are upset about how I’ve described your favorite manosphere figure, just assume I’m talking about some other twink lumberjack.
Last week, my daughter performed in a production of The Wizard of Oz. She was a member of the Lollipop Guild. Also the lead apple tree. Also a denizen of the Emerald City. Also a Winkie. I get the impression that as an actress, she is “good, for a little kid”
Anyway, for some reason, she asked me to AI-enhance a photo I took during the performance, and what came out was kinda wild, like some sort of surrealist interpretation of The Lion King, so I thought I’d share it with you.
And yeah, I am so happy that they’re leaving Calypso in the canon. Yes, we don’t know what could possibly justify them retrofitting Discovery back to its 23rd century configuration, but it was hilarious to watch them scrubbing the “-A” off the hull.
(Just off the top of my head, Craft appears to come from a time when the Federation has degenerated into an imperialistic state. Perhaps Kovitch anticipates that a symbol not of the 32nd century but of “The Long Ago” would be required)
Also, now that we know that Discovery’s state is a cover, it’s possible that Zora’s claim to have been abandoned for a thousand years is also not entirely honest – that she was ordered to claim to have been left there in the 23rd century. Better still, “Calypso” ended on the sad notion that Zora would probably remain alone forever, but now we know that she isn’t lost: they put her there deliberately, and made plans to retrieve her. Might not pay off, but it seems a lot more plausible now to imagine that she’s recovered not long after those events, given that we now know that it was Craft she was waiting for all along.
Anyway, here’s me being angry about the new Taco Bell architecture.
I know, I know, right? Kovitch being Daniels feels so utterly random. But still, him being a time agent was apparently the plan even without the series coming to an end. I like that he’s a time hoarder, with Sisko’s baseball, Geordi’s visor and Riker’s Risan Sex Statue on display in his office.
I also really like the surprise twist of Discovery zapping the Breen out of the plot. It’s a good way to do a big surprising reveal in this situation. We’ve never seen that Discovery can separate, and we’ve never seen that it can jump other things. But we have seen that it can detach its nacelles, and we have seen that some ships can separate their saucers, and we saw back in season 3 that it can take other things with it when it jumps. So it’s new, but not outside the parameters previously set.
Anyway, here’s Death.
I really do want to have my say about the aftercare at the end of Discovery and the interesting implications of its ending and the extent to which some of the final reveals feel tacked on despite apparently being an abbreviation of their aborted season 6 plan. But I have not had a complete thought in a month, so instead, here’s another encaustic.
I’m tired and don’t want to write about Star Trek this week, so instead, here’s An Art. This is one of a series of encaustic collages I’m doing.
I got some fairly devastating news at work last week (Or, as your therapist would tell you, an exciting opportunity to meet new people and be the untrusted new guy and have to impress them all over again. Fear not; I’m being reassigned, not fired. Probably), and now I don’t even have any new Star Trek to look forward to.
So this went exactly the way we knew it would. Michael is granted the power of the gods and promptly chucks it into a black hole because there is going to be a new series in a couple of years set after this, and the writers have no idea how to continue the adventures of Star Trek in a universe where the Federation can create life at will.
I don’t fault them for this. I really don’t. Now, had this actually been the capstone to all of Star Trek – if this had been the planned denouement of the timeline, then yeah, “In the 32nd century, we became gods,” would be a decent ending, a payoff for sixty years of trekking. But it’s not, and we knew it wouldn’t be, and we knew this was exactly what would happen. But I can still object to how it happened.
They tried to be uplifting here. Michael’s decision evolved out of the observation that the galaxy already exists in a state of high diversity. She basically reckons “There’s plenty of life in the galaxy already,” and thus using the forge (I reckon that’s what fandom will call it eventually) to make new life is redundant, and the only practical use for the thing is to instantly clone up a huge slave army. Which is bad.
This is not terrible thinking.
It is also wrong. In the first place, I am utterly gobsmacked by the short-sightedness of, “eh, we got diversity enough.” I’m not talking about something speculative like, “But what if one day a plague or something wipes out most life and they need to reboot it.” That is actually covered in its way (I’ll get back to it). More of medium-range short-sightedness: yeah, there’s plenty of different forms of life in the galaxy right now. But you know what there isn’t? Kweijans. Y’know, Michael’s boyfriend’s species. Or space Tardigrades. Or those people who are white on one side and black on the other. Or that race that Kevin Uxbridge wiped out. Or trance worms. They even mention trance worms later in the episode. Now, they establish that you can’t actually raise the dead in the practical sense after all (More on that later too), so no, they can’t use the forge to resurrect Kweijan. But preserving a species from extinction is a noble goal in and of itself; it’s something that preserves and enhances the diversity of life in the universe. Yes, sure, it wouldn’t be “the same”, but it’s not without value. It’s like that time the Klingons cloned Kahless: sure, the clone wasn’t really the reincarnation of the patriarch of Klingon civilization, but he was a legitimate heir to the imperial line. We know they appreciate the value of this, because Book does go on to replant the Kweijan world root. The only thing stopping me from being livid is that no one seems to actually notice any of this and excuse it – there is no scene where Book has to be told that, no, seriously, Evolution “wanted” his people to die out and thus it would be morally wrong to second-guess Evolution-God.
In the second place, I find the threat of raising an instant army to be extremely dubious here. Sure, you can magic a large number of people into existence. But cloning technology already exists in this setting. And being able to magic an army into existence doesn’t get you training or ships, so what exactly are you going to do with this army? I think you need some justification for the idea that a thirty-second war can be won just by having a huge number of meatsacks available as cannonfodder. Do you have a lot of infantry charges in space? It’s a very regressive view of military might, the kind that complains about the modern military being “woke”. It’s the kind of thinking that convinces you it would be a great idea to invade Ukraine with a ’90s army whose generals already sold half your equipment on the black market.
They never really say it outright, and I wish they had, but one of the strong implications I got was that in the “dark” timeline from “Face the Strange” was not caused by the Breen exploiting the forge, but just by the fact that whichever primarch acquired it would be able to unite the Breen.
Speaking of… Yeah, the subplot with Primarch Ta’al sure did happen. It was fine, but it added up to basically nothing. I’d have to go back and check, but I think even when the shuttle she sent ahead to the black holes is mentioned by Rayner, it’s while he’s out-of-view. Yeah. I’m pretty sure that whole subplot was part of the last-minute rewrites to give Saru something to do other than get married.
It’s a great scene, sure. Saru staring down a Breen primarch on the basis of his being able to carry off the whole “Stone Cold Apex Predator” thing is really cool. It might be a bluff, but I don’t think so. They sent Saru off at the beginning of the season to be the ambassador to the minor planets, and this is the payoff: Saru has made a connection with those planets, and if Ta’al kills him and pursues the other dreadnought, they’re going to attack Ta’al’s holdings along a major trade route. Not with the realistic expectation of defeating the Breen, though. Because they don’t have to: the Breen are in such a state of mutual in-fighting right now, that even the mildest of bloody noses at the hands of a mob of Federation-aligned rabble would scuttle Ta’al’s chances of claiming the throne. But why even involve Ta’al specifically when she’s never going to come face-to-helmet with Rayner? Rayner is really the character served the least well by this season. It’s clear they inserted him expecting to build him up over multiple seasons, but someone at Paramount heard the phrase “Five-Year Mission” and decided that five is the right number of seasons for a Star Trek to run. Also, the Pathway Drive was a bit of a dud. All we see is that it seems to project a watery bubble around the shuttle. Or maybe those were just shields. I was hoping for something cool.
Anyway, the story on balance is okay I guess, but it’s sort of messy and random, and a lot of things seem to happen for very little reason. The Breen who went into the portal last week just get flat out murdered in the first scene. Michael encounters Chiana, they fight, she suggests they work together, then later Michael attacks her… And then says that they need to stop fighting and work together… What?
The portals to different environments was a neat visual. They don’t clarify if those are real places or terrarria or simulations or pocket universes or whatever, but it’s a neat visual. Michael sorting out the puzzle with the shadows was done well.
Then the final obstacle to receive the power of the gods is… A tangram. And Chiana is like, “I wanna do the thing” and Michael is like, “No that is an obvious trap let’s spend five minutes thinking about it” so Chiana cold-cocks her and tries the dumb thing and gets electrocuted.
And since I’m at twelve hundred words and don’t know what I’m going to talk about next week, let’s break here.
We edge ever closer to inevitable disappointment.
This is a good, strong episode, don’t get me wrong. After a few clinkers where they tried to do a puzzle box episode and failed, it occurred to Discovery to play to their strengths, and do a nice straightforward heist. It’s nice and straightforward. The inevitable disappointment comes from the fact that it just seems so obvious that this is going to end with Michael deciding that humanity can’t be trusted with the Power of the Gods. Probably going to shove it into one of those convenient black holes.
Anyway, the main thing I love about this episode is that the entire heist basically hinges on the fact that the Breen are absolute jerks, all the time. So you can fairly trivially infiltrate a Breen warship by putting on a Breen costume and just yelling at anyone who challenges you. How fucked up is it that the Breen keep the environment in their own ships at a temperature that is comfortable for most other races, but not themselves? This seems insane, but, little though we know about the Breen, it does come off as plausible that they are just the kind of assholes who would do that sort of thing. Remember, Breen can survive at normal temperatures, but they have to switch from gooey to non-gooey, which is deeply shameful. So instead, they maintain their low-temperature goo form, but wear face-concealing refrigerated suits all the time. Because they are just jerks like that. It is profoundly stupid, but in an enjoyable way.
I notice President Rillak is back. I had assumed that T’rina was taking point in the Breen negotiations a couple of weeks ago because they hadn’t hired Chelah Horsdal back on for this season. But it’s got me wondering whether Saru’s subplot here was actually added later, after they found out they weren’t getting renewed. Even though it ties back to Rayner – the Breen primarch who is racing to join the fight is the same one who conquered his planet – that subplot is completely isolated from everything else. It seems pretty obvious that they wouldn’t introduce Primarch Ta’al here unless it was to lead to a showdown between her and Rayner. So if that doesn’t happen, I’d take that as evidence that this sideplot exists purely because Doug Jones would’ve otherwise unceremoniously disappeared from the series weeks ago. And if that’s the case, it’s even possible they might kill him off. Though that would be a bit of a bummer. In any case, every scene with Saru and T’rina is an absolute gift. #RelationshipGoals. At least we’ll get to see the pathway drive in action. I hope it’s something super cool and/or weird.
Adira gets to really come into their own on a big important away mission, and it feels very earned that Stamets freaks out a little but ultimately makes his peace with them going. And I guess they were really pushing for Rhys to become a main character, because he’s there too and doesn’t even die or anything.
I need to momentarily drop my conceit of calling them Chiana and D’argo to make a joke about Mol having a La’ak-et in her pocket. Another cool bit of It’s The Future’s Future that I wish had just been a constant background element of this show: personal transporters means everyone can carry around their own personal hammerspace. Maybe that’s where they get their phasers from, though I’m pretty sure they’re slightly more mundanely origami’d up their sleeves.
Another negative point for having to sit through the whole episode with the sense of inevitability from the fact that we all knew the second the barrel opened up to reveal a mysterious portal that the episode was gonna end with Michael jumping into it. I’m interested about the setup, though. We’ve got a pair of Breen, and Chiana with Hammerspace D’Argo, and Michael. I assume next week Book’s going to go in after her, in order that we can set up something with pairs of lovers. The secret last clue did say something about many becoming one. Orgy time?
And then there’s the real centerpiece of the episode: Rayner having them tuck Discovery’s nacelles in and whang itself through the Dreadnought’s shuttle bay in order to blow everyone out into space. It is indeed cool. I’m disappointed we actually get to see the full extent of the Dreadnought on-screen all at once, but still very cool. (This show is bad at scale. The Dreadnought dwarfed Federation HQ, but Discovery seems to be just a bit smaller than the hangar bay that spans 3/4 of the width of the ship. Similarly, there’s very few shots of the Federation fleet that reflect the fact that Discovery really ought to be much smaller than a 32nd century capital ship.
Our final plot complication of the episode is that the barrel containing the Progenitor Technology bursts open leaving what appears to be a Twilight Portal from Zelda in space.
This I assume will complicate things.