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

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.

I don’t want to turn this into a full-on recap, so I will try (and probably fail) to keep it brief. Turns out that Recurring Admiral thinks something is Up with Section 31, so she orders Pike to go pop in on their Evil Headquarters to reset their Evil AI Supercomputer “Control”. To everyone’s shock, the Evil AI Supercomputer has gone rogue and murdered everyone — the Evil Section 31 Admirals we’d seen in previous episodes were actually holographic recreations. Unfortunately, Discovery has a mole aboard, and it’s not the Section 31 liaison Pike currently has locked up on presumption of being a mole.

This week is the only character focus episode I’m aware of for Lieutenant Commander Airiam. Airiam is this robot lady who stands off to one side on the bridge and tells everyone when the Magic Mushroom Drive is ready. Now, by the time of The Next Generation, Data and his brothers were the only known sentient androids, but TOS had human-passing androids show up several times. Discovery reestablished that in a minisode over the season break. It seems that the key difference is that androids of this era don’t possess true self-awareness. This is important but I’m putting it in a misleading spot, because Airiam isn’t an android. She’s a human with heavy cybernetic augmentation as a result of a shuttle accident that apparently killed her husband and destroyed most of her body. Even her brain seems to be augmented, as she needs to upload all the memories she wants to keep to the ship on a weekly basis, which is the angle we use for establishing her character, showing little clips of her interacting with her friends and having a good time and being a normal human sort of person despite looking like Arcee if Michael Bay had more creative control in the Bumblebee movie. And again, I love this. Airiam lived through a tragedy that left her physically and mentally transformed, but she’s not brooding or private or angsty; her character arc isn’t reclaiming her humanity or being upset about how she looks or questioning her identity. She’s adapting to the hand she was dealt. She’s comfortable talking with her friends about her implants in a playful sort of way, and recently took a bottle of sand from the beach where she spent her honeymoon out of storage to put on display in her quarters.

Thing is, two episodes ago, one of those sentinel dealies tried to hack Discovery, and it infected Airiam, and ever since, she’s occasionally had three red lights blink in her eyes before doing something transparently evil that no one around her notices. I think she’s aware of what’s happening, but is under some compulsion not to talk about it.

The thing she’s being compelled to do is to deliver some information to Section 31. Some episodes ago, Discovery downloaded ten thousand years of galactic history from an ancient mysterious space sphere that wanted someone to listen to its story before it died. And Airiam has uploaded everything the sphere knew about AI, and is trying to give it to Control. So it looks like the direction they’re going here is that Control is destined to go Skynet and wipe out its creators, possibly in one of those classic Star Trek Broken Computer “My job is to eliminate threats; eliminating all life will prevent any possible threat,” dealies. This is disappointing, but hopefully it will turn out to be more complicated than that, and if not, at least I can console myself that “Control just wants to be the best it can at being an evil AI” is in keeping with the theme. Once the cat’s out of the bag, Airiam tries to kill Michael, but ends up locked in an airlock. In a moment of clarity, she begs Michael to dump her into space as she’s already trying to hack the door and won’t be able to stop herself. Michael looks for another way, but when time runs out, security officer Nhan pushes the button and ejects Airiam. It is very sad and leads into a silent credit sequence, a la Adric in Doctor Who.

This is probably my second-least-favorite episode this season, but it’s still quite good; Discovery hasn’t really had a bad episode this season. Some of the highlights:

• When Pike learns that Section 31’s base is protected by illegal space mines, he challenges Admiral Cornwall on this, asking if he was kept out of the war because they knew he wouldn’t stand for Starfleet compromising its principles like that. Cornwall’s answer is that she kept him out of the war because he represented the part of Starfleet whose survival they most wanted to ensure.
• I find myself liking Cornwall. After a long tradition of Star Trek admirals whose purpose was to be obstinate obstructionists who the heroes had to work around, Cornwall’s general shtick is that she starts out wanting to do the pragmatic, morally questionable thing, but she immediately comes around when someone proposes a solution that isn’t evil.
• There’s really tight integration between Airiam’s characterization and the plot. We watch her defragging her brain at the beginning of the episode, and at the climax, Ensign Tilly figures out what’s going on because Airiam had to clear out most of her brain to hold the sphere data she was exfiltrating. The memories we see include things like sparring with another crewmember, to establish her skill at hand-to-hand combat. And she has a casual conversation with Nhan about cybernetics. Nhan has cybernetic implants around her mouth, because as a Barzan (a one-off species who appeared in an episode of TNG), she can’t breathe Federation-Standard air unassisted. That gets us up to speed for when Airiam disables her later by ripping off her implants.
• This isn’t the only example of very good setups in the episode; Commander Saru, who has previously been established as having superior vision to humans, works out that the Evil Vulcan Admiral is a hologram by seeing that her body temperature doesn’t change in response to stressors, and then turns around and applies the same reasoning to prove that the footage of Spock murdering his way out of a mental hospital is also fake.
• Speaking of. Spock and Michael continue to have it out. Spock, as previously alluded, had a breakdown after mind-melding with the Red Angel. He’s been put back together now, but he’s still very different from the Spock we know. He’s determined that logic can not tell him how to avert the genocidal vision he saw from the Red Angel, and that failure has given him license to explore his emotions. He’s a complete asshole to Michael, but she kinda has it coming.
• The proximate cause of Spock’s issues at the moment is that he can’t work out why the Red Angel came to him. The only thing he can think of that’s special about him is that he’s half human, but — and I believe this is the only time this has been confirmed — he’s not the only Vulcan-Human hybrid.
• Spock accuses Michael of having an inflated sense of responsibility. She blames herself for her parents’ death, she blames herself for the Klingon War, and she blamed herself for the terrorist attack on Vulcan that had prompted her to run away from home, precipitating Spock’s first encounter with the Red Angel. At least the second one of those, the narrative arc of the show had always broadly agreed with, I think, but context calls that into question: Klingons gotta Klingon, it was really Spock that the terrorists (Vulcan “logic extremists”) objected to, and blaming herself for her parents’ death is just flat-out Bruce Wayning.
• They follow up Spock’s accusation to Michael with him offering support to Stamets, the Spore Drive engineer, who’s having marital troubles ever since his husband came back from the dead. Like Spock, Hugh has to rebuild his sense of self after growing a new body. Long story.

But there’s some other bits that I’m less cool with:

• Cornwall is suspicious of the (late) Evil Admiral in charge of Section 31 because she’s a logic extremist. Yeah, the terrorist group which bombed Spock’s school as a child. This seems like an unlikely career path, though I suppose we’ve established that “Empress of an evil empire in an evil parallel universe to Antiheroic Security Consultant” is a legit career path in this universe.
• It fits fine with the pacing of the story, but Pike coming down hard immediately and ordering Michael to airlock Airiam without even trying anything else feels wildly out of character.
• Once Airiam is trapped in the airlock, Michael doesn’t go to check on Nhan. Nhan is laying on the floor choking to death for a big chunk of act 3, apparently just down the hall from where Michael is emoting over how she can’t possibly sacrifice her crewmate and good friend who is being controlled by an evil computer. This is all so that we can be surprised when Nhan turns out to have reinstalled her implant at the last second. No one on Discovery mentions her either. I guess the idea is that they all assumed she was dead?
• The title of this episode, “Project Daedalus”, refers to Airiam’s last words: Michael is apparently very important to whatever is going on with Control and/or the sentinels, and Airiam warns her to “Find Project Daedalus.” Michael is trying to get some more details about that when Nhan presses the airlock button. Seems like “Project Daedalus” would be a better title for the episode where they find out what it is than the episode where it’s briefly mentioned with no explanation.
• It’s dramatically powerful to end the episode with Airiam’s death, but it does mean that we end with Discovery crippled, surrounded by Scary Death Space Mines, right next to the evil base of the evil AI that has just downloaded 20% of sphere data it needs to become completely invincible. The trailer at the end implies that there’s going to be a whole lot of episode next week that is not related to Discovery escaping certain destruction.

Yeah, so like I said, it’s not as good as some of the other recent episodes, but it’s still solid. I particularly like the idea of Michael suffering from a hypersensitive sense of responsibility because it fits with another theme of Discovery: revisiting things that other Trek series have done, only with more self-awareness and a little better. So they have a space war like Deep Space Nine, and they have the process of a Not-Quite-Star Trek-yet becoming Star Trek like Enterprise, and so forth. So Michael’s inflated sense of responsibility? That’s Kirk’s main character flaw – his actual written flaw that occurs in the text, not the ones that exist primarily in pop culture consciousness but aren’t really supported that well by the text. That’s really where Kirk goes off the rails in the JJ Abrams-verse, where his behavior is interpreted as smug entitlement. For classic Kirk, it’s not that he feels entitled to keep stepping in and taking over, it’s that he feels responsible for everything that happens. It’s basically the core of his character. Seeing it here with Michael may shed some light on why Spock forms such a bond with Kirk later.

Wild-ass speculations for the future:

• The obvious reveal is for Michael to turn out to be the Red Angel. This isn’t something I’d really like, though, because it implies that the Red Angel hasn’t actually changed the timeline yet, which makes for an unsatisfactory arc. What we really would like to see is the Red Angel’s interventions all adding together to avert the predicted future, which doesn’t make sense if the Red Angel is from a timeline where they’ve already happened. Certainly, Michael has to be key to the resolution because (a) she’s the main character, (b) the Red Angel’s first appearance was to a young Spock, showing him where to find her when she’d run away from home and was almost eaten by a giant Vulcan stag beetle, (c) we recently learned that a Section 31 captain was somehow responsible for her parents’ deaths, and (d) Airiam literally tells Michael that she’s the key to all of this.
• Spock doesn’t have a pet seylat in any of the flashback scenes. Wild-ass guess: however things end up between him and Michael, he decides to repress his memories of her by recasting his childhood sibling as his childhood pet.
• I’m not convinced Airiam’s death is going to stick. Since she’d uploaded all her memories to the computer, there’s the possibility of them somehow reconstructing her in digital form, and given how much of her was cybernetic, there’s an opening that her physical death isn’t irreversible. Especially as we’ve already established the possibility of raising the dead using Magic Mushroom Space.
• I think the Enterprise’s catastrophic system failure, currently attributed to a massive security bug in the holographic viewscreens (Which Pike has ordered removed so that they won’t exist in TOS), will turn out to be linked to the Red Angel, as a way to involve Discovery in Pike’s mission.

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Your bit of Correct-Me-If-I’m-Wrong Star Trek trivia: We know of at least 6 Star Fleet officers who were not from Federation planets (Per Deep Space Nine, a command officer can sponsor a non-Federation citizen to the academy, which tracks with Saru, though Worf likely held Federation citizenship via his adoptive parents):

• Saru (Kelpien)
• Nhan (Barzan)
• Gaila (Orion)
• Worf (Klingon)
• Ro Laren (Bajoran pre-2369)
• Nog (Ferengi)