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…
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.