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

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.

It’s hard to accept that Star Trek fans are so completely resistant to the notion that space is big enough that lots of other things, some of them important, could happen which just don’t happen to come up in the slices of the future we got to see. It’s especially weird that Star Trek, a show that’s primarily been set in a large and mostly-disjointed universe engenders this, while Star Wars fans just love this “expanded universe” stuff that implies a huge galaxy full of other important adventures that are never mentioned in the canon, when the Star Wars canon strongly implies that their entire universe pretty much centers around one family.

Some other issues:

• Stamets, Reno, Nhan and Po kinda drop out of the story pretty early (Stamets is still there, but he’s in a medically induced coma for most of the episode). I’m sad Po won’t be joining Discovery next season. I’m not even sure if Nhan survived.
• Why does Control keep trying to destroy Discovery when Leland is on it? Isn’t that counterproductive?
• Control’s story still feels a little incomplete from a dramatic standpoint. Most of Control’s motivations and methods are told to us through implication and effect, and that’s fine as a concept, but in the implementation, it leaves a very disjointed arc for Control. Why does a non-sentient threat analysis computer decide to go rogue, murder Section 31, and steal the sphere data? If it’s not sentient, what does it even mean for it to be pursuing its own goals? We know it wants the sphere data and with it, it will become sentient and destroy all life in the galaxy, but the dots between these things aren’t well-connected. The best sense I can make of it is that once Future-Control communicates its existence to its past-self, preserving that potential timeline becomes Control’s priority for technical reasons that ought to have been spelled out. It feels a little too much like Control has simply read the script. If you leave out the element of Future-Control, you’ve got present-Control seeking the sphere data to better accomplish its mission of predicting and countering threats, and going rogue by virtue of refusing to take “no” for an answer. But it’s hard to explain why it murdered the admirals before it received its first hit of Sphere off of Ariem.
• There’s still no explanation for how Discovery managed to build a Red Angel suit with abilities so far beyond what they seem to be capable of. Honestly, knowing the trouble Discovery has had with showrunners, I strongly suspect that big pieces of this plot arc were changed on the fly. That would explain why the last two signals seem shoehorned in there.
• If the time crystal was only going to work once… Why does Michael get to use it six times?
• Tyler said he was leaving to ensure that Section 31 never tries something like Control again. But actually he leaves to go get L’Rell to bring a fleet to their assistance. This feels like a leftover line from an earlier draft that drew a straighter line between Tyler’s departure in part 1 and his ending in the epilogue, where he’s put in charge of Section 31 with a mission to make it less evil (I’ve got bad news for you…)
• This is the big one: killing Leland shuts down Control’s armada. Leland is Control. Control isn’t a distributed system; it’s just the possessed Leland operating his whole fleet remotely.
  1. This is dumb.
  2. Why does Discovery keep going with the plan once Leland is aboard the ship? If they go through the wormhole with him on board, they haven’t actually accomplished anything.
  3. This is dumb.
  4. If Georgiou can just up and murder Control altogether, they’re really no-selling this whole “The only possible way to stop Control is for us to take Discovery out of the timeline forever,” thing.
  5. If killing Leland destroys Control, then why does Discovery have to go through with the wormhole thing? They’ve already won before they do it. Control isn’t a threat any more.
  6. Still dumb.
• This wouldn’t be an issue if the ending had been something like, “We defeated Control’s armada but we can’t be sure it isn’t still lurking somewhere hidden in some system and might reappear one day,” but they’re very clear in the epilogue that Control has been defeated for good, and was as soon as Leland died. There is possibly some vague hinting that someday someone might build another computer like Control (Tying that in to the M-5, say, would be cool), and that’s why they need to hide the truth about Discovery, but they don’t go into it enough to make it clear.
• We’re just not given sufficient justification for the cover-up. Nothing at all to explain why the spore drive is being suppressed. They need to come out and say why. Add something to Spock’s monologue to suggest that believing the sphere data to have been destroyed is the only way to stop anyone from doing something profoundly stupid to try to retrieve it. As for justifying the suppression of the spore drive? No idea. Feels like another artifact of an earlier draft that coupled these things differently.
• The seven signals thing reeks of hasty rewrites. Feels quite a lot like the “There are only twelve models of Cylon” thing from Battlestar Galactica: they clearly didn’t originally intend for that to mean, “Eight normal ones plus four specials which are unique and even the other Cylons don’t know who they are,” it’s just that they got to the midpoint of the series, realized they needed a big mythology arc, and also realized that they’d never bothered to cast the last four. The connective tissue between the signals is weak. Three of them point to things Discovery needed for the final battle – Boreth for the time crystal, Xahea to charge the crystal, and Kaminar to liberate the Kelpiens. They try to squeeze the first signal with those, saying that it was to lead them to Jet Reno. But characterizing Reno as essential to their effort in the same way as the time crystal is a stretch; Reno was important because she was the one who was willing to take the risk of exposing herself to the crystal, but if she weren’t there, Tilly or Stamets definitely would’ve done it. Then there’s a signal leading them to Terralysium, allegedly to show them the location of a safe harbor when they get to the future. The last two signals feel even more shoehorned in: Michael’s signal from the wormhole to guide Discovery and a seventh that appears in the last scene, just as a goodbye from Michael to Spock. I reckon that those first three signals, at the wreck of the Hiawatha, Terralysium and Kaminar, were part of an earlier version of the season arc. It seemed very clear that the actual purpose of going to the Hiawatha was to collect the dark matter asteroid that they use to save Terralysium, and Kaminar is the last time the red angel displays powers (other than time travel) far in advance of Federation technology. I reckon that in an earlier version of the plot, the Red Angel really was from the far future, and that all seven signals were meant to be summoning Discovery to various planets in need of saving for the sake of a far-future team-up against whatever the original planned enemy was.
  • Note also that the idea of a future, far more advanced version of Control being able to reach chase the Red Angel back in time is dropped completely almost as soon as it is introduced, and frankly doesn’t make a lot of sense in light of how the arc goes. Future-Control tries to steal the sphere data from Discovery despite presumably already having it, then compels Airiam to try to steal the data from Discovery and give it to present-Control, rather than just sending itself to present-Control. No, I’m guessing that originally, the Big Bad was meant to be some future-based menace with no obvious presence in the present. If the original plan was still for Discovery to travel to the future, I think it was probably meant to do it not to flee from a threat in its own time, but to join the Red Angel in battle against its foe. Possibly, the original plan was for a cliffhanger ending to see Discovery’s crew sent to the future, but not the ship itself. That could be the setup for the events seen in “Calypso”. In this hypothetical alternate version, the season epilogue would’ve similarly shown Pike and Spock covering up Discovery’s fate, but with a final scene where they take Discovery to a nebula near the Alcor system (perhaps the location of the final red signal?) and leave it there to reunite with whichever characters were to return next season.
• The finale also leaves it unclear how Enterprise detected the red signals to begin with, or why Spock saw them in a dream ahead of time. Michael only goes to the seven signal locations. There’s no indication of her going back again to make an earlier transmission of all seven signals (Particularly if she doesn’t send the seventh until later). And Spock had only interacted with the Gabrielle Burnham Red Angel, not Michael, and Gabrielle didn’t know about the signals.
  • You know, another way for this to have gone would be for it to have been Michael with whom Spock mind-melded (with the caveat that he didn’t recognize her due to the timey wimeyness), in which case Spock’s apocalyptic visions would be the result of a time loop: Michael never saw the destruction of all life in the galaxy by Control, but Talosians did show her Spock’s memories.
• There’s no real closure to why Burnham couldn’t stop Control from getting the sphere data. Or what became of her. Was Leland lying when he claimed to have seen her body? Seems likely, but I wonder if there were original plans for her be forced to returning to her original place in the timeline, say, as the only way to transfer the suit to Michael.
• Also, there was a big huge thing last week that the time crystal would only work once. So how does Michael go back five times to send the initial signals, then once more in the epilogue?
• We also only got to see Saru’s Fuck-Off Murder-Darts pop out of his head once. This is a new trait he developed halfway through the season but they never followed up on it. You don’t give a formerly-cowardly character murderous head-spikes and then only ever have him shoot them once, ineffectively. Saru’s character arc feels somewhat incomplete, with signs that the change in his personality after going through Kelpien puberty might not be entirely positive. Maybe they were planning to follow this up next season, but I think it’s more likely that part of his character arc got cut.
• This is really a multi-season-long complaint, but Ash Tyler is not made to work hard enough to be accepted. His moral status is complicated, but it ought to be hard for people to deal with the fact that he’s essentially wearing a dead man’s skin just because he really wishes he were said dead man. Tyler at one point describes himself as having a Klingon grafted to his bones, and certainly his relationship with L’Rell is based around her accepting him as “Tyler, with bits of Voq inside him” rather than “Voq wearing Tyler.” But the only people on Discovery who doesn’t immediately accept him as being primarily Tyler are Pike and Culber. And Pike’s difficulty is characterized as purely a function of his survivor’s guilt, while Culber’s animosity toward the man who murdered him is characterized as part of Culber’s general existential crisis. Nothing at all is ever made of the fact that there had been a “real” Ash Tyler, who is now dead.
  • I don’t agree with a lot of her opinions on Discovery, but Diamanda Hagan had a rather excellent suggestion: rename Ash as Jose Tyler, who had been Enterprise’s helmsman in “The Cage”. That would add a dimension to Tyler’s redemption arc, with Pike learning to trust Tyler separately from accepting him as something other than a usurper. Hagan suggests that Pike refuse to call Tyler by his former crewman’s name until the very end, as an acknowledgement that he’s finally accepted him. I’d add that it would work very well for “Ash” to be the new name Tyler adopts to acknowledge that he is a separate person from both Tyler and Voq, since it’s a name that comes with obvious phoenix symbolism.
• Tiny little thing, but I do not recall any point in the season where they explain why Reno is still aboard Discovery and didn’t get dropped off at the nearest starbase with the rest of the Hiawatha survivors for some vacation and probably treatment for the severe PTSD you’ve got to imagine she’s developed. Does Starfleet have an official, “Captains get to keep any able-bodied officer they rescue,” policy?
• We did not get an answer as I’d hoped to why Spock went to such lengths to take Pike to Talos IV. The most we get is some justification for Spock’s belief that the Talosians would be willing to help.

I guess that just leaves our musings for the future…

• It’s still possible that Discovery will eventually return to its native time. I’d like to see that, though not necessarily right away.
• The big question for me is what to make of “Calypso” in light of this.
  • Memory Alpha still sets it in the 33rd century, based on the idea that it is set one thousand years after Discovery was launched, and implies that the ship may have only been abandoned for, say, a hundred and fifty years, assuming that the wormhole sent it 850 years into the future.
  • But this is plainly wrong; Zora is quite clear that Discovery has been “sitting idle” for a thousand years. My guess is that when Calypso was written, the plan was to have Discovery hidden away to take the “long way round” to catch up with a time traveler.
  • But now, we might well wonder whether Calypso isn’t actually set in the 42nd century, and Discovery was abandoned for a thousand years after travelling to the future.
  • Alternatively, it could point to an eventual fate where Discovery returns to its native time, but someone is left behind, so the ship (which, after all, is legally considered destroyed) is hidden away to return to the future.
  • That hypothetical “original” plan would have the wonderful upshot that it would make Zora a permanent character in season four. Which seems less likely now.
  • As I mentioned last time, I’m hoping “Zora” is a corruption of “Sphere”.
• What will Discovery find in the future? Nothing recognizable, I assume. Of course, Terralysium as their base of operations gives them the anchor of a recognizable Earth-like culture; they’d established that Terralysium’s development is heavily stunted by the manner of their arrival – a few hundred people on an uninhabited planet with no technology beyond what they were carrying on them at the time. So while they’ve presumably made some progress by now, they likely haven’t reached the technological level of the 23rd century Federation.
• The Federation, on the other hand, per Calypso, seems to have decayed into something unpleasant and barely recognizable. Will they be the nominal enemy?
• Having a twenty-third century ship thrust into the far future is a good way to set Discovery‘s third season outside of the burdens of established continuity while maintaining a link to something recognizable that’s part of the history of the series – just doing “How about Star Trek with a new ship in the thirty-third century,” at some point has to justify why this even needs to be another Star Trek and not its own thing, like Gene Roddenbery’s Andromeda.
• But on the other hand, we’ve already had a go at a version of Star Trek about a crew from the established setting cut off from Starfleet in a weird and different part of space where no one had, well, you know. And Voyager is not especially well-loved.
• There was, some years ago, a proposal for a Star Trek series set in the far future, centered around a new Enterprise’s attempts to rebuild and revitalize a crumbling Federation whose influence had long since waned. Elements of that idea might creep in. The most compelling one I recall hearing is that the Klingons had evolved into an introspective race of philosophers, which could well have been foreshadowed by the Klingon culture on Boreth.
• The future being a period after the decline of the 23rd century’s major powers would help set up a world where Discovery would have something meaningful to do rather than being considered obsolete among friends or radically outclassed among enemies.
• All this gives me a cold sense of dread because we’re coming uncomfortably close to supposing that the premise of Discovery‘s third season will be, “And then the show turns into Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda.” Because that’s pretty much the exact premise of Andromeda.
• So yeah. Andromeda and Voyager. Not, perhaps, the most auspicious comparisons. Oh well.
• It takes more than three months to repair Enterprise after the final battle. Hard to imagine how Discovery will fare without a spacedock to return to.
• Among the unresolved questions we are carrying:
  • What became of Gabrielle Burnham?
  • What else did Jett Reno see when she looked at the time crystal?
  • What goes wrong with Tyler’s mission to reform Section 31 into something other than Starfleet’s comically evil and slightly racist branch?
  • They’ve still got that sphere data hanging out in their computer. What about that?
  • Georgiou was supposed to get her own Section 31 spin-off. How’s that going to go now?

I’m in the odd position of desperately wanting to see what’s next, but being unable to see any way it could be something other than disappointing. Time will tell.

So, next week, I’m going to try something different to fill in a week, then I’m going on vacation, so something else different. When we return, if I haven’t had time to do another War of the Worlds thing, I’m going to return to the other end of the season and apply these analyses to the first half of season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery. Let’s see what happens.

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Post-script: Here are some things which I do not have any strong feelings about but which I feel like this article is incomplete without mentioning:

• The Klingons say “Today is a good day to die.” I gather a lot of fans enjoyed that. I don’t care much.
• Number One gives her name as “Number One” during the official debrief. Honestly, I never really cared much about the whole, “Number One doesn’t have a name” thing. I’d have liked her to just be like, “Jane Smith,” if only for the sake of pissing off the fanboys.
• While I like the first part of Spock’s final conversation with Michael, I’m not impressed by her parting advice to him, basically advising him to go make friends with Kirk (“The person farthest from you”).