Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery: Short Treks

I was planning something else, but couldn’t get it together in time, so instead, let’s blunder a bit about Short Treks, a series of four mini-episodes supplementary to Star Trek Discovery, released during the inter-season hiatus to stop everyone from cancelling their CBS All Access subscription until next year flesh out some concepts and provide breadth that didn’t really fit in with the flow of any full episodes. As it turned out later, several of these also worked to foreshadow or set up elements for the coming season. Not all of them, though, which is sufficiently weird to make me wonder if they hint at elements that were ultimately dropped from the season (For a show which has been wonderful in its shameless embrace of the bits of Trek that had been cast off and forgotten through the years, Discovery seems to have an awful lot of its own cast-offs).

I’ve talked up season 2 a lot, but really it was Short Treks that made me love Discovery, and I think possibly they’re a lot closer to what the showrunners originally had in mind for the overall feel of the show: a bunch of self-contained vignettes into the lives of the characters that don’t directly connect to each other, but do all broadly feed into later events. And because Short Treks aren’t beholden to filling a spot in an ongoing story, I’m hoping that in the future, they might serve to let us explore anything interesting left in the storylines that the ship and crew have moved beyond – Pike, Cornwall, Number One, Airiam, even pre-Control Leland could show up for a little jaunt.

1. Runaway

Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly frets over her relationship with her overbearing mother, gets in a food-fight with an invisible stowaway, and makes a new friend.

This minisode introduces Me Hani Ika Hali Ka Po, who comes back at the end of Season 2 to be wonderful and help Discovery stabilize their time crystal. On first airing, “Runaway” seems like just a pleasant, low-stakes episode about Tilly becoming more confident in her role as a newly-minted officer (She was a cadet last season) in the command track. It’s just nice. That’s the thing. The fact that the relationship between Tilly and Po comes up later is just a bonus. These first two minisodes really drive home the sense of Discovery as a Trek that really gets the idea of Star Trek as a world where people solve problems by being better at them.

It’s cute and lovely, and Po is a neat character. Previous incarnations of Trek were never really good at depicting alien cultures as something properly alien, and they’re even worse at depicting alien individuals as something other than avatars of their entire race. Po is explicitly contrasted to the rest of her people, who are going through a difficult cultural transition now that they’ve become a warp-capable, strategically-important race. She’s a genius, she’s regal, she’s spiritual, she’s recently lost her entire family, and she’s a teenager, with the paradoxical combination of brashness, confidence, angst and uncertainty that implies.

Also, she can turn invisible, chameleon-style. Shame that didn’t come up in her other appearances.

It is not clear when this episode is set. It’s after the end of season 1 because Tilly is a full ensign and you can see her Medal of Honor in her room, but there’s no reference to ongoing events. Tilly apparently does not tell anyone about meeting Po until “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 1”, which is a little weird; Po isn’t going to get into trouble from Starfleet, and Tilly’s presumably going to need to explain the mess in the Mess (She blames it on a “hormonal space rabbit” that escaped from the lab)  and use of the transporter. There’s no clear place in season 2 for this story to go, but that’s not a huge deal thanks to Discovery‘s quirk where the characters and the plot seem to go through a different amount of time between episodes.

2. Calypso

A soldier escaping imprisonment comes across the long-abandoned Discovery. With no available way to get home, Craft slowly builds a relationship with the ship’s evolved computer, but he still longs to return to his family.

I have made no secret that this is my single favorite piece of Star Trek ever. If it were the ’90s, and I told you that there was an episode of Star Trek where a starship’s computer became sentient and fell in love with a human, you’d pretty much be able to guess how it would go, right? It would go in a kind of Fatal Attraction sort of way, and in the end, the human would need to trick the computer into thinking he reciprocated in order to get close to her CPU or something, and he’d end up having to destroy her.

And that’s not what happens. At all. Zora develops feelings for Craft, but she never becomes jealous or possessive or abusive. Craft is honest with Zora from the start— even when his status as an escaping prisoner of war gives him every reason to be evasive. When Zora tells him she can’t disobey her orders by taking him home in Discovery, Craft doesn’t try to trick her or to override her; he just accepts it. Craft develops genuine feelings for Zora, even if those feelings don’t outweigh his love for his family. Craft isn’t trying to lull Zora into a false sense of security or manipulate her; they’re both genuinely lonely, and they’re both genuinely drawn to each other. And while he believes there’s no way for him to return to Alcor IV, he does his best to be happy with her. He’s legitimately trying to make a life for himself with Zora, culminating in asking her to create a holographic avatar of herself and teaching himself to dance so that they can reenact the “He Loves” scene from Funny Face, just to do something nice for her. In the end, Zora doesn’t need to be tricked or forced into giving Craft Discovery’s last shuttle; she gives it to him when she realizes that the amount he stands to gain justifies the long odds of a thousand-year-old shuttle safely carrying him to the very edge of its range.

That’s “Calypso” overall, really: two people just being nice to each other and trying to do right by each other despite their pain. Craft can’t get past his longing for home, Zora can’t move on from a mission she seems unlikely to ever complete, but they can still take comfort in each other.

Of course, now that we know the greater context, we can also see “Calypso” as a series of tantalizing hints about what might lie in the show’s future. Alcor IV, with its cyclops owls, where true names are kept as secrets between lovers. Or the Vedreysh, obsessed with “The Long Ago”, who stockpile their escape pods with Betty Boop cartoons and are totally a fallen, corrupt version of the Federation.

But honestly, that’s mostly incidental to the real story: just two intelligent beings whose needs don’t fully align but who are trying to do good by each other anyway within the constraints of what they’re willing and able to give.

And that’s the one true constant thing that Star Trek, at its heart, is supposed to be.

3. The Brightest Star

About twenty years before the events of Star Trek Discovery, on the planet Kaminar, the Kelpien people passively accept their role in their planet’s natural balance by willingly sacrificing themselves for predation by the technologically superior Ba’ul. But young Saru happens upon a cast-off piece of Ba’ul technology and his natural intelligence and curiosity puts him at odds with his culture, but also puts him in contact with a young Philipa Georgiou, who offers to take Saru to the stars, at the cost that he will never be allowed to return home.

Saru wasn’t a hugely interesting character to me at this point, and I’m still not sure how I feel about his character. But this episode is very important in hindsight for the fact that it’s a direct prequel to the season 2 episode “The Sound of Thunder”. I didn’t feel hugely connected to this minisode on the first watch, or even now, but I do think it does a great job at making Kelpien culture seem real. It grates to imagine a race that’s so passive about being treated as livestock, but, I mean, they’ve got nice, fulfilling lives, that just happen to end with them being called to ritual sacrifice. And even though Saru’s pursuit of something (Disney music) more… puts him at odds with his people, it doesn’t descend into any of the usual cliches. Dad isn’t unreasonable and doesn’t become angry and abusive; Saru’s sister thinks he’s making a choice that will end badly for him, but is still supportive, and there’s never a moment that tries to rub it in our face that the Kelpiens are wrong for their beliefs or for not fighting back. The Kelpien hyperdeveloped sense of fear is a simple biological fact, and Discovery has done a good job at not entangling that with moral judgment on them for “cowardice”.

Of course, it will turn out that the Kelpiens are wrong. But what they aren’t is cowards.

4. The Escape Artist

Harry Mudd tells anecdotes of his various close calls to a Telarite while trying to persuade him not to hand him over to Starfleet. While he doesn’t succeed, it turns out that the USS De Milo already has a dozen Harry Mudds on board, and the bounty hunter who sold “Mudd” to the Telarite in the first place was actually Harry Mudd in sci-fi drag, operating from a ship crewed by android duplicates of himself.

First things first: Rainn Wilson’s Harry Mudd is very good. But his Mudd is far more sinister than the loveably goofy rogue and human trafficker of TOS. Hard to say how much of this is a deliberate change, and how much is down to the realities of 1960s TV required leaving a lot of Mudd’s menace to subtext. We last saw him in season one’s “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad”, where he used a time crystal to trap Discovery in a time loop, repeatedly destroying the ship or murdering the crew while he worked out the details of selling the ship to the Klingons. Which is horrific, but, y’know, he’s still Harry Mudd so it ends with him being “punished” by turning him over to be forcibly married to his jilted fiancee Stella.

This minisode keeps Mudd’s harder edge, but the lower stakes do make Mudd more like his TOS depiction. The presence of androids that can pass for human is an interesting thing to turn up here, since it puts us in conflict with TNG, but in continuity with TOS, which featured like four different kinds of passing androids. In fact, you could probably call this minisode a direct prequel to “I, Mudd”, the second TOS Mudd story. Possibly, the android doubles here are from “Planet Mudd”, or at least, it’s Mudd’s previous experience with using androids that makes him think he can exploit the Muddian androids.

This minisode is really an outlier, though. “Runaway” and “The Brightest Star” are outright prequels to season 2 episodes, and “Calypso” foreshadows the end of season 2 – as I’ve said repeatedly now, I suspect it was a direct epilogue to an early draft of the season 2 arc. But there’s nothing in “The Escape Artist” which ties directly into any of the events of season 2.

My best guess is that this too is an artifact of the rewrites the season 2 arc went through. I suspect that there was originally going to be an episode in season 2 that connected up with this. At an admittedly wild guess, I’d suggest that perhaps in one iteration of the season 2 arc, Control’s more Borg-like aspect of using nanotechnology to assimilate and possess human hosts was more deliberately avoided, and Control (or whatever the AI menace from the future was called at that stage) instead used android duplicates.

This episode presumably takes place some time after Mudd’s previous appearance in season 1, as his list of outstanding warrants includes one for penetrating a space whale. I do not know if Mudd has ever tried to out the creator of Bitcoin.

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Random Star Trek fact to leave on: One of the unmade script treatments for TOS had a transporter accident cause the Enterprise to be visited by a young version of Adolph Hitler’s Dad. The crew was thrust into the moral dilemma of whether or not to give him a vasectomy before sending him home.