Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×01: Brother

Okay. So having finished the season, and needing some more filler while I try to figure out if I have anything useful to say about Killraven, let’s go back and talk about the part of the season that aired before I decided to blog about it…

When we left the Discovery at the end of last season, it was on its way to Vulcan to drop off Sarek and Amanda, and pick up its new captain. But never mind all that because Enterprise! Pike asks to beam over with a security officer and a science officer, and Michael is obviously uncomfortable about the prospect of seeing Spock. Good news for her: the science officer who beams over is some other dude, who I will call Lt. McJerkface because his only trait is smug contempt. To remind us that McJerkface is our designated butt-monkey, reptilian Ensign Backgroundcharacter comically sneezes all over him in the elevator. Spock, as it turns out, took a long vacation and checked himself into rehab. Pike explains that Enterprise had been investigating a series of “red bursts”, seven unusual energy signals popping up all over the galaxy, until Enterprise suffered a complete breakdown and has to be towed back to spacedock for repairs. We aren’t given specifics as to why, but Starfleet considers these signals so important that Pike assumes command of Discovery to go chasing the only one they can still detect, which puts them next to an asteroid made out of non-baryonic dark matter, where they find the wreck of the USS Hiawatha, believed destroyed in the war. Pike, Michael and McJerkface have to fly down in little tiny shuttles but McJerkface is too busy being a smug asshole to steer properly and gets himself killed, while Pike’s shuttle breaks and Michael has to narrowly save him. The only person still active on the Hiawatha is Comically Grumpy Engineer Jett Reno, who has been keeping bits and pieces of some of the rest of the crew alive with her practical engineering skills. Michael gets very nearly killed on the collapsing Hiawatha and has a vision of a red angelic being before Pike saves her. Adorably goofy ensign Tilly manages to snag a chunk of dark matter because she’s hoping she can use it to make a new control system for the spore drive, as Stamets wants to quit on account of he has visions of his dead husband whenever he plugs himself into it. Pike announces that he’ll be staying on for the rest of the season while Enterprise gets fixed, and Michael visits Spock’s room and reads his diary, from which she learns that Spock had been having ominous visions of the red signals before they occurred.

It’s not the best start. But it’s good enough. More specifically…

• Tig Notaro is a delight as Jett Reno, though I keep feeling like there should be more to her; she’s contributed very little to the plot, mostly just serving to move character arcs forward and be generally a pleasure to listen to. But there’s something about her that comes off as evasive here, and in all of her appearances for the first half of the season, which sure seem like they’re hinting at her having some kind of Deep Dark Secret… Which gets forgotten by the end.
• Obviously, Enterprise is the real guest star here. Her update to the style of Discovery is good. She looks like something from the same universe as the rest of the ships in this series, but isn’t just recognizably the Enterprise: in its way, it helps bridge the visual gap between Discovery and the original series. Because Discovery‘s take on the Enterprise is very consistent with the look and feel of the movie-era Enterprise. Spock’s room, in particular, very strongly evokes its appearance at the beginning of Star Trek III. And once you see this, you start to realize that the whole visual style of Discovery is drawing from the movie era. It’s an update, of course, but there’s a much clearer kinship between the set and starship design of the movies and of Discovery (The most obvious example is that Discovery’s Red Alert icon is identical to the movie-era one). Worth noticing that Discovery’s design clearly took some inspiration from an early concept drawing for a possible Enterprise redesign for Phase II.
  • Interestingly, Enterprise looks quite a bit different from the schematic we saw of Defiant last season. Word of God is that Defiant, by then having spent most of a century in the hands of the Terran Empire, had been heavily modified.
  • As I mentioned at the opposite end of the season, we’re given only a very limited look at Enterprise. We see a few exterior shots, Spock’s quarters, and the hall outside them. I was disappointed at the time, but it’s a good move, because the gravity of the Enterprise permeates this episode enough as it is and lingering on it would only steal the show.
• There’s a kind of subtle reverence in the way the Discovery crew talks about the Enterprise. Clearly, we’re meant to understand that they are impressed by it. Reminds me more than a little of the way that the Terrans in Enterprise were clearly super impressed by Defiant and viewed it as advanced technology even though it looked screen-accurate to the original series and therefore like something out of the 1960s.
• The explanation of why Enterprise wasn’t involved in the war is part of that reverence, the notion that the ships that had been sent out on five-year missions represented the part of Starfleet they wanted to survive even if the rest fell. Coupled with my earlier observation about the visual style of Discovery, a bunch of other things fall into place too:
  • Why is Starfleet basically all Constitution-class ships in TOS? Because that was the fleet that had been out on five-year missions during the war, and therefore weren’t subject to the utter decimation that befell the rest of the fleet.
  • Why is the visual style of TOS so radically different from the visual style of the movie era? Because the movie-era style was already dominant in Kirk’s time in more metropolitan parts of the galaxy, but the war had forced Starfleet to use a lot of older ships in the hinterlands.
  • Why is Enterprise being retired in Star Trek II, and why do we never see any more Constitution-class ships after TOS (Whereas we see Excelsior-class ships into the TNG era)? It’s an old ship. It was already old in TOS, and had been kept in service beyond its originally planned lifetime because most of the fleet had been blown up.
• I love the crap out of Alice in Wonderland, so I dig its inclusion here as a book that was Meaningful to Spock and Michael as children.
• The stray leftover fortune cookie fortune Pike finds on Lorca’s desk is exactly as cute as it can be without crossing the line. “Not every cage is a prison and not every loss is eternal.”

There’s not much to specifically complain about; the major shortcoming of the episode is just that it’s a slow burn that spends a lot of its time arranging the field.

• The Enterprise crew have transitioned to “new uniforms”, Discovery‘s take on the TOS uniform. Even though it’s an updated design (They look to be the exact same cut as the “old” uniforms in use everywhere else, just in the TOS color scheme rather than Discovery blue), they do not really look like they belong in this visual motif.
• It is going to take me several weeks to warm to Anson Mount’s Pike. Don’t really care for him in this episode. Though, “Where’s my damn red thing?” is a good line.
• Lt. McJerkface is a pointless character who just wastes my time.
• Nhan is completely underused for the first half of the season and, like Reno, comes off like there’s something slightly sinister about her that they were waiting to reveal.
• It feels so much like Jett Reno is hiding something that it feels like a plot hole that, no, she’s not, that’s just her being gruff.
• There are some extended flashbacks covering Spock and Michael’s childhood which don’t add much to the story and feel emotionally manipulative. The buildup to the eventual reveal of Spock and Michael’s falling out (The full details of which will not come out until the middle of the season) feels way too protracted. The explanation that Sarek adopted Michael (apparently without consulting his wife first) because he felt Spock needed a human friend is gross.
  • Some might call this an odd angle on Sarek, but I do find it compelling to reveal, through Michael’s relationship with him, that there is much more to Sarek than what we saw interpreted through Spock. Two things in particular:
    • That Sarek deliberately exaggerates his Vulcan stoicism to Spock beyond how he actually feels, because he believes that, being half-human, Spock has a choice about which elements of his cultures he’s going to integrate into his identity and needs an absolute paragon of Vulcanity (Vulcanism?) to use as a role model. One gets the impression that Sarek might be inclined to show at least a small amount of affection to Spock if he weren’t worried it would confuse him. He comes off as a parent who took the idea that “consistency is important” too far.
      • If we assume that Sybok hasn’t been retconned out of existence, it helps justify this mindset; Sarek already had one kid completely fail to internalize the Vulcan way, and probably has some issues related to that.
    • That Sarek’s disapproval of Spock and Spock’s life choices exists more in Spock’s mind than in reality (Which culminates in the minor reveal in “Such Sweet Sorrow” that Sarek wants to reconcile with Spock, but is respecting Spock’s wishes to stay away). This also came up in the Abrams reboot, where we see Sarek show a very brief hint of approval when Spock tells the Vulcan Science Academy to go fuck itself after they insult his mother. And, like, per Star Trek V, Spock’s deepest pain is that his father’s immediate reaction when he was born was to dismiss him as, “So human.” But… Does Spock actually remember being born? Or is this just how he imagines it going from his experience of growing up with Sarek as a dad? I think in the novelization of the ’09 movie, they reenact this scene, but in context, it’s clear that Sarek’s comment isn’t dismissive, but affectionate – he’s saying that he looks like his mother.
• Sarek just kinda vanishes out of the narrative at the top of act 2. In the middle of Discovery’s important side-mission to track the red signals, Sarek can apparently just find his own way back to Vulcan. It’s not a problem from an emotional standpoint as Sarek and Spock don’t get along, but coupled with what we’ll see in “Such Sweet Sorrow”, one gets the impression Sarek can basically just zap around the galaxy under his own power like a space-tardigrade.
• They do not make it as clear as they ought to moving forward: seven signals appeared all at once then vanished. Only one of the signals lasted long enough to get exact coordinates (This is basic astronomy but could’ve used someone spelling it out: you have to use multiple observations from different positions to determine the location of something in space. How much difference in position you need depends on the precision of your measurements and how far away the subject is. The idea is that Enterprise couldn’t move far enough that the could triangulate the position of the signals. Presumably they could narrow it down to “somewhere along this line from our position,” but that leaves an awful lot of space to look at). The other signals which appear later in the season are the initial seven appearing again, giving Discovery time to triangulate them. Up until the end of the season, I wasn’t sure if the signals which they receive later were new in addition to the original seven.
• It’s never really explained why Starfleet puts such a high priority on these red signals. The rule Pike cites to assume command of Discovery suggests that his mission involves a potential apocalyptic threat to the entire Federation. And it does, but there’s no reason they should know that at this stage. It’s like they all just read the script.
  • You know what would’ve been a good explanation? Control. At this point, Control is still working for Starfleet, or is at least pretending to. Control would be positioned to recognize the signals as related to their aborted time travel experiment from 20 years ago and raise the alarm. Though you still have to explain why Control would let the Enterprise handle this instead of Leland.

No point in predictions for the future, but how about some elements that don’t get resolved?

• How did Spock have a vision of the signals ahead of time? We eventually establish that the red angel he saw as a child wasn’t the same one who sent them.
• What became of the “survivors” of the Hiawatha, one of whom appears to be a brain in a jar?
• The idea that Pike and Saru are sharing command of Discovery comes up, I think, one more time and is then forgotten.
• I feel like they originally had a better plan for what trashed Enterprise than, “Awkward retcon to explain why we don’t see holographic viewscreens again until DS9.” There’s plenty of reason by the end of the season to imagine that Gabrielle Burnham deliberately put Pike on Discovery as part of her attempts to stop Control, but the element of, “So I went back and EMP’d the hell out of his ship right as Discovery was passing by,” is missing.
  • I’d have liked to see “flashbacks” of timelines where that didn’t happen – Pike trying to stop Control from Enterprise and failing for want of a magic mushroom drive.
• Michael sees the Red Angel when she’s in danger on the collapsing Hiawatha, and it’s left briefly ambiguous whether that’s real or just her eyes playing tricks on her as Pike arrives to rescue her. It turns out that the Red Angel really was there, but not really why.

For this week’s endnote, I mentioned Sybok up above. Sybok’s most widely accepted backstory is that many years before meeting Amanda, Sarek married a Vulcan priestess. This is reasonable and makes a lot of sense as we know that Vulcan marriages are arranged in childhood (Arranged marriage seems like an odd thing for an advanced, egalitarian society to have, but it does fit when you view Vulcans as having a strong cultural apprehension about the potential for unchecked emotions to drive them to barbarism. You might say, “But won’t that lead to a lot of loveless marriages?” and they’d answer, “We can only hope.”). According to the expanded universe explanation, Sarek’s first wife was pursuing Kohlinar, a Vulcan monastic tradition. So she married as she was duty-bound to do, produced issue, and then, her obligation complete, got an annulment and retreated to the hills to become a monk. This is, presumably, a perfectly normal thing to do on Vulcan, which seems weird but fits with what we know about their society. They’ve got arranged marriage, but presumably they also have easy, no-fault divorce, and it’s also probably entirely common and normal for a married couple to have very little to do with one another (Are there gay Vulcans? Seems likely. They probably do much the same thing: marry and produce issue to fulfill their societal obligation, then divorce and pursue other options. Or indeed remain married but have little to do with one another. Vulcans seem not to have much of a taboo about premarital or extramarital sex as long as it’s just about meeting a biological need and not any of that icky emotional stuff, so it’s likely that the institution of marriage itself only really persists at all as a way of enshrining family lines). It’s easy to imagine that parental abandonment, particularly to pursue a lifestyle of extreme emotional suppression, might have pushed Sybok to eschew Vulcan asceticism. But if we presume that this isn’t in and of itself an unusual thing to happen, we can also see why Sarek would presume a serious fault in his own abilities as a single parent, leading him to adopt a more extreme position with Spock. It’s a shame I don’t like James Frain as Sarek, because he’s really well-served by the material in Discovery; Mark Lenard was a great actor, but his Sarek never got material this good, even in his quite good TNG appearances.