“New Eden” starts me down the path of learning to love Anson Mount’s Pike. He doesn’t quite have his performance down right, but the character is heading in the right direction. It’s directed by Jonathan Frakes, and, fittingly, there’s a certain “retro” aspect to this episode – it’s plotted and paced much more like a TNG-era “procedural” than Discovery’s typically action-heavy style. All the same, it touches on two of the recurring elements of Discovery’s structure: strong parallels between plot elements, and revisiting common Trek motifs with modern sensibilities. This is to a large extent an episode about when and how it is appropriate to break the rules in pursuit of a worthy goal, and it addresses those issues with far more nuance than we have historically gotten from Trek, which usually either goes with “The ends don’t justify the means, that’s the way to the dark side!” or “The ends totally justify the means because it’s the late ’90s and we’re all grimdark and antiheroic!” This is, of all things, a Prime Directive episode, but, miraculously, one that doesn’t suck.
They’ve picked up one of the Red Things again, and remember my little digression before about how triangulation works? Yeah, they come out and literally do it. There’s a layer of obfuscating technobabble around it, but the principle is exactly what I said: take a bearing, jump to warp for a couple of seconds, take another bearing, and use trigonometry to figure out where the signal is coming from. Where the signal is coming from turns out to be the far-end of the Beta quadrant, a century and a half away at warp. Now, the spore drive has been officially decommissioned because of the whole thing where you need a genetically modified human to pilot it, but Pike reckons that if Starfleet was willing to overlook that during the war, they’ll also grant an exception due to the exceptional graveness of the Mysterious Red Thingies mission. Thus, despite Stamets being super uncomfortable about it, they magic mushroom themselves to a planet which I will call “Terralysium” on account of that is its name. Once there, they discover a non-technological human settlement that’s been broadcasting a distress signal on a loop since World War III. So we get a very TNG-style mystery episode: someone transported an enclave of pre-warp humans halfway across the galaxy. Pike assumes it’s linked to the reg signals, and is clearly cozying up to the idea that it’s Godlike Aliens. Pike decides to beam down and have a reconnoiter, taking Michael on account of she’s the main character, and also Joann Owosekun, because she grew up in a Luddite community on Earth. Because there are such things on twenty-third century Earth, and that’s nice. They go snooping around the local church – the only Earth-original structure on the planet – and learn that the Terralysians practice a syncretic cargo cult religion that mixes and matches Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Wicca, Shinto, basically everything the writers could think of, centered around the salvific figure of a “Red Angel” that removed their ancestors from Earth before its presumed destruction. And I know what you’re expecting, but no, Discovery does not go that way and have the away team run afoul of local taboos and get burned at the stake by religious fanatics. The Terralysian religion was built from a diverse community needing to set aside their differences and find common ground, and, miraculously, that still seems central to their culture; Pike presents his gang as travelers from another settlement, and the local All-Mother is cool with that and gives them a little backstory about settling here and building a happy agrarian society whose tourism revenue has been way down now that the church lights are out, what with the only technology they’ve had in two hundred years being one lantern battery and a soldier’s helmet cam (hint hint). But Jacob, the maintenance guy, doesn’t take these strangers at face value and figures out their game. He steals their stuff locks them in the basement in order to prove to everyone else that technologically advanced humans still exist elsewhere in the universe. Pike and the gang escape, but Jacob left a phaser where a little kid could find it and Pike has to throw himself in front of it to keep her from shooting someone. Seriously wounded, he entreats Michael not to violate the Prime Directive to save him, so she convinces the All-Mother to take him to the church and pray, a prayer which is seemingly answered when they get beamed up.
Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Discovery finds out that one of the planet’s rings is about to dump a bunch of radiation on the planet and kill everyone. Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly gets a concussion from screwing with a bit of dark matter. With moral support from a medic named May, Adorably Concussed Ensign Tilly comes up with a plan to save the planet by whanging the dark matter asteroid out the back of the ship like an Olympic hammer toss to, I think, act like a little shepherd moon. Pike agrees to make a very small exception to the Prime Directive and fess up to Jacob along with giving him a brand new extended-life battery for the church lights, in exchange for the helmet. The helmet cam recording doesn’t honestly tell them anything except that the Red Angel is definitely the thing Michael saw on the Hiawatha. Adorably Convalescing Ensign Tilly remembers where she knows May from and looks up her file – and it turns out that May died years ago in a shuttle accident. Duh-Duh-DUNNNNN!
So much goodness here, and very little shakeycam. To wit:
- Terralysium is doomed and Discovery saved it. This is fairly close to the plot of two different TNG Prime Directive episodes, but while those ones suck and blow most of their runtime on the crew agonizing about the ethical implications of fucking around with pre-warp civilizations, or whether or not God “evolution” somehow “wanted” them dead. No, they’re just like, “Hey, we should probably prevent this extinction event.”
- The all-mother is heavily coded with this sort of Tilda Swinton Evil Gynarch Zealot thing going on like we’ve seen approximately a hundred zillion times. But then… She’s really not at all like that. There’s no threatening with being burned at the stake or being tortured for asking heretical questions. In fact, there’s a few times when Michael comes pretty close to being dismissive about their religion and cozying up to saying, “Hey, maybe it was aliens and not an angel,” and she pretty much just rolls with it and is like, “Yeah, okay, but does that distinction even matter?”, and Jacob’s belief that some humans on Earth also survived the war is met not with punishment but with a sort of, “Even if so, what are we supposed to do about that?”
- The whole treatment of the Terralysian religion feels true to some of the themes we’ve seen in Star Trek over the years, but is far more respectful, lacking Trek’s usual smug, “Look at how silly these primitive aliens are believing in religions which are clear proxies for contemporary Earth religions. Thank Science that modern future-humans have long since stopped believing such nonsense,” attitude. There is a strong focus on the idea that their beliefs are reasonable given their circumstance, and the Terralysian religion is not built on a foundation of exclusion and of shutting out new ideas, but rather out of really radical inclusion and community-building.
- Speaking of, Pike refers to Clark’s law, and reveals a post-First-Contact corollary: Any sufficiently advanced alien is indistinguishable from God. That’s sort of the crux of what makes Discovery‘s approach here different and more respectful than traditional Trek: Gene Roddenbery was inordinately, “God turns out to just be a powerful alien, possibly working a scam” plots. It’s peppered all through the TOS and early TNG eras and is tightly coupled into the DS9 mythos. But Discovery doesn’t quite go there: they challenge the very idea that the difference even matters. They question what material difference it would make whether a powerful external entity is understood as a god or an alien. With the exception of the Bajoran Prophets, “God that turns out to be an alien,” had almost invariably been depicted in Trek as a false god. Pike challenges the idea that “extraterrestrial intelligence” and “divine being” are mutually exclusive categories.
- Pike’s dad was an astrophysicist who also taught comparative religion. Cool backstory.
- Parallel constructions: Tilly’s injury and Pike’s injury. Discovery’s use of the magnetic properties of the dark matter asteroid to huck it into orbit and Owosekun’s use of a magnet to free them from the cellar. Pike’s decision to make an exception to the prohibition on the spore drive and his decision to make an exception to the Prime Directive. The Red Angel, as an alien sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from a god, with May, an alien sufficiently spooky as to be indistinguishable from a ghost. For that matter, Michael seeing the Red Angel while concussed on the Hiawatha with Tilly seeing May while concussed in sickbay.
- By the way, Pike refers to the Prime Directive exclusively as “General Order One”. It’s always “The Prime Directive” from the TNG era onward, but “General Order One” is one of the ways it’s referred to in its TOS appearances. (I don’t think Voyager ever uses the alternate name, but it does once refer to “General Order Zero”, the sooper-seekrit rule that allows a captain to go right ahead and play god with pre-warp civilizations in cases involving the extremely dangerous Omega Particle)
- Pike’s interpretation of General Order One evades the usual bullshit idiot plot stuff that usually comes into play in Prime Directive episodes. He clearly views it primarily in terms of respecting other civilizations. There’s no navel-gazing about what god or nature “wants”, but rather, it’s about treating pre-warp civilizations as being worthy of finding their own path rather than bringing fire down from Olympus for them along with some stone tablets. And it’s only himself he’s willing to put on the line for it; the prototypical Prime Directive episode is about the Starfleet crew’s willingness to condemn other civilizations to destruction rather than reveal themselves. So when Pike does decide to bend the rule, he does it in a way that respects this: he tells one man the truth, for that man’s own personal satisfaction, and trusts him with how he will use that knowledge. Pike is, at last, Star Trek captain whose approach to the law is neither, “Screw the rules!” nor “The law is sacred and we imperil our souls to break it,” but rather a man who understands the spirit of a law as distinct from the letter, and is willing to bend the latter but not the former.
- The chemistry between May and Tilly is so good Leah assumed they were going to hook up until it turned out May was a ghost.
- I do not believe that having Discovery do a “donut” in the outer ring is in and of itself per se “cool”, but I really enjoy that Detmer thinks it is.
- Technically, the name of Discovery’s weird magic engine is the “Displacement-Activated Mycelial Spore Hub Drive”. I call it the Magic Mushroom Drive because I think it is funny to do so. But everything about Pike’s reaction to it is wonderful. He even refers to taking the “highway made of magic mushrooms”, and his reaction to the jump brings back some of the sense of wonder that faded in the first season as the spore drive became regularized as part of the show’s mechanic.
- “Be bold. Be brave. Be courageous. Black alert.”
The weaker points, and honestly this is probably a pattern in this season, stem mostly from how full of stuff each episode is, and what can’t be given more time as a consequence:
- Like Owosekun’s presence on the away team. It’s almost a reverse of Jett Reno: Owosekun proves key in resolving a plot conflict by unlocking the trap door, but the character stuff with her being from a Luddite culture is strangely irrelevant to the episode. She barely interacts with the Terralysians at all. I’m super curious about her backstory now, but it never comes up again, and given how the season ended, there’s little chance of a future episode about her relationship with her family – did they disown her for refusing to follow their non-luddic path, as per shitty cliches? Or were they loving and supportive even though she chose a radically different life-path?
- On reflection, though, maybe it’s for the best, since having a dark-skinned woman of color be the person on your ship whose native culture is technologically backward is possibly a dangerous place for the narrative to go.
- Speaking of, Jett Reno is gone and you’d be forgiven for assuming they dropped her off with the rest of the Hiawatha crew between episodes for some vacation and therapy.
- Michael is… Kind of an asshole for no good reason this week. Right from the start, she pushes back hard against Pike (and Saru) for their eagerness to view the red signals as something quasi-divine (here not necessarily meaning anything more than that they are the product of an advanced and benevolent intelligence which has specific intentions for them), she’s kind of resentful about being forced to follow the Prime Directive, and is kind of pushy against the all-mother, like she’s deliberately trying to get them all burned as witches or something. I guess it’s part of her character arc about her coming to trust Pike (by finding a way to obey his order not to reveal their true nature to the locals when he’s bleeding out from a gut wound), but mostly it just comes off as her being an asshole.
- Similarly, we get a rare exception to Discovery’s ban on idiot-ball character bullshit when Michael doesn’t tell Pike about her vision at the beginning of the episode when he pretty much straight-up asks her if there’s anything else she knows that might relate to the signals and Spock’s visions. Now, at the end of the episode, she does tell him, and her explanation there works – she didn’t say anything before because until she saw the Terralysian depiction of the Red Angel, she thought it was just a hallucination. But the framing of the earlier scene of Pike asking and her not telling is very clearly conveying that she did too think it was relevant at the time, but held back.
- The parallels between Jacob’s story and Saru’s backstory from “The Brightest Star” are so strong that it feels like a massively missed opportunity for the two not to meet, or at least for Saru to give Pike no input on his decision to break the Prime Directive. We don’t get to see the nuts and bolts that go into the matter of why Jacob gets to stay behind on Terralysium with his advanced knowledge of the rest of humanity, while Saru was spirited away from Kaminar, never to return.
- Y’know, though, the weight they give to Pike’s decision to break the prohibition and put Stamets into the position of having to pilot the spore drive again, while appropriate to this episode, makes last season’s last scenes seem a little weird, because back then, Stamets was very casually like, “Hey, I know Starfleet is going to wait until they can use spore drives without gene-editing humans, but I don’t mind spinning it up one more time to get us to Vulcan quicker if you want.”
- What is it with shuttle accidents, anyway? It seems to be a disproportionately common way for people to be killed or mangled in the Star Trek universe.
- This whole “We took every religion and mashed it up together to make a new faith” thing is lovely and all, but you still called the capital “New Eden“.
Since last we spoke, the title for the next upcoming Star Trek series, about the later life of Jean-Luc Picard, has been revealed to be “Star Trek: Picard”.
I hope the consultant cashed the check real quick. We know very little about the show at this point beyond that it will star Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes will direct the premiere. One detail they’ve mentioned, though, is a link to the Abrams reboot, as an element of the premise is that Picard’s life has been upended by the sudden dissolution of the Romulan Empire. The backstory to the 2009 movie Star Trek is that Picard spent many of the years following Star Trek Nemesis working with Spock on peace with the Romulans, which became a moot point when a big ol’ chunk of the empire got eaten by a supernova.
Can we all agree that the idea premise for this series is, “Old man Picard feels purposeless and adrift and just bums around the galaxy being crochety and shaking his cane at kids these days”?