So the third episode of the season is, for me at least, the weakest. It’s not outright bad; I’ve yet to see Discovery dip all the way to “bad”. But it’s weak in a couple of ways. The B-plot is important moving forward, but the pacing is weak and its placement here feels like an unfortunate necessity; its thematic ties to the other plots are weak, but it can’t be logically slotted into either of the adjacent stories. The C-plot lapses into idiot-ball territory for a bit that’s incredibly disappointing, despite the gist of the overall story being okay. The A-plot, on the other hand, is a Klingon Intrigue.
I’m not saying it’s a bad Klingon Intrigue. But it’s a Klingon Intrigue. And up until we meet the timemasters of Boreth at the end of this season, the Klingons in Discovery pretty much suck.
To provide context for this week’s episode, I will now relate (with the possibility of me getting some things wrong because I only skimmed those episodes) the Tragedy of Ash Tyler:
So the whole Klingon War thing last season was touched off when Michael Burnham’s impulsive actions and betrayal of her commander led to the death of the Klingon messiah. Said Messiah had appointed a Klingon named Voq as his “Torchbearer”, a duty whose details I did not bother to learn, but the implication was clear that he was the fake-out Big Bad we were meant to be expecting to come back at the end of the season. Instead, what actually happened is that the Klingons captured and gutted a guy named Ash Tyler. As part of a Ridiculously Deep Cover assignment, Voq was surgically and genetically altered to look like Tyler via an incredibly gruesome and nasty process, and on top of that, they used the mind probe or something to pump Voq’s brain full of Tyler’s memories and personality to the point that he could pass, if not for Tyler exactly, for “Tyler after the massive psychological trauma of intense, prolonged torture.” And to make sure he could pass any Starfleet brainwashing tests, Voq’s own memory and personalities were heavily suppressed. Voq was then dumped in a cell with the captured Captain Lorca so they could escape together and he could get adopted onto Discovery. Tyler had little occasional flashes of Voq, but these were largely dismissed as PTSD. Discovery eventually captures Voq’s girlfriend L’Rell, who presumably let them do it because her plan was to reawaken Voq. Around the same time as Discovery was getting knocked into the Mirror Universe, Hugh scanned just the right thing to turn up evidence of Tyler’s true nature, and he Voq’d out enough to murder him. I did not watch this part, but I gather that what ended up happening was that the Tyler personality was too strong to just go quietly into that good night, and somehow they persuaded L’Rell to delete Voq’s original personality rather than lose both of them. So Tyler at this point is technically less “Voq wearing Tyler like a meat-suit” and more “Tyler got uploaded into a new body which was surgically altered to resemble his old one,” which is kinda similar to a thing that happened on an episode of Voyager years ago, only better thought-out, and probably why on balance most folks are willing to accept him as “Tyler”. At the end of the season, to win the war, Discovery goes right up to the edge of grimdark, but then forcefully backs away by declining to blow up the Klingon homeworld, but instead helps L’Rell get herself installed as Chancellor to unite the warring Klingon factions, which somehow will make them less of a threat to the Federation (just roll with it). To help nudge the Klingons away from resuming hostilities, Tyler reclaims Voq’s title of Torchbearer and remains on Qo’nos with L’Rell.
Also Tyler and Michael are lowkey in love with each other.
But we’ll get back to the Klingons in a minute. Over in the C-plot, Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly is still being haunted by visions of May Ahearn, who seems friendly enough and cheers her on during a half-marathon, but Tilly is having none of it. So, of course, having recently suffered severe head trauma at the hands of exotic matter, Tilly does the obvious thing and goes and tells her doctor what she’s experiencing and submits herself to an array of tests to figure out whether the dark matter or the head injury has done something that needs treatment. No, I’m just kidding, she does what people always do in TV shows and decides that her realistic, persistent hallucinations are actually an indication of a weakness in her character, and hides it until it leads to a major outburst in front of Captain Pike, then quits the command training program because obviously she’s “too weak”. Among the Klingons, L’Rell shows off the plans for the D-7 to the Klingon council, but Asshole Klingon TimKol-Sha challenges her on being too friendly with the humans. L’Rell and Tyler stress out a bit privately. He’s mad that she doesn’t trust him like Voq, she’s mad that he doesn’t act like Voq. She’s still got feelings for him, but he’s not really Voq any more, and he’s still got feelings for her, but also, he did kinda torture him a whole lot. Also, he’s been making secret long-distance hologram calls to Michael on the DL. Tyler eventually finds out that L’Rell’s uncle is hiding her secret baby – Voq hadn’t known she was pregnant when he had himself Tyler’d. Finding out that he’s got a kid changes Tyler’s tune about L’Rell and he’s willing to try to make a proper Klingon family with her.
Back in the C-plot, Michael helps Tilly work out that May is an alien and not a hallucination, and with some help from Stamets, they work out that Tilly picked up some fungus from mushroom space that the dark matter powered-up enough to manifest as a hallucination. Over May’s protests, Stamets uses a dark matter sample to yoink the parasite out of Tilly and lock it in a force field where I am sure it will never come up again.
Turns out Kol-Sha had Tyler tracked, kills the uncle and abducts the baby. He demands L’Rell’s abdication and pokes them both with a torture stick, then prepares to kill all three of them anyway, because evil, but a hooded assassin zaps Kol-Sha’s henchmen out of existence and traps Kol-Sha so that L’Rell can finish him off. The assassin turns out to be Former Terran Empress Evil!Georgiou, who spirits Tyler and the baby away. L’Rell presents convincing duplicates of their severed heads to the council with the cover story that Tyler had turned traitor, and Kol-Sha had been martyred defending her, and declares herself the symbolic mother of all Klingons. Tyler drops the baby off on Boreth to be raised by the monks, and accepts Georgiou’s offer to join Starfleet’s Morally Ambiguous-to-Cartoonishly-Evil branch, Section 31.
While all this is going on, there is a B-plot where Amanda shows up on Discovery. She stole Spock’s medical records from the facility where he was checked in. Michael narcs her out to Pike immediately, and calls the hospital. They tell him that Spock murdered a bunch of people and busted out. This sounds fishy enough to Pike that he orders Burnham to decrypt Spock’s medical file, whose contents seem to reaffirm that Spock had some kind of massive breakdown. Amanda tells her about Spock’s first encounter with the Red Angel, which they’d assumed was just a child’s mind processing subconscious clues to help them find Michael after she’d run away from home. Michael confesses to having emotionally wounded Spock in the hopes that driving him away would protect him from the Logic Extremists. Amanda pretty much drops Michael like a hot potato and declares her intention to go save Spock all by her damn self.
Meh. Okay, I get what they’re going for here, and a lot of it is just plain necessary for setting the board up the way they want it. But I’m just not into it. I can’t really separate out a “good” and “bad” list this week even, so here’s a hybridized “things I am interested in” list:
- Now that I know where Georgiou’s storyline is going, most of my annoyance at her reappearance here has faded. When she drops out of the story near the end of the season 1 finale, it felt so much like the implication was that she would one day return as a Big Bad. But no, there’s rather a sense here of Georgiou as an emblem of Section 31: Starfleet’s dark mirror, but one that it is choosing to embrace (loosely) rather than deny. If Discovery really is a show about healing, then I can’t begrudge them for wanting to include Georgiou as an object lesson in, “She is not one of us, she will never be one of us. But yes, we can find a place for her among us, and we will not reject her.” That, and long last, is a role for Secton 31 beyond “Starfleet’s Cartoonishly Evil Branch”: this utopian project needed a place where even people like Leland and Tyler and Georgiou could go and make a positive impact on the universe.
- Mia Kirshner’s Amanda Grayson is great. She really does feel true both to Jane Wyatt’s TOS version and also Wynonna Ryder’s Abramsverse version.
- I know what they’re going for. There’s a parallel meant to be happening here centered around the concept of fierce motherhood, between L’Rell and Amanda. It’s the closest those plots come to belonging in the same episode. But no. I just said Mia Kirshner’s Amanda is great, but this just pisses me off. So much of her plot in this episode is coded around the unintentional implication that Michael was always secondary to her. That the affection Amanda showed Michael as a child was only what she was displacing because she wasn’t permitted to be as affectionate to Spock as she wanted. And when she learns how Michael hurt Spock, her response is so cold, she’s basically just disowned her adopted daughter. I can’t imagine what watching this scene would be like to someone in the audience who was adopted. This largely disappears the next time we see her, so I’m calling that scene an aberration, but it sucks hardcore.
- “My Klingon girlfriend is upset that every time she kisses me I recoil in horror and also the Klingons all think I’m a double agent for the Federation. I think I’ll go place a secret call to my Federation girlfriend to tell her everything that’s going on.” Good job, Tyler.
- Tyler’s major roles for the rest of the season are to share one episode with Pike, gaining his trust; to get punched a few times; to be a deflection that cover’s Ariem’s subversion by control; and to show up with the cavalry in the final battle. That’s pretty much it, and pretty much why he has to be removed from Qo’nos and moved to Discovery. And… I mean, it mostly feels like a waste. The whole big thing of separating Tyler and Michael last season and having him go with the Klingons was a satisfying way for his arc to go. Having him come back literally the first time we see him this season is… It’s just kind of meh.
- Also, having Tyler remain as Torchbearer seemed like it would fit in really nicely with the Klingon Forehead Problem. We know why there are smooth-headed Klingons thanks to that Enterprise episode, but Discovery-era Klingons have forehead ridges. Why would TOS-era Klingons uniformly lack them, but a few years later, everyone’s got them again? Blame Tyler. A “Klingon” of his important position, torchbearer and lover of the chancellor, decides to go for the smooth-headed look, and for a couple of years, it becomes fashionable all over the empire to not bother with ridge-reconstruction surgery after you get the Klingon Forehead Flu. (I’m one of the few people who really likes Enterprise‘s solution to the Klingon Forehead Problem. Not that we needed one, but given that we got one, it fits so well, since “During certain periods, many Klingons lost their foreheads and may later have had them surgically reconstructed,” covers everything, from the human-looking Klingons of TOS, to the classic TOS Klingons appearing in the new style in Deep Space Nine, to the variation in Klingon makeup over the years, even the really doofy-looking Klingon we see briefly at the beginning of Star Trek The Motion Picture.) But alas, that explanation seems rather out the door now.
- Gah. The whole thing with Tilly assuming she’s going crazy and not talking to anyone about her problem. This is ’90s TV bullshit. Discovery is better than this. It just covers up the fact that it would take precisely two seconds to resolve that plot if she’d just talk to someone.
- Kudos, by the way, for it taking precisely two seconds to resolve that plot once she talks to someone. I dig how Michael works it out: she hears Tilly explaining the concept of crying to May, and instantly concludes that a figment of Tilly’s imagination would know what crying was.
- I like that May views Stamets as the captain of Discovery rather than Pike.
- More idiot-ball stuff, though: Tilly’s complete unwillingness to hear May out at the end. They’re just like “Let’s rip it out of me and lock it up and make sure we do not give it a chance to just explain what it wants because it certainly seems like it isn’t actually hostile and has one specific thing that it really wants to communicate.” This is all here because that part of the plot can’t be allowed to happen until next week. Spoilers: next week they’re going to let it out and let it tell them what it wants, and they will be pretty sympathetic and willing to help.
- Throwaway line from the cold open: Sarek has assembled a team to investigate the red signals. This never comes up again. It’s just there so we can be surprised when it’s Amanda and not Sarek who beams aboard.
- The attempts to leave open the possibility that Spock really has become a murderous psychopath (under some adverse outside influence) is so completely no-sold that I’m almost offended they’re even pretending to try.
- Before you say, “Well duh of course Spock didn’t kill those people,” remember that most incarnations of Star Trek have had the occasional episode where a regular has been possessed or controlled by some entity that could compel them to do something like that. Scotty got possessed by the ghost of Jack the Ripper once. Man, Trek gets weird some times.
- Tyler comments on the accuracy of his fake head, implying that it’s beyond normal Federation technology to make such a simulacrum. This may be our first hint of how advanced Section 31 is.
- Leland mentions that Control had recommended recruiting Tyler, giving no more specific reason than his “skills”. Wonder if Control was thinking ahead to using him as a misdirect against Pike. Or just exploiting his relationship with Michael.
So on balance, not a great episode. Most weeks, there’s a few problems, even real wall-bangers, but the high notes more than make up for them. This time, there’s just not enough high notes, and the result is a resounding “meh”. It’s especially disappointing after how good “New Eden” was. But fortunately, we’ve got a real solid one coming up next.