Some Blundering about Star Trek Discovery 2×05: Saints of Imperfection

I was hoping to have the next War of the Worlds II post out this week, but side 2 is a slog and I haven’t been able to sit through more than 30 seconds of it at a stretch. So instead, this:

I’ve said more than a few times that season 2 of Discovery seems like it changes direction significantly in the middle of the season. From what I’ve heard and seen, I think the showmakers originally wanted this season to be much more loosely-plotted series of episodes with overlapping and interconnected subplots and themes, but that were primarily stand-alone, something a bit in the vein of modern Doctor Who. The second half of the season, though is basically a single, ongoing story divided into chapters, more in the “nine-hour movie with regular bathroom breaks” style that’s become popular for streaming series. Both have their merits, though I’m a little more interested in the latter for this show simply because it’s somewhere Star Trek has never boldly gone before. Possibly this episode is a casualty of that change in direction, because a big chunk of its plot is something that feels like setup for the future, but never comes up again.

When we left off last week, Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly had been eaten by a fungus creature called May from Magic Mushroom Space. The closing shot of the episode had her awaken somewhere spooky and gooey, so it should be no surprise that she was not, in fact, killed. Stamets works out that if she had been eaten, there’d be some bits left over, so he concludes that the fungus cocoon is actually a biological transporter and it beamed Tilly into the mycelial network. May helps Tilly out of the gross anus-end of the mushroom transporter, because May can manifest physically in mushroom space, and explains that her people, the jahSepp, are a race of spores that break down and repurpose matter that finds its way into the mycelial plane, and they are in imminent danger of being wiped out by a monster she’d rather like Tilly to kill for her. While this is going on, Discovery catches up to Spock’s shuttle, but it contains not Spock, but Evil!Georgiou, who presents herself to Pike as a retired Starfleet Captain, now working as an independent security consultant on contract to Section 31. Leland, who’s an old friend of Pike’s, calls up on the hologram phone to tell him to let Georgiou handle the Spock-finding, and sends him Ash Tyler as a liaison. Pike does not immediately take to the brainwashed Klingon wearing a dead man’s skin. Stamets locates the receiving transport pod in mushroom space, and comes up with the idea of pulling the handbrake halfway through a spore jump to jam Discovery sideways in the multiverse so him and Burnham can walk out into the mycelial plane to find Tilly. This requires everyone else on the ship standing on the opposite side like in those old Columbian coffee commercials so they don’t die. Also, mushroom space will slowly eat the ship, and also this is an inherently unstable thing to do, so they will only have roughly the length of a CBS All Access Streaming Original Program to find her and get out safely. Typically, Pike frets a little but ultimately consents, and Discovery does a cool barrel roll and crashes itself into mushroom space. May and Tilly team up with Stamets and Michael and agree to go save the Magic Mushroom People by hunting the monster. Only it turns out that the monster is a filthy, ferral Hugh Culber. Yeah, so when Hugh died last season, Stamets was suffering from a bad case of interdimensional epilepsy due to Lorca goading him into overusing the spore drive until he accidentally whanged them into the Mirror Universe. And Stamets reckons that because Hugh died in his arms while he was smeared between dimensions, he acted like an existential lightning rod and siphoned off some vaguely described quality from the dying Hugh that they don’t come right out and say is his soul, but they definitely mean it’s his soul, and the jahSepp didn’t know what to do with it and built him a new body to the original spec. Only humans don’t belong in magic mushroom space, so they tried to take him apart again, and he objected. By smearing himself with the poisonous bark of a mushroom-space tree that May had helpfully foreshadowed to Tilly earlier. Stamets eventually manages to calm Hugh down, though May still wants to kill him, and goes as far as stealing a phaser to try to do it herself, but Tilly talkes her down too, because they’re friends now I guess. Discovery’s in serious danger of falling the rest of the way out of the universe, so Tyler calls Leland (whose ship was hiding nearby disguised as a rock), to give them a tow. Georgiou even lends a hand to get them some extra power and buy Discovery a couple more minutes. Hugh starts to dissolve when they try to bring him into the spore cube to return to normal space, because his new body is made out of mushroom-space matter, like May’s. He accepts his fate and is willing to wipe off the bark and let the jahSepp eat him, but then they remember the mushroom transporter, which can beam things from Mushroom Space to Normal Space, and May escorts Hugh off to do that while Stamets rolls the ship back out of the hole it’s in. The cocoon crumbles to reveal a shiny, new, tastefully nude Hugh Culber shivering on the floor. While he’s being declared physically fit and still human, Cornwall shows up (I guess travel is a free action in act 4 as well) to tell Pike and Leland that they’re both pretty and had better stop being jerks to each other. Pike promises to remember that not everyone has to be a boy scout and Leland promises to remember that shady, morally-compromised antiheroes need to be content with supporting cast roles on this show, and they agree to work together. Georgiou calls up Michael to demand a thank-you and also to unsubtly indicate that it would probably be better if Michael found Spock before she did.

A fairly low-key episode where the stakes aren’t galactic, but personal: at the beginning, Discovery is at risk of losing an adorable crewmember, but at the end they’re plus one. It’s also a more thorough introduction of Leland and reintroduction of Evil!Georgiou than we got in “Point of Light”. But mostly, this episode is INCREDIBLY BEAUTIFUL. It is a real cool effect every time Discovery magic mushrooms itself somewhere, and as the season goes on, they sadly play that down a lot, using shots from the perspective of the destination, so you just see the ship sort of woomph down out of nowhere, but here, we’ve basically got an episode whose middle half is pretty much set in that special effect, and it’s cool. So cool. Also:

• I mean, come on. Yeah, yeah, it robs the whatever of its powerful whatever. But I can’t be the only one who was pissed when they took the first canonical gay couple in televised Star Trek and just offhandedly killed one of them for no real reason and without his killer ever really facing any kind of punishment. It’s not even a fridging really since Stamets is too donked up in the head at the time for Hugh’s death to be a motivation. When you come right down to it, it’s better for Hugh to be alive than to be dead, and Discovery is a better show with him in it, so yeah, the show about broken people healing brought back the dead. It’s a good move.
• And while I don’t think Tyler’s character is worth it, yeah, it makes sense as part of the character-logic of this universe that Tyler’s road to healing himself must bring him back to Discovery.
• Did I mention that Discovery stuck half-in and half-out of mushroom space looks SO COOL.
• May’s not a bad guy. The “monster” she was afraid of isn’t a bad guy. Even Leland isn’t a bad guy. See, this is peak Discovery being Discovery. A show where being the antagonist doesn’t mean you’re bad, just that your goals are opposed, and where the happy ending isn’t the antagonist’s defeat, but a synthesis where both sides can find a way to get what they need. Five episodes in, and we’ve only had one actual villainous character, and that was in the Klingon episode I didn’t like. We get to enjoy this sort of thing just a bit longer; once Control takes on an antagonistic role, we’re transitioning into a more traditional heroes-and-villains narrative.
• Good series of setups and foreshadowing with Stamets’s description of how the cocoon works establishing its use at the end to bring Hugh back, and combining with May’s description of her people to lay the groundwork for his resurrection in the first place.
• I’ve never liked Section 31. Section 31 grew out of ugly ’90s fanboy impulses to “fix” Star Trek by injecting some grimdark ’90s antiheroism. They don’t work as “Starfleet’s Evil Branch”. But Leland here, if you can take him on the level, points to a way to actually make Section 31 work. As I alluded to when they turn up in “Point of Light”, you can make Section 31 work if instead of “Grimdark Evil Starfleet”, you approach it as, “Even if you’re too broken for the shiny utopia of Starfleet, we can still find a place for you, where you can fit in and do good.” Or as Georgiou put it, a place for the “freaks”.
  • Is it deliberate symbolism that the place you go that’s a little darker is where a photophobic former-Evil-Empress goes to find her place?
  • Unfortunately, the followthrough on Leland is scattershot. He spends the next five or so episodes strongly coding as evil, then basically gets one episode to reinforce, “No, he’s a jerk and a bit grimdark, but he’s on the side of the angels,” before getting possessed by Control and turned into a comic book supervillain. This is one place where I think possibly the original pre-direction-change version of Leland was meant to be less sympathetic, and his more noble qualities inserted here are back-ports.
• Section 31 ships can’t cloak, but can disguise themselves as asteroids. This is probably a continuity thing to avoid Starfleet having cloaking technology, but I’m okay with it because it’s a neat idea, the lack of anyone on Discovery noticing that they’re being followed by a large rock notwithstanding.
• Tyler having a commbadge is a cool and quiet way to show us the rough technological edge Section 31 has over the rest of Starfleet. Though Pike’s startled, angry reaction is maybe a little too much.
• I like that May doesn’t even seem to realize that Hugh is the same kind of being as Tilly and the others. A lot of the things that are confusing or seem wrong about the going on of Magic Mushroom Space can be viewed as the result of May not fully understanding what’s going on in terms meaningful to a human, on account of her being, y’know, an interdimensional space fungus.
• The title for this episode is apparently a quote from Guillermo del Toro. So that’s cool.
• “Mr. Stamets, are you ready to execute this very bold, deeply insane plan of yours?” This is probably the point where I gave in and started really liking Anson Mount’s Pike.

Discovery is a show that operates first on character logic, and second on plot logic. That doesn’t mean that the plot logic doesn’t matter, just that a logical error or omission in a plot is a smaller deal than someone acting against their own character. That emphasis is a big part of why Discovery is light on Idiot Ball plots: it’s not true to the characters that they would suddenly become stone stupid or hide things from people they trust, even though there’s an easy and logical plot to be had from it (And when they did engage in an idiot plot for a chunk of “Point of Light”, it was Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly doing it, the one character for whom getting angsty and insecure and making bad decisions based on that is perfectly in-character). But there are times when the plot logic is sacrificed too much in favor of the character logic, and there’s times when they try to have it both ways, and the results are clumsy:

• Thankfully, they stay very vague about the mechanics of Hugh’s resurrection. Like I said, it’s better for him to be alive than to be dead, so let’s just roll with it. But there’s a lot going on here that hand-waves just a bit too hard. In particular, they radically under-sell him as a threat to the jahSepp. According to May, he’s destroying their ecosystem. But how? They want us to believe that the danger is that he’s covered himself in a bark that’s toxic to them. But the bark is native; the jahSepp know how to live around it. And he did that because they were trying to eat him. Why not just, y’know, not do that? May is able to call her people off of trying to eat Tilly, so we know the jahSepp have a choice about what they consume. The idea that Hugh’s very presence is damaging independent of the jahSepp not being able to eat him (The implication that if he cleaned off the bark, the jahSepp could eat him and solve the problem) is not really explained or even confirmed. And if it’s true, it seems like the implication would be that Discovery using the spore drive to pass through would also be a persistent environmental problem, which doesn’t seem to be the case. There’s room here for an answer, that the network is resilient against transientforeign bodies like Discovery, or against foreign bodies the jahSepp can consume, but that something which neither leaves the network nor gets broken down can damage it (An analogy to mesothelioma might work here). But that’s complicated enough that something ought to have been said.
  • But if HughTwo is made of mycelial matter, why is he a foreign body? Is this a cancer analogy?
  • And why is he on Discovery when they find him and not wandering around outside? How’d he get in without anyone noticing?
  • For the future: Is there an intention here to suppose Lorca might come back this way? As I recall, he died by getting impaled by Evil!Georgiou and tossed into the Evil Multiverse-Destroying Giant Mirror Spore Engine.
  • Per a couple of weeks ago, May grew from one of the spores that showered down on them last season when they repaired the Terrans’ damage to Magic Mushroom Space and returned to their own universe. That was the first time that they did a spore jump after Hugh’s death. And they haven’t exactly done a lot of them since. It’s not necessarily wrong for May to know about events in Mushroom Space that took place after her spore came to Discovery, since she seems to still be connected to her home dimension, but they really ought to have explained something this important more clearly.
• The idea that the jahSepp would instinctively rebuild Hugh’s body around his “soul” as it passed into mushroom space is interesting, but the idea that they’d do this and then immediately try to eat him again is a weird enough idea that it needed more explanation.
• Why doesn’t Tilly need to use the cocoon to return to normal space? Where did the second cocoon get normal matter to make her body out of?  I shouldn’t need to rely on outside knowledge from Stargate to make sort this out.
  • To wit, there’s an episode of Stargate SG-1 where someone gets stuck on account of the sending gate being destroyed. Despite all the stuff about wormholes, Stargates are really basically transporters at the technobabble level. The heroes find out that the way it works is that the sending stargate converts matter into energy, transmits the pattern data to the receiving stargate, waits for confirmation, then sends the converted energy, which is used to rebuild the traveler. But if something goes wrong and you lose the converted energy due to a gate failure, you can wire around some stuff and dump in any old energy you like and use that instead. So I guess that is analogous to the idea here: Hugh’s resurrected by a metaphysical transporter accident where Stamets unwittingly sends his “pattern data” to the jahSepp, who reconstruct it using local mushroom matter, whereas in Tilly’s “normal” mushroom transport, it’s her own transmitted matter that is used to reconstruct her body. This is probably parcel to the handwave about how no, really, shut up, being transported does not really kill you and replace you with a rapidly-grown clone.
• The last second twist of May being sad about sending Hugh back because she wanted to use the cocoon to stay in touch with Tilly doesn’t feel earned. Or rather, it feels like true-to-character-logic extension of the Tilly/May dynamic we saw in “New Earth”, but which isn’t in the two following episodes. Too much time was spent on May as a threatening, manipulative character rather than on her developing a friendship with Tilly that it doesn’t quite feel legit when they’re suddenly besties lamenting that they may never see each other again.
  • For the future: How long does a jahSepp live and how even does time work in mushroom space? Is it on the table for Tilly and May to reunite? As a fungus, May might be more similar to a colony than an individual complex organism, so it’s plausible her consciousness might have no effective lifespan.
• There is no mention of the sphere or of the red angel in this episode. Neither Leland nor Control attempt to steal the sphere data, and it’s not indicated that they even know about it yet. That’s all well and good and consistent with the idea that Control only goes rogue after Airiam sends it messages from future-Control. But… We know that Control framed Spock for murder. So, was that an authorized operation by the Admiralty? Why? Presumably, Control recognized Spock’s confused rantings as referencing Section 31’s time travel experiments, so it’s interested from that angle. But the fact that Control is still apparently under Starfleet’s control when it decides to frame Spock for murder as a pretext to capture him and puree his brain does not bode well for the “better” interpretation of Section 31 I gave above; it’s just plain old “Section 31 is Starfleet’s unaccountable Cartoonishly Evil branch.”
  • The admiral in charge of Section 31 is a “Logic Extremist” (Again, Starfleet’s vetting process is kind of lax). It would be adorable if it turned out she greenlit the whole thing because the logic extremists have always wanted to assassinate Spock for being a half-breed.
• Sensing she was not needed for this episode, Jett Reno has once again vanished into thin air to be charmingly grumpy off-screen all episode.

Next time, we will get surprisingly fast payoff to another plot thread that was set up in “An Obol For Charon”, along with the last of the Red Signals to present itself before the endgame.

For this week’s coda, I’d like to briefly address a thing that is often cited as the single biggest “mistake” in Star Trek starship design: the placement of the bridge. Starfleet ships traditionally place their bridge under a dome in the center of the ventral surface of the saucer section. Detractors point out that this makes it an easy target for enemy attackers, and suggest instead that the bridge should be placed at the center of the ship to maximize the amount of hull between the command center and the exterior. I submit that such placement does not confer any significant tactical advantage. The reason for this is fairly straightforward: starship hulls are not armor. We have abundant evidence (Star Trek III, Star Trek VI, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness, Star Trek Beyond, Star Trek Discovery, just to name a few) that a single phaser or photon torpedo shot to an unshielded ship can pierce the entire thickness of the hull. We frequently see ships run through by a single shot, and a single direct hit to certain parts of the ship (presumably the warp core, but apparently other areas, likely major power couplings) cause its immediate and total destruction. Starships are protected by deflector shields, structural integrity fields, and inertial damping systems, not by the physical barrier of the hull (With the exception of the ablative armor seen on the USS Defiant, USS Prometheus and USS Voyager, and at least in the third case, the armor does not seem to be made of normal matter). In light of this, it doesn’t actually matter where within the ship the main bridge is located; if a shot gets through the shields, placing it in the center of the ship adds as much protection as wrapping it in tin foil.

Admittedly, this argument only explains why it is not a “mistake” to place the main bridge on the outer surface of the ship; it does not provide a positive reason why it should be there. Here, we have little to go on. Presumably, the proximate center of the saucer section maximizes the bridge’s coverage by shields (which we have established are the primary means of protecting it), and though there does not seem to be any advantage to placing it against the ventral surface, why not place it a few decks down? The only reason that comes to mind is that, due to its importance, it may be desirable to refit the main bridge many times over a ship’s lifetime, possibly more often than the rest of the ship. In that case, it might simply be a matter of efficiency to design the ship such that the main bridge is modular and can be removed and replaced as a single unit, which would be more difficult for designs that place the bridge in the middle of the ship.