Okay. I think we’re more-or-less at the point where the original plan for the Red Signals story arc runs out. Starting next week, the focus will shift to the Spock arc they’ve been meandering around, which will, honestly, get largely resolved in two episodes, setting the stage for the back half of the season, as I’ve already talked about, where Spock’s journey and Pike’s mission will come together and go in a direction that I’m pretty sure is at least a bit askance of where it as originally supposed to go.
This week, Discovery encounters the last of the seven red signals to appear before the endgame. Like the two we’ve seen so far 0 and unlike the others – it’s leading them on a rescue mission. Tyler is less optimistic about that analysis, though: he points out that a powerful godlike being with access to time travel and a penchant for showing up in doomed places might equally well be summoning Discovery as a witness to destruction as summoning it on a rescue mission. The third signal has appeared over Kaminar, Saru’s home planet. Now, Kaminar is populated by the Kelpiens, a non-technological race known for their heightened sense of fear, and the Ba’ul, who eat the Kelpiens, have only recently developed warp drive and are assholes. Saru is still coming to terms with his recent transformation: the loss of his fear ganglia has caused him to suddenly become fearless, and also he’s got some keratinous growths coming in like teeth in the back of his head. He has a go at comforting Culber, since they’ve both got interesting Weird Bodily Transformation stories to bond over. Discovery’s doctor tells Culber that he probably just feels weird because his entire body is new and his nervous system still has that “New Nervous System” smell. The Ba’ul aren’t interested in talking, so Saru wants to go down to Kaminar on account of it is his home planet. Even though the Kelpiens don’t know about aliens, they could hardly be entirely unaware of space travel since the Ba’ul have it, which means that it’s not a Prime Directive situation if Pike wants to make first contact with them, though in less extreme circumstances, this isn’t really supposed to be the thing you just do on the spur of the moment. Pike orders Michael to go instead on account of she’s the main character and Saru is acting kind of Emotionally Compromised about the whole “Turns out that my people have been systematically slaughtered for generations based on a lie” thing. But Michael talks Pike into letting Saru come with on the promise he will not foment revolution. They pretty much immediately run into Saru’s sister Siranna. Turns out Saru’s dad hit vahar’ai and got eaten some years ago, and now she’s the local priest. Her and Saru have an argument about him having run away from home, but the Ba’ul have noticed him, and once they return to Discovery, they call up to demand Pike turn Saru over. They get even more annoyed when Saru lashes out in rage and reveals that he knows about the scam they’ve been pulling with vahar’ai. The Ba’ul are probably bluffing about attacking a Starfleet ship to get him back, but probably not about blowing up Saru’s village, so he sneaks off to turn himself over. The Ba’ul beam up him and his sister for threats and vivisection, and Saru discovers that those things growing in where his fear ganglia were are giant fuck-off murder darts which he can shoot at at the Ba’ul, though the one he tries it on has a force field so it doesn’t matter. Michael, Tilly and Airiam read up about Kaminar in the sphere data and find out that the Ba’ul almost went extinct a couple thousand years ago, and work out that the Kelpiens are the actual apex predator, and the Ba’ul are their prey. The Ba’ul used their technology to deceive and control the Kelpiens to basically induce species-wide neoteny to save their gross oil-slick skins. Saru breaks free and smashes a Ba’ul drone and rewires it to call Discovery. They send him an MP3 of the sound the sphere made, and he rebroadcasts it on the Ba’ul planet-wide PA system to make his entire species hit puberty at once so that the Ba’ul can’t hide the truth. Pike offers to broker a peace between the two races, but the Ba’ul would rather have a go at genociding the entire species, which is more murder than Discovery has the ability to stop. Fortunately, that level of genocide requires raising their giant underwater base out of the ocean, whereupon the red angel shows up and EMPs them back to the stone age. After some heart-to-heart with Saru on Discovery, Siranna returns to Kaminar to work on leading her people into a new and hopefully less-genocidal age and everyone crosses their fingers that the Ba’ul and Kelpiens will work out a way to live peacefully together. Pike decides that the Red Angel is indeed kind of scary and threatening so Tyler may have a point, and shares with him Saru’s report, since Saru got a good look at the Red Angel and his Apex Predator Eyesight revealed it to be a humanoid in a winged suit. Michael decides that in order to find Spock, she should go back home to Vulcan.
I don’t know where they originally meant for the season to go from here. If it had just been a series of “Discovery receives a red signal and jets off across the universe to save someone from immanent doom,” with occasional questioning about the Red Angel’s motives, that would’ve been fine, honestly. Next week, we’ll settle down into having a direction for the plot to go in instead, with the first actual legitimate hint that there may be something sinister behind the seven signals. This episode is also the last time that we see the Red Angel do something explicitly beyond Federation technology – Detmer mentions that an EMP that powerful should be “impossible”. I can’t say for sure, but it seems pretty obvious that the Red Angel suit was originally meant to be future-technology, not decades-old Section 31. Here’s what else I liked:
- Siranna’s reaction to learning that she lives in a universe full of countless other forms of life and civilizations is one brief moment of reeling at the concept… And then asking Michael whether she’d like some tea.
- I also love that the thing that upsets Siranna isn’t having her worldview challenged, but rather the mercenary reasons for Saru’s return: that chasing the red signals was a good enough reason for him to return home, when his family wasn’t.
- We’ve got yet another episode with no real bad guy. Yes, the Ba’ul are coded strongly as evil – heck, they look like lanky, skeletal humanoids covered in tarry goo. But by the end of the episode, it becomes clear that they’re not just being assholes arbitrarily. They’re basically living under self-imposed martial law out of existential fear of the fact that they share the planet with a species that could and has tried to eat them to the point of extinction.
- The thing is, the Ba’ul don’t actually need the Kelpiens around. They could just wipe them all out and then they’d be safe. But they only try that in a moment of panic when they realize that they can’t keep the Kelpiens docile. The Ba’ul were actually trying to find a peaceful solution that let both species live together. And the one they chose kept their own people sequestered away – the Kelpiens have the run of the planet, while the Ba’ul hole up in their underwater cities.
- I mean, yeah, subverting the Kelpien life cycle and the systematic ritualized slaughter of sentient beings are terrible things. But you can see where they’re coming from. For all we’ve heard about how Kelpiens are defined by their heightened sense of fear, how much worse must it be for the species which is legitimately a prey species and which knows that its survival was won by technological trickery? One by one, all the awful and unpleasant things the Ba’ul do fall into line as the result of them living their entire lives in a constant state of panic. When they scan Discovery, we learn that they’re exclusively interested in assessing the ship’s weapons. It seems immediately to signal, “They’re belligerent and looking for a fight,” but the actual matter is that they’re scared as hell and they’re sizing up this new potential predator.
- The Ba’ul have only had warp technology for twenty years, but they’ve got ships bigger than Discovery and fighters able to hold their own against Control’s fleet at the end of the season. This might seem like a hard-sell, but you can sort of see where it would fit in that the Ba’ul would focus their efforts on building up a capacity to defend themselves.
- There’s a very neat and tidy model of this that plays out in the episode: when Saru is imprisoned by the Ba’ul, goes into a blind rage and unthinkingly shoots murder-darts at his captor. Saru, who we’ve been shown is a kind, gentle soul, who is dedicated to his duty, and has tremendous empathy for other living things, just instinctively hulks out in a blind rage, and the only reason he doesn’t kill the Ba’ul is because it is able to use its superior technology to defend itself. That right there is the microcosm of what’s happening on Kaminar. The Ba’ul are scared because a mature Kelpien can fly into a fit of murderous instinctive rage. Whatever you think about how they chose to deal with the problem, that is a legit reason to be scared.
- And again, no Prime Directive waffling; Pike tells the Ba’ul straight out that Starfleet isn’t interested in getting involved in their local issues, but he’s not just going to stand by and let them commit genocide.
- Shades here of the terrible proto-Prime Directive episode of Enterprise where a planet is shared by two sentient species, one far more advanced than the other. Only not terrible like that one was. And also, Discovery‘s take is that the Right Thing is for them to find a way to live together, unlike Enterprise, which decided that evolution “wanted” the more primitive species to win and the technologically advanced one to die out. God, fuck that show, man.
- I think this may also be the last time they use the plot point of, “Let’s search the sphere data to see if there’s anything relevant,” which is a shame. I hope it becomes a Bigger Thing in season 3.
- Leftover thing I neglected from last week: Pike knew the real Georgiou, though only in passing. He’s struck by how different she is now, but is willing to accept the cover story of, “Yeah, war does that to people.” Accept, but not fully believe. What I like is that he asks Michael about it, and she pretty much tells him that she’s not allowed to talk about it, and he just trusts her about this and moves on.
- We never find out exactly how much Pike knew. He doesn’t seem to know the truth about Georgiou yet, but by the end, he seems to. He knows that Lorca betrayed Starfleet, but it’s not explicit whether he knows the whole story there. His knowing wink indicates that he knows about the mirror universe, but isn’t supposed to know.
And here’s what I’m less happy about:
- I know I said that it was justified that the Ba’ul would advance their defensive technology so quickly, but I feel like the Discovery crew ought to have been more impressed by this. Someone should have said that, hey, that’s really something to go from discovering warp drive to being able to threaten a Crossfield-class starship in roughly the lifespan of the animated TV series Arthur.
- Saru, as I mentioned, is a kind, gentle soul with tremendous empathy. He ought to be more angsty about his transformation. He ought to be horrified at losing control in front of the Ba’ul. I get him being excited and feeling the call of destiny in light of his neurochemistry being altered. But at no point does he ever reflect on the changes with any sort of concern. For the rest of the season, there’s, frankly, a lot of times when it seems like he’s starting to become kind of a jerk, but there’s never any fallout or reckoning attached to that.
- Are mature Kelpiens obligate carnivores? I mean, do they need to start eating Ba’ul now? That is going to make the peace process difficult.
- Why isn’t Hugh in therapy? Why is the physician the one declaring that he’s probably fine and he just needs to break in the new body a little? Seriously, he came back from the dead and also spent months living in a magical blacklight rave smearing himself with bark to stop invisible mushrooms from eating him. He would be at serious risk for PTSD even if you left out the whole, “Literally came back from the dead in a new body” thing. He should be in therapy.
- Not only “Why isn’t he in therapy?” but also “Why isn’t anyone else around him saying that too?” I get that Stamets is just so happy to have his husband back that he maybe can’t be expected to apply strict scrutiny to the issue, but honestly he is not being a very good spouse to keep playing down his husband’s existential crisis with, “See? You’re fine!” When they discover that being resurrected has also removed Hugh’s Deeply Meaningful Scar That Reminds Him Why He Went Into Medicine, Stamets just seems to think it’s kinda cute, and not a powerful metaphor for a metaphysical implosion.
- Tyler’s concerns about the Red Angel don’t feel justified yet – they will next week. But the show feels conflicted right now. On the one hand, the fact that Tyler sees the Red Angel as threatening is clearly meant to reflect how his alignment with Section 31 makes him Darker And Grittier than Pike and Saru’s impression of the Red Angel as a salvific figure. But on the other hand, the show seems to want us to draw the parallel between Tyler and the Ba’ul: they may have acted incorrectly, but they were right to be afraid. Pike’s acceptance of Tyler’s point of view at the end feels wrong. “I just saw the Red Angel use godlike powers to save a race from extermination…. So now I see your point about the Red Angel being dangerous.” Yes, it’s technically true, but it doesn’t feel true to the tone or characters.
- A big part of the problem is that it’s presented as a binary: either the Red Angel is good or evil. But this is a show where over and over again, the antagonists have turned out not to be evil. Tyler’s concern would be easier to swallow framed not as, “What if the Red Angel is really evil?” but as, “What if the Red Angel’s motives are complex enough that we come into conflict with it at some point?”
- Some ambiguity about Kaminar’s fate might help here too: has the Red Angel brought about peace between its two sentient species, or has it made extinction of one side or the other inevitable?
- I guess Tyler doesn’t know what the Red Angel really is at this point? We never see a “reveal” of him learning about it, but okay, that can happen off-stage. Section 31’s behavior up to the point where they reveal themselves as the creators of the Red Angel suit doesn’t quite fit with the ultimate reveal. Some of this can be handwaved by Tyler and Georgiou only learning the truth as they go along, but honestly, I don’t get the impression that Leland realizes the connection between the Red Angel and the timesuit project he oversaw years earlier. Does Control?
- The fact that the plot changes direction shortly means that we don’t have a continuous story arc here; one could imagine Tyler sending Saru’s report to Leland who takes a look at it and is like, “Oh shit, duh, winged timesuit that glows red. I know what that is,” but if so, it happens off-screen between much more serious events.
- Still no Reno. Meh.
Before I forget, here’s a quick rundown of the Discovery Gang, for the sake of Posterity:
- Captain Gabriel Lorca: Discovery’s Season 1 captain. Secretly evil. Did not keep this secret as well as maybe he should’ve, but still a pretty strong counterpoint to Spock’s claim in “Mirror, Mirror” that the barbaric Terrans could never successfully pass themselves off as their prime-universe counterparts. Father figure to Evil!Michael Burnham, and bailed Good!Michael out of jail to groom her for a power-play against the Terran empress. Racist, but did a fair-to-middling job of hiding it. Currently very dead, but since he died by getting kicked into an Evil Mushroom Engine, resurrection is probably on the table.
- Captain Christopher Pike: Loaner captain from the USS Enterprise. Goal-oriented, spiritual, all-around good guy. Bad case of survivor guilt over having missed the war. Currently back on Enterprise. Very doomed.
- Acting Captain Saru: Only Kelpien in Starfleet. Until recently, had a hyperdeveloped sense of fear and considered himself a prey animal. Good with languages. Now fearless and possessed of fuck-off murder darts that grow from the back of his head.
- Commander Michael Burnham: Biological parents invented the Red Angel time travel suit. Raised by Sarek and Amanda. Hyperdeveloped sense of responsibility. Mutinied against Captain Georgiou and accidentally started Klingon War, later pardoned.
- Ambassador Sarek: Apparently the Federation’s only diplomat. Estranged father of Spock, unestranged foster father of Michael. Possibly not a great father.
- Amanda Grayson: Schoolteacher. Wife of Sarek, mother of Spock, foster mother of Michael Burnham. Dyslexia runs in her family. Frequently abuses her husband’s diplomatic immunity. Speaking ill of her is Spock’s berserk button, though this does not come up in Discovery.
- Ensign Sylvia Tilly: Adorable. Goofy. Spent season 1 as a cadet helping Stamets, now an Ensign in the Command Training Program. Insecurity issues stemming from a rocky relationship with her overbearing mother. Michael’s roommate.
- Lieutenant Commander Paul Stamets: Co-inventor of the spore drive. Transgenic tardigrade. Has special Weird Time Powers. Recently widowed then unwidowed. Kind of looks like a younger, pastier Alan Tudyk. Last seen moderately perforated in the battle with Control.
- Dr. Hugh Culber: Paul’s husband, Discovery’s doctor in season 1. Killed by Voq/Tyler, but got better. Suffering from some long-term psychological trauma from that.
- Ash Tyler: Formerly Voq, torchbearer to the Klingon messiah. Klingon sleeper agent who went native, basically. Now in charge of Section 31. Intermittently had a romantic relationship with Michael.
- Lieutenant Spock: Enterprise’s science officer, Michael’s estranged foster brother. Doesn’t get along with his dad. Dyslexic.
- Admiral Katrina Cornwell: Discovery’s main point-of-contact with Starfleet Command. Former therapist. Frequently orders people to do evil things but gives in when they propose a non-evil strategy instead. Currently dead, having been blown up by a torpedo.
- Leland: Important person in Section 31. Field-commander, maybe? Grimdark antihero type who isn’t quite outright evil but believes the ends justify the means. Possessed by Control and later killed by Georgiou with magnets.
- Captain Philipa Georgiou: Former lieutenant on the USS Archimedes, later Captain of the Shenzhou. Convinced Starfleet to grant Saru refugee status. Mother figure to Michael and Saru. Killed at the Battle of the Binary Stars. Official records claim she actually survived and went under cover during the war, then later retired and is now a security consultant.
- Evil!Philipa Georgiou: Former empress of the Terran Empire. Mother figure to Evil!Michael Burnham. Has some issues related to Evil!Michael’s betrayal. Known for being notably less racist than most Terrans (though probably still pretty racist). Currently employed as a security contractor by Section 31.
- Jett Reno: Former Chief Engineer of the USS Hiawatha, now hanging around on Discovery for some reason. Lovably grumpy. Doesn’t get along with Stamets but still cares enough to try to get him and his husband back together. Widowed during the war, and her wife had the misfortune to stay dead. Tendency to disappear from the show for weeks at a time.
- Lieutenant Kayla Detmer: Discovery’s pilot, formerly of the Shenzhou. Lost an eye in the Battle of the Binary Stars and now sports a bitchin’ robot eye. Has not had much character focus but does get a lot of the “functional” dialogue telling the main characters what’s going on outside.
- Lieutenant Joann Owosekun: Discovery’s operations officer. Grew up in a non-religious luddite community. This almost became plot-relevant once. Gets a lot of the functional dialogue like Detmer about what’s going on outside the ship.
- Lieutenant RA Bryce: Discovery’s communications officer. Since people mostly communicate face-to-face in this show, his job is mostly about alerting people to weird signals. No character focus to speak of.
- Lieutenant Commander Airiam: Spore drive officer. Mostly robot due to a shuttle accident. Had lots of friends. Airlocked by N’han after being corrupted by future-Control. She’s also a widow. Do not marry someone on Discovery. It has a shockingly high mortality rate. Seriously, I think there are more dead spouses on this show than dead redshirts. Doesn’t have a last name for some reason.
- Commander N’han: Enterprise’s security officer, now staying on Discovery. Barzan, so she needs mouth implants to breathe. Quiet, kinda mean at first. A tiny bit of character focus. Not clear if she’s alive or not since the last we saw of her, Leland had beat her unconscious.
- Lieutenant Linus: He’s a lizard man. I don’t know what his job is. But he’s cool because his dialogue is just incredibly mundane. Nothing about warrior cultures or interesting mating rituals, just stuff like, “I had a cold last week. It sucked.” He is probably the most boring person on the ship, and that is actually really cool. Has a running competition with Jett Reno over who can think up the most autoantonyms. She calls him “Bamboo Boy”.
- Lieutenant Gen Rhys: Tactical officer. No character focus. Used to be Airiam’s sparring partner.
- Lieutenant Nilssen: Airiam’s replacement. Also helps assemble the second Red Angel suit. Fun fact: Nilssen is played by the same actress who played Airiam in season 1.