Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×07: Light and Shadows

Okay, halfway through the season and it’s time to start the plot. That’s the cynical way of looking at it, and I don’t really mean it of course, but this is the episode where we discreetly introduce the big bad and set off the direct chain of events that will lead to the season finale. This episode, and to a lesser extent the next one, transition from the more episodic, “Red signals lead Discovery to random planets in need of saving” structure of the first half of the season to the more tightly plotted, “Save the sphere data, save the world,” arc of the back half. This episode is closer in style to what’s coming next, but I think it still reflects a plot that was going to go in a slightly different direction.

This one’s got two largely independent plots going on. Last time, we ended on Michael’s decision to return to Vulcan. We pick right up with that here, as Pike gives Michael permission to take some time off to “visit her family”, ie., go look for Spock on the DL. Discovery has been ordered to hang out over Kaminar for a while to look for traces left behind by the Red Angel, which turns out to have left behind “freaking amazing” levels of tachyons, which in turn lead to a Big Swirly Thing In Space. Discovery can’t launch a probe without getting too close, so Pike decides to use his Mad Test Pilot Skillz to get close with a shuttle. Tyler insists on going along because he’s the Section 31 liaison, and because he’s angry Pike won’t tell him where Michael went, so they need to have some character stuff between them about Pike and Tyler learning to trust each other. When they get close, Pike has a SPOOKY FUTURE ECHO of a fake-out where he’s forced to shoot Tyler, and the shuttle gets lost in the timey-wimey after they launch the probe. While they’re trying to get out, the probe comes back, five hundred years older and upgraded to PURE EVIL. It punches tentacles into the shuttle, one of which Pike has to shoot off of Tyler to complete the earlier fake-out. It jams itself into the computer and starts screwing with it. Since Stamets has timey-wimey powers thanks to being part giant water bear, he’s able to track the shuttle via magic mushroom space and beams over to the shuttle to rescue them. The probe starts hacking Discovery’s computer to get the sphere data and infect Airiam, so Pike blows up the shuttle to stop it, the three of them beaming out in the nick of time. Discovery backs away from the time rift before it explodes, and everyone muses on what this means about the Red Angel.

Meanwhile, in the other side of the plot, Michael goes to Vulcan and figures out that Amanda has already found Spock and is hiding him downstairs in the family crypt where the souls of his ancestors can interfere with Sarek’s attempts to locate Spock telepathically. Spock is rambling cliche TV “crazy person” word salad, mixed in with bits of Alice in Wonderland and a sequence of numbers. Sarek eventually figures it out himself and orders Michael to take Spock to Section 31. Which she does. Leland promises to help Spock, but Georgiou reveals that they plan to brain-puree him with Terran mind-blender technology. She throws a fight with Michael to let them escape because she likes Michael and wants to make Leland look bad. Once they’re safely away, Michael realizes that the numbers Spock’s been reciting are backwards due to his dyslexia. Plugging them into the computer in the opposite order reveals them to be the coordinates of a planet: Talos IV.

Aw. Yeah.

• “I’m sorry sir, you know how I get around violations of causality. Plus, you said I shouldn’t curse when I was on duty.” Oh Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly, don’t ever change.
• Pike and Michael question whether the Red Angel broke Spock, or if it appeared to Spock because he was broken. That’s great, and it’s what they should’ve been doing with the mysterious nature of the Red Angel’s motives all along. The central question of whether the Angel is causing the things Discovery encounters, or announcing them. It has a certain supernatural feel to it, like many forms of mythological harbinger where it’s not entirely clear if they cause calamities or are just drawn to them.
  • Bookended by the last conversation between Pike, Tyler and Saru: is the Red Angel working with whatever turned their probe into a tentacle monster, or is the Red Angel here to warn them about it?
• The look at Vulcan we get is pretty cool. In past series, they’ve tended to be overly-literal about the whole “Vulcan is a desert planet” thing and given the impression that Vulcan is pretty much Arrakis – nothing but an endless ocean of sand with the occasional rock. But the fact that it’s a “desert planet” really only needs to mean that it’s got quite a lot of desert, not that it’s exclusively desert. Of course there would be (comparatively small) regions that are more temperate. And Vulcans are a technologically advanced race. They live in cities, not in caves. We see Michael flying through a city that looks like a city. Sarek’s house is surrounded by trees. It’s raining when Michael arrives. Because it rains sometimes, even in deserts.
• We don’t need any comment or justification for the fact that Sarek’s family crypt is full of the souls of his ancestors. It’s just a Vulcan thing.
• It’s a good reveal when Amanda tells Michael that she’s not turning Spock in because she’s got diplomatic immunity and Sarek appears behind her and is like, “Unless the ambassador objects.”
• Sarek is written so well. Still wish I liked James Frain more. His reasoning for making Michael take Spock back to Section 31 is so solid and it fits his character so well. It’s clear that he’s torn here; what clinches it is that Michael has told him that Spock is connected to the red signals. I said before that Sarek’s involvement with the Red Signal taskforce was never relevant, but it does matter just a bit here: Spock’s been accused of murder. Sarek doesn’t tell Michael to hand Spock over to the civilian authorities, but to Section 31 specifically. Sarek knows that Section 31 is investigating the red signals. So he draws the wrong, but extremely reasonable conclusion that Section 31 has a vested interest in healing Spock to find out what he knows, whereas anyone else who captures him might be more interested in punishing him for his alleged crime: he sends Spock to the sort of people he knows would be willing to overlook that someone they needed happened to be a multiple murderer. And he’s not even that far wrong: the only thing he didn’t know is that they were planning to use the mind-juicer on him.
  • Sarek’s other reason is even more wonderful. The paragon of the Vulcan Way says that Michael has to be the one to turn Spock in, because Michael’s already got that mutiny thing hanging over her head. Amanda’s diplomatic immunity won’t cover Michael, and Spock’s recovery is uncertain. The narrative has to be that Michael found Spock, rather than that she was an accessory. Sarek doesn’t think he could stand to lose both* of his children. (*Sybok who? But it still fits, doesn’t it, that Sarek would be pretty bent out of shape over the possibility of losing his kids)
• Pike vents fuel to signal Discovery, a nicely subtle callback to “The Galileo Seven” that lacks the sledgehammer approach some of this season’s TOS references have had.
• You know what’s weird? Tilly considers the tachyon levels “freaking amazing”, but everyone pretty much takes time travel in stride. This is interesting in light of next week.
• It occurs to me that Alice in Wonderland is an apropos thing to reference in light of the importance of magic mushrooms to the series premise.

There is nothing serious wrong with this episode, but for the record, let’s come up with some things to complain about:

• There is no mention of the Kelpiens or the Ba’ul. The Ba’ul, as previously established, are assholes. They really have no objection to Discovery just hanging out in orbit to study their red thing? It explodes in a “temporal tsunami” at the end. Is that a problem for the inhabited planet below? If they’re going to be parked over Kaminar for a while, why isn’t Saru off spending time with his sister?
• It’s weird that Hugh’s character arc hits the pause button for a week. We’ll catch up next time, but right now, I assume he’s hanging out with Reno and maybe Mandy from The West Wing.
• Georgiou needles Leland about working for Control, with an implication that Leland resents the fact that he’s lost some of his authority and been relegated to an enforcer for Section 31’s strategy computer. That’s really interesting and goes exactly nowhere.
  • No one ever says this, but it would tie things up nicely if it were the incident with Michael’s parents that convinced the Admirals to stop trusting human judgment and build Control, especially given that Leland characterizes his responsibility as underestimating the threat. That might also feed into why Gabrielle Burnham was unable to stop Control herself, and possibly why she was stuck in the future: they’re causally linked through timey-wimey stuff.
• There’s a big reveal at the end where Georgiou tells Leland that she knows he killed Michael’s biological parents. It’s possible that she phrased it that way just to needle him, but I have a hard time reading her statement as meaning the thing they actually have it mean: that he was in charge of the mission that got them killed and therefore is responsible in a manly code-of-the-warrior sort of way. I don’t think that was where they wanted this to go when they wrote the line.
• Stamets has Tilly beam him to the shuttle because with his tardigrade-enhanced brain, he can navigate in the time rift and could pilot the shuttle. But when he gets there, the robo-tentacle has already taken over the ship, so the plan changes to him doing the calculations for Discovery to beam them to safety. This is okay now that I write it all down, but it’s hard to follow on-screen, and it’s hard to understand why he goes over in the first place instead of doing the math from Discovery to beam the others back.
• I have already commented on being not-entirely-comfortable with the whole “Spock had dyslexia superpowers” thing. It is very well done, but I’m not convinced it was a thing that ought to have been done. Also, I’m pretty sure “Because he has dyslexia, he’s reciting the numbers backwards,” is more of a “TV dyslexia” thing than a real dyslexia thing.
• The details of Spock’s illness are and will remain vague, and I’ll speak to that a bit more later, but for right now, the progression of it seems pretty odd. Spock apparently remains functional for a while after the onset of his condition, as he’s able to check himself into a hospital. We’ll see next week that he’s able to carry on a rational conversation with his doctor even after some of his symptoms manifest, and he’s able to mastermind an escape and stay one step ahead of pursuit for some time (Where was he going, anyway?) But by the time Amanda finds him, he’s completely non-functional and barely communicative. Is the idea just that his condition is progressive? Or is it meant to be tied to Discovery’s mission, intensifying with each red signal?

It just occurred to me that we never find out exactly what is going on with the evil tentacle monster probe and the time rift. To wit:

• A time rift doesn’t open up any of the other times a red signal appears and evil tentacle robots (clearly inspired by the sentinels from The Matrix) don’t show up other times. This ought to have been tied to Discovery’s actions more- something their scans of the tachyon field did rather than the implication that the Red Angel leaves behind rifts for robothulu to come through.
• It seems obvious that the idea here was that future-Control used the time rift to modify the probe. They say that the probe has aged 500 years, and conclude that something 500 years in the future modified the probe and sent it back. This is a little weird to begin with, because if the probe got sent into the future by the rift, it wouldn’t have aged 500 years.
• This is the only time we’ve had a “500 years in the future” time frame, rather than Gabrielle Burnham’s 850 one. Is 500 years in the future when Control is meant to have destroyed all sentient life? Or just a random date somewhere in the middle?
• Also, as we eventually learn, the red signal was sent by Michael, from only a short time into the future, so why does it create a time rift leading 500 years forward in time? Or even does it?
• Future-Control seems like it’s trying to get the sphere data. So does it come from a timeline where Control is evil and can make sentinels but doesn’t have the sphere data 500 years in the future?
• If the goal was just to infect Airiam to deliver the sphere data to present-Control, attacking Pike and Tyler and being all gratuitously evil seems like a dumb move. Why not just show up still looking like a normal probe, just stuffed with malware?
• You know what would make more sense than, “Someone in the future found the probe, modified it, and sent it back”? If the probe didn’t go anywhere, and the rift didn’t actually go all the way to enabling time travel. Rather, the rift caused time to pass more quickly for the probe, and it mutated over time into the squid monster. Have Tyler add a Section 31 payload to the probe, unwittingly “infecting” it with the not-yet-all-the-way-evil present version of Control (we know Control can hide in Starfleet systems), and it spends 500 years evolving to the point where it comes to the same conclusion that present-Control does, and decides to steal the sphere data. Multiple evolutionary paths all leading to Control going rogue and trying to get the sphere data is a very Terminator sort of thing to happen and is in keeping with Gabrielle Burnham’s claims that every timeline she’s tried ended up with Control getting the sphere data and going all Skynet.

As we draw to a close, I want to talk a little about a random unrelated Star Trek thing which has been wandering around my mind for a few years now. The Guardian of Forever. The Guardian appears in the original series’s most famous and acclaimed episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever”. It’s never been revisited in the core of mainline Trek, and that’s probably for the best. But it has turned up a lot in expanded universe stuff. It makes an appearance in one of the first published Star Trek stories, “Mind-Sifter” (I haven’t seen the Phase II/New Voyages version, so I don’t know if they retained that, but it’s in the short story). It’s a plot device in the animated series episode “Yesteryear”. A giant version turns up in the Phase II/New Voyages episode “In Harm’s Way”. It’s central to Tim Russ’s fan film Of Gods and Men. One of the first Star Trek The Next Generation novels, Imzadi, features it. A duplicate appears in the William Shatner novel Preserver. And the thing is… Not a one of them uses it for something interesting. It’s presented purely as a handy time machine, often on the very odd conceit that it’s the only reliable form of time travel available to a rogue looking to dick around with the past (Oddly enough, the Shatner novel is the only one that does anything different with it, though not anything especially interesting; it’s the mechanism the Preservers use to reveal some backstory to Kirk). As far as I know, no one has ever taken an interest in what makes the Guardian different from just any other time travel MacGuffin. The time crystals of Boreth let you build a time machine, sure, but they also show you scary visions of the future which become fixed moments in time if you touch them, and that’s actually cool and Discovery does stuff with that. But the Guardian? Magic stargate to the past. Nuff ‘said.

So what’s interesting about the Guardian? Well, there’s the obvious question of who built it and why. Shatner (or, probably, his ghost-writers) attributes it to the Preservers, an ancient and mysterious race mentioned in “For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky” (the “I AM KIROK!” episode) who were into conducting large-scale social engineering experiments and may have even created the Star Trek universe, depending on your point of view (Namely, it’s implied that the mirror universe is the control group for their experiment). Linking the Guardian to one of the existing TOS Very Old And Powerful Races like the Preservers, the First Federation, or Sargon’s people is fine I guess. There are some interesting details that don’t have an obvious home in such an interpretation, though. Like the fact that the Guardian implies itself to not only be billions of years old, but to have lain undisturbed for that time (Another thing most analyses overlook: the Guardian says that it’s been waiting since “Before your sun burned hot in space,” not just that it’s existed that long), yet it’s surrounded by Romanesque ruins which are merely thousands of years old. That hints at either temporal shenanigans or the interesting possibility that a civilization lived around the Guardian but didn’t interact with it.

But there’s one other thing which has always stood out for me about the Guardian. It’s completely ignored in almost every piece of Trek that revisits it. And that’s how the Guardian works. Because in “Yesteryear”, and in “Imzadi”, at least, you just tell the Guardian where you want to go and it zaps you there. But that’s not how it works in “The City on the Edge of Forever”. In that episode, it shows you a high-speed montage of a planet’s history, and it’s up to you to jump in at the right moment. It’s not particularly accurate even with the help of a tricorder to tell you when to jump; Spock reckons he can only get it down to within a month. What’s more, the episode actually acknowledges that this is an odd way for a time machine to work. Kirk asks the Guardian about it. And here’s what I find really interesting and am really annoyed that no one has ever seen fit to expand on it: the Guardian’s answer is, “I was made to offer the past in this manner. I cannot change.”

I mean, look at that line. The Guardian is clear about the fact that it was created – it’s not a natural phenomenon; sending people back in time is a feature, not a bug (one could otherwise imagine that it was meant for observation only); it can show you your own planet’s history; but you can’t pick a specific date and time, and that is a deliberate design choice. Why would someone build something like that? What did its creators have in mind? There will probably never be a canonical answer, but it drives me crazy that no one else even seems to have considered it.