Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×08: If Memory Serves

It does not, perhaps, have the same sense of inevitability about it as addressing Pike’s tragic future. But it was always likely. And if, as I have tried to maintain, Discovery is at its heart about going back into the past of Star Trek for the lost, the broken, and the abandoned, and finding a place to heal, then there’s symmetry in the fact that my blunder through the second season of the show should end here, at the very earliest point, the place where Star Trek began.

Previously, on Star Trek:

Still recovering from tragic events on Rigel IV, the Enterprise receives a distress call from a long-lost colony ship, crashed on Talos IV. Their rescue mission is interrupted when Captain Pike is abducted by the native species, hyper-cephalic telepaths with the power to create powerful illusions. Their own race is dying out due to misuse of their powers, and they want to breed Pike with Vina, the colony ship’s only survivor, for reasons that are somewhat ambiguous. Through a consistent application of anger and violence, Pike persuades the Talosians that humans don’t make good pets. They allow him to leave, but Vina, who in reality is old and severely disfigured from the crash, chooses to remain behind with a Talosian-created simulacrum of Pike, with whom she’d fallen in love. Starfleet bans all contact with Talos IV, eventually elevating the ban to carry Starfleet’s only death sentence.

Two years later…

Completely ignoring the restrictions on going there, Michael zaps her shuttle over to Talos IV at maximum warp. In for a penny, I guess. Lucky thing the Section 31 facility where she started out was apparently close. She drops out of warp right next to a black hole, and desperately tries to avoid it, until Spock shoves her out of the way and flies straight into the thing, because it’s a Talosian illusion to hide the planet. I guess the Talosians have decided they don’t want visitors. They are, all the same, comparatively gracious when Michael and Spock show up uninvited. Vina invites them to beam to the Talosians’ underground lair, where a trio of them explain that Spock is perceiving time in a non-linear fashion and needs his logic turned off to process it, and their fee for resetting Spock’s brain is that she pony up the memory of why the two of them fell out. The Talosians show Michael Spock’s memory of his two encounters with the Red Angel, once as a child, helping him find a runaway Michael before she got eaten by a large Vulcan animal; then again a few months earlier, when he tried to mind-meld with it, and had a vision of the red signals and subsequent destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy at the tentacles of spacecraft that looked an awful lot like the modified probe from last week. He also recognized the Red Angel’s mind as human. After a break for them to snark at each other a bit, the Talosians show Spock’s escape from the mental hospital, with him incapacitating his doctors with a neck pinch rather than killing them.

Meanwhile, the admirals at Section 31 kinda sideline Leland in favor of Georgiou, ordering them to find Spock and Michael, but keep Discovery out of it. Georgiou orders Pike to stay near Kaminar and search for debris from the probe. Pike starts making inquiries to try to find Michael all the same, though Tyler warns him off, not because of Section 31’s orders, but because he fears that if Pike does find them, Section 31 will simply follow them. Hugh is still not feeling himself, and starts a fight with Tyler, trying to make Voq resurface. Later, he leaves Stamets, declaring his former self still dead and insisting they both need to move on. Vina contacts Pike using Talosian powers and they have a moment before Michael and Spock report what they’ve learned. Pike orders Discovery to magic mushroom itself to Talos, but someone (it was Airiam) has sabotaged the spore drive, and combined with the fact that someone (it was Airiam) exfiltrated petabytes of data from Discovery using Tyler’s command codes, it looks like Tyler can’t be trusted, so they lock him up. Discovery heads for Talos at warp, trying to fake-out Section 31, but they fail because someone (it was Airiam) tips them off. Michael shows the Talosians her fight with Spock: after a terrorist attack on her school, she believed the only way to protect her family was to run away. Spock tried to follow her, so she called him a freak and a half-breed to break his heart. Present-Spock agrees that it was a logical thing to do and it taught him the important lesson that humans are jerks and he should repress the hell out of his human side. Michael disagrees, and attributes her behavior to being a stupid kid, but Spock’s still bitter. Leland and Discovery arrive at Talos IV at the same time, and both try to beam up Spock and Michael. Vina appears to Pike again, telling him to let go, so he orders Discovery to give up. Leland flies off with Spock and Michael, ordering Pike to turn himself in for disciplinary action. But he only has a minute to gloat before Spock and Michael disappear, having been Talosian illusions all along, which Georgiou anticipated but didn’t say anything about because she hates him. The real Spock and Michael arrive back on Discovery in the shuttle, and the crew give Pike their support in his decision to go on the run.

Ooh. A nice, powerful episode that is heavy on character, if a little light on action. I think possibly you could get a stronger pair of episodes by shuffling around some elements between this episode and the last one, but it’s not bad. Honestly, you can coast a lot on the strength of reintroducing Vina and the Talosians. The high points:

• The Previously bit at the beginning, using the original footage from “The Cage” in a sort of popup-book style is fantastic.
• Upon the reveal that Leland has captured a fake Spock, Georgiou casually remarks that the Talosians pulled that kind of stunt on her once so she genocided the big-headed jerks. And their stupid singing flowers too.
• Speaking of, reproducing the singing flowers is a real nice touch.
• I think the idea is meant to be that because the Red Angel was unstuck in time, mind melding with her broke Spock’s brain in a more extreme form of the occasional TOS incidents where Spock was temporarily donked up by a bad mind meld. But it also seems like possibly it was just that experiencing the future as a memory of the past was something his Vulcan sensibilities couldn’t process. Which is a kind of interesting idea. There’s repeated references in the episode by both the Talosians and Spock’s human doctors that it’s specifically the Vulcan part of his psyche that was damaged. And there’s an interesting comparison in that last week we saw that, beyond Tilly finding it “freaking amazing” no one on Discovery has had any trouble at all believing that the Red Angel is a time traveler. They all just take it in stride. Compare that to the very often repeated refrain in Enterprise and the Abrams-verse that “The Vulcan Science Academy has determined that time travel is impossible.” You could speculate that a Vulcan-trained mind develops a peculiar weak-spot for time travel.
• When Pike accuses Tyler of being behind the exfiltration and the sabotage to the spore drive, it’s not a simple regress to him not trusting him: Pike has just learned about Section 31 using mind-pureeing technology from Michael and he offers the possibility that Tyler might have been mind-whammied into betraying them against his will.
• I like that Stamets keeps desperately trying to make things “normal” for Hugh, and it just keeps making things worse because Hugh doesn’t feel normal. This is what becomes Hugh’s character arc: everyone is trying real hard to reassure him that he’s the same person he used to be, but what he needs to accept is that it’s okay for him to be someone new.
• I love that the rift between Spock and Michael isn’t just down to a misunderstanding about intentions. Spock knows why she did it. It doesn’t help. This problem wouldn’t have been solved by them talking it out. And the big cathartic reveal doesn’t fix things between them – that doesn’t happen until Michael has her own similar emotional crisis a couple of episodes later.
• Not so much a “I liked this” as “This is a thing and I want to note it”: They mention that Talos is restricted, but it’s not treated with the seriousness that it had in “The Menagerie”, where Spock’s life is on the line and I think Kirk and the Enterprise crew are facing serious legal threat too. Does something happen in the next ten years to make Starfleet elevate the restriction on Talos to a General Order carrying the death penalty?
  • On the other hand, at the end of “The Menagerie”, Starfleet calls them up and is like, “Hey, we heard you were sending Pike there so he could have a nice retirement. We’ll let it slide.” Which now that I think of it is consistent with Discovery‘s repeated, “This is really important, so I’m sure Starfleet will give us a dispensation.” It seemed stranger to me because I’m used to the TNG-era Starfleet Command which exists primarily to be obstructive bureaucrats to slow the plot down.
  • Of course, since the court martial in “The Menagerie” was an illusion for Kirk’s benefit, the Talosians may have been playing up the seriousness of the charge.
• I’ve always felt that there’s a tremendous tonal difference between “The Cage” and “The Menagerie” in how the Talosians come off. Pike assumes they want to keep him as a zoo specimen for their amusement and/or to father a slave race for them, and the show doesn’t really challenge that, with the Talosians letting him go because he’s too violent to be useful. I always felt that the way the archive footage is edited and framed in the “Menagerie” version paints the Talosians as more tragic: their race is dying and what they really want is someone to pass their cultural heritage onto, but they ultimately resign themselves to their fate when the realize that humans would just destroy themselves the way they did. Both aspects are there in both tellings, I think, with the difference being mostly a matter of emphasis. Discovery maintains and reinforces a lot of that ambiguity. There’s never any question of the Talosians refusing to help Spock, but there’s a constant low-key threat that they’ll take Michael’s memories by force if she doesn’t give them willingly. Michael at first balks at the idea, accusing the Talosians of voyeurism, and their rebuttal is itself still ambiguous: “It is how we understand. It is how we survive.” It points to a new element, that vicariously experiencing the illusions they create for their “guests” fulfills some sort of need in the Talosians, which points to the possibility of relationship that is either mercenary or symbiotic, depending on your point of view, and adds a dimension to why they would welcome Pike back years later. It’s interesting that the Talosians have very little agenda of their own here, being a largely disinterested third party, though at the end, they take deliberate action to help Spock and Michael.
  • I don’t think it’s spelled out in “The Cage”, but it’s broadly understood that the Talosians are a bit like the Eternals in Doctor Who, and rely on lesser beings as a source for the experience and memories they use in their illusions, since their own race has basically used up its imagination.
• Having Pike meet Vina again is a great way to beef up the idea that ten years later, he would still have feelings for her strong enough to want to spend the rest of his life on Talos IV with her. Heck, he suggests that even at this point, two years later and still healthy, he’s thought about going back to her.
  • The closest thing I guess we’re going to get to an explanation for why Spock risks his life to return Pike to Talos IV is that he’s present for Vina’s talk with Pike and knows that Pike still has feelings for her.
• Another pleasantly weird thing is Vina’s contradictory feelings. She says it was harder for her after Pike left, with the knowledge of what she’d lost. But she also says that the fake Pike she’d been given was good enough because he was a reflection of the part of Pike that was still inside her.
  • Interestingly, Pike doesn’t seem to have known about this. He sees the illusory Pike in “The Cage”, though that isn’t shown in “The Menagerie”, as they recycle the footage to represent the real Pike restored to the appearance of health at the end. Which leaves the strange implication that Vina being given her own personal Pike as in “The Cage” did happen, but only after the real Pike left.
• “Say goodbye, Spock.” “Goodbye, Spock.”
• In Spock’s memories, his doctor suggests that the red signals may be something that had happened before, in the past, and Spock’s vision of them was actually a subconscious memory of having seen them in a historical database. He’s wrong, obviously, but it’s a good theory and it’s good to have someone come up with a more mundane theory first. Also, it’s very similar to how Sarek and Amanda interpreted Child-Spock’s first vision, that Spock had worked out Michael’s location from perfectly mundane clues subconsciously and the vision of the Red Angel was a child’s brain interpreting thought processes it didn’t understand.

On the other hand…

• I’m just going to say that I’m glad we only have a few more scenes of “Everyone conveniently fails to notice when Airiam acts incredibly obviously possessed,” because man is it incredibly obvious.
• Exactly what is going on with Spock is ambiguous. I’m mostly okay with ambiguity, but like with Hugh’s resurrection and the resulting danger to Magic Mushroom Space, it’s really important and has implications going forward, so maybe it could’ve been spelled out more clearly. Spock’s doctor says that the “Vulcan side” of his brain was damaged and needed to heal, the Talosians say that he’s experiencing time as a fluid, and Spock himself says that his logic isn’t able to process the experience. Likewise, the Talosians say that healing him requires decoupling his mind from logic, and Spock says that experiencing the events from Michael’s outsider perspective helped him. I think there’s an attempt here to make it sound weirder and more metaphysical than it is. The conclusion I came to is that mind-melding with Gabrielle Burnham damaged his brain because her thoughts were filtered through the timey-wimey effect of her being unstuck in time. It would’ve been helpful later on if Burnham’s logs had just straightforwardly spelled out that whenever she tried to return to the past, she was out-of-phase with normal time, and this made it impossible for her to communicate, except with Spock. When Spock tried to mind-meld, it took his brain out of phase as well, requiring the Talosians to “reset” it by popping out the relevant memories and untangling the timey-wimey aspect by using Michael as a filter. It doesn’t even need that level of specificity; just some common language between Burnham’s description and the Talosians’ (“out of phase” would be a good one. Burnham says she’s out of phase, the Talosians say the Vulcan part of Spock’s mind is out of phase, we can draw the conclusion that the mind meld did it, especially in light of Michael’s history with Sarek establishing that a mind meld leaves a persistent link).
  • On a practical level, the big unsolved problem is this: where did the vision of the red signals come from? Spock sees two things when he mind-melds with the Red Angel: the destruction of all sentient life by Control, and the seven red signals. But there’s two Red Angels. Gabrielle Burnham didn’t know anything about the red signals. This is a hugely important point in two episodes’ time: the red signals came from Michael, not her mother, and Michael didn’t see the destruction of humanity by Control (and besides, we see that Michael only makes seven jumps, leaving no time for her to mind-meld with Spock).
• Also, how did Spock know the Talosians could help him? This isn’t exactly an obvious extension of the powers they displayed in “The Cage”.
• The Talosians themselves…. Eh. It’s not a bad look, but… So the rule of thumb for Discovery‘s visual reboot is that things may look different, but they will always look enough like their classic depictions that you can tell when something is meant to be the same. Discovery’s uniforms are blue with colored metallic detailing on the sides to indicate department. That’s different enough from the TOS uniform that we know that they’re not meant to be the same; Enterprise has switched to a “new uniform”. Enterprise’s bridge, on the other hand, looks more like Discovery’s than like the TOS bridge, but it still has recognizable features to tell you that, yes, this is meant to be the same thing. It’s generally clear when something is “The same as in TOS, but visually updated to the style of the new show,” as opposed to, “A new thing which is different from what was in TOS.” The Talosians are a little borderline. The main thing that bothers me is how, um, “butch” the Talosians look now. The original Talosians were tall and lanky and frail-looking and deliberately androgynous, most of them played by female actors but dubbed with male voices. Their appearance communicated tremendous mental powers, but also physical weakness, with hints of great age. Discovery Talosians retain the large heads and pallor, but they’re stockier, nearly neckless, and while their heads are still bulbous, they’re not as far out from human proportions, with their heads extending upward, but not spreading out as much, a much more “realistic” hypercephaly than the original “Big ol’ brain-sack perched on top of their head”. Their nose cartilage forms a ridge that extends all the way up. And they come off much more masculine (Even though the non-speaking Talosians are played by female actors), especially the Keeper, who is, presumably, supposed to be the same character originally played by Meg Wylie. Their clothes are also darker and less gown-like.
• Vina is… A problem. Vina has always been a problem, but back in the ’60s, she was the sort of problem the target audience wasn’t going to really notice. So, Vina’s backstory is that she was the only colonist to survive the original crash, almost 20 years before Enterprise came to Talos IV. When the Enterprise crew meets her, she’s introduced (by illusory colonists) as having been born around the time of the crash, the only young, attractive, and just legal woman on a planet of disheveled old men. The reveal comes when Pike, having been freed by the Talosians, tries to take Vina with him. They show him the truth: Vina wasn’t born during the crash; she’d already been an adult twenty years earlier, and her body was badly mangled in the crash. While the Talosians were able to keep her alive and her body functional, they were only guessing at how humans fit together, so now only their illusions hide that she’s severely disfigured, crippled, and middle-aged. When he returns to Enterprise, Pike tells the others that he agreed with her reasons for remaining behind. Ouch. I mean, right there from the outset is the simple and straightforward way Pike just casually accepts that of course spending her life as a prisoner of weird old super-powerful aliens who treat her like livestock and have tortured her in the past is preferable to being disfigured and middle-aged. The Talosians show Pike Vina’s true appearance in order to convince him that her desire to stay is genuine and not coerced, and coupled with the deliberate ambiguity about their motives, you can read this as Pike coming to understand that the Talosians are not the villains they seemed: they tried their best to help Vina, and when they couldn’t fully restore her body, they used their illusions to make up for it. But it reads at least as well or better as abusive behavior, a threat they hang over her (and for that matter, over Pike) to keep her in line. Vina’s behavior kinda screams abuse victim, especially in her warnings not to anger the Talosians, and showing her true appearance at the end feels true to the kind of psychological manipulation abusers do to maintain control over their victims. That’s bad enough, but they don’t even do anything interesting with it; Pike doesn’t even seem to notice, instead just taking it as obvious and natural that Vina would prefer the illusion of beauty over freedom. Discovery compounds this by revisiting it and still not taking a stand against this behavior, and it feels even worse not just because it’s 2019 but also because the Talosians seem, if anything, even more abusive now (Possibly because they’re so much more masculine and so much less flappable – the Talosians of “The Cage” show alarm, concern, and even panic at times, but no one ever properly challenges them in “If Memory Serves”, leaving them to seem consistently in control and detached).
  • Vina’s “true” form is also toned down in Discovery, and seems to just consist of some facial scarring. Which plays up the sense that Vina’s decision is grounded in vanity. No, strike that; Vina doesn’t come of as vain; rather, it seems to just be tacitly accepted that as a woman, her value lies in youth and beauty, and in that model, her true form is worthless. In the original, it’s clear that her disfigurement goes beyond the cosmetic. Her bones don’t seem to be attached properly. Her back isn’t straight, and her hips don’t align properly, and she can only walk with difficulty. It’s not a lot better, but you can at least read her as being extremely uncomfortable in her body. Vina suffering from profound body dysmorphia due to her injuries would’ve been a way Discovery could try to redeem some of the awful implications they inherited for the character, but they don’t go there, and instead pretty much just double down on, “Oh, they made you pretty. Obviously you owe them a lifetime of servitude.”
  • Fifty years more Star Trek under our belt also makes the whole concept a lot more suspect. We’re watching a show where two of the regulars are cyborgs. No one brings up the possibility that they could take Vina back to a modern human hospital and fix her up. There was a scene with Hugh in sickbay last week that pretty much indicated that the only reason anyone has scars in the future is if they think they look cool. But, again, they look at Vina and accept her decision to remain a slave of the scary alien weirdos rather than suggesting she just get her face patched up and her hips realigned at Starbase 12. Some effort to qualify her condition as unfixable would help here – hey, they could say she had delta radiation injuries from the crash, since we know Federation medical science can’t fix that.
  • It seems likely that what they were going for in “The Cage” was to communicate that the Talosians’ behaviors that seemed cruel and abusive were really the result of the Talosians being very alien. They don’t know how to put a human back together exactly, and they don’t know how to behave in a kind, benevolent way to a human. They don’t get why a human would resist captivity like that. This is reinforced by the tonal shift from “The Cage” to “The Menagerie”. There’s a kind of Stanslaw Lem quality to the idea that a powerful alien’s attempts to be kind would in fact be abusive because the aliens don’t think the way we do, which, as I mentioned above, is neat. But even if the presentation of it here flew in the sixties (And I’m not convinced it should’ve), it certainly doesn’t here, where we don’t get something analogous to the scene of the Keeper being horrified that Pike would even try to fight back. And it certainly doesn’t work that no one ever calls them on it.

That problem with Vina is really glaring, but of course it’s a problem that belongs firstly to “The Cage” and only secondarily to “If Memory Serves”. On the whole, I do really like this episode. It indulges fannish nostalgia without being overly obsessive about it, and there’s many examples of Discovery avoiding the kind of shallow character “conflict” that plagued ’90s Trek based around people being arbitrarily obstinate or refusing to talk about things.

And here, we end our bumble through season 2 of Star Trek Discovery. I expect I shall return if we get a new batch of Short Treks, and then in 2020 for season 3, unless it turns out to suck. In the mean time, if the mood strikes me, maybe I’ll turn up early next year for Star Trek: Picard.

Which I really hope surprises me. It seems like they’re going for an angle of “What is the deep dark secret that drove Picard from Starfleet?”, but what I really want to see? A show where space and Starfleet and Trekkishness doesn’t enter into it at all, and it’s just a light domestic comedy-drama where Patrick Stewart plays a grumpy old vintner, dealing with the various hardships of artisanal winemaking in twenty-fifth century France, with beloved ’90s guest stars occasionally dropping by to annoy him. Sample episodes might include:

• “The Turn of the Screw”: Old Man Picard runs into trouble sourcing authentic replacement parts for a five-hundred-year-old wine press. Resisting pressure to switch to a more modern system, he recruits his old friend Geordi LaForge to help him make new parts using period-authentic methods.
• “The Naked Vine”: The Rikers come to visit Old Man Picard, but their teenage children, only accustomed to synthehol, get into the cellars and drunken hijinks ensue.
• “Before its Time”: Quark visits the Picard vineyard looking to set up a distribution deal to sell Chateau Picard in Ferengi space, but trying to fill an optimistic order, Quark tries mixing antifreeze into the wine to speed production.
• “A Case of Honor”: The case of Chateau Picard gifted to Alexander Rozhinko for his wedding is discovered to have gone off. His father Worf insists that Old Man Picard fight him to the death as a matter of honor unless he can prove that the shipping company stored it improperly.
• “What Dreams May Come”: Old Man Picard hooks up Data’s head to run the climate control system in the cellars, but Data gets bored and his daydreams start coming to life on all the holographic TVs in the house.
• “The Universal Constant”: Made suspicious by his “French” accent, retired Admiral Janeway looks into the Chateau’s paperwork. With 24 hours to save his artisanal winemaking license, Old Man Picard turns to the genetically enhanced brain of Dr. Julian Bashir to do a full compliance audit of the vineyard.
• “Exit, Pursued by a Bear”: Experimenting with noble rot, Old Man Picard accidentally infests a field with Prototaxites stellaviatori. He is forced to turn to his ex-girlfriend, Dr. Beverly Crusher, to develop an anti-fungal, but things get complicated when the spores attract a giant tardigrade.
• “L’etranger”: Old Man Picard is visited by a man who bears a striking resemblance to a famous early Starfleet captain. The visitor claims to be a time traveler, sent from the past to set right what would go wrong by preventing a fermenter explosion.
• “Bottle, Bottle, Who’s Got the Bottle?”: While visiting the vineyard, Odo is accidentally bottled. Old Man Picard must find the missing bottle before it is sold and drunk.
• “Fa Q”: Old Man Picard’s zany godlike frenemy Q shows up and pulls ridiculous stunts like turning all the wine into water. Old Man Picard desperately tries to just go about his business and not react to any of Q’s stunts, hoping he’ll get bored and go bother Janeway or something.
• “Un Jour Sans Soleil”: A freak accident with a plasma torch, a self-sealing stem bolt, and a mechanical destemmer plunges Old Man Picard into the Mirror Universe, where he must best his Terran counterpart at a wine tasting to return home.
• “A Christmas Carol”: Christmas Special: Wesley Crusher, Benjamin Sisko and the ghost of Katrina Cornwell appear to Old Man Picard on Christmas Eve to persuade him to go play Santa at the local orphanarium.