Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 3×06: Scavengers

Oof. I am whelmed. Strictly whelmed. Let’s see…

• Storywise, this is first-things-first, but I managed not to notice until my second watch: Discovery gets new hull markings as part of its upgrade and, importantly, they fixed the serifs! This has been driving me crazy. See, the hull markings on Starfleet ships is a derivative of the Microgramma font. But up until Discovery, they always used a modified “1” with a shorter serif, because the serif on the normal Microgramma 1 is sort of weird. And you might think this is just me being a font nerd, which is true, but also, the serif on the 1 is so important that Franz Josef’s technical manuals for Star Trek, which document exactly what everything is supposed to look like with measurements and all that has a big bold note on the page about hull markings saying not to use the “1” glyph for hull markings. It’s always stuck out like a sore thumb and felt Just Slightly Wrong. Discovery’s new markings have the modified 1, and it’s such a relief I didn’t even notice they added an “-A” to its registry number.
• On the other hand, I just don’t like the detached nacelles. I don’t even know why, they just bother me. I don’t have any technical objection; I’m fine with the “The future is super weird” aspect of ships basically being ten percent pixie dust now, and I can imagine detached nacelles for better maneuverability being an evolution of Voyager’s variable geometry, but it just bugs me.
  • Though the bit at the end where Craft’s ship origamis itself instead of just doing a U-turn does not convince me that this “better maneuverability” is really what’s going on rather than, “It looks real cool”.
• Also not crazy about the shape of the new delta badges. Purely an aesthetic objection.
  • I assume the idea is that they’re a little bit chunkier to accomodate the extra tech inside them. They’re still markedly smaller than the other personal transporters we’ve seen so far.
• Linus randomly beaming around the ship was cute though. Happens the exact number of times it could happen without wearing out its welcome.
• I kinda dig the idea of, “We upgraded your ship to be ten percent pixie dust, but we left everything looking the same because we figured you’d be more comfortable that way.”
• Adira and Stamets bonding over the shared experience of the men they love dying and coming back as Sci-Fi Contrivance Zombies is freaking adorable.
• In particular, it’s another bit of people in Discovery taking things in stride where ’90s Trek would burn time with people not believing each other for the sake of conflict. “Oh, my dead boyfriend appears to me in the form of a hologram ghost because of my tummy-grub,” is met neither with outright disbelief or even concern that this is a symptom of a problem with her symbiosis, but just, “Yeah, okay. One time my husband died and I lightning-rodded his soul into magic mushroom space where invisible fungi built him a new body, so who am I to judge?”
  • Though I do feel like the two of them are more up on each other’s backstories than one would expect. It would’ve been entirely fine for this to be the first Adira had heard of Hugh having come back from the dead and had some questions about it. Likewise, it’s a little sub-optimal that Stamets has learned enough about Trill symbiosis to say, “But your symbiote is just supposed to give you memories, not interactive invisible friends,” rather than, like, “I’ve only known about this symbiosis thing for a couple of weeks and I’ve been busy installing pixie dust in the engines. Are ghost boyfriends a normal thing for Trill?”
  • Oh, duh. His husband is the ship’s doctor. There was definitely a dinnertime conversation about the Biology of the Neat New Species We Just Met. And probably also a conversation along the lines of, “You’ve got the memories of several centuries of dead people because of the grub in your belly? I was a dead person once. Now turn your head and cough.” Objection withdrawn.
  • Now I’m imagining a deleted scene where Hugh quietly beams down to Trill Barnes and Noble and picks up a copy of Basic Trill Medical Science for Dummies while Michael and Adira are having weird metaphysical adventures in the glowing underground pond.
• Something feels off with the order of the scenes between them though. The scene where Adira offers to “do something” about Stamets’s shunts happens after she’s installed the new goo-based spore cube controls, when it seems like it should come first, but it’s the end result of their cute bonding scene, which only really works as a follow-up to the earlier scene where Stamets gets annoyed at her for screwing with the spore drive and she proves herself.
• Detmer is the only one who isn’t stoked about their new pixie dust-based controls. I really hope she’s getting therapy.
• It is sort of disappointing that we don’t get to show off Discovery’s new abilities, and for all the setup of Discovery being a “rapid responder” that might be called into a dangerous situation at a moment’s notice, they don’t actually do anything or go anywhere this week. I know it would’ve overburdened the episode to add more plot, but a plot about Discovery doing a rapid response mission to show off the new features would be better than the half of the plot about Burnham and Georgiou.
• Yeah, that plot wasn’t especially great. It was fine, but not great. We finally get another “actual legitimate bad guy”, and, like Zareh, he’s just a bully who only poses a serious threat for a few minutes on account of Whatever’s Wrong With Georgiou. The show is much more explicit about it this time, constantly showing off that even in his own domain, he’s just a nasty little toady for his aunt (who I hope does not show up later as an escalating threat) .
• I hope that this Georgiou thing isn’t going in the direction of her problem being that she’s spontaneously growing a conscience, and, like the various Daleks who get uplifted out of the Dalek worldview, it’s causing her psychological distress to gain the ability to appreciate what a terrible person she is.
  • If this is some weird form of, “Being this far separated from her own universe is somehow causing her to change into a human,” that would be a nicely Weird thing to do, but I still wouldn’t really like it that much.
• Self-sealing stem bolt reference.