Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 3×11 Su’Kal

So much payoff. So much. And then it all comes crashing down because this season has to actually arc somewhere. Oh well.

• So okay, if it had turned out that Grey had gone into hiding because he thought his presence was stopping Adira from moving on and engaging with the living people in their life, that would’ve been just fine. But to have it actually be because Grey is having an existential crisis over the fact that he does not actually exist? Holy shit is that wonderfully weird.
• As with last week, it feels like a lot of character development that in a more traditional show would be happening as B-plot in filler episodes is just outright offscreen.
• I love that when Stamets is trying to dissuade Hugh from going to the death planet, he mentions Adira as a reason to stay because Hugh and Stamets are totally Adira’s space dads now, and it happened quietly in the background without anyone calling attention to it. He doesn’t come out and say it, but it’s very straightforwardly, “You can’t go off and get yourself killed; we’re coparenting this angsty teenage conjoined enby genius with a ghost boyfriend,” and Hugh doesn’t react at all.
• Also, Stamets going all Vaguely Threatening Dad Whose Little Kid’s Heart Got Broken on Gray, who Stamets can not see or hear is just Chef’s Kiss.
• And I wasn’t expecting this payoff for Hugh’s arc. I’ve been complaining about the way his existential angst from last season is just over and done now. But we got some closure on it suddenly when Hugh explains how being in this crappy future has fulfilled this need in him.
• And I like how subtly they convey how far Book has come: when he reports that the planet is made of dilithium, his immediate reaction is to say how it could restore the Federation – not to muse on its value or even on a personal sense of the good it could do.
• Last year they gave us a Good Prime Directive Episode. This year, a Good Holodeck Malfunction episode. I like the broken-computer logic that Su’Kal might be scared of two humans and a Kelpien, so it magicked them into a Trill, a Bajoran and a human.
• Why does Doug Jones not look appreciably less alien as a human?
• So… If you start from the position that it is simply not possible for any explanation for the burn to be big enough or satisfying enough for the narrative gravity of it, we can rejoice in the fact that it didn’t turn out to be Michael’s fault in the first place. I’m not entirely comfortable with this explanation, but certainly, “The Burn is the scream of a frightened child locked in his private hell,” is pretty weird. Heck, I’d barely bat an eyelash if it were the reveal in an episode of Doctor Who.
• So Su’Kal is really the monster, right? I mean, we all get that; just like the holodeck made Michael, Hugh and Saru look different to avoid frightening Su’Kal, it’s also making Su’Kal look normal instead of like a scary ghost monster?
• Or… Since “Su’Kal” is traditionally the name given to the first child born after a tragedy, is the monster actually his big brother? First baby is born with a bad case of monsterism, so the physically-normal baby born after is given the traditional Rainbow Baby name? Shades of The Dunwich Horror.
• Saru getting all choked up at meeting an Elder who’s a lot more eld than he’s ever seen.
• It could’ve gone without saying, but I’m glad, as a background detail, that the elder tells the history of the Kelpiens and the Ba’ul, and that Kaminar entered the Federation as a unified planet. The Kelpiens and the Ba’ul worked it out and learned to live together.
• We seem to be building up to a kind of thematic repeat of the season 1 finale. That, if you’ll recall, had our heroes in a position where they could win the war and save the Federation, and all they had to do was blow up a planet and commit genocide. This time around, Su’Kal caused the burn and could cause another one, and he lives on a planet that could render the Federation economically feasible again. The pragmatic thing, the safe thing, the practical thing is to kill Su’Kal. But it isn’t the Starfleet thing. Discovery, when it is working, is a show about broken people learning to heal, so the only place this can go is healing. If saving the Federation requires killing Su’Kal, then the Federation needs to die.
• Which makes it dramatically strange – even implausible, maybe – that they’ve set up the board for the endgame with Saru, Hugh, and Adira doing this plot. Adira is certainly a wildcard, but they don’t seem like they’d take an aggressive stance. Normally, you’d move toward where this plot has to be going by trying to convince us that killing Su’Kal is on the table. If they’d left Michael there, we’d have that tension: would Michael’s desire to save the Federation and her estrangement from Federation ideals push her to embrace the grimdark and kill the scared child? But with it being a doctor and a Kelpien starved for contact with his own race who are involved in this plot, they can’t be expecting us to presume that tension, so how is this going to play out?
• What’s the over/under on the crashed ship making Grey into a semi-corporeal entity via holodeck magic?
  • I really wanted to go for the Pinocchio reference here instead of “semi-corporeal entity”, but given that Ian Alexander is trans, I think it would mean things I don’t want it to mean.
• “Hey, we can cloak now, right?” is a weird way to drop in the fact that Discovery has a cloaking device now.
• Yeah, we get to the big let down of the episode. I guess we’re doing this thing where Osyraa is the big bad and a serious threat who is going to get right up to the very edge of destroying the Federation once and for all until Michael Burnham personally saves it at the end of act 2. I don’t like this at all.
• I am having an especially hard time with how trivially she takes Discovery. Just beams in and has the place in her control in a matter of seconds with no effort. It’s not exactly bad writing itself, though: I can see how they had to get there.
• To wit, it is absolutely essential for Osyraa to have the upper hand for the sake of the cliffhanger. Sure. That’s how season arcs work. Osyraa has to capture Discovery because otherwise we don’t get to the season finale.
• But for the sake of her character arc, Osyraa’s victory at this point can’t be due to Tilly making a mistake; it completely ruins her arc if Tilly fucks up here. So Tilly has to do things right, but still lose. The consequence is that Osyraa has to win purely by fiat. And I think a little more emphasis on the fact that Discovery was already damaged would help here. But, of course, lean in too hard on that and Osyraa’s victory comes down to Saru having fucked up earlier in the episode.
• This could’ve been the payoff for the tension last time over them using an Emerald Chain range extender – some secret facet of the device unknown to Book. That would shore up the plot a bit, but I can also see why they didn’t want to do it – there’s an ugly thematic element there in justifying the idea that EVIL OUTSIDER THINGS ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED FOR THEY CARRY THE TAINT OF THE LESSER RACES. I wonder if they’d originally intended to have a scene where Osyraa makes some snide remark and pushes a button that makes the range extender light up and crash Discovery’s systems, but someone pointed out the thematic problems with that so they dropped it.
• So where are we going with this plot? I’m not overly optimistic. I know where it ought to go, but will it, or will it go for “Michael Burnham magically saves the day”? Probably the latter.
• The fact that we haven’t seen the Klingons all season has me wondering if they’re being saved for something big and dramatic at the finale. We haven’t even heard about them, let alone seen a single Klingon. There doesn’t seem to be enough time left in the season to satisfactorily answer the question of what became of them, but that wouldn’t necessarily stop the show from rushing through that at the last minute.
  • If Klingon culture hasn’t changed massively since the rest of Trek, you’d expect them to have taken advangate of the chaos caused by the Burn to become their own kind of syndicate.
  • If they joined the Federation, you’d expect some mention of them – surprise by the Discovery crew, the occasional Klingon in the background at Federation HQ even if they have since left.
  • Being wiped out in the Temporal Wars seems plausible, given their connection to Time Crystals.
  • The most interesting possibility, though, is that they’ve turned inward and become a culture of isolationist warrior-monks living in seclusion, like the Time Keepers of Borteth. That would fit with the old “Fall of the Federation” series proposal that was pitched years ago as an alternative to Enterprise. That too could fit in with the Temporal Wars backstory – perhaps the Klingons have given up on galactic affairs to focus on enforcing the Temporal Accords.
• So where would I take it? Osyraa wins. Brings the Federation to its knees. Declares how the whole galaxy is now going to live in a constant state of shakedown by her criminal syndicate. And then the whole galaxy – the Kwijan, the Trill, the Vulcans, the Romulans, the liberated slaves from Hunhau, the Barzan, the Kelpiens, the Coridanites, and United Earth (Even though it doesn’t really need it, the usual rules of television demand that the humans show up last) – all the people Discovery has interacted with and shown the possibility of a better way. And they all show up at Federation Headquarters and tell Osyraa to fuck off, that they don’t care if she’s got a spore drive and a starfleet; they will not consent be ruled by the Emerald Chain, and if she presses the issue, they will fight to the last person and she can be queen of a dead galaxy.
• Or someone pours a bucket of water on her and she melts. That would be funny.