Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 4×02: Anomaly

Okay, that’s a little better.

For its second outing this season, Discovery gives us an episode where a lot less happens. Well, that’s not quite right; I mean, quite a bit happens, but it feels much more constrained. This gives us a lot more room for the character work to steep. Pacing has always been Discovery‘s weakness – and Picard‘s weakness. And really the weakness of all the streaming originals to a greater or lesser extent. This week is, as it pretty much had to be, primarily concerned with Book’s grief at the loss of his world, but there’s other things in there too. My central thesis for Discovery is that it is at its core a show about healing, and I see no reason to back away from that.

One of the few common complaints about the show which I find fully justified is its mining of our heroes’ mental health issues for drama, in a way that leans on the ableist and regressive notion that mental illness is something to be treated via big, exciting, cathartic action sequences rather than medication and counseling. This was kind of gross last season with Admiral Vance expressing entirely justified concern over Detmer’s incredibly obvious PTSD and Saru responding that they were just gonna keep trusting her rather than getting her actual professional help. There’s some improvement this week, with Michael ordering Hugh to be on the line while Book flies into the anomaly in order to assess his mental health. And possibly the closest we’ve come to handling mental health in a proper way happens a bit later when Adorably Troubled Lieutenant Tilly takes Hugh aside and very directly says that she recognizes that she’s not quite right psychologically and wants to make arrangements to see him in his professional capacity (Discovery should have a full-time dedicated psychiatric specialist, but I can tacitly accept that their unique circumstances make it tricky for them to bring on new crew, particularly for a job that requires that kind of intimate working relationship with people who are culturally a millennium different from the rest of the galaxy). It’s particularly good that Tilly in particular reaches out for help, after her arc with May in season 2.

On the other hand, though, Book absolutely needs to be on meds. I mean, I’m generally pro-medication; the only reason I don’t think we should treat the traumatic injury of, “Your planet got blown up,” fundamentally differently than we treat the traumatic injury of, “You threw out your back,” is that the current state of psychoactive medication isn’t yet to the stage of ibuprofen, but one presumes things are better in the thirty-second century. But look, even if you reckon that healing from grief is something the body can do naturally and medical intervention should be reserved for exceptional cases, watching one’s planet get blown up is an exceptional case. And having hallucinations is absolutely on the far side of the far side of the, “when do you need medication?” line. (One of the many times on Deep Space Nine when they gave O’Brien PTSD for funsies, he started having hallucinations, and while they did their usual, “The treatment for your mental trauma is a big dramatic catharsis scene,” they also gave him antipsychotics to make the hallucinations go away while he worked through his trauma.)

So we get our scene early on of the major powers discussing the Big Scary Threat, and it’s an interesting twist that Stamets’s initial proposal of a binary black hole turns out to be just flat out completely wrong. Also, the Ferengi captain that upset everyone so much in the trailer is there, though it’s just a cameo and he doesn’t do anything. I don’t have any issue with them changing the Ferengi makeup (Particularly since I assume he’s meant to be part-Ferengi), though the actual makeup itself is not great. Weird that Book’s allowed to just wander in to a top level meeting with the presidents of the Federation and Ni’Var (and whoever else was there).

Also very good that Adira talks out out with Gray about re-processing the trauma of Gray’s death after the events on the station. Characters in general are better about talking through their feelings this season, and it’s delightfully weird that Adira can discuss their feelings over watching Gray die with Gray. Gray for his part never seems particularly broken up over having died per se, just angsty over being incorporeal. And the reveal of how they plan to “encorporate” Gray? Man, okay, Hugh’s delivery here is a little clumsy and awkward, but major kudos for the mechanism. In brief: they’re Picarding him. Straight up the same process from the end of Picard, making a synth body and using Soong’s neural transfer method to yoink him out of Adira/Tal and stuff him in the golem. I love that Picard set this up for us, but without calling any attention to itself, so that you never really had any reason to predict this would be the path they went down. We can also quietly deduce that synths are still a thing, since there’s people out there who build synth bodies professionally. Gray even muses on the possibility of becoming a host again – oddly, before he asks whether or not his new body will age. And you could easily miss it, but we get on-screen confirmation that Gray is trans. This was pretty much assumed before, since Ian Alexander is, but Trill are alien enough that I wouldn’t have wanted to just take it for granted without them saying it. It’s dropped in a casual sort of way that doesn’t call attention to it, and has all the subtlety that Adira coming out as enby last season lacked. The awkwardness of that scene is fine; Adira’s whole thing is that they’re supposed to be awkward, but Gray really isn’t, so it’s good that they don’t make a big point of it.

We get an answer to the thing I asked last week, as not only is Zora still with us, she’s started going by that name. Still not making a big deal over the ship being sentient, but okay. Nifty little technical thing where they put a Cone of Silence over the captain’s chair when Michael makes a private call. Things are a little rough on the plot logic inside the anomaly, though. Book’s whole argument for flying the ship is that Detmer isn’t experienced with using its morphing ability, but I don’t think he actually does any morphing during that entire scene. They also cut the tether so that Discovery can back off from the gravity waves, which is solid metaphorical stuff about Michael being willing to “let go” of Book in favor of her duty the the rest of the ship. But… Part of the point of the tether was that it helped holo-Stamets maintain his signal?

The character arc between Book and Stamets also feels a little unearned. We get a good resolution: Paul is uncomfortable around Book because Book saved his husband and kid specifically by doing Paul’s “thing”, at a time when Paul himself had been rendered completely helpless. But… Paul’s discomfort around Book is an entirely informed trait; we haven’t seen it even once on-screen. Also, Paul makes a glib joke about being thrown out an airlock, as if everyone else would find it uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong; I like the way they pair up those two and build this parallel: Book couldn’t save his own family, but he saved Paul’s when Paul couldn’t do it himself. However, Discovery‘s ultra-compressed storytelling serves it poorly here, because they basically resolved a character arc without bothering to have the character arc.

I’m also a bit disappointed visually. Other than the appearance of hallucinatory birds in the accretion cloud, there’s not much going on this week that’s visually cool. An obligatory “Turn the camera upside-down” scene, about which I have already made my feelings clear. Felt dumb that after the first time everyone went floating for a minute, they didn’t put their seatbelts on before the second time (Seatbelts on starships are not generally useful, since seatbelts only help over a comparatively narrow range of things, but “the gravity goes out for a minute” is one of the things in that range), though I liked that they depicted everyone getting banged up and Hugh running around the bridge zapping their wounds closed. Plus there’s the unspeakable oddity that the traditional Star Trek showers of sparks have been upgraded to full-on fireballs shooting out of the walls. In fact, it almost looks like the bridge has specific fireball-vents installed specifically for the purpose of shooting fireballs out at dramatically appropriate moments. I have in the past joked that the pyrotechnics on the bridge aren’t really things exploding under stress, but are really harmless-but-dramatic visual indicators designed into ships’ systems by Starfleet engineering as a particularly emphatic visual indicator of an alert status (I once worked in a shop where the sustainment team had gotten so inured to the blinking red alert lights that an indicator of an actual serious emergency was given a pink skull-and-crossbones indicator so they’d realize it was serious), but this is taking it too far.

The anomaly itself gets upgraded via Discovery turning on an Instagram filter from a fisheye effect to…. basically your usual Big Swirly Thing In Space. There’s a few shots of it where I think the idea is just to depict gravitational lensing, but it reminds me a lot of one of the visual effects from the time travel sequence in Star Trek IV. No idea what that could mean, if, indeed, it means anything at all. My working theory right now is that this is going to be another take on the The God Machine – the same idea that very broadly inspired both Star Trek The Motion Picture and Star Trek IV. The parallels to V’ger and The Probe are modest so far, but they’re certainly there. I’ll admit, I’m intrigued by the mystery, despite the fact that seven and a half seasons of modern-era Trek have so far given me no reason to believe they are going to pursue unfolding this plot with any sort of grace or pacing, but more likely will just faff about for seven weeks and then drop the whole thing in one massive shaky-cam climax at the end.

And still no damn Tig Notaro.