Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 4×03: Choose to Live

Discovery is really getting the hang of being on-point thematically. Other aspects… Well, we’re working on it.

We don’t do much to advance the overall plot this week, but we do deal with a lot of the fallout from last week’s character work. I generally like Discovery’s more stand-alone episodes, so this is nice even if the stakes are a bit… complicated? But with short seasons, it’s hard to really do this sort of thing while simultaneously giving due time to the massive season-spanning plot they’ve decided to have, and pacing is, as I have bored you all many times with now, not Discovery’s strong suit.

This episode reminds me a lot of season 2’s “New Eden”, another episode whose plot was somewhat self-contained and which continued the season arc in a largely indirect way. Though that one had Detmer doing donuts in a starship, which is a point against “Choose to Live”. “Choose to Live” has some nice matte shots, and they keep the camera right-side-up for the whole episode, though, so it’s better than nothing.

Our A-plot gets the Qowat Milat back to their Picard depiction as an order of warrior nuns who swear themselves to lost causes, rather than last season’s oddly random decision that the Qowat Milat of the far future mostly do ritualistic doctoral thesis defense. Gabrielle Burnham is back, and this is not milked for Drama! and Conflict! the way you might expect. Michael and her mom disagree, but there’s never that much tension between them. Honestly, Michael’s relationship with her mom is one place where Disco is weird about how muted it is emotionally. Keep in mind that Michael’s mom disappeared and was presumed dead when Michael was a little girl; she only recently found out she was still alive, then lost her again, and now they’re stranded in the far future and her mom’s become a Romulan Warrior Nun; I would be okay if they had Michael get emotional about this.

The whole thing where it turns out that the antagonist isn’t a “bad guy”, just someone whose goals, while reasonable, put her at cross-purposes with the heroes, is exactly the kind of conflict I think Star Trek should be exploring, and resolving it with a, “Hey, wait, if we stop fighting for a moment and everyone just behaves reasonably, we can find a solution that works for everyone,” is exactly the sort of conflict resolution I think Star Trek should be exploring. The major weakness of the plot comes from the idiot balls, and even there, that feels like it’s down mostly to the perennial pacing issues. Michael is sort of arbitrarily and uncharacteristically resistant to the idea that J’Vini is pursuing a noble goal in a way that reminds me of her being just kind of arbitrarily a dick about the religious beliefs of the Terralysians. If they went somewhere with this, it would be okay, but they don’t really. You might expect that this boils down to Michael feeling abandoned by her mother – that her mom is siding with her Nun Sister over her Starfleet Daughter. Tilly’s speech to them about missing her own shitty mom plays into that, but feels out-of-place in the episode-as-filmed because the conflict between the Burnhams is so muted. I assume that this was trimmed down from a draft that centered the conflict more. The fact that J’Vini’s actions have gotten another Qowat Milat sister killed (Which is itself pretty gross; this character exists for no reason other than to die, and they don’t even milk that death for anything. The one interesting thing she does is reassure Tilly that her adorable goofiness doesn’t make her look incompetent) barely seems to register; it has no impact on Gabrielle Burnham’s determination to risk everyone’s lives to take J’Vini in alive, nor does it seem to be much remembered at the end. Again, with Michael’s underwritten and inconsistent motivations: at the end, she requests leniency for J’Vini, given her motivations. But when they hand her over to Ni’vari justice, Michael instantly jumps to being indignant that they would dare let Ni’var handle the enforcement of law against a Ni’vari citizen for crimes one of which is the murder of another Ni’Vari citizen. In fact, Michael assumes that the Ni’Var government is going to just let J’Vini off the hook entirely, which, again, two people died, and one of them was Ni’Vari. (Mercenaries do not count, because reasons). It feels like there was meant to be a character arc here for Michael that ended up on the cutting room floor. Michael again has this frustration at the Federation President’s politicing, and I think we’re meant to see Michael in the wrong here, but the show isn’t using the language of television to convey that properly, so I’m conflicted between the idea that Michael’s own control issues are blinding her to the bigger picture and she needs to learn to defer to the president’s judgment (This is clued by the fact that, just like two weeks ago, the president knows the names of the dead officer’s family), and the idea that the president is a political schemer who has lost sight of being Good and Just and Noble in the face of Realpolitik. I’m hoping it’s the former here, because Michael learning to grow and change and improve is a better, more personal journey for this story than another rehash of, “Politics bad! Action good!” that genre shows like to indulge in. The show does seem to want very much for us to accept that letting the Qowat Milat take the lead on the mission and letting Ni’Var handle criminal proceedings against J’Vini is a case of “This is wrong, but we have to accept it because of the delicate political situation.” And I don’t like that interpretation, because Ni’Var has a strong claim here. We are of course – particularly if “we” are American, which, given what Paramount has decided to do with the distribution model of Discovery, we absolutely are – meant to view the Federation in the analogous role to the US Government, and think, “Well obviously if a rogue member of a foreign armed force killed a US servicemember, the US would be the one to bring them in and bring them to justice; there is no negotiating on this point, and any politician who let the foreign government handle it instead would be terrible,” and not at all imagine outselves as analogous to the Ni’Var government here. If you do, you might notice that if an American went rogue and murdered a foreign servicemember and also a US servicemember while trying to escape, there is no way in hell we would allow them to stand trial in a foreign court for that.

There are shades of “11001001” in J’Vini’s motivations too – the whole “I went on an interstellar crime spree and killed a man rather than ask for help” angle. They do a better-than-average job of justifying it in her case, though: not relying on the lazy “I didn’t ask because you might have said no,” of the TNG-era, they give us justification in that she can’t even admit to the existence of this species, because of the whole, “Their blood is worth its own weight in their blood,” thing. And I like the angle that she needs the dilithium not to wake them, but to move their moon-ship if the anomaly gets too close: to her, this is a lost cause: she doesn’t realize that they even can be brought out of hibernation. It still feels forced, but it’s not nearly as bad as a lot of the, “We could’ve solved this in thirty seconds if we’d actually asked,” plots that Trek has relied on over the years. Of course, they do solve it in thirty seconds once Michael realizes enough of what’s going on to wake the sleepers. Who we do not meet or anything.

Meanwhile, in plot B, almost nothing happens. Stamets and Book go to the Ni’Var Science Institute to talk about what I guess we’re calling the “DMA”, for Direct Memory Access Digital Millennium Copyright Act Dark Matter Anomaly. I shall continue to call it the Big Swirly Thing In Space. This plot does not do much of anything at all; Stamets explains his theory, the Vulcans and Romulans consider it, and then – in much the same way as the last time the Ni’Var Science Academy got involved – they don’t do shit, and the president of Ni’Var intervenes and solves things herself. Remember what I said before about it being good that Tilly was getting therapy instead of resolving her mental health crisis via a Big Cathartic Set Piece? Well, turns out that what Book needed was… A Big Cathartic Set Piece. The president very clearly comes up with this whole plan specifically because she wants to help Book, but she leverages it to solve Stamets’s problem, by using a mind-meld with Book to get him his catharsis while simultaneously disproving the Primordial Wormhole theory. I don’t approve of the mental health angle, but I do appreciate the way the puzzle pieces fit together. Book identifies the core of his survivor’s guilt being that he reckons there must have been some clue he should’ve seen. Stamets is looking for the key piece of evidence for his theory. The president ties these two up in a bow by using a mind-meld to establish an absence of evidence: there was nothing for Book to have seen, which means that Book couldn’t have saved his family, and also the tachyons Stamets’s theory hinges on weren’t present. It’s very clean. It’s a bit less satisfying that it seems like maybe the running plot here is going to be “Stamets comes up with an explanation for the BSTiS and it is disproven.”

Also, the Ni’Var science academy meets on a floating platform over a mountain. Discovery is somewhat better than previous incarnations of Trek about giving us the tiny little scrap of justification for its weird Star Trek nonsense. Here I am, about to point out how goofy it is that the Ni’Var Science Academy meets on a floating platform overlooking a mountain range.. And they all go into a meditative trance. Okay. That’s fair. They have their science meetings somewhere serene and picturesque because a major part of their process is quiet, peaceful contemplation. A zen garden would be more efficient, but the Ni’Var Science Academy probably had some deep-pocket donors who want their name on something extravagant. I spent enough time in academia to understand that. Our humanities building was a Tudor-style mansion with genuine Stickley furniture.

And then, we’ve got a C-plot. And it’s fine. I think possibly there would’ve been some advantage in moving this one to next week to give the A and B plots a little more room, though? I’m real surprised how briskly they’ve made it through Gray’s arc; I expected this would take a significant part of the season. The C-plot is just “They transfer Gray into the synth body and for a little while it doesn’t look like it’s going to work but then it does,” which is a little less than fully satisfying; no one has any real agency in this plot; it just kind of happens all on its own. And Gray is the one it’s happening to, but he’s not there for most of it. I wish Hugh had more to say here – he’s in something of a unique position to relate to the experience of dying and having your ego transplanted into a newly-grown replacement body. Maybe that will be for next week as Gray adjusts to being corporeal again? So far, Gray seems entirely fine, but who knows if that will last. I like that they ask Tal for consent separately from both Adira and Gray; that’s cool. It’s a bit weird and lovely that Guardian Z can perform the soul swap via telepresence, but, I mean, what, am I going to say “But magical psychic powers don’t work that way!” I like that they remembered that the Trill already had a process in place for yoinking a past host’s identity out of a symbiont and stuffing it in someone else. I will not try to say what it’s called, because when I try to remember, all I get is “Gom Jabar”, but that’s the thing where you put your hand in the box of pain. Also, “Guardian Z” is a fun name that sounds like it should be long to the person who gives you Power Ranger powers. Not actually showing us the transfer is unsatisfying though, and I think more evidence that all three plots needed breathing room. We have three largely disjoint plots very loosely connected by some common threads of mental health and trauma over being separated from family (Available in three great flavors: “Estrangement from Warrior Nun Mom”; “My whole species but especially my nephew is dead”; and new “Had my dead boyfriend’s soul surgically extracted from the grub that lives in my belly”), but there’s nothing here that required them to happen at the same time.

Also, we are now three episodes in and I have still not seen Reno. I was promised more Reno this season.