Some Blundering about Star Trek: Discovery 4×04: All is Possible

Discovery is a flawed show in many respects. But every once in a while it’ll do something – usually not even a huge something – that knocks it so far out of the park that I completely forget about the myriad ways in which this show infuriates me. Michael agreeing to euthanize Saru. Pike taking the time crystal. All of “Calypso”. On the other hand, there are moments which make me grind my teeth and do the shouty Internet Man-child thing and insist that my childhood has been RUINED FOREVER.

It is rare that it does both in the same episode.

So, very good, from my lips back in time to the writers’ ears: Book’s big cathartic scene last week doesn’t solve his mental health problems. It helped, but his grief is still a process and he’s still got work to do, some of which he does over the course of this week’s “Just character stuff” subplot, having a therapy session with Hugh. Hugh seems to have aged tremendously since last season, but hey, haven’t we all? Hugh also hints at some of the baggage he’s carrying, which seems to be something other than the whole, “Was dead for a bit” thing. This was real, real good. Everything that the show about healing needs to show us about the work of it. (I do consider it a bit of a misstep how everyone keeps saying how beautiful Kweijan was. Kweijan was pre-warp at the time of the burn; no one should really know much of anything about the place, and it sounds cheap when everyone reflects on what a nice place it was)

Meanwhile, political intrigue! I said back in episode one that I don’t really want political intrigue in my Star Trek. This episode hints a lot around the edges at what a West Wing-flavored Star Trek might be like. I’m not entirely averse to such a thing. Just… Not while it’s also trying to be a Fun Adventures in Space Show. They want to do a spin-off about Federation Politics? I’ll give it a chance. This is thematically great. Once again, we’ve got people who aren’t bad and who aren’t pursuing bad ends; it’s just that what’s right for each of them is in conflict. The Ni’Var President is the best politician character in all of Star Trek, and she’s better than most politician characters in all of fiction. The reveal that she leaked her own political bombshell to the person she was going to drop the bomb on, in order that she could set up Michael and Saru to defuse it is fantastic. Also, I am so glad to have been right about the romantic chemistry between her and Saru last season. (The president’s name is T’rina, for what it’s worth, which sounds like the name of a character in a joke about Star Trek alien names and apostrophes, like when Stephen Colbert met his Romulan counterpart, who was also called Stephen Colbert, except, “I spell it with a KH and three apostrophes.”). So: Ni’Var wants an escape clause that would let them leave the Federation whenever they felt like it at no cost to them. T’rina knows this is too much to ask and would be politically impossible for the Federation to grant, but she needs the support of the isolationists, and can’t afford to show weakness by listening to a Federation compromise. The Federation President (Can’t hold on to her name. I think it’s Laura? But probably with a KH and three apostrophes?) knows that while a full-on escape clause is too much, the Federation needs to do more to reassure member worlds that it isn’t going to step on their autonomy and that they’ll have recourse if the central government goes off the rails again (The backstory to Ni’Var leaving the Federation was that immediately prior to the Burn, they’d been pressured by the central government into dangerous research and felt their safety concerns weren’t being taken seriously), but her coalition depends on her projecting an uncompromising position of strength through unity. She’s right that if Ni’Var gets its escape clause, everyone’s going to want one, and then what you’ve got isn’t so much a Federation as a social club.

So the President’s solution – and if the focus on this episode were different, I could easily imagine the episode ending with Martin Sheen explaining what he just did and why it worked to Dule Hill – is to contrive a reason for Saru and Michael to attend, so that they can be the ones to basically get both presidents to admit, “Yes I am willing to compromise, but I can’t be seen to do it with her,” and then solve the problem by proposing the actual compromise themselves, as an independent third party.

Of course, this requires you not think too hard about the fact that the Federation’s uniformed service which we have explicitly been told is only nebulously distinct from the civilian government these days is the alleged “third party” bringing the compromise to the table.

It’s not as bad as all that, I guess. The actual proposal is to create an independent third party to oversee the relationship, with the authority to, I assume, penalize the Federation or release Ni’Var from its member world obligations. I don’t know, they don’t go into details because that would be boring. Now, it’s here we get to my one big problem with the episode, which you can easily see coming a mile away, because it is, point of fact, an entirely logical outcome of pieces that have been in play since the very beginning: there’s no cheats, no idiot ball logic, no last-minute-ass-pulls. And it still burns.

So, logically, who is going to be in charge of this independent body that will arbitrate between Ni’Var and the Federation? Who doesn’t have a clear legal stake one way or the other? Okay, that’s asking way too much, but who is at least legally on paper equally beholden to both parties?

Yeah.

Michael Fucking Burhnam, who must be the absolute center of the entire fucking universe in all things. Forget the Big Swirly Thing In Space (Which gets just the briefest mention this week to remind us that everyone is very stressed out about it, even though it has not actually hurt anyone since it ate Kweijan. It’s not like I want more planets of adorable child actors and beautiful wildlife to get squished by a big swirly thing in space, but if you want to sell me on the scope of this threat, it really ought to do some threatening) – nothing has more gravity in the 32nd century than Michael Burnham, who is apparently the only current dual-citizen of the Federation and Ni’Var (I can just about believe this. Vulcans aren’t big into living far from their homeworld, with most Vulcans having to physically visit home every seven years, Vulcans generally consider starfleet a “safety school”, and things had been rough for relations between Ni’Var and the Federation for decades, so yeah, I can buy that there weren’t a lot of Vulcans offworld after the burn who retained their Federation citizenship), and thus uniquely suited to this role. Can’t have something important happen in the galaxy without Michael.

Super nice to see Saru get a date though. I really dig that. The only other example I can think of where they depicted romance between two different species neither of whom was human is Neelix and Kes, which I think everyone agreed was weird and gross. Anyway, that was well-crafted and logical and character motivations all made sense and this would be just about the perfect plot except that the fucking need to make Michael the center of the universe will not be denied.

T’Rina’s apartment has a nice view of Vasquez Rocks. That rock formation really gets around. Also, there’s a brief mention of J’Vrini’s fate from last week, which sounds a lot like the Ni’var version of jail is a life sentence in Time Out. Michael’s mom will be her warden, excusing her from ever having to show up on the show again this season.

But wait, there’s a whole third plot to this episode, and it’s pretty great. Adorably Goofy Lieutenant Tilly and Adorably Awkward Ensign Adira take a bunch of cadets on a training mission and it goes badly and people die! Yay!

No, seriously, this is a pretty good plot. And I guess Kovich is in charge of the academy for some reason? Are they building up to a reveal of what the hell his job actually is? Anyway, this plot is really the first piece of Star Trek that is clearly and directly addressing the pandemic. The pandemic certainly influenced season 3, in how it affected what they could film and you can feel some influence on the themes, but really, season 3 does very little to lean in on pandemic or lockdown themes – they should be a natural fit for the Post-Burn world, and those ideas are present, but the show chose not to focus on them, possibly anticipating that audiences at the end of 2020 would have little appetite for it. But here, we actually take it head-on: the first class of cadets are all people who have lived their entire lives in the sci-fi equivalent of pandemic lockdown. And a hundred years into the burn, all their instructors kinda have too. They’ve basically forgotten how to live among people who are culturally (and in many cases biologically) different from themselves- they’re from cultures that aren’t cosmopolitan. At Federation HQ, you’ve got all these different species interacting, but some of the cadets have never even met another species before. They don’t make a point of it, but I think it’s relevant too that at this point, most members of Starfleet have probably lived their whole lives in space, and won’t know how to relate to the experience of coming from a place where there’s a majority race. This is basically the sci-fi version of “Oh shit we’re going back to in-person schools and the children have gone feral!”

I can relate.

I’m glad they didn’t reveal in the end that the whole thing had been a training exercise after all. And I’m glad Adira got to invoke some of Tal’s past lives – tbh the fact that Adira is joined is something that has had so little relevance outside of being a vehicle for Gray’s resurrection it feels negligent. I am unclear what happened there when Adira gets stuck in the ice for a bit. They’re talking about the horror of Plasma Lightning, and then something and then ice is trying to eat them? Is this parasitic ice again? Tilly has a gun that magics seat belt webbing into existence.

The monster…. Man, I have to believe that they filmed this episode with a completely different idea of what the monster was going to look like. I mean, they describe it as a colony life form and “the jellyfish from hell”, and it shows up and… It’s just a sort of bear thing? Reminds me a bit of the twilight monsters from Zelda. But more than that, the monster is possibly the worst CGI monster I have seen in Star Trek in the past ten to fifteen years, and I am including at least some of Enterprise in that. Why?

The culmination of all of this of course is that everyone works together to save Adira, and then later everyone works together to save Tilly, and they remember to explain that there’s a reason personal transporters won’t work which perhaps would have been better placed half an hour earlier in the episode where it could justify why they had to trek through the ice planes of death rather than tap their badges and instantly reappear on the other side of the mountain. Instead, the explanation only comes when they get to “We can’t beam up to the ship as soon as we’re out of the valley but instead need to wait for the length of a dramatic but poorly rendered CGI fight scene while the ship locks on to us.” I don’t really know what the deal is with personal transporters. They established in “That Hope is You, Part 1” that they can zap you from site to site on a planet without coordinating with a ship or programming destinations ahead, and people use them in Federation HQ as a replacement for stairs, but on actual away missions, they seem oddly reluctant to use them in favor of walking through large expanses of danger.

So important lessons are learned about working together, and the Tellarite (I assume he’s a Tellarite. Don’t think they say, and his makeup does not look like any Tellarite makeup we’ve seen before – tbh he looks more like an Ogron than anything – but come one, the classic Tellarite makeup was so embarrassing that we all knew they weren’t going to revisit it. He does look quite a lot like Jenkom Pog on Prodigy, so I assume he’s a Tellarite) learns not to be racist because the Orion boy is really the son of a martyred political activist. That seemed like a bit much, but whatever. The real punchline here is that Tilly’s leaving Discovery to go be a teacher.

This arc was done very well and feels entirely earned. I have a little bit of a misgiving that it’s happening to Tilly, given that last season it seemed like she was really thriving as Saru’s XO and was integrating herself into this new world well. Maybe that’s why it makes sense for her to be the one who’s ready to leave the nest and be part of “proper” Starfleet, while her crewmates remain in this weird kind of annex, being held at arm’s length from the rest of the fleet? Either way, they did right by this arc. It never really was all that convincing that Tilly was ever laser-focused on the road to the captain’s chair and more than Spock was (Q&A’s misguided assertion that he is notwithstanding), and I think Trek could do with a lot more of, “People accept and are good with the idea that not everyone’s career path has to be oriented toward the Best Destiny of Starship Command.” I had hoped that was where they were going with Michael last season, but obviously the show couldn’t let her escape her own gravity. I like Tilly, but as long as she’s going to be hanging around Federation HQ to pop in from time to time, I’m not going to miss her on the Discovery itself, where her role was mostly just to be adorably awkward.

Now, ahem, we are four damn weeks in. Where. Is. Reno?