Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 4×05: The Examples

So… I was pretty drunk while I watched this episode so my analysis might be a little… Weird. Also, I think there was something wrong with my speakers, but possibly I was just drunk.

But okay. This is a super duper competent episode. But just… Why? I mean why? The A-plot of this episode is one of those “Alien planet has a stupid justice system and the crew has to show the backwards locals the value of a justice system based on 20th century US Jurisprudence” episodes. Standard fare for ’90s Trek. And it worked fine in the 90s, and they do an entirely adequate job this time, but, I mean, it is the year of our lord 2021 and I don’t know why we are fucking bothering.

The central thrust of the idea here is that they have to evacuate a nicely weird sci-fi colony (It’s a bunch of asteroids tethered to each other), populated “mostly” by a random one-off species from Enterprise. But the colony has an old Emerald Chain tradition where six people are kept in life sentences for comparatively minor crimes (mostly) to be “examples” to keep everyone else in line, and Michael and Book have to go save them for the sake of Higher-Minded Starfleet ideals. And they do… Fine I guess? “Michael checks Starfleet Regulations For a Loophole Where She Is Legally Empowered To Grant Asylum” isn’t quite the Must See TV they think it is. The Incoming Plot Complication is that one of the Examples is a legit murderer – most of them are in there for stuff like jaywalking or petty theft, but this one guy is basically Jean Valjean if he’d offed the bishop in the process of stealing the candlesticks. It is probably a nice change-up that the guy is just a normal sort of desperate person who escalated to murder in a stressful situation and regrets it rather than some more dramatic form of murderer. His whole “I’m going to martyr myself here as atonement for my crime,” thing feels a little weaksauce though. He isn’t sacrificing anything for any kind of greater good; he’s just committing suicide because reckons he deserves to die. I don’t know. Near the end, we get some very limited moralizing from Michael about the colony’s unjust legal system, and she reminds the colony leader that they’re going to be refugees wherever she dumps them, so maybe don’t be assholes about imposing your own stupid laws. I think she’s supposed to come off sort of Exodus 22:21 (“For you were refugees in the land of Egypt”), but instead it just feels like she’s being petty and putting him in his place.

Elsewhere in the plot, more therapy, which is good. But this time it’s Hugh as the patient and Kovitch of all people as his therapist. I guess Kovitch is a therapist-spymaster-academy commandant-possibly-secretly-running-the-Federation-from-the-shadows? Anyway, the whole idea that Hugh is burning himself out in his desperation to help take care of people is solid, and I like Kovitch’s analysis that Hugh has a savior complex because he feels guilty over the fact that hardly anyone else gets to come back from the dead. I really hope he bonds with Grey over this. Neither Grey nor Adira are in this episode, and Grey’s presence last week was perfunctory at best, yet again showcasing Discovery‘s lack of space to let its ideas breathe.

The other half of the plot – this one is very plot-light, honestly – is that Stamets has to partner with a cocky Risan genius to further his research into the BSTiS, which we have now learned must be artificially created and intelligently controlled. They name-check a few of the godlike aliens who aren’t responsible for it, mentioning the Metrons of all people, and the Caretaker from Voyager, and the Q, who they say have not been in touch for hundreds of years. The conclusion they come to at the end is dangerously close to, “Actually the amount of godlike involved in doing this means that we may be dealing with an actual god.” Book reasonably objects to calling the sort of being that would destroy his planet “god”. We get a mention of Aurelio, though he doesn’t appear in person. I have no idea whether his actor could feasibly show up for filming given that he’s got a serious medical condition and we’re still in the middle of a global plague. It seemed at first like the conflict in this episode would be him and Stamets not getting along, but once they actually meet, they get along just fine, possibly because the scientist knows exactly how to manipulate Stamets’s obsessive side. Dangling the possibility of creating their own Tiny Little Swirly Thing In The Engine Room for the purposes of research completely blinds Paul to the fact that they’re putting the ship at risk with the power involved. Instead, much of the conflict is between the scientist and Saru, of all people. The scientist comes off as charismatic and manipulative, but he does stop short of the usual Trek cliche of the reckless scientist who puts everyone in danger – I like that he starts right out by insisting that he likes himself too much to risk destroying the ship he’s on. The culmination is him subtly conscripting Book for an as-yet-unspecified subversiveness. He’s got some kind of baggage himself, hinted by the scar on his neck. Shit, is this those flue gill aliens from the first season of TNG? I will not accept them as our Big Bad.

I mean really, why do we even need a Big Bad? Discovery has kind of sucked at big bads. Lorca… I guess he was adequate, but he suffers from the Modern Era Disney Villain problem where they need the villain to appear heroic until the middle of the third act, so they don’t actually have any time to be properly evil. Control never managed to make a convincing argument for the level of existential threat we were told it was (Indeed, it’s only Picard that makes Control a sensible villain: I can’t believe Control could wipe out all sentient life. But I can believe Control might be able to summon Robothulu). And Osyraa was a joke of a main villain. Especially given the cultural situation in which we find ourselves, I feel like a natural calamity would speak to me a lot more than Yet Another Godlike Alien (Admittedly, given Disco‘s penchant for dredging up and rehabilitating old discarded Star Trek proposals, a revisit of The God Thing would be extremely on-point). But it’s not a problem per se; the other seasons did fine by having a perfunctory villain to provide a structure while what was really good about the show was elsewhere. So maybe we’ll see the same here.

We finally get Reno, and… She’s just kind of there. Gets one good snip about how close their experiment came to killing everyone which… I mean at this point, if you want me to believe they were in immanent danger, you should really do a little more than they did. The camera stayed right-side-up and there were no fireballs. How am I supposed to know this is serious?

Also, why was this even a thing? Why did they have to run the Little Swirly Thing in Space experiment on Discovery while in the middle of a rescue mission? Couldn’t this all have been done at Federation HQ (or preferably, somewhere nice and safe in the middle of nowhere) or at least waited a few hours until Discovery wasn’t using half its power supply relocating an entire planet?

The one properly interesting thing we get is Michael learning that Zora has gained the capacity for emotion, and being a little disturbed by this. First time someone has actually shown any awareness of the fact that it’s kind of weird and concerning that our computer has come to life. I like the fact that everyone is cool just rolling with it, but at least a little acknowledgement that this is a strange state of affairs, please?

In all, a competent episode, but not a particularly compelling one. Or maybe that’s the rum speaking. No complaint about the lack of Reno this week, but I hope next week they actually give her some worthwhile material.