Some Blundering about Star Trek: Discovery 4×06: Stormy Weather

Happy New Year!

Another Frakes-directed episode and, much like his last Disco, it’s got a bit of a retro vibe to it. Discovery takes on one of Trek‘s oldest and dearest trope: the “We’re stuck in a deadly void and have to solve a puzzle to escape” episode.

But, of course, this is Discovery, so the solution isn’t a simple, “Let’s science the shit out of this.” The scienceing is basically just perfunctory at the end: the actual meat of the solution is to heal. Because, holy crap, this is Zora’s character focus episode, and it is wonderful.

It’s also a focus episode for Gray, which is also lovely. And Gray’s angst has little to do directly with his recent reincarnation. That still seems strange, but I like that they aren’t just retreading Hugh’s plot arc, even if it feels remiss that we haven’t seen those two really talk about this shared experience. No, Gray’s angst in this episode is simply that he’s not Starfleet, and thus, he doesn’t actually have a job on the ship. He’s a student, doing, I assume, distance learning at the Trill School of Being a Guardian, and that’s a fine career path that he can, in fact, do perfectly well while living on Discovery with his partner, it does mean that he’s left just kind of hanging around doing nothing when Shit Goes Down. So Gray finds a place not by bonding with the other person on the ship who has the experience of having died and come back, but with the other person who has the experience of being a ghost that got uploaded into an artificial body: he councils Zora when the combination of her new emotions and the sensory deprivation of the void impact her concentration.

And, of course, when Gray helps Zora find peace, she proves to have the solution to the problem of being stuck in a rapidly shrinking void that is dissolving their ship, feeling their way back along the path that led them into this Weird Zone of Darkness and Nothing. Our obligatory “shoot fireballs over the bridge set” sequence comes only because it takes long enough to get this far that the ship is substantially eaten when it gets to the bumpy turbulent bit on the way out.

I wonder to what extent Discovery from now on is going to revel in teasing the circumstances that might have led to the ship’s fate in “Calypso”. We had just a bit of that last season – I think – with the possibility that Book’s jump sans warp core might leave the ship lost and stranded. Here, we have an even closer setup, with the entire crew sans the captain stored in the pattern buffer and the possibility that they might be stuck there until Michael personally orders them recovered. You could imagine a disappointing ending where Michael doesn’t survive the escape but Zora is unwilling to accept this and just drifts aimlessly for centuries, refusing to restore the others without her orders. Instead, of course, Michael puts her faith in Zora, ordering her to bring the crew back on her own, so they can limp home for repairs while Michael recovers from her own injuries. One of the more interesting small bits is that when pressed on whether she trusts Zora, Michael demurs, saying it doesn’t matter, but later she confesses her faith in the computer. One way you can read it is that Michael doesn’t trust Zora until she’s halfway through being cooked alive. That would be a normal sort of Star Trek way for things to go, but I think a better read here is that Michael does, in fact, trust Zora, even at the beginning, because this is a show about hope and healing. Rather, Michael refuses to give a direct answer before because she recognizes that Zora is struggling, and wants her to make her own decision for her own reasons rather than feeling pressured into it by the weight of the crew’s faith in her. So she tells her, but only after the decision has already been made.

The other big thing of this episode of course is that Book tries to magic mushroom them out of the void, but gets zapped in the brain, causing him to hallucinate his dead dad. And because this is Discovery and not any other part of Star Trek (including season 2 of Discovery), he copes with this in as healthy a way as possible rather than keeping it to himself and becoming erratic and weird and behaving dangerously. And we get to see in a very explicit way, that whether ghost dad is a “real” ghost or just a projection of Book’s subconscious, he’s wrong. He pushes Book on the thing that’s become a point of tension between him and Michael: that Book wants to leave Federation space and look for clues among the couriers. Sorry, Ghost Dad, but the failed mushroom jump attempt left some plot sparklies in Book’s brain which proves that the mysterious creators of the BSTiS are really from outside the galaxy, and thus the couriers would know nothing – all four quadrants are apparently pretty well-connected now, but the Federation is still limited to just the one galaxy even in the 32nd century (This is a minor disappointment to me; I was really hoping for extragalactic Trek set in the 26th century), so Book’s courier contacts wouldn’t be much help. From this, I think, we should equally challenge his departing jab, that Michael will choose Starfleet over him, and he would do well to distance himself from her. Instead, Book dismisses the apparition taking only what is helpful: the faith that this ghost could mean his other lost loved ones still exist in some form.

Other things:

• There are references to Enterprise and Voyager experiencing similar subspace disruptions, but it’s not entirely clear to me whether this refers to current incarnations of those ships – the first reference to a 32nd century Enterprise – and the BSTiS itself, or if they’re referencing historical ships which also encountered many Weird Space Things in their own times.
• No Tig Notaro, and I am sad. Again, “The ship is being eaten and we need to squeeze out a little more time to escape,” is the exact sort of problem where you want your snarky chief engineer reminding you that she cannae break the laws of physics. But on the other hand, it would probably ruin the very heartfelt scene to have Reno show willingness to pair off with her besties to get Scotty’d into transporter-space in a dangerous survival gambit.
• The internet is, of course, banking on Ridiculously Powerful Extra-Galactic Species 10-C being the Kelvins, based on the compelling evidence of (A) they are the only extra-galactic species we have ever heard of before. I don’t have strong feelings about this. Evidence (A) does seem pretty darn compelling, given the law of conservation of canon, but it would be a little disappointing in light of the assertion that 10-C is far more godlike than the normal crop of godlike entities. The Kelvins were technologically advanced, sure, but they were still basically just Technologically Advanced Aliens – their warp drive was thousands of times faster, but it was still warp drive; they could turn people into little foam block dodecahedrons, but they did it with a machine, not a finger-snap.
• What I lit on, though, is that when they determined how to navigate through the void, Bryce (I think) likens it to sonar. It’s a tiny, tiny little thing, and yeah, probably it will indeed be the Kelvins who show up in the season finale, but adding together sonar with the VFX for the anomaly, I can’t help but desperately cling to the possibility that 10-C might be related to the whale-seeking probe from Star Trek IV.