Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 4×07: … But to Connect

Our 70%-of-the-season cliffhanger is an episode that is simultaneously high-stakes and low-key. Weird.

Yeah, this is a slow, talky episode where most of what happens is speeches. And what a wonderful arrangement of speeches it is, too. Because if I could summarize the A-plot of this episode, it falls to Michael Burnham to persuade the Federation and its allies to pursue peace with the mysterious 10-C rather than attack, and she actually does this despite breaking Book’s heart in the process, and that is very good Star Trek, but the B-plot is that Starfleet orders a starship to go to therapy with David Cronenberg and that is possibly the most wonderful sentence I have ever written.

The B-plot is the more interesting plot, even if it isn’t really likely to direct events going forward – it pretty much resolves itself to a new stable equilibrium. The A-plot sets the stage for the rest of the season: Discovery has to stop Book and Tarka from carrying out their plan to blow up the BSTiS, probably by proving that the 10-C didn’t really mean it and/or would respond to such a thing by nuking the entire galaxy out of existence. Actually, I’m a lot bothered by the fact that the argument the Federation makes for approaching the 10-C peacefully is based entirely on it being the Morally Right And Logical thing to do. I mean, yes, that’s very Star Trek. But given the stakes, why isn’t anyone also raising the pragmatic point that provoking a godlike extragalactic power might not end well for you?

But that’s okay; it felt really good that the vote, while not unanimous, went overwhelmingly in favor of peaceful contact. It feels like a kind of rejection of the “This is how democracy dies” scene from Star Wars. It felt good. I was kind of worried the grimdark would get a temporary victory here and fear would win in the short term.

The big deal for the continuing plot is of course what goes down with Tarka and Book. Tarka has developed a weapon that will destroy the BSTiS, but it’s an evil weapon, one that damages subspace and might backwash in a genocidal sort of way to the 10-C. In fact, it’s the same kind of weapon the Son’a used on the Enterprise in Star Trek Insurrection in order to prove how nasty they were, though it’s not like this carries that much weight given how pretty much everyone has memory-holed that movie by now. Tarka also reveals his secret agenda. It is a nicely weird one. Him and his boyfriend deduced the existence of an utopian parallel universe – a kind of anti-mirror-universe I guess – while enslaved by the Emerald Chain (That scar on his neck, I completely failed to remember last time, is from the same kind of implant Book got while imprisoned last season), and he wants to steal the BSTiS’s power source in order to go there, hoping it will reuinite him with the boyfriend, who did not escape the Chain. That is some Superboy Prime plotting, man. It’s over-the-top and I’m not crazy about it, but I appreciate the weird. Will the probably-dead boyfriend manifest at the end to stop and/or absolve him? In 90s Trek, I’d expect that; less sure now.

So when the vote doesn’t go Tarka’s way, he steals the itty bitty prototype for a new magic mushroom drive (Namecheck to Aurelio, who I reckon they might have wanted to give this plot to in an early draft, since they’d established his familial connection) and him and Book take off to go start a war with extragalactic godlike aliens all on their lonesome.

Yes, incidentally, Book’s ship can magic mushroom now. It looks pretty cool and I wish they’d composed the shot of it happening to give us a closer look. It’s been a long time since we’ve had the really cool version of the mushroom-space VFX.

I think they’ve made a positive stand to convey that Book is acting from a place of pain, but that his motivation isn’t vengeance. He doesn’t want to avenge his family. But he is desperate, irrationally, uncontrollably desperate, to ensure that no one else goes through what he did. Again, this is good progress from a franchise notorious for not having any idea how to be “deep” other than by ripping off Moby-Dick. “Book is obsessed with hunting his white whale and is risking self-destruction for it” would be a perfectly normal thing for Star Trek to do here, but they go for something different here. I like it, but I don’t feel like they’ve quite given it enough room to breathe – Disco’s perennial problem. And fifty years into the franchise, I think they really needed to put a lot more work in to sell that we’re not chasing the whale yet again. I’m not optimistic about either of them surviving the season after this – Tarka looks like he might need to be Big-S-Stopped and Book feels like he might be lining up for a “Redemption equals Death”, but if Discovery really is going to be a show about healing, I’ll remain optimistic.

This brings us back to the B-plot. Zora works out where the 10-C live, but doesn’t want to tell the crew, because she doesn’t want them getting themselves killed by the, again, extragalactic godlike aliens. So… They send her to therapy. With, as I said, David Cronenberg. Starfleet has a prohibition of “fully integrated AI” in Starfleet systems, and thus if he concludes that she is indeed a fully sentient AI, they will have no choice but to…

Remove her from Discovery and put her in a synth body where she’ll have all the rights of any other sentient being, but won’t be a starship. Oh flutter my little heart. If this were TOS, Zora would be a threat, and in the end they’d have to destroy her, and maybe, maybe Kirk would say something touching at the end about it being sad there wasn’t another way. If this were TNG, everyone would want to kill her, but Picard would make a big, dramatic speech, and she’d end up sacrificing herself so that they didn’t have to deal with the fallout. But this is Discovery so killing Zora was never on the table at all. The stakes were never her life; that would be monstrous. In fact, the only one who raises the possibility of killing Zora is Zora herself, when she offers up a self-destruct button in a show of trust. What’s at stake is whether she can be permitted to live rent-free in the brain of Starfleet property.

One of the interesting choices in this segment is that it’s Paul who fails to take Zora’s side. To a certain extent, he ends up in the role by default; they need someone to be the antagonist – or at least the prosecuting attorney – and it wasn’t going to be Saru, Hugh, Gray or Adira. Paul’s feelings about Zora link back to the fact that he, more than any of the others, still has raw memories from Control: he almost died in the final battle. This hasn’t been an ongoing part of his story, but it was there at least – we had a scene last season of Detmer lashing out in her own pain to needle him over his injuries.

The macguffin that resolves the plot is a little weak and vague: they find Zora’s subconscious and see that it’s full of love, and apparently the existence of a spontaneously generated subconsious is enough to convince Kovitch (or really, I think, to give him the excuse to formally document what he already wanted the answer to be) that Zora doesn’t count as an AI so much as a novel life form. There’s a vague implication here that while AIs can develop emotions and AIs can dream, emotions can be an emergent behavior, but dreams can’t.

The other thing that really spoke to me is that Zora ultimately does decide to disclose the location of the 10-C. Not because she’s been ordered to, or because she is willing to risk the crew, but because of trust. She wants to protect them. She loves them. But part of loving them is trusting them, even with this. She was willing to give them the power to kill her, but she wasn’t willing to give them the power to kill themselves, and she finally comes around on this and realizes that part of living together with the people she loves is trusting them to make their own decision.

And we close out Zora’s “trial” with a final reveal from Kovitch: if Paul hadn’t come around, his recommendation would not have been to remove Zora, but to remove Paul. Once we accept that from the outset Zora was recognized as a sentient life form, the question wasn’t simply, “Should we let Zora stay in Discovery,” but, “Should Zora and Discovery stay together.”

All the feels. All the feels.