Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 4×12: Species Ten-C

(I am practicing self-control in that I am not going to start in on Picard until I’ve finished Disco. Also in that I watched this episode sober, but I don’t promise this will be repeated.)

It never rains but it pours. Twice in a row now we’ve got episodes with a focus on good old-fashioned TNG-style competency porn. That can-do, “Let’s science the shit out of this,” spirit where we solve complicated problems with simple analogies. Just like blowing up a balloon.

So yeah, I guess the reveal last week was a lot more concrete than I realized. There is, as a I predicted, one more step to get from what I learned to communication, but it’s a much more straightforward step than I was expecting. Discovery hoses down the 10-C’s hyperfield with the hydrocarbon for “We come in peace”, and then get scared and try to flee when the 10-C respond by summoning them inside. But the real meaty part of the front half of the episode is what happens next. Because the 10-C show up and would point of fact like to have a word with them. We don’t get a good look at the 10-C yet; they appear only as a very indistinct and large “something” seen through the mist, but they seem to at least be a recognizable sort of lifeform, with physical extension and sensory organs.

Their communication method – or at least, the “bridge language” they invent to dumb down their communication for the bipeds – is a pretty good depiction of something utterly alien that can nonetheless be understood, and I enjoyed watching the process as the gang sciences the shit out of it. I didn’t quite get the significance of the hydrocarbons last week; they’re not just a byproduct of the 10-C’s biology, but rather they communicate directly with them. My gut tells me that their full means of communication is some form of sharing complete thoughts at their own full cognition directly via biochemical means – your Star Trek-style simple analogy would be like a precise and controlled form of the way that a certain innocuous smell can remind you of a very specific event from your past. That part reminds me of the old Trek novel Enterprise: The First Adventure, wherein Kirk and Company met a ship of bear-like beings whose natural communication was basically just sharing their entire life experience and cognitive process telepathically, and Spock goes crazy for a bit trying to handle it.

For the sake of the bald apes, the 10-C dumb it down to hucking a pile of chemicals at you which can be interpreted as numbers, mathematical symbols, and emotions, then blinking a sequence of lights to indicate what order to read them in, and that part reminds me a lot of decoding the faerie language in the first Artemis Fowl book. And, again, really good work at showing how they build from using this constructed language to just math at each other in order to establish the possibility of communication, to communicating more abstract concepts. The 10-C phrase their question as “(atomic number of isolitium) + (mathematical formula for the shape of the BSTiS controller) = (emotion of curiosity)”, though they are helpful enough to give them a reconstruction of Tarka’s bomb to provide the necessary context. The question is “Why did you blow up our thinger?” The answer the galactic gang comes up with is “(chemical composition of humanoid atmosphere) + (mathematical shape of BSTiS controller) = (emotion of terror)” ie., “Because your thinger scares the shit out of us,” which would seem maybe a bit vaguer than you’d want, but remember from last week that the particular form of terror they’ve isolated as a 10-C lexeme is specifically, “The existential terror of your planet being doomed,” which is a real lucky break for them. The 10-C respond, rather wonderfully, with a very simple “(emotion of sorrow)”.

Then, of course, Tarka fucks everything up, because fuck that guy. Back in our other plots, Zora can’t detect Book’s ship due to Tarka’s sabotage, but she feels that something’s a little “off”, and we have a second parallel “figuring shit out” plot going on simultaneously with the main plot about decoding the 10-C’s bridge language. But, despite this being Star Trek, it’s not so much a “science the shit out of this” as “talk therapy the shit out of this”. The only downside of this plot is that it doesn’t end up going anywhere – they discover Reno’s abduction and Tarka’s sabotage basically at the same time as Tarka makes his move. But it’s nice to see Zora, Paul and Adira all working together.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Reno, Tarka and Book have their own plot going on. Seriously, this episode is thick with plot, and it’s paced really well; you never feel overwhelmed and nothing feels too thin. Though I am having a hard time keeping track of the fact that the events before Discovery gets pulled into the hyperfield is the same episode as Tarka’s betrayal and the language parts. It feels like two episodes worth of stuff happening, but in a good way.

We don’t quite get a whole third “figuring shit out” plot because among Tig Notaro’s many many talents (seriously, can we just digitally replace all problematic white men in movies with Tig Notaro from now on?), “science the shit out of this” scenes are not. Though she can pull off just a simple “Explain complex concept with a slightly dodgy analogy.” It’s kind of neat, given that Tig Notaro in interviews really presents this image of an almost sublime lack of academic skills, the way they handle this plot is to simply declare that Tarka’s plan is so very scientifically complicated that there’s no point in even trying to explain it. Reno can just tell with a glance that the thing Tarka is plotting will genocide the 10-C, blow up Discovery and Book’s ship and doom Earth and Ni’Var, but the reason is just a pile of complicated math so there’s no explaining it – and I dig that she’s up-front with Book about it: “Ask him to show you the math,” she says. “It won’t mean anything to you. But his reaction will.”

Tarka is a hard nut to crack. Because this is real fucking evil shit he’s doing, but he’s doing it in desperation to ascend to a better universe to be with his boyfriend. How do you square “Willing to genocide possibly four entire cultures” with “Loves this one dude so much he’s willing to genocide up to four entire cultures”? In a 90s show, the answer would be “bad writing”, and it still might, sure, but I think Disco has earned the right to use “Because people be complicated, yo,” as an explanation. Discovery has always been a show about how trauma fucks us up.

This episode was good on many, many levels; its flaws are few. They even manage to do a convincing explanation for the generally infuriating decision that the team that goes into the 10-C’s hospitality goo ball consists of the highest concentration of senior officers to go on one away mission in the entire history of the show. I mean, yeah, it’s a diplomatic mission at the highest levels, so I guess it’s justified to send the presidents. And Michael and Saru are, point of fact, the experts in the exact fields relevant to the situation. It should grate, but how else are you going to do it? I do think they didn’t really give a good justification for why the 10-C sent them a goo ball containing a recreation of Discovery’s bridge – making a construct that recreates their environment makes sense and all, but it’s not clear why they couldn’t just keep conversing from the shuttle bay. If the goo ball was going to take them somewhere, it would make more sense, but of course, it just sits there waiting to dump them back on the floor when the 10-C get pissed at Tarka.

The finale comes next (It’s already in your past, of course, because of the time delay I incurred to handle Prodigy), and I’m hella curious how they’re going to sort all of this out. I think I have a solid guess about the broad strokes, but there’s elements where I’m not sure how far and how satisfying they’re going to go. Tarka seems ripe to die, either undone by his own failure to transcend his guilt, or self-sacrifice when he does. Book seems ripe to die in an act of self-sacrifce. But neither of these would put Michael as central in the ultimate resolution as you know the show wants (Admittedly, seasons 2 and 3 were both willing to share the glory in the final moments, with Michael’s contribution being critical, but not outsized. They let Georgiou defeat Control, and while Michael killed Osyraa, it’s Owo and Book that save the ship and Saru who saves the galaxy), and besides, Discovery’s go-to move in the end isn’t to win by sacrifice: it’s to win by healing.