Well okay. Didn’t mean to take three months off, but I found I really enjoyed not having the pressure of churning out a weekly article added to all the other fucking pressure I experience every moment of every day. It’s not that I don’t have things I could say – I’ve been mulling over a plot for an Admiral Pike Timeline version of Star Trek III-and-IV (The biggest part of the idea is the observation that if it’s Pike who steals the Enterprise to go to Genesis, he’d obviously recruit Pelia rather than Scotty to help him), and I’ve been trying for years to summon up the energy to finish off the War of the Worlds thing (I am just giving up on the two different 2019 versions because life is too short to force myself to keep watching either of them). But my family has way too the fuck much going on for me to handle, and since I can only cut things from my own personal schedule, reducing my cognitive load means that I have to do fewer “me” things. (Yes! I know this is somewhat pathological! But I can’t very well tell my wife to cut my daughter’s dance class for the benefit of no one but me; that’s not only selfish, but weird. It gets even more pathological when I realize that the 8 hours a day I spend at work is probably the best part of my day because I fully understand the requirements on my time and other things aren’t allowed to interrupt or supersede or double-book). So we are where we are.
And where we are is, “Two new episodes of Discovery dropped last Thursday.” Kinda wish they’d push it back to Wednesday, honestly.
Where did we leave off with Discovery? Let’s see. Book’s doing community service for all the theft and piracy and war crimes and nearly inciting an intergalactic war. Tilly’s off running Starfleet Academy. Saru and T’rina are dating. Grey’s on Trill studying to be a Guardian. He’s an android now, but that doesn’t seem to be a big deal in the 32nd century. Peace has been made with Species 10-C, Earth and Ni’var are back in the Federation, the Emerald Chain has collapsed, all seems right with the universe. So let’s break that up.
First off, who’s missing? I saw Reno in the trailer, but she’s not in this episode. Bryce got written out near the end of last season to go work on a secret project for Kovitch. From the latest rumors about Section 31, it appears that Georgiou was sent back to the early 24th century, during the “Lost” era between TOS and TNG. Nilssen is absent with no explanation; Linus is working the Spore Drive console on the bridge.
The first good thing I’ll observe is that while this is still very much in the “Michael is the main character” mode, they seem to have decided that it’s time for her arc to move on. She’s confident in her role as captain of Discovery, and the show feels confident of her in that role. The angst over finding her place that directed the character for the first four seasons doesn’t put in an appearance in the season opener. Her only big angst just at the moment is that she officially breaks up with Book over that whole thing where he sided against her to run off with Tarka and committed war crimes and nearly started an intergalactic war. As previously mentioned.
For those of our other characters who deign to show up, we get a lot of new depth. Tilly is coming into her own as a character, and there’s a hint of budding romance with… A dude whose name I do not remember.
Saru’s been offered an ambassadorship, which will take him away from Starfleet (Last season, I think they said he was destined to eventually take command of the new Voyager once his term ended in Kelpien government, but it appears he just crystalized into Michael’s permanent XO instead), and he gets a character arc in this episode that leads him to take it, deciding that T’rina’s companionship is more than enough to fill the gap in his heart from leaving Discovery. And then she proposes to him, so even better. God those two are so cute together. They could so easily have done some kind of bullshit to imperil their relationship, but they didn’t; these are two very mature adults, and despite being romantically inexperienced, they can be open and honest with each other and themselves. Like, there’s a moment early in the episode where she tells him not to take her into account when deciding whether or not to quit Starfleet. And for a moment, he looks like he might be hurt. But instead of letting him feel that she’s unwilling to commit or doesn’t care, she explains herself, that she will be there for him and support him and is fully committed in either case, and she won’t be any less content with their relationship if he chooses to keep the job that involves a lot of travel.
Paul’s new trait is a concern about his own legacy. We saw hints of this from time to time – Lorca tempting him with the suggestion that his name would be remembered alongside Zefram Cochrane and Elon Musk (Some people like to imagine this was a hint of Lorca’s true nature, that he thought of Musk as one of history’s great engineering luminaries. But I think it’s just part of Trek’s longstanding tradition of future historians radically misreading people. See also Kirk’s history teacher who thought that the Nazis were pretty great aside from that one thing). But it wasn’t really a big deal like it is in this episode. While Discovery’s spore drive has been repaired since he burned it out last season, Tarka blowing up the new model and the fact that navigating the network can only be done by two known species, both of which are extinct has led to Starfleet deciding to shelve the project and focus on the Pathway drive instead (Which might be in production now? Rayner mentions not having one, but in a way that comes off like the rollout is already underway and he’s salty about how far down the queue he is). So Paul is feeling bummed about how history will remember him. It comes up again when he notices an allusion to Altan Soong in the serial number of a memory module from a dead seven-hundred-year-old Soong-type android antiquities dealer.
That exchange, along with a couple of others, I think highlights why it’s probably okay for Discovery to end now. Paul thinks of Altan Soong as a legendary scientist from centuries in the past, just as Tilly and Michael think of Vellek and Picard as characters from the distant past. Fred is a “primitive” Synth, of a design that hasn’t been made in hundreds of years, and they’re impressed with him as a historical artifact himself (A historical artifact who is an antiquities dealer. That’s fun). But these are all things which post-date these characters by more than a century. And no one comments on that. No one comments on the weirdness of a crew from the mid twenty-third century investigating a secret from the late twenty-fourth century while in the thirty-second century. There’s no observation of the fact that Michael, Paul, Hugh, even Saru are culturally more similar to Vellek, Picard, and even Fred than they are to Kovitch, Rayner and Vance. Because after about the mid-point of season 3, the Discovery crew haven’t really acted like displaced refugees from the twenty-third century; they’ve fully integrated themselves into thirty-second century life. And that’s not a bad thing – a constant frustration when an Issekai sort of story goes on for a long time is the way the fish-out-of-water character can be compelled for the sake of the narrative to remain a weird and aloof fish-out-of-water who never adapts to their environment. But, as the pathway drive winning out over the spore drive reinforces, there’s not not much left to justify this show continuing as Star Trek: Discovery, rather than moving on to just be “A Star Trek Show Set in the Thirty-Second Century. Discovery itself is effectively a thirty-second century ship, the crew are effectively thirty-second century people. It doesn’t make all that much difference that they’ve got a novel propulsion system or that the captain is Spock’s sister or that the first officer is a Kelpien. Back in season 3, we still had the fact that they hadn’t lived through the Burn as something that set them apart – Discovery had become a show about the return of Those Old Scientists to bring a new enlightenment to a world that had been plunged into a sort of new dark age. But now, it’s just Star Trek in the 32nd Century. The 32nd Century setting is interesting, but there’s no real need to stay connected to the 23rd.
But anyway, what’s this season about?
Turns out they cribbed the plot wholesale from season 10 of Stargate SG-1. I mean, more or less. So way back in season 6 of TNG, there was this cool episode where Picard goes chasing around the galaxy on a very Indiana Jones-style adventure that culminates in everyone learning that a race of ancient and very smooth humanoids had evolved billions of years before any other life, and, being lonely, kickstarted evolution in the galaxy, and that is why so many planets gave rise to intelligent life that look like members of the Screen Actor’s Guild with prosthetic foreheads. And literally nothing ever came of this. But now, eight hundred years later, the notebook of one of the unnamed background Romulans from that episode has turned up, and they haven’t come all the way out and said it yet, but it’s pretty clear that he found the device the Precursors used in this kickstarting, and now Starfleet has to find it before it falls into the nebulously-defined “wrong hands”. (Okay, I say “nebulously”, but they namecheck the Breen and the Tholians. The Breen are the most boring and pointless antagonists in Trek history, and the Tholians, despite being a TOS one-off whose only particular trait was punctuality, have not really had enough said about them to give me an opinon).
Yeah, there was this whole thing in Stargate where they found the machine that their own precursor race used to reboot life after a plague wiped most of it out, and they had to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. I will add as a minor side-note here that there really shouldn’t be any precursor technology for them to find, because the whole reason the precursors encoded their message in DNA was that they knew there would be absolutely nothing left of their civilization by the time more spacefaring sentients evolved.
That’s our setup, and Michael is only very reluctantly read-in by blackmailing Doctor Kovitch. You’ll remember him from the last two seasons; he’s… Okay, still don’t know what his job is. He’s an expert on the mirror universe, in charge of Starfleet Academy, in charge of intelligence, he runs a secret project that Bryce got written out to join, he was in charge of the effort to figure out the 10-C, he was in charge of declaring Zora a legal person, and I think he’s also Hugh’s therapist? Let’s just say he’s the Federation’s Mycroft Holmes. Also he wears a 21st century suit and eyeglasses and he is played by David Cronenberg, and I love how insane this is, but it’s starting to get hard to handle.
I’m writing this in the break I’m taking between episodes one and two, so I assume at some point in the next hour or so, this season’s new add, Captain Rayner, will misplace his own ship and replace Saru as Michael’s number one. Rayner seems fun so far. He’s free-wheeling and goal-oriented and a bit reckless, willing to endanger others to accomplish his mission. He’s also apparently a Kellerun, a one-off species from DS9 who tried to off Bashir and O’Brien, but for entirely noble reasons. Fortunately, in the past eight hundred years, they have evolved past their penchant for big shoulder pads and man-buns. He seems like the sort of dude who needs to learn a season-long lesson in the importance of connecting with other people, trusting his teammates, and putting love and faith and trust above cold pragmatism, which, fortunately, is the main thematic arc Discovery characters take.
Speaking of, I assume we’re going to get some proper antagonists at some point. Because the ones they try to sell us on in “Red Directive” are just about the most obvious fake-outs I’ve seen. I am having a hard time remembering their names, so I will call them Chiana and D’argo because they absolutely seem to be a couple of Farscape characters who somehow ended up in the wrong show. They’re former couriers who’ve turned to roguery since the courier economy collapsed. They’re like the intermediate-level villains from a Tomb Raider story – the ones who are always competing with Lara or Indy or Nathan Drake to find the treasure, but for selfish rather than noble reasons. The sort who are destined to help the hero out like one time at the three-quarters mark in the story when they realize that the other bad guy is a literal Nazi who isn’t seeking the Spear of Longinus just for money but to resurrect Cthulhu or something. They’re violent, unscrupulous and don’t care who gets hurt, but they’re also fiercely and lovingly devoted to each other, in a way that may or may not be sexual. And as we know, in Discovery, if you have the capacity to love other people, you’re not exiting the show without some form of redemption. Also, what the hell kind of “wrong hands” are these two for the power of creation to fall into?
It’s a good episode, it’s a good setup. I think the landspeeder sequence went on too long. It was a good way to show how Rayner’s priorities were a problem – he blows up the Chiana and D’argo’s cave to stop them hiding, so they blow up the whole mountain so that Discovery and Antares have to beach themselves to block the resulting avalanche from wiping out the city of adorable poverty-stricken space-bedouins (and specifically the two adorable children whose landspeeder broke down outside of town directly in front of Michael.)
Tholians were my favourtie part of Enterprise.