Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 5×02: Under the Twin Moons

You know, I rather liked Michael’s breakthrough last week that “twin moons” referred not to a planet with two moons, but a planet where two of its moons moved were in sync. This week, Michael and Saru will talk knowledgably about fine details of Romulan culture while in the middle of a desperate fight for their lives.

I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense that they might have a detailed understanding of Romulan poetical styles and a callback to the Picard Season 1 trivia about Romulan houses having a fake back-door. I mean, I say it out loud and it is, indeed, weird that they would have these facts ready to hand, and I feel like the scene would have been easier to take if they’d had to call up Discovery and have Zora do a google search instead. But at the same time, Michael is legally a citizen of the Romulan homeworld and her mom is an adopted Romulan, and Saru is shortly going to be the first gentleman of the Romulan homeworld, so if any of the regulars are justified in knowing stuff about Romulan culture, it’s these two. Yet it once again brings home the fact that Discovery stopped being a show about twenty-third century people a long time ago. From Michael’s perspective three years ago, no one even knew what Romulans look like, and now she can just casually recognize that a poem fails to match the traditional structure of a particular Romulan form.

Like I was saying last week, this is why I think Paramount is justified in ending the show. Discovery has become “Just Star Trek but in the 32nd Century” now (I have even worked out that by now, Discovery has some 32nd century natives on board in addition to Adira. There’s a Bajoran bridge officer and a Ferengi bartender and either a second Saurian or they’ve redone Linus’s makeup), while Strange New Worlds is “Just Star Trek but in the 23rd century”. And I think this is also making it a hard sell to greenlight Star Trek Legacy, because right now, it seems like that would just be “Just Star Trek but in the 25th Century”. They don’t need three different versions of “Just Star Trek, but with slightly different visual motifs to indicate what year it is.” On the other hand, they’ve got “Star Trek as a Comedy” and “Star Trek but for Kids” (Admittedly, also cancelled) and they’re coming out with “Star Trek But Grimdark” and “Star Trek But At College”, which are a much bigger departure from the core Trek “Just dudes having adventures in space” concept, and thus justify their existence more. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with any of the concepts; it’s that we don’t need three minor variations on the same show. Well, at least, normal people don’t; I eat this shit up.

This week’s A-plot is Michael and Saru’s final mission together, doing some tomb raiding on a dead planet. For those keeping score, the Promelians were another long-dead one-off TNG race like the Progenitors, this one from the episode where Geordi has a fling with a holographic reconstruction of the Enterprise’s designer and it is super creepy and pervy because the writers wanted to do “Geordi is a nerd and this awkward with women” but had a great deal of contempt for nerds, so they wrote him as kind of an incel. An element of the Promelian characterization that has carried over is that while their technology was less advanced than 24th century Federation technology, they built things to last, which means Saru gets to whip out his Fuck-Off-Murder-Darts against some two-thousand-year-old automated defense drones. (Again, no recognition here Michael and Saru are roughly equally displaced from the time of the Promelians as from the present day of the series). It’s a lovely touch that Michael makes a point to order the Dots to go undo the tomb desecration done by Chiana and D’argo, who beat them to the clue, but overlooked the hidden fifth stanza.

While this is going on, there’s a couple of B-plots. We get some good material for Tilly and Adira as they puzzle out how to keep Saru and Michael alive. We introduce the incoming plot complication – Adira is thinking about dumping Grey. Turns out that they’ve never really spent any time apart before and Adira thinks they might actually like being by themself. Hell of a thing to come back from the dead and then get dumped though. Also, I’m once again struck by how little the fact that Adira is joined to a Trill symbiont has to do with their character. Awkward enby teen genius is a perfectly fine character (Adira is the least awful teen genius the franchise has ever given us), but if you’re going to toss in “Also has the memories of several lifetimes possibly including their ex-boyfriend and a Starfleet Admiral,” that should make some kind of impact, shouldn’t it?

We’ll get a chance for Adira to interact with their Trill side next week, though, what with the fifth verse pointing Discovery to Trill, I’m sure they’ll be a major part of the A-plot rather than just having a little side-plot to dump Grey. Right now, they get to interact with Rayner, via telepresence, because time and space and distance means nothing in the 32nd century. He doesn’t do much, this is just to establish his value so we buy it when Michael asks him to replace Saru. He has a lot to learn about how to connect to other people though.

Our other B-plot involved Book, who pulls out that Secret Courier Communications Mushroom from season 3 to see if Chiana and D’argo are willing to cash out. They are not. (Minor point here, Stamets refers to the Spore Lab as “Main Engineering”, because he serves the narrative role of the chief engineer in this show, even though technically he’s a scientist, because no one is going to believe Tig Notaro giving technical exposition. If she ever shows up.  Reno still counts as chief engineer, though, just in the TOS sense of “Mostly pipes up to be salty about how you’re mistreating her engines and tell you that she’s working on it,” rather than the TNG sense of “The nerd who solves your technical problems through technobabble.”

The big reveal that Chiana is the daughter of the previous Dread Pirate Roberts Booker Cleveland is kind of a jaw-dropping contrivance, but look, we need an angle for connection here. Chiana and D’argo have done some murdering, but not too much. I’m curious whether they both get to live or not. They might need to kill D’argo off to give Chiana an enemy she’d side with the Federation against.

But they’d better get on with it. There are not a lot of episodes left. We’ve got a solid and predictable structure of the rest of the season with the incredibly telegraphed revelation that the Terrible Secret of Space (future edition) is a key in six parts. I wonder which one will be The Power of Friendship.