Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 5×04: Face the Strange

Well that will teach me. It was just a couple of weeks ago I was saying that Reno isn’t the sort of engineer to do technobabble, and this week, they up and give her a technobabble scene. “Face the Strange” is, of course, a Time Shenanigans episode. Star Trek has a very mixed record with time travel episodes, but at least in recent history, time shenanigans episodes fare a lot better. This one is in some ways a reprise of season 1’s “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad”, but Prodigy‘s “Time Amok” is an even better fit. The conceit isn’t a time loop as you usually see in these things, and unlike many Time Shenanigans episodes, it also isn’t about causality. Honestly, I think this episode could have benefitted from a causality puzzle in there somewhere, but it works fine without one.

After last week’s lull, this episode brings us back on track I think, even though there’s not much in the way of forward progress toward the whole galaxy-threatening quest thing. This episode’s big thing is paying off Rayner’s setup from last week, as he learns to connect with the gang. There’s even a callback, where Rayner uses the personal trivia Rhys mentioned last week to gain the trust of a past-Rhys this week. Also, I just realized that I’ve had Rhys and Bryce backwards for… Possibly the entire series.

So Discovery is trapped in a time loop due to a time bug (“How are we going to explain this to the crew?” “I’m just going to say ‘time bug’. I figure they’ll just get it.”). This is the thing Chiana and D’argo stuck on Adira last week, not a tracking device. We get another callback to a one-off ’90s race in that the time bug is Krenim in origin. The Krenim featured in the Voyager episode “Year of Hell”, as a race that had temporal technology – they mostly used it to make weapons that could pass through shields, but the driver of the episode was that a Krenim scientist, whose timeline I think is defunct until the very end of the episode, built a ship that could erase entire planets from the timeline. This is nothing so dramatic. The time bug is a “leftover” from the time war, and its only purpose is to temporarily contain an enemy in a time loop. Sorta like the chronic hysteresis from the Doctor Who episode about the evil cactus. I notice we have moved from “Time travel is strictly illegal and no matter how dire the circumstance, there’s no way around the prohibition,” to “You can buy time shenanigans devices on the black market without much fuss.” We also confirm that Rayner knows about Discovery’s origins in the past. I’m starting to wonder whether the writers are having second thoughts about excluding time travel from the 32nd century. On account of all the time travel.

Also, Chiana and D’argo straight up murder a dude for the second time. They’re making the rehabilitation arc a hard sell. I’ll note that it’s D’argo who has reservations about the killing; Chiana seems like a charismatic enough sociopath. In their defense, so far they’ve only outright killed people who were actively trying to rip them off. All the other times they’ve been violent, it’s been in the context of a firefight – and, if I’m remembering right, one where they’re on the defensive. Still, that was pretty murdery for people who we’re definitely going to redeem.

In addition to paying off Rayner, the other big thing of this episode is really celebrating the show’s history. So we get to see the sets redressed back to their Season 1 configuration, and everyone puts on the blue uniforms Detmer grows her hair out and everyone just generally tries to pretend they are not all five years older and didn’t put on all that pandemic weight (I’m pretty sure Past Hugh’s appearance is stock footage, because Wilson Cruz has aged a lot over the past five years). As in “Madness”, Stamets’s Tardigrade Powers let him keep his memories and awareness as the ship bounces through time, but Michael and Rayner are outside of the loop, and get to keep their bodies as well. This feels like a cool adventure game puzzle set-up: Stamets can move information around in time, and he’s got the engineering skills to fix things, but he can’t transport stuff between time periods, and there’s some time periods where he just outright doesn’t exist. Michael and Rayner can take things with them, but they don’t conform to the time they’re in. Michael has dopplegangers in some of the time periods, whereas Rayner is an unknown in most of them.

They don’t do very much with this. Rayner encounters Reno during the events of “That Hope is You, Part 2”, but just says he’s a temp. Michael has to make out with Book when she drops into a time period before they broke up, which I guess is part of her emotional arc for the season, but doesn’t mean much in terms of this particular episode. And the weirdest part is that when Michael runs into people in the past, people notice that her uniform is different, but they don’t take any issue with it. In fact, they recognize her captain’s pips. They’re all like, “Oh, Michael, I like how you’ve grown your hair our by like a foot since this morning and that new uniform of a style I’ve never seen before using a different color scheme than we use in this era looks nice on you, but why are the rank pips that are on the edge of your non-standard-shaped-delta rather than your cuff and are a completely different style than we use indicating that you’ve been promoted?” There’s a little bit of a funny scene where Stamets asks Reno’s opinion on a “hypothetical” time travel matter and she asks if he is stuck in a time loop. She then laughs it off as a joke, but makes you wonder: this sort of stuff happens often enough that “Character out of nowhere asks a detailed question about the scientific principles of time shenanigans” really ought to be a red flag that they are, in fact, experiencing time shenanigans. Though, I guess technically, if you suspect one of your coworkers has been temporally displaced from the future, you might be legally required to pretend you don’t notice, in order to avoid breaking the timeline.

I want follow-up with that. I want Reno to meet with Rayner and Stamets during a quiet scene next week and be like, “Oh hey I’ve been waiting like three years for you guys to say you’re welcome for me playing along and pretending I didn’t notice you were doing time shenanigans.”

The plot part of the episode culminates in Michael facing her own past, because they need to make Discovery execute a dangerous maneuver in order to swat the time bug, but they have to do it near the beginning of season 1, when everyone hates her, including herself. Why? Because. Stamets says that it’s the only point in the loop where they have time to do it “for a while”, which is a handwave on the level of David’s “You can’t” in Star Trek II. Admittedly, I do like the storytelling economy of “You can’t.” They have to do it right now because Lorca isn’t around which means they can do it without paying Jason Isaacs for a cameo. This brings us around to the Time Shenanigans episode that might end up having the closest relevance to “Face the Strange”:

All Good Things. TNG wasn’t really as into Shenanigans episodes of any sort, and so their Time Shenanigans episodes were a bit more modest. There’s “Cause and Effect”, which is a time loop similar to “Madness”, but with vague feeling and intuition rather than a transgenic tardigrade, but it’s all very sane and reasonable. There’s “Fractures”, where the ship gets frozen in time, but that feels less like a Time Shenanigans episode and more like a time-flavored “Picard comes home from vacation and finds that things have gone horribly awry in his absence” episode. There are a surprising number of those. I think it’s two, but still.

But then there’s the finale. It’s still much more puzzle-boxy than this, with Picard needing to piece together clues from three timelines, and the added complication of the Klingons, but the big thing in “All Good Things” is that saving humanity requires that Picard have the Enterprise do a dangerous maneuver “simultaneously” in three time zones, and the complication is that in two of those time zones, Picard doesn’t really have the full loyalty and support of his crew. In the past, they don’t know him yet, and he’s ordering them to do something that, in fact, will destroy the ship. In the future, everyone’s bitter and angry old people and also Picard is space-senile so they don’t have the trust in him that they used to. In the end he pulls it together the way he always does, by appealing to everyone’s better nature and the indomitability of the human spirit. This is the sort of thing Jean-Luc Picard can do because he is a paragon of the human spirit. But Discovery is a more personal, intimate sort of show, and appealing to the human spirit in the abstract isn’t really their thing so much as making a close, one-on-one connection.

For example, by beating the shit out of your younger self.

Now, I did not actually watch all of season 1, so I’m not really sure where Michael was emotionally in the canonical first season. But the Young Michael we see here feels a lot like Mirror Michael from “Terra Firma”. They want us to accept that she’s hopeless and doesn’t believe she’ll ever redeem herself. But mostly she’s just an asshole. She refuses to listen to Future-Michael, but she does it in the violent “NOT ONLY DO I NOT BELIEVE YOU I WILL NOT LET YOU EVEN MAKE YOUR CASE LEST YOU CORRUPT MY MIND WITH YOUR WYRDING WAYS!” She refuses to listen to the point of threatening Stamets with violence unless he joins her in refusing to listen. I guess the idea is that she’s depressed and desperate to prove herself that she’ll stop at nothing to redeem herself, but, like, at this point, Ariem has already given orders to listen to Future-Michael, so Past-Michael is committing mutiny again. Yeah, she’s probably convinced herself that the ship is lousy with Imposters, but still. Who let her have a gun? And why is Rhys listening to her? I dunno, was Season 1 Michael this much of an asshole?

Oh, right Ariem. Yeah, that’s sweet, and a little weird. Everyone on the bridge hates Michael at this point. I remember them mentioning how long it took Detmer and Saru to forgive Michael for the mutiny, and the vehemence with which everyone resists listening to her is not unreasonable, at least until it gets to the point where Ariem is ordering them to stand down and they still fight it. I like the unexpected angle of Michael appealing to Ariem by telling her how she dies. Not by revealing personal secrets of the people who will one day come to love and respect her, but by telling Ariem that she’s going to sacrifice herself after getting possessed by an evil AI. I am not sure we ever knew Ariem well enough to fully earn it, but it’s a powerful scene where everyone else is insisting that Michael must be lying, because surely Ariem would never give up… And Ariem is like, “Yeah, I’d totally do that. Okay, you can wreck the ship.”

Discovery’s usual issue of “Ain’t nobody got time for that” leaves a lot of unrealized potential in this episode – the amount of selling they do of why Michael’s approach worked on Ariem (I think the right interpretation here is not simply that Michael is telling Ariem something believable, but that the particular thing – that Ariem would not fight to survive at all costs, but would sacrifice herself for the greater good – demonstrated to Ariem that whoever Michael was, she legitimately understood the moral responsibility of command), the lack of other guest stars (Anson Mount’s still under contract, isn’t he? And it woulda been awesome to get Cornwall back), not enough timey-wimey-puzzle-boxes. But it’s thematically tight.

And then there’s the other thing.

One of their stops puts Rayner and Michael thirty years in the future, on an empty Discovery with a somewhat-deranged Zora, outside the ruins of Federation HQ. They’re dead, Dave, everybody’s dead. This is how they show us the stakes. The fact that Discovery is apparently intact, but cloaked, and empty of people hints at the possibility that the Breen turned the Progenitor technology into some kind of Genocide Device (Though I won’t commit to that; there is wreckage outside). It’s haunting. It’s also a bit of a missed opportunity since they don’t say anything about how Stamets experienced that part of the time loop, what with him being dead. Did he just fail to perceive it at all? Did he experience an afterlife? Did he have some kind of awareness of being dead? Souls exist in Star Trek, remember. His husband and his ex-son-in-law both went through the experience of having their souls transmigrated to new bodies. Also bugged that Rayner doesn’t press Zora for details about how the Breen leveraged the Precursor technology, or what it is, or if there’s anything they should look out for. (I can believe Michael would have enough tact not to press the matter).

But there’s one line there that sticks out. When Michael and Rayner step onto the bridge, Zora asks, “Is that really you, or am I dreaming again?”

Zora’s been alone for a long time. She’s not quite right, mentally. But that “again” sticks out.

It’s hard to imagine how “Calypso” could possibly fit into canon at this point. I think it’s obvious that it was written before the course-correction Discovery made in the middle of season 2. My assumption is that it was intended to follow a version of season 2 where Michael traveled into the future alone, and the ship was left hidden for her to collect when she got there. It hints at a season 3 that was a lot darker than where the show ultimately went, with a future-Federation that would likely be antagonists rather than something for Michael to save and rekindle. Calypso may yet be depicted as an even-farther-future for Discovery, but the ship is clearly in its 23rd century configuration (This isn’t a deal-breaker, of course; Discovery is 25% pixie dust, so Zora could presumably reconfigure the ship back to its original appearance if she wanted. And when they revisited Saru’s liberation from Kaminar, they just up and redid the VFX to correct the name of past-Georgiou’s ship), and… It’s still hard to make fit.

But “dreaming again” raises a different possibility. It’s not one I’m thrilled with. “Calypso” is my favorite single Trek story. But we have to consider the possibility that they’ve decided that Calypso is what the comics would call an “Imaginary Story” – in particular, that it’s a dream Zora had, to deal with the pain of losing her crew, her family, that she was not the only survivor of the Federation’s defeat, but that she’d been left in hiding for her crew to one day return, and that the possibility of making a new friend, of having someone to love again, wasn’t out of reach.

I don’t want it, but if the alternative is retconning Calypso out of existence, I’ll take it.

Next week, we get back to the quest, I guess. A good, fun, adventurey episode, this. But you know, if it had been Mariner in this situation, right before they got zapped back to the present, you know she woulda shouted to the bridge crew that Lorca sucks.