Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 5×07: Erigah

The frelniks killed my D’argo.

Well that’s a hell of a thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked this episode. But man, that stretch of ten minutes or so where you know that because this is episode 7 and not episode 9, Chiana and D’argo are about to frell everything up. This is the furthest into “Everyone acts like an idiot for half the episode so that the plot doesn’t end prematurely,” that Discovery has ever boldly gone. At least it’s all on Chiana and D’argo.

So get this, right: Michael left D’argo with a good sized hole in him a couple of weeks ago, but they are so obsessed with not trusting anyone that instead of letting Discovery help, they run away and… Broadcast their location via Smuggler’s SOS. So of course they get caught by the Federation, but also let the Breen – D’argo’s uncle in particular – know where they are. So the Federation works out a cunning trick to placate the Breen and everything would be fine except that from the fucking moment they show up on Disco, Chiana starts plotting their escape, planning to fight her way out with D’argo, who is still, remember, actively dying.

And then D’argo overdoses on Space-Fentanyl and fucking dies. That’s it. That’s the plot complication. Their plan to escape was for D’argo to OD on painkillers, and then Chiana to fight her way out when they unlocked the force field to tend to him. Only he overestimates the amount of Space-Fentanyl and kills himself.

So now, having just delicately negotiated an agreement that would prevent a war with the Breen, the Federation suddenly has a dead prince on their hands, because D’argo and Chiana didn’t trust the Federation not to give them to the Breen, and would rather die than go back.

So, of course, Chiana’s next move over D’argo’s still-cold corpse is to tell the Breen all about the Progenitor technology and offer to help them find it in exchange for her liberty. Makes sense.

This is all so profoundly stupid that it would be very easy for me to just reject it and be angry. And I am angry, mostly over that painful interval where you know how badly this is going to go but it hasn’t actually happened yet. Like I said, the saving grace is that the stupidity is driven entirely by Chiana and D’argo. Everyone else does the right thing. There’s not even any falling into stupid traps; you kind of expect Hugh or Book to get taken advantage of at some point, but they don’t really. Book successfully talks Chiana down with the information that D’argo has accidentally killed himself, and Hugh isn’t tricked into lowering the force field or anything; he does what he as to as a doctor given the constraint that there is a Breen dreadnought outside which would be displeased if the prince died.

There’s a lot otherwise to like about the A-plot. T’rina’s politicking is masterful. Rayner’s “Oh we should just start shooting now because the Breen can’t be negotiated with” is a little grating because of the whole thing where Starfleet can not possibly take on the Breen (The Breen Dreadnought is so big that it is never actually on-screen in its entirety. We only ever see the front half of it. It’s one ship, and it’s many times bigger than Federation HQ and the entire fleet put together.), but it leads to the sad backstory drop, and that leads to the solution to the problem, since they use Rayner’s personal experience with the Breen to fabricate a convincing lie and broker an agreement where the D’argo’s uncle will let the Federation keep him rather than risk one of the other factions getting their hands on him.

Until he goes and donks it all up by dying. But it’s pretty metal how Chiana proceeds to show off her Breen matrimonial tattoo and claim widow’s rights. Why she thinks throwing in with the Breen is a good idea is beyond me. Even if she doesn’t trust the Federation, it’s hard to see why she’d trust the Breen more. I guess she’s counting on the Breen wanting their Scion back enough to let her use the hypothetical resurrection power?

There’s a weakness at the end, where they present the decision of whether or not to give her to the Breen as the Federation making a pragmatic decision – there’s friction between Michael and Book over the fact that he considers it wrong. But nowhere in the discussion does it come up that this is what she wants. Like, the argument for keeping her is not “We musn’t sacrifice her to the evil aliens”, it’s “She’s a criminal and giving her to them is the thing she wants.”

But anyway, there’s also a whole B-plot, and… Man, I don’t know. Stamets is being all single-minded about solving the next clue, and I feel like there ought to be some comeuppance for this – he stops Tilly from going back to protect her cadets in the face of impending doom, and stops Book from going off to confront Chiana. I can’t tell if the show is on his side or not – he makes a good point about the importance of solving the clue, since they’re still gonna need to finish the quest if things go south. But he’s also a dick.

Also, solving the clue involves a lot of idiot ball. Like, Stamets spends half the episode hung up on chemical analysis of the MacGuffin before he gets to “Hey, it was made by an empath, maybe our empath should try to empath it.” And it takes them forever to marry up Adira and Tilly’s connection between the MacGuffin and the Space Library with Stamets and Book’s work.

I am so glad we got a scene with Adira and Reno, but frankly, it’s kinda weird, right? Like, they theorize that they are looking for a rare book, so they go to… Jet Reno. See, it’s because Zora said that Reno has experience with antique manuscripts. Because Reno did a stint as a smuggler in her youth.

And it pays off, because Reno knows about the Space Library, which puts them on the right track. But can you see the issue here? “We need to find an ancient manuscript. We should ask the person with experience in antiquities dealing.” Okay, that makes sense. Except that Reno’s experience in antiquities dealing is itself nine hundred years old. She herself points out that all of her contacts in that market died decades before the manuscript they are looking for was written. Jesus Christ. Okay, so it turns out that the key observation – that there’s a Space Library and that’s probably where it is, and the MacGuffin kinda looks like a Space Library Card – are basically timeless things that anyone who knew anything about rare books would know, so yes, it was helpful. But now there’s another “except”. Because if these key observations are things anyone who knows anything about rare books would know, Tilly and Adira should have just been able to look that up. You know what hasn’t come up at all this season? That Zora has ten thousand years of observational data about the galaxy. Zora ought to have known about the Space Library.

And then, of course, they have to circle back to Stamets and Book, because no one knows where the library is, since it moves. Fortunately, between Adira’s mathematical genius (but not the fact that they have access to centuries of Tal’s knowledge) and Stamets’s chemical analysis, and Book’s telepathic vision that the next clue is somewhere plasma-stormy, they can plot out that the Library is in the Badlands.

Again, except, it’s a library. Libraries like visitors usually. Is there really no one they could just ask to find it? I can accept that the library moves around, but I’m having a hard time with “The Library is such a secret that it doesn’t appear in Starfleet Databases and no one knows where it is and it can only be found by a combination of math, telepathy, and spectral analysis. Also Jet Reno knows about it.”

I can forgive involving Reno for dubious reasons, especially because we got the absolutely wonderful “Seven of Limes” bit out of it. I mean, think about the complexity of that. Jet Reno was born in the twenty-third century and lives in the thirty-second century. Seven of Nine was born in the twenty-fourth century, rose to importance in the twenty-fifth century, and certainly died no later than the twenty-sixth century. There is no reason for Reno to have the name of an ex-Borg Starfleet Captain from seven hundred years earlier ready-to-hand. This implies a level of devotion in her drinksmixing. Here’s how I imagine it went down.

Reno: Hey Zora, I need a name for my new drink.
Zora: How can I help, Commander Reno?
Reno: I was thinking that a tribute to a historical figure would give it some snap. Who’s the baddest bitch in Starfleet history?
Zora: I believe that would be Fleet Captain H’garrrrn of Vulvamax VII, who led the tenth battalion at the battle of the Nightmare Child during the Temporal Wars.
Reno: I like your thinking, but it’s not going to work. Vulvamaxians are allergic to gin, so it would be culturally insensitive.
Zora: In that case, might I suggest Kathryn Janeway, captain of the twenty-fourth century USS Voyager?
Reno: Maybe. Was she straight?
Zora: There is some inconsistency among the primary sources.
Reno: Who else you got?
Zora: Perhaps Captain Seven of Nine of the twenty-fifth century USS Enterprise?
Reno: Ooh, I like that. What do you think of “Seven of Limes”?
Zora: Commander Reno, I must remind you that your beverage does not contain any citrus.
Reno: I’ll make it work.

But I’m still not comfortable with the general ramshackle nature of the clue hunt here. They try to sell this as a super hard puzzle that requires everyone working across disciplines, but the solution is not actually all that hard; it just makes everyone look dumb instead for taking so long. I’m starting to worry that this whole thing is going to culminate with Michael struggling to figure out whether she should take the sword or the pen.