Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 5×10: Life Itself, Part 1

I got some fairly devastating news at work last week (Or, as your therapist would tell you, an exciting opportunity to meet new people and be the untrusted new guy and have to impress them all over again. Fear not; I’m being reassigned, not fired. Probably), and now I don’t even have any new Star Trek to look forward to.

So this went exactly the way we knew it would. Michael is granted the power of the gods and promptly chucks it into a black hole because there is going to be a new series in a couple of years set after this, and the writers have no idea how to continue the adventures of Star Trek in a universe where the Federation can create life at will.

I don’t fault them for this. I really don’t. Now, had this actually been the capstone to all of Star Trek – if this had been the planned denouement of the timeline, then yeah, “In the 32nd century, we became gods,” would be a decent ending, a payoff for sixty years of trekking. But it’s not, and we knew it wouldn’t be, and we knew this was exactly what would happen. But I can still object to how it happened.

They tried to be uplifting here. Michael’s decision evolved out of the observation that the galaxy already exists in a state of high diversity. She basically reckons “There’s plenty of life in the galaxy already,” and thus using the forge (I reckon that’s what fandom will call it eventually) to make new life is redundant, and the only practical use for the thing is to instantly clone up a huge slave army. Which is bad.

This is not terrible thinking.

It is also wrong. In the first place, I am utterly gobsmacked by the short-sightedness of, “eh, we got diversity enough.” I’m not talking about something speculative like, “But what if one day a plague or something wipes out most life and they need to reboot it.” That is actually covered in its way (I’ll get back to it). More of medium-range short-sightedness: yeah, there’s plenty of different forms of life in the galaxy right now. But you know what there isn’t? Kweijans. Y’know, Michael’s boyfriend’s species. Or space Tardigrades. Or those people who are white on one side and black on the other. Or that race that Kevin Uxbridge wiped out. Or trance worms. They even mention trance worms later in the episode. Now, they establish that you can’t actually raise the dead in the practical sense after all (More on that later too), so no, they can’t use the forge to resurrect Kweijan. But preserving a species from extinction is a noble goal in and of itself; it’s something that preserves and enhances the diversity of life in the universe. Yes, sure, it wouldn’t be “the same”, but it’s not without value. It’s like that time the Klingons cloned Kahless: sure, the clone wasn’t really the reincarnation of the patriarch of Klingon civilization, but he was a legitimate heir to the imperial line. We know they appreciate the value of this, because Book does go on to replant the Kweijan world root. The only thing stopping me from being livid is that no one seems to actually notice any of this and excuse it – there is no scene where Book has to be told that, no, seriously, Evolution “wanted” his people to die out and thus it would be morally wrong to second-guess Evolution-God.

In the second place, I find the threat of raising an instant army to be extremely dubious here. Sure, you can magic a large number of people into existence. But cloning technology already exists in this setting. And being able to magic an army into existence doesn’t get you training or ships, so what exactly are you going to do with this army? I think you need some justification for the idea that a thirty-second war can be won just by having a huge number of meatsacks available as cannonfodder. Do you have a lot of infantry charges in space? It’s a very regressive view of military might, the kind that complains about the modern military being “woke”. It’s the kind of thinking that convinces you it would be a great idea to invade Ukraine with a ’90s army whose generals already sold half your equipment on the black market.

They never really say it outright, and I wish they had, but one of the strong implications I got was that in the “dark” timeline from “Face the Strange” was not caused by the Breen exploiting the forge, but just by the fact that whichever primarch acquired it would be able to unite the Breen.

Speaking of… Yeah, the subplot with Primarch Ta’al sure did happen. It was fine, but it added up to basically nothing. I’d have to go back and check, but I think even when the shuttle she sent ahead to the black holes is mentioned by Rayner, it’s while he’s out-of-view. Yeah. I’m pretty sure that whole subplot was part of the last-minute rewrites to give Saru something to do other than get married.

It’s a great scene, sure. Saru staring down a Breen primarch on the basis of his being able to carry off the whole “Stone Cold Apex Predator” thing is really cool. It might be a bluff, but I don’t think so. They sent Saru off at the beginning of the season to be the ambassador to the minor planets, and this is the payoff: Saru has made a connection with those planets, and if Ta’al kills him and pursues the other dreadnought, they’re going to attack Ta’al’s holdings along a major trade route. Not with the realistic expectation of defeating the Breen, though. Because they don’t have to: the Breen are in such a state of mutual in-fighting right now, that even the mildest of bloody noses at the hands of a mob of Federation-aligned rabble would scuttle Ta’al’s chances of claiming the throne. But why even involve Ta’al specifically when she’s never going to come face-to-helmet with Rayner? Rayner is really the character served the least well by this season. It’s clear they inserted him expecting to build him up over multiple seasons, but someone at Paramount heard the phrase “Five-Year Mission” and decided that five is the right number of seasons for a Star Trek to run. Also, the Pathway Drive was a bit of a dud. All we see is that it seems to project a watery bubble around the shuttle. Or maybe those were just shields. I was hoping for something cool.

Anyway, the story on balance is okay I guess, but it’s sort of messy and random, and a lot of things seem to happen for very little reason. The Breen who went into the portal last week just get flat out murdered in the first scene. Michael encounters Chiana, they fight, she suggests they work together, then later Michael attacks her… And then says that they need to stop fighting and work together… What?

The portals to different environments was a neat visual. They don’t clarify if those are real places or terrarria or simulations or pocket universes or whatever, but it’s a neat visual. Michael sorting out the puzzle with the shadows was done well.

Then the final obstacle to receive the power of the gods is… A tangram. And Chiana is like, “I wanna do the thing” and Michael is like, “No that is an obvious trap let’s spend five minutes thinking about it” so Chiana cold-cocks her and tries the dumb thing and gets electrocuted.

And since I’m at twelve hundred words and don’t know what I’m going to talk about next week, let’s break here.