Author: Ross

(I am practicing self-control in that I am not going to start in on Picard until I’ve finished Disco. Also in that I watched this episode sober, but I don’t promise this will be repeated.)

It never rains but it pours. Twice in a row now we’ve got episodes with a focus on good old-fashioned TNG-style competency porn. That can-do, “Let’s science the shit out of this,” spirit where we solve complicated problems with simple analogies. Just like blowing up a balloon.

So yeah, I guess the reveal last week was a lot more concrete than I realized. There is, as a I predicted, one more step to get from what I learned to communication, but it’s a much more straightforward step than I was expecting. Discovery hoses down the 10-C’s hyperfield with the hydrocarbon for “We come in peace”, and then get scared and try to flee when the 10-C respond by summoning them inside. But the real meaty part of the front half of the episode is what happens next. Because the 10-C show up and would point of fact like to have a word with them. We don’t get a good look at the 10-C yet; they appear only as a very indistinct and large “something” seen through the mist, but they seem to at least be a recognizable sort of lifeform, with physical extension and sensory organs.

Their communication method – or at least, the “bridge language” they invent to dumb down their communication for the bipeds – is a pretty good depiction of something utterly alien that can nonetheless be understood, and I enjoyed watching the process as the gang sciences the shit out of it. I didn’t quite get the significance of the hydrocarbons last week; they’re not just a byproduct of the 10-C’s biology, but rather they communicate directly with them. My gut tells me that their full means of communication is some form of sharing complete thoughts at their own full cognition directly via biochemical means – your Star Trek-style simple analogy would be like a precise and controlled form of the way that a certain innocuous smell can remind you of a very specific event from your past. That part reminds me of the old Trek novel Enterprise: The First Adventure, wherein Kirk and Company met a ship of bear-like beings whose natural communication was basically just sharing their entire life experience and cognitive process telepathically, and Spock goes crazy for a bit trying to handle it.

For the sake of the bald apes, the 10-C dumb it down to hucking a pile of chemicals at you which can be interpreted as numbers, mathematical symbols, and emotions, then blinking a sequence of lights to indicate what order to read them in, and that part reminds me a lot of decoding the faerie language in the first Artemis Fowl book. And, again, really good work at showing how they build from using this constructed language to just math at each other in order to establish the possibility of communication, to communicating more abstract concepts. The 10-C phrase their question as “(atomic number of isolitium) + (mathematical formula for the shape of the BSTiS controller) = (emotion of curiosity)”, though they are helpful enough to give them a reconstruction of Tarka’s bomb to provide the necessary context. The question is “Why did you blow up our thinger?” The answer the galactic gang comes up with is “(chemical composition of humanoid atmosphere) + (mathematical shape of BSTiS controller) = (emotion of terror)” ie., “Because your thinger scares the shit out of us,” which would seem maybe a bit vaguer than you’d want, but remember from last week that the particular form of terror they’ve isolated as a 10-C lexeme is specifically, “The existential terror of your planet being doomed,” which is a real lucky break for them. The 10-C respond, rather wonderfully, with a very simple “(emotion of sorrow)”.

Then, of course, Tarka fucks everything up, because fuck that guy. Back in our other plots, Zora can’t detect Book’s ship due to Tarka’s sabotage, but she feels that something’s a little “off”, and we have a second parallel “figuring shit out” plot going on simultaneously with the main plot about decoding the 10-C’s bridge language. But, despite this being Star Trek, it’s not so much a “science the shit out of this” as “talk therapy the shit out of this”. The only downside of this plot is that it doesn’t end up going anywhere – they discover Reno’s abduction and Tarka’s sabotage basically at the same time as Tarka makes his move. But it’s nice to see Zora, Paul and Adira all working together.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Reno, Tarka and Book have their own plot going on. Seriously, this episode is thick with plot, and it’s paced really well; you never feel overwhelmed and nothing feels too thin. Though I am having a hard time keeping track of the fact that the events before Discovery gets pulled into the hyperfield is the same episode as Tarka’s betrayal and the language parts. It feels like two episodes worth of stuff happening, but in a good way.

We don’t quite get a whole third “figuring shit out” plot because among Tig Notaro’s many many talents (seriously, can we just digitally replace all problematic white men in movies with Tig Notaro from now on?), “science the shit out of this” scenes are not. Though she can pull off just a simple “Explain complex concept with a slightly dodgy analogy.” It’s kind of neat, given that Tig Notaro in interviews really presents this image of an almost sublime lack of academic skills, the way they handle this plot is to simply declare that Tarka’s plan is so very scientifically complicated that there’s no point in even trying to explain it. Reno can just tell with a glance that the thing Tarka is plotting will genocide the 10-C, blow up Discovery and Book’s ship and doom Earth and Ni’Var, but the reason is just a pile of complicated math so there’s no explaining it – and I dig that she’s up-front with Book about it: “Ask him to show you the math,” she says. “It won’t mean anything to you. But his reaction will.”

Tarka is a hard nut to crack. Because this is real fucking evil shit he’s doing, but he’s doing it in desperation to ascend to a better universe to be with his boyfriend. How do you square “Willing to genocide possibly four entire cultures” with “Loves this one dude so much he’s willing to genocide up to four entire cultures”? In a 90s show, the answer would be “bad writing”, and it still might, sure, but I think Disco has earned the right to use “Because people be complicated, yo,” as an explanation. Discovery has always been a show about how trauma fucks us up.

This episode was good on many, many levels; its flaws are few. They even manage to do a convincing explanation for the generally infuriating decision that the team that goes into the 10-C’s hospitality goo ball consists of the highest concentration of senior officers to go on one away mission in the entire history of the show. I mean, yeah, it’s a diplomatic mission at the highest levels, so I guess it’s justified to send the presidents. And Michael and Saru are, point of fact, the experts in the exact fields relevant to the situation. It should grate, but how else are you going to do it? I do think they didn’t really give a good justification for why the 10-C sent them a goo ball containing a recreation of Discovery’s bridge – making a construct that recreates their environment makes sense and all, but it’s not clear why they couldn’t just keep conversing from the shuttle bay. If the goo ball was going to take them somewhere, it would make more sense, but of course, it just sits there waiting to dump them back on the floor when the 10-C get pissed at Tarka.

The finale comes next (It’s already in your past, of course, because of the time delay I incurred to handle Prodigy), and I’m hella curious how they’re going to sort all of this out. I think I have a solid guess about the broad strokes, but there’s elements where I’m not sure how far and how satisfying they’re going to go. Tarka seems ripe to die, either undone by his own failure to transcend his guilt, or self-sacrifice when he does. Book seems ripe to die in an act of self-sacrifce. But neither of these would put Michael as central in the ultimate resolution as you know the show wants (Admittedly, seasons 2 and 3 were both willing to share the glory in the final moments, with Michael’s contribution being critical, but not outsized. They let Georgiou defeat Control, and while Michael killed Osyraa, it’s Owo and Book that save the ship and Saru who saves the galaxy), and besides, Discovery’s go-to move in the end isn’t to win by sacrifice: it’s to win by healing.

 

Once again I find myself at the disadvantage of having been pretty drunk when I watched this episode. I’m going through some stuff right now. It’s fine.

Anyway, this episode has some ups and downs. It has a more solid “Science Fiction” plot than we’ve gotten out of Discovery in a while, but correspondingly less of the Discovery goodness that I’ve come to like. We spend a bit more time with Book and Tarka than I want, and honestly they aren’t doing great at justifying their part of the plot. I could’ve done with some more time for “character” stuff.

We don’t really learn a lot about the 10-C despite that being what the episode is ostensibly about. It’s called “Rosetta” because they’re meant to be discovering the key to communicating, and they probably do, but it’s going to involve one more ass-pull to get there (Betcha it’s Book. Book is, after all, an empath. Also, proper emotional catharsis requires Book, the face of having been hurt by the 10-C, be the one to heal the divide by connecting at an emotional level with those he holds responsible) because where they are right now is basically that they have discovered that the 10-C, despite possibly being GIANT FREAKING SPACE DRAGONS WHO LIVED INSIDE A GAS GIANT experience emotions that are entirely recognizable to galactic humanoids: fear of death; the desire to protect their young; self-sacrifice. Okay, cool, fine start. But we still need a little treknobabble to take the last step from there to communication. Which is plausible, since the key technical aspect of this discovery is that the remains of ancient 10-C impregnated their environment with hydrocarbons that can transmit their emotions to other lifeforms that touch them.

This is fairly close, on a technical level, to imagining one could relive the memories of a dinosaur by touching crude oil. It is quite mad and quite wonderful, and well outside the sort of thing “respectable” Trek tends to do, but is actually fairly in-line with some of the wild things I’ve seen in expanded universe novels, and in Doctor Who. But that said, “Aha! They have emotions!” isn’t on the surface as big a revelation as its weight in the story merits.

Meanwhile, Tarka and Book sneak aboard Discovery so that they can find a way to piggyback when it goes to visit the 10-C in their new home. We still haven’t gotten a really plausible explanation for what Tarka means to do now – he doesn’t have another isolytic weapon, and I see no evidence of him having an alternative plan for capturing the power source. Unless he just wants to sneak up to it and plug is interdimensional transporter into it. And I see even less why Book is going along with him: if Tarka had a plan to disable the power source, maybe. But given that Tarka doesn’t have a concrete plan and Michael does, why isn’t he just turning himself in and asking if he can do anything to help? Also, as much of a dick as Tarka is, I noticed that he made a point of referring to Zora by name. He unquestioningly and naturally accepts her for who and what she is despite the two never having directly interacted. This is a nice change from the expected cliche of, “Communicate that the character is a dick by having him refuse to use the sentient ship’s actual name.” It is possible that they really do mean for us to see Tarka as another “broken” character rather than the total dick they portrayed him as.

And then they accidentally kidnap Reno. Cool. Reno being snarky at Tarka will certainly make the next episode more fun.

And another low-key one, oddly. “The Galactic Barrier”‘s A-plot is exactly what it says on the tin: Discovery crosses the galactic barrier. It’s… Strangely empty as storytelling goes. That plot boils down to “They fly through a dangerous part of space and it gets dicey for a bit but ultimately works out”. The barrier itself is not much like its depiction in TOS, coming off as a far more direct threat – we basically see the ship starting to burn away as it passes through – and not so much of the whole, “May induce godlike powers and megalomania” aspect (NGL, I was kinda hoping that this one thing they’d keep the original VFX for, just for the novelty of it). The meatier part of the episode is the character work. And this is pretty well done, though I think the context undermines where the biggest focus went.

That is, about half of this episode is about Tarka’s backstory. And sure, they did a good job at it. Even did a good job at making Tarka visibly younger in the flashbacks. But… Look, I hate Tarka at this point. You’re not going to walk it back by showing me a montage of him cuddling his boyfriend to help him through a PTSD flashback. It’s not really helped by the frankly-too-easy-to-miss reveal that Tarka had originally been placed with Othros to spy on him, since the Chain had already expected him of plotting escape. We’re meant, I assume, to see this as the source of Tarka’s guilt. But, I mean, it would have been enough if Tarka had just been forced to leave Othros behind when he escaped; all this does is remind me that Tarka is a piece of shit who has a history of fucking over other people for his own ends. There just isn’t enough weight given to the other side of it, the side that says, “Look, this imprisonment is so bad that even a good person would be driven to do terrible things.” I know Star Trek is technically capable of selling that, because they have done that – see also The Many Psychological Traumas of Miles O’Brien. But the difference here is that they gave full weight to the torture they put O’Brien under, and also that they led with the audience having faith that O’Brien was a good man. We have no such charity for Tarka because we’ve never seen him be anything other than a complete and utter dick. And that could certainly be part of a balanced storytelling breakfast – the tale of a complete and utter dick who, under duress, does dickish things, and ultimately has some kind of emotionally satisfying denouement where he either learns not to be a dick, or else fails at a critical moment because of his tragic inability to rise above dickishness. But the moral texture of this episode reads very strongly that it wants Tarka’s ark to be the same as Miles O’Brien: a good man who was driven by extreme trauma to do terrible things, and who will in time redeem himself by letting his Inner Goodness win. And that just is not the character they have given us.

Meanwhile, literally everyone of importance in the entire Federation is all going on this incredibly deadly mission together, with the Ni’Var president and the Federation President and the Earth – I think she’s not the president but has some cool title like “Defender of the Solar System” instead? I realize this is in some respects obviously dumb, but in other respects, it is just such peak Trek that I admire the brazenness of it. Also the brazenness of Saru being super awkward when he confesses his feelings to T’rina then finds out she’s coming with them.

Speaking of awkward, Adira is back and we get a nice Awkward Space Dad scene with Stamets which just makes me all the angrier at how thin the runtime is spread with the most compelling characters disappearing for weeks at a time. There’s just a hint at the fact that it ought to be weird for Adira to be without Gray for the first time since well before he died, but it’s just one line and then they disappear into the background noise of the episode again. They wrote out Bryce for some reason, sending him off to work on Kovitch’s SUPER SECRET PROJECT which… Are we introducing a new plot thread at this point?

Which leaves us I guess with the Room Elephant. After weeks of me pointing out that the Big Swirly Thing in Space hasn’t actually done a huge amount of threatening since it destroyed Kweijan, there is a correction now. And one hell of a correction: the new, bigger, faster-moving BSTiS is threatening Earth and Ni’Var. And, I assume other planets which are in between those two; I got to be honest, it’s a bit much to buy that this thing is simultaneously threatening The Two Planets We’re Most Likely To Care About (ie. Michael’s birth-home and planet-of-legal-residence). They do (if you blink you will miss this) clarify that the BSTiS is not actually close enough to squish Earth and Ni’Var, but rather, it’s close enough that its gravitational field will fling stuff at both systems. But still, it’s maybe just a bit too much? Unless they’re planning to actually go ahead and have Earth get its shit fucked up; that would be a hell of a thing. I don’t know. It’s probably too much.

“Rubicon” is a good solid name for an episode of pretty much any sci-fi adventure series. It’s got a clear meaning but is just obscure enough that people feel good about themselves for getting it (I mean, not countries which teach schoolchildren the history of the Roman empire in detail, obviously, but I’m American). It’s respectable. Plus it just has a really nice cadence to it.

Something I don’t usually get to say about Discovery is that this episode is really well-paced. This episode is really well-paced. A lot happens but it never feels rushed and it never drags. In fact, as I was sorting out my thoughts, I had to stop a moment and confirm whether or not all these plots actually happened in the same episode.

Now, none of this is to say that the episode was flawless. It’s not. For one thing, they mention Reno but she doesn’t actually appear. And there’s multiple character beats which are certainly good things to do, but just kind of fall flat because of how under-served half the cast is. The biggest example is Nhan, who returns to babysit Michael as she confronts Book. She’s got some new breathing implants that are a bit more discrete, and she’s now “Federation Security”, but… Look, Nhan was a fairly minor character in season 2 who had one or two interesting moments but was mostly defined by how she didn’t fit in with the family, who kind of inexplicably decides to throw in with the gang primarily out of a sense of responsibility after Erimem’s death. Just like they did with Georgiou, they wrote her out and then turned around and treated her like a beloved part of the family who everyone’s missing even though we never actually saw her interact with any of them. Nhan has a bit of a character arc in that she’s struggling with her inability to reconnect with her family since she can’t tell them where she comes from, what with the whole “Flagrant violation of the temporal accords” thing and it culminates in Michael teaching her, near as I can tell, “Why not just lie?”  It makes more sense the way they phrase it, but the whole thing is largely informed. We did get to see this notion of how important family is to Barzans last season, but we only have a thin sense of what that means on-the-ground, and no idea what it means for Nhan personally. Similarly, showing some tension between Bryce and Rhys over their position on Tarka’s plan. Okay, kudos for showing that not everyone on Discovery is in complete agreement, but they’re all going to defer to their captain and work together anyway, but it would carry more weight if I knew a damn thing about these characters beforehand.

It also undermines it a bit that the “Destroy the BSTiS without making contact first” side is just so transparently wrong. I mean, there’s just not an even two-sided moral debate here. The 10-C are unfathomably powerful beings from beyond the galaxy, and the two equal sides here are, “Go talk to them and ask nicely” and “Provoke them by using our most powerful and dangerous weapons and the maximum extent of our powers to blow up mining equipment with no idea what they could do if we actually made them angry.” Also, they just have not done enough to sell the threat of the DMA: everyone is acting out of fear of what it might do, but so far, Kweijan is the only planet that actually got its shit wrecked without plenty of warning. This isn’t a battle between revenge and justice or between compassion and pragmatism or between safety and understanding, because when your opponent is even more godlike than all the other godlike aliens from fifty years of Star Trek those goals are all aligned. It’s neither right not pragmatic to attack. And just in case you missed that point, Tarka’s pretty clear that he doesn’t give a fuck about the galaxy; he just wants the power source so he can go dimension-hopping.

Which doesn’t work out for him, of course. It couldn’t, as a practical matter, since we need him to still be around for next week, but it’s almost a little too much to mix in the pathos of Tarka tempting Book away from Michael, endangering our heroes, betraying Book, possibly starting an intergalactic war, and it turning out to be all for naught. This is bordering on the comeuppance you expect for a kid’s show villain.

And in the light of Tarka’s actions here – firing on Discovery, launching the weapon after Book has agreed to stand down, secretly adding murdernanos to Book’s ship – what are we supposed to make of him saving the shuttle? Is that the hint that even he might be eligible for redemption? I assume that’s where we’re going, Tarka redeeming himself in the end. When the shuttle’s being torn apart, Tarka is very quick to say that he can’t possibly reprogram the defenses in time to save them… But with his next breath he suggests them EMPing themselves to let the shuttle break free. I’d expect Tarka to be cold and unhelpful and this to be the beginning of the rift between him and Book, with Book horrified to be complicit in attempted murder and Tarka being upset when Book endangers their quest to protect the Discovery crew. But no, Tarka just steps up and helps. Interested in where this goes.

Now, what does land this week very well is the denouement between Book and Michael. I love that everyone keeps reiterating this: Book is not irrational. Book isn’t doing the traditonal Big Manpain Lashing Out thing where his own pain and grief and lust for vengeance is making him blind. No; Book isn’t out for revenge, because that’s not the kind of person Book is. Book isn’t Batman, angrily beating the crap out of the mentally ill because he’s still the little kid raging at his parents’ death. No, he’s Batman: violating every norm and convention of a civilized society in his desperate, cloying need to ensure that no other little kid has to go through what he did. Book came to a different conclusion than Michael and the Federation, but not because he’s irrational; reasonable people can disagree.

(I mean, that’s what they want it to be; as I said above, this is undermined by how transparently wrong Tarka’s plan is)

So Book eventually stands down not because he’s outgunned (Why is Book’s ship capable of taking on Discovery in a fight anyway? That seems weird) or because he’s outmaneuvered, but because Michael offers him new information: that there’s time to try both plans. Tarka fucks this up, of course, for reasons that aren’t well-communicated, but yeah, that’s our big Discovery theme: most of our problems can be solved peacefully if we just take time to listen to each other. Please do not let them fuck this up by having the 10-C be assholes.

Other small things in this episode: Aww. President T’rina asked Saru out on a date. Those two are adorable. I do not like Linus’s new voice. The visual effects of cloaked Discovery are pretty cool. Bunch of decent Magic Mushroom effects, but none of them are the full-on blacklight-rave-space effect.

We ease back into Disco this week with an episode that’s somehow both high-stakes and low-key. The camera remains upright, the fight scene is discrete, the climax is a poker game, and Michael doesn’t even cry.

The downside of this is that it leaves me without a whole lot to say. I continue to revere the mature and respectful dealing with mental health. That Michael recognizes that Book was hurting, but didn’t expect his betrayal. And it’s an interesting turn to see Vance’s sense of betrayal over Tarka. Or Owosekun very quickly getting the gist of Tarka’s underlying issue.  Nice to see her having some character development, even if it’s mostly getting the crap beat out of her in the boxing ring. That bit did feel a little underwritten; we see her get her ass kicked a few times and then she wins for no clear reason other than because of how far we were into the episode. I can’t blame the champ and his booker thinking they got hustled. This is a good episode for Joanne, but it does drive home how poorly Disco uses its ensemble, what with Michael having the narrative gravity of an extragalactic dark matter Big Swirly Thing in Space. Owo’s “thing” seems to be that she’s hella tough, what with her luddite upbringing, and that’s nice and all, especially since she doesn’t look it, being not especially big or visibly buff and being sort of bright-eyed and smiley. But Discovery really isn’t a show whose narrative prizes toughness very often, which leaves Owo without much to do a lot of the time.

They’ve shed so much of the cast at the moment that this episode feels a bit sparse; rather than multiple plot threads, we mostly just have the same plot from two angles. The only respite is a brief scene of Hugh beating himself up for his failure to help Book enough. It’s cute that he yells at the Space Roomba, which retreats, but then sneaks back out again to finish cleaning once they’ve left. Also, as a small nice point, good to see Stamets own what a complete dick he was to Zora.

There’s something deeply unsavory about Tarka, and I hope it turns out to be more interesting than just, “Actually he plans on destroying the whole ding dong universe in a Superboy Prime tantrum over his dead boyfriend.” There is a world of unspoken backstory in the small side-event of a changeling with a nervous tic showing up as a con artist at a space casino. This episode is pretty rich in showing us small weird space stuff to make us nostalgic, but the barge is perhaps a little too claustrophobic? The poker game is fine. They play space poker for the macguffin, but space poker appears to just be Greek Hold ‘Em with a very pretty deck of cards I expect to find on Etsy soon enough.

I was at first a little disappointed that the climax was simply “Book outplays Michael”; I was expecting it to be something where Michael finds herself in the positon of having to let Book win in order to stop the Emerald Chain Wannabees from getting the isolitium. But upon reflection, I’m okay with this turn; the other thing’s been done enough, and it’s a neat twist to reveal that Michael went into it knowing she was going to lose and – in a sense both metaphorical and literal – playing the hand she was dealt as best she could. I do note with very mild derision that they embraced the TV Poker Game trope of having the final hand come down to Book’s flush beating Michael’s straight, rather than any of the seven million poker hands that are way more common – on TV, skill in poker is entirely down to skill at being dealt good cards.

Discovery is well-served by having a smaller, more pleasant sort of episode every once in a while. With the short episode count, that’s not really something they can do very often, and I’m glad they moved the arc forward while doing it. Book and Tarka have settled in to build their doomsday device, Discovery knows where they are, and, kind of out of nowhere as a random coda, we find out what the deal with the 10-C is.

Now, I don’t like the way the reveal scene was written; Michael seems to just magically deduce out of nowhere a lot more detail than makes sense. I’m okay with her coming up with “Hey what if they’re mining something,” and letting Zora work out what exactly. But she jumps immediately to the idea that the BSTiS is a trawl for mining boronite based only on “The 10-C have tremendous energy needs,” and she’s not just right in principle, but in detail: the 10-C live in an immense force-shielded bubble and they need boronite to power it, and they DGAF about life in the galaxy so they’re strip-mining it. Boronite can be used to make the scary and dangerous “Omega Molecule”, which destroys subspace in return for basically infinite energy, so that tracks. This sets up the 10-C as an existential threat to space travel in an even more fundamental way than they already are, but there’s also an implication that they might be desperate to maintain their power supply, and it’s even possible that they’re oblivious to the harm they’re doing. And now we finally start to talk about the element that was curiously absent from the discussion last time: the 10-C have the capacity to fuck shit up seriously in the galaxy, and blowing up the thing which is providing them the power they need to survive is definitely going to provoke them. We also get an oblique allusion to the Kelvin timeline: the DMA is like the Nerada, a simple mining ship which is just so breathtakingly advanced compared to the Federation that it can destroy an entire planet and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.

It wouldn’t make a lick of sense, but if it turned out that the 10-C were the Diviner’s people, that would be just about completely insane enough to be enjoyable. They’re technologically advanced, capable of time travel, but hadn’t made first contact. An extragalactic species that was artificially isolated from other life is a plausible way for that to have happened – and would be a heck of a fun Douglas Adams reference to insert into Star Trek.

I’m not holding out hopes though. I think a slightly more likely possibility (though still pretty unlikely) is that it’s actually an isolated human civilization. In particular, there’s an old Star Trek novel about Young Picard and the Stargazer crew encountering survivors of the SS Valiant – twenty-first century warp ship that had crossed the barrier and subsequently been destroyed by its captain to protect humanity from a crewmember who was developing godlike powers as the backstory to the second TOS pilot episode. Could it be that Disco is mining that concept too? It would be consistent with Discovery‘s frequent interest in revisiting TOS-era concepts that didn’t end up having major influence on ’90s Trek. If the 10-C turned out to be a race of diaspora humans, a thousand years separated from the rest of human culture, with massive psychic powers and technology that had evolved in isolation, it would play very well into Discovery’s major themes and offer a path to healing.

But like I said, it doesn’t seem that likely compared to, “It’s someone we’ve never heard of before.”

I guess we’re backing away from the Protostar gang for a bit in order to get Back to the Future next week. And we see them off with an episode that isn’t quite what I wanted, but my word did this go to some much richer, deeper, and at times darker places than I was expecting.

We’ll work back-to-front by leading off with my great disappointment: pretty strong confirmation that no, those weren’t hints; the show really is set exactly when it claims to be, some time probably between Lower Decks and Picard. Because Admiral Janeway is out there in the USS Dauntless (A ship which is very clearly modeled on its namesake, the fake USS Dauntless – an alien ship that was disguised as a Starfleet prototype as part of a plot against Voyager), looking for the Protostar – or more immediately, its lost crew. It sure does look like Janeway is going to be the unwitting antagonist of the next arc, as the episode’s big reveal is that it is absolutely critical that the Protostar not return to the Federation, as it’s been infected with a computer payload that will destroy Starfleet.

Some – though not all – of the oddities in the timeline do get explained, though, with the reveal that while the show isn’t set in the post-TNG-era far future, the Diviner himself is a time-traveler. The “betrayal” he blames Starfleet for hasn’t happened yet. And, got to be honest, while his emotions feel legitimate, his plan has a lot wrong with it. This is a lot to go through from a place of irrational anger; it requires a level of planning that one would hope would take long enough that anyone rational enough to pull it off would at some point during the execution stop and say, “Wait… There’s actually much easier and less insane ways to accomplish my goals here.”

The Diviner’s planet destroyed itself in civil war following the social upheaval triggered by first contact. That’s it. That’s his motivation. He has traveled back in time and spent two decades pursuing the Protostar in order to give it a computer virus, in order to destroy the Federation, in order to prevent them from making First Contact with his planet.

Okay, I get the angry and tragic obsession. But this is a deeply stupid plan. I mean, leaving everything else aside: it would take him no more than a few months to travel to the Federation. Why did he spend 20 years hunting the Protostar? We established last week that even without the protodrive it’s possible to send messages between the quadrants in real-time and travel between them in far less than the length of Voyager’s marathon. So why invest so much in the Protostar? He doesn’t need the special high-warp prototype; any Starfleet ship would do. Misplaced Starfleet ships are a dime a dozen in the Alpha quadrant.

No sooner do we get this reveal, of course, than we trivially dispense with the Diviner as a villain, and holy crap, you can do this in a kids’ show? They defeat the Diviner by having Zero reveal its true form, thus destroying his mind and rendering him permanently insane. What? Wow. The balls on this show. Also ballsy: the cute little cat person comes back and flat out murders the fuck out of Deathlok. There’s a great bit of thematic satisfaction out of the whole thing, because The Diviner has turned the defenses back on and sent down his murderbot to restore order, but the Unwanted are no longer isolated and alone: they can communicate now; they can work together, and because they can do that, not only can they overcome these previously insurmountable obstacles, they aren’t even hard. That theme is reiterated over and over again, with the Diviner gloating in his victory over Dal only to have Zero trivially defeat him specifically with the reveal that Dal wasn’t alone. Dal saving Gwynn from her father’s fate by just having her look at him.

And oh my oh my. That scene where the two miners come into range of Dal’s translator and for the first time are able to communicate. That is fucking beautiful. The affection between those two dudes is so obviously and straightforwardly romantic, and it is the gayest thing I have ever seen in a kids’ show (Gayer, even, than the fact that on the past season of Power Rangers they gave Izzy a girlfriend) and I am so glad that it was Star Trek that did it. How far we’ve come from the TNG era’s well-meaning but terrible, “Beverly Crusher isn’t picky whether her lovers are alive or not, but does require them to have dicks,” or “Riker tries to rescue the only straight woman from the planet of the angry lesbians,” or, “Everyone’s bi in the evil universe.”

So the tease for the next arc leaves me just a little cold, I think, but I’m really enjoying how this show works on multiple levels, so I’m happy to give it a chance when we return to it later this year.

Aw man, yeah.

Look, Lower Decks just isn’t my jam; I get what they’re going for, but they keep either trying too hard to channel Rick and Morty or drifting into a kind of Big Bang Theory hatefulness, and when they avoid both of those, you’re left with a show that seems to think that its main appeal is the Memberberries – that you’re here to recognize things and feel good about your geek cred for understanding references (By the way, my favorite “I recognize that reference” joke about Star Trek is from an episode of “The Middleman”. Kevin Sorbo plays a character who’s been frozen since the ’60s, and he makes a Star Trek reference, then explains it because he assumes no one in the future would know about a cult sci-fi show from decades earlier). I love Discovery and I have… Complicated feelings about Picard, but they both appeal to a very different part of me than any past Trek has; neither one is a show that tells the kinds of stories Star Trek traditionally has. And that’s great. That’s what I like about Disco.

But Prodigy? Prodigy actually does do the thing it is there for: it is doing Star Trek in the traditional Star Trek way, only for kids(!).

So this week, the gang is faced with their own Kobyashi Maru: the Deathlok copy from last week, though properly dead, still manages to play a “Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi” message to Gwynn from her dad, offering to trade the entire slave colony on Tars Lemora for the Protostar – along with the threat of what he’ll do if they don’t. Because of the tight time-table and the protodrive’s cool-down period, the gang is left with an impossible choice. They can surrender the ship as requested, or they can protojump to the Federation. They quietly presume (not without reservation) that the Federation will help if they can, but they know that the Protostar is experimental, and there’s no way of knowing if Starfleet has the capacity to return to the Delta quadrant in time. And this is just fantastic. Because everyone, still high from last week, is working together. There’s no question, even from Dal, of just fucking off into deep space. No, Dal has reservations, but it’s about putting the others in danger: if it were just him, scared as he is, he’d do it.

And so they do what you do to beat the Kobyashi Maru: they cheat. I love their solution and I love the way it’s presented. We don’t quite see what they’re building, we don’t quite see what they’re doing. Everything you need to see is there, but they don’t call attention to it. And if you’re me, at least, you don’t really think, “Where’s Murf?” You might think, “Why is Pog carrying Zero?” But – and this felt so good – it only fully hits you when Zero starts floating off in zero-G and they have to rescue him. “Wait… Can’t Zero fly? Why do they need to grab him with a grappling hook?” And just as you finish processing it, that’s when the reveal comes: cut back to the Protostar, to the Diviner demanding a premature protojump, and…

Bam! What a fantastic reveal. Knowing this was a cliffhanger, I fully expected this part to end with the gang screwed and facing certain destruction and the Diviner seemingly-triumphant. But no, we actually end with the reveal that, despite the Diviner’s double-cross, leaving Tars Lemora powerless, without gravity and about to lose its atmosphere, the gang is still okay. The lack of gravity is a snag, but they’ve got it under control. Because losing Gwynn – who agrees to go with her father to cement the trade – was a snag. Losing the gravity was a snag. But the plan is still in place. The thing they beamed to Tars Lemora before surrendering? Zero. The thing they built? A replica of Zero’s containment suit. And inside? Murf. And inside Murf? Holy shit, this is the payoff from three weeks ago. Murf is indestructible. He’s specifically indestructible from eating dangerous explody things. So they fed him the protocore. This is just an amazing bit of problem solving by our gang, playing to their strengths and their newfound unity as a crew. And it’s also a great bit of storytelling, with all the plot beats hitting home at the right time.

So what else do we have moving forward? Man, we get some good progress on the character of The Diviner of all people – his pain over having hurt Gwynn, and the possibility that he might legitimately have some nobility to him, but calloused over his obsession with his mission. Now, they’re going to have to work around his attempt to kill everyone by shooting up the place on the way out, but they’ve telegraphed a major element of his backstory in that he feels he was betrayed by Starfleet. Depending on how Gwynn takes the details when he reveals them, we might have to endure her allegiance shifting again. I hope not. Now obviously, it’s not going to turn out that Starfleet deliberately fucked him over. But that means that they might be setting up a path to redemption for him in the best tradition of twenty-first century Trek by healing: an eleventh hour revelation that causes him (and possibly Starfleet as well) to realize that the disconnect wasn’t a betrayal. My bet right now is that Deathlok is responsible here – that Starfleet had some kind of deal with the Diviner that would’ve benefitted the both of them, but the cartoonishly evil robot donked things up and let Starfleet take the fall.

Oh, and Evil Janeway. The fact that Kate Mulgrew is credited separately as Janeway and “Corrupted Janeway” could well be a hint that we’re going to see a Good Kirk/Evil Kirk fight scene next week. Man I hope so.

New costumes? Meh.

And hey you know what I never noticed before? Dal’s got a prehensile rattail. That’s nifty.

Ooh boy, a Nickelodeon Puzzle Box. I kind of love it. “Time Amok” (clever!) is a Temporal Shenanigans episode that showcases incremental problem solving in a very lovely way. Rok is really the showcase character here, though her role is a little bit liminal – what we’re dealing with from her involves a lot of off-stage growth and things that aren’t made explicit. We again reinforce the symmetry between Dal and Gwynn and get some development for Dal in particular that showcases his growth into his leadership role. Plus, we get some tantalizing hints about the ongoing story.

Also, we start out on the holodeck with the gang literally trying to solve the fox-chicken-grain puzzle as a training exercise, which is hilarious. And you know what? They never actually solve it. They don’t circle back to that plot point and have them figure it out, and that’s weird but shows a certain level of trust in the audience that they don’t need to be spoon-fed. One thing I do dig here is that while they don’t bother showing the solution, they do show Zero having the key insight: “Wait,” he says, “There’s nothing that says we can’t take one thing over and then bring a different thing back.” Again, the emphasis here is on the process of solving the problem, not the solution.

And then Dal, frustrated by their inability to function as a team, reveals their secret to Janeway: that the ship is stolen and they aren’t really cadets. And I am fascinated here that everyone assumes this will be a problem, but Janeway just rolls with it, and she appears to have already decided to roll with it before the ship gets smeared across different time periods by the tachyon MacGuffin.

That’s when we get into the iterative problem solving. Pog, the engineer, is able to identify the problem with the protodrive, but his accelerated time frame means that he can’t solve it in time. Janeway next visits Rok, whose time frame is massively slowed. And we see her conflict: her upbringing as a slave has left her unequipped emotionally and psychologically for the weight of making decisions for herself, but it’s also left her desperate to choose her own path, and resistant in the face of being told what to do. She doesn’t trust herself or her abilities, but she bristles at being ordered around, so she simply rejects Janeway’s attempt to get her to save the ship. Zero is able to work out a solution, but as his time is also accelerated, he can’t implement it. Since Murf isn’t really one for engineering, it falls to Dal to build the necessary device, and here he’s beset by his own self-doubt. Self-doubt is a big element for Dal, Gwynn and especially Rok; not at all for Pog or Zero – I’m curious what it’s going to look like when we finally get an in-depth character study for Pog in particular, since he seems far and away the best adjusted of the gang. And Dal almost manages to save the day, but for an incompatible coupling, which I think is probably a Parental Bonus reference, since Janeway just moments earlier had referenced Apollo 13, and I’m guessing that if you’re in the age range of the expected audience’s parents, one of the big details you remember about Apollo 13, from the Tom Hanks film, is solving the problem of the carbon dioxide filters not being compatible between the modules.

Gwynn’s scene is where we get into the ongoing story elements. We’d established before the break how easily her people can seize control of the Protostar, and more recently hinted that there’s some element of their culture embedded in the ship. The Diviner’s ship is now revealed to be “months” away (Speaking of timeline, don’t think I didn’t notice Janeway giving a six digit stardate. Production error, or hint?), but communications between the Gamma and Delta quadrants is now real-time, so he’s already received the intel from Nandi, and that’s enough for him to email Deathlok to the Protostar’s vehicle replicator. And man, he just owns the crap out of Gwynn, admitting that, while he’s been ordered not to harm her, he reckons he should because she’s bad for his boss’s mission. He also has enough insider information about the Protostar to trivially find the necessary coupling and to outright murder Janeway, using Chakotay’s command codes. There’s enough similarity between Deathlok’s voice and Robert Beltran’s that if we hadn’t seen him in the background on the flight recorder and this weren’t a For Kids! show, I’d almost be expecting a twist a la The Black Hole where Deathlok is eventually revealed to be a somehow transfigured Chakotay. Gwynn bests him in the end, but only by sacrificing the ship.

You might – I was kind of hoping – they might pop back and have Murf somehow save the ship. But that’s a bit less satisfying than what actually happens. No, in her slow-time reality, Rok has already spent an unspecified amount of time alone – long enough that it’s weighing on her as she’s created props of her missing friends to talk to. But eventually, Gwynn’s farewell recording catches up with her, explaining how to save the ship and apologizing for the pressure they’d put on her. Gwynn, of course, has since her face turn started showing kinship to each of the others in turn. She bonds with Zero over the sense of alienation at being cut off from her culture. She bonds with Dal over the weight of responsibility and parental abandonment. Now, she bonds with Rok over the feeling of being pressured to do things she’s not comfortable with. Wondering what she’ll bond with Murf over. So, over the span of a very long time, Rok teaches herself enough engineering to build the necessary device, find the necessary coupler, and even restore Janeway – since her deletion only occurred “seconds” earlier in sidereal time, all her data is still in the cache, and it’s just a matter of recompiling her. We don’t know exactly how long Rok spends on this. She doesn’t age visibly, but we don’t know what the aging process for her species looks like. We do know it’s a long time, but if there’s any lasting psychological damage from that, we don’t get to see it. We are told – I think we’ll see this as the show goes on, but I don’t think it was honestly conveyed in as much detail as it merits on-screen – that she’s had time to mature and “find herself”.

I really liked this episode. It felt good. Prodigy is doing at least one thing that the other streaming-era Treks seem to struggle with: giving us a good solid one-off adventure that works by the traditional Star Trek methods for a problem-solving ensemble story, while still feeling entirely fresh and 21st century.

Damn, I think I kinda like this show.

Okay, well then. Here we get a look into what the Protostar crew looks like on something approximating “a mission” – something they very broadly tried in “Dreamcatcher”, but that was really just setup for everyone to have some character insight. This is a proper mission.

It’s also… They are really not eager to make the setup for the galaxy straightforward, are they? So, as we learned last week, Protostar has hopped from the Delta quadrant over to the Gamma quadrant, and everyone is very clear that their hustle here is much faster than a normal sort of hustle. And yet this week they run into someone from Dal’s past. A Ferengi who Dal had traveled with before being sold into slavery. So Protostar might be fast, but a Gamma-to-Delta trip isn’t untenable at this point in history, not even for an Alpha Quadrant race. Jumping to the Gamma quadrant has gotten them out of The Diviner’s reach, but only for the moment: the bounty on the Protostar is already known in the quadrant, and we can expect that he’ll catch up either next week or the one after. And if Dal was raised by a Ferengi – one who knows about and recognizes the Federation – why was Dal completely ignorant of them? The gang also discovers transporters for the first time (This was obliquely hinted at last week when Dal was surprised to be beamed aboard the Klingon ship). Again, despite knowing about Klingons, Pog being a Tellarite (The fact that Pog was raised on a “sleeper ship” does leave open the possibility that he’s from a subculture that predates the televised era), and Dal having been raised by a Ferengi. You might want to justify this as them knowing about transporters but never having seen one, but they’re uncertain whether it will work on something living (They try it on Murf).

Timeline is still curious. The presence of Chakotay would seem to confirm that Protostar itself originates not long after Voyager, (Assuming that actually was Chakotay and not another hologram), but how much time has passed since then? We have Ferengi, Telarites and Klingons with access to the Delta Quadrant, travel between Delta and Gamma, no mention of the Borg, plus now the character of Nandi. Ferengi women’s rights were a thing that were just starting out at the tail end of Deep Space Nine, so the fact that a Ferengi woman would be wearing clothes and operating her own ship and this is seen as utterly unremarkable would seem to hint that we’re quite a few years divorced from ’90s Trek status-quo.

This episode really feels like a very straightforward approach to adapting a traditional Trek story to the “for kids!” format, and it works taken that way. It’s a little thinner than a “proper” Trek episode would be, but it hits the major points. Dal’s former mentor offers them a cloaking device in return for helping to con a pre-contact species out of a MacGuffin. As sold to Dal, it’s not a huge con; they just plan to buy one off of them in an unfavorable deal. Caveat Emptor. And besides, Nandi is in deep to the mob and is gonna have her lobes cut off if she can’t deliver the goods. So Dal talks the crew into it selling it with only the very modest lie that they’re going to do some diplomacy.

It all goes south because the MacGuffin is load-bearing and the Ferengi isn’t willing to take no for an answer, and she’s setting them all up to take the fall, and also she totally sold Del to the Diviner because she thought he was “too soft”. The day is saved because Dal slips his commbadge onto the MacGuffin so they can retrieve it despite the betrayal, and the day is saved despite a dressing down from Janeway over their betrayal of Starfleet ideals. But Dal himself largely escapes being an object lesson: he should’ve known better than to trust the Ferengi, but hey, it’s as close as Dal comes to having family. There’s a nice moment of kinship with Gwynn over their shared sense of betrayal and their shared guilt over being complicit in their respective parent-figures’ crimes.

I like the sophistication of the moral storytelling here. Nothing as simple as, “Dal lied; lying is always wrong.” Because Dal was as much a victim as they were, and he got victimized precisely because of his vulnerability.

The other thing about this episode worth noting is that the planet of the musical sand beings is really a visual extravaganza and also in places an auditory delight. I’m not crazy about the character animation in Prodigy. It’s fine, but only incremental progress over what we saw a while back in “The Girl Who Made the Stars”. A little plasticky. But man, they can do something more abstract like a planet of animated sand.

As to our ongoing plot, with Nandi ratting them out, we can assume The Diviner will be on Protostar’s trail soon. And Janeway’s use of freeze-frame and zoom reveals the image of Deathlok preparing to breach the Protostar’s bridge during the mysterious backstory battle, a reveal which is shocking in just how unsurprising it is. I’m hoping we make some progress on the story soon, but honestly, I’d also be okay with more like we just got.

And we’re back to this. As one would expect after a break, we ease back in with a low-key episode. There’s not much that is of major plot-interest: we set things up but don’t take them very far. There’s a flashback to Gwyn’s conception, the Diviner breaking the rules of his people by creating her to ensure he has a successor if he doesn’t live long enough to complete whatever ambiguous mission for salvation he’s seeking the Protostar for. We learn that the Protostar has been lost for more than seventeen years – The Diviner had already been searching for it for some time when Gwynn was conceived. And her peoples’ language is encoded in the ship’s classified records. But the biggest reveal is something we only get the first hint of: the ship was fully crewed at some point before its crash, with Chakotay as its captain.

The real meat of the episode, rather, is Dal obsessively replaying the Kobyashi Maru test in order to prove to himself that he’s fit to be captain. This episode is in its way the most Lower Decks that Prodigy has been so far: very heavy on the love notes to the fanboys. We start out with Dal playing a hopefully-neutered version of that “Put the ball in the hole” game from the TNG episode “The Game”, and the Kobyashi Maru test  set aboard the Enterprise-D, with a crew of the finest stock footage. Rene Auberjonois, James Doohan, Leonard Nemoy and Nichelle Nichols appear as Dal’s crew in the form of audio clips (It is logically unsound that Odo, a security officer of the Bajoran provisional government, is one of the character options, but I do not give a damn and neither do you). Gates McFadden recorded new dialogue, making her the only one who sounds remotely realistic (I fully understand why, but there is something deeply unsettling about the fact that voice clips were used for actors who are no longer with us… And Nichelle Nichols). This has to be deliberate, right? I mean, they must have made a choice to make everyone sound super janky and “Return of Chef”? Because I’m sure that the technology to stitch together audio clips better than this is a thing which exists in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-two.

I think it kind of undermines the episode a bit that Dal ultimately does beat the test only to lose in an extremely cheap way: after sixty-several attempts, he tries a wild, reckless strategy to stop the first wave of Klingons, only to be confronted by an additional ship – okay, fine. That seems in keeping with the parameters. But he beats that ship by (accidentally) having Spock beam him directly aboard (The assumption, I guess, being that the ship has just finished decloaking and thus doesn’t have its shields up yet), where they defeat the entire crew in hand-to-hand combat… And then Dal puts his feet up on a console, accidentally firing a torpedo at the Enterprise. Spock gives him a speech that, honestly, doesn’t really seem to fit the lesson Dal was meant to be learning this week: it’s primarily about how the captain doesn’t have the luxury of showing uncertainty or weakness because his crew depends on him to be their rock. This… Feels like possibly the opposite of what he was supposed to be learning?

This is a fun little episode and I guess it’s a good way to ease back into the season; we transition a little from the Diviner being the main driver of the plot directly to the Protostar’s own mysterious past. There’s some good stuff about Gwynn struggling with her own identity in the face of her father’s betrayal, and pairing her off with Zero is nice, but ti’s a small part of the episode overall. The bulk of the episode is really just an admittedly touching but ultimately hollow homage to the fans. Also we learn that Murph is indestructible.