Category: Star Trek

So much payoff. So much. And then it all comes crashing down because this season has to actually arc somewhere. Oh well.

• So okay, if it had turned out that Grey had gone into hiding because he thought his presence was stopping Adira from moving on and engaging with the living people in their life, that would’ve been just fine. But to have it actually be because Grey is having an existential crisis over the fact that he does not actually exist? Holy shit is that wonderfully weird.
• As with last week, it feels like a lot of character development that in a more traditional show would be happening as B-plot in filler episodes is just outright offscreen.
• I love that when Stamets is trying to dissuade Hugh from going to the death planet, he mentions Adira as a reason to stay because Hugh and Stamets are totally Adira’s space dads now, and it happened quietly in the background without anyone calling attention to it. He doesn’t come out and say it, but it’s very straightforwardly, “You can’t go off and get yourself killed; we’re coparenting this angsty teenage conjoined enby genius with a ghost boyfriend,” and Hugh doesn’t react at all.
• Also, Stamets going all Vaguely Threatening Dad Whose Little Kid’s Heart Got Broken on Gray, who Stamets can not see or hear is just Chef’s Kiss.
• And I wasn’t expecting this payoff for Hugh’s arc. I’ve been complaining about the way his existential angst from last season is just over and done now. But we got some closure on it suddenly when Hugh explains how being in this crappy future has fulfilled this need in him.
• And I like how subtly they convey how far Book has come: when he reports that the planet is made of dilithium, his immediate reaction is to say how it could restore the Federation – not to muse on its value or even on a personal sense of the good it could do.
• Last year they gave us a Good Prime Directive Episode. This year, a Good Holodeck Malfunction episode. I like the broken-computer logic that Su’Kal might be scared of two humans and a Kelpien, so it magicked them into a Trill, a Bajoran and a human.
• Why does Doug Jones not look appreciably less alien as a human?
• So… If you start from the position that it is simply not possible for any explanation for the burn to be big enough or satisfying enough for the narrative gravity of it, we can rejoice in the fact that it didn’t turn out to be Michael’s fault in the first place. I’m not entirely comfortable with this explanation, but certainly, “The Burn is the scream of a frightened child locked in his private hell,” is pretty weird. Heck, I’d barely bat an eyelash if it were the reveal in an episode of Doctor Who.
• So Su’Kal is really the monster, right? I mean, we all get that; just like the holodeck made Michael, Hugh and Saru look different to avoid frightening Su’Kal, it’s also making Su’Kal look normal instead of like a scary ghost monster?
• Or… Since “Su’Kal” is traditionally the name given to the first child born after a tragedy, is the monster actually his big brother? First baby is born with a bad case of monsterism, so the physically-normal baby born after is given the traditional Rainbow Baby name? Shades of The Dunwich Horror.
• Saru getting all choked up at meeting an Elder who’s a lot more eld than he’s ever seen.
• It could’ve gone without saying, but I’m glad, as a background detail, that the elder tells the history of the Kelpiens and the Ba’ul, and that Kaminar entered the Federation as a unified planet. The Kelpiens and the Ba’ul worked it out and learned to live together.
• We seem to be building up to a kind of thematic repeat of the season 1 finale. That, if you’ll recall, had our heroes in a position where they could win the war and save the Federation, and all they had to do was blow up a planet and commit genocide. This time around, Su’Kal caused the burn and could cause another one, and he lives on a planet that could render the Federation economically feasible again. The pragmatic thing, the safe thing, the practical thing is to kill Su’Kal. But it isn’t the Starfleet thing. Discovery, when it is working, is a show about broken people learning to heal, so the only place this can go is healing. If saving the Federation requires killing Su’Kal, then the Federation needs to die.
• Which makes it dramatically strange – even implausible, maybe – that they’ve set up the board for the endgame with Saru, Hugh, and Adira doing this plot. Adira is certainly a wildcard, but they don’t seem like they’d take an aggressive stance. Normally, you’d move toward where this plot has to be going by trying to convince us that killing Su’Kal is on the table. If they’d left Michael there, we’d have that tension: would Michael’s desire to save the Federation and her estrangement from Federation ideals push her to embrace the grimdark and kill the scared child? But with it being a doctor and a Kelpien starved for contact with his own race who are involved in this plot, they can’t be expecting us to presume that tension, so how is this going to play out?
• What’s the over/under on the crashed ship making Grey into a semi-corporeal entity via holodeck magic?
  • I really wanted to go for the Pinocchio reference here instead of “semi-corporeal entity”, but given that Ian Alexander is trans, I think it would mean things I don’t want it to mean.
• “Hey, we can cloak now, right?” is a weird way to drop in the fact that Discovery has a cloaking device now.
• Yeah, we get to the big let down of the episode. I guess we’re doing this thing where Osyraa is the big bad and a serious threat who is going to get right up to the very edge of destroying the Federation once and for all until Michael Burnham personally saves it at the end of act 2. I don’t like this at all.
• I am having an especially hard time with how trivially she takes Discovery. Just beams in and has the place in her control in a matter of seconds with no effort. It’s not exactly bad writing itself, though: I can see how they had to get there.
• To wit, it is absolutely essential for Osyraa to have the upper hand for the sake of the cliffhanger. Sure. That’s how season arcs work. Osyraa has to capture Discovery because otherwise we don’t get to the season finale.
• But for the sake of her character arc, Osyraa’s victory at this point can’t be due to Tilly making a mistake; it completely ruins her arc if Tilly fucks up here. So Tilly has to do things right, but still lose. The consequence is that Osyraa has to win purely by fiat. And I think a little more emphasis on the fact that Discovery was already damaged would help here. But, of course, lean in too hard on that and Osyraa’s victory comes down to Saru having fucked up earlier in the episode.
• This could’ve been the payoff for the tension last time over them using an Emerald Chain range extender – some secret facet of the device unknown to Book. That would shore up the plot a bit, but I can also see why they didn’t want to do it – there’s an ugly thematic element there in justifying the idea that EVIL OUTSIDER THINGS ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED FOR THEY CARRY THE TAINT OF THE LESSER RACES. I wonder if they’d originally intended to have a scene where Osyraa makes some snide remark and pushes a button that makes the range extender light up and crash Discovery’s systems, but someone pointed out the thematic problems with that so they dropped it.
• So where are we going with this plot? I’m not overly optimistic. I know where it ought to go, but will it, or will it go for “Michael Burnham magically saves the day”? Probably the latter.
• The fact that we haven’t seen the Klingons all season has me wondering if they’re being saved for something big and dramatic at the finale. We haven’t even heard about them, let alone seen a single Klingon. There doesn’t seem to be enough time left in the season to satisfactorily answer the question of what became of them, but that wouldn’t necessarily stop the show from rushing through that at the last minute.
  • If Klingon culture hasn’t changed massively since the rest of Trek, you’d expect them to have taken advangate of the chaos caused by the Burn to become their own kind of syndicate.
  • If they joined the Federation, you’d expect some mention of them – surprise by the Discovery crew, the occasional Klingon in the background at Federation HQ even if they have since left.
  • Being wiped out in the Temporal Wars seems plausible, given their connection to Time Crystals.
  • The most interesting possibility, though, is that they’ve turned inward and become a culture of isolationist warrior-monks living in seclusion, like the Time Keepers of Borteth. That would fit with the old “Fall of the Federation” series proposal that was pitched years ago as an alternative to Enterprise. That too could fit in with the Temporal Wars backstory – perhaps the Klingons have given up on galactic affairs to focus on enforcing the Temporal Accords.
• So where would I take it? Osyraa wins. Brings the Federation to its knees. Declares how the whole galaxy is now going to live in a constant state of shakedown by her criminal syndicate. And then the whole galaxy – the Kwijan, the Trill, the Vulcans, the Romulans, the liberated slaves from Hunhau, the Barzan, the Kelpiens, the Coridanites, and United Earth (Even though it doesn’t really need it, the usual rules of television demand that the humans show up last) – all the people Discovery has interacted with and shown the possibility of a better way. And they all show up at Federation Headquarters and tell Osyraa to fuck off, that they don’t care if she’s got a spore drive and a starfleet; they will not consent be ruled by the Emerald Chain, and if she presses the issue, they will fight to the last person and she can be queen of a dead galaxy.
• Or someone pours a bucket of water on her and she melts. That would be funny.

I have feelings about this episode! They are conflicting!

• Yeah, Carl is exactly the most obvious thing for him to be unless you thought he was Q. You can predict a lot of things about this show by always guessing, “The most fanwanky thing that would make the fanboys excited except that this is Star Trek so they will actually be furious instead.”
• On the one hand, YAY IT’S THE GUARDIAN OF FOREVER!
• On the other hand, WHAT? Really? Why? How? What for?
• I mean, it kind of undermines the epicness of the reveal when Paul Guilfoyle suddenly develops stentorian reverb to announce, “I AM THE GUARDIAN OF FOREVER,” when Georgiou and Michael are both like, “The what now?”
• And as I mentioned in a random aside last season, the one thing I find most interesting about the Guardian is completely ignored here, just as it has been completely ignored in every other appearance the Guardian has made since the original: the bit where Kirk asks the Guardian if it can present them with time travel in some form other than a high-speed uncontrolled montage of his home planet’s history, and the Guardians says, “Nope. I was built to do it this way and can’t change.” The Guardian has very obviously changed.
• The thing about the Guardian of Forever is that it is such a beautiful mystery that you both want to invoke it, but also the more you delve into it, the less wonderful and weird and mysterious it becomes. So using it here in such an offhanded way is a let down, and yet they found a new and weird way to use it, giving it agency and a human face and making it weird and irascible and letting it send Georgiou to a parallel universe to test her, and that is so much better than the, “Oh it’s just a time machine when we need one as a plot device” approach that has been taken in the one pseudocanonical appearance it made and most of the expanded universe appearances it’s made.
  • Ranking of Guardian appearances by Worthwhileness:
    1. The City on the Edge of Forever
    2. Terra Firma, Part 2
    3. The Shatner novel “Preserver”
    4. James Cawley’s fan film where the Enterprise flies through a giant one
    5. Tim Russ’s fan film “Of Gods and Men”
    6. Peter David’s novel “Imzadi”
    7. The roughly eight million novels I haven’t read where it’s just a magic time machine.
    8. The TAS episode “Yesteryear”
  • So I guess it’s not that bad, but they still shouldn’t have done it. I might even go as far as to say, “This was the best way to have done that thing they definitely should not have done.”
• One imagines the angry fanboys were so busy complaining about the Guardian being on the wrong planet that they missed the bit where the Guardian very clearly explains why it is on the wrong planet and Michael figures out how Zora found it.
• I guess they really are doing that Georgiou-centered Section 31 spin-off after all. Meh.
• I love that not only is Reno back, but also that the first thing anyone says to her is Stamets making a deal over the fact that no one’s seen her in weeks.
  • Is Reno the chief engineer now? Did that officially happen at some point and I just missed it? Maybe just a cut line from season 2 where Pike says, “I’ve asked Commander Reno to stay on as our chief engineer,” because this whole time, it kinda just seemed like they forgot to drop her off at the medical starbase with the surviving bits and pieces of the Hiawatha crew.
• Why doesn’t Mirror-Saru pull out his Fuck Off Murder Darts? This would’ve been a perfect moment for some Fuck Off Murder Darts.
• I really like that Georgiou’s arc is not actually, “Then she becomes good.” In fact, it’s very close to Mirror Spock’s arc in the original mirror universe episode – she’s still not one of them, not like them, but she realizes that the Empire is counterproductive. That even if all you want out of life is cheap thrills, the Terran approach isn’t an efficient way to get them.
• Anyone else surprised Evil!Tilly didn’t turn on Georgiou? This whole “Evil Tilly” thing just did not work, tbh.
• I should not have expected less, but I appreciate that Georgiou pronounced “Genghis Khan” correctly.
• Not at all cool with Prime!Saru transparently in denial over the fact that he’s emotionally compromised by the reveal that a Kelpien ship is where The Burn started. Saru has shown himself to be a competent administrator and I want him to grow into a good captain, but the show is actively undermining him at this point, and if that doesn’t lead up to something, I will be disappoint.
• Vance gets a little bit Obstructive Admiral, which is disappointing. This may be the first time Michael got the better half of the plot.
• This whole season continues to feel sort of rudderless. There’s a big season-long mystery to be solved and things in motion, but it doesn’t feel like the show is on a particular track. There’s several mini-arcs and plot threads, but there’s no overall sense of forward motion with one revelation leading to another or one action having knock-on consequences. Rather than an evolving story, it’s more like a ’90s TV plot arc, where there’s an ongoing plot, but it’s dispensed in the form of weekly plot tokens that don’t really come from anywhere. Are they deliberately trying to be more episodic this season?
• Coming back to an observation I made last season, though, I guess you could say that in Discovery, it’s characters who have arcs, rather than plots. Saru’s working through becoming a captain in this world, Georgiou’s working through evolving beyond the Terran mindset, Michael’s trying to find her place after her year in the cold, Adira’s trying to sort out who they are as a conjoined being, Book’s working through coming around to the Starfleet Way.
• It feels like there’s a line of exposition missing or something at the end, when Saru declares Georgiou dead and they hold a wake. In particular, it’s easy enough to imagine them deciding that what with time travel being strictly verboten and the very existence of the Guardian being a threat to the temporal accord and them having promised to not unleash a retired Terran empress on an unsuspecting galaxy, it would probably be best to let the record reflect that she’s gone, she’s not coming back, and probably she’s been dead for like nine hundred years, so let’s just say “deceased”. But they don’t actually say that. Saru asks if she’s dead, Michael gives him an evasive answer, and Saru clearly understands that “It’s complicated,” but then declares her dead anyway.
• And then everyone misses her and reflects on how much she meant to them and did I actually miss several episodes, because I do not remember Georgiou ever earning the love and respect of this crew in any meaningful way. Sure, she came with them to the future when she didn’t have to and she did kill Leland, but she barely interacted with anyone but Michael, and even that was only every third week. A big part of the problem here is that because this show is so much tighter than previous series, we don’t have the occasional bottle episode to show the crew interacting and establish the bond between them in a low-stakes adventure. Which would probably be okay if the tighter structure was in service to a strong plot, but this is a character-driven show that doesn’t seem like it has time for its characters. As is generally the case in the modern era of Trek, they really ought to pick a lane.

Well, you all know I like it when Star Trek just goes fucking nuts. I like it enough that I’m not even too upset about doing an episode in the Mirror Universe. I mean come on, Paul Guilfoyle showing up as a cryptic man in a bowler hat on an empty planet with a mysterious door? Let’s go fucking nuts.

• Get it out of the way early, I guess: the David Cronenberg-looking guy who is in fact the actual David Cronenberg makes a direct reference to the Kelvin timeline. Kinda wish the time soldier’s uniform had been slightly off in some way – maybe a TNG-inaccurate commbadge or something just to reinforce that he’s not quite TNG.
• So Georgiou is dying because you can only do one of traveling in time and leaving your home universe. Though didn’t Classic Spock get to live out his twilight years trying to repopulate the species on New Vulcan in the Kelvin universe? I guess it’s down to that old saying: “Dimension-jump before time-travel, molecules unravel; Time-Travel before Dimension-Jump, retire to New Vulcan and hump.”
• And here I thought Vance was gonna be more of the obstructive asshole kind of Admiral, but this is like the third week in a row when he’s told Saru to go ahead and just do the Right Thing – and the week before that was the one where he told Saru he should’ve asked first because he would’ve told him to do the right thing.
  • In fact, if anything it seems like maybe Saru is becoming too conservative in the face of the Realpolitik of the future.
• Where’s Reno. Can we have some more Reno please?
• Space Dad Stamets comforting Adira that their ghost boyfriend is maybe – ahem – ghosting – them because he wants them to make living friends is a bit Chef’s Kiss.
• I don’t like Mirror-Tilly (Who I will refuse to call “Killy” because that sounds like an AVGN joke). This whole thing where they try to portray her as evil by having her visibly struggle not to crack up laughing at every evil thing.
• Oh look, there’s Mirror-Nilssen, retconned into existence because back in season 1, her actress was playing Ariem instead.
• So I assume the idea here is that Georgiou will earn herself a place in the prime universe by making the active choice to reject the Terran way. I wonder if there will be some technobabble wrapper around it to make it make sense.
  • I guess there are three likely ways to interpret what’s going on. First, Georgiou has actually been sent back in time to her own universe; second, that this is all some sort of illusion or simulation by Carl to test her; or third, that this is real-but-not-literal, and she’s undergoing some kind of metaphysical experience that she’s perceiving as revisiting her past, akin to Adira’s experience communing with the symbiotes.
• Unsure what the point of the magic bracelet is going to be. Unless Georgiou needs to wear it from now on and it will turn color to indicate if she is in danger of being Too Evil For This Universe, which would be a stupid plot device but kind of funny.
• Nice to see Anthony Rapp return to his theatrical roots. Also, I think I would’ve enjoyed Rent more if someone had stabbed Mark at the end of “The Tango Maureen”.

I don’t really know how I feel about this one. I like it on paper, but the parts I emotionally connected with weren’t the parts that got the main dramatic weight of the episode. I should probably lay this much out: I don’t object to the character backstory of Michael Burnham, and I don’t think she’s a Mary Sue (a term which is pretty fraught anyway because despite what people say it means, it’s historically boiled almost entirely down to, “A female character who displays the same sort of hypercompetence as a traditional male adventure story protagonist,”). But I don’t like the narrative gravity she has within the show. It’s very clear that the showrunners view her as “The main character”. Most episodes have two main plot threads: the “Michael Plot” and the “Everyone Else Plot”. And invariably, I like the Everyone Else Plot better. This is a subject that needs some caution getting into it, because so much of the discourse about Michael’s role in Discovery is tainted by the misogyny and racism of reactionary fans who can’t stand the “SJWs” injecting politics into their Star Trek.

I bring it up right now because in this episode especially, Michael does very little – yet her gravity is what guides the whole episode. Her role is purely supportive, and yet everything that happens happens because of her. Star Trek works best when it is an ensemble. I realize now that one of the biggest problems with Enterprise was the extent to which Archer controlled the narrative gravity, and this was probably a trend that started with Voyager, which gave Janeway (And later, though to a lesser extent, Seven) outsized gravitational pull. The height of Star Trek‘s imperial phase in the ’90s was marked by TNG and DS9 being very strong ensemble shows which actively resisted becoming The Patrick Stewart Show (Ironically, I don’t feel like Picard – the only series to explicitly be “about” one specific person – gives its title character too much of the narrative gravity) or Sisko and Pals. Voyager didn’t actively try to break from it, but the edict that Janeway always had to be morally in the right nonetheless meant that the universe had to bend to accomodate her. When we get to Enterprise, the combination of half the characters being a bit thin what I assume was a desire to exploit Scott Bakula’s comparative star power pushed the show into centering firmly on Archer more often than not. Fast forward, and Discovery isn’t quite tryng to be The Michael Burnham show, but she’s definitely Slimer to Disco’s The Real Ghostbusters.

That is less flattering than I intended. Anyway…

• I am not optimistic about the appearance of Osyraa and her threat of the Emerald Chain taking on the Federation. The Emerald Chain are not interesting Big Bads and nothing good could come of them actually being the Big Bads. The only way this ends well is if she does indeed show up to take down the Federation and Starfleet complete no-sells it, smacking her down effortlessly because, again, decent people compelled to make bad choices by difficult situations are a “real” threat – nasty, viscious space-thugs are just bullshit that can be dealt with trivially.
• On the other hand, Osyraa’s appearance has me thinking: she’s got strong Wicked Witch of the West energy. Wicked Witch. Emerald Chain. Discovery emerging from a swirly space-thing into a really weird and fantastical world and trying to find a way “home”. Captain who’s genetically predisposed to constant fear but is really quite brave. Cyborg helmsman who’s having emotional issues. Fluffy pet. Is this whole season a subtle Wizard of Oz riff? Holy shit. Please let me be right about this.
• After realizing last week that Book is kinda Tim Curry, it seems his brother is a transporter accident between Budget-Rate Antonio Banderas and Normal-Price Russell Crowe?
• What does the Chain even do with those trance worms? If they’re just using them to murder people, fine, but it seems like a financially unsound deal to set up this financial deal that involves a lot of expensive transportation when the Emerald Chain already has plenty of perfectly good ways to murder people.
• Adira’s announcement that they’re nonbinary is a little clunkier than I was hoping for, but, if I’m being honest, WAY less clunky than I was expecting.
• Are Hugh and Stamets Adira’s Space Dads now? Between their scene together and Hugh’s completely unsubtle dropping to Georgiou that he wants kids, I think they’re setting up for Hugh and Stamets to be Adira’s Space Dads.
• Why is the camera so obsessed with giving me motion sickness? I have never liked the cinematography in this show.
• I’ve seen a lot of pushback about Tilly becoming Saru’s XO. But I mean, who else is he gonna pick? Everyone outranks her, but they’re also all scientists; she’s had command training, and she’s not more useful doing something else. Also, this episode seems to be pretty clear that the XO’s role is basically, “Captain’s secretary”.
• Saru’s struggle to find a Cool Thing To Say When Giving an Order is not funny. I do hope he takes “Make it so” out for a swing though.
• Future Space Medicine and all, but I feel like Hugh did not react sufficiently to Georgiou momentarily glitching out like Carrie Fischer in Rogue One. 
• I get that Georgiou’s plot arc through this episode is setup for next week, but I don’t like the way that it just stops abruptly rather than coming to a cliffhanger or lull; we see her go off to talk with Hugh about her condition, and then she’s gone for the rest of the episode. Hugh comes back, but only for Space Dad stuff.
• The thing with Adira’s algorithm also kinda just stops in favor of Space Dads. I’m glad they have these multi-episode plot arcs, but I find it clunky the way they just stop dead on a per-episode basis rather than finding a natural break-point. We didn’t really need Michael showing the cool lizard man to Book’s nephew; coulda tossed in one more scene of either Adira or Georgiou there to end the B-plots on a cliffhanger.
• I have no real feels about Book deciding to join on with the Federation’s cause. I like Book, especially since I realize he’s Tim Curry. But his journey as a character is not clicking with me, probably because any journey he has is subsidiary to Michael’s narrative gravity.
• At least in principal, “When the two brothers put aside their differences and work together in empathy, along with some Space Magic, the impossible is done and the day is saved,” is a great climax. I wish it had worked for me.
• Who’s taking bets on what the ship at the center of the nebula is? Enterprise? La Sirena? One of the Spare Voyagers still trying to get home? A duplicate of Discovery somehow? Some Random Ship We’ve Never Heard of Before? It’s probably one of those last two.

Man, it is one hell of a flex to make an episode of Discovery be a direct sequel to a TNG episode from a quarter of a century ago.

• Nice: Admiral Vance remembers to explain for the Discovery crew about Romulans and Vulcans being related.
  • But he does it in a way that does not confirm the strong-fan-assumption-that-isn’t-actually-confirmed that “Balance of Terror” is the first time any human had ever seen a Romulan.
• Discovery’s nacelles re-attach before Magic Mushrooming. That’s okay I guess, but having them spin in the opposite direction from the rest of the ship would’ve been cooler.
• Seems like Discovery has been in this time long enough for it to occur to them that they shouldn’t mushroom right up next to a planet, and maybe should zap in a little ways off and approach under impulse, like they did for Earth.
• I really like that Stamets was openly uncomfortable with Tilly getting promoted, but he deals with it and is ultimately supportive. This show is really mature.
• I mean, the episode doesn’t work without it, but it seems pretty darned contrived that Gabrielle Burnham was on Ni’Var.
• Nice: No one on Discovery is resistant to the idea of Romulan reunification. They’ve only just found out about the relationship between the two races, and they know the Romulans only as an old enemy, but they roll with it to the point that no one even gets the planet’s name wrong. Heck, I’m having a harder time not calling it Vulcan than they are.
• Is “Ni’Var” a pun? Like, as in, “When will the Vulcans and the Romulans reunite? NEEEVAAAARRRR!”
• “Actually the Romulans are cool; it’s the Vulcans that are assholes,” is a good direction for the story.
• Nice: Michael is legally a citizen of Ni’Var.
• I just want to say this out loud. The plot of this episode is, “It turns out that Michael’s mom became a Romulan Warrior Monk, who is Michael’s defense lawyer when she challenges the Vulcans to Ritualistic Doctoral Thesis Defense.”
• I was a little iffy about how tenuous relations are between the Vulcans and the Romulans, hundreds of years after reunification, but I guess it’s not actually all that long in Vulcan terms, what with a generation on Vulcan being two hundred years.
• Is Saru sweet on the president of Ni’Var? Are, in fact, they sweet on each other? I would really like that.
• So here’s my big mind-blowing realization from this week: Book reminds me of Tim Curry. Seriously. Watch his eyes and mouth. Damnedest thing.

Oof. I am whelmed. Strictly whelmed. Let’s see…

• Storywise, this is first-things-first, but I managed not to notice until my second watch: Discovery gets new hull markings as part of its upgrade and, importantly, they fixed the serifs! This has been driving me crazy. See, the hull markings on Starfleet ships is a derivative of the Microgramma font. But up until Discovery, they always used a modified “1” with a shorter serif, because the serif on the normal Microgramma 1 is sort of weird. And you might think this is just me being a font nerd, which is true, but also, the serif on the 1 is so important that Franz Josef’s technical manuals for Star Trek, which document exactly what everything is supposed to look like with measurements and all that has a big bold note on the page about hull markings saying not to use the “1” glyph for hull markings. It’s always stuck out like a sore thumb and felt Just Slightly Wrong. Discovery’s new markings have the modified 1, and it’s such a relief I didn’t even notice they added an “-A” to its registry number.
• On the other hand, I just don’t like the detached nacelles. I don’t even know why, they just bother me. I don’t have any technical objection; I’m fine with the “The future is super weird” aspect of ships basically being ten percent pixie dust now, and I can imagine detached nacelles for better maneuverability being an evolution of Voyager’s variable geometry, but it just bugs me.
  • Though the bit at the end where Craft’s ship origamis itself instead of just doing a U-turn does not convince me that this “better maneuverability” is really what’s going on rather than, “It looks real cool”.
• Also not crazy about the shape of the new delta badges. Purely an aesthetic objection.
  • I assume the idea is that they’re a little bit chunkier to accomodate the extra tech inside them. They’re still markedly smaller than the other personal transporters we’ve seen so far.
• Linus randomly beaming around the ship was cute though. Happens the exact number of times it could happen without wearing out its welcome.
• I kinda dig the idea of, “We upgraded your ship to be ten percent pixie dust, but we left everything looking the same because we figured you’d be more comfortable that way.”
• Adira and Stamets bonding over the shared experience of the men they love dying and coming back as Sci-Fi Contrivance Zombies is freaking adorable.
• In particular, it’s another bit of people in Discovery taking things in stride where ’90s Trek would burn time with people not believing each other for the sake of conflict. “Oh, my dead boyfriend appears to me in the form of a hologram ghost because of my tummy-grub,” is met neither with outright disbelief or even concern that this is a symptom of a problem with her symbiosis, but just, “Yeah, okay. One time my husband died and I lightning-rodded his soul into magic mushroom space where invisible fungi built him a new body, so who am I to judge?”
  • Though I do feel like the two of them are more up on each other’s backstories than one would expect. It would’ve been entirely fine for this to be the first Adira had heard of Hugh having come back from the dead and had some questions about it. Likewise, it’s a little sub-optimal that Stamets has learned enough about Trill symbiosis to say, “But your symbiote is just supposed to give you memories, not interactive invisible friends,” rather than, like, “I’ve only known about this symbiosis thing for a couple of weeks and I’ve been busy installing pixie dust in the engines. Are ghost boyfriends a normal thing for Trill?”
  • Oh, duh. His husband is the ship’s doctor. There was definitely a dinnertime conversation about the Biology of the Neat New Species We Just Met. And probably also a conversation along the lines of, “You’ve got the memories of several centuries of dead people because of the grub in your belly? I was a dead person once. Now turn your head and cough.” Objection withdrawn.
  • Now I’m imagining a deleted scene where Hugh quietly beams down to Trill Barnes and Noble and picks up a copy of Basic Trill Medical Science for Dummies while Michael and Adira are having weird metaphysical adventures in the glowing underground pond.
• Something feels off with the order of the scenes between them though. The scene where Adira offers to “do something” about Stamets’s shunts happens after she’s installed the new goo-based spore cube controls, when it seems like it should come first, but it’s the end result of their cute bonding scene, which only really works as a follow-up to the earlier scene where Stamets gets annoyed at her for screwing with the spore drive and she proves herself.
• Detmer is the only one who isn’t stoked about their new pixie dust-based controls. I really hope she’s getting therapy.
• It is sort of disappointing that we don’t get to show off Discovery’s new abilities, and for all the setup of Discovery being a “rapid responder” that might be called into a dangerous situation at a moment’s notice, they don’t actually do anything or go anywhere this week. I know it would’ve overburdened the episode to add more plot, but a plot about Discovery doing a rapid response mission to show off the new features would be better than the half of the plot about Burnham and Georgiou.
• Yeah, that plot wasn’t especially great. It was fine, but not great. We finally get another “actual legitimate bad guy”, and, like Zareh, he’s just a bully who only poses a serious threat for a few minutes on account of Whatever’s Wrong With Georgiou. The show is much more explicit about it this time, constantly showing off that even in his own domain, he’s just a nasty little toady for his aunt (who I hope does not show up later as an escalating threat) .
• I hope that this Georgiou thing isn’t going in the direction of her problem being that she’s spontaneously growing a conscience, and, like the various Daleks who get uplifted out of the Dalek worldview, it’s causing her psychological distress to gain the ability to appreciate what a terrible person she is.
  • If this is some weird form of, “Being this far separated from her own universe is somehow causing her to change into a human,” that would be a nicely Weird thing to do, but I still wouldn’t really like it that much.
• Self-sealing stem bolt reference.

Oh, um. I meant to write something this week. Fiction actually. But the kids have been extra needy and I’ve been extra tired, so I’ll rattle off some random Star Trek Thoughts…

• Is it just me, or does the United Earth insignia look like it was ripped off from the National Organization For Women? I mean, actually we could do worse than NOW taking over the world.
• We’re on a pretty solid streak here of Discovery living up to the best summary of Star Trek Disney ever wrote: People make bad choices when they’re mad or scared or stressed, but throw a little love their way and you’ll bring out their best.
• Not that I disapprove of Detmer’s character arc, but I feel like they maybe skipped a few steps between “The concussion coupled with all the other stuff going on has given her PTSD,” and, “Now she’s making up haiku about Stamets bleeding out all over sickbay.”
• The right response when the admiral warned Saru that Detmer isn’t mentally healthy should’ve been, “Then we’ll make sure she gets the help she needs,” not, “Well we still trust her with our lives just like she is.” She’s got a serious health problem; you need to address that.
• “Die Trying” is a very solid episode that’s brought down a bit by the introduction of a Conspiracy Thriller plot arc. What is it with Streaming Trek and its conspiracy thriller arcs?
• It’s a nice touch that Michael is familiar with Trill but doesn’t know about the symbiotes.
• Also, I do not like the starship cinematography in Discovery. The whole scene with Starfleet was more interested in presenting easter eggs than actually letting us revel in the starship porn. They make sure we get a good look at the marquees for the USS Nog and the Voyager-J, but we don’t actually get to see what any of the ships look like in any detail. It’s exactly the same as the Federation Armada at the end of Picard, where the whole thing is a big mess. I never imagined I’d say this, but we could really do with a big, slow, languid, parasexualized tracking shot all over the hull like in Star Trek The Slow-Motion Picture.
• I really dig Adria and am sad she’s sidelined immediately in “Die Trying”
• Surprised that Georgiou seems genuinely shook when she learns the empire fell. She seemed like a very literal “Apres moi, le deluge,” sort of former empress.
• Why is Wen dressing up like an alien anyway? What even is that?
• What I’m dreading right now is the seemingly inevitable reveal that Discovery caused the Burn – that something happened to it within the wormhole whose fallout turned most of the galaxy’s dilithium inert as it “passed by”.
• What seems less certain, but I am hoping, is that the solution (or cause) will link back to Xahea. Possibly Po’s recrystalization technology could be used to end the dilithium shortage – we know that recrystalization is possible in the future, but perhaps 30th century recrystalization technology did something to the dilithium that led to the Burn, and Po’s method is a lost technology that doesn’t have the same effect?

I feel like I need some time to process this season more than I have been, so I’m going to build up a little lag between watching new episodes and talking about them. Instead, very quick impressions:

• I didn’t really like “People of Earth”, but this is purely a matter of implementation; at a conceptual level it’s pretty much exactly what I want out of my Star Trek.
• On the other hand, I really liked “Forget Me Not”. And Zora’s brief appearance is only the least of the reasons. “People are tempted to be assholes, but ultimately choose not to be,” seems to be a running theme and it is very much where Star Trek should be.

Well that serves me right, doesn’t it? We actually get a properly nasty, even sadistic villain in Zareh, and start challenging my whole, “The universe bends toward utopia” thing.

But the reason I’m okay with it is that the climax reveals that, as it turns out, Zareh was never really as big of a threat as he was coded to be. A nasty piece of work, to be sure, but when it throws down, Georgiou just tanks a bunch of shots from his pointlessly nasty torturegun, and, hey, Saru is a seven-foot-tall apex predator who – I am glad they have not forgotten – can shoot fuck-off-murder-darts out of his skull (The fuck-off-murder-darts continue to not actually do all that much. Which is sad but makes sense given that they were, after all, evolved for hunting a race of frail, goo-covered, aquatic humanoids). Zareh is scary, but he’s the sort of penny-ante thug who’s only of any note because The Burn made space into a small pond. Saru was doing things the hard way because it was the right thing to do rather than throwing his weight around for expedience. And Tilly was there too.

And compared to last week, they do much more to sell the whole, “This is the future and it’s weird.” The exchange last time was a big futurey city and all, but we’ve seen that before. This unnamed planet has floating boulders and parasitic ice, because space is big and weird and that sort of stuff happens.

Also good:

• “You’ve got some Leland on your shoe.”
• I got a kick out of Oweosekun and Detmer competing to shout for everyone to brace for impact.
• I dig how everyone comes off a little shellshocked but is holding it together because they’re professionals.
• “Let’s go down to sickbay and get our lungs modified so we can breathe the air here,” is kind of an amazing offhand thing to do. I wonder if they did it just so that the VFX artists didn’t need to create a new CGI model for Saru wearing a respirator.
• Reuniting Michael with the others in the last scene is great, because separating them was a good way to give us two different angles on the new setting, but it would’ve been tedious to extend the quest to reunite into a longer plot arc.
• Once again everyone works out the fact that the Discovery crew are time travelers all on their own and takes it entirely in stride.
• The take on Discovery being out-of-time feels pretty fresh. Your “classic” Out-of-Time Space Opera setup has the heroes as being constrained by limited resources but possessing a ship full of The Uber-Technology-of-the-Old-Gods. Here, Discovery is at a disadvantage because their technology is out of date – they have to trade for things that anyone in this time would be able to build for themselves out of Programmable Matter, but transportation is very high-cost in this world, and Discovery has a massive stockpile of dilithium and the ability to travel without warp.
• Just like last week, instead of “this is a grimdark future where everyone’s out for number one and no one believes in unity and togetherness,” we encounter people who want to believe in the ideals of the Federation and are instantly on-board for being better people once they had a legitimate choice in the matter. Even to the point of the miners letting Zareh go with an uncertain chance at survival.

On the other hand:

• Something’s wrong with Detmer, and instead of talking about it with the people she cares about, she’s keeping it to herself even though it’s impacting her performance when they need her. I hate this bullshit, especially in my Star Trek. I also question the fact that her medical exam didn’t turn up what was wrong with her. I assume the implication is that it’s a problem with her cybernetics, but you’d think “Check her cybernetics” is part of a standard medical checkup.
• I’m glad Hugh and Stamets have patched things up, but it feels like their reconciliation skipped over a whole lot of tentative fumbling toward a new and stronger partnership while Stamets was in a medically induced coma, because they’re just all happy and comfortable and lovey-dovey now in a way that kind of disrespects the fact that they’ve been through a lot and Hugh should be still sorting through his existential crisis.
• Georgiou isn’t quite right this week. We get that she’s feeling maternal about Michael, but Georgiou is a hypercompetent psychopath, so in the early part of the episode, the fact that she seems largely unconcerned with getting the ship working feels too far out in the direction of, “She’s behaving irrationally in her desire to find and protect Michael.” Saru is right: they can’t help Michael with a broken starship, and even in full-Mama-Bear mode, Georgiou is the sort of Retired Evil Empress who should appreciate that.
• Tig Notaro is a joy in every single scene, but I do prefer it when they give her something to actually do rather than complaining about her back.
• I was just telling people how much I love Linus because his dialogue is always just mundane shit unrelated to him being a lizard man. And here they go having his one line of dialogue being about his visual spectrum. They never even elaborate on why Georgiou cares about it; it seems like it’s a setup for something – she wants him to help her find something or identify something, but all she does is give him the slip to go rescue Saru and Tilly.
• “Parasitic ice” is a cool concept and a good way to establish us as being in a Weird Future, but, like, what does that even mean? How does that even work? The floating boulders, I’m just like, “Okay, cool.” But I want some detail on what “parasitic ice” is.
• So I guess V’dreysh is just pidgin for “Federation” and not the proper name for some degenerate remnant of the Federation that has given in to their colonialist tendencies. Disappointing.

I’ll get back to Short Treks when I get around to it. Just a short blunder this week. In the weeks leading up to this, I’d been increasingly worried that Disco was going to evolve into Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, but so far, they’ve avoided that in a very key way that I bet will piss people off.

To wit: despite the neverending pull of the grimdark, this far-future where the Federation has fallen? It’s not grimdark. Everyone’s… Okay. For the first half of the episode, Book is a jerk to Michael, but he’s in dire straits and she has caused him a lot of trouble; he’s actually a pretty great guy. Book is all like, “Oh the Federation’s gone and everyone’s out for themselves now and no one cares about the ideals of Starfleet any more,” but he just randomly knows a guy who is has spent his whole life being ridiculously devoted to his duty as a technically-not-even-really-a-Starfleet-Officer. (Now, it is a bit of an annoyance that they keep trying to play this fake-out “Rah, we’re all grimdark and everyone is only out for themselves and you need to get all hard and mean and dystopian or this universe will eat you up,” when they’re clearly not going there) Even the antagonists aren’t really bad people; their response to Michael and Book is pretty darned reasonable given that they are in the middle of pulling off a major heist. They’re… Pleasant.

That is why this is not Andromeda: because it is not fundamentally set in a fallen, grimdark universe; it is set in a universe which is at its fundamental level, oriented toward utopia, even if it has been pushed farther from that goal than ever before.

Other things I like:

• How incredibly obvious it is that the Orion and the Andorian enforcers are a couple.
• Things Book Namechecks:
  • Quantum Slipstream
  • A time war
  • Recrystalizing dilithium
• The Federation didn’t collapse in one big dramatic explosive confrontation; it just sort of petered out in the face of the work of utopia having gotten much, much harder.
• I do really like the play of emotions Michael goes through at the beginning, alternating between despair at her situation and her inability to locate Discovery, with her elation to confirm that sentient life still exists, to determination as she slaps on her badge and walks toward the smoke from Book’s crash.
• Kitty!
• This thirty-second century design trend of stuff just growing out of the floor is neat.
• Everyone taking time travel in stride. Also, Michael and Sahil both understand wormhole-based time travel well enough to casually explain that Discovery and Michael should’ve ended up close to the same physical location, but Discovery might show up years in the future. Is that a reference to Star Trek (2009), where Spock and Nero show up decades apart?
• I get that people are gonna find it corny. But when Sahil confesses that he isn’t really an officer, and Michael commissions him? I actually got goosebumps. You can feel what he feels, having spent his whole life manning this outpost waiting to be helpful to someone from Starfleet, thinking probably it would never happen, and then getting it. That’s Star Trek. That right there.

On the other hand:

• The transition from Book setting Michael up and being a jerk for the first half of the episode who only looks out for number one and doesn’t believe in the principles of unity and utopianism to the reveal that he’s a vigilante environmentalist saving the space slugs who I guess is actually into peace and unity and utopianism is clunky. Given that the dialogue in the very first scene reveals that the cargo he’s stolen is a living creature he’s rescuing, it’s weird that the structure of the middle third plays it coy like it’s going to be a shocking reveal that his cargo was a wild animal and he wanted to rescue it.
• Stoned Michael.
• I don’t like Michael’s reaction to learning of the fall of the Federation. Sadness, sure, but her immediate reaction is disbelief. Disbelief that a civilization could have possibly fallen in a thousand years. The Federation is only a hundred years old in her time and already almost collapsed once. And she not only assumed it would still exist but can’t believe it could’ve collapsed in longer than the lifespan of basically any civilization other than Ancient Egypt?
• Michael is more chill with reducing people to puddles of goo than I am really comfortable with.
• Okay, I was fine with it, but for the record, Evelyn had a strong objection that “Book” is not a name, but rather an object.

Random Discovery Reflection:

• The Discovery crew learned about the events of the Enterprise episode, “In a Mirror, Darkly”. So Starfleet spent ten years knowing that one of their Constellation Class cruisers was eventually going to get zapped back in time and into a parallel universe. But they apparently did nothing at all about it. This sounds weird, but it’s less weird if you imagine the USS Defiant as Covid-19.