Category: Star Trek

First things first: I neglected to give a rating last time because I immediately forgot the running gag I wanted to establish. So, it goes without saying, I think, that “The Trouble With Edward” merits four weird-ass uncanny-valley Data heads out of four:

That out of the way, let’s move on to “Ask Not”.

Meh.

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s perfectly fine. It’s just… There’s nothing to it. “Q&A” gave us the Deep Lore on Spock and a musical number. “The Trouble With Edward” was probably the funniest piece of Star Trek ever written. And then there’s “Ask Not”, which is… Fine.

So this is the first minisode to give us Anson Mount in more than a cameo role. But… Whatever, really. I’m not per se complaining, because it’s certainly not bad. It’s just, like, a perfectly adequate and disposable scene featuring Captain Pike and an engineering cadet who wanted to serve on Enterprise but didn’t make the cut and got assigned to Starbase 28 instead and you just figured out the plot, didn’t you?

Yeah, Cadet Thira Sidhu is working in some random room on Starbase 28 when she gets shaken up and tossed around by an attack on the station by the Tholians. A bunch of redshirts show up with a gold-shirted prisoner in a needlessly sci-fi face mask (Like, you know the neat origama sword Sulu had in Star Trek 2009? It was that except a gimp mask instead of a sword), who they declare to be a mutineer that they need her to look after because the fighting outside has blocked the way to the brig.

Once the mask is off (the redshirts say that they didn’t want to demoralize the rest of the crew by showing them who the mutineer was), Captain Pike immediately orders Sidhu to let him go and help him retake command so that he can lead the Tholians away. He admits to the mutiny charge, explaining that he’d tried to overrule an admiral who wanted him to leave another ship to the mercy of the Tholians as soon as she herself was safe. And wouldn’t you know it, the ship in question is where Sidhu’s husband is stationed, and the two of them were the only survivors of a Tholian attack a few years earlier.

When you add together what you figured out three paragraphs ago with that last bit, you can probably imagine that there are only three ways this episode could go, and only one of them can really work in the five minutes we have left.

Yep, her “rejection” was a feint and this is all a training exercise to see if she’s really worthy of serving on Enterprise. So which is the “right” solution to the exercise? This is probably the most interesting thing in the episode conceptually, though in practice It’s just “okay”.

There are two ways this setup could go. One is that the right thing to do is to follow the rules and listen to orders and not give in to her desire to save her husband and make the Tholians pay and whatever. The other is that the “right” thing to do is to say that Starfleet regulations aren’t a suicide pact and to put saving lives above following regulations.

But what happens is actually somewhere in the middle. I missed a key point the first time I watched this because Dylan had me distracted; I assumed they’d left open the possibility that Pike was lying – that we (or rather, Cadet Sidhu) were supposed to assume that either he or the Admiral had been compromised somehow, and so Sidhu’s decision would be whether or not to believe Pike. But on rewatching, it’s clear that’s not what her dilemma really is: the scenario presumes she will accept Pike’s explanation of the situation as truthful. The question for her is whether to trust his judgment.

Because Pike speaks of saving lives and giving the Tholians “what they deserve,” and – this is important – Pike gives her a legalistic out. They cite regulations at each other: he orders her to release him; she counters that his orders carry no weight because he’s under arrest. He reminds her that regulations dictate that the tactical superiority of the Enterprise means that he should be in charge during a battle. She returns that he is not, at the moment, the captain of the Enterprise. He then pulls out the “reserve activation clause”, which technically means that she’s got the legal authority to reinstate him for the duration of the emergency. She calls this a “loophole”, but I think it’s important here that her ultimate decision is not whether to break the rules, but which rules to uphold.

And ultimately, her decision is that violence has to be the last resort and vengeance shouldn’t enter into it, and on the basis of that, she concludes that Pike is in the wrong: that his plan, to take the Enterprise away from the starbase in order to lure the Tholians off so he can kill them all, is not in line with the Starfleet way, and therefore that it is not the right call for her to exercise her authority under the Reserve Activation Clause to reinstate him.

So he makes some broad threats about her career prospects and tries to leave anyway, whereupon she points a phaser at him. Pike tells the air above him that it’s all good and the alarms stop and he takes off the handcuffs and apologizes for scaring her about her husband (He’s fine). There’s a stirring speech about how war is hell and it’s important for an officer to uphold their duty even when triggered, and she does not immediately grasp the full implication of the test until they beam over to Enterprise to be met by Spock and Una, who is the one who came up with the whole, “Tell them they didn’t make the cut for Enterprise then do a cruel gaslighting test on them to see how they handle it,” plan. Pike drops her off in engineering (We’ve never seen the regular engine room of a Discovery-era ship; engineering scenes on Discovery proper take place in the Spore Lab. We did briefly see a class J training ship’s engine room but that was ten years in the future. Enterprise’s engine room is a huge, multi-story gallery that’s too big to properly take in with just the one quick glance) and is pointedly coy about whether or not the phaser was real.

So… It’s okay. Profoundly… Okay. This would make a fine B-plot in a full-length episode of a TV series that was structured more like ’90s-era Star Trek. But for a minisode, which only has the one plot and not much of it, you really want something more. You either want something which touches a nerve in its own right, like “The Trouble with Edward” or “Calypso”, or even “The Escape Artist” (I suspect “Q&A” was supposed to be like this as well, what with the Deep Lore about Spock and Number One), or else something which foreshadows the upcoming season, like “Runaway” or “The Brightest Star”.

And a character study of a one-off character we’ve never seen before just isn’t that. These minisodes need to be strong all on their own because they’re not feeding directly into future episodes. Why waste time giving us introductory episodes for characters we’re never going to see again. I mean, unless…

Unless…

Oh. Oh. Oh.

Huh.

One and a half cereal mascots out of four, with an option to reevaluate.

 

We’ll return near Christmas for not one but two animated shorts (and in different styles, too; one looks to be cel-shaded, while the other has a distinctly Pixar vibe), “Ephraim and Dot” and “The Girl Who Made the Stars”. See you then.

Busy, so have this to spread around and brighten your day:

First, a leftover from last week:

• So as I said, Pike is barely in “Q&A”… But he does have one really good moment. When Spock finally reaches the bridge, Number One tries to cover the depth of their exchange before by pretending that she doesn’t know Spock well and has to look up his name on her tablet. And Pike gives her a look when he does this that absolutely screams, “I know this is bullshit because there is no way you don’t have his name memorized, but I have no idea why you’d want to pretend you didn’t, and I trust you, so I’m just going to roll with it.”

Now, last time, I said that if you just explained what the episode was about on paper, it sounded good, but in execution, I was underwhelmed. Guess what happened this week?

The exact opposite. This episode shouldn’t work. And let’s get that out of the way: there are some serious problems with the logic of this episode. Not the least of which is that it’s utterly unbelievable that someone like Edward would be allowed to grow to maturity and wasn’t fed to wolves as a child. I mean in Star Trek. In the real world he’d probably be a senator. And, y’know, just straight-up ignoring conservation of matter.

I don’t care. This is great. It is spectacular. It is hilarious.

It is the origin story of the tribbles.

And the origin story of the tribbles is, “They were created by an incel to show up that stupid bitch Stacy of a captain.”

(If you are complaining right now that tribbles were presumed in all other appearances to have evolved naturally in a predator-rich environment, just… don’t? Please? No one cares. Besides, “They reproduce exponentially because they’re born pregnant,” makes little enough sense that, come on, “They were genetically modified to breed fast,” is a pretty substantial improvement. When tribbles turn up in Enterprise and Discovery, they aren’t nearly the threat they are in their other appearances, so yeah, it’s a better backstory that the fast-breeding tribbles are an abberation)

I will excuse you if you need to sit down for a moment.

Okay, quickly then: Presumably a short time before last week’s minisode, Anson Mount once again gets pretty much just a cameo as he sees off Lynne Lucero, Enterprise’s science officer, who has just been promoted to captain of the USS Cabot. The Cabot is stationed over the planet Pragine 63, and I’m guessing that the name is a joke, and I have several candidates but am not sure which one. Her mission is to help with a food shortage. The newly minted captain’s first staff meeting introduces a handful of scientists who are all working on clever ways to increase food production. And Edward.

Edward Larkin is an awkward, nebbishy guy played by H. Jon Benjamin, who I hear is on Archer, but mostly he feels like a budget-rate Paul Giamatti. And if you’ve watched a lot of science fiction, then you know to expect that he’s going to be awkward and weird and nerdy but ultimately he’ll be vindicated and maybe even get a kiss because he’s a nerd, and we need to make the fans feel good about themselves and remind them that they’re good people and someday the jocks who bully them will learn to respect them.

Only that doesn’t happen. What actually happens is that Edward is utterly horrible and makes things bad for everyone, because Edward is not a good person and he does not deserve respect and vindication.

Anyway, Edward is clumsy and awkward and can’t get his tablet working when Captain Lucero calls on him and gets very flustered and resentful when the female officer next to him fixes it for him. Edward’s idea is that he’s got these critters called tribbles. Which are – this is how he actually describes them – basically big furry scallops (How I’m going to be referring to tribbles from now on). He suggests they’d be good to hunt, which I think tells you something about Edward, that he doesn’t intend for people to farm tribbles; no; he means for them to be wild game.

There’s something of the techbro about Edward – the sort of guy who is very good at solving technical problems and very bad at reducing societal problems into technical ones, and is so full of Dunning-Kruger that he has no idea that these are two different things and also that what he just invented is a bus.

To Edward’s mind, there’s just one problem with this plan. Everyone else sees many, many problems with this plan, but Edward just sees the one. (To be honest here, I wish they’d actually voiced some of the problems with breeding tribbles as a food source; it just seems to go without saying that this not just a bad idea, but an offensively bad one. I assume the grounds here are basically, “People will not want to eat an animal as cute as a tribble,” though, I mean, I’ve eaten cute animals before. Rabbit. Lamb. Antelope. So I wish they’d actually explained the problem instead of hanging a big part of the episode on the assumption that the audience would not question the fact that Edward’s idea is bad) Namely, tribbles reproduce slowly. But don’t worry: he can genetically manipulate the furballs to increase their reproductive rate. And since he’s not entirely sure whether they’re sentient, he’ll also modify them to be brain damaged as well, just to make sure it’s all ethical.

Captain Lucero politely reassigns Edward to climatology, and everyone goes out of their way not to laugh at him. But, see, Edward is a man and he has not been permitted to get his own way, and that can only mean one thing: it’s time to talk smack about her to the rest of the crew and go ahead and genetically modify the tribble anyway, before sending multiple “anonymous” reports to Starfleet command accusing Lucero of stupidity and incompetence. After confirming with the rest of the crew that Edward is a talented biologist and a whiny little bitch who can’t stand it when he doesn’t get his own way, Captain Lucero orders him transferred off the Cabot. It’s too late, though, as little baby tribbles are popping off of Edward’s test subject in a scene reminiscent of Gremlins, and he barely has time to wander down the halls in his underwear before someone notices the ship is infested.

Never one to take responsibility, Edward’s first reaction is an unconvincing, “Oh my God, who did this?”, though he still seems to think that the fact that his plan “succeeded” vindicates him. Lucero points out that disobeying a direct order is going to look bad on his permanent record.

And then one of the most surreal and wonderful sequences in the history of Star Trek ensues to the tune of Bing Crosby’s “Johnny Appleseed” (A nice touch here: the opening bar of “Johnny Appleseed” sounds more than a little like the comedy leitmotif from the Original Series soundtrack) as the crew of the Cabot fights a losing battle against the tribbles. First, they’re just scooping them up into cages (Edward is scooping them up into a soup pot. He initially says that he doesn’t personally have any interest in eating the critters, but it quickly becomes clear that the dude has a bit of a Gargamel-style fixation on consuming small cute creatures). Things take a more sinister turn when the tribbles get into the ship’s systems, causing the transporter to fail, and their reproduction is fast enough that they’ll exceed the ship’s life support capacity. The whole “born pregnant” thing? “Well, when you mix human DNA with tribble DNA, crazy stuff happens.”

Yep, these are not merely augmented tribbles: they are tribble-human hybrids. Let me remind you once again that genetic experimentation on humans is one of the biggest no-nos there is under Federation law. And whose DNA did he use? I will grant, Edward makes a fine point when he says, “What? Like Noel’s DNA would be any better?” Everyone’s super grossed out, though, probably because Edward is still pushing, “If everyone eats their fair share, the population will level out,” as a strategy.

Meanwhile, someone walks by in the background wearing a kind of vacuum cleaner backpack to suck tribbles up off the floor with a satisfying pheumatic tube “whoomp” sound. Just a little touch to remind us that even when the text tells us that this is SRS BSNS, we’re still watching a show where the threat to the heroes is basically a pile of animate merkins.

Shit’s serious now, so they break out the phaser rifles and start a sort of very gentle Aliens parody, with security officers working their way down the halls shooting tribbles, and a shot of a crewman screaming as she’s engulfed, and it’s absolutely wonderful when we show an exterior shot with tribbles visibly rising up behind the windows. We cut to a computer screen issuing a pressure alarm before it cracks under the weight of the growing tribble mass.

And if you are about to get upset about the fact that they never say what the tribbles are eating or where their biomass is coming from, you can just fuck right off because I will not have silly things like basic physics ruin a tongue-in-cheek attempt to make me terrified of the prospect of being buried alive in a pile of fur-covered scallops.

Besides, exactly the same thing happened in “The Trouble with Tribbles” and all they needed to say was, “Oh, the tribbles got into the food slot mechanism.”

The crew is forced to give up the ship. Edward tarries as they evacuate to give a full on mad scientist speech about how Lucero thought he was dumb, but he’s not dumb! He’s smart! He showed them! He showed them all! He almost manages to get out, “You’re the dumb one!” before he is crushed to death under a wave of tribbles. Lucero barely manages to seal the escape pod.

Regrettably, we do not get to see the final fate of the Cabot. Even in the age of computer-generated graphics, making a starship pop under the force of a billion simultaneous tribble births is apparently something the budget could not support. Instead we cut to the inquiry, where Lucero is basically yelled at by the admirals. And, I mean, that’s fair. Losing a starship on one’s first day is pretty bad. We can extrapolate that Lucero is not as good a captain as Kirk. We learn that some of the modified tribbles made it to the surface of Pragine 63, and now the planet is uninhabitable to humans. Plus, some of the tribbles made it into Klingon space, causing a diplomatic incident. As for the Cabot itself? “Total and complete structural failure.”

The question of how one man could’ve caused so much destruction is what the episode ends on. Lucero’s answer? “He was an idiot.”

I love this episode to pieces. It’s ridiculous nonsense and that’s something Star Trek needs more of. It’s just such a great rejection of the “Nerd makes good” story. Edward is apparently technically proficient. But he can’t tell a good idea from a bad idea, and he doesn’t listen. They never come right out and say that he’s a misogynist, but it sure does feel like it. Edward, Pike and Noel are the only male speaking roles in the episode (And Noel only counts because he’s finishing his status report when the briefing scene starts); the Cabot’s crew is really diverse, with Edward as the only older white man we see. And Rosa Salazar is great as Lucero. She’s small and unassuming, and she never really projects a tough image despite Pike’s warning that she’ll need to be tough as a captain. This is important in the context of the show because Edward reacts at every turn as though he’s being bullied and belittled and… He totally isn’t. His final speech is all about how Lucero called him dumb.

She didn’t. Not once. Exactly the opposite, she repeatedly spoke of his intelligence. On the contrary, he repeatedly calls her dumb, to his shipmates and in his letters to Starfleet command. Nerdy Guy Makes Good stories are real popular in science fiction, probably because an awful lot of science fiction is written by nerdy guys who would desperately like to believe that the way they were treated in high school was some form of dues paying for the greater rewards to come in the future.

But “The Trouble With Edward” takes pains to ensure we don’t sympathize with Edward as the victim of people who don’t appreciate him or his great intellect. He’s not being oppressed or bullied; he just thinks it’s his right to do whatever the hell he likes, and anyone who tries to stop him is “dumb” and doesn’t deserve his respect. Edward isn’t intimidated by Lucero, and she never becomes forceful or even really angry with him: that’s all just his outsize sense of entitlement telling him that not being allowed to do whatever he wants is a kind of oppression.

He’s an idiot.

And there actually is a serious point here. Space is hella dangerous. Even something as adorable as a tribble can destroy a starship. The last thing we need is a bunch of arrogant manbabies who think they’re too good to follow the rules and who don’t respect the chain of command. Somehow the human race got away with coddling that sort of asshole for, I guess, like, all of history, but you try that shit in space and people gonna die. (Actually, people die a lot here on Earth too, but for most of history we were largely okay with that as long as it was mostly the right sort of people). Fortunately, this is the utopian world of Star Trek so Edward was the only victim. In a more realistic show, he’d be promoted to captain and the rest of the crew would’ve died.

Seriously, this is a good episode to show to your clever boychicks who think they don’t have to follow rules they disagree with. Dylan.

And then, after the credits, just for one last little laugh, we get a post-credits scene. Under a heavy VHS filter, a commercial for Tribbles, the only breakfast cereal with self-replication. There’s a prize at the bottom of each box. Not that you’ll get to the bottom. They’re packed with 18 essential vitamins and minerals. And Edward. Tribbles contain more human DNA than any other leading brand. Available in Original, Hairy Berry, and new Spicy Ranch. They’re pregnant… With flavor!

And we’re back to this, I guess. From now until the premiere of Star Trek: Picard, the second Thursday of every month will see the release of a new Short Treks minisode. But the first one dropped this past weekend, with the next one scheduled to appear tomorrow, so let’s tuck in to Q&A.

This episode was predicted to be a fan-favorite, giving viewers a bit more of Anson Mount’s Pike, Rebecca Romijn’s Number One, and Ethan Peck’s Spock. And from what I’ve seen, the fan reactions have been pretty positive.

You can guess where this is going. I mean, I didn’t hate it or anything, and it’s not like I was expecting something else – these Short Treks have pretty consistently been lighthearted character studies, and that’s exactly what this one is. But it just left me a little cold. It’s a bit more caricature than character study, and bits of it feel at odds with the progression of the characters.

As I mentioned before, while Rebecca Romijn is pretty good as Number One, a big problem with her appearance in Discovery is that she is playing the exception rather than the rule. A central aspect of the character of Number One is that she’s cold, reserved, and clinical most of the time, so that when she does open up and show a softer side, it carries a lot of weight. And Romijn does a great job of conveying, “I’m not normally willing to open up like this, but I will now.” But the show never really gives us much of the “I’m normally reserved like this,” angle. She’s all exception and no rule. “Q&A” at least tries to establish the “most of the time” part, but it’s mostly an informed ability – she starts out cold and clinical, but the mask drops real quick. As much as her role in this story is to show us why Number One is the way she is, we’ve never actually seen how she is, and we only barely do now.

The other thing that this minisode seems to want to do is, if I am being unkind, indulge a fanboy impulse to “fix” old canon. Specifically, to explain why Spock behaves so differently in “The Cage” than he does anywhere else in canon. Eh. Whatevs.

So, “Q&A” is the story of Spock’s first day on Enterprise. The highlight of which is him getting stuck in an elevator. Having been chastised by Number One for failing to display the expected level of curiosity for an ambitious young science officer, he responds by peppering her with questions until she gets annoyed at him. This feels like a sound idea ruined by pacing, because the setup is that she literally tells him that he should be asking so many questions that she gets annoyed, but the number of questions it takes to get her annoyed is three.

One of them is, “What’s your name?” Okay, sure, it’s kinda a thing that Number One doesn’t tell people her name. It’s kinda a big thing. But I mean, she really ought to be used to getting the question, right? Sure, she should dodge or refuse to answer, but “What is my commanding officer’s name?” is an incredibly reasonable question and she shouldn’t be annoyed that he asked.

Also, her name is Una.

Yeah. This is the one thing I really like in this Short Trek: the complete non-reveal that her name is Una, which is done with no fanfare or weight. First time we see her, she’s reading a memo off of a tablet and we can clearly see that it’s addressed to Commander Una. for what it’s worth, Pike called her “Una” back in “An Obol for Charon”, but it wasn’t clear at the time whether that was a term of endearment. Spock finds out her name in his first ten minutes on the job (The reveal is meant to show him being smart, but it feels clumsy in execution. He asks a technical question, and a few minutes later, realizes that the “Una Algorithm” mentioned in her answer was eponymous). I am cool with them telling us her name, but it’s still symptomatic of the flaw in how the character is used, that they set up, “She’s cold and reserved and doesn’t tell people her name,” but what actually gets screen-time is, “She opens up in private and tells a new Ensign her name the first time she meets him.”

The core of the exchange comes when Number One tells Spock he should smile less. Sigh. On paper, I really like this. First, I really like the image of a woman in a position of authority telling a man who is her junior to smile less. It’s a lovely inversion of the ugly trope of women always being ordered to smile more by men. And I do kinda like the decision to embrace rather than downplay the “Spock grins ridiculously while playing with the singing Talosian flowers,” scene from “The Cage”. And the idea that Spock’s extreme stoicism in TOS is informed more by a deliberate choice to emulate Number One than by his Vulcan upbringing alone is really interesting.

It doesn’t really fit in with the arc of Spock’s character as laid out by Discovery, though. Bracket Discovery for a minute and let’s look at what we’ve seen of Spock’s character. We’ve got a young Spock in “The Cage” who smiles and shouts (This comes up in “Q&A”; Number One tells him to tone it down). By TOS, he’s extremely reserved and stoic. This peaks with him pursuing Kohlinar in The Motion Picture, after which he backs down a bit and starts appreciating the value of his human side, even if he’s still insulted by being compared to a human. Then he dies and gets better and after this point, we really see a Spock who’s fully at ease with his human side, to the point that he doesn’t even really try to hide his emotions when he meets the Kelvin-timeline version of Jim Kirk.

Discovery adds the backstory that his fallout with Michael caused Spock to spend years forcefully rejecting his human side. After reconciling with her, we see Spock adopt a more integrated personality, similar to his character in the later TOS movies. But he speculates that the pain of losing her again will push him back into his shell. For her part, Michael suggests that the way to avoid this is to make a friend, and basically describes Jim Kirk as the sort of friend who would be good for Spock.

That’s all very lovely. The only real weakness it has is that it doesn’t quite explain Goofy “The Cage” Spock. I’m happy to overlook that. “Q&A” is not. Instead, “Q&A” tells us, in a nicely oblique sort of way, that Spock’s sense of awe in the face of scientific wonder trumps his Vulcan stoicism. We start out with Spock smiling to himself as he gets ready to beam aboard Enterprise.

Una finds a smiling Vulcan disconcerting and tells him to knock it off. That’s kinda weird and uncomfortable. Specifically, she asserts that since Spock’s goal is to someday have his own command, he should keep his emotions to himself, because people won’t take a smiling Vulcan seriously. I get the idea here: we’re being told, in reverse, that Una’s cold, reserved demeanor is her locking herself down in order to present the image she feels she needs to present to be taken seriously as a command officer. I have some problems here.

1. “A woman has to hide any hint of softness or sensitivity to be taken seriously in a leadership role,” is an ugly idea that ought not to be true in the real world, and sure as fuck ought not to be true in Star Trek.
2. Again, this would work a lot better if they spent more time showing us Number One being Number One and less time having her take the mask off.
3. “Spock’s life goal is command” comes out of nowhere. There’s nothing anywhere else in canon to suggest that Spock is even interested in command. There’s basically a whole thing in Star Trek II where Spock tells Kirk that he’s really not that into leadership roles. (Not saying that it wouldn’t be fair to assert that young Spock wants to command, but when he grows older, his goals change, but this is the one and only time we’ve been told Spock wants his own command.)
4. If Spock wants his own command, why did he major in Blue Shirt? Surely he could’ve tested into Yellow Shirt.
5. Also, Spock spends like twenty years as the science officer aboard the Enterprise. This does not seem like the career path of an ambitious man.
6. It doesn’t even really fit with the assertion in this very minisode that what really gets Spock’s motor running is seeing the wonder and majesty of the universe.
7. This is Spock’s first day. The arc of Spock’s character just gets hopelessly muddled up in light of this. So wee Spock is learning to embrace his humanity through his bond with his sister, but then she breaks his heart and he rejects his humanity for the next twenty years, except that he also smiles a lot, until his first day on Enterprise where Number One tells him he needs to learn to be more stoic and use his inside voice, but then a couple of years later on Talos IV, he’s grinning like an idiot in front of everyone and shouting all his lines, then he reconciles with Michael and learns to integrate his Vulcan and Human sides, but then he rejects that and becomes a hardcore stoic, but then he gets kicked out of Kohlinar school and goes back to Starfleet and learns to integrate his Vulcan and Human sides again. This conversation with Number One only really works here, on Spock’s first day, but the arc of his character would actually make more sense if you put this conversation after “The Cage” (Possibly a lot of character stuff would make more sense if you placed “The Cage” after season 2 of Discovery, but I won’t get into that here).

The nice thing that happens next is that Spock reasons from her advice that there’s some aspect of herself that Una keeps under wraps and asks her about it. She responds by busting out the Gilbert and Sullivan.

Again, on paper the idea of a minisode centered around Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck singing “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” while stuck in a turbolift on Spock’s first day aboard the Enterprise sounds super charming. Maybe it’s just the way it’s shot? It’s kinda awkward and weird. They are both passable but not great, which I think is possibly deliberate.

Then once they’re done singing, they get rescued and she swears Spock to silence about the musical number and they go to the bridge and meet Pike. Anson Mount gets roughly two lines of dialog and they’re not that interesting. There’s a pretty cool nebula on the screen and he asks Spock if Vulcans experience awe. Spock, having learned an important life lesson from Una, says, “Yes, but we usually keep it to ourselves.” It’s a nice ending, but it doesn’t feel fully earned, because “And then they sing showtunes” is a poor substitute for a deep character growth moment.

The miniscule and generic role Pike plays is a bit of a disappointment. In fact, when Number One describes him to Spock, her description of him is oddly generic as well. He’s a fighter pilot but he abhors violence; he wants you to passionately defend your point of view to him; he’s willing to change his mind in the face of evidence. He likes horses. It’s… just kinda generic. Where’s the stuff like, “He’s obsessively goal-oriented,” or, “He’s not actually all that into being in charge of people,” (which could very easily be integrated into Una’s character; one gets the feeling that Pike probably delegates a lot of the day-to-day telling-people-what-to-do, which means that she has to be good at projecting the full authority of the captain), or “He won’t ask his crew to face a danger he won’t face himself.”

So that’s “Q&A”. It’s not bad by any stretch, and on paper, it’s got good stuff going on. But a weak execution fails to elevate some character moves that, while they certainly would be good somewhere, don’t quite fit where they end up.

I give it two and a half Open-Shirted Portly Old Man Rikers out of four.

Next week: “The Trouble With Edward”.

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Proposed Star Trek: Picard side-story: “A Fist-Full of Ones” – Will Riker, Una, and Old Man Picard’s Dog team up to uncover the mystery behind a strange village populated by retired spies, guarded by a murderous weather balloon. Jim Caviezel guest stars on account of Patrick MacGoohan being dead.

It does not, perhaps, have the same sense of inevitability about it as addressing Pike’s tragic future. But it was always likely. And if, as I have tried to maintain, Discovery is at its heart about going back into the past of Star Trek for the lost, the broken, and the abandoned, and finding a place to heal, then there’s symmetry in the fact that my blunder through the second season of the show should end here, at the very earliest point, the place where Star Trek began.

Previously, on Star Trek:

Still recovering from tragic events on Rigel IV, the Enterprise receives a distress call from a long-lost colony ship, crashed on Talos IV. Their rescue mission is interrupted when Captain Pike is abducted by the native species, hyper-cephalic telepaths with the power to create powerful illusions. Their own race is dying out due to misuse of their powers, and they want to breed Pike with Vina, the colony ship’s only survivor, for reasons that are somewhat ambiguous. Through a consistent application of anger and violence, Pike persuades the Talosians that humans don’t make good pets. They allow him to leave, but Vina, who in reality is old and severely disfigured from the crash, chooses to remain behind with a Talosian-created simulacrum of Pike, with whom she’d fallen in love. Starfleet bans all contact with Talos IV, eventually elevating the ban to carry Starfleet’s only death sentence.

Two years later…

Completely ignoring the restrictions on going there, Michael zaps her shuttle over to Talos IV at maximum warp. In for a penny, I guess. Lucky thing the Section 31 facility where she started out was apparently close. She drops out of warp right next to a black hole, and desperately tries to avoid it, until Spock shoves her out of the way and flies straight into the thing, because it’s a Talosian illusion to hide the planet. I guess the Talosians have decided they don’t want visitors. They are, all the same, comparatively gracious when Michael and Spock show up uninvited. Vina invites them to beam to the Talosians’ underground lair, where a trio of them explain that Spock is perceiving time in a non-linear fashion and needs his logic turned off to process it, and their fee for resetting Spock’s brain is that she pony up the memory of why the two of them fell out. The Talosians show Michael Spock’s memory of his two encounters with the Red Angel, once as a child, helping him find a runaway Michael before she got eaten by a large Vulcan animal; then again a few months earlier, when he tried to mind-meld with it, and had a vision of the red signals and subsequent destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy at the tentacles of spacecraft that looked an awful lot like the modified probe from last week. He also recognized the Red Angel’s mind as human. After a break for them to snark at each other a bit, the Talosians show Spock’s escape from the mental hospital, with him incapacitating his doctors with a neck pinch rather than killing them.

Meanwhile, the admirals at Section 31 kinda sideline Leland in favor of Georgiou, ordering them to find Spock and Michael, but keep Discovery out of it. Georgiou orders Pike to stay near Kaminar and search for debris from the probe. Pike starts making inquiries to try to find Michael all the same, though Tyler warns him off, not because of Section 31’s orders, but because he fears that if Pike does find them, Section 31 will simply follow them. Hugh is still not feeling himself, and starts a fight with Tyler, trying to make Voq resurface. Later, he leaves Stamets, declaring his former self still dead and insisting they both need to move on. Vina contacts Pike using Talosian powers and they have a moment before Michael and Spock report what they’ve learned. Pike orders Discovery to magic mushroom itself to Talos, but someone (it was Airiam) has sabotaged the spore drive, and combined with the fact that someone (it was Airiam) exfiltrated petabytes of data from Discovery using Tyler’s command codes, it looks like Tyler can’t be trusted, so they lock him up. Discovery heads for Talos at warp, trying to fake-out Section 31, but they fail because someone (it was Airiam) tips them off. Michael shows the Talosians her fight with Spock: after a terrorist attack on her school, she believed the only way to protect her family was to run away. Spock tried to follow her, so she called him a freak and a half-breed to break his heart. Present-Spock agrees that it was a logical thing to do and it taught him the important lesson that humans are jerks and he should repress the hell out of his human side. Michael disagrees, and attributes her behavior to being a stupid kid, but Spock’s still bitter. Leland and Discovery arrive at Talos IV at the same time, and both try to beam up Spock and Michael. Vina appears to Pike again, telling him to let go, so he orders Discovery to give up. Leland flies off with Spock and Michael, ordering Pike to turn himself in for disciplinary action. But he only has a minute to gloat before Spock and Michael disappear, having been Talosian illusions all along, which Georgiou anticipated but didn’t say anything about because she hates him. The real Spock and Michael arrive back on Discovery in the shuttle, and the crew give Pike their support in his decision to go on the run.

Ooh. A nice, powerful episode that is heavy on character, if a little light on action. I think possibly you could get a stronger pair of episodes by shuffling around some elements between this episode and the last one, but it’s not bad. Honestly, you can coast a lot on the strength of reintroducing Vina and the Talosians. The high points:

• The Previously bit at the beginning, using the original footage from “The Cage” in a sort of popup-book style is fantastic.
• Upon the reveal that Leland has captured a fake Spock, Georgiou casually remarks that the Talosians pulled that kind of stunt on her once so she genocided the big-headed jerks. And their stupid singing flowers too.
• Speaking of, reproducing the singing flowers is a real nice touch.
• I think the idea is meant to be that because the Red Angel was unstuck in time, mind melding with her broke Spock’s brain in a more extreme form of the occasional TOS incidents where Spock was temporarily donked up by a bad mind meld. But it also seems like possibly it was just that experiencing the future as a memory of the past was something his Vulcan sensibilities couldn’t process. Which is a kind of interesting idea. There’s repeated references in the episode by both the Talosians and Spock’s human doctors that it’s specifically the Vulcan part of his psyche that was damaged. And there’s an interesting comparison in that last week we saw that, beyond Tilly finding it “freaking amazing” no one on Discovery has had any trouble at all believing that the Red Angel is a time traveler. They all just take it in stride. Compare that to the very often repeated refrain in Enterprise and the Abrams-verse that “The Vulcan Science Academy has determined that time travel is impossible.” You could speculate that a Vulcan-trained mind develops a peculiar weak-spot for time travel.
• When Pike accuses Tyler of being behind the exfiltration and the sabotage to the spore drive, it’s not a simple regress to him not trusting him: Pike has just learned about Section 31 using mind-pureeing technology from Michael and he offers the possibility that Tyler might have been mind-whammied into betraying them against his will.
• I like that Stamets keeps desperately trying to make things “normal” for Hugh, and it just keeps making things worse because Hugh doesn’t feel normal. This is what becomes Hugh’s character arc: everyone is trying real hard to reassure him that he’s the same person he used to be, but what he needs to accept is that it’s okay for him to be someone new.
• I love that the rift between Spock and Michael isn’t just down to a misunderstanding about intentions. Spock knows why she did it. It doesn’t help. This problem wouldn’t have been solved by them talking it out. And the big cathartic reveal doesn’t fix things between them – that doesn’t happen until Michael has her own similar emotional crisis a couple of episodes later.
• Not so much a “I liked this” as “This is a thing and I want to note it”: They mention that Talos is restricted, but it’s not treated with the seriousness that it had in “The Menagerie”, where Spock’s life is on the line and I think Kirk and the Enterprise crew are facing serious legal threat too. Does something happen in the next ten years to make Starfleet elevate the restriction on Talos to a General Order carrying the death penalty?
  • On the other hand, at the end of “The Menagerie”, Starfleet calls them up and is like, “Hey, we heard you were sending Pike there so he could have a nice retirement. We’ll let it slide.” Which now that I think of it is consistent with Discovery‘s repeated, “This is really important, so I’m sure Starfleet will give us a dispensation.” It seemed stranger to me because I’m used to the TNG-era Starfleet Command which exists primarily to be obstructive bureaucrats to slow the plot down.
  • Of course, since the court martial in “The Menagerie” was an illusion for Kirk’s benefit, the Talosians may have been playing up the seriousness of the charge.
• I’ve always felt that there’s a tremendous tonal difference between “The Cage” and “The Menagerie” in how the Talosians come off. Pike assumes they want to keep him as a zoo specimen for their amusement and/or to father a slave race for them, and the show doesn’t really challenge that, with the Talosians letting him go because he’s too violent to be useful. I always felt that the way the archive footage is edited and framed in the “Menagerie” version paints the Talosians as more tragic: their race is dying and what they really want is someone to pass their cultural heritage onto, but they ultimately resign themselves to their fate when the realize that humans would just destroy themselves the way they did. Both aspects are there in both tellings, I think, with the difference being mostly a matter of emphasis. Discovery maintains and reinforces a lot of that ambiguity. There’s never any question of the Talosians refusing to help Spock, but there’s a constant low-key threat that they’ll take Michael’s memories by force if she doesn’t give them willingly. Michael at first balks at the idea, accusing the Talosians of voyeurism, and their rebuttal is itself still ambiguous: “It is how we understand. It is how we survive.” It points to a new element, that vicariously experiencing the illusions they create for their “guests” fulfills some sort of need in the Talosians, which points to the possibility of relationship that is either mercenary or symbiotic, depending on your point of view, and adds a dimension to why they would welcome Pike back years later. It’s interesting that the Talosians have very little agenda of their own here, being a largely disinterested third party, though at the end, they take deliberate action to help Spock and Michael.
  • I don’t think it’s spelled out in “The Cage”, but it’s broadly understood that the Talosians are a bit like the Eternals in Doctor Who, and rely on lesser beings as a source for the experience and memories they use in their illusions, since their own race has basically used up its imagination.
• Having Pike meet Vina again is a great way to beef up the idea that ten years later, he would still have feelings for her strong enough to want to spend the rest of his life on Talos IV with her. Heck, he suggests that even at this point, two years later and still healthy, he’s thought about going back to her.
  • The closest thing I guess we’re going to get to an explanation for why Spock risks his life to return Pike to Talos IV is that he’s present for Vina’s talk with Pike and knows that Pike still has feelings for her.
• Another pleasantly weird thing is Vina’s contradictory feelings. She says it was harder for her after Pike left, with the knowledge of what she’d lost. But she also says that the fake Pike she’d been given was good enough because he was a reflection of the part of Pike that was still inside her.
  • Interestingly, Pike doesn’t seem to have known about this. He sees the illusory Pike in “The Cage”, though that isn’t shown in “The Menagerie”, as they recycle the footage to represent the real Pike restored to the appearance of health at the end. Which leaves the strange implication that Vina being given her own personal Pike as in “The Cage” did happen, but only after the real Pike left.
• “Say goodbye, Spock.” “Goodbye, Spock.”
• In Spock’s memories, his doctor suggests that the red signals may be something that had happened before, in the past, and Spock’s vision of them was actually a subconscious memory of having seen them in a historical database. He’s wrong, obviously, but it’s a good theory and it’s good to have someone come up with a more mundane theory first. Also, it’s very similar to how Sarek and Amanda interpreted Child-Spock’s first vision, that Spock had worked out Michael’s location from perfectly mundane clues subconsciously and the vision of the Red Angel was a child’s brain interpreting thought processes it didn’t understand.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×08: If Memory Serves

Okay, halfway through the season and it’s time to start the plot. That’s the cynical way of looking at it, and I don’t really mean it of course, but this is the episode where we discreetly introduce the big bad and set off the direct chain of events that will lead to the season finale. This episode, and to a lesser extent the next one, transition from the more episodic, “Red signals lead Discovery to random planets in need of saving” structure of the first half of the season to the more tightly plotted, “Save the sphere data, save the world,” arc of the back half. This episode is closer in style to what’s coming next, but I think it still reflects a plot that was going to go in a slightly different direction.

This one’s got two largely independent plots going on. Last time, we ended on Michael’s decision to return to Vulcan. We pick right up with that here, as Pike gives Michael permission to take some time off to “visit her family”, ie., go look for Spock on the DL. Discovery has been ordered to hang out over Kaminar for a while to look for traces left behind by the Red Angel, which turns out to have left behind “freaking amazing” levels of tachyons, which in turn lead to a Big Swirly Thing In Space. Discovery can’t launch a probe without getting too close, so Pike decides to use his Mad Test Pilot Skillz to get close with a shuttle. Tyler insists on going along because he’s the Section 31 liaison, and because he’s angry Pike won’t tell him where Michael went, so they need to have some character stuff between them about Pike and Tyler learning to trust each other. When they get close, Pike has a SPOOKY FUTURE ECHO of a fake-out where he’s forced to shoot Tyler, and the shuttle gets lost in the timey-wimey after they launch the probe. While they’re trying to get out, the probe comes back, five hundred years older and upgraded to PURE EVIL. It punches tentacles into the shuttle, one of which Pike has to shoot off of Tyler to complete the earlier fake-out. It jams itself into the computer and starts screwing with it. Since Stamets has timey-wimey powers thanks to being part giant water bear, he’s able to track the shuttle via magic mushroom space and beams over to the shuttle to rescue them. The probe starts hacking Discovery’s computer to get the sphere data and infect Airiam, so Pike blows up the shuttle to stop it, the three of them beaming out in the nick of time. Discovery backs away from the time rift before it explodes, and everyone muses on what this means about the Red Angel.

Meanwhile, in the other side of the plot, Michael goes to Vulcan and figures out that Amanda has already found Spock and is hiding him downstairs in the family crypt where the souls of his ancestors can interfere with Sarek’s attempts to locate Spock telepathically. Spock is rambling cliche TV “crazy person” word salad, mixed in with bits of Alice in Wonderland and a sequence of numbers. Sarek eventually figures it out himself and orders Michael to take Spock to Section 31. Which she does. Leland promises to help Spock, but Georgiou reveals that they plan to brain-puree him with Terran mind-blender technology. She throws a fight with Michael to let them escape because she likes Michael and wants to make Leland look bad. Once they’re safely away, Michael realizes that the numbers Spock’s been reciting are backwards due to his dyslexia. Plugging them into the computer in the opposite order reveals them to be the coordinates of a planet: Talos IV.

Aw. Yeah.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×07: Light and Shadows

Okay. I think we’re more-or-less at the point where the original plan for the Red Signals story arc runs out. Starting next week, the focus will shift to the Spock arc they’ve been meandering around, which will, honestly, get largely resolved in two episodes, setting the stage for the back half of the season, as I’ve already talked about, where Spock’s journey and Pike’s mission will come together and go in a direction that I’m pretty sure is at least a bit askance of where it as originally supposed to go.

This week, Discovery encounters the last of the seven red signals to appear before the endgame. Like the two we’ve seen so far 0 and unlike the others – it’s leading them on a rescue mission. Tyler is less optimistic about that analysis, though: he points out that a powerful godlike being with access to time travel and a penchant for showing up in doomed places might equally well be summoning Discovery as a witness to destruction as summoning it on a rescue mission. The third signal has appeared over Kaminar, Saru’s home planet. Now, Kaminar is populated by the Kelpiens, a non-technological race known for their heightened sense of fear, and the Ba’ul, who eat the Kelpiens, have only recently developed warp drive and are assholes. Saru is still coming to terms with his recent transformation: the loss of his fear ganglia has caused him to suddenly become fearless, and also he’s got some keratinous growths coming in like teeth in the back of his head. He has a go at comforting Culber, since they’ve both got interesting Weird Bodily Transformation stories to bond over. Discovery’s doctor tells Culber that he probably just feels weird because his entire body is new and his nervous system still has that “New Nervous System” smell. The Ba’ul aren’t interested in talking, so Saru wants to go down to Kaminar on account of it is his home planet. Even though the Kelpiens don’t know about aliens, they could hardly be entirely unaware of space travel since the Ba’ul have it, which means that it’s not a Prime Directive situation if Pike wants to make first contact with them, though in less extreme circumstances, this isn’t really supposed to be the thing you just do on the spur of the moment. Pike orders Michael to go instead on account of she’s the main character and Saru is acting kind of Emotionally Compromised about the whole “Turns out that my people have been systematically slaughtered for generations based on a lie” thing. But Michael talks Pike into letting Saru come with on the promise he will not foment revolution. They pretty much immediately run into Saru’s sister Siranna. Turns out Saru’s dad hit vahar’ai and got eaten some years ago, and now she’s the local priest. Her and Saru have an argument about him having run away from home, but the Ba’ul have noticed him, and once they return to Discovery, they call up to demand Pike turn Saru over. They get even more annoyed when Saru lashes out in rage and reveals that he knows about the scam they’ve been pulling with vahar’ai. The Ba’ul are probably bluffing about attacking a Starfleet ship to get him back, but probably not about blowing up Saru’s village, so he sneaks off to turn himself over. The Ba’ul beam up him and his sister for threats and vivisection, and Saru discovers that those things growing in where his fear ganglia were are giant fuck-off murder darts which he can shoot at at the Ba’ul, though the one he tries it on has a force field so it doesn’t matter. Michael, Tilly and Airiam read up about Kaminar in the sphere data and find out that the Ba’ul almost went extinct a couple thousand years ago, and work out that the Kelpiens are the actual apex predator, and the Ba’ul are their prey. The Ba’ul used their technology to deceive and control the Kelpiens to basically induce species-wide neoteny to save their gross oil-slick skins. Saru breaks free and smashes a Ba’ul drone and rewires it to call Discovery. They send him an MP3 of the sound the sphere made, and he rebroadcasts it on the Ba’ul planet-wide PA system to make his entire species hit puberty at once so that the Ba’ul can’t hide the truth. Pike offers to broker a peace between the two races, but the Ba’ul would rather have a go at genociding the entire species, which is more murder than Discovery has the ability to stop. Fortunately, that level of genocide requires raising their giant underwater base out of the ocean, whereupon the red angel shows up and EMPs them back to the stone age. After some heart-to-heart with Saru on Discovery, Siranna returns to Kaminar to work on leading her people into a new and hopefully less-genocidal age and everyone crosses their fingers that the Ba’ul and Kelpiens will work out a way to live peacefully together. Pike decides that the Red Angel is indeed kind of scary and threatening so Tyler may have a point, and shares with him Saru’s report, since Saru got a good look at the Red Angel and his Apex Predator Eyesight revealed it to be a humanoid in a winged suit. Michael decides that in order to find Spock, she should go back home to Vulcan.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×06: The Sound of Thunder

I was hoping to have the next War of the Worlds II post out this week, but side 2 is a slog and I haven’t been able to sit through more than 30 seconds of it at a stretch. So instead, this:

I’ve said more than a few times that season 2 of Discovery seems like it changes direction significantly in the middle of the season. From what I’ve heard and seen, I think the showmakers originally wanted this season to be much more loosely-plotted series of episodes with overlapping and interconnected subplots and themes, but that were primarily stand-alone, something a bit in the vein of modern Doctor Who. The second half of the season, though is basically a single, ongoing story divided into chapters, more in the “nine-hour movie with regular bathroom breaks” style that’s become popular for streaming series. Both have their merits, though I’m a little more interested in the latter for this show simply because it’s somewhere Star Trek has never boldly gone before. Possibly this episode is a casualty of that change in direction, because a big chunk of its plot is something that feels like setup for the future, but never comes up again.

When we left off last week, Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly had been eaten by a fungus creature called May from Magic Mushroom Space. The closing shot of the episode had her awaken somewhere spooky and gooey, so it should be no surprise that she was not, in fact, killed. Stamets works out that if she had been eaten, there’d be some bits left over, so he concludes that the fungus cocoon is actually a biological transporter and it beamed Tilly into the mycelial network. May helps Tilly out of the gross anus-end of the mushroom transporter, because May can manifest physically in mushroom space, and explains that her people, the jahSepp, are a race of spores that break down and repurpose matter that finds its way into the mycelial plane, and they are in imminent danger of being wiped out by a monster she’d rather like Tilly to kill for her. While this is going on, Discovery catches up to Spock’s shuttle, but it contains not Spock, but Evil!Georgiou, who presents herself to Pike as a retired Starfleet Captain, now working as an independent security consultant on contract to Section 31. Leland, who’s an old friend of Pike’s, calls up on the hologram phone to tell him to let Georgiou handle the Spock-finding, and sends him Ash Tyler as a liaison. Pike does not immediately take to the brainwashed Klingon wearing a dead man’s skin. Stamets locates the receiving transport pod in mushroom space, and comes up with the idea of pulling the handbrake halfway through a spore jump to jam Discovery sideways in the multiverse so him and Burnham can walk out into the mycelial plane to find Tilly. This requires everyone else on the ship standing on the opposite side like in those old Columbian coffee commercials so they don’t die. Also, mushroom space will slowly eat the ship, and also this is an inherently unstable thing to do, so they will only have roughly the length of a CBS All Access Streaming Original Program to find her and get out safely. Typically, Pike frets a little but ultimately consents, and Discovery does a cool barrel roll and crashes itself into mushroom space. May and Tilly team up with Stamets and Michael and agree to go save the Magic Mushroom People by hunting the monster. Only it turns out that the monster is a filthy, ferral Hugh Culber. Yeah, so when Hugh died last season, Stamets was suffering from a bad case of interdimensional epilepsy due to Lorca goading him into overusing the spore drive until he accidentally whanged them into the Mirror Universe. And Stamets reckons that because Hugh died in his arms while he was smeared between dimensions, he acted like an existential lightning rod and siphoned off some vaguely described quality from the dying Hugh that they don’t come right out and say is his soul, but they definitely mean it’s his soul, and the jahSepp didn’t know what to do with it and built him a new body to the original spec. Only humans don’t belong in magic mushroom space, so they tried to take him apart again, and he objected. By smearing himself with the poisonous bark of a mushroom-space tree that May had helpfully foreshadowed to Tilly earlier. Stamets eventually manages to calm Hugh down, though May still wants to kill him, and goes as far as stealing a phaser to try to do it herself, but Tilly talkes her down too, because they’re friends now I guess. Discovery’s in serious danger of falling the rest of the way out of the universe, so Tyler calls Leland (whose ship was hiding nearby disguised as a rock), to give them a tow. Georgiou even lends a hand to get them some extra power and buy Discovery a couple more minutes. Hugh starts to dissolve when they try to bring him into the spore cube to return to normal space, because his new body is made out of mushroom-space matter, like May’s. He accepts his fate and is willing to wipe off the bark and let the jahSepp eat him, but then they remember the mushroom transporter, which can beam things from Mushroom Space to Normal Space, and May escorts Hugh off to do that while Stamets rolls the ship back out of the hole it’s in. The cocoon crumbles to reveal a shiny, new, tastefully nude Hugh Culber shivering on the floor. While he’s being declared physically fit and still human, Cornwall shows up (I guess travel is a free action in act 4 as well) to tell Pike and Leland that they’re both pretty and had better stop being jerks to each other. Pike promises to remember that not everyone has to be a boy scout and Leland promises to remember that shady, morally-compromised antiheroes need to be content with supporting cast roles on this show, and they agree to work together. Georgiou calls up Michael to demand a thank-you and also to unsubtly indicate that it would probably be better if Michael found Spock before she did.

Continue reading Some Blundering about Star Trek Discovery 2×05: Saints of Imperfection

So here we are. “An Obol For Charon” is where the season arc really starts settling down and making itself into something with a direction to it. It also revisits a major plot from an old and incredibly thematically-messy TNG episode, and while it turns out in a similar sort of way, it avoids that episode’s bullshit moral conundrums and is far more respectful to its characters and its moral dimension.

Enterprise’s XO, Number One, makes a brief visit to give us a not-really-satisfying explanation about Enterprise’s complete breakdown and also to give Pike the warp signature for the shuttle Spock stole when escaping the hospital, so they set out to find him. Unfortunately (or not) this puts them in the path of MYSTERIOUS SPACE SPHERE, which snares the ship and makes everyone start speaking in tongues. Since he speaks all the languages, Saru is called up to the bridge to fix the universal translator, despite the fact that he’s got a bad head cold that’s making bits of his brain pop out of the sides of his head. He collapses right after fixing it, and in sickbay, admits that what he’s got isn’t a cold, but vahar’ai, the physical signal that it’s time for him to ritually sacrifice himself to be eaten by the Ba’ul, and if he doesn’t, he’ll eventually be driven mad by the brain inflammation. All the same, he helps Michael work on an antivirus to reverse the sphere’s corruption of the computer. Down in the mushroom kingdom, Stamets and Lovably Grumpy Engineer Reno (Yeah, turns out she’s still aboard) exchange fun grumpy banter where Reno plays the proxy for angry fanboys complaining that powering a starship on magic mushrooms just sounds dumb, while Stamets basically just calls her stupid and talks about pollution (This being a century before TNG, he’s talking about the ecological damage done by dilithium mining rather than proposing that warp drive itself pollutes space). The computer issues start making the ship’s power grid blow up in places (Discovery has not backed away from Star Trek‘s tradition of computer malfunctions causing consoles to explode), which locks the two of them in Engineering with Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly and May the interdimensional fungus monster. They try to ground the power surges out through the door frame to avoid setting the air on fire, but this knocks everyone down and turns off the lights briefly, and May, the sentient fungus from last week, takes the opportunity to escape and attach itself to Tilly’s arm. Tilly warms to the idea of being infected with an interdimensional fungus, but that’s probably just the hallucinogens talking. Stamets and Reno end up drilling a hole in Tilly’s head with an actual literal power drill (They’re locked in engineering and have to make do) to give her an implant that lets them talk to May. May rather angrily explains that Stamets mucking around with mushroom space has endangered her people. Stamets, to his credit, immediately offers to help, but May is kind of belligerent and engulfs Tilly. Seeing Reno and Stamets try to let May communicate through Tilly gives Michael the idea that the MYSTERIOUS SPACE SPHERE is also trying to communicate through the medium of breaking Discovery’s translator, blowing up its power grid, and inducing Kelpien puberty. Saru gets the same idea from patterns in the flashes of ultraviolet light he’s been seeing since he got sick. The sphere starts getting hot and Pike makes plans to have a go at blowing it up, but Saru and Michael convince him to drop the shields and route all the power to communications because they reckon the MYSTERIOUS SPACE SPHERE is dying and just wants to tell its story before it goes. Discovery downloads the sphere’s parting message and is pushed clear just before it explodes. Michael helps Saru back to his room, where he asks her to cut off his fear ganglia, killing him peacefully before vahar’ai drives him mad, but they shrivel up and fall off all on their own just as she starts, leading to his immediate recovery and the loss of his Kelpien hyperdeveloped sense of fear. Discovery lost track of Spock’s shuttle while trapped, but it turns out that the sphere recorded its location right before it died, giving Pike a fresh lead. Downstairs, Stamets cuts Tilly out of the fungus and prepares to permanently cut Discovery off from mushroom space, but he and Reno start tripping from psilocybin, and they come down too late to stop May from swallowing Tilly again. When Stamets cuts the cocoon open this time, Tilly is gone.

Continue reading Some Blundering about Star Trek Discovery 2×04: An Obol for Charon

So the third episode of the season is, for me at least, the weakest. It’s not outright bad; I’ve yet to see Discovery dip all the way to “bad”. But it’s weak in a couple of ways. The B-plot is important moving forward, but the pacing is weak and its placement here feels like an unfortunate necessity; its thematic ties to the other plots are weak, but it can’t be logically slotted into either of the adjacent stories. The C-plot lapses into idiot-ball territory for a bit that’s incredibly disappointing, despite the gist of the overall story being okay. The A-plot, on the other hand, is a Klingon Intrigue.

I’m not saying it’s a bad Klingon Intrigue. But it’s a Klingon Intrigue. And up until we meet the timemasters of Boreth at the end of this season, the Klingons in Discovery pretty much suck.

To provide context for this week’s episode, I will now relate (with the possibility of me getting some things wrong because I only skimmed those episodes) the Tragedy of Ash Tyler:

So the whole Klingon War thing last season was touched off when Michael Burnham’s impulsive actions and betrayal of her commander led to the death of the Klingon messiah. Said Messiah had appointed a Klingon named Voq as his “Torchbearer”, a duty whose details I did not bother to learn, but the implication was clear that he was the fake-out Big Bad we were meant to be expecting to come back at the end of the season. Instead, what actually happened is that the Klingons captured and gutted a guy named Ash Tyler. As part of a Ridiculously Deep Cover assignment, Voq was surgically and genetically altered to look like Tyler via an incredibly gruesome and nasty process, and on top of that, they used the mind probe or something to pump Voq’s brain full of Tyler’s memories and personality to the point that he could pass, if not for Tyler exactly, for “Tyler after the massive psychological trauma of intense, prolonged torture.” And to make sure he could pass any Starfleet brainwashing tests, Voq’s own memory and personalities were heavily suppressed. Voq was then dumped in a cell with the captured Captain Lorca so they could escape together and he could get adopted onto Discovery. Tyler had little occasional flashes of Voq, but these were largely dismissed as PTSD. Discovery eventually captures Voq’s girlfriend L’Rell, who presumably let them do it because her plan was to reawaken Voq.  Around the same time as Discovery was getting knocked into the Mirror Universe, Hugh scanned just the right thing to turn up evidence of Tyler’s true nature, and he Voq’d out enough to murder him. I did not watch this part, but I gather that what ended up happening was that the Tyler personality was too strong to just go quietly into that good night, and somehow they persuaded L’Rell to delete Voq’s original personality rather than lose both of them. So Tyler at this point is technically less “Voq wearing Tyler like a meat-suit” and more “Tyler got uploaded into a new body which was surgically altered to resemble his old one,” which is kinda similar to a thing that happened on an episode of Voyager years ago, only better thought-out, and probably why on balance most folks are willing to accept him as “Tyler”. At the end of the season, to win the war, Discovery goes right up to the edge of grimdark, but then forcefully backs away by declining to blow up the Klingon homeworld, but instead helps L’Rell get herself installed as Chancellor to unite the warring Klingon factions, which somehow will make them less of a threat to the Federation (just roll with it). To help nudge the Klingons away from resuming hostilities, Tyler reclaims Voq’s title of Torchbearer and remains on Qo’nos with L’Rell.

Also Tyler and Michael are lowkey in love with each other.

But we’ll get back to the Klingons in a minute. Over in the C-plot, Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly is still being haunted by visions of May Ahearn, who seems friendly enough and cheers her on during a half-marathon, but Tilly is having none of it. So, of course, having recently suffered severe head trauma at the hands of exotic matter, Tilly does the obvious thing and goes and tells her doctor what she’s experiencing and submits herself to an array of tests to figure out whether the dark matter or the head injury has done something that needs treatment. No, I’m just kidding, she does what people always do in TV shows and decides that her realistic, persistent hallucinations are actually an indication of a weakness in her character, and hides it until it leads to a major outburst in front of Captain Pike, then quits the command training program because obviously she’s “too weak”. Among the Klingons, L’Rell shows off the plans for the D-7 to the Klingon council, but Asshole Klingon TimKol-Sha challenges her on being too friendly with the humans. L’Rell and Tyler stress out a bit privately. He’s mad that she doesn’t trust him like Voq, she’s mad that he doesn’t act like Voq. She’s still got feelings for him, but he’s not really Voq any more, and he’s still got feelings for her, but also, he did kinda torture him a whole lot. Also, he’s been making secret long-distance hologram calls to Michael on the DL. Tyler eventually finds out that L’Rell’s uncle is hiding her secret baby – Voq hadn’t known she was pregnant when he had himself Tyler’d. Finding out that he’s got a kid changes Tyler’s tune about L’Rell and he’s willing to try to make a proper Klingon family with her.

Back in the C-plot, Michael helps Tilly work out that May is an alien and not a hallucination, and with some help from Stamets, they work out that Tilly picked up some fungus from mushroom space that the dark matter powered-up enough to manifest as a hallucination. Over May’s protests, Stamets uses a dark matter sample to yoink the parasite out of Tilly and lock it in a force field where I am sure it will never come up again.

Turns out Kol-Sha had Tyler tracked, kills the uncle and abducts the baby. He demands L’Rell’s abdication and pokes them both with a torture stick, then prepares to kill all three of them anyway, because evil, but a hooded assassin zaps Kol-Sha’s henchmen out of existence and traps Kol-Sha so that L’Rell can finish him off. The assassin turns out to be Former Terran Empress Evil!Georgiou, who spirits Tyler and the baby away. L’Rell presents convincing duplicates of their severed heads to the council with the cover story that Tyler had turned traitor, and Kol-Sha had been martyred defending her, and declares herself the symbolic mother of all Klingons. Tyler drops the baby off on Boreth to be raised by the monks, and accepts Georgiou’s offer to join Starfleet’s Morally Ambiguous-to-Cartoonishly-Evil branch, Section 31.

While all this is going on, there is a B-plot where Amanda shows up on Discovery. She stole Spock’s medical records from the facility where he was checked in. Michael narcs her out to Pike immediately, and calls the hospital. They tell him that Spock murdered a bunch of people and busted out. This sounds fishy enough to Pike that he orders Burnham to decrypt Spock’s medical file, whose contents seem to reaffirm that Spock had some kind of massive breakdown. Amanda tells her about Spock’s first encounter with the Red Angel, which they’d assumed was just a child’s mind processing subconscious clues to help them find Michael after she’d run away from home. Michael confesses to having emotionally wounded Spock in the hopes that driving him away would protect him from the Logic Extremists. Amanda pretty much drops Michael like a hot potato and declares her intention to go save Spock all by her damn self.

Meh. Okay, I get what they’re going for here, and a lot of it is just plain necessary for setting the board up the way they want it. But I’m just not into it. I can’t really separate out a “good” and “bad” list this week even, so here’s a hybridized “things I am interested in” list:

• Now that I know where Georgiou’s storyline is going, most of my annoyance at her reappearance here has faded. When she drops out of the story near the end of the season 1 finale, it felt so much like the implication was that she would one day return as a Big Bad. But no, there’s rather a sense here of Georgiou as an emblem of Section 31: Starfleet’s dark mirror, but one that it is choosing to embrace (loosely) rather than deny. If Discovery really is a show about healing, then I can’t begrudge them for wanting to include Georgiou as an object lesson in, “She is not one of us, she will never be one of us. But yes, we can find a place for her among us, and we will not reject her.” That, and long last, is a role for Secton 31 beyond “Starfleet’s Cartoonishly Evil Branch”: this utopian project needed a place where even people like Leland and Tyler and Georgiou could go and make a positive impact on the universe.
• Mia Kirshner’s Amanda Grayson is great. She really does feel true both to Jane Wyatt’s TOS version and also Wynonna Ryder’s Abramsverse version.
• I know what they’re going for. There’s a parallel meant to be happening here centered around the concept of fierce motherhood, between L’Rell and Amanda. It’s the closest those plots come to belonging in the same episode. But no. I just said Mia Kirshner’s Amanda is great, but this just pisses me off. So much of her plot in this episode is coded around the unintentional implication that Michael was always secondary to her. That the affection Amanda showed Michael as a child was only what she was displacing because she wasn’t permitted to be as affectionate to Spock as she wanted. And when she learns how Michael hurt Spock, her response is so cold, she’s basically just disowned her adopted daughter. I can’t imagine what watching this scene would be like to someone in the audience who was adopted. This largely disappears the next time we see her, so I’m calling that scene an aberration, but it sucks hardcore.
• “My Klingon girlfriend is upset that every time she kisses me I recoil in horror and also the Klingons all think I’m a double agent for the Federation. I think I’ll go place a secret call to my Federation girlfriend to tell her everything that’s going on.” Good job, Tyler.
• Tyler’s major roles for the rest of the season are to share one episode with Pike, gaining his trust; to get punched a few times; to be a deflection that cover’s Ariem’s subversion by control; and to show up with the cavalry in the final battle. That’s pretty much it, and pretty much why he has to be removed from Qo’nos and moved to Discovery. And… I mean, it mostly feels like a waste. The whole big thing of separating Tyler and Michael last season and having him go with the Klingons was a satisfying way for his arc to go. Having him come back literally the first time we see him this season is… It’s just kind of meh.
  • Also, having Tyler remain as Torchbearer seemed like it would fit in really nicely with the Klingon Forehead Problem. We know why there are smooth-headed Klingons thanks to that Enterprise episode, but Discovery-era Klingons have forehead ridges. Why would TOS-era Klingons uniformly lack them, but a few years later, everyone’s got them again? Blame Tyler. A “Klingon” of his important position, torchbearer and lover of the chancellor, decides to go for the smooth-headed look, and for a couple of years, it becomes fashionable all over the empire to not bother with ridge-reconstruction surgery after you get the Klingon Forehead Flu. (I’m one of the few people who really likes Enterprise‘s solution to the Klingon Forehead Problem. Not that we needed one, but given that we got one, it fits so well, since “During certain periods, many Klingons lost their foreheads and may later have had them surgically reconstructed,” covers everything, from the human-looking Klingons of TOS, to the classic TOS Klingons appearing in the new style in Deep Space Nine, to the variation in Klingon makeup over the years, even the really doofy-looking Klingon we see briefly at the beginning of Star Trek The Motion Picture.) But alas, that explanation seems rather out the door now.
• Gah. The whole thing with Tilly assuming she’s going crazy and not talking to anyone about her problem. This is ’90s TV bullshit. Discovery is better than this. It just covers up the fact that it would take precisely two seconds to resolve that plot if she’d just talk to someone.
• Kudos, by the way, for it taking precisely two seconds to resolve that plot once she talks to someone. I dig how Michael works it out: she hears Tilly explaining the concept of crying to May, and instantly concludes that a figment of Tilly’s imagination would know what crying was.
• I like that May views Stamets as the captain of Discovery rather than Pike.
• More idiot-ball stuff, though: Tilly’s complete unwillingness to hear May out at the end. They’re just like “Let’s rip it out of me and lock it up and make sure we do not give it a chance to just explain what it wants because it certainly seems like it isn’t actually hostile and has one specific thing that it really wants to communicate.” This is all here because that part of the plot can’t be allowed to happen until next week. Spoilers: next week they’re going to let it out and let it tell them what it wants, and they will be pretty sympathetic and willing to help.
• Throwaway line from the cold open: Sarek has assembled a team to investigate the red signals. This never comes up again. It’s just there so we can be surprised when it’s Amanda and not Sarek who beams aboard.
• The attempts to leave open the possibility that Spock really has become a murderous psychopath (under some adverse outside influence) is so completely no-sold that I’m almost offended they’re even pretending to try.
  • Before you say, “Well duh of course Spock didn’t kill those people,” remember that most incarnations of Star Trek have had the occasional episode where a regular has been possessed or controlled by some entity that could compel them to do something like that. Scotty got possessed by the ghost of Jack the Ripper once. Man, Trek gets weird some times.
• Tyler comments on the accuracy of his fake head, implying that it’s beyond normal Federation technology to make such a simulacrum. This may be our first hint of how advanced Section 31 is.
• Leland mentions that Control had recommended recruiting Tyler, giving no more specific reason than his “skills”. Wonder if Control was thinking ahead to using him as a misdirect against Pike. Or just exploiting his relationship with Michael.

So on balance, not a great episode. Most weeks, there’s a few problems, even real wall-bangers, but the high notes more than make up for them. This time, there’s just not enough high notes, and the result is a resounding “meh”. It’s especially disappointing after how good “New Eden” was. But fortunately, we’ve got a real solid one coming up next.