Category: Star Trek

“New Eden” starts me down the path of learning to love Anson Mount’s Pike. He doesn’t quite have his performance down right, but the character is heading in the right direction. It’s directed by Jonathan Frakes, and, fittingly, there’s a certain “retro” aspect to this episode – it’s plotted and paced much more like a TNG-era “procedural” than Discovery’s typically action-heavy style. All the same, it touches on two of the recurring elements of Discovery’s structure: strong parallels between plot elements, and revisiting common Trek motifs with modern sensibilities. This is to a large extent an episode about when and how it is appropriate to break the rules in pursuit of a worthy goal, and it addresses those issues with far more nuance than we have historically gotten from Trek, which usually either goes with “The ends don’t justify the means, that’s the way to the dark side!” or “The ends totally justify the means because it’s the late ’90s and we’re all grimdark and antiheroic!” This is, of all things, a Prime Directive episode, but, miraculously, one that doesn’t suck.

They’ve picked up one of the Red Things again, and remember my little digression before about how triangulation works? Yeah, they come out and literally do it. There’s a layer of obfuscating technobabble around it, but the principle is exactly what I said: take a bearing, jump to warp for a couple of seconds, take another bearing, and use trigonometry to figure out where the signal is coming from. Where the signal is coming from turns out to be the far-end of the Beta quadrant, a century and a half away at warp. Now, the spore drive has been officially decommissioned because of the whole thing where you need a genetically modified human to pilot it, but Pike reckons that if Starfleet was willing to overlook that during the war, they’ll also grant an exception due to the exceptional graveness of the Mysterious Red Thingies mission. Thus, despite Stamets being super uncomfortable about it, they magic mushroom themselves to a planet which I will call “Terralysium” on account of that is its name. Once there, they discover a non-technological human settlement that’s been broadcasting a distress signal on a loop since World War III. So we get a very TNG-style mystery episode: someone transported an enclave of pre-warp humans halfway across the galaxy. Pike assumes it’s linked to the reg signals, and is clearly cozying up to the idea that it’s Godlike Aliens. Pike decides to beam down and have a reconnoiter, taking Michael on account of she’s the main character, and also Joann Owosekun, because she grew up in a Luddite community on Earth. Because there are such things on twenty-third century Earth, and that’s nice. They go snooping around the local church – the only Earth-original structure on the planet – and learn that the Terralysians practice a syncretic cargo cult religion that mixes and matches Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Wicca, Shinto, basically everything the writers could think of, centered around the salvific figure of a “Red Angel” that removed their ancestors from Earth before its presumed destruction. And I know what you’re expecting, but no, Discovery does not go that way and have the away team run afoul of local taboos and get burned at the stake by religious fanatics. The Terralysian religion was built from a diverse community needing to set aside their differences and find common ground, and, miraculously, that still seems central to their culture; Pike presents his gang as travelers from another settlement, and the local All-Mother is cool with that and gives them a little backstory about settling here and building a happy agrarian society whose tourism revenue has been way down now that the church lights are out, what with the only technology they’ve had in two hundred years being one lantern battery and a soldier’s helmet cam (hint hint). But Jacob, the maintenance guy, doesn’t take these strangers at face value and figures out their game. He steals their stuff locks them in the basement in order to prove to everyone else that technologically advanced humans still exist elsewhere in the universe. Pike and the gang escape, but Jacob left a phaser where a little kid could find it and Pike has to throw himself in front of it to keep her from shooting someone. Seriously wounded, he entreats Michael not to violate the Prime Directive to save him, so she convinces the All-Mother to take him to the church and pray, a prayer which is seemingly answered when they get beamed up.

Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Discovery finds out that one of the planet’s rings is about to dump a bunch of radiation on the planet and kill everyone. Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly gets a concussion from screwing with a bit of dark matter. With moral support from a medic named May, Adorably Concussed Ensign Tilly comes up with a plan to save the planet by whanging the dark matter asteroid out the back of the ship like an Olympic hammer toss to, I think, act like a little shepherd moon. Pike agrees to make a very small exception to the Prime Directive and fess up to Jacob along with giving him a brand new extended-life battery for the church lights, in exchange for the helmet. The helmet cam recording doesn’t honestly tell them anything except that the Red Angel is definitely the thing Michael saw on the Hiawatha. Adorably Convalescing Ensign Tilly remembers where she knows May from and looks up her file – and it turns out that May died years ago in a shuttle accident.  Duh-Duh-DUNNNNN!

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery: 2×02 New Eden

Okay. So having finished the season, and needing some more filler while I try to figure out if I have anything useful to say about Killraven, let’s go back and talk about the part of the season that aired before I decided to blog about it…

When we left the Discovery at the end of last season, it was on its way to Vulcan to drop off Sarek and Amanda, and pick up its new captain. But never mind all that because Enterprise! Pike asks to beam over with a security officer and a science officer, and Michael is obviously uncomfortable about the prospect of seeing Spock. Good news for her: the science officer who beams over is some other dude, who I will call Lt. McJerkface because his only trait is smug contempt. To remind us that McJerkface is our designated butt-monkey, reptilian Ensign Backgroundcharacter comically sneezes all over him in the elevator. Spock, as it turns out, took a long vacation and checked himself into rehab. Pike explains that Enterprise had been investigating a series of “red bursts”, seven unusual energy signals popping up all over the galaxy, until Enterprise suffered a complete breakdown and has to be towed back to spacedock for repairs. We aren’t given specifics as to why, but Starfleet considers these signals so important that Pike assumes command of Discovery to go chasing the only one they can still detect, which puts them next to an asteroid made out of non-baryonic dark matter, where they find the wreck of the USS Hiawatha, believed destroyed in the war. Pike, Michael and McJerkface have to fly down in little tiny shuttles but McJerkface is too busy being a smug asshole to steer properly and gets himself killed, while Pike’s shuttle breaks and Michael has to narrowly save him. The only person still active on the Hiawatha is Comically Grumpy Engineer Jett Reno, who has been keeping bits and pieces of some of the rest of the crew alive with her practical engineering skills. Michael gets very nearly killed on the collapsing Hiawatha and has a vision of a red angelic being before Pike saves her. Adorably goofy ensign Tilly manages to snag a chunk of dark matter because she’s hoping she can use it to make a new control system for the spore drive, as Stamets wants to quit on account of he has visions of his dead husband whenever he plugs himself into it. Pike announces that he’ll be staying on for the rest of the season while Enterprise gets fixed, and Michael visits Spock’s room and reads his diary, from which she learns that Spock had been having ominous visions of the red signals before they occurred.

It’s not the best start. But it’s good enough. More specifically…

• Tig Notaro is a delight as Jett Reno, though I keep feeling like there should be more to her; she’s contributed very little to the plot, mostly just serving to move character arcs forward and be generally a pleasure to listen to. But there’s something about her that comes off as evasive here, and in all of her appearances for the first half of the season, which sure seem like they’re hinting at her having some kind of Deep Dark Secret… Which gets forgotten by the end.
• Obviously, Enterprise is the real guest star here. Her update to the style of Discovery is good. She looks like something from the same universe as the rest of the ships in this series, but isn’t just recognizably the Enterprise: in its way, it helps bridge the visual gap between Discovery and the original series. Because Discovery‘s take on the Enterprise is very consistent with the look and feel of the movie-era Enterprise. Spock’s room, in particular, very strongly evokes its appearance at the beginning of Star Trek III. And once you see this, you start to realize that the whole visual style of Discovery is drawing from the movie era. It’s an update, of course, but there’s a much clearer kinship between the set and starship design of the movies and of Discovery (The most obvious example is that Discovery’s Red Alert icon is identical to the movie-era one). Worth noticing that Discovery’s design clearly took some inspiration from an early concept drawing for a possible Enterprise redesign for Phase II.
  • Interestingly, Enterprise looks quite a bit different from the schematic we saw of Defiant last season. Word of God is that Defiant, by then having spent most of a century in the hands of the Terran Empire, had been heavily modified.
  • As I mentioned at the opposite end of the season, we’re given only a very limited look at Enterprise. We see a few exterior shots, Spock’s quarters, and the hall outside them. I was disappointed at the time, but it’s a good move, because the gravity of the Enterprise permeates this episode enough as it is and lingering on it would only steal the show.
• There’s a kind of subtle reverence in the way the Discovery crew talks about the Enterprise. Clearly, we’re meant to understand that they are impressed by it. Reminds me more than a little of the way that the Terrans in Enterprise were clearly super impressed by Defiant and viewed it as advanced technology even though it looked screen-accurate to the original series and therefore like something out of the 1960s.
• The explanation of why Enterprise wasn’t involved in the war is part of that reverence, the notion that the ships that had been sent out on five-year missions represented the part of Starfleet they wanted to survive even if the rest fell. Coupled with my earlier observation about the visual style of Discovery, a bunch of other things fall into place too:
  • Why is Starfleet basically all Constitution-class ships in TOS? Because that was the fleet that had been out on five-year missions during the war, and therefore weren’t subject to the utter decimation that befell the rest of the fleet.
  • Why is the visual style of TOS so radically different from the visual style of the movie era? Because the movie-era style was already dominant in Kirk’s time in more metropolitan parts of the galaxy, but the war had forced Starfleet to use a lot of older ships in the hinterlands.
  • Why is Enterprise being retired in Star Trek II, and why do we never see any more Constitution-class ships after TOS (Whereas we see Excelsior-class ships into the TNG era)? It’s an old ship. It was already old in TOS, and had been kept in service beyond its originally planned lifetime because most of the fleet had been blown up.
• I love the crap out of Alice in Wonderland, so I dig its inclusion here as a book that was Meaningful to Spock and Michael as children.
• The stray leftover fortune cookie fortune Pike finds on Lorca’s desk is exactly as cute as it can be without crossing the line. “Not every cage is a prison and not every loss is eternal.”

There’s not much to specifically complain about; the major shortcoming of the episode is just that it’s a slow burn that spends a lot of its time arranging the field.

• The Enterprise crew have transitioned to “new uniforms”, Discovery‘s take on the TOS uniform. Even though it’s an updated design (They look to be the exact same cut as the “old” uniforms in use everywhere else, just in the TOS color scheme rather than Discovery blue), they do not really look like they belong in this visual motif.
• It is going to take me several weeks to warm to Anson Mount’s Pike. Don’t really care for him in this episode. Though, “Where’s my damn red thing?” is a good line.
• Lt. McJerkface is a pointless character who just wastes my time.
• Nhan is completely underused for the first half of the season and, like Reno, comes off like there’s something slightly sinister about her that they were waiting to reveal.
• It feels so much like Jett Reno is hiding something that it feels like a plot hole that, no, she’s not, that’s just her being gruff.
• There are some extended flashbacks covering Spock and Michael’s childhood which don’t add much to the story and feel emotionally manipulative. The buildup to the eventual reveal of Spock and Michael’s falling out (The full details of which will not come out until the middle of the season) feels way too protracted. The explanation that Sarek adopted Michael (apparently without consulting his wife first) because he felt Spock needed a human friend is gross.
  • Some might call this an odd angle on Sarek, but I do find it compelling to reveal, through Michael’s relationship with him, that there is much more to Sarek than what we saw interpreted through Spock. Two things in particular:
    • That Sarek deliberately exaggerates his Vulcan stoicism to Spock beyond how he actually feels, because he believes that, being half-human, Spock has a choice about which elements of his cultures he’s going to integrate into his identity and needs an absolute paragon of Vulcanity (Vulcanism?) to use as a role model. One gets the impression that Sarek might be inclined to show at least a small amount of affection to Spock if he weren’t worried it would confuse him. He comes off as a parent who took the idea that “consistency is important” too far.
      • If we assume that Sybok hasn’t been retconned out of existence, it helps justify this mindset; Sarek already had one kid completely fail to internalize the Vulcan way, and probably has some issues related to that.
    • That Sarek’s disapproval of Spock and Spock’s life choices exists more in Spock’s mind than in reality (Which culminates in the minor reveal in “Such Sweet Sorrow” that Sarek wants to reconcile with Spock, but is respecting Spock’s wishes to stay away). This also came up in the Abrams reboot, where we see Sarek show a very brief hint of approval when Spock tells the Vulcan Science Academy to go fuck itself after they insult his mother. And, like, per Star Trek V, Spock’s deepest pain is that his father’s immediate reaction when he was born was to dismiss him as, “So human.” But… Does Spock actually remember being born? Or is this just how he imagines it going from his experience of growing up with Sarek as a dad? I think in the novelization of the ’09 movie, they reenact this scene, but in context, it’s clear that Sarek’s comment isn’t dismissive, but affectionate – he’s saying that he looks like his mother.
• Sarek just kinda vanishes out of the narrative at the top of act 2. In the middle of Discovery’s important side-mission to track the red signals, Sarek can apparently just find his own way back to Vulcan. It’s not a problem from an emotional standpoint as Sarek and Spock don’t get along, but coupled with what we’ll see in “Such Sweet Sorrow”, one gets the impression Sarek can basically just zap around the galaxy under his own power like a space-tardigrade.
• They do not make it as clear as they ought to moving forward: seven signals appeared all at once then vanished. Only one of the signals lasted long enough to get exact coordinates (This is basic astronomy but could’ve used someone spelling it out: you have to use multiple observations from different positions to determine the location of something in space. How much difference in position you need depends on the precision of your measurements and how far away the subject is. The idea is that Enterprise couldn’t move far enough that the could triangulate the position of the signals. Presumably they could narrow it down to “somewhere along this line from our position,” but that leaves an awful lot of space to look at). The other signals which appear later in the season are the initial seven appearing again, giving Discovery time to triangulate them. Up until the end of the season, I wasn’t sure if the signals which they receive later were new in addition to the original seven.
• It’s never really explained why Starfleet puts such a high priority on these red signals. The rule Pike cites to assume command of Discovery suggests that his mission involves a potential apocalyptic threat to the entire Federation. And it does, but there’s no reason they should know that at this stage. It’s like they all just read the script.
  • You know what would’ve been a good explanation? Control. At this point, Control is still working for Starfleet, or is at least pretending to. Control would be positioned to recognize the signals as related to their aborted time travel experiment from 20 years ago and raise the alarm. Though you still have to explain why Control would let the Enterprise handle this instead of Leland.

No point in predictions for the future, but how about some elements that don’t get resolved?

• How did Spock have a vision of the signals ahead of time? We eventually establish that the red angel he saw as a child wasn’t the same one who sent them.
• What became of the “survivors” of the Hiawatha, one of whom appears to be a brain in a jar?
• The idea that Pike and Saru are sharing command of Discovery comes up, I think, one more time and is then forgotten.
• I feel like they originally had a better plan for what trashed Enterprise than, “Awkward retcon to explain why we don’t see holographic viewscreens again until DS9.” There’s plenty of reason by the end of the season to imagine that Gabrielle Burnham deliberately put Pike on Discovery as part of her attempts to stop Control, but the element of, “So I went back and EMP’d the hell out of his ship right as Discovery was passing by,” is missing.
  • I’d have liked to see “flashbacks” of timelines where that didn’t happen – Pike trying to stop Control from Enterprise and failing for want of a magic mushroom drive.
• Michael sees the Red Angel when she’s in danger on the collapsing Hiawatha, and it’s left briefly ambiguous whether that’s real or just her eyes playing tricks on her as Pike arrives to rescue her. It turns out that the Red Angel really was there, but not really why.

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For this week’s endnote, I mentioned Sybok up above. Sybok’s most widely accepted backstory is that many years before meeting Amanda, Sarek married a Vulcan priestess. This is reasonable and makes a lot of sense as we know that Vulcan marriages are arranged in childhood (Arranged marriage seems like an odd thing for an advanced, egalitarian society to have, but it does fit when you view Vulcans as having a strong cultural apprehension about the potential for unchecked emotions to drive them to barbarism. You might say, “But won’t that lead to a lot of loveless marriages?” and they’d answer, “We can only hope.”). According to the expanded universe explanation, Sarek’s first wife was pursuing Kohlinar, a Vulcan monastic tradition. So she married as she was duty-bound to do, produced issue, and then, her obligation complete, got an annulment and retreated to the hills to become a monk. This is, presumably, a perfectly normal thing to do on Vulcan, which seems weird but fits with what we know about their society. They’ve got arranged marriage, but presumably they also have easy, no-fault divorce, and it’s also probably entirely common and normal for a married couple to have very little to do with one another (Are there gay Vulcans? Seems likely. They probably do much the same thing: marry and produce issue to fulfill their societal obligation, then divorce and pursue other options. Or indeed remain married but have little to do with one another. Vulcans seem not to have much of a taboo about premarital or extramarital sex as long as it’s just about meeting a biological need and not any of that icky emotional stuff, so it’s likely that the institution of marriage itself only really persists at all as a way of enshrining family lines). It’s easy to imagine that parental abandonment, particularly to pursue a lifestyle of extreme emotional suppression, might have pushed Sybok to eschew Vulcan asceticism. But if we presume that this isn’t in and of itself an unusual thing to happen, we can also see why Sarek would presume a serious fault in his own abilities as a single parent, leading him to adopt a more extreme position with Spock. It’s a shame I don’t like James Frain as Sarek, because he’s really well-served by the material in Discovery; Mark Lenard was a great actor, but his Sarek never got material this good, even in his quite good TNG appearances.

I was planning something else, but couldn’t get it together in time, so instead, let’s blunder a bit about Short Treks, a series of four mini-episodes supplementary to Star Trek Discovery, released during the inter-season hiatus to stop everyone from cancelling their CBS All Access subscription until next year flesh out some concepts and provide breadth that didn’t really fit in with the flow of any full episodes. As it turned out later, several of these also worked to foreshadow or set up elements for the coming season. Not all of them, though, which is sufficiently weird to make me wonder if they hint at elements that were ultimately dropped from the season (For a show which has been wonderful in its shameless embrace of the bits of Trek that had been cast off and forgotten through the years, Discovery seems to have an awful lot of its own cast-offs).

I’ve talked up season 2 a lot, but really it was Short Treks that made me love Discovery, and I think possibly they’re a lot closer to what the showrunners originally had in mind for the overall feel of the show: a bunch of self-contained vignettes into the lives of the characters that don’t directly connect to each other, but do all broadly feed into later events. And because Short Treks aren’t beholden to filling a spot in an ongoing story, I’m hoping that in the future, they might serve to let us explore anything interesting left in the storylines that the ship and crew have moved beyond – Pike, Cornwall, Number One, Airiam, even pre-Control Leland could show up for a little jaunt.

1. Runaway

Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly frets over her relationship with her overbearing mother, gets in a food-fight with an invisible stowaway, and makes a new friend.

This minisode introduces Me Hani Ika Hali Ka Po, who comes back at the end of Season 2 to be wonderful and help Discovery stabilize their time crystal. On first airing, “Runaway” seems like just a pleasant, low-stakes episode about Tilly becoming more confident in her role as a newly-minted officer (She was a cadet last season) in the command track. It’s just nice. That’s the thing. The fact that the relationship between Tilly and Po comes up later is just a bonus. These first two minisodes really drive home the sense of Discovery as a Trek that really gets the idea of Star Trek as a world where people solve problems by being better at them.

It’s cute and lovely, and Po is a neat character. Previous incarnations of Trek were never really good at depicting alien cultures as something properly alien, and they’re even worse at depicting alien individuals as something other than avatars of their entire race. Po is explicitly contrasted to the rest of her people, who are going through a difficult cultural transition now that they’ve become a warp-capable, strategically-important race. She’s a genius, she’s regal, she’s spiritual, she’s recently lost her entire family, and she’s a teenager, with the paradoxical combination of brashness, confidence, angst and uncertainty that implies.

Also, she can turn invisible, chameleon-style. Shame that didn’t come up in her other appearances.

It is not clear when this episode is set. It’s after the end of season 1 because Tilly is a full ensign and you can see her Medal of Honor in her room, but there’s no reference to ongoing events. Tilly apparently does not tell anyone about meeting Po until “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 1”, which is a little weird; Po isn’t going to get into trouble from Starfleet, and Tilly’s presumably going to need to explain the mess in the Mess (She blames it on a “hormonal space rabbit” that escaped from the lab)  and use of the transporter. There’s no clear place in season 2 for this story to go, but that’s not a huge deal thanks to Discovery‘s quirk where the characters and the plot seem to go through a different amount of time between episodes.

2. Calypso

A soldier escaping imprisonment comes across the long-abandoned Discovery. With no available way to get home, Craft slowly builds a relationship with the ship’s evolved computer, but he still longs to return to his family.

I have made no secret that this is my single favorite piece of Star Trek ever. If it were the ’90s, and I told you that there was an episode of Star Trek where a starship’s computer became sentient and fell in love with a human, you’d pretty much be able to guess how it would go, right? It would go in a kind of Fatal Attraction sort of way, and in the end, the human would need to trick the computer into thinking he reciprocated in order to get close to her CPU or something, and he’d end up having to destroy her.

And that’s not what happens. At all. Zora develops feelings for Craft, but she never becomes jealous or possessive or abusive. Craft is honest with Zora from the start— even when his status as an escaping prisoner of war gives him every reason to be evasive. When Zora tells him she can’t disobey her orders by taking him home in Discovery, Craft doesn’t try to trick her or to override her; he just accepts it. Craft develops genuine feelings for Zora, even if those feelings don’t outweigh his love for his family. Craft isn’t trying to lull Zora into a false sense of security or manipulate her; they’re both genuinely lonely, and they’re both genuinely drawn to each other. And while he believes there’s no way for him to return to Alcor IV, he does his best to be happy with her. He’s legitimately trying to make a life for himself with Zora, culminating in asking her to create a holographic avatar of herself and teaching himself to dance so that they can reenact the “He Loves” scene from Funny Face, just to do something nice for her. In the end, Zora doesn’t need to be tricked or forced into giving Craft Discovery’s last shuttle; she gives it to him when she realizes that the amount he stands to gain justifies the long odds of a thousand-year-old shuttle safely carrying him to the very edge of its range.

That’s “Calypso” overall, really: two people just being nice to each other and trying to do right by each other despite their pain. Craft can’t get past his longing for home, Zora can’t move on from a mission she seems unlikely to ever complete, but they can still take comfort in each other.

Of course, now that we know the greater context, we can also see “Calypso” as a series of tantalizing hints about what might lie in the show’s future. Alcor IV, with its cyclops owls, where true names are kept as secrets between lovers. Or the Vedreysh, obsessed with “The Long Ago”, who stockpile their escape pods with Betty Boop cartoons and are totally a fallen, corrupt version of the Federation.

But honestly, that’s mostly incidental to the real story: just two intelligent beings whose needs don’t fully align but who are trying to do good by each other anyway within the constraints of what they’re willing and able to give.

And that’s the one true constant thing that Star Trek, at its heart, is supposed to be.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery: Short Treks

Thanks. I hated it.

Naw, just kidding. But… The truth is, I’m not entirely satisfied with where the story ended up going, and I have mixed feelings about how it got there.

So… Contrary to my expectation, the season finale of Discovery was, in fact, an hour-long space battle. Fortunately, it’s broken up with a lot of things that aren’t an hour-long space battle, but still, there’s a lot of space battle. Enterprise, Discovery, and their fleet of shuttles and pods, face off against Section 31’s armada, which Control turns out to have refitted with the ability to shed hundreds of autonomous fighters. Enterprise and Discovery get donked up real good while the Discovery crew finishes building their new Red Angel suit. Michael takes off in it, but can’t get the suit to work. Tyler shows up with the cavalry: a fleet of Klingons and Kelpiens of all people, using borrowed Ba’ul ships. Spock works out that Michael has to go back in time and send the five signals in order to set things up before the suit will let her travel forward in time, so she does that. Leland boards Discovery and fucks shit up good, but not as lethally as in Michael’s vision, before Georgiou kills him. Enterprise gets impaled by a torpedo and Admiral Cornwall sacrifices herself to close the blast doors around it. Michael sends a sixth signal to guide Discovery into the wormhole to an unknown future, but is forced to leave Spock behind since his shuttle is damaged.

And there, curiously, with several minutes left, Discovery leaves the story altogether. An extended epilogue shows that Tyler and the crew of the Enterprise have agreed to report Discovery as having been destroyed by a spore drive malfunction, and Spock recommends that Starfleet swear everyone to secrecy about the Discovery and, for some reason, magic mushroom space, and vows never to mention his sister ever again, because reasons. Three months later, as the repaired Enterprise leaves spacedock, it picks up the seventh signal, too far away to do anything about, but signalling that Michael and Discovery are still out there somewhere.

It’s just a bit much, man. For the most part, I really liked all the bits that were not space battles, and liked the existence of bits that were. In more detail…

• Control’s drone armada look very distinctly like a more primitive form of the future-control drones we saw in Spock’s visions.
• Still digging Reno. Asked if she can cut the remaining time to charge the crystal in half, she just says, “Violate the basic laws of physics? Uh, no.”
  • And later, “Get off my ass… Sir. Get off my ass sir.”
• Yes, of course, it turns out that Culber came back to Discovery just in time to help take care of Stamets, who gets impaled. They get to declare their love for each other without either of them getting dead.
• I was pleasantly surprised to see them address something I mentioned before: Pike actually considers invoking his plot armor when dealing with the torpedo. Since he knows his fate, he reckons he can stay behind to nobly sacrifice himself by locking himself in with the torpedo. It doesn’t come to anything, since Cornwall ultimately councils him not to take the risk when his ship needs its captain, but I’m glad they acknowledged it.
• Yes, we get a good look at the D7.
• Pretty much everyone gets to be useful. Stamets helps build the suit. Spock guards Michael and sorts out how to make it work. Pike commands the Enterprise. Saru commands Discovery. Culber tends to Stamets. Tilly fixes the shields. Reno powers up the time crystal, Number One tries to defuse the torpedo. Cornwall saves the Enterprise by locking herself in with it. Po steals a shuttle (“Diplomatic immunity!”) and figures out how to destroy the drones. Nhan and Georgiou fight Leland.
• Leland’s death is a satisfying culmination of things that came before. Georgiou uses the device he gave her back in “The Red Angel” to transfer the Sphere data to the spore drive console, and when Leland enters the spore reaction chamber to get it, she magnets him to death much as Spock did to Control/Gant back in “Through the Valley of Shadows”
• Having Saru’s sister show up with a fleet of Ba’ul fighters was a pretty good reveal. Didn’t see it coming, but it also didn’t feel like a cheat at all.
• The Enterprise missing a big chunk out of the front is visually striking.
• Okay, that last scene where he’s shaved and gotten a haircut, Ethan Peck finally does actually look like Spock.
• I really liked the bit in Spock’s final conversation with Michael where he tells her that she taught him how to integrate both sides of his heritage, and that he thinks he won’t be able to do that without her. This is, I think, meant to explain why the Spock of the last third of Discovery (And, to a certain extent, “The Cage”) comes off as having a level of comfort in integrating his human and Vulcan sides which Spock would eventually show later in life, after his death and resurrection, but which he doesn’t really show in TOS.
• Despite my misgivings about the content of the epilogue, I do like the idea of not having Discovery or its crew in the last ten minutes, but instead telling the story from the point of view of those left behind.
• So last season, they closed on the reveal of the Enterprise and the original series theme played over the end credits. This season, they end on the Enterprise jumping to warp, and the end theme is actually a fusion of the original series theme and the Discovery theme. And the two work together really well.

So why am I unsatisfied? It mostly comes down to that epilogue. As I said last week, a lot of people have issues with Star Trek doing this whole prequel thing. They object to real violations of continuity. They object to imagined violations of continuity which don’t actually contradict anything real but contradict things they had made up in their heads and confused with canon. They object to things where they carefully adhere to the letter of canon by clever trickery. They object to the failure of Discovery to have its own visual style rather than slavishly recreate exact replicas of 1960s sets the way James Cawley and Vic Mignogna and the Axanar folks did. They find it problematic that a thing could happen over the course of a few months in 2257 that isn’t mentioned by any of three random starfleet crews a hundred years later during the course of the one hour per week out of a seven-year slice of their lives we got to see. I mean, how could Starfleet possibly have a working prototype of a soliton wave drive and then never mention it again. No wait, I mean a coaxial warp drive. No, wait. I mean a folded-space transporter. And how come we never see any duplicate-Earths in Picard’s time, huh? Wait, no, no one complains about those because those weren’t prequels.

Anyway. There’s some rejoicing that Discovery has “solved” the “continuity problem” by permanently removing the ship to the far future. I don’t per se object to having our story continue in the far future. But I do object to treating Discovery‘s setting as a problem to be solved. We didn’t need Spock to push Starfleet to classify everything about Discovery to ensure no one would ever speak of it again. “The spore drive technology was promising but never really panned out,” is good enough. We don’t need Spock to wear a blood oath to never mention his sister again. “Spock is kinda private about his family and doesn’t bring it up,” is good enough. Hell, I’m almost surprised they didn’t tell Pike at the end, “Oh by the way, we’re sending over an interior decorator to handle Enterprise’s refit. He’s really into art deco.” You know what is handled well? The mirror universe. People know about it. Not everyone. Those that do know they’re not supposed to talk about it. Some people, like Pike, know more than they’re inclined to say. We don’t need there to be a massive cover-up; a low key sort of, “Everyone who needs to know does, but we try not to encourage this being widely known,” is enough. (It helps that we don’t actually see how the USS Enterprise deals with the ISS Enterprise crew; Spock just handwaves at the end that it’s harder for barbarians to pass for civilized people than the other way around.). It actually fits with established continuity really well that the half-dozen regulars in the shows set almost a century in the future just don’t happen to know a lot about this time period, given that your standard Star Trek character is obsessive about some respectable aspect of early-to-mid twentieth century culture but generally never speaks of anything from the past two hundred years.

TLDR: If you’re the sort of person whose reaction to the ending was, “Thank God, now we don’t have to worry about them contradicting some real or imagined point from a fifty-year-old TV show!” you are Star Trekking wrong.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery: 2×14 Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2

Showdown time, I suppose. I am not overly thrilled with the pacing of last week’s episode of Discovery, but there’s an obvious reason for some of that which, frankly, played me like a fiddle. We don’t get the climactic space battle last week’s trailer seemed to promise; that’ll come tomorrow. This worries me a little because I think it suggests that we should expect the pacing to continue to flail a bit in order to accommodate everything the season finale needs to accomplish.

Everyone evacuates Discovery for Enterprise, which is now finally fixed, but Discovery knows it’s the star of the show and refuses to let itself be blown up. Michael reckons that the solution is to build a new Red Angel suit and have her tow Discovery to the far future so Control can’t get it. A new red signal leads Discovery to Xahea, where Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly reunites with her buddy the queen, who – I called it – works out a way to use her dilithium recrystalizing technology to power the time crystal, but with the caveat that the process would shorten the crystal’s lifespan, so Michael will be trapped in the future. All the named characters decide to stay on Discovery and go to the future with Michael except for Tyler and Pike, and maybe Hugh. Enterprise catches up with them near Xahea just a few minutes ahead of Control’s fleet, and everyone throws down for the big climactic battle.

It’s a little wheel-spinny. One last chance to get in some character development before an action-packed denouement, I guess. The main selling point of this episode is very straightforwardly that we get a good long look at the Enterprise, including our first look at the bridge, and it is predictably lovely. Though it’s consistent with the Discovery visual style overall, there’s also many more touches to remind us of the classic TOS design. The chairs look like TOS chairs. The conn has the familiar red alert lamp in the center. Some stations have those pop-up 3D viewmaster things. The elevators have handles you have to grab. Enterprise is also a lot smaller than Discovery. Most of the difference is down to Discovery’s extremely long nacelles. Their footprints are otherwise pretty close, but the shape of Discovery’s secondary hull gives it a tremendous difference in interior volume. In fact, Enterprise is smaller than virtually all the Starfleet ships in Discovery, which is consistent with the notion that Enterprise is already a fairly old ship (It’s more than ten years old in Discovery, which is probably not as old as the Shenzhou, which was already “old” four years after Enterprise’s launch. We have no idea what counts as “old” for a starship, really. US Navy ships have operational lifetimes mostly around 40 years, but they don’t go into space. NASA’s space shuttles were designed to last 10-15 years. The only number I can recall for Starfleet ships is Admiral Morrow in Star Trek III telling Kirk that the Enterprise was due for retirement because it was twenty years old, which doesn’t fit into any reasonable sort of timeline because the Enterprise was already older than that during TOS). This episode to a large extent does what the season premier carefully avoided doing: letting the gravity of the Enterprise take over the story. At the other end of the season, we had to keep it at arms’ length, but by now we’re confident enough in Discovery’s identity in this new postwar story arc that we can afford to let the Starship Porn carry us off for a bit before we finish up. So:

• The beginning sequence, where Discovery sort of rolls itself around Enterprise to get into docking position is super lovely.
• Discovery’s origami evacuation tunnels that unfold themselves into position. Joyous.
• When Pike grabs the handle in the elevator on the Enterprise, the Discovery crew all give it a slightly incredulous look.
• Michael gets a vision from the time crystal which prompts her to stop Pike from trying to blow up Discovery the old-fashioned way lest it raise its shields. She doesn’t explain how she’s so confident about what’s going on, but Pike gives her a haunted look that very clearly conveys that he knows what’s going down. It’s not the only time in the episode when he uses that look. This seems to be how they convey the effect that his own vision had on him.
• Xahea has a sort of large root or tentacle wrapped around it that is so large as to be not only visible from space, but to visibly project from the surface. So cool.
• When Tilly tells the bridge crew about Po’s dilithium recrystalizer, Saru’s expression clearly indicates that he thinks the idea is bullshit, but the he dials it back before saying anything, and just points out that it would completely reorient the space-economy.
• Po is wonderful. She’s got great chemistry with Tilly and good rapport with Reno, and she’s a bouncy goofy teenager who’s also a brilliant engineer and also, don’t forget, the queen of a politically important planet. And it seems she’ll be accompanying Discovery into the great unknown.
  • More of Discovery‘s glib avoidance of bullshit: when Pike realizes that Po intends to stay on the ship, he just waves it off as a “Diplomatic meltdown for another day.”
  • Also, Tilly tells them that Po is unwilling to share her dilithium technology because she doesn’t trust anyone to use it responsibly. But this doesn’t come up once Po arrives. TNG woulda spent all of act 2 with them trying desperately to convince Po to share her technology given the crisis. Voyager would probably have spent act 3 with them deciding to steal it and having a terrible comeuppance. But nah. Po is just like, “Well duh, of course I’m going to help you prevent the destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy; I‘m sentient life in the galaxy. Also this crazy plan sounds super cool and I get to build a mini supernova.”
• Discovery has been light on Star Trek‘s trademark “Babble something technical then explain it with a simple metaphor,” banter. But Reno gets to describe the method for charging the time crystal as being like getting a drink from a waterfall: it’ll work, but then you drown.
• Speaking of Reno, finally she gets to contribute to the plot directly. To charge the crystal in time, they have to take it out of its cage, and risk having Scary Visions of the Future. So Reno kicks everyone else out of the room and does it. She gets a clip of next week’s episode just as Michael did, the money shot of Enterprise being impaled by an unexploded torpedo. Her own haunted expression suggests that she saw more than the audience did, and I’m thinking that the direction this is going is that Reno will be the one who ends up removing or defusing the thing, possibly as some form of heroic sacrifice.
• The fact that Michael is about to become a new Red Angel and is the actual source of the red signals drops so offhandedly that it hardly counts as a reveal. Which is nice in its way, because it was so obvious by this point that it would’ve felt like a bit of an insult to the audience had they played it off like we were meant to be surprised.
• As always, Rebecca Romijn is delightful as Number One and Mia Kirshner is delightful as Amanda Grayson. She’s come a long way from being covered in goo on a Morthren cloning table.
• As Pike beams away, Georgiou reveals her true identity to him. His response? “What mirror universe?” and a knowing wink. I think Pike may be my favorite captain in the franchise by now. I’ll miss him.
• Also, there is absolutely no commentary on Georgiou remaining on Discovery. Doesn’t need to be. I mean sure, she’s evil, but what else is she going to do anyway? She’s got no real stake in this universe other than the fact that she’s fond of Michael.

The pacing is this week’s big problem. Other issues I have include:

• There’s some wheel-spinning with Stamets and Culber; they have a conversation but it doesn’t go anywhere. Culber says he’s going over to Enterprise when it arrives, but this is before anyone’s actually made the decision to stay with Discovery.
• Sarek and Amanda show up for one scene that… Really isn’t very interesting. They just show up, tell Michael that they’re proud of her, lament that they’ll probably never see her again, and leave.
  • If Amanda sees Spock on this visit, it happens off-screen. Canonically, Spock and his dad won’t speak to each other for another ten years. This has always been presented as due to Sarek’s disapproval at Spock’s career choices (Discovery has fleshed this out a bit: the position Spock turned down to join Starfleet was one Sarek had recommended him for over Michael. Which left Sarek guilty that he’d basically screwed over his adopted daughter for no reason), but Sarek claims their estrangement is by Spock’s request. That’s not per se a retcon, as it could fully well mean something like, “He told me never to talk to him again until I was willing to apologize,” or something.
• So Sarek knew where Michael was and what was going on because the two of them have a psychic bond from an old mind meld. This came up in the first season too. Fine. But Sarek and Amanda could apparently get a ship from Vulcan to Xahea faster than Enterprise and Control could get there. How does space even work? If they can do that, and Tyler can jet off to wherever at the end, why is “Control has taken out the subspace network” a problem? Why can’t they send someone in a shuttle to go call the cavalry?
  • Given the scale of the devastation during the war, this problem would go away if they didn’t present it as a communications problem but as a matter of Starfleet just not having many ship available that are combat-ready.
• Also, I don’t really care for James Frain’s Sarek.
• I don’t think nearly enough is made of the fact that apparently Discovery could’ve built a new Red Angel suit whenever they liked. Off-screen. Sure, it needs a time crystal, but for the first two-thirds of the season, the Red Angel was presented as having these almost inconceivable powers. If it were just a time machine, fine, but this thing also has, remember, comparable range to Discovery, an EMP generator that can fry a planet, and the ability to raise the dead.
  • This is the downside of Discovery‘s anti-bullshit attitude: there’s a fine line between “We’re not going to waste screen-time on the implementation details which, after all, were never really anything more than scientific jargon we randomly pulled out of wikipedia tossed in a blender,” and “All the stuff that should be hard will happen conveniently off-screen so we can spend more time with the kissing and punching.”
• Admiral Cornwall is on the Enterprise. She doesn’t really do anything; she’s just there.
• The viewscreen on the TOS Enterprise was a lot smaller than the wall-sized screens on every subsequent incarnation, and the one in “The Cage” was even smaller. I was a little disappointed that this version of Enterprise has the same wall-size display as everyone else.
• I feel like I missed something about how Pike could contact Enterprise but neither Discovery nor Enterprise could call for any sort of reinforcements because Control had taken down the subspace relay network. “Enterprise was the only ship in range” was an old standard, but last we heard, Enterprise was in drydock for major repairs. So… They finished the repairs, fine, but then happened to fly the ship out near the Klingon border to just hang out in case Discovery needed them?
• When Michael sees an “Everybody dies” version of the future, the direction treats Owosekun’s death as the Big Dramatic Money Shot of the scene, which just seems weird for a character I have never mentioned before because she has like 2 lines all season.
  • Similarly, Pike addresses each of the bridge crew personally in his departing speech, but it feels a little fakey when he’s talking about their grace under pressure and how proud he is of their performance to the five characters who who’ve spoken eight lines between them all season.
  • Fun fact: one of the Barely-Speaking-Part bridge crew is Nilssen, who is Airiam’s replacement. Nilssen is played by Sarah Mitich, who also played Airiam in season 1, but was replaced by Hannah Cheesman for season 2. So I wonder if the reason for the recasting was because they wanted to keep the actress despite killing off the character?
• Why do they need to take Discovery into the future? I get the argument, but last time they tried this, they had the option of moving the data into the Red Angel. If they can build a new Red Angel suit, they should be able to do the same thing and leave Discovery where it is.
  • This would be trivially fixed with “We can mostly recreate the suit but a few of its features are beyond us, so we’ve replaced the infinite quantum storage unit with a couple of SD cards.”
• Wish someone had mentioned “high energy photons” when discussing the dilithium recrystalizer so that Spock could remember it fifteen years later.

Next week will have a lot of heavy lifting to do. Some thoughts on that:

• Obviously, if the time crystal will fail once Michael goes to the future, we still need a way for her to create the red signals.
• Taking Discovery “out of the equation” still leaves us with the matter of actually defeating Control, which remains a threat even without the sphere data
• Could it be that Discovery’s fated abandonment as told in “Calypso” is because it’s been left somewhere to wait for a time traveler to catch up with it?
  • Also, small thought, could “Zora” be a corruption of “Sphere”, not unlike “Vedraysh” for “Federation”?
• The fourth minisode, featuring Harry Mudd, has not been relevant to anything this season. Given that two minisodes have already provided key backstory for episodes and the third seems likely to come into play next week, is “The Escape Artist” just an outlier, or will it come up somehow?
• Where’s Tyler off to? He returns to Enterprise with Pike in order to “make sure nothing like Control ever happens again,” but all we know about this plan is that it involves him being somewhere else during the climactic battle. If he’s planning to take down Section 31 altogether, I’ve got some bad news for him.
• Any chance L’Rell is going to show up and we’ll get a proper look at the D-7?
• With so little time left, I fear we might end the season on a cliffhanger. Might season 3 start with Discovery in the far future? That might shut up the people who continue to object to Trek’s resistance to setting anything post-Nemesis in the timeline.
  • Personally, I have zero problems with a prequel. Space and time are big enough that lots of other stuff can happen which never intersects TOS or TNG. I know a lot of people object to the existence of the spore drive in the first place since, “Why haven’t we ever heard of it before?” As if Voyager didn’t discover at least four new drive technologies every season and then never speak of them again. Even TNG had two Radical New Alternatives To Warp Drive Which Almost But Didn’t Quite Pan Out And Were Never Spoken Of Again. Given humantity’s bugaboo about genetic engineering, I don’t think we really need an explicit justification for “We never managed to come up with an alternative to splicing a human with a water bear to fly the thing, so we never productized magic mushroom technology. There’s still some researchers working on it, but their paths didn’t happen to cross any ships named Enterprise.
• I think it’s a good thing that Spock didn’t get a Time Crystal vision since Pike’s vision is substantially the same as what would his would certainly be, but I wonder now if Spock will have an unshown encounter with it, and the similarity between his and Pike’s visions will figure into Spock’s decision to kidnap Pike. Now that we’ve seen that Pike and Spock have such similar near-death experiences, there’s a neat symmetry between Spock stealing the Enterprise and going to a forbidden planet to save Pike and Kirk stealing the Enterprise and going to a forbidden planet to save Spock. It particularly ties into the notion of Pike’s Star Trek as a not-fully-formed prototype: Spock can only give Pike a limited form of new life, while he himself is fully reborn.

Next week: the big showdown. We can’t really expect Michael’s plan to go off as expected since even if you could make the episode length work, “Enterprise and Discovery fight Section 31 for forty minutes then Discovery disappears into the future forever” is not really a great plot. But how quickly will the plan change?

Well, now it is time, I suppose. On the one hand, this story element doesn’t go here; it’s the ghost of a future that falls outside Discovery‘s domain, and the implications will take some unraveling. But equally, it was inevitable. You just plain can’t tell a story about Christopher Pike without this hanging over it. You could not reasonably ask Discovery to avoid it. Perhaps they could’ve delayed it, but it is what it is. Before we get started, this ghost of the future is going to require an essay…

Just who is Christopher Pike? I guess that’s a question we ought to address. And the answer is a bit conflicted. On the one hand, it’s very easy to dismiss the question and just assert that he’s just Captain Kirk if he were played by Jeffery Hunter instead of William Shatner. But on the other hand, that’s a ridiculous assertion right on the face of it, because if you untangle “Captain Kirk” from “William Shatner”, what’s even left? There’s been attempts, to be sure. Chris Pine, James Cawley, Vic Mignogna (Who I’d be remiss in omitting despite the fact that I don’t wanna). Cawley has the best claim to be playing Kirk as something other than a broad caricature of Shatner, but his portrayal is still fairly thin. And besides, Pike is not simply a prototype of Kirk. Putting on my Faction Paradox skull-mask for a second, Pike is that precisely that which Star Trek chose to explicitly reject in order to become itself. And if Discovery at its heart truly is a vision of Star Trek as the place where the flawed work to become better and the broken work to heal, it was inevitable that Christopher Pike, Star Trek‘s first casualty, should come here.

That’s all very deep and fanboy, you might say, but come on, we all know he’s just Kirk with the serial numbers rubbed off. And yet. If you watch “The Cage” in its original version, the first thing you learn about Pike is that he’s seriously considering retirement. And the only canonical Pike story for fifty years is heavily oriented around the fact that Pike is a man who gives a lot of thought to other paths his life might have taken. He’s a man who’s considered other options.

Star Trek is often described, based on an early pitch, as a sort of “Wagon Train to the stars.” There was an early draft of the opening narration that played that up, emphasizing the Enterprise’s role in settling border and trade disputes. But really, Star Trek as it aired was far less of a space-western than the meme implies. Those space-western themes and motifs were progressively downplayed from the first pilot to the second pilot to the series proper. Even the episode that’s explicitly a western is stylistically and thematically far more surrealist and existentialist than it is a western. The “space western” feel is at its strongest in “The Cage”, and Pike is more far more cowboy than jobbing spaceman. Shatner plays Kirk in several modes over the course of the series, but “cowboy” is one of the lesser ones (It is a small but nifty point that we know Pike had horses as a young man. And while we know that Kirk, later in life, tried to retire to a farm to raise horses, that’s the specific life he rejected to return to Starfleet). (And I’m not saying Kirk is devoid of “cowboy” traits, but they tend to be magnified in popular discourse well above what’s actually in there.) They both feel drawn to fly off out into the great unknown, explore strange new worlds, but Pike approaches it as a cowboy: maybe an old soldier with some regrets in his past, who heads out west looking to start something new – Pike is looking for a place to settle down out there in space.

Kirk, on the other hand, is fundamentally a sailor, not a cowboy. The command of a starship is, unquestionably, Jim Kirk’s first, best destiny. That’s a lot less clear for Pike. Kirk is the sort of guy whose job defines him. He bristles at retirement, always looking for an excuse to get back out there. He’s not looking for a new place where he can settle down and build a new life. He’s the sailor who tells Brandy she’s a fine girl, but his life, his love and his lady is the sea.

And Jim Kirk’s single defining character trait is that he’s got a hyperdeveloped sense of responsibility (I hope Discovery locks in on this and gives us a path to see that this sense of responsibility is what prompts Spock to form such a strong bond to Kirk – that he reminds Spock of his sister). Pike is hardly irresponsible, but we learn from “The Cage” that the responsibilities of command weigh heavily on him. He doesn’t want to be responsible for the lives under his command. It’s not a natural fit for him. Where Kirk seeks out things to be responsible for, Pike longs for freedom from those responsibilities (This trait is utterly lacking in the Kirk of the JJ Abrams-verse, with the result that Chris Pine’s Kirk is pretty much a smarmy, entitled git. And I’m fine with this! So much of the characterization in the Abrams movies boils down to broad caricatures of the canon characters, I like having one specific thing we can latch onto and say, “Here is a place where the changes to the timeline have left a character superficially the same but have radically changed his character in very deep ways.”). This fits in with the notion that Kirk is a sailor and Pike is a cowboy: the life of a cowboy is one of solitude (Note also that Pike is a former test pilot, another solo gig), with only his trusty horse for company, while a sailor is always defined in relationship to a ship and a crew.

Kirk can not be Kirk anywhere other than in command of the Enterprise. When Kirk left the Enterprise for the Admiralty, he immediately began concocting plans to get back to it. Pike can be captain of the Enterprise, but he doesn’t have to. He could be a rancher in New Mexico, or a trader on Orion, or a teacher on a class J training vessel. Or Captain of Discovery. Kirk could never move on. Pike could. That makes Pike’s accident as revealed in “The Menagerie” all the more tragic: Pike was a man with possibilities, which are now denied him. This also sets the tone for the meaning of Pike’s ultimate fate. For a man like Kirk, living out his remaining years in a fantasy would be a cruel joke. Kirk could certainly sympathize with Pike in the sense that for Kirk, being rendered utterly impotent (heh) by a disability so profound that it stole even his ability to communicate would be the worst sort of hell. But Kirk would surely reject the offer to retire to a world of illusion. This isn’t speculation: we actually got to see Kirk have a go at retiring to an illusory world in the Nexus and ultimately reject it for not being real. But it’s clear that we’re supposed to interpret the end of “The Menagerie” as a good end for Pike. Pike’s burden is physical, Kirk’s is a control issue stemming from his all-consuming belief that he is responsible for every bad thing that happens in the universe (Indeed, after Michael, if there’s one character in Discovery who would seem to be most like Kirk, it’s probably Leland). For Pike, having his disability rendered non-burdensome (Importantly, Pike is not healed. Neither is Vina. What the Talosians offer them is not magical erasure of their disabilities. Star Trek calls what they offer instead an “illusion”, but it might be fitting to call it a kind of assistive technology) in the context of a constructed world serves to give him back what the accident had taken: a life of infinite possibilities. And for Pike, a life where he no longer has responsibility over the lives of other people is a life where his choices are freer and more his own. When Pike objected to the Talosians, his objections centered around being locked in a cage, on display for their amusement like a zoo animal. We know Kirk would object first and foremost on the grounds that the illusion, however nice, wasn’t real, but for Pike, the objection is not to the illusion, but to the cage.

How does this vision of Pike fit with Discovery? Imperfectly, as it turns out. Fleshing out Pike to fill the role of “Captain of a starship in a Star Trek series” necessarily involves a certain regression to the mean. So all the common denominators we’ve seen in Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway and Archer have to project onto Pike just to make him work in the role. He’s noble, he’s dedicated, he’s loyal, he’s determined.

But still. We can see that Pike isn’t married to Enterprise the way Kirk would be in how quick he is to abandon his own ship when it’s crippled. Pike’s first duty is to his mission, not his ship. And he does rub a bit against the established grain of captains in other ways. He’s hinted to have a much stronger spiritual side than any captain with the possible exception of Sisko, though this angle hasn’t really been explored since “New Eden”. He’s also extremely decisive, almost cavalier in his disregard for rules in the name of his mission. Though that’s as much a trait of Discovery overall as of Pike personally – this is not a show that embraces the TNG-era model of “The actual solution presents itself immediately and the bridge officers spend all of act 2 agonizing over whether or not it is ethically acceptable to do it.” Pike is the sort of man who believes that the rules must serve the underlying moral principles, and will break the former to protect the latter. And this is a point of contrast with wartime Starfleet, which fails to make that distinction and threatens to undermine their own principles in the name of victory.

But the main trait which Discovery adds to Pike is a big helping of survivor’s guilt. It weighs heavily on him that he missed the war, and that would seem to undermine my thesis about Pike lacking Kirk’s hyperdeveloped sense of responsibility. Still, though, the fact that Pike is uncomfortable at being kept out of the war points at something else: he is more at ease placing himself in harm’s way than other people. This would be reflected on Discovery by his eagerness to take on dangerous missions personally. Pike has a harder time than his franchise counterparts with ordering others to undertake dangerous missions, something which TNG once explicitly called out as the qualifying trait of a commander. At the same time, though, it reinforces the trend of Pike being defined first and foremost in terms of what he is not. He is the Enterprise captain who wasn’t in Star Trek and he’s the Enterprise captain who wasn’t in the war.

Years ago, while talking about JM Dillard, I mentioned her book The Lost Years, where I felt that the Spock’s feelings of betrayal at learning that Kirk had accepted promotion rather than returning to another tour on the Enterprise served as a metaphor for the wound inflicted on the audience by Star Trek‘s original cancellation, just as Russel T. Davies used the Doctor’s guilt and pain over the Time War as a metaphor for the wound inflicted on Doctor Who‘s audience by its 1989 cancellation. I think we can similarly view Pike’s absence from the Klingon War as a metaphor for Pike’s absence from Star Trek. So it seems Pike is fated to remain a character whose life is defined by a multitude of possibilities denied him.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×12: Through the Valley of Shadows

Last Week’s Discovery centers itself around a big action set-piece. It hits a couple of sour notes, but none so sour as the previous episode’s, “Non-vanilla sex is strictly for evil folks.” While there’s a lot to recommend it, though, its high notes are a bit muted and there’s a bit more bullshit than I’m used to from this show in a way that is reminiscent of ’90s Trek.

As predicted, Leland gets possessed by Control, though it actually happens in the cold open of this episode, not when he got eye-stabbed last time. Control/Leland claims to have seen Dr. Burnham’s body years ago, and proposes that the Red Angel is a clone or impostor or something, possibly planted by Control, so Section 31 should go steal the Sphere MacGuffin to make sure she doesn’t trick Pike and Michael into handing it over. We learn that Michael’s mom tried to save her family by using the just-barely-completed Red Angel suit to jump back in time an hour and warn them before the Klingons showed up. Instead, she got zapped 950 years into the future, and is now anchored to that time, unable to remain in other times for very long. They’ll explain later. Or maybe they won’t. The future’s trying to pull her back even now, and Discovery only has roughly the length of an episode of a CBS All Access Streaming Original Series before the force field holding her will fail. Discovery tries to dispose of the Sphere data by dumping it into the Red Angel suit, and also comes up with a plan to hold on to Dr. Burnham while they send the suit off to the end of time, but Control/Leland interferes, very nearly murders everyone, destroys the suit’s Time Crystal, and steals half the data before Dr. Burnham and the now-useless suit get zapped back to the far future.

• Control is kind of fantastic here. It possesses Leland because while it’s very convincing as a hologram, there’s nuances it can’t get down, and Leland is specifically a good choice because he’s ruthless and willing to do morally questionable things in the name of the greater good, so when Control uses his body to order people to do morally questionable things in the name of the greater good, they won’t find it out of character.
• I think part of Control not being “fully sentient” yet is that it is still bound by its original mission, so it, very honestly, tells Leland that being possessed by an evil computer that wants to take over and control the universe is not a betrayal of his oath and values, but the fulfillment of them, because Leland is a terrible person and his values are “bringing a dangerous universe to heel at all costs.”
• As a villain, Control is very Palpatine. He manipulates Georgiou and Tyler by being very careful to always pursue its own agenda in a way that aligns with what Leland’s agenda ought to be. It wants the sphere data, so it orders Tyler to steal it. But the story it gives makes a compelling case that it’s dangerous to leave the data with Discovery. When Tyler ultimately refuses, instead of arguing, Control/Leland backs him up, saying that he made the right call under the circumstances. Control then manipulates Georgiou pretty expertly, trying to get her to steal the sphere data and blow up the Red Angel. If Control’s story about Dr. Burnham being an imposter were true, Georgiou would be protecting Michael by killing her; if he’s “wrong”, Michael’s mother is competition for Michael’s affection, which is itself motivation enough for murder.
• Critically, neither Tyler nor Georgiou trust Leland/Control, but it’s not like they fully trusted him when he wasn’t possessed either. They also both seem to intuit that something’s wrong with him once he’s possessed, but again, it’s not a matter of them being too dumb to realize he’s acting oddly – even if there’s something wrong with him, they haven’t been offered any alternatives that make more sense than the orders he’s giving them.
• More good examples of Discovery setting up an idea ahead of using it: They plan to use dark matter to enhance the transporter in order to beam Dr. Burnham back into normal space-time so she won’t keep getting yanked back to the future. In any other Trek, this would be some out-of-nowhere technobabble. But in Discovery, there’s an analogy already set up: the recent resurrection of Dr. Hugh Culber. He’d been reincarnated in Magic Mushroom Space, but couldn’t return to regular space since his new body was made out of Mushroom Space Matter. They recover him using a form of “organic” transporter that the Mushroom People (long story) had built on Discovery to convert him back into normal matter.
• Dr. Burnham knows about Pike and warns him that he wouldn’t like to know his future.
• The ultimate reveal of why the Red Angel chose Spock to communicate with? Yes, because he’s half-human and half-vulcan, but there’s one other element: Spock is also dyslexic. Again, good setup-payoff on Discovery; they introduced that several weeks ago as part of Spock’s baggage – the Vulcan educational system effectively misdiagnosed it as an common childhood disorder that Vulcan children grow out of with only minimal intervention. Because of being unstuck in time, Burhnam was only able to communicate with someone who had the particular combination of logic, emotion, and learned experience with processing mis-ordered symbolic information.
• They are not evoked by name, but Leland’s possession by Control has heavy shades of Borg. A VFX shot shows him being pumped full of nanorobots. He shows enhanced speed and strength and a resistance to phasers. We also see him “hulk out” a few times, with dark lines appearing on his face when he thinks no one is looking. He’s actually erupted in full blown techno-bits sticking out when Tyler confronts him. Also, Control rather emphatically almost-but-not-quite tells the restrained Leland that resistance is futile.
  • One imagines this sticks in the crawl of a certain kind of Trekker, as, “Nobody knew about the Borg until TNG Season 2! And that technology is way too advanced for a TOS prequel” I answer that:
    • We’ve already established by way of visual motif that Section 31’s technology is not simply more advanced than the rest of Starfleet, but it’s more advanced specifically to the point of being TNG comparable. This is quietly conveyed in a way that’s clear but doesn’t call attention to itself: Section 31 uses commbadges rather than communicators, the UI on their computers looks more similar to LCARS, and they’ve got TNG-era hologram technology.
    • This whole “nobody knew about the Borg until TNG season 2” thing is nonsense. Elaurian refugees had been living among the Federation for decades before TNG, and the Hudson family were doing research on the Borg a decade or so before Voyager. What we actually see is just that the crew of the Enterprise doesn’t know about the Borg, which is consistent with them being effectively cryptids at the beginning of the TNG era – stories about them have made their way to Starfleet, but no formal contact, so they’re mostly known only to fringe researchers.
    • Starfleet has encountered Borg nanotechnology (Without the details of its provenance) before, back in Enterprise, so it’s entirely reasonable as a callback that Starfleet’s evil branch that is cool with using stolen evil technology might have repurposed some.
    • Also, shut up.
• I think it’s nice that we open up with Michael waking up in sickbay thinking that her mother had been a near-death hallucination because that was a more reasonable assumption than the truth.
• When Dr. Burnham doesn’t want to speak to Michael and Pike chooses to respect her wishes, Michael doesn’t go around his back. Later, when she expresses to Spock how important it is that she see her, Spock agrees to help her… By talking to Pike, not by going around him. In any other Trek, she’d have decided she knew better than anyone else, snuck in to see her mom, donked something up in the process and made things way worse.
• The actual shining character bits in this episode are actually between Dr. Burnham and Evil!Georgiou. I guess we do have to concede that, yeah, Georgiou’s a legit antihero now. Burnham reveals that she’s witnessed timelines where Georgiou sacrificed herself to protect Michael, and even speaks to her, “mother to mother”, which legitimizes Georgiou’s maternal connection to Michael far more than she’s actually earned it yet.
• There’s a thing Star Trek fans always complain about where computers are kinda magic, particularly, in that copying data and moving it are depicted as pretty radically different. That happens here. When Pike orders the sphere data deleted, the data “protects itself” by partitioning itself in memory using encryption in a dead language and it all sounds like nonsense, but apparently they can still get rid of the data by moving it to the Red Angel. Which sounds like complete bullshit, except that it’s 2019 now, and they use the magic word: the Red Angel suit computer is a quantum computer, and actually, yeah, quantum computers work like that. The act of reading data out of a quantum superposition is destructive, so okay, it’s actually plausible that transferring data between two quantum computers would be fundamentally different from deleting it.
• Spock quotes Hamlet. A slightly ironic choice because Hamlet’s main character flaw is that he sits around angsting over what he should do rather than taking action, and one of the delightful things about Discovery is the way they avoid the common TNG wheel-spinning of “We spend 3/4 of the episode debating the ethical implications of whether or not it would be right to save those kitties from that burning building.” It’s incredibly rare in this show for anyone to be paralyzed with indecision.

And some points of contention:

• The whole plot thread of “Dr. Burnham is cold and doesn’t want to talk to Michael because after seeing her die in hundreds of timelines, she’s moved on and only cares about the mission,” thing is tedious and smacks of exactly the sort of “People lie about and conceal their feelings for no good reason because CONFLICT!” bullshit that has plagued Trek forever.
  • That said, it does tie into Discovery’s theme of people who are broken and need to heal.
• Much as I appreciate the execution, the explanation for why Spock can communicate with the Red Angel is a little too “Disabilities are actually superpowers” for my liking.
• You know who we haven’t seen in a while? Tig Notaro’s character, a gruff engineer they rescued from a ship that crashed on a dark matter asteroid the first time they went chasing the red signals, and who seems like she might be hiding something. Like, she had a major role about 6 episodes ago, and the story continues directly into the next episode, but she’s gone. Seemed like that character was going somewhere.
• Hugh gets reinstated off-screen between episodes. Seriously, they mention that he hasn’t been reinstated in the previous episode, and mention that he has in this one.
• The excuse they give for their mistake about the Red Angel’s identity is that mothers and daughters have the same mitochondrial DNA. But… Hadn’t they identified Michael as the Red Angel because of a brainwave analysis?
• I know I said that Section 31’s technology is more advanced than Starfleet’s, but it’s hard to justify the capabilities of the Red Angel suit without something more than this. We know it can:
  • Travel in time.
  • Travel in space with similar range to Discovery‘s spore drive. That is, distances that would take decades to reach by warp.
  • Produce an EMP strong enough to paralyze a global civilization.
  • Transport a church full of people halfway across the galaxy.
  • Store an effectively unlimited amount of data.
• But apparently it can’t survive a shot from a phaser rifle through a force field.
• The church thing. Burnham zapped a church full of refugees halfway across the galaxy on a trip to World War III. Discovery met the descendants recently. She did this to establish whether or not she could change history with the suit. Turns out she can, but for some reason she can’t prevent Control from getting the sphere data. There had better be a reason for this that isn’t just “Grandfather paradox handwave!”
• Having Leland hulk out on the bridge when everyone is looking away was a bit too much.
• Tyler gets shanked the moment he discovers Leland in Borg-mode. We used to call this “The Worf Effect”, where an alien baddie casually tosses Michael Dorn across the set to demonstrate that he’s so formidable. But it doesn’t sit especially well that Leland dispatches him so easily given that Tyler is a Klingon, while Georgiou holds her own against Leland in hand-to-hand combat for several minutes
• There are other people on that ship besides Tyler, Leland and Georgiou. We see them in the background. No one else questions any of this? Tyler, we learn in the epilogue, is able to drag himself to an escape pod before Leland’s ship flies off. No body noticed him crawling out of Leland’s office with a giant gut wound? I suppose it’s possible Leland killed the rest of the crew before beaming down for the big fight scene, but if they turn up alive later, I’m going to be annoyed.
• Leland’s ship does not have a name. This annoys me greatly.
• No one seems especially interested that the sphere data apparently has intelligence and agency all of its own and can manipulate their computer. In a plot arc about an evil computer.
• “Perpetual Infinity” is not an especially good title.

Things to look out for in the future:

• I think it’s as good as confirmed that Michael will be donning the Red Angel suit later. The whole “Oh we mistook it for you because you have the same mitochondrial DNA” bit isn’t a legit explanation: it’s part of a setup. When Georgiou admires the suit, Burnham warns her that it’s DNA encoded so that only she can use it. Yeah. They’re fake-establishing that only Dr. Burnham can use the suit in a way that leaves a big bright shiny loophole that Michael can probably use it too.
• Also, Dr. Burnham doesn’t know anything about the red signals. No one mentions the obviously telegraphed explanation that the Red Angel they caught is from before the signals were sent.
• Implication, by the way, is that it’s the future version of the Red Angel with whom Spock mind-melded, not Dr. Burnham, since he saw the red signals in his vision.
• This could also explain the suit’s abilities, if it gains them after being repaired in the future using the sphere data. Though moving a group of 21st century humans to Terralysium is probably the most impressive thing the Red Angel does, and that was explicitly an early mission.
• They’re not setting up Leland as Borg Patient Zero, are they? Please don’t let that be what they’re setting up.
• The gap between the seasons gave us a series of mini-episodes called “Short Treks”. So far, one of these has been directly plot-relevant, giving the backstory of Saru’s home planet, which became relevant a few episodes back. Another, “Calypso”, is the finest piece of Star Trek ever made, and is set about a thousand years in the future. Which would place it a few decades after Gabrielle Burnham’s anchor point 950 years in the future, though in a timeline where humanity has survived. Significantly, that episode featured a fully sentient benevolent AI. Is there a connection here? I’m reminded a bit of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which seemed to be edging up to the idea that the appearance of a sentient AI in that time period was inevitable and the best humanity could hope for was to guide its evolution along a benevolent path. Perhaps Zora is presented as a benevolent alternative to Control.

Looks like next week will be a bit of a downshift. If the trailer is indicative, it’s a bit of a, “Control has gone into hiding so Discovery goes back to investigating the red signals for want of anything better to do,” episode centered around the Klingons. I don’t especially like the Klingon stuff, but they may surprise me yet.

And we’re back on track, I guess. Last week’s Star Trek Discovery is more of a high note than last week’s in many ways, and it does a lot to recast and redeem things the few things I hadn’t liked this season.

So our quick recap: Discovery being crippled right next to the evil base of the evil all-powerful AI while being on the run for harboring a fugitive is quietly resolved off-screen, and Adorable Goofy Ensign Tilly loots Airiam’s corpse to find a file which reveals Michael to be the Red Angel. Of course, given that everything seemed to be building up to Michael being the Red Angel, the fact that they reveal this as the cliffhanger before the opening titles means that she’s totally not.

Quasi-Antgonist Section 31 Captain Leland and Evil Former Empress Georgiou come over for shocking revelations and plotting. Turns out that the Red Angel suit is actually experimental Section 31 technology, and what’s more, it was Michael’s birth parents who built it. This is a big deal because a couple of weeks ago, we found out that Leland was responsible for their deaths, and it turns out that what that means isn’t anything so banal as him having killed them For The Greater Good, but rather that he was in charge of the mission and didn’t do a good enough job at protecting them.

Since it seems like Skynet is chasing the Red Angel through time, Section 31 has a technobabbly plan to capture her, and Spock comes up with the bright idea that if they just up and murder Michael slowly and painfully, the grandfather paradox will require the Red Angel to show up and save her. And this works! Except that at a key moment, Skynet shows up and murders Leland. The revelation we end on, though, is that the Red Angel isn’t Michael, but her mother.

So, the good:

• I’ve developed a very low tolerance for wheel-spinning bullshit in TV. So I like that the mystery behind Project Daedalus is revealed immediately — soon as they show up, Leland explains that Project Daedalus was Section 31’s time travel program.
• I was worried where they were going with Section 31. Section 31 has always been a bit of a millstone around Trek’s neck ever since it was introduced in Deep Space Nine as Starfleet’s Evil branch, serving as a betrayal of Trekkian optimism with a pragmatic “But sometimes we really do need a Lawful Evil branch of crypto-fascists to keep us safe.” It seemed at first like Discovery was backing away from that and depicting Section 31 as being genuinely good and genuinely believing in the Starfleet philosophy, but operating in areas where right and wrong were more ambiguous. However, with the reveal that Leland was responsible for the deaths of Michael’s parents on top of the whole “Attempt to puree Spock’s brain” thing, it was starting to sound like, no, that was just a line and they really are Grimdark. But they’ve turned it around again now: their most evil acts were under subversion by Skynet and Leland’s culpability is of the “It was my duty to protect them and I failed,” sort.
• Apparently Admiral Cornwall was a therapist before getting into Being In Charge of Starfleet. I mentioned weird career paths last week. This one is weird and delightful.
• Also delightful is her advice to Hugh, who, you may remember, recently left his husband on account of he doesn’t feel connected to his old life ever since he died. She tells him that love is a choice, and one that’s made continuously. Reminiscent of the Doctor’s assessment that, “Love, it’s not an emotion. Love is a promise.” It’s also very cool that she talks about the life he lived before his death in the past tense, acknowledging, without being prompted, that he is a different person from who he was before he died. Everyone else has tried to play that down: you’re the same person, you just grew a new body. But Cornwall acknowledges what Hugh himself feels: that he’s not the same person he used to be.
• I started out this season expecting Georgiou to be an antagonistic character, but I’m increasingly confident that she’s on the level. She legitimately seems to care about Michael, whose counterpart had been Georgiou’s adopted daughter.
• So much of “conflict” in TV shows centers around people obstinately refusing to believe things or talk about things. But in Discovery, people actually do talk about their issues and believe each other, but this doesn’t neuter conflict and tension; it just relives it of the bullshit factor. Take Spock and Michael. Years ago, Michael broke little Spock’s heart by saying some very cruel things to him because she thought their closeness put him in danger. Spock has held a grudge ever since. But Spock knows and has always known (Or at least has known for a long time) what she was doing and why she did it and that she didn’t mean it. But the fact that he knows didn’t make it hurt any less. His sister called him a half-breed freak. It doesn’t matter that she didn’t mean it; she still did it. He’s only able to forgive her once they’ve both gone through experiences where both logic and emotion failed them— for Spock, mind-melding with the Red Angel, and for Michael, learning the truth about her parents.
• Nhan apologizes for airlocking Airiam and is deeply moved by her eulogy. Up till now, Nhan had come off as being kind of a jerk. Not evil or anything, but brusque and detached. It’s good to see that she’s not so cynical as to completely compartmentalize her role in a crewmate’s death.
• Hugh, Georgiou, Pike and Leland each try to abort the mission when it looks like Michael is going to die for real. Not a single one of them is actually willing to let her die. Who is? Spock. Spock holds them all at gunpoint on the presumption that Michael’s dying flails are her telling them not to interfere. It has to be Spock who does this because anyone else would be sacrificing Michael for the Greater Good – Spock’s the only one who can do it out of pure faith that things will work out.
• A nice sort of Discovery thing to do: after setting up a complex science-fictiony explanation of how the Red Angel appears in order to protect Michael because of the Grandfather Paradox, it turns out that actually it’s just a mother protecting her child. Aww.
• The Red Angel suit is powered by a Time Crystal. What a wonderfully non-bullshit explanation. No one even bothers to explain what a time crystal is.

And the less-good:

• Okay, there’s no place for it in the narrative and it would screw up the pacing. But we open on an intercut between Airiam’s autopsy and her funeral, with no mention of how Discovery managed to destroy Control and Section 31’s base or convince the rest of Starfleet that they hadn’t just up and murdered the covert ops division, and this seems like a dramatic weak-spot.
• Pike’s reluctance to consent to Michael’s plan to commit controlled suicide is in character, but leaves a bad taste in my mouth over how quick he was to order Airiam’s death.
• Also, “He’s willing to ignore the rules in the name of the mission” seems to be becoming Pike’s main personality trait. Which is a shame because when they first introduced him, there was a kind of otherworldliness to him, a sense of him being very balanced between reason and instinct, that I was hoping would be his main trait.
• Leland is killed when Skynet takes control of a retinal scanner and stabs him in the eyes with it. This is super gross and yucky. Why does the retinal scanner even have murder-spikes built into the eyepieces?
• Georgiou flirts with Paul and claims that his mirror counterpart was pansexual (as Evil Georgiou herself seems to be), which continues Trek’s unfortunate tradition of linking pansexuality with evil, and also is just a weird scene overall. I think maybe the idea here is that she’s actually trying to help here by making Hugh jealous and therefore rekindle their love? Or maybe it’s just that she’s looking for a three-way with the two of them. It’s just weird.
  • Are you allowed to have sex with your own parallel universe counterpart? Is that masturbation or incest?
• To reframe, “good” Paul Stamets is gay. He even asserts that he would be gay in “every universe” he cares to imagine. Evil Stamets was pan. This is the first time any Trek has ever used the term, and they draw a very explicit connection here that it’s Okay To Be Takei, but nonbinary sexuality is associated with being from an unimaginably evil universe.
  • This is not a mitigation, but for the sake of completeness, there are several instances in the franchise where this whole “Their mirror universe counterpart is bi/pan” thing seems to have been intended to mean “Actually everyone’s at least a little bit bi, but in the prime universe, they’re too repressed to acknowledge it.” In fact, Georgiou’s flirtation leads off by claiming that Stamets is more brilliant than his counterpart, but also more neurotic. This makes me view their shitty views on sexuality in a frame of them trying to communicate the message, “Evil is liberating because you get to do fun things like have threesomes, some times with aliens.”
  • This whole thing is so damn boneheaded that I think I would’ve hated this episode had the rest of it not been so strong, and if you don’t have a high tolerance for Star Trek Being Boneheaded About Sexualities That Aren’t Extremely Vanilla And Heteronormative, this would probably be cause to ragequit.
• You know, I still haven’t seen anything in the relationship between Pike and Spock to justify why Spock takes the tremendous risk he does ten years later to let Pike retire to Talos IV.
• One thing I’ve never been crazy about in Discovery is the cinematography. Too much shakeycam and weird angles.
• When Saru sings at Airiam’s funeral, that’s clearly not his voice.
  • (Except that technically, it is, since Doug Jones really is singing.)

And wild-ass speculations for the future:

• Well, Airiam seems to be dead in a permanent sort of way I guess, but Leland is still on the fence. We hear his voice on the intercom after his murder, which is probably Skynet faking it as it did with the Admirals, but there’s something odd about his eyes when he falls down after being stabbed. Maybe those weren’t murder-spikes but rather some kind of cybernetic implant and now he’s possessed?
• I’m thinking that Airiam’s file that led them to identify Michael as the Red Angel isn’t a complete red herring. As of the end of this episode, Discovery and Section 31 have the Red Angel suit, which means that she could still end up donning it for some of the Red Angel’s appearances. Possibly Michael is the Red Angel associated with the Red Signals, while her mom is the one that appears without the signals.
• Oh shit, they’re setting up a reset button, aren’t they? Michael goes back and saves her parents and paradoxes the entire show out of existence and ensures no one will ever wonder why Spock is now up to 2 siblings he never talks about. (I am holding out faith that Discovery will avoid this. But only just)
  • Sybok seems to have just been erased from canon altogether. There’s a strong attitude in Trek that “Star Trek V didn’t happen it wasn’t very good,” which upsets me greatly not because I think it is good, but because if you’re going to use that as your excuse, there’s a lot of Trek that has to unhappen.

So yeah, I’m liking this one a lot. Things are coming to a head…

---

Stuff I forgot to say last week…

• Airiam mentions that she’s disabled her helmet so that she will suffocate when ejected into space. How? Why did the virus controlling her motor functions let her do that? Why didn’t it just un-disable it? Why do their space-helmets have a “disable” feature anyway? They could’ve easily sorted this out by having her helmet break in the fight with Michael.
• Speaking of helmets, I guess Nhan’s suit produced human air rather than Barzan air? It’s not a plot hole or anything, but that seems like design flaw. I’d think you’d want to adapt the suit to the occupant’s needs just for the added safety. Again, if you need the excuse to keep her sidelined, have Airiam break her helmet after ripping out her implants.
• So… It’s a bit awkward now that I think about it more that of the regulars we’ve killed off, there’s:
  • Hugh, half of the first regular same-sex couple in the history of Trek
  • Not!Evil Georgiou, the first Malaysian character in Trek
  • Gabriel Lorca, Mirror Universe Guy
  • Airiam, cyborg
• Admittedly, half of those people did not stop being regulars just because they died, but two of them are minorities relative to the target market, and one of them has a disability (Two if you count Lorca’s photophobia). Despite its first season taking place during a war, Discovery has a pretty low body count, and it’s skewed toward people who aren’t able-bodied white men (Though they did kill off Pike’s asshole science officer in the episode that introduced him).
• Though the upside of this is, of course, that Discovery has far and away the most diverse cast Trek has ever had, both among the fictional diversity of its characters and the real diversity of its actors.

 

I should’ve started doing this nine weeks ago, as it would’ve given me something easy to write about. The long and short of it is: I really dig Star Trek Discovery. At least, as of season 2. Season 1 didn’t really grab me that much, I think because it was a war story. Season 2 is not a war story so far, and I hope it won’t become one. Discovery is, to me, Star Trek unabashedly being what it was really meant to be all along but often lost sight of: a story about the work of utopia.

See, some people don’t like Star Trek because they think it’s too clean and sanitized and utopian. But the thing about the world of Star Trek is that it is not utopian in the sense of being set in a utopia; it is utopian in the sense of being oriented toward utopia. The fundamental thing that makes something Star Trek is not that the world or the people are perfect, but rather that they view perfection as a reasonable thing to shoot for. They are aiming at utopia, without cynicism or even pragmatism. A Star Trek person goes into a situation not asking, “How do I win?” or “What’s the safe thing to do?” but rather, “If this were a perfect world, how would this situation play out?” In Discovery, even antagonistic characters are, for the most part, trying to be better — you don’t have conflict based around people being arbitrarily jerks to each other or people being greedy or people being shortsighted or people being assholes; rather, they’re people who have conflicting goals, and conflicts aren’t resolved by holding someone down and forcing them to do the right thing, but by finding a solution that gets everyone what they want. Hell, even during last season’s war arc, the Klingons’ basic motivation was outright stated as them wanting to be better Klingons rather than having their own identity subsumed by the Federation’s, like, niceness.

So, quick recap to get you up to speed: Discovery is a science vessel whose main claim to fame is that it’s got an experimental new engine which lets them travel through “magic mushroom space” (To make a very long story short, the superstructure of the entire multiverse is made of a kind of dimensionally transcendent fungus. Yes, that is a lot to swallow. Hey, remember the episode of TOS where they meet a giant floating space-Abraham Lincoln? Trek is weird again) to cross great distances instantly, and the special effect for it is unspeakably beautiful. Their current mission is to investigate the “red bursts”, a series of unexplained signals linked to a being called the “Red Angel”, now known to be a time traveling human from the far future wearing a high-tech suit, whose indirectly-pursued agenda seems to be linked to stopping the destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy at the tentacles of what look to be Sentinels from The Matrix.

(There appears to be some color-symbolism going on as well; the angel and its signals are red, while the sentinels are blue. It may or may not be relevant that Discovery itself has a blue color scheme, while the brief look we got at the interior of the Enterprise showed lots of red.)

We left off last week with Discovery on the run from Starfleet. Section 31, Starfleet’s cartoonishly evil covert ops branch, has framed Spock for murder because they want to use Terran technology to puree his brain, since he mind-melded with the Red Angel. Captain Pike (yes, that Captain Pike) has defied orders to protect Spock and his sister Michael.

Let’s unpack that a bit, for the sake of people who have some Trek background but not Discovery:

• Captain Pike (the captain of the Enterprise from TOS’s original pilot, best known for the “Beep once for yes, twice for no” meme) is the acting captain of Discovery. The cliffhanger at the end of season 1 was Discovery being summoned to rescue the Enterprise after it suffered a catastrophic system failure that will have it in drydock for the rest of the season.
  • I didn’t mention, but I should get it out of the way: Enterprise was not involved in the war, ordered to remain out in deep space and continue its five-year mission. Pike has pretty bad survivor’s guilt about this.
• Michael Burnham, basically the main character of Discovery, was adopted by Sarek and Amanda after her parents were killed. She and Spock were once close, but they haven’t spoken in years.
• “Terran” refers to the Terran Empire an evil version of the Federation from the mirror universe. The penultimate arc last season revealed that Discovery’s previous captain, Gabriel Lorca, had been replaced by his mirror universe counterpart and was manipulating Discovery’s mission in order to get home. Discovery returned from the mirror universe with the Terran Empress, the counterpart of Captain Phillipa Georgiou, Michael’s former commander, who’d died in the inciting incident of last year’s war. Evil Georgiou now works for Section 31 as a consultant, but may possibly have legitimately turned over a new leaf from “evil” to “antiheroic”. She’s apparently getting her own spin-off.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery: 2×09 Project Daedalus