A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aw man, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New costumes? Meh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damn, I think I kinda like this show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Our 70%-of-the-season cliffhanger is an episode that is simultaneously high-stakes and low-key. Weird.

Yeah, this is a slow, talky episode where most of what happens is speeches. And what a wonderful arrangement of speeches it is, too. Because if I could summarize the A-plot of this episode, it falls to Michael Burnham to persuade the Federation and its allies to pursue peace with the mysterious 10-C rather than attack, and she actually does this despite breaking Book’s heart in the process, and that is very good Star Trek, but the B-plot is that Starfleet orders a starship to go to therapy with David Cronenberg and that is possibly the most wonderful sentence I have ever written.

The B-plot is the more interesting plot, even if it isn’t really likely to direct events going forward – it pretty much resolves itself to a new stable equilibrium. The A-plot sets the stage for the rest of the season: Discovery has to stop Book and Tarka from carrying out their plan to blow up the BSTiS, probably by proving that the 10-C didn’t really mean it and/or would respond to such a thing by nuking the entire galaxy out of existence. Actually, I’m a lot bothered by the fact that the argument the Federation makes for approaching the 10-C peacefully is based entirely on it being the Morally Right And Logical thing to do. I mean, yes, that’s very Star Trek. But given the stakes, why isn’t anyone also raising the pragmatic point that provoking a godlike extragalactic power might not end well for you?

But that’s okay; it felt really good that the vote, while not unanimous, went overwhelmingly in favor of peaceful contact. It feels like a kind of rejection of the “This is how democracy dies” scene from Star Wars. It felt good. I was kind of worried the grimdark would get a temporary victory here and fear would win in the short term.

The big deal for the continuing plot is of course what goes down with Tarka and Book. Tarka has developed a weapon that will destroy the BSTiS, but it’s an evil weapon, one that damages subspace and might backwash in a genocidal sort of way to the 10-C. In fact, it’s the same kind of weapon the Son’a used on the Enterprise in Star Trek Insurrection in order to prove how nasty they were, though it’s not like this carries that much weight given how pretty much everyone has memory-holed that movie by now. Tarka also reveals his secret agenda. It is a nicely weird one. Him and his boyfriend deduced the existence of an utopian parallel universe – a kind of anti-mirror-universe I guess – while enslaved by the Emerald Chain (That scar on his neck, I completely failed to remember last time, is from the same kind of implant Book got while imprisoned last season), and he wants to steal the BSTiS’s power source in order to go there, hoping it will reuinite him with the boyfriend, who did not escape the Chain. That is some Superboy Prime plotting, man. It’s over-the-top and I’m not crazy about it, but I appreciate the weird. Will the probably-dead boyfriend manifest at the end to stop and/or absolve him? In 90s Trek, I’d expect that; less sure now.

So when the vote doesn’t go Tarka’s way, he steals the itty bitty prototype for a new magic mushroom drive (Namecheck to Aurelio, who I reckon they might have wanted to give this plot to in an early draft, since they’d established his familial connection) and him and Book take off to go start a war with extragalactic godlike aliens all on their lonesome.

Yes, incidentally, Book’s ship can magic mushroom now. It looks pretty cool and I wish they’d composed the shot of it happening to give us a closer look. It’s been a long time since we’ve had the really cool version of the mushroom-space VFX.

I think they’ve made a positive stand to convey that Book is acting from a place of pain, but that his motivation isn’t vengeance. He doesn’t want to avenge his family. But he is desperate, irrationally, uncontrollably desperate, to ensure that no one else goes through what he did. Again, this is good progress from a franchise notorious for not having any idea how to be “deep” other than by ripping off Moby-Dick. “Book is obsessed with hunting his white whale and is risking self-destruction for it” would be a perfectly normal thing for Star Trek to do here, but they go for something different here. I like it, but I don’t feel like they’ve quite given it enough room to breathe – Disco’s perennial problem. And fifty years into the franchise, I think they really needed to put a lot more work in to sell that we’re not chasing the whale yet again. I’m not optimistic about either of them surviving the season after this – Tarka looks like he might need to be Big-S-Stopped and Book feels like he might be lining up for a “Redemption equals Death”, but if Discovery really is going to be a show about healing, I’ll remain optimistic.

This brings us back to the B-plot. Zora works out where the 10-C live, but doesn’t want to tell the crew, because she doesn’t want them getting themselves killed by the, again, extragalactic godlike aliens. So… They send her to therapy. With, as I said, David Cronenberg. Starfleet has a prohibition of “fully integrated AI” in Starfleet systems, and thus if he concludes that she is indeed a fully sentient AI, they will have no choice but to…

Remove her from Discovery and put her in a synth body where she’ll have all the rights of any other sentient being, but won’t be a starship. Oh flutter my little heart. If this were TOS, Zora would be a threat, and in the end they’d have to destroy her, and maybe, maybe Kirk would say something touching at the end about it being sad there wasn’t another way. If this were TNG, everyone would want to kill her, but Picard would make a big, dramatic speech, and she’d end up sacrificing herself so that they didn’t have to deal with the fallout. But this is Discovery so killing Zora was never on the table at all. The stakes were never her life; that would be monstrous. In fact, the only one who raises the possibility of killing Zora is Zora herself, when she offers up a self-destruct button in a show of trust. What’s at stake is whether she can be permitted to live rent-free in the brain of Starfleet property.

One of the interesting choices in this segment is that it’s Paul who fails to take Zora’s side. To a certain extent, he ends up in the role by default; they need someone to be the antagonist – or at least the prosecuting attorney – and it wasn’t going to be Saru, Hugh, Gray or Adira. Paul’s feelings about Zora link back to the fact that he, more than any of the others, still has raw memories from Control: he almost died in the final battle. This hasn’t been an ongoing part of his story, but it was there at least – we had a scene last season of Detmer lashing out in her own pain to needle him over his injuries.

The macguffin that resolves the plot is a little weak and vague: they find Zora’s subconscious and see that it’s full of love, and apparently the existence of a spontaneously generated subconsious is enough to convince Kovitch (or really, I think, to give him the excuse to formally document what he already wanted the answer to be) that Zora doesn’t count as an AI so much as a novel life form. There’s a vague implication here that while AIs can develop emotions and AIs can dream, emotions can be an emergent behavior, but dreams can’t.

The other thing that really spoke to me is that Zora ultimately does decide to disclose the location of the 10-C. Not because she’s been ordered to, or because she is willing to risk the crew, but because of trust. She wants to protect them. She loves them. But part of loving them is trusting them, even with this. She was willing to give them the power to kill her, but she wasn’t willing to give them the power to kill themselves, and she finally comes around on this and realizes that part of living together with the people she loves is trusting them to make their own decision.

And we close out Zora’s “trial” with a final reveal from Kovitch: if Paul hadn’t come around, his recommendation would not have been to remove Zora, but to remove Paul. Once we accept that from the outset Zora was recognized as a sentient life form, the question wasn’t simply, “Should we let Zora stay in Discovery,” but, “Should Zora and Discovery stay together.”

All the feels. All the feels.

Happy New Year!

Another Frakes-directed episode and, much like his last Disco, it’s got a bit of a retro vibe to it. Discovery takes on one of Trek‘s oldest and dearest trope: the “We’re stuck in a deadly void and have to solve a puzzle to escape” episode.

But, of course, this is Discovery, so the solution isn’t a simple, “Let’s science the shit out of this.” The scienceing is basically just perfunctory at the end: the actual meat of the solution is to heal. Because, holy crap, this is Zora’s character focus episode, and it is wonderful.

It’s also a focus episode for Gray, which is also lovely. And Gray’s angst has little to do directly with his recent reincarnation. That still seems strange, but I like that they aren’t just retreading Hugh’s plot arc, even if it feels remiss that we haven’t seen those two really talk about this shared experience. No, Gray’s angst in this episode is simply that he’s not Starfleet, and thus, he doesn’t actually have a job on the ship. He’s a student, doing, I assume, distance learning at the Trill School of Being a Guardian, and that’s a fine career path that he can, in fact, do perfectly well while living on Discovery with his partner, it does mean that he’s left just kind of hanging around doing nothing when Shit Goes Down. So Gray finds a place not by bonding with the other person on the ship who has the experience of having died and come back, but with the other person who has the experience of being a ghost that got uploaded into an artificial body: he councils Zora when the combination of her new emotions and the sensory deprivation of the void impact her concentration.

And, of course, when Gray helps Zora find peace, she proves to have the solution to the problem of being stuck in a rapidly shrinking void that is dissolving their ship, feeling their way back along the path that led them into this Weird Zone of Darkness and Nothing. Our obligatory “shoot fireballs over the bridge set” sequence comes only because it takes long enough to get this far that the ship is substantially eaten when it gets to the bumpy turbulent bit on the way out.

I wonder to what extent Discovery from now on is going to revel in teasing the circumstances that might have led to the ship’s fate in “Calypso”. We had just a bit of that last season – I think – with the possibility that Book’s jump sans warp core might leave the ship lost and stranded. Here, we have an even closer setup, with the entire crew sans the captain stored in the pattern buffer and the possibility that they might be stuck there until Michael personally orders them recovered. You could imagine a disappointing ending where Michael doesn’t survive the escape but Zora is unwilling to accept this and just drifts aimlessly for centuries, refusing to restore the others without her orders. Instead, of course, Michael puts her faith in Zora, ordering her to bring the crew back on her own, so they can limp home for repairs while Michael recovers from her own injuries. One of the more interesting small bits is that when pressed on whether she trusts Zora, Michael demurs, saying it doesn’t matter, but later she confesses her faith in the computer. One way you can read it is that Michael doesn’t trust Zora until she’s halfway through being cooked alive. That would be a normal sort of Star Trek way for things to go, but I think a better read here is that Michael does, in fact, trust Zora, even at the beginning, because this is a show about hope and healing. Rather, Michael refuses to give a direct answer before because she recognizes that Zora is struggling, and wants her to make her own decision for her own reasons rather than feeling pressured into it by the weight of the crew’s faith in her. So she tells her, but only after the decision has already been made.

The other big thing of this episode of course is that Book tries to magic mushroom them out of the void, but gets zapped in the brain, causing him to hallucinate his dead dad. And because this is Discovery and not any other part of Star Trek (including season 2 of Discovery), he copes with this in as healthy a way as possible rather than keeping it to himself and becoming erratic and weird and behaving dangerously. And we get to see in a very explicit way, that whether ghost dad is a “real” ghost or just a projection of Book’s subconscious, he’s wrong. He pushes Book on the thing that’s become a point of tension between him and Michael: that Book wants to leave Federation space and look for clues among the couriers. Sorry, Ghost Dad, but the failed mushroom jump attempt left some plot sparklies in Book’s brain which proves that the mysterious creators of the BSTiS are really from outside the galaxy, and thus the couriers would know nothing – all four quadrants are apparently pretty well-connected now, but the Federation is still limited to just the one galaxy even in the 32nd century (This is a minor disappointment to me; I was really hoping for extragalactic Trek set in the 26th century), so Book’s courier contacts wouldn’t be much help. From this, I think, we should equally challenge his departing jab, that Michael will choose Starfleet over him, and he would do well to distance himself from her. Instead, Book dismisses the apparition taking only what is helpful: the faith that this ghost could mean his other lost loved ones still exist in some form.

Other things:

• There are references to Enterprise and Voyager experiencing similar subspace disruptions, but it’s not entirely clear to me whether this refers to current incarnations of those ships – the first reference to a 32nd century Enterprise – and the BSTiS itself, or if they’re referencing historical ships which also encountered many Weird Space Things in their own times.
• No Tig Notaro, and I am sad. Again, “The ship is being eaten and we need to squeeze out a little more time to escape,” is the exact sort of problem where you want your snarky chief engineer reminding you that she cannae break the laws of physics. But on the other hand, it would probably ruin the very heartfelt scene to have Reno show willingness to pair off with her besties to get Scotty’d into transporter-space in a dangerous survival gambit.
• The internet is, of course, banking on Ridiculously Powerful Extra-Galactic Species 10-C being the Kelvins, based on the compelling evidence of (A) they are the only extra-galactic species we have ever heard of before. I don’t have strong feelings about this. Evidence (A) does seem pretty darn compelling, given the law of conservation of canon, but it would be a little disappointing in light of the assertion that 10-C is far more godlike than the normal crop of godlike entities. The Kelvins were technologically advanced, sure, but they were still basically just Technologically Advanced Aliens – their warp drive was thousands of times faster, but it was still warp drive; they could turn people into little foam block dodecahedrons, but they did it with a machine, not a finger-snap.
• What I lit on, though, is that when they determined how to navigate through the void, Bryce (I think) likens it to sonar. It’s a tiny, tiny little thing, and yeah, probably it will indeed be the Kelvins who show up in the season finale, but adding together sonar with the VFX for the anomaly, I can’t help but desperately cling to the possibility that 10-C might be related to the whale-seeking probe from Star Trek IV.