A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

So… I was pretty drunk while I watched this episode so my analysis might be a little… Weird. Also, I think there was something wrong with my speakers, but possibly I was just drunk.

But okay. This is a super duper competent episode. But just… Why? I mean why? The A-plot of this episode is one of those “Alien planet has a stupid justice system and the crew has to show the backwards locals the value of a justice system based on 20th century US Jurisprudence” episodes. Standard fare for ’90s Trek. And it worked fine in the 90s, and they do an entirely adequate job this time, but, I mean, it is the year of our lord 2021 and I don’t know why we are fucking bothering.

The central thrust of the idea here is that they have to evacuate a nicely weird sci-fi colony (It’s a bunch of asteroids tethered to each other), populated “mostly” by a random one-off species from Enterprise. But the colony has an old Emerald Chain tradition where six people are kept in life sentences for comparatively minor crimes (mostly) to be “examples” to keep everyone else in line, and Michael and Book have to go save them for the sake of Higher-Minded Starfleet ideals. And they do… Fine I guess? “Michael checks Starfleet Regulations For a Loophole Where She Is Legally Empowered To Grant Asylum” isn’t quite the Must See TV they think it is. The Incoming Plot Complication is that one of the Examples is a legit murderer – most of them are in there for stuff like jaywalking or petty theft, but this one guy is basically Jean Valjean if he’d offed the bishop in the process of stealing the candlesticks. It is probably a nice change-up that the guy is just a normal sort of desperate person who escalated to murder in a stressful situation and regrets it rather than some more dramatic form of murderer. His whole “I’m going to martyr myself here as atonement for my crime,” thing feels a little weaksauce though. He isn’t sacrificing anything for any kind of greater good; he’s just committing suicide because reckons he deserves to die. I don’t know. Near the end, we get some very limited moralizing from Michael about the colony’s unjust legal system, and she reminds the colony leader that they’re going to be refugees wherever she dumps them, so maybe don’t be assholes about imposing your own stupid laws. I think she’s supposed to come off sort of Exodus 22:21 (“For you were refugees in the land of Egypt”), but instead it just feels like she’s being petty and putting him in his place.

Elsewhere in the plot, more therapy, which is good. But this time it’s Hugh as the patient and Kovitch of all people as his therapist. I guess Kovitch is a therapist-spymaster-academy commandant-possibly-secretly-running-the-Federation-from-the-shadows? Anyway, the whole idea that Hugh is burning himself out in his desperation to help take care of people is solid, and I like Kovitch’s analysis that Hugh has a savior complex because he feels guilty over the fact that hardly anyone else gets to come back from the dead. I really hope he bonds with Grey over this. Neither Grey nor Adira are in this episode, and Grey’s presence last week was perfunctory at best, yet again showcasing Discovery‘s lack of space to let its ideas breathe.

The other half of the plot – this one is very plot-light, honestly – is that Stamets has to partner with a cocky Risan genius to further his research into the BSTiS, which we have now learned must be artificially created and intelligently controlled. They name-check a few of the godlike aliens who aren’t responsible for it, mentioning the Metrons of all people, and the Caretaker from Voyager, and the Q, who they say have not been in touch for hundreds of years. The conclusion they come to at the end is dangerously close to, “Actually the amount of godlike involved in doing this means that we may be dealing with an actual god.” Book reasonably objects to calling the sort of being that would destroy his planet “god”. We get a mention of Aurelio, though he doesn’t appear in person. I have no idea whether his actor could feasibly show up for filming given that he’s got a serious medical condition and we’re still in the middle of a global plague. It seemed at first like the conflict in this episode would be him and Stamets not getting along, but once they actually meet, they get along just fine, possibly because the scientist knows exactly how to manipulate Stamets’s obsessive side. Dangling the possibility of creating their own Tiny Little Swirly Thing In The Engine Room for the purposes of research completely blinds Paul to the fact that they’re putting the ship at risk with the power involved. Instead, much of the conflict is between the scientist and Saru, of all people. The scientist comes off as charismatic and manipulative, but he does stop short of the usual Trek cliche of the reckless scientist who puts everyone in danger – I like that he starts right out by insisting that he likes himself too much to risk destroying the ship he’s on. The culmination is him subtly conscripting Book for an as-yet-unspecified subversiveness. He’s got some kind of baggage himself, hinted by the scar on his neck. Shit, is this those flue gill aliens from the first season of TNG? I will not accept them as our Big Bad.

I mean really, why do we even need a Big Bad? Discovery has kind of sucked at big bads. Lorca… I guess he was adequate, but he suffers from the Modern Era Disney Villain problem where they need the villain to appear heroic until the middle of the third act, so they don’t actually have any time to be properly evil. Control never managed to make a convincing argument for the level of existential threat we were told it was (Indeed, it’s only Picard that makes Control a sensible villain: I can’t believe Control could wipe out all sentient life. But I can believe Control might be able to summon Robothulu). And Osyraa was a joke of a main villain. Especially given the cultural situation in which we find ourselves, I feel like a natural calamity would speak to me a lot more than Yet Another Godlike Alien (Admittedly, given Disco‘s penchant for dredging up and rehabilitating old discarded Star Trek proposals, a revisit of The God Thing would be extremely on-point). But it’s not a problem per se; the other seasons did fine by having a perfunctory villain to provide a structure while what was really good about the show was elsewhere. So maybe we’ll see the same here.

We finally get Reno, and… She’s just kind of there. Gets one good snip about how close their experiment came to killing everyone which… I mean at this point, if you want me to believe they were in immanent danger, you should really do a little more than they did. The camera stayed right-side-up and there were no fireballs. How am I supposed to know this is serious?

Also, why was this even a thing? Why did they have to run the Little Swirly Thing in Space experiment on Discovery while in the middle of a rescue mission? Couldn’t this all have been done at Federation HQ (or preferably, somewhere nice and safe in the middle of nowhere) or at least waited a few hours until Discovery wasn’t using half its power supply relocating an entire planet?

The one properly interesting thing we get is Michael learning that Zora has gained the capacity for emotion, and being a little disturbed by this. First time someone has actually shown any awareness of the fact that it’s kind of weird and concerning that our computer has come to life. I like the fact that everyone is cool just rolling with it, but at least a little acknowledgement that this is a strange state of affairs, please?

In all, a competent episode, but not a particularly compelling one. Or maybe that’s the rum speaking. No complaint about the lack of Reno this week, but I hope next week they actually give her some worthwhile material.

Discovery is a flawed show in many respects. But every once in a while it’ll do something – usually not even a huge something – that knocks it so far out of the park that I completely forget about the myriad ways in which this show infuriates me. Michael agreeing to euthanize Saru. Pike taking the time crystal. All of “Calypso”. On the other hand, there are moments which make me grind my teeth and do the shouty Internet Man-child thing and insist that my childhood has been RUINED FOREVER.

It is rare that it does both in the same episode.

So, very good, from my lips back in time to the writers’ ears: Book’s big cathartic scene last week doesn’t solve his mental health problems. It helped, but his grief is still a process and he’s still got work to do, some of which he does over the course of this week’s “Just character stuff” subplot, having a therapy session with Hugh. Hugh seems to have aged tremendously since last season, but hey, haven’t we all? Hugh also hints at some of the baggage he’s carrying, which seems to be something other than the whole, “Was dead for a bit” thing. This was real, real good. Everything that the show about healing needs to show us about the work of it. (I do consider it a bit of a misstep how everyone keeps saying how beautiful Kweijan was. Kweijan was pre-warp at the time of the burn; no one should really know much of anything about the place, and it sounds cheap when everyone reflects on what a nice place it was)

Meanwhile, political intrigue! I said back in episode one that I don’t really want political intrigue in my Star Trek. This episode hints a lot around the edges at what a West Wing-flavored Star Trek might be like. I’m not entirely averse to such a thing. Just… Not while it’s also trying to be a Fun Adventures in Space Show. They want to do a spin-off about Federation Politics? I’ll give it a chance. This is thematically great. Once again, we’ve got people who aren’t bad and who aren’t pursuing bad ends; it’s just that what’s right for each of them is in conflict. The Ni’Var President is the best politician character in all of Star Trek, and she’s better than most politician characters in all of fiction. The reveal that she leaked her own political bombshell to the person she was going to drop the bomb on, in order that she could set up Michael and Saru to defuse it is fantastic. Also, I am so glad to have been right about the romantic chemistry between her and Saru last season. (The president’s name is T’rina, for what it’s worth, which sounds like the name of a character in a joke about Star Trek alien names and apostrophes, like when Stephen Colbert met his Romulan counterpart, who was also called Stephen Colbert, except, “I spell it with a KH and three apostrophes.”). So: Ni’Var wants an escape clause that would let them leave the Federation whenever they felt like it at no cost to them. T’rina knows this is too much to ask and would be politically impossible for the Federation to grant, but she needs the support of the isolationists, and can’t afford to show weakness by listening to a Federation compromise. The Federation President (Can’t hold on to her name. I think it’s Laura? But probably with a KH and three apostrophes?) knows that while a full-on escape clause is too much, the Federation needs to do more to reassure member worlds that it isn’t going to step on their autonomy and that they’ll have recourse if the central government goes off the rails again (The backstory to Ni’Var leaving the Federation was that immediately prior to the Burn, they’d been pressured by the central government into dangerous research and felt their safety concerns weren’t being taken seriously), but her coalition depends on her projecting an uncompromising position of strength through unity. She’s right that if Ni’Var gets its escape clause, everyone’s going to want one, and then what you’ve got isn’t so much a Federation as a social club.

So the President’s solution – and if the focus on this episode were different, I could easily imagine the episode ending with Martin Sheen explaining what he just did and why it worked to Dule Hill – is to contrive a reason for Saru and Michael to attend, so that they can be the ones to basically get both presidents to admit, “Yes I am willing to compromise, but I can’t be seen to do it with her,” and then solve the problem by proposing the actual compromise themselves, as an independent third party.

Of course, this requires you not think too hard about the fact that the Federation’s uniformed service which we have explicitly been told is only nebulously distinct from the civilian government these days is the alleged “third party” bringing the compromise to the table.

It’s not as bad as all that, I guess. The actual proposal is to create an independent third party to oversee the relationship, with the authority to, I assume, penalize the Federation or release Ni’Var from its member world obligations. I don’t know, they don’t go into details because that would be boring. Now, it’s here we get to my one big problem with the episode, which you can easily see coming a mile away, because it is, point of fact, an entirely logical outcome of pieces that have been in play since the very beginning: there’s no cheats, no idiot ball logic, no last-minute-ass-pulls. And it still burns.

So, logically, who is going to be in charge of this independent body that will arbitrate between Ni’Var and the Federation? Who doesn’t have a clear legal stake one way or the other? Okay, that’s asking way too much, but who is at least legally on paper equally beholden to both parties?

Yeah.

Michael Fucking Burhnam, who must be the absolute center of the entire fucking universe in all things. Forget the Big Swirly Thing In Space (Which gets just the briefest mention this week to remind us that everyone is very stressed out about it, even though it has not actually hurt anyone since it ate Kweijan. It’s not like I want more planets of adorable child actors and beautiful wildlife to get squished by a big swirly thing in space, but if you want to sell me on the scope of this threat, it really ought to do some threatening) – nothing has more gravity in the 32nd century than Michael Burnham, who is apparently the only current dual-citizen of the Federation and Ni’Var (I can just about believe this. Vulcans aren’t big into living far from their homeworld, with most Vulcans having to physically visit home every seven years, Vulcans generally consider starfleet a “safety school”, and things had been rough for relations between Ni’Var and the Federation for decades, so yeah, I can buy that there weren’t a lot of Vulcans offworld after the burn who retained their Federation citizenship), and thus uniquely suited to this role. Can’t have something important happen in the galaxy without Michael.

Super nice to see Saru get a date though. I really dig that. The only other example I can think of where they depicted romance between two different species neither of whom was human is Neelix and Kes, which I think everyone agreed was weird and gross. Anyway, that was well-crafted and logical and character motivations all made sense and this would be just about the perfect plot except that the fucking need to make Michael the center of the universe will not be denied.

T’Rina’s apartment has a nice view of Vasquez Rocks. That rock formation really gets around. Also, there’s a brief mention of J’Vrini’s fate from last week, which sounds a lot like the Ni’var version of jail is a life sentence in Time Out. Michael’s mom will be her warden, excusing her from ever having to show up on the show again this season.

But wait, there’s a whole third plot to this episode, and it’s pretty great. Adorably Goofy Lieutenant Tilly and Adorably Awkward Ensign Adira take a bunch of cadets on a training mission and it goes badly and people die! Yay!

No, seriously, this is a pretty good plot. And I guess Kovich is in charge of the academy for some reason? Are they building up to a reveal of what the hell his job actually is? Anyway, this plot is really the first piece of Star Trek that is clearly and directly addressing the pandemic. The pandemic certainly influenced season 3, in how it affected what they could film and you can feel some influence on the themes, but really, season 3 does very little to lean in on pandemic or lockdown themes – they should be a natural fit for the Post-Burn world, and those ideas are present, but the show chose not to focus on them, possibly anticipating that audiences at the end of 2020 would have little appetite for it. But here, we actually take it head-on: the first class of cadets are all people who have lived their entire lives in the sci-fi equivalent of pandemic lockdown. And a hundred years into the burn, all their instructors kinda have too. They’ve basically forgotten how to live among people who are culturally (and in many cases biologically) different from themselves- they’re from cultures that aren’t cosmopolitan. At Federation HQ, you’ve got all these different species interacting, but some of the cadets have never even met another species before. They don’t make a point of it, but I think it’s relevant too that at this point, most members of Starfleet have probably lived their whole lives in space, and won’t know how to relate to the experience of coming from a place where there’s a majority race. This is basically the sci-fi version of “Oh shit we’re going back to in-person schools and the children have gone feral!”

I can relate.

I’m glad they didn’t reveal in the end that the whole thing had been a training exercise after all. And I’m glad Adira got to invoke some of Tal’s past lives – tbh the fact that Adira is joined is something that has had so little relevance outside of being a vehicle for Gray’s resurrection it feels negligent. I am unclear what happened there when Adira gets stuck in the ice for a bit. They’re talking about the horror of Plasma Lightning, and then something and then ice is trying to eat them? Is this parasitic ice again? Tilly has a gun that magics seat belt webbing into existence.

The monster…. Man, I have to believe that they filmed this episode with a completely different idea of what the monster was going to look like. I mean, they describe it as a colony life form and “the jellyfish from hell”, and it shows up and… It’s just a sort of bear thing? Reminds me a bit of the twilight monsters from Zelda. But more than that, the monster is possibly the worst CGI monster I have seen in Star Trek in the past ten to fifteen years, and I am including at least some of Enterprise in that. Why?

The culmination of all of this of course is that everyone works together to save Adira, and then later everyone works together to save Tilly, and they remember to explain that there’s a reason personal transporters won’t work which perhaps would have been better placed half an hour earlier in the episode where it could justify why they had to trek through the ice planes of death rather than tap their badges and instantly reappear on the other side of the mountain. Instead, the explanation only comes when they get to “We can’t beam up to the ship as soon as we’re out of the valley but instead need to wait for the length of a dramatic but poorly rendered CGI fight scene while the ship locks on to us.” I don’t really know what the deal is with personal transporters. They established in “That Hope is You, Part 1” that they can zap you from site to site on a planet without coordinating with a ship or programming destinations ahead, and people use them in Federation HQ as a replacement for stairs, but on actual away missions, they seem oddly reluctant to use them in favor of walking through large expanses of danger.

So important lessons are learned about working together, and the Tellarite (I assume he’s a Tellarite. Don’t think they say, and his makeup does not look like any Tellarite makeup we’ve seen before – tbh he looks more like an Ogron than anything – but come one, the classic Tellarite makeup was so embarrassing that we all knew they weren’t going to revisit it. He does look quite a lot like Jenkom Pog on Prodigy, so I assume he’s a Tellarite) learns not to be racist because the Orion boy is really the son of a martyred political activist. That seemed like a bit much, but whatever. The real punchline here is that Tilly’s leaving Discovery to go be a teacher.

This arc was done very well and feels entirely earned. I have a little bit of a misgiving that it’s happening to Tilly, given that last season it seemed like she was really thriving as Saru’s XO and was integrating herself into this new world well. Maybe that’s why it makes sense for her to be the one who’s ready to leave the nest and be part of “proper” Starfleet, while her crewmates remain in this weird kind of annex, being held at arm’s length from the rest of the fleet? Either way, they did right by this arc. It never really was all that convincing that Tilly was ever laser-focused on the road to the captain’s chair and more than Spock was (Q&A’s misguided assertion that he is notwithstanding), and I think Trek could do with a lot more of, “People accept and are good with the idea that not everyone’s career path has to be oriented toward the Best Destiny of Starship Command.” I had hoped that was where they were going with Michael last season, but obviously the show couldn’t let her escape her own gravity. I like Tilly, but as long as she’s going to be hanging around Federation HQ to pop in from time to time, I’m not going to miss her on the Discovery itself, where her role was mostly just to be adorably awkward.

Now, ahem, we are four damn weeks in. Where. Is. Reno?

Discovery is really getting the hang of being on-point thematically. Other aspects… Well, we’re working on it.

We don’t do much to advance the overall plot this week, but we do deal with a lot of the fallout from last week’s character work. I generally like Discovery’s more stand-alone episodes, so this is nice even if the stakes are a bit… complicated? But with short seasons, it’s hard to really do this sort of thing while simultaneously giving due time to the massive season-spanning plot they’ve decided to have, and pacing is, as I have bored you all many times with now, not Discovery’s strong suit.

This episode reminds me a lot of season 2’s “New Eden”, another episode whose plot was somewhat self-contained and which continued the season arc in a largely indirect way. Though that one had Detmer doing donuts in a starship, which is a point against “Choose to Live”. “Choose to Live” has some nice matte shots, and they keep the camera right-side-up for the whole episode, though, so it’s better than nothing.

Our A-plot gets the Qowat Milat back to their Picard depiction as an order of warrior nuns who swear themselves to lost causes, rather than last season’s oddly random decision that the Qowat Milat of the far future mostly do ritualistic doctoral thesis defense. Gabrielle Burnham is back, and this is not milked for Drama! and Conflict! the way you might expect. Michael and her mom disagree, but there’s never that much tension between them. Honestly, Michael’s relationship with her mom is one place where Disco is weird about how muted it is emotionally. Keep in mind that Michael’s mom disappeared and was presumed dead when Michael was a little girl; she only recently found out she was still alive, then lost her again, and now they’re stranded in the far future and her mom’s become a Romulan Warrior Nun; I would be okay if they had Michael get emotional about this.

The whole thing where it turns out that the antagonist isn’t a “bad guy”, just someone whose goals, while reasonable, put her at cross-purposes with the heroes, is exactly the kind of conflict I think Star Trek should be exploring, and resolving it with a, “Hey, wait, if we stop fighting for a moment and everyone just behaves reasonably, we can find a solution that works for everyone,” is exactly the sort of conflict resolution I think Star Trek should be exploring. The major weakness of the plot comes from the idiot balls, and even there, that feels like it’s down mostly to the perennial pacing issues. Michael is sort of arbitrarily and uncharacteristically resistant to the idea that J’Vini is pursuing a noble goal in a way that reminds me of her being just kind of arbitrarily a dick about the religious beliefs of the Terralysians. If they went somewhere with this, it would be okay, but they don’t really. You might expect that this boils down to Michael feeling abandoned by her mother – that her mom is siding with her Nun Sister over her Starfleet Daughter. Tilly’s speech to them about missing her own shitty mom plays into that, but feels out-of-place in the episode-as-filmed because the conflict between the Burnhams is so muted. I assume that this was trimmed down from a draft that centered the conflict more. The fact that J’Vini’s actions have gotten another Qowat Milat sister killed (Which is itself pretty gross; this character exists for no reason other than to die, and they don’t even milk that death for anything. The one interesting thing she does is reassure Tilly that her adorable goofiness doesn’t make her look incompetent) barely seems to register; it has no impact on Gabrielle Burnham’s determination to risk everyone’s lives to take J’Vini in alive, nor does it seem to be much remembered at the end. Again, with Michael’s underwritten and inconsistent motivations: at the end, she requests leniency for J’Vini, given her motivations. But when they hand her over to Ni’vari justice, Michael instantly jumps to being indignant that they would dare let Ni’var handle the enforcement of law against a Ni’vari citizen for crimes one of which is the murder of another Ni’Vari citizen. In fact, Michael assumes that the Ni’Var government is going to just let J’Vini off the hook entirely, which, again, two people died, and one of them was Ni’Vari. (Mercenaries do not count, because reasons). It feels like there was meant to be a character arc here for Michael that ended up on the cutting room floor. Michael again has this frustration at the Federation President’s politicing, and I think we’re meant to see Michael in the wrong here, but the show isn’t using the language of television to convey that properly, so I’m conflicted between the idea that Michael’s own control issues are blinding her to the bigger picture and she needs to learn to defer to the president’s judgment (This is clued by the fact that, just like two weeks ago, the president knows the names of the dead officer’s family), and the idea that the president is a political schemer who has lost sight of being Good and Just and Noble in the face of Realpolitik. I’m hoping it’s the former here, because Michael learning to grow and change and improve is a better, more personal journey for this story than another rehash of, “Politics bad! Action good!” that genre shows like to indulge in. The show does seem to want very much for us to accept that letting the Qowat Milat take the lead on the mission and letting Ni’Var handle criminal proceedings against J’Vini is a case of “This is wrong, but we have to accept it because of the delicate political situation.” And I don’t like that interpretation, because Ni’Var has a strong claim here. We are of course – particularly if “we” are American, which, given what Paramount has decided to do with the distribution model of Discovery, we absolutely are – meant to view the Federation in the analogous role to the US Government, and think, “Well obviously if a rogue member of a foreign armed force killed a US servicemember, the US would be the one to bring them in and bring them to justice; there is no negotiating on this point, and any politician who let the foreign government handle it instead would be terrible,” and not at all imagine outselves as analogous to the Ni’Var government here. If you do, you might notice that if an American went rogue and murdered a foreign servicemember and also a US servicemember while trying to escape, there is no way in hell we would allow them to stand trial in a foreign court for that.

There are shades of “11001001” in J’Vini’s motivations too – the whole “I went on an interstellar crime spree and killed a man rather than ask for help” angle. They do a better-than-average job of justifying it in her case, though: not relying on the lazy “I didn’t ask because you might have said no,” of the TNG-era, they give us justification in that she can’t even admit to the existence of this species, because of the whole, “Their blood is worth its own weight in their blood,” thing. And I like the angle that she needs the dilithium not to wake them, but to move their moon-ship if the anomaly gets too close: to her, this is a lost cause: she doesn’t realize that they even can be brought out of hibernation. It still feels forced, but it’s not nearly as bad as a lot of the, “We could’ve solved this in thirty seconds if we’d actually asked,” plots that Trek has relied on over the years. Of course, they do solve it in thirty seconds once Michael realizes enough of what’s going on to wake the sleepers. Who we do not meet or anything.

Meanwhile, in plot B, almost nothing happens. Stamets and Book go to the Ni’Var Science Institute to talk about what I guess we’re calling the “DMA”, for Direct Memory Access Digital Millennium Copyright Act Dark Matter Anomaly. I shall continue to call it the Big Swirly Thing In Space. This plot does not do much of anything at all; Stamets explains his theory, the Vulcans and Romulans consider it, and then – in much the same way as the last time the Ni’Var Science Academy got involved – they don’t do shit, and the president of Ni’Var intervenes and solves things herself. Remember what I said before about it being good that Tilly was getting therapy instead of resolving her mental health crisis via a Big Cathartic Set Piece? Well, turns out that what Book needed was… A Big Cathartic Set Piece. The president very clearly comes up with this whole plan specifically because she wants to help Book, but she leverages it to solve Stamets’s problem, by using a mind-meld with Book to get him his catharsis while simultaneously disproving the Primordial Wormhole theory. I don’t approve of the mental health angle, but I do appreciate the way the puzzle pieces fit together. Book identifies the core of his survivor’s guilt being that he reckons there must have been some clue he should’ve seen. Stamets is looking for the key piece of evidence for his theory. The president ties these two up in a bow by using a mind-meld to establish an absence of evidence: there was nothing for Book to have seen, which means that Book couldn’t have saved his family, and also the tachyons Stamets’s theory hinges on weren’t present. It’s very clean. It’s a bit less satisfying that it seems like maybe the running plot here is going to be “Stamets comes up with an explanation for the BSTiS and it is disproven.”

Also, the Ni’Var science academy meets on a floating platform over a mountain. Discovery is somewhat better than previous incarnations of Trek about giving us the tiny little scrap of justification for its weird Star Trek nonsense. Here I am, about to point out how goofy it is that the Ni’Var Science Academy meets on a floating platform overlooking a mountain range.. And they all go into a meditative trance. Okay. That’s fair. They have their science meetings somewhere serene and picturesque because a major part of their process is quiet, peaceful contemplation. A zen garden would be more efficient, but the Ni’Var Science Academy probably had some deep-pocket donors who want their name on something extravagant. I spent enough time in academia to understand that. Our humanities building was a Tudor-style mansion with genuine Stickley furniture.

And then, we’ve got a C-plot. And it’s fine. I think possibly there would’ve been some advantage in moving this one to next week to give the A and B plots a little more room, though? I’m real surprised how briskly they’ve made it through Gray’s arc; I expected this would take a significant part of the season. The C-plot is just “They transfer Gray into the synth body and for a little while it doesn’t look like it’s going to work but then it does,” which is a little less than fully satisfying; no one has any real agency in this plot; it just kind of happens all on its own. And Gray is the one it’s happening to, but he’s not there for most of it. I wish Hugh had more to say here – he’s in something of a unique position to relate to the experience of dying and having your ego transplanted into a newly-grown replacement body. Maybe that will be for next week as Gray adjusts to being corporeal again? So far, Gray seems entirely fine, but who knows if that will last. I like that they ask Tal for consent separately from both Adira and Gray; that’s cool. It’s a bit weird and lovely that Guardian Z can perform the soul swap via telepresence, but, I mean, what, am I going to say “But magical psychic powers don’t work that way!” I like that they remembered that the Trill already had a process in place for yoinking a past host’s identity out of a symbiont and stuffing it in someone else. I will not try to say what it’s called, because when I try to remember, all I get is “Gom Jabar”, but that’s the thing where you put your hand in the box of pain. Also, “Guardian Z” is a fun name that sounds like it should be long to the person who gives you Power Ranger powers. Not actually showing us the transfer is unsatisfying though, and I think more evidence that all three plots needed breathing room. We have three largely disjoint plots very loosely connected by some common threads of mental health and trauma over being separated from family (Available in three great flavors: “Estrangement from Warrior Nun Mom”; “My whole species but especially my nephew is dead”; and new “Had my dead boyfriend’s soul surgically extracted from the grub that lives in my belly”), but there’s nothing here that required them to happen at the same time.

Also, we are now three episodes in and I have still not seen Reno. I was promised more Reno this season.

Okay, that’s a little better.

For its second outing this season, Discovery gives us an episode where a lot less happens. Well, that’s not quite right; I mean, quite a bit happens, but it feels much more constrained. This gives us a lot more room for the character work to steep. Pacing has always been Discovery‘s weakness – and Picard‘s weakness. And really the weakness of all the streaming originals to a greater or lesser extent. This week is, as it pretty much had to be, primarily concerned with Book’s grief at the loss of his world, but there’s other things in there too. My central thesis for Discovery is that it is at its core a show about healing, and I see no reason to back away from that.

One of the few common complaints about the show which I find fully justified is its mining of our heroes’ mental health issues for drama, in a way that leans on the ableist and regressive notion that mental illness is something to be treated via big, exciting, cathartic action sequences rather than medication and counseling. This was kind of gross last season with Admiral Vance expressing entirely justified concern over Detmer’s incredibly obvious PTSD and Saru responding that they were just gonna keep trusting her rather than getting her actual professional help. There’s some improvement this week, with Michael ordering Hugh to be on the line while Book flies into the anomaly in order to assess his mental health. And possibly the closest we’ve come to handling mental health in a proper way happens a bit later when Adorably Troubled Lieutenant Tilly takes Hugh aside and very directly says that she recognizes that she’s not quite right psychologically and wants to make arrangements to see him in his professional capacity (Discovery should have a full-time dedicated psychiatric specialist, but I can tacitly accept that their unique circumstances make it tricky for them to bring on new crew, particularly for a job that requires that kind of intimate working relationship with people who are culturally a millennium different from the rest of the galaxy). It’s particularly good that Tilly in particular reaches out for help, after her arc with May in season 2.

On the other hand, though, Book absolutely needs to be on meds. I mean, I’m generally pro-medication; the only reason I don’t think we should treat the traumatic injury of, “Your planet got blown up,” fundamentally differently than we treat the traumatic injury of, “You threw out your back,” is that the current state of psychoactive medication isn’t yet to the stage of ibuprofen, but one presumes things are better in the thirty-second century. But look, even if you reckon that healing from grief is something the body can do naturally and medical intervention should be reserved for exceptional cases, watching one’s planet get blown up is an exceptional case. And having hallucinations is absolutely on the far side of the far side of the, “when do you need medication?” line. (One of the many times on Deep Space Nine when they gave O’Brien PTSD for funsies, he started having hallucinations, and while they did their usual, “The treatment for your mental trauma is a big dramatic catharsis scene,” they also gave him antipsychotics to make the hallucinations go away while he worked through his trauma.)

So we get our scene early on of the major powers discussing the Big Scary Threat, and it’s an interesting twist that Stamets’s initial proposal of a binary black hole turns out to be just flat out completely wrong. Also, the Ferengi captain that upset everyone so much in the trailer is there, though it’s just a cameo and he doesn’t do anything. I don’t have any issue with them changing the Ferengi makeup (Particularly since I assume he’s meant to be part-Ferengi), though the actual makeup itself is not great. Weird that Book’s allowed to just wander in to a top level meeting with the presidents of the Federation and Ni’Var (and whoever else was there).

Also very good that Adira talks out out with Gray about re-processing the trauma of Gray’s death after the events on the station. Characters in general are better about talking through their feelings this season, and it’s delightfully weird that Adira can discuss their feelings over watching Gray die with Gray. Gray for his part never seems particularly broken up over having died per se, just angsty over being incorporeal. And the reveal of how they plan to “encorporate” Gray? Man, okay, Hugh’s delivery here is a little clumsy and awkward, but major kudos for the mechanism. In brief: they’re Picarding him. Straight up the same process from the end of Picard, making a synth body and using Soong’s neural transfer method to yoink him out of Adira/Tal and stuff him in the golem. I love that Picard set this up for us, but without calling any attention to itself, so that you never really had any reason to predict this would be the path they went down. We can also quietly deduce that synths are still a thing, since there’s people out there who build synth bodies professionally. Gray even muses on the possibility of becoming a host again – oddly, before he asks whether or not his new body will age. And you could easily miss it, but we get on-screen confirmation that Gray is trans. This was pretty much assumed before, since Ian Alexander is, but Trill are alien enough that I wouldn’t have wanted to just take it for granted without them saying it. It’s dropped in a casual sort of way that doesn’t call attention to it, and has all the subtlety that Adira coming out as enby last season lacked. The awkwardness of that scene is fine; Adira’s whole thing is that they’re supposed to be awkward, but Gray really isn’t, so it’s good that they don’t make a big point of it.

We get an answer to the thing I asked last week, as not only is Zora still with us, she’s started going by that name. Still not making a big deal over the ship being sentient, but okay. Nifty little technical thing where they put a Cone of Silence over the captain’s chair when Michael makes a private call. Things are a little rough on the plot logic inside the anomaly, though. Book’s whole argument for flying the ship is that Detmer isn’t experienced with using its morphing ability, but I don’t think he actually does any morphing during that entire scene. They also cut the tether so that Discovery can back off from the gravity waves, which is solid metaphorical stuff about Michael being willing to “let go” of Book in favor of her duty the the rest of the ship. But… Part of the point of the tether was that it helped holo-Stamets maintain his signal?

The character arc between Book and Stamets also feels a little unearned. We get a good resolution: Paul is uncomfortable around Book because Book saved his husband and kid specifically by doing Paul’s “thing”, at a time when Paul himself had been rendered completely helpless. But… Paul’s discomfort around Book is an entirely informed trait; we haven’t seen it even once on-screen. Also, Paul makes a glib joke about being thrown out an airlock, as if everyone else would find it uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong; I like the way they pair up those two and build this parallel: Book couldn’t save his own family, but he saved Paul’s when Paul couldn’t do it himself. However, Discovery‘s ultra-compressed storytelling serves it poorly here, because they basically resolved a character arc without bothering to have the character arc.

I’m also a bit disappointed visually. Other than the appearance of hallucinatory birds in the accretion cloud, there’s not much going on this week that’s visually cool. An obligatory “Turn the camera upside-down” scene, about which I have already made my feelings clear. Felt dumb that after the first time everyone went floating for a minute, they didn’t put their seatbelts on before the second time (Seatbelts on starships are not generally useful, since seatbelts only help over a comparatively narrow range of things, but “the gravity goes out for a minute” is one of the things in that range), though I liked that they depicted everyone getting banged up and Hugh running around the bridge zapping their wounds closed. Plus there’s the unspeakable oddity that the traditional Star Trek showers of sparks have been upgraded to full-on fireballs shooting out of the walls. In fact, it almost looks like the bridge has specific fireball-vents installed specifically for the purpose of shooting fireballs out at dramatically appropriate moments. I have in the past joked that the pyrotechnics on the bridge aren’t really things exploding under stress, but are really harmless-but-dramatic visual indicators designed into ships’ systems by Starfleet engineering as a particularly emphatic visual indicator of an alert status (I once worked in a shop where the sustainment team had gotten so inured to the blinking red alert lights that an indicator of an actual serious emergency was given a pink skull-and-crossbones indicator so they’d realize it was serious), but this is taking it too far.

The anomaly itself gets upgraded via Discovery turning on an Instagram filter from a fisheye effect to…. basically your usual Big Swirly Thing In Space. There’s a few shots of it where I think the idea is just to depict gravitational lensing, but it reminds me a lot of one of the visual effects from the time travel sequence in Star Trek IV. No idea what that could mean, if, indeed, it means anything at all. My working theory right now is that this is going to be another take on the The God Machine – the same idea that very broadly inspired both Star Trek The Motion Picture and Star Trek IV. The parallels to V’ger and The Probe are modest so far, but they’re certainly there. I’ll admit, I’m intrigued by the mystery, despite the fact that seven and a half seasons of modern-era Trek have so far given me no reason to believe they are going to pursue unfolding this plot with any sort of grace or pacing, but more likely will just faff about for seven weeks and then drop the whole thing in one massive shaky-cam climax at the end.

And still no damn Tig Notaro.

Look at me building up a buffer even though it means Imma be a week late talking about Disco all season. Minor spoilers: Yay trans rights, boo the fact that mental healthcare doesn’t appear to have made significant advancement in a thousand years.

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Well that was rather more than I expected.

There’s certainly something to be said for modern television in that even a largely disposible kids’ show like this can actually Get On With It five episodes in. Going in knowing that this is the last episode before the mid-season hiatus, I expected us to end on some sort of transformative equilibrium. Not an outright cliffhanger – it seems like in the era of binge-watching, the genre fiction public has largely lost its patience for “Now wait six-to-twelve weeks to find out how the heroes escape certain death,” structures – but something that establishes a new status quo and leaves us with six-to-twelve weeks to instead contemplate what this new state of affairs will mean. But I wasn’t expecting them to do all of the transformative equilibria. I expected them to recover the Protostar and get off the planet. But I didn’t expect them to recover the Protostar and get off the planet and confront The Diviner and have Gwynn’s face-turn and discover the mysterious secret of the Protostar’s third engine. We’re resolving plot threads faster than we’re asking them, which is unusual for a show of modern complexity, even a kids’ show. What we’re really left with is just, “What’s the Diviner’s deal?” and “Where is Dal from?”, neither of which is a mystery the show has spent much effort actually investing me in. (We don’t even really have “Will our plucky heroes escape?” as a mystery at the moment, since they have escaped; it seems pretty stable at the moment that the Protostar has fucked right off well out of The Diviner’s range for the moment; when we pick up, there’s going to need to be some new inciting event to justify this not simply being the end of the story. I assume everyone-but-Dal is going to insist that they need to go back and liberate the Diviner’s labor camp).

So yeah, the big secret of the Protostar is… A protostar. Not every day that “exactly what it says on the tin” is quite this literal. This is a weird thing to put in your training ship, to be sure, and quite possibly we’re still playing into my notion that the ship was intended to strand cadets in the wilderness, but with a secret “easy button” to bail them out in an emergency. Interesting that Janeway doesn’t seem fully aware of it, since she’s surprised that its containment field is using up so much power. You might be about to object to the idea of powering a ship with a small star that needs to be contained with a force field that uses much of the output of a traditional power plant. But it’s Star Trek. The ships already run on antimatter and have a tendency to explode dramatically when pierced. I find it especially interesting that the Diviner refers to it as, “My salvation.” It’s got me speculating – heck, when he’s mentioned the Protostar by name, was he actually talking about the ship, or the star? They’re clearly setting him up as a tragic villain in some regard – major kudos for his clear agony and reluctance when he’s forced to choose between saving Gwynn and claiming the ship. We know him and Gwynn are the last of their people. I’d been assuming that the Protostar’s secret was simply a faster-than-warp engine and he wanted it to go home. But now, the obvious reveal here is that he’s from a dead star system and a portable baby star is his only chance to restore his homeworld. There was a moment there when I thought the episode might end on a cliffhanger with him getting control of the Protostar – I somehow didn’t see it coming that the Protostar was what the murderplanet would show him as an enticement. Touche, Prodigy. Well played.

Pog mentions the sleeper ship again, and this time we see a crashed Klingon ship. Not only the ship, but Klingons are known well enough that Dal and Gwynn can muse darkly on their chance of survival where even Klingon warriors had failed, which seems like still more evidence that the Delta Quadrant isn’t as far away as it used to be. I mentioned the lack of transporters before, but The Diviner has one, so I guess they’re not going for surprise. Janeway never offers to beam them up, and they have to retrieve Gwynn by hand, so I’m not sure what the deal is. I suppose if it turns out that the Protostar is a burn-era ship (And a minimalist one at that), it might not have its own transporters, on the expectation that the crew would be carrying their own personal transporters. The baby star aside, Protostar doesn’t feature a lot of the hallmarks of far-future Starfleet – no detached nacelles; no morphing phasers; discrete communicators and tricorders rather than tricomm badges. But its transformation is a bit closer to the “morphing” on Book’s ship than to Voyager’s variable geometry, and there’s several hundred years of Starfleet history unaccounted for.

Speaking of, at the risk of reading too much into things, Holojaneway again refers to her namesake in a way that feels like she’s referencing a historical character. Small missed trick that when she asks, “What would the real Janeway do?”, she doesn’t follow it up with, “But there’s no Tuvix here for me to kill…” It’s interesting that she seems to be far more autonomous and far more human in her thought processes than most of the holographic characters we’ve met in the past few years, and that she clearly thinks of herself as a distinct individual from the real Janeway – and yet, she also refers to herself as a “former captain” when talking to the computer. I also liked the problem solving she showcases for the target audience in working around her limitations to leverage the cleaning system since she isn’t permitted to operate the weapons.

You also see the kids’ show heritage as Dal similarly showcases problem-solving in his sudden discovery of celestial navigation, but why did this have to fall to him instead of Zero? The whole thing for Medusans is that they’re inherently good at navigation. Zero started off in a great place back in episode 1 being sort of charmingly inexperienced but hypercompetent. But halfway through that first episode, the “but he’s very, very green,” outstripped the, “he’s incredibly intelligent and his nature as an energy being gives him unique insight,” and it really just never looked back. Also, I think it would be nice if Zero gave us a little gallows humor. Y’know, Pog shouts, “Oh no, we’re all going to die!” and Zero echoes, “Oh no, you‘re all going to die. I’ll be okay. Non-corporeal.”

So I guess we’ll see where they go from here. If the show just ended on this, it would be a certain amount of closure. The gang has made peace with each other, escaped the murderplanet, and are beyond the reach of the Diviner. It’s a new stable equilibrium, so we’re really going to need a new inciting incident to get the momentum going again.

But not until 2022.

Ahem. We’re back.

Discovery’s fourth season premiere, “Kobayashi Maru” sure does a bunch of things! Some of them it does well! Not all of them!

Okay, the oddly-long pre-titles scene I just kind of love, because I have reached a point in my life where I no longer care for ’90s Trek’s pursuit of Respectability and just want my Star Trek to go fucking nuts. And the oddly-long pre-titles scene gives us a planet of butterfly people. And not even the remotely-sane-but-still-nuts “People in butterfly suits like a poorly-advised modernization of the Doctor Who episode with the butterfly people”. These are humanoids who are culturally butterfly and who can summon swarms of alien butterflies which form into wings for them. Holy shit. That is insane and wonderful. It’s also another one of those planets with floating mountains, and it’s got trees that glow from within and a wow it’s all just lovely. And they actually thought through this premise? Check it: the butterfly people are having trouble navigating because of the natural shifting of their planet’s magnetic poles. Okay. But they recognize that a spacefaring civilization would not have something like natural shifts in their magnetic poles just sneak up on them. So the butterfly people actually have taken steps to compensate for the magnetic shift using technology. It just doesn’t work because they don’t have any dilithium. The problem encapsulates what the post-burn galaxy is like and what issues it faces: they’re technologically sophisticated and highly intelligent, but there’s one specific resource that they lack and their problems derive from it. It’s a problem that calls specifically for the sort of solution the Federation can provide and doesn’t rely on the butterfly people being too stupid to handle an entirely natural part of their planet’s normal life cycle which it has been doing since the dawn of time, not does it cheat on the timescale over which natural geological processes can happen by declaring that the magnetic poles on this planet flipped overnight like in every other sci-fi piece featuring a magnetic pole shift. There’s very good “Let’s science the shit out of this” in the sequence, which sets a mood for additional sciencing the shit out of stuff later. And the bit where Book’s ship morphs around Discovery? That’s damn cool. Got to admit, morphing starships are kinda doing it for me.

The negative, of course, is that it doesn’t have much of anything to do with the rest of the plot. And that Michael is jaw-droppingly terrible at this. Flies down with her boyfriend rather than any of her actual crew, brings a cat to the butterfly planet (If this were a Golden Age scifi story, the punchline would be Grudge eating their emperor or something), awkwardly fumbles into using the Q-word (Also, “They’re butterfly people so obviously they have an aristocratic structure led by a monarch, because that is now insects are, despite the fact that butterflies are, in fact, solitary, and also it’s not like insect queens are actually “in charge” in some kind of organizational sense; they’re baby-factories. Also, the whole thing is probably just because there’s a species of butterfly called a “monarch”), and why do they not use the transporters to get away? I’d have assumed the planet had some kind of beaming mitigation, but they do use their personal transporters to beam from the outside of Book’s ship to the inside, and once they’re done, they beam the dilithium straight down to the planet.

I’m bothered by the diplomatic faux-pas. Less because “It’s just a dumb faux-pas” – after all, the one time we ever see Picard try to shake a stranger’s hand, it’s the time he’s met by the ambassador from the planet of people who really hate to be touched, because we needed an expository scene, and tbh that’s a dumber mistake for the “seasoned diplomat” Picard to make than Michael not evicting Grudge from her home. I’m bothered more because “Michael is not experienced at diplomacy,” isn’t really what they’re going for as her character flaw to be explored this season.

So on to the actual story. Kudos for trying for some starship porn with the reveal of Archer Station and the new shipyard dominated by the new Intrepid Class…. But it’s just not great. The way it’s shot is, like every look we get at 32nd century starships, kind of dark and muddy and small and the Big Ass Future Voyager Ship we see doesn’t even look like the CGI is complete. It’s not terrible, but it’s closer to a StarFox 64 model than I really expect out of my Prestige-Class Streaming Premiere.

I dig that Michael is completely wrong about the motivations of the president. I was worrying that this was going to get all political (Not “political” in the usual sci-fi fanboy sense of “It includes minorities”, but in the sense of “About political intrigues and in-fighting”, which is a fine thing to put in a sci-fi show, but not when it’s a low-episode-count streaming action-adventure series that has already committed 1/3 of its runtime to Soniqua Martin-Green crying), but really she’s there to decide whether Michael has the emotional maturity to be put in charge of the Big Impressive New Ugly Ship  (With a name-drop of the “Pathfinder” drive. Possible Voyager reference, as that was, I think, the project to establish communications between Starfleet command and Voyager in the delta quadrant). Spoiler: she does not. I said back in season 2 that Michael’s character is centered on a overweening sense of responsibility: its explicit that she is like Kirk in this regard, and she was called out for it by Spock. Here, they get more explicit about the extent to which this is pathological: she endangers the entire ship because she’s not willing to sacrifice Adorably Goofy New Lieutenant Tilly and Adorably Enby New Ensign Adira. I mean obviously she couldn’t; they’re in the credits. But still. Also, I like that they namecheck the Kobayashi Maru without anyone mentioning the two people who beat it. Michael explains the lesson of the test correctly, but doesn’t seem to have internalized it. Unlike Kirk, she hasn’t realized that if losing is a sin, cheating is a sacrament. (And I dig that the president is apparently part Cardassian). I would complain about the fact that Michael isn’t even savvy enough to hide her smug contempt for the president, but she was raised on Vulcan, so, I mean, unwillingness to hide one’s smug contempt is probably a cultural thing.

(Incidentally, why is this episode titled “Kobayashi Maru”? Sure, they mention it and it does seem thematically relevant, but no one actually faces a no-win scenario in this episode; they just face situations where they don’t win. Even the big centerpiece of Michael showing her personality flaw by not giving up on two crewmembers isn’t a Kobayashi Maru scenario; it’s just, y’know, tough.)

As usual, we spend too much time with Michael and not enough with anyone else, though we get some hints at character development. The rapport between Owo and Detmer feels stronger, and it seems like they’re trying to grow Rhys and Nilssen as characters, but it’s early days for that. Tilly is very forthright about the fact that she’s finally noticed that she has literally nothing in her life beyond her career – I assume the fact that Michael is no longer in a position to be her bestie is taking a toll. Adira’s insecurity about their new position is cute, and Gray using the word “encorporated” to refer to getting a body is awesome. (No one seems to notice Adira talking to themself on the bridge. I assume they’re used to it by now). It seems like Stamets has gotten more secure in his parental role – he asks after Adira when they’re in danger but it doesn’t lock him up the way it did at the end of last season. Word of God is that he hasn’t fully forgiven Michael from throwing him off the ship, but time has softened it. No Reno, which sucks. She is, remember, the nominal chief engineer, so really it would’ve made more sense for her to be handling the “The bridge calls down to engineering asking for more power” scenes.

I really like a lot of what they are trying to do in this episode. Discovery’s overarching theme has been of healing, and they do seem to want to show this as a process. They make a big point of how far Su’kal has come, and juxtapose it with the Kelpiens and Ba’ul living in harmony. They show the healing relationship between Book and his family. And everyone on Disco just seems a lot happier and more comfortable with each other.

But… Just so much of it doesn’t quite work. Su’kal’s inspirational speech to Saru feels a little flat because he’s still being played like what TVTropes would call an “Inspirationally Disadvantaged” guest star. The death of the high strung station commander is visible from orbit, as is the extent to which Book’s adorable nephew is doomed (He is not a good child actor, tbh, which softens the blow. But still). Adira is nervous when they start, but there’s very little for them to do once they’re on the mission. Tilly’s slow nihilism is just sort of abruptly dumped on us.

And there’s the decision to film the space station scenes upside-down, because they are all about the nauseating camera tricks for interior shots, but sexy space ship tracking shots, not so much. And we get what, four spore jumps, but none of them do the awesome blacklight rave transition through magic mushroom space.

I can’t get behind the visual decisions so far. The station looks like crap. The new Voyager looks meh at best. Archer Station is just the same “Big metal ribcage” as every other spacedock in the franchise – it’s clearly meant to be much, much bigger, but it’s not filmed in a way that gives you a sense of scale. The underwater city on Kaminar is fine, but not as good as the surface city we saw in the distance last season. And the “big bad” this season appears to be… a fisheye lens. Okay, it actually does look like the thing we so far know about it: a massive gravitational disruption. But…. Television is a visual medium. Lens effects aren’t going to cut it. Unless this all turns out to be a clever dig at JJ Abrams and the enemy this season is lens flare.

Credit where it’s due: destroyed Kweijan is well-done. You’d normally expect a generic debris field, but they managed to show us a mangled planet that is still clearly a planet and clearly devastated beyond all hope. The place has been trashed, but not pulverized. I just wish they had managed to land the emotional weight of it. Book is, quite reasonably, too deeply in shock to emote about what he’s seeing, so the emotional weight of the loss falls, as usual in this show, to teary-eyed Michael Burnham. And… It’s just the scale of it. The scale of that devastation is a hard thing to sell, but Teary-Eyed-Michael-Burnham not only isn’t successful in conveying the scale of the tragedy, it’s the entirely wrong thing to try.

But I’m optimistic. Like I said: they’re trying all the right things. I just want them to actually succeed next time.

Oh, and one more thing… Is the ship still alive? That was kind of a deal last season, but then the Chain reformatted the hard drive, and the Sphere Data transferred into the Dots but the Dots all got killed except the last one but she sacrificed herself to save Owo, and then Burhnam had to roll back the OS, so… Is the Sphere Data still around? If the show doesn’t want to pursue that, it’s their prerogative I guess but Zora was totally my favorite character who isn’t played by Tig Notaro.

This is more like it, aside from the fact that I don’t care for a cliffhanger at this point. So the gang goes to one of those honeytrap planets (Which is visually a bit reminiscent of Xahea, with root structures visible from orbit) – and it’s interesting that they get strongarmed into it by Janeway given how badly this goes due to no fault of their own (Also: they land the ship rather than beaming down. How much you want to bet that the existence of transporters is going to be a Big Shocking Reveal?). There’s big trouble in the episode due to Dal’s irresponsibility but it’s a secondary sort of fault: his mistake is fairly modest, and for the most part he’s in the right. We get some manner of justification for Dal’s behavior last time: he’s just that scared of The Diviner that he wants to just fuck off into space forever and avoid everyone. It’s not the most satisfying explanation, but it’s something at least. And in this case, yeah. the planet is dangerous, going their puts the Diviner on their trail and allows Gwynn to escape.

There’s some interesting parallelism in what the planet chooses to show them: both Gwynn and Dal are show constructs of their parents, and in both cases, it doesn’t work. It’s pretty moving that Gwynn is clearly tempted by the construct of her father, but the fact that he is showing her affection tips her off. As desperately as she wants her father’s love, approval and appreciation, she knows when she gets it that it can’t be real. Of course, the planet also kinda whiffs it with Dal and Gwynn, both times telegraphing the fact that it’s a set-up and immediately giving up and switching to grabby-space-vine mode.

I also really love that Protostar’s Mysterious Third Engine is the thing the planet coughs up to tempt Zero. Pog is still pretty one-dimensional, with his temptation just being home cooking, but we do at least get the interesting blink-n-you’ll-miss-it drop that Pog’s youth was on a sleeper ship. That, obviously, could be the justification for a Tellarite in the Delta Quadrant (The planet is also described as being in Hirogen space, which is a big chunk of the Delta quadrant, but on the opposite side of Borg Space as the Kazon, which might be more evidence that things have been shaken up a lot since Voyager. Or it’s just a random name they threw out for the fans). Rokh, naturally, just wants to be cuddled by space-puppies, which is simple and lovely.

Now, as much as I like the symbolism in Gwynn rejecting her false-father, I do take issue with just how OP she is this week, easily escaping the brig, trivially circumventing the security lockout, and easily reprogramming Janeway. When they inevitably depower her so she can be a full member of the gang, it’s going to be weird. On the other hand, Janeway’s tone when Gwynn loses the ship feels like a hint that there might be more to Janeway than the training hologram she claims to be.

And then in the cliffhanger, the planet yeets the Protostar over the horizon. Which is pretty much the exact sort of silliness I want in my kid-friendly Trek, but a cliffhanger after episode 4?

 

(There is no episode 2 of Prodigy. Episode 1 was a double-wide.)

Two weeks in and… I mean, it’s okay. Still don’t think this is going to be my bag, but the kids are still pretty psyched, except that Evelyn didn’t like the brief fight scene between Rokh and Gwynn.

We get some good hinting at the underlying mythos: Protostar is, for reasons not yet disclosed, massively overpowered, with two warp cores, along with a mysterious third engine whose nature has not been disclosed. It’s pretty obvious that this is what makes it so attractive to The Diviner. Janeway also leads off with the assumption that the Protostar’s nominal mission is to return to the Alpha Quadrant. Maybe it’s just because she’s a hologram and her programming is narrow in scope, but the general sense I get of it is that “This ship will be in the Delta quadrant, crewed by cadets, on a mission to return home,” is the specific use case this ship was designed for. (They still haven’t explicitly said this actually is the Delta quadrant, but at this point it really might just as well be).

There’s a pretty obvious interpretation at this point. I’m not really sold on it, because there’s some parts of it that seem, y’know, incredibly stupid, so I’m hoping this is either a misdirect or just ambiguity. But as of right now, it seems like what they are leading up to is that by the time of Protostar’s launch, Starfleet had an engine capable of quickly reaching the Delta Quadrant, and they chose to use it to build a training ship, on which cadets could be shipped out to the far side of the galaxy to reenact Voyager’s mission as a training exercise. The big reveal, if this is the case, is that at any time, the gang can tell Janeway that this whole thing has gone terribly wrong, and she’ll power up the third engine and spore jump quantum slipstream coaxial warp transwarp soliton wave wormhole the ship all the way back to the Alpha Quadrant.

As I said, while this is where I feel the evidence is pointing right now, it’s also very hard to swallow, since it requires assuming – particularly if this is indeed 2385 – that Starfleet has not only invented a much-faster-than-warp drive, but has developed it to the point that it can be deployed for the Starfleet equivalent of Naked and Afraid. It’s not entirely outside the realm of probability – as I have said a few times now, we know almost nothing about travel times in the post-TNG-era. It doesn’t appear that La Sirena could travel that fast fifteen years late, at least without transwarp. But then, Riker and his Armada show up what, two days later without it. It is still pretty weird, though. Again, the whole thing could be plausible if it’s closer to the 31st century.

Given that Janeway describes her namesake as “one of Starfleet’s most decorated captains”, it feels like it would be a lot more fitting if Protostar is closer to being the 29th century version of an Eagle Scout project. There’s an air of “Training exercise based on a famous historical event,” about the whole thing. Time will tell. (I will also toss out here the possibility that the show is set in 2380, but Protostar is from the future, and fell through a negative space wedgie. Possibly The Diviner is as well – with a name like that, his shtick could easily be that he and the Protostar are from the future, and he’s been using his knowledge of the future to get ahead while looking for the ship.)

Zero continues to be wonderful, even excited about the novelty of dying horribly. Pog is… Uninteresting this week. Janeway as expected is smug, and, tbh, a little racist depending on how you take her sort of offhandedly referencing Tellarite stereotypes. At least she doesn’t murder anyone or commit genocide. Gwynn is being set up for a redemption arc, and I’m glad that the show isn’t letting her off the hook. She’s done terrible things and she’s allowed terrible things. And it’s not personal – she’s not inclined toward being evil. But she’s loyal to her dad. There’s no instantaneous turn-around where she declares that she’d never have gone along with it if she’d known the truth. No, she acknowledges that she’s done wrong, but still plans to betray the others return to her dad and help him capture the ship. Then there’s Rokh. And it is wonderful seeing her struggle so hard with this sudden experience of freedom. I’m guessing they’re setting her up to betray them at a critical moment – she’s clearly overwhelmed with something as simple as the choice of what to have for dinner. She has some very child-friendly symptoms of PTSD. She’s clearly put out when Dal bosses her around. Someone is going to offer her an “out” at some point, and she’ll be tempted by it.

Which brings us back to Dal. Oh Dal. Fuck, man. Dal is the Wheeler of this show. And not a cool Wheeler like in Yu-gi-Oh. No, I mean Wheeler the kid from Captain Planet. You know: the one who the showmakers assume the audience will identify with, and thus must be a total asshat. Wheeler was cool and sassy and rebellious and white and blonde and male and American and wielded the bad-ass power of fire (Ironically, his power was actually the least cool in practice, because very few of the practical uses for “can summon fire on demand” are amenable to a kid’s show. He could have solved most of the plots by simply immolating the bad guys, but you’re not allowed to do that in a kids’ show), so he was the one the writer’s treated like an actual person rather than an object lesson. In particular, because this is a children’s show, every week somebody is contractually required to fuck up hardcore so that they can learn an important prosocial lesson. And it’s going to be the one that the writers assume the audience is imagining themselves as.

And that brings us to Dal: he’s rebellious, he’s “cool”, he’s male, and… I mean technically he’s not a white boy, but come on. Dude has strong white boy energy. The entitlement, the sass, the disrespect for authority, the arrogance, the hair. (Dal is voiced by a black VA. I don’t want to overlook that. And yet, he’s clearly written in the tradition that traces back through Bandit Keith, Bart Simpson, James Wheeler, Mike Seaver, Eddie Haskell, and Tom Sawyer).

My point is, Dal’s job in this show is to be wrong. He leads off by lying to Janeway that they’re Starfleet cadets (This is clearly coded as Wrong and Bad because it is a Lie, and Dal struggles to justify his behavior to the others. This is just kids’ show morality trumping logic, because, look: she’s the ship’s computer. It would actually be kinda bad if the ship decided they weren’t allowed to be there), claims command, and when Janeway proposes taking them back to the Federation, he freaks out and orders them away.

I hope there’s something to this. Dal doesn’t know where he’s from, that’s part of his backstory. There’s a hint in here that Dal might have some actual reason to be worried about the Federation, and it would be cool if it’s something he doesn’t actually consciously understand – some suppressed memory linked to the Protostar’s backstory. But right now, I kinda think they’re just going for, “He’s being sassy and rebellious and doesn’t want to return the ship to its proper owners.” which is gross and dumb. He goes on to get them nearly destroyed by ignoring Janeway’s advice and flying the ship into a star, then doubling down by resisting Janeway’s help to make additional bad decisions, accidentally releasing Gwynn from the brig by diverting too much power to the engines.

That’s another thing that grates a little – apparently, it’s like one button push to divert so much energy from the ship’s systems that internal security goes down, the shields drop and the life support shuts down, and you don’t even notice you’re doing it. This is poor design. Protostar also has a vehicle replicator, which can build a shuttle in a matter of minutes. That seems rather extravagant, and another hint that Protostar isn’t 2380s technology. But, again, Gwynn is able to replicate a shuttle despite all power being diverted to the engines, and they can’t restore power later, because they can’t turn the replicator off.

But none of this is unforgivable. And it might be more evidence for the wild theory I gave above: they’re building up to a reveal that in the event that the gang gets in really thoroughly over their heads, Protostar can auto-pilot itself back to the Alpha Quadrant – that any danger they’re in is being “permitted” by the ship in the name of education. (This is not sustainable indefinitely of course. If this turns out to be the case, I’d expect the first season finale to find them discovering Protostar’s Easy Button, and either having to sacrifice it to stop The Diviner, or else discovering that it’s broken).

Now that The Diviner is hot on the trail of our heroes, I expect there to be more external conflict starting this week. Hopefully that will soften the kids’ show morality here, because having Dal be the primary driver of conflict in this episode just wasn’t fun.

Well now. I dunno. I’m not sure if this show is for me, but unlike Lower Decks, I won’t say that it not being for me is reflective of a failing in the show. The kids loved it though; this appears to be the Trek that finally got the kids into Star Trek.

The first thing I’ll say about Prodigy is that it feels much more Star Wars than it does Star Trek. I’m not quite sure how to explain that in detail, but this seems to draw much more from the tradition of The Clone Wars and Rebels than Discovery or Lower Decks. Also, there’s the extent to which Dredlok is very obviously General Grevious.

We’ve got some decent character designs. Our “hero” is Dal, a purple teenage from an unknown species who is… Well he’s you’re generic rebellious mouthy teenager archetype that I don’t really need from my Star Trek, but that’s fine. Gwyn is the Evil Overlord’s Beautiful Daughter Who Is Loyal To Dad But Isn’t Sold On The Evil. I know neither of these are exact matches to Star Wars characters, but this feels so much more like a set of Star Wars archetypes than Trek. Things get cooler with Rok-Takh, an adorable giant rock girl with just lovely eyes. And then there’s Murf, the non-verbal amorphous “team pet” who’s… I mean he’s pretty much Gleep from The Herculoids but with a cooler color palate. The neatest design among the regulars is Zero, a Medusan who wears a homemade kit-bashed robot suit that sort of looks like the version of Broke-Down-Animitronic-Punk Mike Wazowski from a hypothetical Disney-Pixar’s Epic Woody. And… why does Pog look like Beebop from the ’89 Ninja Turtles cartoon?

I love the simple joy when Rok and Dal realize they can understand each other. Withholding translators for the first half of the story is done to great effect here. The one plot misstep to my mind is the introduction of Hologram Janeway. She just turns up in the last scene to introduce herself and nothing else. I get that they don’t want her stealing the show from the “proper” characters, and they didn’t want to push her back to the next episode. But I feel like there was a great place to insert her that would make her appearance feel coupled to events rather than bolted on. In the show as written, Murf activates the weapons console by randomly squishing on it, which probably is meant to hint that he’s more intelligent than it seems. But I’m not convinced the payoff is going to be worth the setup here. I think it would’ve been better for them to struggle to find the phaser controls, and then Hologram Janeway appears and just says, “Looks like you’re having some trouble. Would you like to view a tutorial on using the phasers to clear navigational hazards?” while things are too busy and tense for everyone to stop and ask what her deal is.

Now, Protostar itself… Meh. As I’ve said before, the streaming era’s Starship Porn has been a little lacking. Discovery is a weirdly-proportioned ship; La Sirena has a very deliberately “It’s a private cargo hauler, not a Cool Ship” thing going on, and Cerritos is almost deliberately ugly. Protostar is just a sort of generic-looking incarnation of the general Starfleet archetype, like what you’d doodle if you were given the prompt “Draw a Starfleet ship”.  The interior decor is the most Kelvin-Timeline we’ve seen in the prime universe… If this is the Prime universe; I guess we can’t actually be sure yet.

That gets us to the big question for me as the season unfolds. According to what’s been released from the showmakers, Prodigy is set in the Delta Quadrant in 2383. That’s a couple of years after Lower Decks and a couple of years before the Romulan supernova, five years after the end of Star Trek: Voyager. This is all hard to square, and if it’s right, I think we need to be expecting Temporal Shennanigans to ensue. Because Gwyn has been on this mining colony her entire life, and the implication is that the Protostar was buried here for at least that long, probably much longer. It’s hard to imagine that within five years of returning to the Alpha quadrant, they built Protostar, sent it all the way out to the Delta Quadrant, lost it, buried it, and The Diviner set up a mining colony to look for it.

Then there’s the fact that we see a bunch of different species here, and of the ones we’ve seen before, only the Kazon are Delta Quadrant natives. There’s a Tellarite, a Medusan, a Caitian and a Lurian – all Alpha Quadrant races. Now, Voyager did occasionally encounter displaced Alpha quadrant refugees on its way home, but Dal is able to make broad, vaguely racist generalizations about Tellarites, which implies to me that they’re a species that is well known in this part of space.

While this is far from certain, it feels like The Diviner has a personal history with the Protostar, some time in the distant past. One plausible explanation is that the Protostar reached the Delta Quadrant via time warp some time in the distant past, and The Diviner has been unnaturally prolonging his life in his quest to find it. Why? Unclear. Some of his dialogue implies that he’s just looking for A Federation Ship in general, but it feels more like it’s this ship in particular. You almost wonder if this is a revamp of the general outline if Star Trek Beyond, and The Diviner is part of Protostar’s original crew, somehow transformed and twisted by Space Weirdness.

But this still doesn’t explain the presence of so many Alpha Quadrant races, and their presence in a context that doesn’t acknowledge the extent to which they shouldn’t be there. The Diviner also speaks of the Federation as something whose existence must be kept hidden from the enslaved workers for fear it might foment rebellion. That doesn’t fit well with the Federation of 2383, whose presence in the Delta Quadrant is effectively nonexistent. My inclination at this point is to assume that Protostar was lost in 2383, but that the series proper is set a long time after that, closer to the time of Discovery far enough in the future that there’s been a significant diaspora of Alpha Quadrant races all over the galaxy, in a place and time where the Federation isn’t unheard of, but is more legendary than real. Obviously, my dream-come-true would be for this to be in the same part of the timeline as Calypso, but I recognize that’s a longshot.

I’ll definitely be back for more next week. It’s interesting to see a Star Trek that feels so utterly not-beholden to the feel of Star Trek, even if I’m not quite sold on why this even should be part of that shared universe and not its own thing.