A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Well now. As an episode, this was pretty good. As the culmination of a plot arc, I’m less sure. Like last season, the last few minutes are more of an epilogue than a conclusion, but they’re far less satisfying this time. It feels more like a series finale than a season finale: a highly articulated, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Or continued to not-live in the case of Gray.

When you get down to it, my problems with Discovery mostly derive from the fact that it is a 13-episode prestige series, plotted like a 13-episode prestige series, but with the worldbuilding of a 22-episode arc-moderate broadcast series. So a lot of character beats and background are developed as if they should be doled out a little at a time in the C-plots of half a dozen episodes, but Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That – we’ve still got fifty minutes of Michael crying and the camera turning upside-down to get through, so instead of slow-simmering development that culminates in a focus episode, you get a little hint of something, then two episodes later a casual reveal that the character arc had culminated off-screen some time ago. So, like, we have a few scenes of Stamets feeling some familial affection toward Adira, and Hugh not interacting with them much at all, and then a couple weeks later, Paul and Hugh have adopted them. And everyone misses Mirror!Georgiou and remembers how she’d grown on them and was too one of the gang despite her tough exterior… Despite the fact that she’d barely interacted with anyone but Michael.

Compare this to something like Doctor Who. There, you get more-or-less thirteen bespoke one-off worlds in a season; there’s no building going on at that level. And characters like the Doctor exist in a state of punctuated equilibrium: they aren’t really meant to be developing week-to-week, but in big dramatic fits that occur on season boundaries. Having said this all out, it actually makes me kind of optimistic for Strange New Worlds, which is alleged to be planned as a planet-of-the-week series whose major characters’ life paths are already carved in stone.

So…

• Why must they keep turning the camera upside-down? Why? What does that accomplish?
• Somehow Xahean Adira and Vulcan Gray are even more adorable than regular Adira and Gray.
• We finally do get some interaction between Adira and Hugh, and it is, in fact, very good and nicely subtle in how comfortably dadly he is toward them. And the fact that he’s got this instant rapport with Gray is pretty cool too. Have Hugh and Stamets adopted Gray too, or is he more like a son-in-law?
• Speaking of: called it. Gray gets to be corporeal. And it makes it even worse for him when he’s about to go back to being non-corporeal. But I hope this isn’t a protracted thing next season. Like, now that they know it’s possible, it should’t be too hard for a ship full of geniuses to Programmable Matter-up a body for him.
  • Saru doesn’t bat an eyelid at Gray. I guess Adira has been open about their ghost boyfriend? If this communicates that Saru is a good captain who is really up on what is going on in his crew’s lives in a way that even, say, Picard never was, I like that. But probably it’s more, “Ain’t Nobody Got Time For Thirty Seconds of Hugh Explaining his kid’s ghost boyfriend.” Also, Saru’s had kind of a day and might just be too burned out to question it.
• So… There’s a lot of setups where either the payoff doesn’t work, or the payoff never even comes. Like, everyone does a lot of stuff but hardly any of it is actually involved in resolving the plot.
• Like, the crew going to blow up the nacelle and knock the ship out of warp…. It works, it’s very dramatic, everyone nearly suffocates. Owo nearly explodes herself. DOT actually does explode herself. There’s the tense moment when we don’t know who made it out alive… But… Michael kills Osyraa and reclaims the ship about one minute later, so did it even actually matter?
• Or how Ni’Var shows up with a fleet to defend the Federation, and that is great and perfect and I called it, but… Do they actually do anything? They do not.
• Or how Gray gets to use the fact that he is already dead to step outside the simulation without ill effect to see what’s going on outside, and he’s out there for like five minutes, but all he comes back with is, “Yeah, the ship is falling apart,” which we already knew.
• Or how nothing at all comes of Clancy trying to make peace with the Chain.
• Or how Michael mentions that rebooting the computer reset it to before the upgrade, but this has zero impact on the rest of the episode.
  • I’d been considering since last week – and this was the closest they came – that possibly the season might end with Discovery abandoned in the nebula for a thousand years and the Federation joining the Chain, presaging what appears to be a more imperialistic Federation in Calypso. Discovery reverting its upgrade could’ve been setup for that, and I wonder if they were trying to fake us out.
• Or that Adira’s role in this episode is purely to deliver medicine.
• Or the fake-out where we’re meant to experience some kind of fear that Discovery didn’t manage to jump and was destroyed with the Veridian, thus also dooming Saru, Adira, Hugh and Su’Kal. There was zero chance of anyone believing that, and it just deprived us of a cool VFX shot of them jumping while inside another ship.
  • If you wanted tension, show the jump, but have something unrecognizable on the viewscreen after and cut away after Michael says, “Then where the hell are we?”
• The DOTs were of comically little use, weren’t they? I mean aside from the one who saves Owo.
• I really enjoyed the cleverness of Michael giving in to Osyraa’s demands in order to hit the medical quarantine button.
• Osyraa doesn’t get water poured on her, but I do like her end. I get that a lot of people won’t, and that’s fair. But it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about this season: Osyraa is a cheap thug and she doesn’t deserve a big impressive exciting demise; she deserves to get shot easily once the heroes decide to stop fucking around. I want the message in their defeat to come down to, “Actually we could’ve ended this a lot sooner, but we are Starfleet and were willing to suffer in the hopes of finding a peaceful resolution.”
• Like, she shoves Michael into a wall, and is just like, “Okay she’s dead now, good,” and walks away and it just turns out that being shoved through a programmable matter wall is not lethal so Michael walks back out again and shoots her dead. Why were we supposed to think that the computer core had a programmable matter murderwall in it to begin with anyway?
• Book murdering the fuck out of Zareh because he threatened the cat was nice.
• I’m not entirely sold on Michael’s decision that, having liberated the ship and having a plan to escape by jumping away, they also need to blow up the Veridian, killing everyone aboard, is quite moral though. There’s no reason they needed to eject their warp core before they jumped.
  • Again, unless there was some version of this season where, say, Book couldn’t control where they ended up and they needed to abandon the ship because they had no warp core and couldn’t get home by jumping.
• Like I said before, there was zero chance that any explanation could be big enough to be properly satisfying. But I think the emotion is right for “Su’Kal saw his mother die, and his scream did it.” And Hugh’s technobabble explanation about how Su’Kal’s mutation gives him the ability to scream at the resonant frequency of dilithium in subspace, honestly? That is the most TNG-era feeling technobabble we’ve ever gotten from this show. It feels absolutely peak Star Trek. It’s deliciously [TECH].
• By the way, again, called it: Guy Whose Name I Still Can’t Remember figured out that Kwijan empaths can operate the spore drive.
  • I keep trying and pulling out “Atoholan”, but that’s the magic memory glacier from Frozen II.
  • His face-turn occurs entirely off-screen I guess. I wonder if he’ll become a recurring character. Not sure there is really a niche he fits into on Discovery as a regular since his skill-set overlaps with Stamets, Adira and Reno, but he’d be a solid addition to the gang at Federation HQ.
  • The fact that the brain-control technology is aparently his work might indicate he could play the key role in giving Gray a physical presence – maybe that circlet could be modified to bridge Gray’s consciousness (which one assumes resides in Tal) to a holoprojector.
• Did not call it: Su’Kal looks normal. He’s not the monster. The monster is exactly what it was presented as: a security feature in the program specifically designed – in keeping with Kelpien folklore – to scare him away from the “off” switch until he was old enough to face reality.
• But the whole, “Oh don’t worry, once we get him away from this planet, he won’t be able to blow up every ship in the galaxy any more,” thing is a little Makes It Easy I Guess.
• Nice touch that there’s a big modern city visible in the distance on Kaminar now, because the Kelpiens aren’t technologically suppressed and the Ba’ul aren’t hiding out. We haven’t really seen any Amazing 32nd Century Future-Cities, with the borderline exception of the exchange back at the other end of the season.
• Overall, the action-side of the plot was pretty solid action that did what it needed to. The emotional side of the plot had good emotional beats, but I think the catharsis was a bit muted because of the extent to which it came out of nowhere. Su’kal being a character who has only been in about half an episode so far paired with Saru having gotten comparatively little focus so far reduces the emotional impact. And Hugh, Adira and Gray fare just a little better: this is where these characters should be going given where they started out. It’s just that they haven’t actually done the middle bit of moving toward this climax because Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That.
  • I’ve said before that it was weird that Hugh suddenly seemed happy and well-adjusted all season when the rest of the crew was struggling, as though his third act catharsis back in the season 2 finale was just a magic wand that left his emotional problems completely solved. This would be business as usual for earlier incarnations of Trek (I’m still a little cheesed about the Deep Space 9 where Nog loses a leg and is very upset for the remainder of the episode and then is perfectly fine afterward. Or the multiple episodes where O’Brien goes through extremely prolonged torture and suffers PTSD over it until the end of the episode after which he is perfectly fine again, but that’s not how Discovery works. So we did eventually get some closure with Hugh a couple of weeks ago that, yeah, this change in circumstance has helped him to heal, and that culminates here, and this is the logical place for his journey to go given where he started… It’s just that the journey never actually happened because Hugh is only in a handful of scenes all season.
  • I will qualify this with the understanding that a global pandemic did happen while they were making this show, which probably had some impact on which actors were available at which times and might have influenced the relative screen-time devoted to different plots. I know in particular Tig Novaro had more scenes scripted than filmed because of which filming sessions she was willing to travel to.
  • But we didn’t really need “Terra Firma” to be a two-parter. I liked it fine and all, but that screen-time could’ve been spent developing the actual characters, even if the cast probably benefited personally from getting to spend a few weeks chewing the scenery as their OTT leather daddy counterparts.
• And then we get to the epilogue. It’s…. It’s not actively bad, but it isn’t a great fit for the show we’ve been watching. First of all, it’s so “Makes it Easy I Guess”. I mean:
  • The Emerald Chain, which I was kind of interpreting as a comparatively loose-knit cabal of crime syndicates completely collapses because one ship was destroyed. I know there was the whole, “The Chain is running out of dilithium and is desperate” thing going on, but that was very tell-don’t-show; the fact that Osyraa used a transwarp conduit to pursue Discovery is the closest we come to demonstrating that the capture of Discovery and strongarming the Federation into an alliance is a make-or-break gambit for them. If that’s true, the whole thing where Osyraa is promising to destroy the Federation utterly is hard to swallow. Osyraa and the entire Chain has lost the second the Federation decides to stop fucking around. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not demonstrated well. All the plot beats are set up with the idea that the Federation is desperate and completely fucked if the Emerald Chain comes gunning for them, but it’s actually the reverse: the Chain only exists at all because the Federation has chosen to focus its resources on preserving and protecting peace.
  • Off-screen in the time it takes to patch themselves up and get a new warp core installed, the Federation figures out how to safely harvest dilithium from the nebula and so now the galactic shortage is completely solved and not a problem any more. Makes it easy!
  • Trill rejoins the Federation. Not a surprise since they’d left it as, “We’re interested in rejoining the Federation as soon as they are operating in this part of space again,” but still.
  • Ni’Var hasn’t rejoined yet but is moving toward it. Makes it easy!
• I am not entirely over the tension between the implication (Which, admittedly, only comes from Michael, but the fast resolution of everything at the end seems to back this up) that fear of a second Burn is keeping the people of the galaxy insular and unwilling to commit to unity and the observation that literally no one except Michael shows the least interest in determining the cause of the Burn. In a hundred years, she’s not just the only person to track down enough black boxes to establish the timing of the Burn, she’s the only one who’s even tried.
• It was nice to see Sahil again, though I wish he’d had some kind of role.
• Michael’s captain now, as the show has been desperate to do for years now. Fine, I guess. But I’m not crazy about it.
• 32nd century uniforms suck. And Tilly’s looks weird. Did they digitally recolor it in post? Why is she wearing blue now? She wasn’t blue before. Is she chief science officer now?
  • Michael is the only one wearing a red uniform in that scene, which is a little strange. Kind of approve of the color scheme being TNG instead of TOS, though possibly having an entirely different color scheme would’ve been better? I dunno. I guess there is an advantage to using a color scheme that we would still recognize so that the audience can appreciate what it means when Michael walks onto the bridge wearing red.
• Is “Captain’s Boyfriend” a bridge position? Though Leah points out that his full title is “Captain’s Boyfriend And Spare Magic Mushroom Wrangler”.
• Adira is an officer now for some reason. Again, something you might have wanted to have happen on-screen with proud space dads and proud ghost boyfriend attending their commissioning.
• One thing that isn’t Makes It Easy which I really like: Stamets hasn’t forgiven Michael. Every time you see him in the epilogue, he’s giving her a dirty look.
• Why is Discovery’s new mission to deliver dilithium? You might well say, “Because Spore Drive”, except that Discovery clearly goes off on this mission by warp. It’s a little vague, but my impression is that in the 32nd century, Discovery’s spore drive isn’t really important for its speed nearly as much as for not-being-warp: without dilithium as a constraint, it seems like 32nd century warp drives are fast enough to reach much of the galaxy in reasonable time frames. So why send a fairly small, millennium-old science ship on these delivery runs instead of a thirtieth century cargo ship the size of Deimos?
• Hey, remember that mysterious lullaby that everyone in the galaxy knows? It came up like six episodes ago in the pattern of distortion on the Kelpien distress signal. What was up with that? I assumed that it was going to turn out that the lullaby was the reverse of Su’Kal’s scream and they’d go full Symphogear or something and reverse the Burn by having everyone in the universe sing together. That would be thematically lovely and make trekkies’ heads full-on explode Scanners-style. It doesn’t fully fit to just be some form of “Su’kal’s lullaby, like his scream, resonates in subspace,” because it seems to predate the Burn across multiple cultures.
• In all, this season felt like it rapidly got bored with its own premise. The first few episodes do a great job of Bringing The Weird – morphing ships, programmable matter, parasitic ice, trance worms, personal transporters, floating boulders. You have this really interesting setup where Discovery has free travel and a stockpile of dilithium worth a king’s ransom, but is a thousand years out of date technologically in galaxy that is insular and paranoid. But it only really comes up twice, and once they’re reunited with the Federation, they’ve got support and all the upgrades they need.
• While “Die Trying” isn’t my favorite episode, if Discovery was going to link back up with the Federation so quickly, it really should’ve been a model for the rest of the season: Discovery using the fact that they have free travel to zap out and handle things that aren’t actually hard except for the fact that no one else can get there in time. I’d be okay with a season that didn’t have an explicit antagonist, where the “bad guy” is distance. But they set up this thing with Saru wanting to help but Vance holding them back because Discovery is his “rapid responder” and there is not a single episode where they are used that way. “Die Trying” is the only episode whose setup is “There is a thing that could be solved easily except that dilithium shortages mean it would take a year to get there. Thank goodness Discovery can magic mushroom itself anywhere in the universe instantly.” We needed more episodes like that, but Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That because we need to burn three episodes on Georgiou having quantum epilepsy from time travel.
• Instead, Vance is constantly authorizing Discovery to go fuck off all over the galaxy to do its own thing. In almost every instance, specifically to make Michael happy. To Ni’Var so she can bug the Vulcans for their sensor data; to Kwijan to bail out her boyfriend’s family; to Dannus to save her mentor’s evil twin; and finally to the nebula to solve the Burn, which they have consistently characterized as being almost entirely Michael’s personal thing. And those episodes are mostly pretty good – probably better than “People of Earth” and “Forget Me Not”, but both of those episodes felt like they were setting a direction for the season that just gets lost. “Discovery goes on missions for Starfleet because in this time, they are the only ship with free travel,” is a potentially interesting setup. “Discovery is cut off from the Federation in a more dangerous time” is a potentially interesting setup. “Discovery has the resources of the Federation, plus free transit, and they use it mostly to pursue their Chief Science Officer’s pet project and/or boyfriend,” is… Less so.
• I never really felt like the Federation was in any sort of peril – this would be fine if the season arc was, “There’s no particular antagonist, but we no longer have the resources to perform the basic responsibilities of Federation,” but the show takes a strong turn against that arc once they decide that, “No, seriously, the Wicked Witch of the Western Spiral Arm is the Big Bad,” around episode 6.
• I have no idea where the show goes from here. Both previous seasons ended on a tease for things to come. This season ends with Discovery taking on a bold new mission as a dilithium delivery ship. Now, this could be fine. This could lead into a fourth season based around them visiting planets that have been cut off for a century and solving their local problems. We would be close to a TOS status-quo with a smaller, looser-knit Federation undergoing rapid expansion. But I don’t think that’s a likely plot for this show, on account of the fact that Discovery has not thus far never been content to be a Planet of the Week series, and CBS already has Strange New Worlds lined up for that.
• Still no one is really all that worked up about their ship having developed its own sentience? I do kinda want Vance to at some point be like, “Oh, yeah, that’ll happen. We have a ship become sentient every twenty years or so. Just make sure it’s the friendly, protective kind of sentient and not the evil megalomaniacal kind of sentient.” It would be at least consistent with Vance’s whole “Grumble, I’m gruff and irritable and you weirdos don’t appreciate how tough things are these days and… Actually whatever. You go off and do whatever you want.”
• Things that are conspicuous by their absence this season:
  • The Borg. They probably don’t want to commit to what became of them, but it seems like something that would turn up
  • Synths or sentient holograms. Given that some of them could pass for human, I suppose it’s possible that they’ve just assimilated transparently into human society. Some hint might’ve been nice, though. It’s odd that there are holographic people in the future but they seem inhuman even compared to Voyager-era medical holograms. This could be deliberate, to hint (or misdirect) that the people of the 32nd century have some reason to keep their holograms more constrained.
  • Michael’s ship. Remember how she offhandedly mentions that she had her own ship during her year as a courier? And then it is never mentioned again? That’s weird, right? I mean, she probably just sold it, but still.
  • The name of Book’s ship. What is it with them not bothering to name ships?
  • Klingons. You’d think the Klingons would be a big deal in the Space Mad Max future, unless something’s happened to them. I’m hoping when they do resurface, their absence has something to do with the intersection of the Timekeepers of Boreth and the Temporal War.
  • Statues of Miles O’Brien. Well, we can’t have it all.

Eeeeee. This is a good solid episode with very little to object to. It’s not especially deep or anything, but it works pretty well and it’s got one big thing in it that is so good that I don’t really care about the rest. I mean, except for the bit near the end where Michael steals the emotional beat because everything has to be about her (I had honestly missed how often they have her cry as an emotional device until now).

• So first things first: Under interrogation, Stamets refers to himself as Adira’s dad. Unambiguously. We get a repeat of the “What will I tell Adira if Hugh dies?” beat later, but this is less ambiguous: he tries to connect with his interrogator (Whose name I can not hold onto) via the angle of them both being fathers. And I am of two minds about this, because it’s actually kinda cool that they are content to have it happen off-screen without the need to hammer the audience with the details. But, like, it’s kind of a big deal? Also, be kind of nice if Hugh ever said anything about it himself, or interacted with Adira more than once.
• I will not be pleased if it turns out that Osyraa can fool Eli and wasn’t on the level about the proposed alliance with the Federation. I don’t want the Chain allying with the Federation, but if Osyraa legitimately sees the value in Federation and is on the level about wanting to be part of it in her own way, and is really willing to make significant concessions in order to make that happen? That’s something that would elevate her to a character worthy of being the antagonist rather than the cheap thug I thought she was.
• And her terms to the Federation in this devil’s bargain are, “All you have to do is embrace capitalism.” Holy shit. Even at its most imperial, I wouldn’t expect a flex like that out of Star Trek
• Back to Stamets: I really like his analysis of Osyraa: Maybe she’s more than she seems. But she’s also exactly what she seems. That could make a pretty solid character.
• Disabled Chain Scientist Who Doesn’t Know He’s Working For Evil And Whose Name I Can’t Remember seems like a promising character. I assume he’s going to turn face. Not sure if this means he’s going to join the cast moving forward; he feels a little bit like his arc is a Redemption Equals Death thing.
• If Admiral Vance is going to keep being so reasonable and moral and noble, they should probably stop coding him so strongly as the asshole.
• Michael gets a message out to her mother. Could this be setting up a “And then everyone they’ve made better shows up to join forces” ending like I was hoping for?
• Having Michael lose her shoes during her Die Hard On A Space Ship plot which aired right after Christmas is a little on-the-nose.
• Why tell Stamets that Adira is with Hugh? How is that helping? How is that not just twisting the knife?
• Anyway, the first thing Guy I Can’t Remember His Name says about Stamets’s connection to magic mushroom space is that it must be his tardigrade DNA because he’s not an empath. So I assume the setup for next week is that once he turns face, he will help the good guys figure out that Book can operate the spore drive. Possibly at great personal cost because he probably has to die by proxy so Michael can be sad and also so she can have karmic retribution for the clearly wrong action of ejecting Stamets against his will.
• Oooh that ending. Having Zora show up in the Dots, ready to assist in retaking the ship? I still have some issues with the extent to which everyone takes the whole, “Our ship has come to life,” thing in stride, but I liked that.

I couldn’t figure out why they’d set up the season endgame with Saru, Hugh and Adira being the ones to face Su’Kal.

Duh.

The one who’s recovering from cowardice
The one who’s recovering from amnesia.
The one who’s recovering from PTSD.

 

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

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

I have feelings about this episode! They are conflicting!

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

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

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

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

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

That is less flattering than I intended. Anyway…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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