A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

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?

I feel like I need some time to process this season more than I have been, so I’m going to build up a little lag between watching new episodes and talking about them. Instead, very quick impressions:

• I didn’t really like “People of Earth”, but this is purely a matter of implementation; at a conceptual level it’s pretty much exactly what I want out of my Star Trek.
• On the other hand, I really liked “Forget Me Not”. And Zora’s brief appearance is only the least of the reasons. “People are tempted to be assholes, but ultimately choose not to be,” seems to be a running theme and it is very much where Star Trek should be.

Well that serves me right, doesn’t it? We actually get a properly nasty, even sadistic villain in Zareh, and start challenging my whole, “The universe bends toward utopia” thing.

But the reason I’m okay with it is that the climax reveals that, as it turns out, Zareh was never really as big of a threat as he was coded to be. A nasty piece of work, to be sure, but when it throws down, Georgiou just tanks a bunch of shots from his pointlessly nasty torturegun, and, hey, Saru is a seven-foot-tall apex predator who – I am glad they have not forgotten – can shoot fuck-off-murder-darts out of his skull (The fuck-off-murder-darts continue to not actually do all that much. Which is sad but makes sense given that they were, after all, evolved for hunting a race of frail, goo-covered, aquatic humanoids). Zareh is scary, but he’s the sort of penny-ante thug who’s only of any note because The Burn made space into a small pond. Saru was doing things the hard way because it was the right thing to do rather than throwing his weight around for expedience. And Tilly was there too.

And compared to last week, they do much more to sell the whole, “This is the future and it’s weird.” The exchange last time was a big futurey city and all, but we’ve seen that before. This unnamed planet has floating boulders and parasitic ice, because space is big and weird and that sort of stuff happens.

Also good:

• “You’ve got some Leland on your shoe.”
• I got a kick out of Oweosekun and Detmer competing to shout for everyone to brace for impact.
• I dig how everyone comes off a little shellshocked but is holding it together because they’re professionals.
• “Let’s go down to sickbay and get our lungs modified so we can breathe the air here,” is kind of an amazing offhand thing to do. I wonder if they did it just so that the VFX artists didn’t need to create a new CGI model for Saru wearing a respirator.
• Reuniting Michael with the others in the last scene is great, because separating them was a good way to give us two different angles on the new setting, but it would’ve been tedious to extend the quest to reunite into a longer plot arc.
• Once again everyone works out the fact that the Discovery crew are time travelers all on their own and takes it entirely in stride.
• The take on Discovery being out-of-time feels pretty fresh. Your “classic” Out-of-Time Space Opera setup has the heroes as being constrained by limited resources but possessing a ship full of The Uber-Technology-of-the-Old-Gods. Here, Discovery is at a disadvantage because their technology is out of date – they have to trade for things that anyone in this time would be able to build for themselves out of Programmable Matter, but transportation is very high-cost in this world, and Discovery has a massive stockpile of dilithium and the ability to travel without warp.
• Just like last week, instead of “this is a grimdark future where everyone’s out for number one and no one believes in unity and togetherness,” we encounter people who want to believe in the ideals of the Federation and are instantly on-board for being better people once they had a legitimate choice in the matter. Even to the point of the miners letting Zareh go with an uncertain chance at survival.

On the other hand:

• Something’s wrong with Detmer, and instead of talking about it with the people she cares about, she’s keeping it to herself even though it’s impacting her performance when they need her. I hate this bullshit, especially in my Star Trek. I also question the fact that her medical exam didn’t turn up what was wrong with her. I assume the implication is that it’s a problem with her cybernetics, but you’d think “Check her cybernetics” is part of a standard medical checkup.
• I’m glad Hugh and Stamets have patched things up, but it feels like their reconciliation skipped over a whole lot of tentative fumbling toward a new and stronger partnership while Stamets was in a medically induced coma, because they’re just all happy and comfortable and lovey-dovey now in a way that kind of disrespects the fact that they’ve been through a lot and Hugh should be still sorting through his existential crisis.
• Georgiou isn’t quite right this week. We get that she’s feeling maternal about Michael, but Georgiou is a hypercompetent psychopath, so in the early part of the episode, the fact that she seems largely unconcerned with getting the ship working feels too far out in the direction of, “She’s behaving irrationally in her desire to find and protect Michael.” Saru is right: they can’t help Michael with a broken starship, and even in full-Mama-Bear mode, Georgiou is the sort of Retired Evil Empress who should appreciate that.
• Tig Notaro is a joy in every single scene, but I do prefer it when they give her something to actually do rather than complaining about her back.
• I was just telling people how much I love Linus because his dialogue is always just mundane shit unrelated to him being a lizard man. And here they go having his one line of dialogue being about his visual spectrum. They never even elaborate on why Georgiou cares about it; it seems like it’s a setup for something – she wants him to help her find something or identify something, but all she does is give him the slip to go rescue Saru and Tilly.
• “Parasitic ice” is a cool concept and a good way to establish us as being in a Weird Future, but, like, what does that even mean? How does that even work? The floating boulders, I’m just like, “Okay, cool.” But I want some detail on what “parasitic ice” is.
• So I guess V’dreysh is just pidgin for “Federation” and not the proper name for some degenerate remnant of the Federation that has given in to their colonialist tendencies. Disappointing.

I’ll get back to Short Treks when I get around to it. Just a short blunder this week. In the weeks leading up to this, I’d been increasingly worried that Disco was going to evolve into Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, but so far, they’ve avoided that in a very key way that I bet will piss people off.

To wit: despite the neverending pull of the grimdark, this far-future where the Federation has fallen? It’s not grimdark. Everyone’s… Okay. For the first half of the episode, Book is a jerk to Michael, but he’s in dire straits and she has caused him a lot of trouble; he’s actually a pretty great guy. Book is all like, “Oh the Federation’s gone and everyone’s out for themselves now and no one cares about the ideals of Starfleet any more,” but he just randomly knows a guy who is has spent his whole life being ridiculously devoted to his duty as a technically-not-even-really-a-Starfleet-Officer. (Now, it is a bit of an annoyance that they keep trying to play this fake-out “Rah, we’re all grimdark and everyone is only out for themselves and you need to get all hard and mean and dystopian or this universe will eat you up,” when they’re clearly not going there) Even the antagonists aren’t really bad people; their response to Michael and Book is pretty darned reasonable given that they are in the middle of pulling off a major heist. They’re… Pleasant.

That is why this is not Andromeda: because it is not fundamentally set in a fallen, grimdark universe; it is set in a universe which is at its fundamental level, oriented toward utopia, even if it has been pushed farther from that goal than ever before.

Other things I like:

• How incredibly obvious it is that the Orion and the Andorian enforcers are a couple.
• Things Book Namechecks:
  • Quantum Slipstream
  • A time war
  • Recrystalizing dilithium
• The Federation didn’t collapse in one big dramatic explosive confrontation; it just sort of petered out in the face of the work of utopia having gotten much, much harder.
• I do really like the play of emotions Michael goes through at the beginning, alternating between despair at her situation and her inability to locate Discovery, with her elation to confirm that sentient life still exists, to determination as she slaps on her badge and walks toward the smoke from Book’s crash.
• Kitty!
• This thirty-second century design trend of stuff just growing out of the floor is neat.
• Everyone taking time travel in stride. Also, Michael and Sahil both understand wormhole-based time travel well enough to casually explain that Discovery and Michael should’ve ended up close to the same physical location, but Discovery might show up years in the future. Is that a reference to Star Trek (2009), where Spock and Nero show up decades apart?
• I get that people are gonna find it corny. But when Sahil confesses that he isn’t really an officer, and Michael commissions him? I actually got goosebumps. You can feel what he feels, having spent his whole life manning this outpost waiting to be helpful to someone from Starfleet, thinking probably it would never happen, and then getting it. That’s Star Trek. That right there.

On the other hand:

• The transition from Book setting Michael up and being a jerk for the first half of the episode who only looks out for number one and doesn’t believe in the principles of unity and utopianism to the reveal that he’s a vigilante environmentalist saving the space slugs who I guess is actually into peace and unity and utopianism is clunky. Given that the dialogue in the very first scene reveals that the cargo he’s stolen is a living creature he’s rescuing, it’s weird that the structure of the middle third plays it coy like it’s going to be a shocking reveal that his cargo was a wild animal and he wanted to rescue it.
• Stoned Michael.
• I don’t like Michael’s reaction to learning of the fall of the Federation. Sadness, sure, but her immediate reaction is disbelief. Disbelief that a civilization could have possibly fallen in a thousand years. The Federation is only a hundred years old in her time and already almost collapsed once. And she not only assumed it would still exist but can’t believe it could’ve collapsed in longer than the lifespan of basically any civilization other than Ancient Egypt?
• Michael is more chill with reducing people to puddles of goo than I am really comfortable with.
• Okay, I was fine with it, but for the record, Evelyn had a strong objection that “Book” is not a name, but rather an object.

Random Discovery Reflection:

• The Discovery crew learned about the events of the Enterprise episode, “In a Mirror, Darkly”. So Starfleet spent ten years knowing that one of their Constellation Class cruisers was eventually going to get zapped back in time and into a parallel universe. But they apparently did nothing at all about it. This sounds weird, but it’s less weird if you imagine the USS Defiant as Covid-19.

And we’re back. A few weeks behind, but we’ll make do. Much Ado About Boimler is… Fine. Just fine. This show still isn’t clicking with me, but they’ve done a good job at toning down the parts I find most grating.

The title of this episode… I really like the cadence of it. But it isn’t really a particularly good fit for the episode. Nearly any of the Boimler-heavy episodes could’ve carried the title better. Boimler’s consigned to the B-plot this week, and while it’s the funnier of the two plot-halves, it’s a fairly modest role.

Every episode of Lower Decks is a continuity-fest, squarely targeting old-school fans and rewarding them for their obsession with trivia. But this one feels particularly heavy-handed on that front. I’d be upset about this, but fortunately, the story manages to be fairly solid in spite of it. The command staff are all sent off on a dangerous black ops mission, leaving the Cerritos in the care of a “babysitter captain”. This is a very straight-up whole-plot-homage to the seminal TNG episode “Chain of Command”, and one of my two disappointments this week is that somehow they managed not to bother doing a “THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!” reference. Unlike “Chain of Command”, the episode follows the Cerritos exclusively, rather than primarily focusing on the black ops team. One gag I rather like is that we get basically no details about the mission that has taken the captain, first officer, and security chief, and the one of two we do are incongruous and actively undermine the idea of them being on a high-stakes high-danger mission.

Mariner is incredibly down on the idea, even referencing Jellico, until it turns out that their babysitter captain is another of her Old Friends From The Academy. Ramsay makes Mariner temporary first officer, but Mariner immediately starts fucking up simple tasks in embarrassing ways. Also, there’s a planet whose people look like anthropomorphic axolotls. When the Rubidoux misses a rendezvous, the Cerritos tracks it down and finds it out of power. Assuming they’ve just broken down, Ramsay sends her crew to restore power while she and Mariner look for the Rubidoux’s crew. They find them traumatized and cowering in a storage bay, warning that Rubidoux is infested by a spaceborn lifeform that feeds on energy. Ramsay is unable to reach her crew in time to stop them restarting the engines, and glowing tentacles quickly start to tear the ship apart – in the episode’s central visual easter egg, the creature that finally emerges from the wreckage of the Rubidoux looks to be the same sort of “space jellyfish” as appeared in the TNG pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint”. Fortunately, now that there’s an actual crisis, Mariner snaps back into her usual hypercompetence, quickly orchestrating a rescue by having Rutherford beam the crew to safety with a transporter improvement he’s been testing.

And here, I’m a little disappointed. Because all of Mariner’s mistakes felt like they were born out of insecurity. And I was really hoping this would lead to an admission that while she’s great in a crisis, when she’s got time to think about what she’s doing, Mariner has some sort of anxiety issue that affects her ability to handle mundane tasks – that her irresponsible attitude is really covering for her not being able to handle the “ordinary” pressure of higher-level routine. But no. She’s been fucking up deliberately in harmless-but-embarrassing ways because she’s afraid Ramsay will promote her, because she likes being Lower Decks and is too cool and hip and rebellious to want career advancement.

So basically the exact same thing as when she insulted the admiral’s speech impediment last time. Grr.

Anyway, about that transporter improvement? That’s what kicks off our B-plot, the one that is, in fact, About Boimler. In his zeal to impress the babysitter captain, Boimler agrees to be the first to try Rutherford’s transporter improvement. But it goes wrong, leaving Boimler “out of phase”, though in a way that Rutherford insists is purely cosmetic: he glows, sparkles, and emits a loud hum (The same fate befalls the Rubidoux crew upon their rescue, and is eventually cured off-screen). Rutherford is able to fix the hum, but the visual effects persist, and the doctor has him sent off to Division 14, an elite medical team who handle special cases at “The Farm”, allegedly a sort of health spa.

Division 14 is coded very transparently as evil. Their ship is a terrifying black monstrosity that emerges from a dark storm cloud in space. The doctor commanding the ship is an alien of the same race as the helmsman who replaced Checkov in the Animated Series, wearing a uniform that’s a bit super-villainish. He speaks in ominous, stentorian tones and occasionally breaks into evil laughter. Tendi accompanies Boimler to The Farm, on account of she’s genetically engineered a dog, named “The Dog”. She keeps failing to notice that The Dog is, in fact, a terrifying abomination, who, despite looking like a golden retriever, occasionally displays frightening abilities such as shapeshifting and doing a sort of Silent Hill kind of “flipping all its joints around backwards and climbing up the wall like a spider”. This is one of those episodes where everyone is okay with genetic engineering in principle and only objects when someone makes a terrifying abomination, as opposed to all the other times when humans have an absolute shitfit over genetic engineering even in principle.

On the ship, they meet a variety of freaks, mostly various degrees of references to ’90s Trek. The most straightforward is a giant salamander who they assume had once been human. The de facto leader of the freaks, an officer in a DS9-style uniform whose body is aging in different directions, warns him that there is no Farm, and this ship is really a prison where Starfleet hides its embarrassing abominations (Possibly the fact that his uniform is a generation out of date is meant to indicate how long he’s been there?). He plots mutiny, and though Boimler joins in their chant of solidarity (Which, sadly, is not “One of us! One of us!”), it’s no surprise when they immediately cut to him ratting them out. The captain deals with the impending mutiny by… Locking them all in the room where they already were? But it’s also a room that has an airlock they can open? I don’t know. The “freaks” decide to airlock Boimler, and his case is not helped when he suddenly pops back into phase, thus not even being a “freak” himself any more. But when they open the airlock, Boimler tumbles out harmlessly to find they’ve arrived at The Farm, which is indeed the idyllic resort hospital they were promised. The captain apologizes for how long the trip took, and muses that they really ought to paint the ship a cheerier color. Then he does another big evil laugh, before clarifying that’s just how he laughs.

Tendi says a fond farewell to The Dog, who she doesn’t think deserves any of this, being Just an Ordinary Dog. The Dog tells her it’s okay and wishes her well before flying away, leading to the pretty good punchline that Tendi knew about The Dog’s abilities this whole time, but, being Orion and never having met a dog before, didn’t realize anything was odd about them. The Dog reveals that she, on the other hand, did know that she wasn’t an ordinary dog, and was just being polite. In the coda, Tendi meets a real dog and is grossed out when it licks her.

This episode was inoffensive, and the punchline about The Dog was pretty solid. And for an episode full of freaks, it surprises by not leaning in on the Tod Browning angle. The only real issue for me this week is that it leaves me pretty much entirely cold. Just was not able to elicit much of an emotional reaction in me. So, what, is that the mode for this show now? Offensive or Boring?