A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Okay, halfway through the season and it’s time to start the plot. That’s the cynical way of looking at it, and I don’t really mean it of course, but this is the episode where we discreetly introduce the big bad and set off the direct chain of events that will lead to the season finale. This episode, and to a lesser extent the next one, transition from the more episodic, “Red signals lead Discovery to random planets in need of saving” structure of the first half of the season to the more tightly plotted, “Save the sphere data, save the world,” arc of the back half. This episode is closer in style to what’s coming next, but I think it still reflects a plot that was going to go in a slightly different direction.

This one’s got two largely independent plots going on. Last time, we ended on Michael’s decision to return to Vulcan. We pick right up with that here, as Pike gives Michael permission to take some time off to “visit her family”, ie., go look for Spock on the DL. Discovery has been ordered to hang out over Kaminar for a while to look for traces left behind by the Red Angel, which turns out to have left behind “freaking amazing” levels of tachyons, which in turn lead to a Big Swirly Thing In Space. Discovery can’t launch a probe without getting too close, so Pike decides to use his Mad Test Pilot Skillz to get close with a shuttle. Tyler insists on going along because he’s the Section 31 liaison, and because he’s angry Pike won’t tell him where Michael went, so they need to have some character stuff between them about Pike and Tyler learning to trust each other. When they get close, Pike has a SPOOKY FUTURE ECHO of a fake-out where he’s forced to shoot Tyler, and the shuttle gets lost in the timey-wimey after they launch the probe. While they’re trying to get out, the probe comes back, five hundred years older and upgraded to PURE EVIL. It punches tentacles into the shuttle, one of which Pike has to shoot off of Tyler to complete the earlier fake-out. It jams itself into the computer and starts screwing with it. Since Stamets has timey-wimey powers thanks to being part giant water bear, he’s able to track the shuttle via magic mushroom space and beams over to the shuttle to rescue them. The probe starts hacking Discovery’s computer to get the sphere data and infect Airiam, so Pike blows up the shuttle to stop it, the three of them beaming out in the nick of time. Discovery backs away from the time rift before it explodes, and everyone muses on what this means about the Red Angel.

Meanwhile, in the other side of the plot, Michael goes to Vulcan and figures out that Amanda has already found Spock and is hiding him downstairs in the family crypt where the souls of his ancestors can interfere with Sarek’s attempts to locate Spock telepathically. Spock is rambling cliche TV “crazy person” word salad, mixed in with bits of Alice in Wonderland and a sequence of numbers. Sarek eventually figures it out himself and orders Michael to take Spock to Section 31. Which she does. Leland promises to help Spock, but Georgiou reveals that they plan to brain-puree him with Terran mind-blender technology. She throws a fight with Michael to let them escape because she likes Michael and wants to make Leland look bad. Once they’re safely away, Michael realizes that the numbers Spock’s been reciting are backwards due to his dyslexia. Plugging them into the computer in the opposite order reveals them to be the coordinates of a planet: Talos IV.

Aw. Yeah.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×07: Light and Shadows

Okay. I think we’re more-or-less at the point where the original plan for the Red Signals story arc runs out. Starting next week, the focus will shift to the Spock arc they’ve been meandering around, which will, honestly, get largely resolved in two episodes, setting the stage for the back half of the season, as I’ve already talked about, where Spock’s journey and Pike’s mission will come together and go in a direction that I’m pretty sure is at least a bit askance of where it as originally supposed to go.

This week, Discovery encounters the last of the seven red signals to appear before the endgame. Like the two we’ve seen so far 0 and unlike the others – it’s leading them on a rescue mission. Tyler is less optimistic about that analysis, though: he points out that a powerful godlike being with access to time travel and a penchant for showing up in doomed places might equally well be summoning Discovery as a witness to destruction as summoning it on a rescue mission. The third signal has appeared over Kaminar, Saru’s home planet. Now, Kaminar is populated by the Kelpiens, a non-technological race known for their heightened sense of fear, and the Ba’ul, who eat the Kelpiens, have only recently developed warp drive and are assholes. Saru is still coming to terms with his recent transformation: the loss of his fear ganglia has caused him to suddenly become fearless, and also he’s got some keratinous growths coming in like teeth in the back of his head. He has a go at comforting Culber, since they’ve both got interesting Weird Bodily Transformation stories to bond over. Discovery’s doctor tells Culber that he probably just feels weird because his entire body is new and his nervous system still has that “New Nervous System” smell. The Ba’ul aren’t interested in talking, so Saru wants to go down to Kaminar on account of it is his home planet. Even though the Kelpiens don’t know about aliens, they could hardly be entirely unaware of space travel since the Ba’ul have it, which means that it’s not a Prime Directive situation if Pike wants to make first contact with them, though in less extreme circumstances, this isn’t really supposed to be the thing you just do on the spur of the moment. Pike orders Michael to go instead on account of she’s the main character and Saru is acting kind of Emotionally Compromised about the whole “Turns out that my people have been systematically slaughtered for generations based on a lie” thing. But Michael talks Pike into letting Saru come with on the promise he will not foment revolution. They pretty much immediately run into Saru’s sister Siranna. Turns out Saru’s dad hit vahar’ai and got eaten some years ago, and now she’s the local priest. Her and Saru have an argument about him having run away from home, but the Ba’ul have noticed him, and once they return to Discovery, they call up to demand Pike turn Saru over. They get even more annoyed when Saru lashes out in rage and reveals that he knows about the scam they’ve been pulling with vahar’ai. The Ba’ul are probably bluffing about attacking a Starfleet ship to get him back, but probably not about blowing up Saru’s village, so he sneaks off to turn himself over. The Ba’ul beam up him and his sister for threats and vivisection, and Saru discovers that those things growing in where his fear ganglia were are giant fuck-off murder darts which he can shoot at at the Ba’ul, though the one he tries it on has a force field so it doesn’t matter. Michael, Tilly and Airiam read up about Kaminar in the sphere data and find out that the Ba’ul almost went extinct a couple thousand years ago, and work out that the Kelpiens are the actual apex predator, and the Ba’ul are their prey. The Ba’ul used their technology to deceive and control the Kelpiens to basically induce species-wide neoteny to save their gross oil-slick skins. Saru breaks free and smashes a Ba’ul drone and rewires it to call Discovery. They send him an MP3 of the sound the sphere made, and he rebroadcasts it on the Ba’ul planet-wide PA system to make his entire species hit puberty at once so that the Ba’ul can’t hide the truth. Pike offers to broker a peace between the two races, but the Ba’ul would rather have a go at genociding the entire species, which is more murder than Discovery has the ability to stop. Fortunately, that level of genocide requires raising their giant underwater base out of the ocean, whereupon the red angel shows up and EMPs them back to the stone age. After some heart-to-heart with Saru on Discovery, Siranna returns to Kaminar to work on leading her people into a new and hopefully less-genocidal age and everyone crosses their fingers that the Ba’ul and Kelpiens will work out a way to live peacefully together. Pike decides that the Red Angel is indeed kind of scary and threatening so Tyler may have a point, and shares with him Saru’s report, since Saru got a good look at the Red Angel and his Apex Predator Eyesight revealed it to be a humanoid in a winged suit. Michael decides that in order to find Spock, she should go back home to Vulcan.

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×06: The Sound of Thunder

I was hoping to have the next War of the Worlds II post out this week, but side 2 is a slog and I haven’t been able to sit through more than 30 seconds of it at a stretch. So instead, this:

I’ve said more than a few times that season 2 of Discovery seems like it changes direction significantly in the middle of the season. From what I’ve heard and seen, I think the showmakers originally wanted this season to be much more loosely-plotted series of episodes with overlapping and interconnected subplots and themes, but that were primarily stand-alone, something a bit in the vein of modern Doctor Who. The second half of the season, though is basically a single, ongoing story divided into chapters, more in the “nine-hour movie with regular bathroom breaks” style that’s become popular for streaming series. Both have their merits, though I’m a little more interested in the latter for this show simply because it’s somewhere Star Trek has never boldly gone before. Possibly this episode is a casualty of that change in direction, because a big chunk of its plot is something that feels like setup for the future, but never comes up again.

When we left off last week, Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly had been eaten by a fungus creature called May from Magic Mushroom Space. The closing shot of the episode had her awaken somewhere spooky and gooey, so it should be no surprise that she was not, in fact, killed. Stamets works out that if she had been eaten, there’d be some bits left over, so he concludes that the fungus cocoon is actually a biological transporter and it beamed Tilly into the mycelial network. May helps Tilly out of the gross anus-end of the mushroom transporter, because May can manifest physically in mushroom space, and explains that her people, the jahSepp, are a race of spores that break down and repurpose matter that finds its way into the mycelial plane, and they are in imminent danger of being wiped out by a monster she’d rather like Tilly to kill for her. While this is going on, Discovery catches up to Spock’s shuttle, but it contains not Spock, but Evil!Georgiou, who presents herself to Pike as a retired Starfleet Captain, now working as an independent security consultant on contract to Section 31. Leland, who’s an old friend of Pike’s, calls up on the hologram phone to tell him to let Georgiou handle the Spock-finding, and sends him Ash Tyler as a liaison. Pike does not immediately take to the brainwashed Klingon wearing a dead man’s skin. Stamets locates the receiving transport pod in mushroom space, and comes up with the idea of pulling the handbrake halfway through a spore jump to jam Discovery sideways in the multiverse so him and Burnham can walk out into the mycelial plane to find Tilly. This requires everyone else on the ship standing on the opposite side like in those old Columbian coffee commercials so they don’t die. Also, mushroom space will slowly eat the ship, and also this is an inherently unstable thing to do, so they will only have roughly the length of a CBS All Access Streaming Original Program to find her and get out safely. Typically, Pike frets a little but ultimately consents, and Discovery does a cool barrel roll and crashes itself into mushroom space. May and Tilly team up with Stamets and Michael and agree to go save the Magic Mushroom People by hunting the monster. Only it turns out that the monster is a filthy, ferral Hugh Culber. Yeah, so when Hugh died last season, Stamets was suffering from a bad case of interdimensional epilepsy due to Lorca goading him into overusing the spore drive until he accidentally whanged them into the Mirror Universe. And Stamets reckons that because Hugh died in his arms while he was smeared between dimensions, he acted like an existential lightning rod and siphoned off some vaguely described quality from the dying Hugh that they don’t come right out and say is his soul, but they definitely mean it’s his soul, and the jahSepp didn’t know what to do with it and built him a new body to the original spec. Only humans don’t belong in magic mushroom space, so they tried to take him apart again, and he objected. By smearing himself with the poisonous bark of a mushroom-space tree that May had helpfully foreshadowed to Tilly earlier. Stamets eventually manages to calm Hugh down, though May still wants to kill him, and goes as far as stealing a phaser to try to do it herself, but Tilly talkes her down too, because they’re friends now I guess. Discovery’s in serious danger of falling the rest of the way out of the universe, so Tyler calls Leland (whose ship was hiding nearby disguised as a rock), to give them a tow. Georgiou even lends a hand to get them some extra power and buy Discovery a couple more minutes. Hugh starts to dissolve when they try to bring him into the spore cube to return to normal space, because his new body is made out of mushroom-space matter, like May’s. He accepts his fate and is willing to wipe off the bark and let the jahSepp eat him, but then they remember the mushroom transporter, which can beam things from Mushroom Space to Normal Space, and May escorts Hugh off to do that while Stamets rolls the ship back out of the hole it’s in. The cocoon crumbles to reveal a shiny, new, tastefully nude Hugh Culber shivering on the floor. While he’s being declared physically fit and still human, Cornwall shows up (I guess travel is a free action in act 4 as well) to tell Pike and Leland that they’re both pretty and had better stop being jerks to each other. Pike promises to remember that not everyone has to be a boy scout and Leland promises to remember that shady, morally-compromised antiheroes need to be content with supporting cast roles on this show, and they agree to work together. Georgiou calls up Michael to demand a thank-you and also to unsubtly indicate that it would probably be better if Michael found Spock before she did.

Continue reading Some Blundering about Star Trek Discovery 2×05: Saints of Imperfection

So here we are. “An Obol For Charon” is where the season arc really starts settling down and making itself into something with a direction to it. It also revisits a major plot from an old and incredibly thematically-messy TNG episode, and while it turns out in a similar sort of way, it avoids that episode’s bullshit moral conundrums and is far more respectful to its characters and its moral dimension.

Enterprise’s XO, Number One, makes a brief visit to give us a not-really-satisfying explanation about Enterprise’s complete breakdown and also to give Pike the warp signature for the shuttle Spock stole when escaping the hospital, so they set out to find him. Unfortunately (or not) this puts them in the path of MYSTERIOUS SPACE SPHERE, which snares the ship and makes everyone start speaking in tongues. Since he speaks all the languages, Saru is called up to the bridge to fix the universal translator, despite the fact that he’s got a bad head cold that’s making bits of his brain pop out of the sides of his head. He collapses right after fixing it, and in sickbay, admits that what he’s got isn’t a cold, but vahar’ai, the physical signal that it’s time for him to ritually sacrifice himself to be eaten by the Ba’ul, and if he doesn’t, he’ll eventually be driven mad by the brain inflammation. All the same, he helps Michael work on an antivirus to reverse the sphere’s corruption of the computer. Down in the mushroom kingdom, Stamets and Lovably Grumpy Engineer Reno (Yeah, turns out she’s still aboard) exchange fun grumpy banter where Reno plays the proxy for angry fanboys complaining that powering a starship on magic mushrooms just sounds dumb, while Stamets basically just calls her stupid and talks about pollution (This being a century before TNG, he’s talking about the ecological damage done by dilithium mining rather than proposing that warp drive itself pollutes space). The computer issues start making the ship’s power grid blow up in places (Discovery has not backed away from Star Trek‘s tradition of computer malfunctions causing consoles to explode), which locks the two of them in Engineering with Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly and May the interdimensional fungus monster. They try to ground the power surges out through the door frame to avoid setting the air on fire, but this knocks everyone down and turns off the lights briefly, and May, the sentient fungus from last week, takes the opportunity to escape and attach itself to Tilly’s arm. Tilly warms to the idea of being infected with an interdimensional fungus, but that’s probably just the hallucinogens talking. Stamets and Reno end up drilling a hole in Tilly’s head with an actual literal power drill (They’re locked in engineering and have to make do) to give her an implant that lets them talk to May. May rather angrily explains that Stamets mucking around with mushroom space has endangered her people. Stamets, to his credit, immediately offers to help, but May is kind of belligerent and engulfs Tilly. Seeing Reno and Stamets try to let May communicate through Tilly gives Michael the idea that the MYSTERIOUS SPACE SPHERE is also trying to communicate through the medium of breaking Discovery’s translator, blowing up its power grid, and inducing Kelpien puberty. Saru gets the same idea from patterns in the flashes of ultraviolet light he’s been seeing since he got sick. The sphere starts getting hot and Pike makes plans to have a go at blowing it up, but Saru and Michael convince him to drop the shields and route all the power to communications because they reckon the MYSTERIOUS SPACE SPHERE is dying and just wants to tell its story before it goes. Discovery downloads the sphere’s parting message and is pushed clear just before it explodes. Michael helps Saru back to his room, where he asks her to cut off his fear ganglia, killing him peacefully before vahar’ai drives him mad, but they shrivel up and fall off all on their own just as she starts, leading to his immediate recovery and the loss of his Kelpien hyperdeveloped sense of fear. Discovery lost track of Spock’s shuttle while trapped, but it turns out that the sphere recorded its location right before it died, giving Pike a fresh lead. Downstairs, Stamets cuts Tilly out of the fungus and prepares to permanently cut Discovery off from mushroom space, but he and Reno start tripping from psilocybin, and they come down too late to stop May from swallowing Tilly again. When Stamets cuts the cocoon open this time, Tilly is gone.

Continue reading Some Blundering about Star Trek Discovery 2×04: An Obol for Charon