A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

So the third episode of the season is, for me at least, the weakest. It’s not outright bad; I’ve yet to see Discovery dip all the way to “bad”. But it’s weak in a couple of ways. The B-plot is important moving forward, but the pacing is weak and its placement here feels like an unfortunate necessity; its thematic ties to the other plots are weak, but it can’t be logically slotted into either of the adjacent stories. The C-plot lapses into idiot-ball territory for a bit that’s incredibly disappointing, despite the gist of the overall story being okay. The A-plot, on the other hand, is a Klingon Intrigue.

I’m not saying it’s a bad Klingon Intrigue. But it’s a Klingon Intrigue. And up until we meet the timemasters of Boreth at the end of this season, the Klingons in Discovery pretty much suck.

To provide context for this week’s episode, I will now relate (with the possibility of me getting some things wrong because I only skimmed those episodes) the Tragedy of Ash Tyler:

So the whole Klingon War thing last season was touched off when Michael Burnham’s impulsive actions and betrayal of her commander led to the death of the Klingon messiah. Said Messiah had appointed a Klingon named Voq as his “Torchbearer”, a duty whose details I did not bother to learn, but the implication was clear that he was the fake-out Big Bad we were meant to be expecting to come back at the end of the season. Instead, what actually happened is that the Klingons captured and gutted a guy named Ash Tyler. As part of a Ridiculously Deep Cover assignment, Voq was surgically and genetically altered to look like Tyler via an incredibly gruesome and nasty process, and on top of that, they used the mind probe or something to pump Voq’s brain full of Tyler’s memories and personality to the point that he could pass, if not for Tyler exactly, for “Tyler after the massive psychological trauma of intense, prolonged torture.” And to make sure he could pass any Starfleet brainwashing tests, Voq’s own memory and personalities were heavily suppressed. Voq was then dumped in a cell with the captured Captain Lorca so they could escape together and he could get adopted onto Discovery. Tyler had little occasional flashes of Voq, but these were largely dismissed as PTSD. Discovery eventually captures Voq’s girlfriend L’Rell, who presumably let them do it because her plan was to reawaken Voq.  Around the same time as Discovery was getting knocked into the Mirror Universe, Hugh scanned just the right thing to turn up evidence of Tyler’s true nature, and he Voq’d out enough to murder him. I did not watch this part, but I gather that what ended up happening was that the Tyler personality was too strong to just go quietly into that good night, and somehow they persuaded L’Rell to delete Voq’s original personality rather than lose both of them. So Tyler at this point is technically less “Voq wearing Tyler like a meat-suit” and more “Tyler got uploaded into a new body which was surgically altered to resemble his old one,” which is kinda similar to a thing that happened on an episode of Voyager years ago, only better thought-out, and probably why on balance most folks are willing to accept him as “Tyler”. At the end of the season, to win the war, Discovery goes right up to the edge of grimdark, but then forcefully backs away by declining to blow up the Klingon homeworld, but instead helps L’Rell get herself installed as Chancellor to unite the warring Klingon factions, which somehow will make them less of a threat to the Federation (just roll with it). To help nudge the Klingons away from resuming hostilities, Tyler reclaims Voq’s title of Torchbearer and remains on Qo’nos with L’Rell.

Also Tyler and Michael are lowkey in love with each other.

But we’ll get back to the Klingons in a minute. Over in the C-plot, Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly is still being haunted by visions of May Ahearn, who seems friendly enough and cheers her on during a half-marathon, but Tilly is having none of it. So, of course, having recently suffered severe head trauma at the hands of exotic matter, Tilly does the obvious thing and goes and tells her doctor what she’s experiencing and submits herself to an array of tests to figure out whether the dark matter or the head injury has done something that needs treatment. No, I’m just kidding, she does what people always do in TV shows and decides that her realistic, persistent hallucinations are actually an indication of a weakness in her character, and hides it until it leads to a major outburst in front of Captain Pike, then quits the command training program because obviously she’s “too weak”. Among the Klingons, L’Rell shows off the plans for the D-7 to the Klingon council, but Asshole Klingon TimKol-Sha challenges her on being too friendly with the humans. L’Rell and Tyler stress out a bit privately. He’s mad that she doesn’t trust him like Voq, she’s mad that he doesn’t act like Voq. She’s still got feelings for him, but he’s not really Voq any more, and he’s still got feelings for her, but also, he did kinda torture him a whole lot. Also, he’s been making secret long-distance hologram calls to Michael on the DL. Tyler eventually finds out that L’Rell’s uncle is hiding her secret baby – Voq hadn’t known she was pregnant when he had himself Tyler’d. Finding out that he’s got a kid changes Tyler’s tune about L’Rell and he’s willing to try to make a proper Klingon family with her.

Back in the C-plot, Michael helps Tilly work out that May is an alien and not a hallucination, and with some help from Stamets, they work out that Tilly picked up some fungus from mushroom space that the dark matter powered-up enough to manifest as a hallucination. Over May’s protests, Stamets uses a dark matter sample to yoink the parasite out of Tilly and lock it in a force field where I am sure it will never come up again.

Turns out Kol-Sha had Tyler tracked, kills the uncle and abducts the baby. He demands L’Rell’s abdication and pokes them both with a torture stick, then prepares to kill all three of them anyway, because evil, but a hooded assassin zaps Kol-Sha’s henchmen out of existence and traps Kol-Sha so that L’Rell can finish him off. The assassin turns out to be Former Terran Empress Evil!Georgiou, who spirits Tyler and the baby away. L’Rell presents convincing duplicates of their severed heads to the council with the cover story that Tyler had turned traitor, and Kol-Sha had been martyred defending her, and declares herself the symbolic mother of all Klingons. Tyler drops the baby off on Boreth to be raised by the monks, and accepts Georgiou’s offer to join Starfleet’s Morally Ambiguous-to-Cartoonishly-Evil branch, Section 31.

While all this is going on, there is a B-plot where Amanda shows up on Discovery. She stole Spock’s medical records from the facility where he was checked in. Michael narcs her out to Pike immediately, and calls the hospital. They tell him that Spock murdered a bunch of people and busted out. This sounds fishy enough to Pike that he orders Burnham to decrypt Spock’s medical file, whose contents seem to reaffirm that Spock had some kind of massive breakdown. Amanda tells her about Spock’s first encounter with the Red Angel, which they’d assumed was just a child’s mind processing subconscious clues to help them find Michael after she’d run away from home. Michael confesses to having emotionally wounded Spock in the hopes that driving him away would protect him from the Logic Extremists. Amanda pretty much drops Michael like a hot potato and declares her intention to go save Spock all by her damn self.

Meh. Okay, I get what they’re going for here, and a lot of it is just plain necessary for setting the board up the way they want it. But I’m just not into it. I can’t really separate out a “good” and “bad” list this week even, so here’s a hybridized “things I am interested in” list:

• Now that I know where Georgiou’s storyline is going, most of my annoyance at her reappearance here has faded. When she drops out of the story near the end of the season 1 finale, it felt so much like the implication was that she would one day return as a Big Bad. But no, there’s rather a sense here of Georgiou as an emblem of Section 31: Starfleet’s dark mirror, but one that it is choosing to embrace (loosely) rather than deny. If Discovery really is a show about healing, then I can’t begrudge them for wanting to include Georgiou as an object lesson in, “She is not one of us, she will never be one of us. But yes, we can find a place for her among us, and we will not reject her.” That, and long last, is a role for Secton 31 beyond “Starfleet’s Cartoonishly Evil Branch”: this utopian project needed a place where even people like Leland and Tyler and Georgiou could go and make a positive impact on the universe.
• Mia Kirshner’s Amanda Grayson is great. She really does feel true both to Jane Wyatt’s TOS version and also Wynonna Ryder’s Abramsverse version.
• I know what they’re going for. There’s a parallel meant to be happening here centered around the concept of fierce motherhood, between L’Rell and Amanda. It’s the closest those plots come to belonging in the same episode. But no. I just said Mia Kirshner’s Amanda is great, but this just pisses me off. So much of her plot in this episode is coded around the unintentional implication that Michael was always secondary to her. That the affection Amanda showed Michael as a child was only what she was displacing because she wasn’t permitted to be as affectionate to Spock as she wanted. And when she learns how Michael hurt Spock, her response is so cold, she’s basically just disowned her adopted daughter. I can’t imagine what watching this scene would be like to someone in the audience who was adopted. This largely disappears the next time we see her, so I’m calling that scene an aberration, but it sucks hardcore.
• “My Klingon girlfriend is upset that every time she kisses me I recoil in horror and also the Klingons all think I’m a double agent for the Federation. I think I’ll go place a secret call to my Federation girlfriend to tell her everything that’s going on.” Good job, Tyler.
• Tyler’s major roles for the rest of the season are to share one episode with Pike, gaining his trust; to get punched a few times; to be a deflection that cover’s Ariem’s subversion by control; and to show up with the cavalry in the final battle. That’s pretty much it, and pretty much why he has to be removed from Qo’nos and moved to Discovery. And… I mean, it mostly feels like a waste. The whole big thing of separating Tyler and Michael last season and having him go with the Klingons was a satisfying way for his arc to go. Having him come back literally the first time we see him this season is… It’s just kind of meh.
  • Also, having Tyler remain as Torchbearer seemed like it would fit in really nicely with the Klingon Forehead Problem. We know why there are smooth-headed Klingons thanks to that Enterprise episode, but Discovery-era Klingons have forehead ridges. Why would TOS-era Klingons uniformly lack them, but a few years later, everyone’s got them again? Blame Tyler. A “Klingon” of his important position, torchbearer and lover of the chancellor, decides to go for the smooth-headed look, and for a couple of years, it becomes fashionable all over the empire to not bother with ridge-reconstruction surgery after you get the Klingon Forehead Flu. (I’m one of the few people who really likes Enterprise‘s solution to the Klingon Forehead Problem. Not that we needed one, but given that we got one, it fits so well, since “During certain periods, many Klingons lost their foreheads and may later have had them surgically reconstructed,” covers everything, from the human-looking Klingons of TOS, to the classic TOS Klingons appearing in the new style in Deep Space Nine, to the variation in Klingon makeup over the years, even the really doofy-looking Klingon we see briefly at the beginning of Star Trek The Motion Picture.) But alas, that explanation seems rather out the door now.
• Gah. The whole thing with Tilly assuming she’s going crazy and not talking to anyone about her problem. This is ’90s TV bullshit. Discovery is better than this. It just covers up the fact that it would take precisely two seconds to resolve that plot if she’d just talk to someone.
• Kudos, by the way, for it taking precisely two seconds to resolve that plot once she talks to someone. I dig how Michael works it out: she hears Tilly explaining the concept of crying to May, and instantly concludes that a figment of Tilly’s imagination would know what crying was.
• I like that May views Stamets as the captain of Discovery rather than Pike.
• More idiot-ball stuff, though: Tilly’s complete unwillingness to hear May out at the end. They’re just like “Let’s rip it out of me and lock it up and make sure we do not give it a chance to just explain what it wants because it certainly seems like it isn’t actually hostile and has one specific thing that it really wants to communicate.” This is all here because that part of the plot can’t be allowed to happen until next week. Spoilers: next week they’re going to let it out and let it tell them what it wants, and they will be pretty sympathetic and willing to help.
• Throwaway line from the cold open: Sarek has assembled a team to investigate the red signals. This never comes up again. It’s just there so we can be surprised when it’s Amanda and not Sarek who beams aboard.
• The attempts to leave open the possibility that Spock really has become a murderous psychopath (under some adverse outside influence) is so completely no-sold that I’m almost offended they’re even pretending to try.
  • Before you say, “Well duh of course Spock didn’t kill those people,” remember that most incarnations of Star Trek have had the occasional episode where a regular has been possessed or controlled by some entity that could compel them to do something like that. Scotty got possessed by the ghost of Jack the Ripper once. Man, Trek gets weird some times.
• Tyler comments on the accuracy of his fake head, implying that it’s beyond normal Federation technology to make such a simulacrum. This may be our first hint of how advanced Section 31 is.
• Leland mentions that Control had recommended recruiting Tyler, giving no more specific reason than his “skills”. Wonder if Control was thinking ahead to using him as a misdirect against Pike. Or just exploiting his relationship with Michael.

So on balance, not a great episode. Most weeks, there’s a few problems, even real wall-bangers, but the high notes more than make up for them. This time, there’s just not enough high notes, and the result is a resounding “meh”. It’s especially disappointing after how good “New Eden” was. But fortunately, we’ve got a real solid one coming up next.

“New Eden” starts me down the path of learning to love Anson Mount’s Pike. He doesn’t quite have his performance down right, but the character is heading in the right direction. It’s directed by Jonathan Frakes, and, fittingly, there’s a certain “retro” aspect to this episode – it’s plotted and paced much more like a TNG-era “procedural” than Discovery’s typically action-heavy style. All the same, it touches on two of the recurring elements of Discovery’s structure: strong parallels between plot elements, and revisiting common Trek motifs with modern sensibilities. This is to a large extent an episode about when and how it is appropriate to break the rules in pursuit of a worthy goal, and it addresses those issues with far more nuance than we have historically gotten from Trek, which usually either goes with “The ends don’t justify the means, that’s the way to the dark side!” or “The ends totally justify the means because it’s the late ’90s and we’re all grimdark and antiheroic!” This is, of all things, a Prime Directive episode, but, miraculously, one that doesn’t suck.

They’ve picked up one of the Red Things again, and remember my little digression before about how triangulation works? Yeah, they come out and literally do it. There’s a layer of obfuscating technobabble around it, but the principle is exactly what I said: take a bearing, jump to warp for a couple of seconds, take another bearing, and use trigonometry to figure out where the signal is coming from. Where the signal is coming from turns out to be the far-end of the Beta quadrant, a century and a half away at warp. Now, the spore drive has been officially decommissioned because of the whole thing where you need a genetically modified human to pilot it, but Pike reckons that if Starfleet was willing to overlook that during the war, they’ll also grant an exception due to the exceptional graveness of the Mysterious Red Thingies mission. Thus, despite Stamets being super uncomfortable about it, they magic mushroom themselves to a planet which I will call “Terralysium” on account of that is its name. Once there, they discover a non-technological human settlement that’s been broadcasting a distress signal on a loop since World War III. So we get a very TNG-style mystery episode: someone transported an enclave of pre-warp humans halfway across the galaxy. Pike assumes it’s linked to the reg signals, and is clearly cozying up to the idea that it’s Godlike Aliens. Pike decides to beam down and have a reconnoiter, taking Michael on account of she’s the main character, and also Joann Owosekun, because she grew up in a Luddite community on Earth. Because there are such things on twenty-third century Earth, and that’s nice. They go snooping around the local church – the only Earth-original structure on the planet – and learn that the Terralysians practice a syncretic cargo cult religion that mixes and matches Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Wicca, Shinto, basically everything the writers could think of, centered around the salvific figure of a “Red Angel” that removed their ancestors from Earth before its presumed destruction. And I know what you’re expecting, but no, Discovery does not go that way and have the away team run afoul of local taboos and get burned at the stake by religious fanatics. The Terralysian religion was built from a diverse community needing to set aside their differences and find common ground, and, miraculously, that still seems central to their culture; Pike presents his gang as travelers from another settlement, and the local All-Mother is cool with that and gives them a little backstory about settling here and building a happy agrarian society whose tourism revenue has been way down now that the church lights are out, what with the only technology they’ve had in two hundred years being one lantern battery and a soldier’s helmet cam (hint hint). But Jacob, the maintenance guy, doesn’t take these strangers at face value and figures out their game. He steals their stuff locks them in the basement in order to prove to everyone else that technologically advanced humans still exist elsewhere in the universe. Pike and the gang escape, but Jacob left a phaser where a little kid could find it and Pike has to throw himself in front of it to keep her from shooting someone. Seriously wounded, he entreats Michael not to violate the Prime Directive to save him, so she convinces the All-Mother to take him to the church and pray, a prayer which is seemingly answered when they get beamed up.

Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Discovery finds out that one of the planet’s rings is about to dump a bunch of radiation on the planet and kill everyone. Adorably Goofy Ensign Tilly gets a concussion from screwing with a bit of dark matter. With moral support from a medic named May, Adorably Concussed Ensign Tilly comes up with a plan to save the planet by whanging the dark matter asteroid out the back of the ship like an Olympic hammer toss to, I think, act like a little shepherd moon. Pike agrees to make a very small exception to the Prime Directive and fess up to Jacob along with giving him a brand new extended-life battery for the church lights, in exchange for the helmet. The helmet cam recording doesn’t honestly tell them anything except that the Red Angel is definitely the thing Michael saw on the Hiawatha. Adorably Convalescing Ensign Tilly remembers where she knows May from and looks up her file – and it turns out that May died years ago in a shuttle accident.  Duh-Duh-DUNNNNN!

Continue reading Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery: 2×02 New Eden

Okay. So having finished the season, and needing some more filler while I try to figure out if I have anything useful to say about Killraven, let’s go back and talk about the part of the season that aired before I decided to blog about it…

When we left the Discovery at the end of last season, it was on its way to Vulcan to drop off Sarek and Amanda, and pick up its new captain. But never mind all that because Enterprise! Pike asks to beam over with a security officer and a science officer, and Michael is obviously uncomfortable about the prospect of seeing Spock. Good news for her: the science officer who beams over is some other dude, who I will call Lt. McJerkface because his only trait is smug contempt. To remind us that McJerkface is our designated butt-monkey, reptilian Ensign Backgroundcharacter comically sneezes all over him in the elevator. Spock, as it turns out, took a long vacation and checked himself into rehab. Pike explains that Enterprise had been investigating a series of “red bursts”, seven unusual energy signals popping up all over the galaxy, until Enterprise suffered a complete breakdown and has to be towed back to spacedock for repairs. We aren’t given specifics as to why, but Starfleet considers these signals so important that Pike assumes command of Discovery to go chasing the only one they can still detect, which puts them next to an asteroid made out of non-baryonic dark matter, where they find the wreck of the USS Hiawatha, believed destroyed in the war. Pike, Michael and McJerkface have to fly down in little tiny shuttles but McJerkface is too busy being a smug asshole to steer properly and gets himself killed, while Pike’s shuttle breaks and Michael has to narrowly save him. The only person still active on the Hiawatha is Comically Grumpy Engineer Jett Reno, who has been keeping bits and pieces of some of the rest of the crew alive with her practical engineering skills. Michael gets very nearly killed on the collapsing Hiawatha and has a vision of a red angelic being before Pike saves her. Adorably goofy ensign Tilly manages to snag a chunk of dark matter because she’s hoping she can use it to make a new control system for the spore drive, as Stamets wants to quit on account of he has visions of his dead husband whenever he plugs himself into it. Pike announces that he’ll be staying on for the rest of the season while Enterprise gets fixed, and Michael visits Spock’s room and reads his diary, from which she learns that Spock had been having ominous visions of the red signals before they occurred.

It’s not the best start. But it’s good enough. More specifically…

• Tig Notaro is a delight as Jett Reno, though I keep feeling like there should be more to her; she’s contributed very little to the plot, mostly just serving to move character arcs forward and be generally a pleasure to listen to. But there’s something about her that comes off as evasive here, and in all of her appearances for the first half of the season, which sure seem like they’re hinting at her having some kind of Deep Dark Secret… Which gets forgotten by the end.
• Obviously, Enterprise is the real guest star here. Her update to the style of Discovery is good. She looks like something from the same universe as the rest of the ships in this series, but isn’t just recognizably the Enterprise: in its way, it helps bridge the visual gap between Discovery and the original series. Because Discovery‘s take on the Enterprise is very consistent with the look and feel of the movie-era Enterprise. Spock’s room, in particular, very strongly evokes its appearance at the beginning of Star Trek III. And once you see this, you start to realize that the whole visual style of Discovery is drawing from the movie era. It’s an update, of course, but there’s a much clearer kinship between the set and starship design of the movies and of Discovery (The most obvious example is that Discovery’s Red Alert icon is identical to the movie-era one). Worth noticing that Discovery’s design clearly took some inspiration from an early concept drawing for a possible Enterprise redesign for Phase II.
  • Interestingly, Enterprise looks quite a bit different from the schematic we saw of Defiant last season. Word of God is that Defiant, by then having spent most of a century in the hands of the Terran Empire, had been heavily modified.
  • As I mentioned at the opposite end of the season, we’re given only a very limited look at Enterprise. We see a few exterior shots, Spock’s quarters, and the hall outside them. I was disappointed at the time, but it’s a good move, because the gravity of the Enterprise permeates this episode enough as it is and lingering on it would only steal the show.
• There’s a kind of subtle reverence in the way the Discovery crew talks about the Enterprise. Clearly, we’re meant to understand that they are impressed by it. Reminds me more than a little of the way that the Terrans in Enterprise were clearly super impressed by Defiant and viewed it as advanced technology even though it looked screen-accurate to the original series and therefore like something out of the 1960s.
• The explanation of why Enterprise wasn’t involved in the war is part of that reverence, the notion that the ships that had been sent out on five-year missions represented the part of Starfleet they wanted to survive even if the rest fell. Coupled with my earlier observation about the visual style of Discovery, a bunch of other things fall into place too:
  • Why is Starfleet basically all Constitution-class ships in TOS? Because that was the fleet that had been out on five-year missions during the war, and therefore weren’t subject to the utter decimation that befell the rest of the fleet.
  • Why is the visual style of TOS so radically different from the visual style of the movie era? Because the movie-era style was already dominant in Kirk’s time in more metropolitan parts of the galaxy, but the war had forced Starfleet to use a lot of older ships in the hinterlands.
  • Why is Enterprise being retired in Star Trek II, and why do we never see any more Constitution-class ships after TOS (Whereas we see Excelsior-class ships into the TNG era)? It’s an old ship. It was already old in TOS, and had been kept in service beyond its originally planned lifetime because most of the fleet had been blown up.
• I love the crap out of Alice in Wonderland, so I dig its inclusion here as a book that was Meaningful to Spock and Michael as children.
• The stray leftover fortune cookie fortune Pike finds on Lorca’s desk is exactly as cute as it can be without crossing the line. “Not every cage is a prison and not every loss is eternal.”

There’s not much to specifically complain about; the major shortcoming of the episode is just that it’s a slow burn that spends a lot of its time arranging the field.

• The Enterprise crew have transitioned to “new uniforms”, Discovery‘s take on the TOS uniform. Even though it’s an updated design (They look to be the exact same cut as the “old” uniforms in use everywhere else, just in the TOS color scheme rather than Discovery blue), they do not really look like they belong in this visual motif.
• It is going to take me several weeks to warm to Anson Mount’s Pike. Don’t really care for him in this episode. Though, “Where’s my damn red thing?” is a good line.
• Lt. McJerkface is a pointless character who just wastes my time.
• Nhan is completely underused for the first half of the season and, like Reno, comes off like there’s something slightly sinister about her that they were waiting to reveal.
• It feels so much like Jett Reno is hiding something that it feels like a plot hole that, no, she’s not, that’s just her being gruff.
• There are some extended flashbacks covering Spock and Michael’s childhood which don’t add much to the story and feel emotionally manipulative. The buildup to the eventual reveal of Spock and Michael’s falling out (The full details of which will not come out until the middle of the season) feels way too protracted. The explanation that Sarek adopted Michael (apparently without consulting his wife first) because he felt Spock needed a human friend is gross.
  • Some might call this an odd angle on Sarek, but I do find it compelling to reveal, through Michael’s relationship with him, that there is much more to Sarek than what we saw interpreted through Spock. Two things in particular:
    • That Sarek deliberately exaggerates his Vulcan stoicism to Spock beyond how he actually feels, because he believes that, being half-human, Spock has a choice about which elements of his cultures he’s going to integrate into his identity and needs an absolute paragon of Vulcanity (Vulcanism?) to use as a role model. One gets the impression that Sarek might be inclined to show at least a small amount of affection to Spock if he weren’t worried it would confuse him. He comes off as a parent who took the idea that “consistency is important” too far.
      • If we assume that Sybok hasn’t been retconned out of existence, it helps justify this mindset; Sarek already had one kid completely fail to internalize the Vulcan way, and probably has some issues related to that.
    • That Sarek’s disapproval of Spock and Spock’s life choices exists more in Spock’s mind than in reality (Which culminates in the minor reveal in “Such Sweet Sorrow” that Sarek wants to reconcile with Spock, but is respecting Spock’s wishes to stay away). This also came up in the Abrams reboot, where we see Sarek show a very brief hint of approval when Spock tells the Vulcan Science Academy to go fuck itself after they insult his mother. And, like, per Star Trek V, Spock’s deepest pain is that his father’s immediate reaction when he was born was to dismiss him as, “So human.” But… Does Spock actually remember being born? Or is this just how he imagines it going from his experience of growing up with Sarek as a dad? I think in the novelization of the ’09 movie, they reenact this scene, but in context, it’s clear that Sarek’s comment isn’t dismissive, but affectionate – he’s saying that he looks like his mother.
• Sarek just kinda vanishes out of the narrative at the top of act 2. In the middle of Discovery’s important side-mission to track the red signals, Sarek can apparently just find his own way back to Vulcan. It’s not a problem from an emotional standpoint as Sarek and Spock don’t get along, but coupled with what we’ll see in “Such Sweet Sorrow”, one gets the impression Sarek can basically just zap around the galaxy under his own power like a space-tardigrade.
• They do not make it as clear as they ought to moving forward: seven signals appeared all at once then vanished. Only one of the signals lasted long enough to get exact coordinates (This is basic astronomy but could’ve used someone spelling it out: you have to use multiple observations from different positions to determine the location of something in space. How much difference in position you need depends on the precision of your measurements and how far away the subject is. The idea is that Enterprise couldn’t move far enough that the could triangulate the position of the signals. Presumably they could narrow it down to “somewhere along this line from our position,” but that leaves an awful lot of space to look at). The other signals which appear later in the season are the initial seven appearing again, giving Discovery time to triangulate them. Up until the end of the season, I wasn’t sure if the signals which they receive later were new in addition to the original seven.
• It’s never really explained why Starfleet puts such a high priority on these red signals. The rule Pike cites to assume command of Discovery suggests that his mission involves a potential apocalyptic threat to the entire Federation. And it does, but there’s no reason they should know that at this stage. It’s like they all just read the script.
  • You know what would’ve been a good explanation? Control. At this point, Control is still working for Starfleet, or is at least pretending to. Control would be positioned to recognize the signals as related to their aborted time travel experiment from 20 years ago and raise the alarm. Though you still have to explain why Control would let the Enterprise handle this instead of Leland.

No point in predictions for the future, but how about some elements that don’t get resolved?

• How did Spock have a vision of the signals ahead of time? We eventually establish that the red angel he saw as a child wasn’t the same one who sent them.
• What became of the “survivors” of the Hiawatha, one of whom appears to be a brain in a jar?
• The idea that Pike and Saru are sharing command of Discovery comes up, I think, one more time and is then forgotten.
• I feel like they originally had a better plan for what trashed Enterprise than, “Awkward retcon to explain why we don’t see holographic viewscreens again until DS9.” There’s plenty of reason by the end of the season to imagine that Gabrielle Burnham deliberately put Pike on Discovery as part of her attempts to stop Control, but the element of, “So I went back and EMP’d the hell out of his ship right as Discovery was passing by,” is missing.
  • I’d have liked to see “flashbacks” of timelines where that didn’t happen – Pike trying to stop Control from Enterprise and failing for want of a magic mushroom drive.
• Michael sees the Red Angel when she’s in danger on the collapsing Hiawatha, and it’s left briefly ambiguous whether that’s real or just her eyes playing tricks on her as Pike arrives to rescue her. It turns out that the Red Angel really was there, but not really why.

For this week’s endnote, I mentioned Sybok up above. Sybok’s most widely accepted backstory is that many years before meeting Amanda, Sarek married a Vulcan priestess. This is reasonable and makes a lot of sense as we know that Vulcan marriages are arranged in childhood (Arranged marriage seems like an odd thing for an advanced, egalitarian society to have, but it does fit when you view Vulcans as having a strong cultural apprehension about the potential for unchecked emotions to drive them to barbarism. You might say, “But won’t that lead to a lot of loveless marriages?” and they’d answer, “We can only hope.”). According to the expanded universe explanation, Sarek’s first wife was pursuing Kohlinar, a Vulcan monastic tradition. So she married as she was duty-bound to do, produced issue, and then, her obligation complete, got an annulment and retreated to the hills to become a monk. This is, presumably, a perfectly normal thing to do on Vulcan, which seems weird but fits with what we know about their society. They’ve got arranged marriage, but presumably they also have easy, no-fault divorce, and it’s also probably entirely common and normal for a married couple to have very little to do with one another (Are there gay Vulcans? Seems likely. They probably do much the same thing: marry and produce issue to fulfill their societal obligation, then divorce and pursue other options. Or indeed remain married but have little to do with one another. Vulcans seem not to have much of a taboo about premarital or extramarital sex as long as it’s just about meeting a biological need and not any of that icky emotional stuff, so it’s likely that the institution of marriage itself only really persists at all as a way of enshrining family lines). It’s easy to imagine that parental abandonment, particularly to pursue a lifestyle of extreme emotional suppression, might have pushed Sybok to eschew Vulcan asceticism. But if we presume that this isn’t in and of itself an unusual thing to happen, we can also see why Sarek would presume a serious fault in his own abilities as a single parent, leading him to adopt a more extreme position with Spock. It’s a shame I don’t like James Frain as Sarek, because he’s really well-served by the material in Discovery; Mark Lenard was a great actor, but his Sarek never got material this good, even in his quite good TNG appearances.