Star Trek: Discovery -- "Lethe"

I.... actually liked this episode.

While on a secret diplomatic mission to open negotiations with a subversive group of Klingons, Ambassador Sarek's shuttle is damaged by a "Logic Extremist" (they are going to have to come up with a better word for that) Vulcan suicide bomber.  Because of his unique telepathic relationship with Specialist Burnham, Sarek is able to broadcast a psychic distress signal, kicking the crew of the Discovery into high-level ambassadorial rescue mode.  Meanwhile, Admiral Cronwell, an apparently old friend-with-benefits (more on that later) of Captain Lorca shows up, worried that Captain Lorca is not quite over being tortured by Klingons (or, presumably, blowing up his own crew, as we learned last episode that he once did).  Turns out, Captain Lorca is not over being tortured by Klingons, and Admiral Cornwell informs him that she is going to relieve him of command.  Sarek is rescued, but in too injured a state to meet with the subversive Klingons.  Admiral Cornwell goes in his stead.  The meeting is actually a trap and Admiral Cornwell is captured by the Klingon high command.  Upon being informed of this, Captain Lorca does nothing.

The heart of this episode is the interaction between Specialist Burnham and her adoptive father, Sarek.  The aforementioned "psychic distress call" takes the form of Sarek's greatest regret: the day when Specialist Burnham graduated from the Vulcan Science Academy, fully expecting (as valedictorian) to be admitted to the Vulcan Expeditionary Mission (a Vulcans-only form of Starfleet, I think).  Specialist Burnham has always believed that she, mysteriously, did not make the cut and in that way failed Sarek.  What actually happened is that Vulcan high-command, anticipating Spock's eventual application, was only going to admit one of Sarek's "not quite Vulcan" children (Burnham is human; Spock's mother is human) into the Expeditionary Mission, and they forced Sarek to choose.  He chose Spock, forcing Burnham to join Starfleet instead.  Ironically, Spock goes on to do the same thing of his own free will.  What Burnham had always seen as her greatest failure, Sarek actually saw as his greatest failure.  I love this for two reasons.  Family is hard, which is actually a theme that Star Trek has explored before.  I am even more thrilled with the idea that there are nationalist Vulcans.  How can there not be?  They are a) devoted to a religion (logic) whose principal tenet is that it is the only correct way to make a decision and b) technologically slightly more advanced than everyone they have diplomatic relations with.  Of course some of them are going to let it go to their heads.  I love this idea.  To be fair, it is, like everything good about Discovery, an idea that Deep Space Nine first introduced, if somewhat clumsily, in "Field of Fire" and "Take Me Out to the Holosuite."  Regardless, it is a modification to Roddenberry's canon that has long deserved a proper treatment, and I can't wait to meet more "Logic Extremists" (though can we please, for Surak's sake, call them something else).

This particular backstory also goes some way towards answering one of my first, most exasperated questions of this show: "why did it have to be Sarek?"  If one of the themes that they intend to explore is Specialist Burnham's alienation at being a human raised on Vulcan, then the idea of Vulcan-human families is going to have to remain somewhat outside accepted Vulcan norms.  The alternatives are: put her in Spock's family (we already know that Sarek married a human, and, indeed, marries another after Amanda Grayson dies), or posit that there is another high-ranking Vulcan official open to an inter-species family.  The latter option would cut against the idea that humans are not fully accepted in Vulcan society (though, I suppose the idea could be that the Vulcan elite is more accepting of humans than working class Vulcans).  This theme could also be the long-awaited justification for making Star Trek: Discovery a Star Trek prequel, rather than a Star Trek: Voyager sequel.  It is much easier to believe that Vulcan nationalism is running hot before Captain Kirk rather than after Captain Janeway (unless the idea is that it is revanchist Vulcan nationalism arising in a future where the Federation itself is starting to fall apart; certainly Europe in 2017 proves that such movements are always possible).  The writers will have to tread lightly, though.  It was a little ridiculous in Star Trek V that Spock had a half-brother he'd never mentioned.  Now we learn that he had a human foster sister.  Surely, that would have come out in one, if not all of the "passionate humans" versus "green-blooded, pointy-eared Vulcans" disputes between Spock and Doctor McCoy.  Or maybe Amanda would have mentioned her during her appearance in "Journey to Babel" (the flashback we are shown seems to indicate that Amanda regarded Specialist Burnham as her daughter, whatever Sarek's feelings may have been).  I am sort of reasoning my way through this as I write, but I think my opinion is: I can now almost see why they wanted this to be a prequel, but there were ways it could have been a sequel, and I don't think that they can get through the complications involved with making Burnham a part of Spock's family without trampling canon.

This episode has other, more obvious warts, as well.  As I mentioned before, the B-plot revolved around the past relationship between Captain Lorca and Admiral Cornwell.  Apparently, a part of this relationship involved casual sex.  I have no problem with casual sex between characters in general.  I do have a problem with a) a Starfleet admiral sleeping with someone under her command and b) Star Trek joining the ranks of fiction that seems incapable of portraying an emotionally intimate relationship between a man and a woman that doesn't involve sex.  This just seemed like a sloppy choice on their part, much sloppier than last week's forced "f-bomb."  It was unnecessary and I wish they hadn't done it.

There is also the question of Lieutenant Tyler, whom we are apparently supposed to trust even though the entire internet has already decided he is a sleeper Klingon spy.  The longer they draw this out (assuming we're right), the more awkward it is going to feel.  Maybe they're going to reveal this in a few episodes and it will be moot.  I fear, though, that they are saving the reveal for the season finale.  That would be unfortunate.

All of that being said, this episode falls squarely into the "is Star Trek" Venn diagram in my mind.  I am as shocked as you are.  Don't worry.  The teaser for next week involved Harry Mudd.  I expect to be back to my snarky self in a week's time.

Star Trek: Discovery -- "Choose your pain"

Last week, we learned that the keys to instantaneous space travel are

1) mushrooms

2) torturing a space hippopotamus

This week's episode opens with Specialist Burnham dreaming about an engineering deck in which she is both the one operating the instantaneous space drive and the one inside the drive being tortured.  While Star Trek has never been subtle it has, at least, evinced its own belief that it was subtle in seasons past.  I think that time is now over.

The plot of this episode kicks off when Captain Lorca, having been identified as the commanding officer of Starfleet's teleporting super-weapon, is kidnapped by the Klingons while returning from a meeting with Starfleet Command.  Obviously, Discovery is the only ship that can effect a rescue since he is now being held in Klingon space (don't ask how the Klingons got so close to Starfleet Command).  Unfortunately, the space hippopotamus is not doing so well on account of all the torture.  In fact, as soon as Discovery teleports in close enough to have a shot at rescuing the Captain, space hippopotamus sheds all its water and curls up into a shriveled comatose mass.  This provokes much sturm and drang amongst the crew.  Specialist Burnham, Cadet Tilley, and Chief Engineer Lieutenant Stamets think torture is a bad idea and start working on a plan to engineer something else that can interface with the mushrooms and run the teleportation drive.  Acting Captain Saru also thinks torture is a bad idea, but he is thinking more about his erstwhile captain getting tortured by the Klingons, and doesn't really care if the space hippopotamus has feelings.  Eventually, the engineering team comes up with an injection that can engineer a human's DNA to be just close enough to space hippopotamus DNA to work, but there is apparently some blanket Federation law against "eugenics" the prevents them from using it.  This, presumably, is supposed to make us feel warm and fuzzy because it obviously has its roots in World War 3 and the rise of Khan Noonien Singh.

Meanwhile, Captain Lorca is indeed being tortured (but not being asked any questions, as far as we can tell) on a Klingon prison ship where he is being held with a random Starfleet Lieutenant and.... drumroll please.... Harcourt Fenton Mudd.  Yes, the delightfully campy human trafficker from the Original Series episodes "Mudd's Women" -- an episode about mail order brides that somehow fails to conclude that mail ordering people is wrong -- and "I, Mudd" -- a delightful tale about robots that is probably still okay to watch -- apparently has a backstory that we are going to learn.  Shenanigans ensue, Mudd colludes with the Klingons; Lorca and the random Starfleet Lieutenant shoot their way out of prison, Discovery beams them aboard, and Lieutenant Stamets heroically injects himself with the illegal space hippopotamus DNA, letting Discovery teleport back to Federation space.  The penultimate scene shows Specialist Burnham and Cadet Tilly setting the space hippopotamus free.  The ultimate scene shows Lieutenant Stamets and his boyfriend doctor (whose name I guess I now have to learn) talking about the days' adventure and ends when they both leave the bathroom only to have Lieutenant Stamets' reflection linger behind them.  Cue the creepy music.

I suppose this episode was fine.  I may actually like one of the characters now: doctor boyfriend has done nothing morally objectionable, nor has he verbally abused anyone that I am aware of.  Lieutenant Stamets is also almost an okay person, now.  It was obviously too easy for Captain Lorca to shoot his way out of Klingon prison (there's a theory about that on the internet, I'm told), but I am going to ignore that for the moment to talk about the thing I really want to talk about: Harry Mudd.

It has always offended me a little that, of all the guest stars in all of original Star Trek, Harry Mudd is the only one who shows up more than once.  Even before I thought about "Mudd's Women" long enough to realize why it was totally unacceptable (and it took an embarrassingly long time), the episode was too campy to warrant a repeat appearance by it's equally campy villain.  Yet there he was in "I, Mudd" and here he is now.  This strikes me as problematic in two ways.  Given that Captain Lorca did not bring Harry Mudd with him on his escape, it seems unlikely to me that, having been abandoned on a Klingon prison vessel, Harry Mudd will evolve into the comically problematic sixties archetype that Captain Kirk encounters eight story years from now.  I have said similar things before on this blog.  That is not even the heart of my complaint, though.  The heart of my complaint is that this is naked fan service.  There is no reason to make him Harry Mudd (just as there was no reason to make Specialist Burnham's foster father Sarek) except so that the writers can lean on our preconceptions of who Harry Mudd is.  This feels lazy.  It's an insurance policy in case the writers fail to properly characterize Harry Mudd this time around.  "Just fill in the gaps with the things you learned about Harry Mudd in the Original Series."  I also find it a little offensive.  "You'll think this is cool because it's a thing you have history with."  I'm sorry, but I'm not that stupid, and I wish you (the writers) would stop treating me as though I am.  Benedict Cumberbatch saying "my name is Khan" in Abrams Trek 2 did not compensate for the fact that nothing anyone in that movie did made any sense.  Rainn Wilson declaring that he is Harry Mudd evokes no emotion other than, on my part, confusion.  It does disservice to me as a fan and it does disservice to the show.  This Harry Mudd actually makes some good points.  "[This war] is your fault for 'boldly going where no one has gone before.'  What did you think would happen when you finally ran into people who didn't want you on their front lawn?"  It's a question which Star Trek has never dealt with (except for passing mention in "Arena," I guess).  I would like to see how they answer it.  Given that I know how Harry Mudd ends up, though, the writers' options to explore the question through his character are already constrained at one end.  Why tether yourself that way? Oh, right.  Because I'll think it's cool because it's a thing I have history with.  It's okay.  This is Star Trek.  We care enough to run with you while you try new things (case in point: I have referenced "mushroom-based propulsion" twice in this post alone).

While we're here and talking about fan service: when the engineering team is trying to figure out if any other lifeform can interface with the mushroom drive in space hippopotamus' place, Cadet Tilly asks if she should access "the top secret life form files at the Daystrom Institute."  The Daystrom Institute is where Leah Brahms, the engineer who designed the Enterprise-D, will be employed 100 years from now.  It was (I presume) named for Richard Daystrom, who created the M-5 computer featured in the Original Series episode "The Ultimate Computer."  It's not clear to me that there would be an institute named for Dr. Daystrom while he is still alive, and possibly even before he is famous.  If you're going to drop Easter eggs on the second most detail-obsessed fandom in all of geekery, do it right.

Star Trek: Discovery -- "The Butcher's Knife Cares N" -- wait, seriously? That's your title for this episode?

Star Trek should be better than this.  Star Trek is better than this.

By way of a recap: last episode, we learned that the USS Discovery and her sister ship were working on (and this is not a typo) a fungus-based propulsion system that would allow starships to instantaneously teleport anywhere in the galaxy.  An accident occurs aboard Discovery’s sister ship, and Discovery is sent to investigate.  The boarding party discovers a derelict vessel filled with many dead humans, a few dead Klingons, and a creature that appears to be a cross between a hippopotamus and a beetle.  Shenanigans that look remarkably like “Alien” ensue, but, somehow, the landing party (minus one red shirt) manages to survive and return to Discovery.  The final scene reveals that Captain Lorca has ordered his somehow-even-creepier-than-he-is security chief to beam the hippopotabeetle into a containment cell in what appears to be his own personal Menagerie of Death.  There might also be some pontificating by chief engineer Stamets about how he just wanted to do science and not fight a war.  I can’t quite remember.  Cut to black.

In this episode, Captain Lorca invites Specialist* Burnham into the Menagerie of Death (which is actually a museum containing “the deadliest weapons in the galaxy”).  He wants her to figure out how the hippoptabeetle’s skin is “hard enough to deflect Bat’Leths” and why its claws can “tear through a starship’s hull.”  He wants her to weaponize these abilities.  Burnham does some science and, in the truest tradition of Star Trek, discovers that the hippopotabeetle isn’t a predator, but an herbivore with a very good defense mechanism.  In fact, the hippopotabeetle is the key to making the fungus drive work.  She convinces Chief Engineer Stamets to connect his engines to the hippopotabeetle and, whammo! my prediction that fungal-based teleportation will not work because Captain Kirk doesn’t do it is proven incorrect (new prediction: Captain Kirk doesn’tt use fungal teleportation because doing so appears to inflict pain on the hippopotabeetle and this is Star Trek and inflicting needless pain on beetles is wrong).

*Michael Burnham has been stripped of rank.  I will call her a “specialist” until I am told to do otherwise, though I believe that word actually does mean something specific in the military.

None of this is objectionable.  It is, in fact, the bare minimum of pseudo-science and pseudo-ethical conundrums one needs to fall in the “is Star Trek” circle on the Venn diagram in my mind.  What is objectionable is the wtf-ex-machina used to inject drama into this plotline.  Turns out, creepy-as-f@#$& security chief is a soldier and she doesn’t buy any of Burnham’s Vulcan space ethics nonsense.  She is going to stun the hippopotabeetle and cut off one of its claws because that is how you win wars.  The flaw in her plan (besides the fact that it is cruel) is that the hippopotabeetle cannot be stunned and its claws can still rip through starship hulls.  Creepy-as-f@#$& security chief does not survive the encounter.  This is good because, as you can tell, she was annoyingly one-dimensional.  This is bad because she was the only other named woman in the cast who was not white (not that I bothered to learn her name because, as I already mentioned, she was annoyingly one dimensional).  I get that sometimes you write characters just to kill them.  This is, after all, the franchise that gave “red shirt” a meaning outside of college football.  However, it is just common courtesy to respect your audience’s intelligence enough not to telegraph that this is a throw away character by making her so unbelievable that we want her to die so that we can go on trying to enjoy your television show.

Meanwhile, back in the wreckage of the space-battle from the pilot episode, we discover that T’Kuvma’s ship is still crippled, his followers are still on board, and both the Federation and the Klingons left every ship that was destroyed or crippled in the battle just sort of drifting there.  We know this latter fact because T’Kuvma’s appointed successor, Voq, has been scavenging the derelicts for parts to fix his crippled vessel before his/T’Kuvma’s followers all starve to death.  Did I mention that T’Kuvma’s ship, the one that the Klingons left behind for anyone to find, is apparently the only one with a cloaking device?  During World War 2, the allies went to great effort to make sure the Germans did not know that they had captured a functioning enigma device.  The Klingons just left their only enigma device (okay, bad metaphor) drifting in space for anyone to find.  It’s okay, though.  Voq and another Klingon manage to fix T’Kuvma’s ship through a combination of eye-fornicating and scavenging parts off of the Shenzhou, Michelle Yeoh’s ship, which the Federation left behind for anyone to find.  I once got in a debate about whether or not Starfleet was a military organization.  My argument was “no.”  The man I was debating with thought I was making the “Starfleet’s missions has always been one of peace" argument.  I wasn’t.  I was making the “Starfleet is terrible at behaving like a military” argument.  Turns out, I was right.

Eventually, a member of one of the other Klingon great houses (one who ostentatiously refused to follow T’Kuvma in the pilot) realizes that the Klingons left their single greatest weapon just drifting in space and comes back to claim it, buying off T’Kuvma’s starving followers with food.  There’s some palace intrigue between this newcomer (I think his name was Kor*), Voq, and Voq’s eye-lover (I know I should learn her name, but I am not rewatching this episode; not for any amount of money).  It ends with a promise to the viewers that Voq is going to go find some Klingon nuns who will teach him how to truly unite the Klingon empire.  This plot is actually fine.  It’s fun to see an alien culture in flux, but I have the same worry I have expressed from the beginning that I don’t see how these Klingons become Kang, Koloth, and Korr in just eight years and I don’t know why these Klingons couldn’t represent a nationalist revanchement several decades after Martok.

*Oh, wow, if this ends up being Korr from “Errand of Mercy,” I don’t know what I’m going to do, but it might involve impolite words.

Reading these words, it seems like I am giving this episode a passing grade.  I am not.  I did not enjoy it.  The nonsense with the security chief dragged on too long, keeping me in mortal terror that I was going to be stuck with this character and her total lack of believable motivations for many episodes to come.  There was a subplot involving an attack on a Federation dilithium mine which served only to provide pressure on the “what is the hippopotabeetle?” plot and to set up an overwrought argument between Captain Lorca and his chief engineer about whether they were scientists or soldiers.  In summary: this episode had all of the pretentiousness of Star Trek with none of the levity.  My wife reminds me that, at this point in Star Trek: the Next Generation (my first great geek love), we still had “Code of Honor” to look forward to, so, I guess, as long as we can avoid adding “explicitly racist” to the list of invectives I hurl at any given episode, we’re ahead of the curve.  I like to think, though, that we have learned things about storytelling in the last 30 years and that I am justified in holding this show to a slightly higher standard.  Or maybe I am just stodgy.

One other red flag that went up for me: in the course of getting caught up on what has happened in the six months of story time since the pilot, we learn that Voq and his crew ate Michelle Yeoh’s body.  I am going to go with the generous interpretation that they were starving.  If Klingons now eat other sentient beings for fun or ritual, that would be a bridge too far in the direction of the “Klingons as ‘savages’” direction for me.  I have a haunting feeling that the Klingons are going to be stand-ins for one or more of the peoples on the receiving end of Manifest Destiny (remember, this is still Roddenberry’s “wagon train to the stars”).  I’m not sure I yet trust Star Trek to tell that story respectfully.

Star Trek: Discovery -- "Context is for Kings"

I waited three days before writing anything about this episode, because I was hoping something would come to me that I haven't already said.  Alas, it was not to be.  I still see no justification for this series being a prequel to original Star Trek.  If anything, I see even less justification for this series being a prequel.  Apparently, the crew of the Discovery (or, at least, its engineering staff) is working on a fungus-based technology that will allow people to beam from planet to planet.  Benedict Cumberbatch's shenanigans notwithstanding, we know that doesn't pan out, because people are not beaming from planet to planet in the twenty fourth century.  Already we are seeing the brutalizing effect of war on the Federation (or maybe this vision of the Federation was always brutal).  Very few characters in this episode come off as sympathetic or empathetic to each other or us.  Authority figures relate to their subordinates principally via condescension.  A shuttle pilot gets jettisoned into deep space in the first five minutes of the episode and no one bats an eye.  Culturally, I do not see how this Federation evolves into Captain Kirk's Federation in less than ten years.

While we're on the topic of the Federation's new mean streak, I'm beginning to worry that I gave the first episode too easy a pass on the whole "mutiny" thing.  The first half of the effectively two-part pilot ends with Commander Burnham (sp?) Vulcan neck-pinching her mentor and (I assume) friend of seven years, Captain Georgiou.  Captain Georgiou then pulls a phaser on Commander Burnham.  I understand that "character you like pulls a gun on another character you like" is a time-honored way of ratcheting up the tension (and, I assume, it is probably what a commanding officer would do upon being rendered unconscious against her will by a subordinate, so maybe the fault lies more with Commander Burnham than Captain Georgiou), but I thought Star Trek was better than that.  This is supposed to be a vision of what humanity can become when we recognize, if not entirely overcome, our flaws, not a world in which professional military officers -- especially those in command of.... anything -- assault one another when they disagree.  The idea that the moral authority of the Federation has been or always was compromised is a worthwhile theme (again: something that Deep Space Nine got to first with the Maquis and Section 31 plots).  I'm not sure, though, that the way to explore that theme is by presenting us with a cast of main characters who are themselves compromised (put another way: I'm not ready to watch a Star Trek series in which I feel unfriendly towards more than half of the characters).  I know I am being hasty and we will get a chance to see everyone's warm and sympathetic side in turn (except Captain Lorca; that guy is Admiral Presman levels of creepy).  I just feel like this isn't quite Star Trek (because I clearly get to define what is and is not Star Trek....), which I would be much more comfortable with if it was sold to me as what Captain Janeway's Federation became through neglect and dissolution as opposed to the thing that became Captain Kirk's Federation through surviving a war with the Klingons.

Also: the super-top-secret lab is secured with a.... breathalyzer lock.  Clearly that choice was made to make it reasonable for Commander Burnham to hack the lock (which she could only do because her cadet bunk mate is authorized to enter the super-top-secret lab; one of those words, "cadet" or "top-secret" doesn't mean what I think it means).  I am just pointing this out because that level of world building for the sake of plot this early in the show doesn't strike me as a good sign.