Star Trek: Picard -- "The End is the Beginning"

Star Trek is big. It is too big for any one person to completely hold it in their mind (even if that one person is a Star Trek showrunner). It is definitely too big for any one person to love all of it simultaneously. It is probably too big to be about one thing. The Original Series was about proving that our conception of freedom is the correct conception of freedom, if only we could understand what it actually meant. The Federation was novel, or, at least, expanding, and surrounded on all sides by entities of nameless power and questionable intent. “Deep Space 9” was about learning that other people’s conceptions of freedom are probably also the correct conceptions of freedom. The Federation itself faced no real threat (until the Dominion War), but, at the borderlands, the intersection between the reality experienced by the luminaries of Earth and Vulcan and that experienced by everyone else was starting to come into question. “Voyager” was about a lot of deeply earnest people exploring the meaning of deep earnesty. “Enterprise” did not happen and I have no idea what you are talking about (see what I did there?). If I had to pick one thing that “The Next Generation,” my Star Trek, was about, “who gets to be a person?” is probably not a bad choice. The series begins and ends with Q threatening to wipe out humanity (and possibly all other carbon-based lifeforms) because we are either too barbaric or too stupid to be allowed to exist. The series is undergirded by a pervasive awe at the fact of Data and what that means in a universe permeated with machines that could easily pass the Turing test. Halfway through the final season of the series, the Enterprise — the actual ship — gives birth through the miracle of holodeck trains. Artificial life existed in the Original Series, but it was always a menace, threatening to consume everything that was born, not made. Thankfully, 1960s artificial intelligence was almost universally easily dispatched through exposure to the contradictions of being in the universe. Captain Kirk defended freedom against those who would take it from others. Captain Picard defended freedom against his own inclination to deny it to someone because they had been made, not born. It’s starting to look like he didn’t do nearly as good a job as we were initially led to believe. In the series “Picard” he is being given the chance to come to terms with that failure and to try to do better. Let’s do a recap, shall we?

Flashback to 2385, days (hours?) after the events of last week’s pre-credit flashback (I think this is going to be A Thing). Admiral Picard emerges from Starfleet Command where Lieutenant Commander Raffi, the woman from last week with the phaser and the “get the hell off my lawn you crazy SOB” relationship to Jean-Luc, is waiting for him. The revolt of the synthetics has destroyed the fleet meant to facilitate the evacuation of Romulus. Jean-Luc has just made his last, best effort to convince Starfleet to adopt a plan B which he and Raffi have cobbled together from a hodgpodge of decomissioned Starfleet vessels and an army of synthetic crewmembers, which Starfleet has just banned, to Jean-Luc’s utter bewilderment. “They say that [the attack on Mars] indicates a fatal coding flaw in the operating system,” Jean-Luc reports. There’s a lot going on there. One of the driving premises of this series is that Jean-Luc Picard has been fundamentally unable to move beyond Data’s final heroic sacrifice. I don’t recall Jean-Luc, Beverly, or Geordi ever referring to the vital forces driving Data’s positronic brain as an “operating system.” My phone has an operating system. I suppose one can argue that, insomuch as I am just a computer made of meat, I also have an operating system, but I doubt that any of my friends would feel comfortable saying that about me, especially after my death. I would expect Data to be afforded the same respect. I will reiterate that Jean-Luc and Raffi intended to make up for the loss of the rescue fleet’s crew by populating their ersatz fleet with synthetic crew members, none of whom, I assume, would be given the chance to volunteer. It does not bode well for any of us that the man who defended Data’s rights in “the Measure of a Man” thought that Starfleet’s use of synthetic labor was reasonable right up to, and presumably beyond the moment that they banned it. “Fortunately,” Starfleet is even further on the wrong side of the personhood question than Jean-Luc Picard. They have ordered all synthetic life forms disassembled and scuttled the Romulan rescue operation. In a final act of desperation, Jean-Luc demands that Starfleet accept either his plan or his resignation. They accept his resignation. A few minute later, “the CNC” (i.e. Admiral Can’t’Act) calls Raffi into Starfleet Command to be fired. All justice is political in the 24th century. Fun fact: the last time I heard the tearm “CNC” was in Star Trek VI. I think it refers to head of all Starfleet. Admiral Can’t’Act may yet go far in the annals of terrible admiralty.

In 2399, Jean-Luc Picard and Raffi are discussing the Dahj/Soji/Jat Vazh situation. Raffi seems to blame Jean-Luc for the premature end of her career, or maybe she blames him for the fact that he resigned and retired to a manor house on a vineyard, while she got fired and now lives in a trailer in the desert. The Federation is, indeed, a classless society; it’s just that “classless” is being used in a different sense than we all thought. Because of their divergent fortunes, Raffi wants nothing more to do with Jean-Luc, even though she loves a good Romulan conspiracy theory, having spent the last 14 years convinced that the Tal Shi’ar orchestrated the attack on Mars. She has no clear answer to the question “why would they attack a fleet designed expressly for the rescue of their own people?”

“That’s what happens in a cover-up; things disappear.”

I want to dismiss this as the post-fact schlock that it is, but the question is asked just too frequently and Jean-Luc dismisses it just too flippantly for the Tal Shi’ar not to have orchestrated the attack on Mars. All that remains is for the showrunners to tell us why.

Eventually, Raffi relents, agreeing to refer Jean-Luc — or “J-L” as she calls him; I will never get used to that — to a pilot who can aid him in his hunt for the missing sister robot.

Speaking of the missing sister robot*: we are learning things at the Romulan Reclamation Center. Specifically, we are learning that the Romulan Reclamation Center is run by the Reclamation Initiative and that the Reclamation Initiative is run by Hugh, Geordi’s second best friend turned resistance fighter under the Lore regime turned… what did happen to him after “Descent”? Whatever transpired, Hugh is now properly de-assimiliated. He is both a fully individuated being and a color indicative of circulation taking place in his capillaries. Only a few tastefully placed face rivets and a Frankensteinian network of scarring speak to his time as a member of the Borg collective. Hugh is very impressed by Soji’s work as a clinical psychiatrist for emerging post-Borg (ex-Borg, I guess; Hugh calls them “XBs”). Soji leverages Hugh’s good favor to get an interview with Ramda, the foremost scholar on Romulan mythology (because there’s only one Romulan mythology) before she was assimilated. Ramda is being kept in a wing of the center devoted to XB Romulans (XBRs?) who are having a particularly hard time adjusting back to individuality. We see Romulans with face rivets speaking to walls, frantically solving Rubik’s cubes, and, in Ramda’s case, playing with Romulan tarot cards. When Soji and Hugh arrive, Ramda is playing the tarot card with the door on it. Except it is not a door; it is a false door. “Traditional Romulan houses all have a false door at the front,” Soji explains, “to get in, you have to go around to the back.” Because of course they do. Exposition ensues. Soji is an anthroplogist who wants to build a “common narrative framework” to help guide Romulan Borg out of the collective. It’s fun to see Star Trek techno-babble cross the university quad into the humanities departments. Soji turns heads when she reveals that Ramda was one of the last batch of Romulans assimilated by this Borg cube before its “submatrix collapsed,” presumably severing it from the collective. According to the other Romulan Romulans and Hugh, Soji wasn’t supposed to know that. According to Soji, she doesn’t know why she does.

*If anyone wants to help me form a band named “Missing Sister Robot,” I am all in. I just need a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, and a vocalist (you know: a band).

Back on Earth, Commodore Oh visits Doctor Jurati, the Daystrom Institute cyberneticist with whom Jean-Luc has been consulting.

In orbit around Earth, Picard meets Captain Rios (a lot of “R” names in this series), a cigar-smoking ex-Starfleet officer who is now a freelance captain whose only crewmember is a seven foot tall Wookiee… sorry, an emergency medical hologram that manifests as a projection of Captain Rios’ own self, speaking in an Irish accent rather than the Captain’s native Spanish accent. This is the part where my wife asks “didn’t Starfleet ban all synthetic life?” and I remind everyone that, even though “Doctor Soong was an unprecedented genius and no one has been able to reproduce what he did,” the USS Voyager’s emergency medical hologram was almost indistinguishable from a person within 12 hours of being left ever-on. The personhood question is messy. It probably has to be defined in the moment, and if you blink, you can find yourself on the wrong side of it. The fact that emergency medical holograms still exist after Voyager returned home and the Doctor integrated into polite society should have been the first warning that we were not learning the lessons we were supposed to be learning along the way.

Captain Rios agrees to take on Captain Picard as a client, but definitely not because Captain Picard is kind of a big deal. “I’ve already had a heroic captain in my life,” Rios tells his holographic alterna-self. “Every time I close my eyes, all I see are his brains and blood splattered on a bulkhead.” I have checked, and I am reasonably certain that Captain Rios is not Chief O’Brien with a fake beard on.

What happens next is interleaved with the end of Soji’s interview with Ramda.

Captain Picard is going to space, and Irish Romulan’s Husband has packed him a sack lunch complete with pâté, roquefort, and, oops, he dropped the apple. Just as he ducks to pick it up, a phaser bolt whizzes by where his head used to be. “Watch out: Jat Vazh!”

On the Reclamation Center, Ramda plays the tarot card with the twins on it, and she asks Soji, “are you this sister who lives, or are you the sister who dies?”

Irish Romulan and Her Husband kill a lot of Jat Vazh. I mean, a lot. It helps that there is a phaser pistol bolted to the underside of Jean-Luc’s side table.

The XBR solving the Rubik’s cube gets very excited.

Doctor Jurati shows up at Chateau Picard just in time to shoot the last Jat Vazh in the back and explain earnestly to Jean-Luc that Commodore Oh approached her and that “I told her everything; I didn’t know what else to do.”

Ramda pulls a disruptor from one of the many Romulan guards and points it at Soji.

Irish Romulan and Her Husband leave one of the Jat Vazh alive for interrogation. It goes about as well as you would expect. “You can’t protect her.” “We will find her.” And then, at the same time (whatever simultaneity means in a universe where superluminal spaceflight is possible), the Jat Vazh prisoner and Ramda say:

“She is the Destroyer”/ "You are the Destroyer"

The Jat Vazh prisoner bites down on his “cyanide” tooth and disintegrates. Don’t mess with Romulans.

Jean-Luc beams aboard Rios’ ship. Doctor Jurati comes with him. Raffi is also there. As I mentioned, she *loves* a good Romulan conspiracy, and has managed to figure out that their first stop should be Freecloud, where they are hoping to find Bruce Maddox, the man who probably made Soji and Dahj and, fun fact, is also the man who sued to have Data’s rights abolished in “Measure of a Man.” Raffi claims she doesn’t care about Soji or Doctor Maddux. She just wants to hitch a ride to Freecloud. By the way: she is very upset that Jean-Luc has accepted Doctor Jurati’s help without at least letting Raffi run a security check on her. Everyone takes their places aboardship. Captain Rios turns to Jean-Luc.

“Engage.”

At long last we are hurtling through space at many factors of the speed of light (I’m not going to fall into the trap of trying to define how the warp system works), bound for the new front lines in the never-ending fight against space fascism. Are we self-aware enough to avoid repeating the mistakes that got us here in the first place?

While evaluating Jean-Luc as a potential client, Captain Rios asks him “do you intend to break any laws?” to which Jean-Luc responds that he is “not in the habit of consulting lawyers before doing the right thing.” That is an odd thing to hear from the man voted “Most Likely to Uphold the Prime Directive” by the La Barre High School graduating class of 2325. Seriously, though, it is worth enumerating the absurd and questionably ethical things Jean-Luc has done in the name of the law. He ordered a little girl’s memories erased in “Pen Pals.” He ordered Ray Wise’s memories erased in “Who Watches the Watchers,” and, when that didn’t work, consented to getting shot in the chest with an arrow to prevent “the Cult of the Picard” from forming in one village on one continent for fear that it would ruin an entire planet’s civilization. In “Redemption: Part 1” Jean-Luc encouraged Worf to take a leave of absence to clear his father’s name, then scolded Worf for having the temerity to request access to the Federation communication records that were the only actual physical evidence of Mogh’s innocence. Which brings us to what, for me, has always been the most egregious example of the letter of the law trumping its spirit: Jean-Luc Picard consents to let an entire inhabited planet die rather than attempt an emergency evacuation of a pre-industrial civilization in “Homeward.” The parallels between what he didn’t do then and what he did do on Romulus are only just now sinking in for me. If Captain Picard never consulted lawyers before acting, it’s because he never needed to. Captain Picard was the foremost expert on Federation law in all of Starfleet. Casually disregarding legalistic mumbo jumbo was Captain Kirk’s schtick, a contrast almost explicitly drawn when Captain Picard chastises Ambassador Spock for practicing “cowboy diplomacy” in “Unification.” So long as the Federation was the last thing standing between the galaxy and the will to power, Jean-Luc was more than happy to stand atop the law, lecturing the masses about their first duty. Now that the mask has been torn off and we have discovered that the Federation has been debating personhood in bad faith this whole time, Jean-Luc needs to find a different justification for the way he has acted these past seventy years. Whether this justification will serve as a framework for making better choices or merely provide cover for restoring Starfleet to its elder glories remains to be seen.

PS I know that I am being part of The Problem by sustaining my weekly speculation regarding “who is evil.” Unfortunately, I can’t unsee "Discovery." The pivotal scene this week is, of course, the attack on Chateau Picard (which, I guess, was the only scene featuring Irish Romulan and Her Husband). It is very convenient that Her Husband has to duck to pick up an apple right as a Tal Shi’ar/Jat Vazh sniper is pulling the trigger. That being said, I can’t think of a good reason, if Irish Romulan and Her Husband are evil, that the Jat Vazh would want to fake at attack on the Chateau rather than just kill Jean-Luc. If not for the still poorly explained sequence of events leading from the roof of the Starfleet Archives to the couch in Jean-Luc’s living room, I would be tempted to say that the case for Irish Romulan’s moral turpitude is rapidly withering. That does not mean that I cannot think of any reason that the Jah Vazh would want to fake an attack on Chateau Picard. Recall that the conclusion of the attack is what introduces Doctor Jurati to Jean-Luc’s merry band of space pirates. She shows up just at the tail end of the fight and shoots the final Romulan with a disruptor rifle she finds… it’s not clear. She doesn’t read as someone who can handle herself in a fight. It is possible she picked up the rifle from one of the half dozen Romulans dispatched by Irish Romulan and Her Husband. It is also possible that the whole thing was a set-up designed to give Doctor Jurati cover to admit that she had spoken with Commodore Oh without prompting Jean-Luc to think too hard about that statement. So, after three weeks, the state of play is

Irish Romulan and Her Husband: “hopefully not evil”

Doctor Jurati: “definitely evil”

Oh yeah: Rizzo the Romulan is now physically on the Reclamation Center and looking like a Romulan again. Maybe the showrunners learned a little too much from "Discovery’s" shortcomings.

Star Trek: Picard -- "Maps and Legends"

“This is not your parents’ Star Trek.” That has been said before. It was a part of the official advertising campaign for Abrams Trek. A friend-of-a-friend once used it to describe Discovery. I do not usually respond positively to that formulation. I like my parents’ Star Trek, both literally, in that I still have a soft spot for the Original Series (though, admittedly, every time I have watched an episode since my 30th birthday, I have come away feeling… uncomfortable), and figuratively, in that I have taken “not your parents’ Star Trek” to mean “not a staid affair,” and I like it when Star Trek is a staid affair. I need a Starfleet captain to scold me every now and again. If I want laser guns and explosions, I will watch Star Wars. If I want a cosmic fungus providing the foundation for all space and time, I will watch Doctor Who. If I want a series of empty plot twists played exclusively for shock value, I will seriously reevaluate my life choices.

Star Trek: Picard is not your parents’ Star Trek in the sense that it has abandoned the central theme of Gene Roddenberry’s “wagon train to the stars.” This is not a hopeful depiction of a utopic future in which humans and aliens have come together to forge a more perfect union. This wagon train, like its historical counterpart, is carrying the vanguard of a decadent society that has decided to give slave labor a shot. On the frontier they have met a population of refugees representing all that remains of a lost power principally organized around a seemingly endless series of nested secret police forces. There is no hope here. Even our titular hero is resigned to the coming of an unnamed neurodegenerative disease (let’s be honest: it’s Irumodic Syndrome).

We start this week’s episode with a flashback to the burning of Mars. It is First Contact Day 2385 (so…. 14 years ago relative to the series). A group of construction workers at Utopia Planitia shipyards are lamenting the fact that they are the only ones not allowed to take the day off. Not quite. Their ample work force of synthetic life forms are also forced to work, when they’re not being forced to “sleep” in a cargo container between shifts, or serve as the butt-end jokes meant to illustrate the primacy of organic life forms. In other words, that thing that Guinan said would happen in the season two “Next Generation” episode “the Measure of a Man” — the mass-production of androids as slave labor for the Federation — actually did happen. Of course, Guinan projected this outcome if Data lost the court case to decide his rights. He actually won that case. Slavery came anyway. Fortunately, First Contact Day 2385 is the day that the synthetics have officially had enough. A synthetic named F-8 (that sound you hear is my best friend screaming at the screen that “ROBOTS CAN HAVE REAL NAMES, TOO!”), after watching his human overseers demonstrate their superior faculties by ordering the equivalent of a Tyson’s TV dinner from a machine that can make any food in recorded history, uses his workstation computer to deactivate Mars’ planetary shield just as a squadron of unmarked triangular starships arrives to begin bombarding the planet. There are also satellites with space lasers. F-8 takes, I’m going to call it a “plasma torch,” and murders his co-workers before blowing his own head off. Roll the title credits.

Back in 2399, Jean-Luc’s Romulan companions (whom I will call Irish Romulan and Her Husband until I can bother to learn their names; I guess I should confirm that they’re married; I get the impression that they are married), who are apparently and openly ex-Tal Shi’ar, are helping him try to puzzle out what happend to Dahj back at Starfleet Command (I should be more careful; she was killed at the Starfleet Archives; we’re going to visit Starfleet Command shortly). Irish Romulan tells Jean-Luc an interesting story about a Romulan police force worse than the Tal Shi’ar, the Jat Vazh (sp?), whose job it is to keep a Terrible Secret: Romulans hate artificial life forms and no one knows why. “Have you ever noticed,” she asks, “that our computers are limited to basic numerical functions? We do not research artificial intelligence.” She thinks that the Jat Vazh killed Dahj because… it’s not clear, but they hate artificial life forms.

Which is weird, because, in the third season “Next Generation” episode “the Defector,” Romulan Admiral Jarok looks Data straight in the eye and tells Data that he knows dozens of Romulan cyberneticists who would kill to be in the same room as Data. I love Star Trek. Really, I do. Its showrunners wouldn’t know continuity if it hit them with a Klingon pain stick. I guess Jean-Luc’s Romulan friends could be lying…?

Through ex-Tal Shi’ar jiggery-pokery, we are able to learn that Dahj was in contact with her twin sister Soji (I can’t tell you why, but I definitely walked out of the last episode under the impression that Dahj did not know she had a twin sister; she certainly didn’t *mention* one, which seems like an odd omission when trying to refute a kindly Starfleet Admiral’s assertion that you are an android) and that Soji is not on Earth. Recall that Soji is in the “Romulan Reclamation Center.” I now know what that is. Sort of. It is a Borg cube turned research facility run by the Free Romulan State where they are researching how to de-assimilate dormant Borg drones. A sign on the wall proudly proclaims that “This workplace has gone 5843 days without any assimilations.” Soji has started sleeping with that almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unattractive Romulan. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Jean-Luc goes to Starfleet command to visit this series’ entrant in the “worst admiral ever” competition. I don’t think Cornwell has much to worry about. Don’t get me wrong: this admiral is terrible but there is no indication that she is a) sleeping with her subordinates or b) toying with the idea of casual genocide as a warfighting tactic. Jean-Luc wants his commission reinstated so that he can go to space and save Soji from the Jat Vazh. Unfortunately, Admiral Can’t’Act (this is the one way in which she might make the podium in the Bad Admiral Olympics) saw the part on space CNN where Jean-Luc shamed Starfleet for turning its back on androids and Romulans, and impolitely tells him to go… away (that’s not actually what she says). The conversation is pretty boilerplate for things that happen in a Starfleet Admiral’s office, except for the notable exchange where Admiral Can’t’Act informs Jean-Luc that, if Starfleet hadn’t pulled its support for the Romulan rescue operation (an apparent side-effect of the synthetic revolt on Mars; I guess Jean-Luc just saved the Romulans himself? With space pirates?), “14 species would have left the Federation.”

“Starfleet doesn’t get to decide which species live and die,” says Jean-Luc.

“Yes we do.”

So…. yeah.

At some point after this, Admiral Can’t’Act puts in a call to her good friend, Commodore Oh, a Vulcan who appears to be in charge of Starfleet Intelligence and/or Section 31, informing her that “the hermit of La Barre” (I actually love this) is afoot with conspiracy theories about Romulan covert ops taking place on Earth. Commodore Oh promises to look into it. “Looking into it” means chiding her subordinate, Lieutenant Rizzo, for making such a mess of the attempt to capture Dahj at the Archives and promising that she herself will “take care of Picard” if things get out of hand.

It gets weirder when Lieutnant Rizzo, apparently a human, holographically visits Romulan McDreamy-Ears at the reclamation center to tell him to speed up his “work” on Soji (“Have you managed to learn where its nest is?”). The cute Romulan remarks denigratingly on Lieutenant Rizzo’s surgically rounded ears and assures his older sister that he has the situation under control. It is left ambiguous whether or not Commodore Oh knows she is being played by… that Tal Shi’ar? The Jat Vazh? Am I spelling any of these words correctly?

In the final act of the episode, Jean-Luc specifically goes out of his way to crush all of our most fan service-saturated dreams by informing Irish Romulan’s Husband that he doesn’t want to ask Riker, Worf, or Geordi for help, because they might get themselves killed out of loyalty to him, and he “can’t go through that again,” not after Data (poor Jack Crusher). Instead, Jean-Luc goes to visit a trailer in a desert where I swear Captain Kirk once fought the Gorn and wherein now lives someone we’ve never met, who immediately pulls a phaser rifle and tells Jean-Luc to turn around and go home.  As he’s leaving, Jean-Luc mutters under his breath about “Romulan covert assassins operating on Earth.”

“Is that the ’83?” his new old friend, Raffi, asks of the wine bottle casually dangling from Jean-Luc’s upraised hand.

Jean-Luc nods and walks back towards the trailer. Think Arnold and Carl Wethers’ first meeting in “Predator.”

This episode was mostly exposition and connective tissue. In our post-Abrams Trek, post-Discovery world, that is high praise. I will gladly accept any Star Trek that feels confident enough to go more than seven minutes between explosions without fear of its audience getting bored. We clearly have not gotten beyond the over racialization that Star Trek has leaned on so heavily over the past 50 years of its world building. All Ferengi are venture capitalists. All Klingons love “Fight Club.” All Cardassians are mid-level bureaucrats. All Romulans are spies. My eyes rolled more than a little when I first learned that there was something worse and more secretive than the Tal Shi’ar.  Maybe that is the point, though. If I am allowed to be that guy who read a book once and is convinced that only that book matters: in “Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt posits that one of the methods by which Nazi social control functioned was by creating redundant bureaucracies with nominally overlapping responsibilities whose real responsibility was to spy on each other and prevent anyone from knowing where power actually lies. My first year college debate partner once posited to me that, in the same way that the Klingons are an allegory for the Soviets, the Romulans are an allegory for the Nazis (this sentence makes more sense in the context of the Original Series and its movie spin-offs than in literally any other Star Trek; there is very little about modern Klingons that is Soviet). If he was correct, then we should expect there to be at least a half-dozen more secret police forces on top of, beneath, and adjacent to the Tal Shi’ar and the Jat Vazh. Every Romulan is a spy, just on each other, rather than the Federation (though they all do seem to be spying on the Federation, too).

Abrams Trek (am I really about to say something positive about Abrams Trek?) gave Star Trek the opportunity to talk about what the 24th century looks like as things start falling part. Romulus and Remus were destroyed and the galaxy has been saddled with an enormous population of refugees who have never not lived in a totalitarian society. This is the limit of the ideal that we, and Jean-Luc Picard, thought that the Federation represented. Does the primacy of diplomacy, empathy, and attempted mutual understanding extend to space Nazis? Starfleet Command does not believe that it does. Jean-Luc Picard disagrees. What do the space Nazis think? It is not a good sign that their government appears very keen on dissecting a Borg cube.

Meanwhile, it appears that the Federation has also found ways to undermine the stories it tells about itself, without the need to refer to anyone else at all. I’ve already mentioned their dalliance with the idea of utilizing slave labor. I would like to dwell for a minute on the Tyson’s TV dinner that came out of that replicator minutes before F-8 freed Mars. It really did look that disgusting, and if you listen closely, you can hear the organic workforce complaining about “the amino acid matrix” use to supply the Utopia Planitia replicators. For the past 50 years, we have been presented the Federation as an exemplar of a post scarcity society, perfectly blending liberal values and Marxist concern with human welfare. There is no money. There is no need for money. No one has a job they don’t want. In the season 1 “Next Generation” finale, Captain Picard explains to an early 21st century American that Data accidentally brought out of hibernation that every citizen of the Federation is free to devote herself to “personal betterment” and the pursuit of passions. Mars is never more than 2.5 AU from the capital of the Federation. I don’t think I expected it to be fully terraformed. I did not expect it to be modeled after a 20th century industrial park, complete with lousy work-life balance and sub-standard food. Maybe this is a betrayal of Gene Roddenberry’s original vision of the future. Maybe that original vision has only ever been presented to us through the eyes of characters who have a vested interest in The Way Things Are. I hate to give credence to those who claim that DS9 is the best Star Trek, but Lieutenant Commander Eddington’s rant to Sisko about the arrogance of the Federation at the end of “For the Cause” is one of my favorite moments in all of Star Trek. “You’re worse than the Borg,” Eddingon says. “You assimilate people, and they don’t even know it.” After the assimiliation comes the exploitation. This is not our parents’ Star Trek. I’m starting to think that it is the Star Trek we deserve, though. Especially this week. The Federation is awful.

PS I have, to this point, completely ignored the question of whether or not the Irish Romulan and Her Husband are evil. The case is less strong that it was last week. If they were evil, I would expect the “Jat Vash” to be a cleverly constructed lie meant to distract Jean-Luc from whatever the Tal Shi’ar is up to, and I think I have managed to convince myself that it is reasonable for the Romulans to have at least two secret police forces. That being said, when Commodore Oh is dressing down Rizzo the Romulan, she goes out of her way to say “Admiral Can’t’Act just told me that Jean-Luc Picard paid her a visit and spoke the name of the Jat Vash openly, except that she didn’t say that last part, but I know it.” Commodore Oh does not divulge her sources, and, as far as I know, only Admiral Can’t’Act, the Irish Romulan, and Her Husband know that Jean-Luc is thinking about the Jat Vash. Granted, electronic surveillance is a thing. Irish Romulan and Her Husband turning out to be evil is probably a red line for me. Yes, every Romulan is a spy, but that can’t literally be true. *Every* human is not a plucky community builder. I am, at least, grateful that this is the only “shadowy figure” deception we are currently dealing with. Within ten minutes of introducing them, the writers showed us that Commodore Oh and Lieutenant Rizzo are not to be trusted (and did we ever really trust Romulan Commander Hot Pants?). Clearly, the showrunners learned something from the disaster that was Lieutenant Ash “Mom told me I don’t have to do the Klingon stuff” Tyler (See? I’ve clearly lost my touch). Here’s hoping that the “lie within a lie leading to a trap” doesn’t go too deep.

Star Trek: Picard -- "Remembrance" (because the internet is for snark and spoilers)

Let’s try this again, shall we?

Obviously, I failed in my attempt to successfully blog even one season of “Star Trek: Discovery.” Anger is a potent fuel, but there were only so many ways to refer to Lieutenant Ash “prefers his racht at least half-dead” Tyler, and, at the point where he was outed as a Klingon sleeper, what was the point? Suffice it to say: I did not enjoy the experience of watching Discovery season 1 and have yet to even attempt to watch season 2. I will try to give a glib explanation later (by way of explaining my nascent skepticism of “Star Trek: Picard”). For now, let me just point out that, in the penultimate episode of Discovery season 1, the war between the Federation and the Klingons has gone so lopsidedly that the front lines are within a few parsecs of Earth. Cosmically speaking, a parsec is not that far. This strains my credulity because, while Captain Kirk’s Federation certainly doesn’t like the Klingon Empire (and vice-versa), nothing in the original series gives us any indication that, barely ten years prior, the Federation almost ceased to exist due to a war with the Klingons. That is a pretty dire reality to just sweep under the rug. Furthermore, the Klingons’ reason for not just finishing the Federation off is… strained.  We see no evidence of any arcane ritual indicating that the soul of Kahless was reborn into a Starfleet officer (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you really should consider watching “Babylon 5”). The Federation seeds Q’onos’ mantle with planet-killing explosives and then gives the trigger mechanism to Klingon revolutionaries who negotiate the formation of Klingon unity government somehow less bent on wiping out the Federation that, as I mentioned, just threatened to destroy Q’onos. Needless to say, my respect for people whose favorite Star Trek is “Voyager” went up considerably after watching “Discovery.”

And so we come to “Picard.” I have always been skeptical of the idea of the idea of “Star Trek: Picard.” Creators coming back to long dormant projects and completely missing the mark is, after all, a thing that happens in science fiction all (Star Wars) the (Foundation) time (Handmaid’s Tale — I’m sorry; “Testaments” wasn’t great). That being said, I am also human, and when I saw the trailer featuring a sextegenarian Will Riker yelling at his kid to use her inside voice, I decided to adopt an attitude of cautious optimism, the alternative being too terrible for me to contemplate.

There were actually other reasons to be optimistic, as well. It did not take long for us to learn from the trailers that the Borg (or remnants thereof; I distinctly remember Captain Janeway killing all of the Borg upon her triumphant return to the Alpha Quadrant) and Seven-of-Nine were going to play central roles in this series. I was originally skeptical of these choices. In my opinion, the “Next Generation” became a little too obsessed with the Borg in its later years (the last Borg-themed story I actually enjoyed was “I, Borg;” “Descent” and “First Contact” felt too much like action movies, which is to say that they felt too much like Star Wars for me) and I have always been a “Voyager” skeptic. However, after reading the reactions at tomandlorenzo.com, I came to realize that these were probably necessary choices. The two defining traumas* of Captain Picard’s career are that a) he is one of only a few dozen people, presumably in the galaxy, to survive the Borg assimilation process and that b) for seven years, a demigod selected him as its personal chew toy (I know fanservice is a problem, but it will be really hard to swallow a post-Starfleet Picard series if Whoopi Goldberg and John de Lancie don’t either appear or get explained away). Seven-of-Nine is one of the other few survivors of Borg assimilation. It beggars belief that she and Picard don’t attend weekly meetings of some kind together. So: if I want a series that thoughtfully treats the aftermath of everything I know and love as “Star Trek,” then I’m probably going to have to swallow some Borg-themed stories. As my wife said: let’s rip this bandaid off.

*Quick aside: the fact that getting tortured by David Warner is a distant third indicates just how terrible Jean-Luc Picard’s life actually was.

The first episode takes place about two decades after the events of “Star Trek: Nemesis” (the only thing about which you need to know is that Data directly sacrifices his life to save Picard specifically and the Enterprise more generally). A lot has happened in that time. The Romulan sun has exploded (which events lead to the creation of the execrable alternate timeline depicted in the even more execrable Abrams Trek movies)*. Captain Picard has rallied Starfleet to go rescue the Romulan population (a measly 900 million spread over Romulus and Remus; apparently 24th century birth control works). A population of androids has gone rogue, “deactivated Mars’ planetary defense grid” (whatever that means), and attacked Utopia Planitia such that “Mars is still burning to this day” (whatever THAT means). As of this writing, I have no idea how we got from “Doctor Soong was an unprecedented genius; no one has ever been able to create another artificial intelligence” to “there are enough androids to SET MARS ON FIRE.” Starfleet has banned the research into and production of artificial life. Captain (Admiral?) Picard has resigned in protest of said decision. He is now living out his dotage on the family winery with two pointy eared companions whom, I am embarrassed to say, it took me until the second commercial break to identify as Romulans, rather than Vulcans.

*Another quick aside: I guess ecological catastrophe is the fate of all major astro-political rivals to the Federation. The events ultimately leading to the Federation-Klingon alliance began when the Klingon moon Praxis exploded, promising to render Q’onos’ air unbreathable within a generation. The Romulan sun goes supernova without warning (that’s not how it happens). I know that only Vulcans and Bajorans have religion in the 24th century, but apparently there is a God and He wants you to JOIN STARFLEET.

Meanwhile, in Boston, a Very Special Girl (I’m sorry, but her role in this story is a little Jenna Louise Coleman vis-a-vis Matt Smith; her actual name is Dahj) is celebrating with her boyfriend that she was just accepted as a research fellow by the Daystrom Institute. Four people in black jumpsuits and motorcycle helmets beam into her apartment, murder her boyfriend, and start yelling at her about “activation” and “the rest of you.” She “activates,” discovers that, much like Neo, she knows Kung Fu, and murders the people in black. She “deactivates,” starts crying over her boyfriend’s body, and then closes her eyes and sees a vision of Jean-Luc Picard. Don’t worry, Dahj, that last part happens to me all the time.

Dahj comes to Chateau Picard in search of refuge. She insists she feels safe around Jean-Luc, and he’s willing to go with that, even though he has no memory of ever meeting her. She stays the night, but is gone the next morning. On a dream-inspired hunch, Jean-Luc visits the Quantum Archives of his personal affects at Starfleet Command (honestly, I expect a more responsible use of the word “quantum” from Star Trek; though, I guess the Defiant did fire “quantum torpedos”…) and discovers that, thirty years prior (so, about ten years before Nemesis?) Data painted a picture of Dahj, which he entitled “Daughter” (no, I don’t think she’s Lal; that would be terrible). Dahj finds Jean-Luc at Starfleet Command. Jean-Luc explains to her that he thinks she is a “synthetic” (what I used to know as an “android”) even though she was obviously bleeding when he first met her. She denies it. More people in motorcycle helmets show up. We learn that they (or, at least two of them) are Romulans. Dahj murders them all, but the last one blows her up with an overloading phaser rifle. The blast hurls Jean-Luc to the pavement. He wakes up on his couch in La Barre, his Romulan companions hovering over him in deep concern (this will be important later).

Jean-Luc visits the Daystrom institute and learns that it is theoretically possible to make androids out of flesh and blood (because what you really want is an artificial intelligence that can still be killed by the Spanish Flu), but only in pairs, which means….there is another. Cut to a “Romulan Reclamation Center” (nope; don’t know what that means, either), where we meet a woman who looks exactly like the late great Dahj but is named Soji and is being hit on by a Romulan who is just cute enough that you wish he was cuter. As they flirt, the camera pulls away and we see that the “Romulan Reclamation Center” is really a partially assembled Borg Cube (which doesn’t seem possible, given that all of the Borg cubes that ever made it to the Alpha quadrant got blown up).

This is all fine. It is actually almost intriguing. There’s a lot of subtext which I glossed over indicating that the Federation has had second thoughts about its decision to rescue the Romulans from their rapidly dying homeworld. I support that decision. Late stage DS9 seriously started to question the Federation's devotion to its professed ideals (or, even, whether their ideals were worth devotion in the first place), and, given the way that the Western liberal consensus has unfolded (unraveled?) over the quarter century since the “Next Generation” went off the air, I think it was good decision to commit to exploring that, assuming that is the showrunners’ plan.

What is less fine is the puzzle-box nature of the story as presented thus far. A mysterious girl shows up at Chateau Picard in need of help, just as Data foretold in one of his paintings. There are two of them because there physically have to be (because of *course* there have to be). Don’t get me wrong, “Clues,” “Cause and Effect,” and “Remember Me” were all great episodes, but if that’s all the “Next Generation” had ever amounted to, I doubt we would be having this conversation.

I am probably overreacting. Except…

It is never adequately explained why Dahj left Chateau Picard in the middle of the night. There’s a weird scene in which she contacts her mother via space Skype and says that she felt it was “too dangerous” for Jean-Luc for her to stay there (her mother, eerily, responds “find Picard”). It seemed to me that Dahj was eliding something. One of Jean-Luc’s Romulan companions says that she looked over the feed from the Chateau’s security cameras and could find no evidence of Dahj leaving. That also doesn’t seem right. Recall, this is the world of “Computer, locate Commander Riker.” Which brings us to the aftermath of the attack at Starfleet Command. The phaser rifle blows up, Jean-Luc is hurled to the ground, and we cut to his living room in La Barre where his Romulan companions inform him that the official story is that he was alone on the roof (the attack was on a rooftop) and no one knows what happened. Jean-Luc immediately assumes that Dahj, being a synthetic, must have a cloaking device that gets triggered whenever she is in danger but that…. makes no sense. What does make sense is that Jean-Luc’s Romulan companions are somehow “in on it” (recall that the motorcycle helmet wearing assailants appear to be Romulan-affiliated). Dahj left Chateau Picard because she did not feel safe, either implicitly or because Jean-Luc’s companions tried to attack her. Jean-Luc’s companions know exactly what happened at Starfleet Command and are trying to put Jean-Luc off the scent. Data is the one who reset the ship’s chronometer and that is why Doctor Crusher’s pink moss is so advanced.

I disliked “Discovery” for many reasons. If I had to distill them all down into one sentence, though, it would be that I felt the show’s creative team was writing towards the twists. Character development and building a textured world were never as important as revealing a) that Captain Lorca was from the Mirror Universe b) that Ash Tyler *always* ate live racht and c) that the Mirror Universe was run by Emperor Michelle Yeoh who was also a cannibal. As long as those revelations landed with the appropriate emotional impact, nothing else mattered. Unfortunately, since we didn’t care about or necessarily respect the characters experiencing those revelations, they didn’t land with any emotional impact. Also, those revelations were stupid. I will keep watching “Picard.” I will try to remain cautiously optimistic, but I am worried that we are being led into yet another web of deception and conspiracy about which I ultimately do not care. As of this writing, I still want to be proven wrong.

Star Trek: Discovery -- "What's Past is Prologue"

In under three hours, we will have a new episode of "Star Trek: Discovery" to talk about, and I still haven't shared my thoughts about last week's episode.  There are no thoughts to share.  None of this matters anymore.

Last week, Captain Lorca (who is really alterna-Lorca) attempted his coup against Emperor Michelle Yeoh, quickly phasering his way to the bridge of her flagship and forcing her to execute an emergency transport to... somewhere else.  During the fighting, Michael Burnham escaped the bridge unharmed and set out to do... something else.  Meanwhile, the crew of Discovery, led by a surprisingly inspiring Commander Saru (you know, the guy who sold out his comrades five episodes ago because he thought the pollen people could cure him of his species' inveterate fear?), have learned that Emperor Yeoh's flagship derives its power directly from the space mushroom network in such a way that, if it is not destroyed, "all life will end, everywhere", because... techno babble.

Eventually, Burnham unites with Emperor Yeoh.  They devise a "plan" which is really just the realization that the two of them doing martial arts is way more deadly than a room full of people with phasers so, if they agree to let alterna-Lorca capture them, it's okay, because they can just roundhouse kick everyone until they are the only people left alive and conscious on the bridge, which is what happens.  Alterna-Lorca ends up one of those people who is neither conscious nor alive, having been stabbed and thrown into the mushroom generator through a trap door installed at the foot of Emperor Yeoh's dias because... plot device.  Discovery comes up with a plan to destroy the flagship's mushroom generator in such away as to create a totally awesome mushroom wave that will carry them back home.  The plan involves a direct hit with a torpedo.  Fortunately, the mushroom engine is bigger than a womp rat.  Right before the mushroom explosion destroys the flagship, Michael Burnham is beamed to safety aboard discovery.  Right before that, Michael Burnham throws herself onto Emperor Michelle Yeoh, who is thus also beamed to safety aboard discovery.  Lieutenant Stamets pilots Discovery atop the mushroom wave, and everyone ends up in their proper Universe, except, I guess, Emperor Yeoh, who ends up in our Universe.

But wait!  They overshot in time!  It is now nine months later!  The Klingons have almost won the war!  Remember?  The war with the Klingons?  As I said: none of this matters anymore.

Nothing I have just written specifically precludes me from enjoying this show.  I can dig a good, old fashioned whacky space adventure in which everything is connected but nothing makes sense.  I am a huge fan of "Adventure Time," "The Good Place," and post-McGann "Doctor Who," each of which, to some degree or another, embrace the "yes, and..." theory of screenwriting.  The difference between those shows and this (which I am admittedly not the first to articulate) is that, in those other shows, the seemingly endless sequence of escalating absurdity happens to stable character whom you actually like.  It matters when Princess Bubblegum turns into an omnipotent mountain of candy and tries to remake the world in her image because you are invested in the tension between her meaningful relationships with both Finn and Marceline and the way that she can so callously manipulate literally everyone else around her (if you have no idea what I am talking about, you really need to watch "Adventure Time").  I cannot write a sentence one third that long about any of the characters in this show.  Saru is an officious bureaucrat, except when he's a charismatic leader (I still can't tell you when that change occurred).  Stamets is a self-absorbed narcissist, except when space mushrooms mean he's the Traveler.  Doctor Boyfriend is dead.  Lieutenant inevitably-became-a-sword Tyler is a lie.  Michael Burnham just is.  The only conclusion I can justifiably draw is that this show was meant to be about Cadet Tilley all along and we just haven't been paying close enough attention.  If there were more than two episodes left in this season, I would stop watching.  As it is, I will see the season out to its end, but I will also start watching "The Orville."  I have it on good authority that "The Orville" is actually Star Trek.

PS As was implied above, Emperor Michelle Yeoh is now in our Universe.  The teaser for tonight's episode featured Sarek.  I can't wait for Michael Burnham to get to work out both her daddy- and mommy-issues AT THE SAME TIME (wa-ho!).

Star Trek: Discovery -- "Vaulting Ambition"

Lots of things happened this week.  I only have the energy to talk about one.

Apparently, Captain Lorca, commanding officer of the USS Discovery, has been a sleeper agent from the Mirror Universe this whole time.  Remember how I said that mirror Lorca was presumed dead after attempting a coup against Emperor Michelle Yeoh?  Rather than dying, he escaped into our universe where he assumed command of the Discovery with the intentions of 1) regaining the services of his right-hand woman, Michael Burnham (albeit "our" Michael Burnham) and 2) using the mushroom drive to get home and finish what he began.  I guess I should be happy that there is a reasonable explanation for the gratuitous mushroom jump home that "went wrong," sending Discovery into the Mirror Universe (it was an intentional inter-dimensional jump orchestrated by alterna-Lorca), but...

Now, not only is it commonplace for starships to cross over from our Universe into the Mirror Universe, but Terran officers from the Mirror Universe are involving us in their intrigues.  At the risk of sounding like a broken record: how did Captain Kirk not know about this?

It is starting to seem obvious that the point of this season was to tell a Mirror Universe story.  I'm not sure I find that interesting.  Insomuch as alternative universe stories (and I'm not just talking about Mirror Universe stories; in "Parallels," Worf visits dozens of alternate universes, each unique) are fun, they are fun because they give us a brief glimpse of how things could have been if the stories we know had not unfolded the way we know them (what if Captain Picard had not de-assimilated himself by sheer force of will at the end of "Best of Both Worlds"?).  That is why I give Deep Space Nine's "Crossover" a pass: it was interesting to learn what the result of Captain Kirk's heart-to-heart with fascist Spock were.  They weren't an unalloyed good.  This current story lacks that context.  There are no stories to unfold differently because we haven't been told any stories, yet.  This is the first story.  By extension, whatever happens in this story will have, at best, limited effects on the stories we will be told later.  Yes, the characters we are supposed to live with during Discovery's run as a series will have lived through alterna-Lorca's betrayal and coup (and yes: I understand that characters are the heart of any story, but I am, before all things, a Tolkien fan, and thus a world-builder), but all of these events will take place in a Universe that (I hope) no one will visit again for ten years.  The Federation-Klingon war will play out however it will play out without Discovery.  Assuming Discovery ever gets home*, no one will know or care how its crew spent the last three months.  Their actions will have no consequences in the world around them.  The stakes seem very low at this point.

*If the entire run of Discovery plays out in the Mirror Universe.... let's not contemplate that outcome.

My final thought is that it seems that Star Trek has wandered into dangerous waters previously charted by Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse" and HBO's "Westworld."  Captain Lorca has been behaving very erratically lately.  When we first met him, he was, to put it mildly, an impersonal stereotype of a Military Man.  All he looked for in a colleague was "how good is she at killing Klingons?"  At the mid-season break, a phase change occurred.  Lorca became a sympathetic commander interested in relating to, motivating, and supporting his crew (you know: a Starfleet Captain).  It didn't make sense at the time, but so few things about this show made sense that I let it pass.  Now we learn that there was a reason for the shift: Lorca was close to getting what he wanted and needed to use manipulation rather than brute force to close the gap.  Unfortunately, if the explanation "he's actually his Mirror Universe self" (or "he's a Doll" or "he's a Host") is now a reasonable explanation for erratic behavior, what is the point in trying to evaluate anyone's actions?  I have not yet met the actual Mirror Tilley.  I am told there is such a person.  Am I sure the Tilley we know isn't the Mirror Tilley?  I know that I am stretching here.  The show went to great pains to introduce us to the fascist versions of everyone except Burnham and Lorca, but, given the rate of trans-dimensional crossing lately (how did alterna-Lorca get into our Universe, anyway?), are we supposed to hold every new character to this standard?  What Universe is Admiral Cornwell from?  Show me your papers!

I am being petulant.  When I heard there was a new Star Trek series coming, I was excited to see what has happened in my second favorite fictional Universe since that unfortunate incident in which an attempt to clone Captain Picard produced Tom Hardy instead.  I am not really interested in what is going on in (yet another**) alternative fictional Universe to which I have no allegiance.

**Abrams Trek: I am looking at you.

Star Trek: Discovery -- "The Wolf Inside"

Wow... that was close.  I had literally resorted to googling "Worf Klingons don't" to figure out how I was going to refer to Tyler this week.  Thankfully, to the exact opposite of surprise, Starfleet Lieutenant Ash Tyler was revealed this week to be a surgically altered form of the Klingon Voq infiltrated into the Discovery's crew as a sleeper agent (for which foible, it is worth pointing out, Captain Lorca seems to have accepted no responsibility).  I am very glad we are done with that part of the series.

Unfortunately, the part of the series we are not done with is the part where we are in the Mirror Universe.  So, how did we get here (where "here" means "the same place we were last week")?

Captain Burnham (remember: she's the captain of the fascist Shenzhou) receives orders from the Imperial flagship.  Imperial intelligence has located the "Fire Wolf," their code name for the leader of the multicultural resistance fighting the Terran Empire.  The Shenzhou is to travel to that planet and blow up the rebel base (Governor Tarkin will be so proud).  Captain Burnham, not being a native of this universe, is not very keen on murdering rebels who appear to embody the ideals of the Federation, so she convinces her crew to let her and Lieutenant is definitely a Klingon Tyler beam down alone, "infiltrate the rebel base and get the intelligence we need to crush the rebellion once and for all."  They'll blow up the base after that, she assures her first officer.  Burnham's true goals are twofold: buy the rebels enough time to escape, and learn how to negotiate with Klingons.  The Fire Wolf is a Klingon.  Burnham thinks that if she can learn how the Fire Wolf overcame Klingon culture's apparently innate belief in its own supremacy and rose to the lead an alliance of Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellurites, then maybe she can use that experience to come to an understanding with the Klingons in her own universe and convince them that the Federation does not mean to annihilate them.  Because all Klingons in all universes are all the same, obviously, regardless of the context in which they are living.  Burnham and Tyler, who, again is totally a Klingon (it just feels so good to say that), make contact with the Fire Wolf, who, for obvious reasons, does not trust them.  Fortunately, the Fire Wolf has a prophet "whose wisdom pierces all illusions; nothing can be hidden from him."  That prophet is Sarek.  His "wisdom" is a Vulcan mind meld.  Sure.  Why not.  Alterna-Sarek mind melds with Burnham, sees that she was raised by... him, and vouches for her intentions.  He does not try to explain where she came from or who she claims to be.  He just says "she means us no harm," which is true enough.  The Fire Wolf agrees to negotiate, and Burnham begins her trans-cosmos exchange of cultural undstanding.  Unfortunately, the Fire Wolf is actually alterna-Voq (i.e Tyler's true self).  Seeing a version of himself compromising the purity of Klingon culture finally breaks the thin veneer of human programming and Lieutenant Tyler attacks alterna-Voq.  Alterna-Voq wins the fight and is about to order both Tyler and Burnham executed when alterna-Sarek reiterates his firm belief that Burnham, at least, means the rebels no harm.  Burnham is, at this point, understandably confused.  Why did Tyler just violate her orders and attack alterna-Voq?  Nobody knows.  If only there were some way to meld with his mind to see what made him lash out at his host, seemingly unprovoked.  Alas, the prophet's wisdom is an apparently limited resource, and the question of Tyler's motives is left an unanswered question as he and Burnham beam back aboard the Shenzhou having warned the rebels and promised not to torpedo them from orbit until they've had time to evacuate, a plan which, I'm sure, Captain Burnham's crew should have no problem executing (actually, no one says anything about it).

[Something else no one says anything about: alterna-Sarek's son is the first officer of the Fascist Enterprise.  What gives?]

Back aboard the Shenzhou, Burnham asks Tyler what happened down on the planet and Tyler finally snaps.  "I am Voq, the torchbearer" he proclaims.  He attacks Burnham.  She survives.  Burnham executes Tyler Imperial fashion, by beaming him into empty space, except that Burnham arranges for Discovery to be there and beam him on board before he can suffocate (at a probability of 2^267,709 to 1 against), at which point he is escorted to the brig to await trial for the murder of Doctor Boyfriend.

Meanwhile (yes, there's a meanwhile), Lieutenant Stamets is dying.  His brain is trying to exist in all universes at once, I think.  It is unclear.  Regardless, the only treatment is to expose him to more space mushrooms, a procedure which almost kills him, except, after his heart stops beating, he wakes up in a psychic mushroom forest with the fascist version of himself, who chides him for not being ready to get back to work.  I guess we are about to see the two Stametses collaborate on trying to swap our Discovery and Fascist Discovery restoring some semblance of order to the universe.  I'm not sure that I care.

In the final act of the episode, another ship appears next to the Shenzhou and torpedoes the rebel base before the appointed time, presumably killing all of the rebels.  It is the Emperor's ship.  More specifically, it is Emperor Michelle Yeoh's ship (so surprised... no, wait; I meant the opposite of that).  She is not happy that Captain Burnham delayed carrying out her orders and she wants to see Captains Burnham and Lorca (if I didn't mention it, our Lorca is masquerading as Burnham's prisoner, since fascist Lorca apparently committed treason some months ago) immediately.  Fade to black.

This needs to end.  The longer we spend in the Mirror Universe, the more we have to accept the idea that a society where assassination is the principal means of social mobility could last for more than a few months.  It was a cute idea in "Mirror, Mirror" and "Crossover."  At this point, it is starting to strain my suspension of disbelief.  I am not entirely clear why, as soon as Burnham and Tyler beamed down, Burnham's first officer didn't torpedo the rebel base on her own, claim (truthfully) that Burnham was killed in action, and take all the credit for killing the Fire Wolf in the name of the Emperor.  That seems like a totally reasonable thing to do in Fascist Starfleet, and yet, somehow, this civilization conquered the galaxy and remained in power until our Captain Kirk taught them about democracy.

Furthermore, I am starting to feel that the existence of the Mirror Universe as it is being fleshed out by post-Captain Kirk Star Trek undermines the core ethos that Star Trek was meant to represent.  Naively or not, Star Trek is based on the idea that plurality and tolerance and multiculturalism are not only morally superior but materially superior.  Everywhere that Voyager goes, it (not just the Federation, but Voyager itself) is the most technologically advanced civilization in the Delta Quadrant that is not the Borg.  Back home, the Federation is a utopic Great Power.  They have the most vibrant economy and one of the three strongest militaries in the galaxy.  Everyone wants to be the Federation.  The idea of Star Trek is that the Federation is strong because the Federation is made of diverse cultures working together and that idea is greater than any one culture standing alone, making an exclusive claim to superiority over all others.  It is the thing white America tells itself that it is so that it can sleep better at night.  In the Mirror Universe (before fascist Spock's rebellion), the humans are the only evident Great Power.  All the other species we see have been relegated to a rag-tag Maquis-style rebellion.  There is no Klingon Empire.  We haven't met any Romulans.  Vulcans are all either rebels (alterna-Sarek) or collaborators (fascist Spock).  Now the lesson of Star Trek is not "multiculturalism always wins," but "humans always win."  Earth is the City on a Hill carrying the rest of the Federation along on its back.  We would be doing just fine without any of those other species, thank you very much.  That is a much weaker vision of Star Trek than the one I thought I was growing up with.  Then again, I suppose I could replace the words "Star Trek" with "America" in that last sentence, and it would be just as appropriate.

Star Trek: Discovery -- "Despite Yourself"

"I'm impressed... but not how you think"
-- Captain Kirk to Dr. Korby in "What are Little Girls Made Of"

We and Jonathan Frakes, who directed this episode, so he'd better know what he's talking about, were right: that last mushroom jump pushed Discovery into the Mirror Universe, an alternate universe in which the Federation is fascist and everyone else is a slave.  This universe was first introduced in the Original Series episode "Mirror, Mirror," playfully revisited in the Deep Space Nine episode "Crossover," and beaten to within an inch of its life in four subsequent Deep Space Nine episodes that shall not be named here.  Unfortunately, Discovery made this mushroom jump before broadcasting its cloak-breaking algorithm to the rest of Starfleet, so the longer they stay stuck in the Mirror Universe (and it looks like the answer to that could be "for quite a while"), the worse the Federation is going to get beaten by the Klingons back home.  This is the part where I remind everyone that Admiral Cornwell was safely taken to a Starfleet hospital in a bloody shuttle craft before Discovery attempted its ill-fated mushroom jump.  As I've said before: Starfleet is terrible at being a military.

Fortunately, Discovery materializes in the middle of a battlefield where its fascist counterpart (which, presumably, has ended up in the "real" universe) just finished slaughtering some Klingon-Vulcan-Andorian rebels trying to overthrow the Terran Empire (which is what the Fascist Federation calls itself).  Lieutenant Tyler, who hates both your tea and your house, salvages the computer core from one of the rebel ships, Specialist Burnham reads it (with almost no effort), and everyone aboard Discovery is quickly brought up to speed on where they are (an alternate universe), what that means (there's a fascist version of yourself out there killing and torturing people), and, somehow, what their fascist opposites are up to these days.  As in "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," at least the writers did not waste our time figuring out what happened.  Say what you will about this show (and I will): at least they don't beat around the bush, except about that one thing, which we will get to two paragraphs from now.  The plan that is hatched in response to this intelligence is to pretend to be the fascist Discovery long enough to gain access to Imperial Intelligence.  It turns out (how do a bunch of rebels know all of this?) the USS Defiant (not Sisko's Defiant; a 22nd century Defiant) has already tunneled through into the Mirror Universe and encountered the Empire,which means that it is possible to cross between universes without a mushroom drive.  Lieutenant Stametz is still in sickbay, recovering from the failed jump that brought Discovery here.  If Burnham and company can just get the full Imperial report on that incident, they can figure out how to get home, give the Federation the cloak-breaking algorithm, and win the war.  This isn't as crazy as it sounds (yes it is), because Michael Burnham is the Captain of the Shenzhou in the Mirror Universe, so it should be fairly simple for her to infiltrate Imperial Starfleet Command.  As we go to black, our Burnham is installed as the Captain of their Shenzhou and we are all told to settle in for a good two-to-three-to-four episode romp through the Mirror Universe.

I'm impressed: the producers have found a way to make this show, already creaking under the weight of a spoiled reveal, even more gimmick-dependent, having spent an entire half-season introducing us to a crew of new characters, apparently just for the shock value of spending another half-season introducing us to their fascist opposite numbers (the "next time on Star Trek: Discovery" trailer promised fascist Sarek; he has the same beard as his son).  That is one way to make a science fiction television show.  It does not seem like a very clever way, nor is it very respectful of the canon they claim to be a protecting.  Now, in addition to "Harry Mudd has the ability to rewrite time," we must add "there is an alternate universe in which the Federation is fascist, and it is fairly easy to get there from here," to the list of things that Captain Kirk clearly did not know but probably should have.  At least they have now justified their choice to make a prequel rather than a sequel Star Trek series.  At the end of "Mirror, Mirror," our Captain Kirk convinces fascist Spock that fascism is bad and the Empire should probably be collapsed from within.  By the time Doctor Bashir and Major Kira return to the Mirror Universe in "Crossover," the Empire has fallen and a sado-masochist alliance between Klingons and Cardassians has gone about enslaving the last surviving humans.  If the plan for Discovery has always been to tell a story in the Mirror Universe where the Terran Empire was still in control, they had to do it as a prequel.  That is a terrible reason to make a Star Trek series.  I hope for everyone's sake that I am being unfair to the creators of this show.

I will say one good thing about this episode: my days of having to think of snide ways to refer to Lieutenant prune juice is that icky thing my grandfather drinks to stay regular Tyler may have come to a definite middle.  While harvesting the computer core from the rebel ship, Tyler experiences another PTSD flashback, causing him to confront L'Rell in Discovery's brig.  Somehow, L'Rell convinces Tyler to lower the shield on her cell; they almost but not quite make out; then she starts reciting the Klingon Pater Noster.  Tyler echoes her in Klingon, but the de-programming doesn't take.  Tyler leaves the brig still thinking that he's a human, while L'Rell protests "the prayer was supposed to make you remember!" [shocking piano sting].  Fast forward twenty minutes of show time.  Tyler is in sickbay, reviewing the results of a new physical he asked Doctor Boyfriend to run on him.  Doctor Boyfriend has found evidence that the scar tissue originally written off as the result of Klingon torture, may have been the result of body-altering Klingon surgery.  Doctor Boyfriend spouts some meaningless psycho-babble about alternate personalities layered on top of rather than beneath true personalities and relieves Tyler of duty.  "But they need me!" protests Tyler.  "You might not be you," warns Doctor Boyfriend, at which point the audience hears a Klingon voice speaking in the distance, and Lieutenant Tyler, who always bluffs, kills Doctor Boyfriend.  Our long national nightmare having to pretend that we don't know what we all know may finally be over, but they killed Doctor Boyfriend!  I liked Doctor Boyfriend, and now, the first gay couple in Starfleet history (reckoned by airdate chronology) has been reduced to a widower who may or may not still be metamorphosing into the Traveler.  It would appear that the only thing wholly joyful left in this iteration of Star Trek is Cadet Tilley, and I doubt that will last, given that her part in the Master Plan is to pretend to be the captain of Fascist Discovery.  Insert overused Nietzsche quotation about staring into the abyss here.

A few months ago, as the thirtieth anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation came and went, the internet was riddled with "best of Star Trek" lists.  Deep Space Nine kept topping the lists, which made no sense to a Next Generation partisan like myself.  I asked my best friend, who had recently finished a rewatch of Deep Space Nine, what I was missing.  "People have a tendency to confuse darkness with quality," he said.  Apparently, the creators of Star Trek series are also "people."  It's going to be a rough month and a half.

PS Throughout her exposition dump on the Mirror Universe, Specialist Brunham kept referring to a "faceless Emperor" running the show.  In the real world, there have been rumors that Michelle Yeoh is not done on this series.  My wife and I would like to call it now (because that is how you win the internet): Michelle Yeoh is the Emperor.  Done.