The Spores Must Flow — Star Trek Discovery’s “The Butcher’s Knife Cares Not for the Lamb’s Cry”

I felt this episode worked better than the previous one. It was highly predictable that the tardigrade (they actually called it that!) would turn out to be the missing “supercomputer” needed to make the Spore Drive work, but from a thematic standpoint, it was a nice Trekkish sort of message about how aggressive, warmongering thinking only leads to harmful outcomes and science, understanding, and communication are the keys to success. Although that “success” only ended up getting the creature exploited and tortured, so that thread isn’t over yet. But it’s now pretty clear why Starfleet doesn’t use the Spore Drive in the future — because using it means torturing a living thing. (I’m a bit bothered that this is basically a rehash of Voyager: “Equinox.”) Presumably Burnham will either convince Lorca to free it or stage another mutiny.

Or maybe she’ll convince the rest of the crew to join her in standing up to Lorca. After all, they’re scientists and diplomats by training, not soldiers or students of warfare like Lorca. So this shouldn’t sit well with them, I’d think.

I found Stamets a bit less irritating here than I did last week. Maybe there’s hope for him yet. And I don’t mind that Landry is gone, though I am bothered that she’s the second woman of color we’ve had killed off so far on the show. And we’re nearly 1/3 of the way through the season now and we still haven’t met Shazad Latif’s Ash Tyler, the final supposed regular character.

If Saru has “threat ganglia” that come out when his spidey-sense tingles, why weren’t they visible in episode 1 when he had that stilted line about sensing death approaching now?

By the way, I think we can now dismiss the speculations that Discovery is a Section 31 ship. This episode made it clear that Discovery was not built to serve Lorca’s agenda, but rather as a science vessel and a testbed for Stamets’s experimental drive. It was created and staffed for peaceful purposes, and events have forced it to be repurposed for war. I’d guess that the reason the scientist crew haven’t been swapped out for soldiers is because too many of them are involved in the drive experiment and so they’re needed where they are.

As for the question of whether the series needs to be set pre-TOS, I’ve been thinking about that. In “Errand of Mercy,” Kirk said “We have legitimate grievances against the Klingons. They’ve invaded our territory, killed our citizens.” Since he was trying to justify the current conflict to the Organians, presumably he was referring to events that happened before the current war broke out. And in “Day of the Dove,” Chekov accused the Klingons of murdering his brother in the attack on the Archanis IV research outpost. He was imagining the brother thanks to the evil pinwheel alien’s influence, but if he were imagining the whole attack, then the others in the scene would’ve noticed earlier that he was delusional. And DS9 repeatedly referred to Archanis as a territory that had been historically disputed between the UFP and the Klingons. So it seems likely that that attack really happened at some point. I’m wondering if one or both of these could be the event mentioned in TOS that Bryan Fuller hinted Discovery would depict.

The visual effects are certainly flashy as heck, but I find them a bit lacking conceptually. The saucer hull actually being a spinning gyroscope as part of the Spore Drive is visually novel, but structurally kind of questionable. Are there people in those rotating sections? How robust are the inertial dampers in there? And how do they cross from one section to another? Also, this is the second time they’ve shown a starship coming in extremely close to a planet surface, something that isn’t supposed to be routine or easy. And O-type stars are blue, not orange.

“And TNG’s first season and the first movie were the two bits of Trek he had 100% creative control over.”

He did theoretically have absolute creative control over the animated series, as part of his deal with NBC. But he chose not to exercise it, instead letting D.C. Fontana and Lou Scheimer take charge of the show. Which made it quite hypocritical for him to try later on to declare TAS non-canon because it wasn’t “his vision.” (I’ve come to suspect that he did so largely in an attempt to discredit Fontana’s contributions, as part of his effort to deny her co-creator credit for TNG and hog all the profits and glory for himself.)

By the way, if it turns out the tardigrade can use the Spore Drive to travel through time as well as space, we’ll have to rename it the TARDISgrade.

@13/MaGnUs: You may be right. A common mistake I see among people who are eager to see stories about Section 31 or who try to defend them as the good guys is to confuse them with Starfleet Intelligence, or to forget that Starfleet already has a legitimate, legal and answerable intelligence agency. I often see people compare S31 to the Tal’Shiar or the Obsidian Order, but those are different because they’re official government agencies, so the corresponding bureau would be Starfleet Intelligence — plus there’s probably a civilian intelligence agency in the UFP government as well. (True, Odo made that same comparison in “Inquisition,” but presumably he was talking about their methodology and general lack of ethics.)

As for the male vs. female characters killed, the problem is that the female characters who’ve been killed off were both fairly prominent. There’s never been a shortage of prominent male characters in action-adventure TV, but prominent female characters, especially nonwhite ones, are underrepresented enough that it’s disappointing to see them introduced only to be swiftly killed off. It’s good to have a woman of color in the lead, but it would be better if she weren’t the only one who lasted more than two weeks.

@16/MaGnUs: Indeed, I’ve used Federation Security in a couple of my books. Although I interpreted them as just that, a security/law enforcement agency like the FBI or Secret Service, rather than an intelligence agency. That’s how ST III depicted them. It seems to be David Mack’s books that have treated them as an intelligence agency as well as law enforcement.

@20/Jason: Exactly. The episode was actually pretty heavy-handed about it, with Georgiou’s last-will message to Burnham, “Take care of those under your care” or whatever that was, coincidentally being directly applicable to her current situation where the tardigrade is under her care and being made to suffer.

@31/MikeKelm: I have no trouble accepting that Lorca is a contemporary of Kirk, because that means he’s also a contemporary of Matt Decker, R.M. Merik, Ron Tracey, and Garth of Izar. Starfleet in this era had more than its share of unstable or renegade captains. Not to mention civilian Federation scholars and scientists like Tristan Adams, John Gill, Richard Daystrom, and Sevrin.

@36/roxana: But they presumably had the potential in them to begin with — a tendency to be high-strung or arrogant or to bend the rules. It takes a fair amount of ego to be a starship captain. Even Kirk is considered an overly aggressive maverick by later history. So I don’t see Lorca as being out of place in this era.

After all, Lorca is sane and stable, just driven and morally flexible. He’s the kind of person who might become a Tracey or a Garth if pushed too far.

@57/jmwhite: That “sporocystian energy” thing was gibberish, a result of writers not paying attention to what the technobabble meant. In “Caretaker,” calling the Caretaker a sporocystian life form just meant that it was a life form that reproduced asexually with spores, basically. But in “Cold Fire,” they fell into the common, lazy Trek pattern of assuming that any advanced superbeing is a being of “pure energy” (which is also gibberish, but that’s another discussion), because they apparently didn’t actually know what “sporocystian” meant and just thought it was an arbitrary label for what the Caretaker was. It makes about as much sense as saying that a bird is a being of pure oviparous energy. Anyway, I always took it to be a shorthand for “the specific type of energy emitted by the beings that we’ve categorized as ‘sporocystian’, for want of a better term.”

Anyway, as MaGnUs says, they never connected the “sporocystian energy” to the mechanism that transported Voyager to the Delta Quadrant. That’s just what the Caretaker and Suspiria were supposedly made of. They used technological means to displace ships — the displacement wave was “some kind of polarized magnetic variation,” according to Kim, and was preceded by a coherent tetryon beam, although the impression is that the beam was merely for scanning.

@58/John Kwok: “it’s not the tech itself, but the plot and, especially, the character of Captain Gabriel Lorca, that have led some to think that this is all somehow Station 31-related.”

But that’s exactly why it now seems unlikely that the ship itself was built by/for S31. People were assuming that Lorca and the ship went together, but it’s clear now that the ship and crew are at odds with Lorca. This is a vessel and crew meant for pure research and exploration. The ship was literally built around Stamets’s Spore Drive experiment, and Stamets clearly hates having his work repurposed for war. He and the rest of the crew are chafing against Lorca’s more militaristic goals and methods.

Anyway, my vote is, leave Section 31 out of it. They shouldn’t be the only group in the Federation that ever gets to do anything sneaky or wrong. And we just got a movie about them four years ago. We don’t need to return to that well so soon.

More importantly, plots shouldn’t just be about exposing secret affiliations. Revealing that “Oooh! Lorca works for Section 31!” isn’t all that interesting. Revealing that he has his own individual, personal motivations for doing the things that he does would be far more meaningful. Even if he is with Section 31, that fact alone isn’t remotely as interesting as the question of why he’s with them, so it’s the wrong question to fixate on. Stories that rely too much on revealing big gotcha secrets are not my cup of tea. The worst thing that happened to the Battlestar Galactica revival is that it became too narrowly fixated on “Who’s the next secret Cylon?” over and over at the expense of more worthwhile storylines. That kind of stuff is more a gimmick than anything else.

@60/Meredith: I don’t understand your issue with the Klingon speech. Does it matter if the spoken words are comprehensible? We have subtitles. Those and the actors’ emotional nuances are all that really matter, though the latter part isn’t as successful as it could be.

@62/Corylea: Sophisticated navigational ability isn’t necessarily proof of sapience, just of being evolutionarily specialized for that particular skill. Think of how salmon are able to find their way back to where they were originally spawned, or how homing pigeons can find their way home.

@74/MaGnUs: There’s no way a whole starship on this scale could be designed and built in just six months. Per the TNG Technical Manual, the design and construction process of the Galaxy class took more than 20 years. This ship couldn’t have taken that long, given Stamets’s age, and it’s not nearly on the same scale as a Galaxy. But it probably took several years, given that it’s based on a prototype technology.

Also, Stamets said the ship was built around his research, and he clearly did not expect to be doing military work. He reacts to the wartime efforts as an unwanted imposition. Moreover, as we saw in the battle drills, the Discovery‘s bridge crew aren’t hardened soldiers. They aren’t comfortable with this stuff either. So it stands to reason that the ship was both built and staffed before the war broke out.

@78/ghostly1: “Also, did they just find the creature on some planet and think “hey, let’s hook it up to this machine we’ll need to custom build and see if it improves our distance?””

See comment #48. As Burnham explained, the tardigrade somehow found its own way aboard the Glenn, seeking the spores.

“I feel like the writers didn’t even consider a backstory to it,”

Just because they haven’t revealed everything to the audience yet, that doesn’t mean they haven’t figured it out themselves. This is serialized TV, after all. Things don’t always get set up and paid off in the same episode.

@81/GoKartMozart: The first episode opened with “First officer’s log, stardate 1207.3. On Earth, it’s May 11, 2256, a Sunday.” The third episode opened with a “Six Months Later” caption, and the Klingons in this episode also mentioned that six months had passed since the initial battle.

There’s a prominent map of the combat zone in Lorca’s ready room, and I gather that it’s updated from episode to episode.

@98/random22: It’s a trivial point, I know, but technically Discovery is more like a 12-hour movie at most, assuming the 48-minute length of the past couple of episodes is typical (although the first two were only 40 minutes each).

@99/John Kwok: Straczynski didn’t become the sole writer on B5 until season 3. He wrote 12 out of 22 episodes in season 1 and 15 out of 22 in season 2. He wrote all of seasons 3-4, and all of season 5 except for one episode by Neil Gaiman and two that JMS co-plotted with Harlan Ellison.

“(Incidentally, the entire creative team I saw at the Paleyfest “Star Trek Discovery” panel over the weekend admitted that they are diehard “Trekkies”, though they noted that only Bryan Fuller – who wasn’t present – has an extensive knowledge of the canon.)”

Well, then, they were failing to mention Kirsten Beyer, whose extensive knowledge of Trek canon has been invaluable to the staff. And I seem to recall someone saying in an interview that Akiva Goldsman provided a lot of Trek-continuity expertise as well.

@112/John: Yes, yes, I know, but you keep making the mistake of leaving out season 5, which he also wrote all of except for “Day of the Dead.” JMS wrote 61% of season 1-2 and 98.5% of seasons 3-5. So your insistence on counting it as seasons 2-4 is off by one season. It was seasons 3-5 that he wrote (nearly) all of.

And I’m perfectly well aware of Trek’s efforts at scientific plausibility. It’s part of the reason I’m a fan in the first place, and I strive to live up to that standard in my own Trek fiction. But I’m also aware that a lot of Trek falls short of that standard, whether due to certain writers’ and producers’ lack of concern for science or due to necessary logistical, dramatic, and budgetary concessions. A giant tardigrade is no more biologically implausible than a human-Vulcan hybrid or a shapeshifter or a telekinetic or an energy being or any of a hundred other things we’ve seen in past Trek.

I don’t get the problem with the giant tardigrade. Sure, I know all about the square-cube law and such, but just because the creature has a similar outward appearance to a tardigrade and a similar durability, that doesn’t mean its internal systems and structures can’t be quite different and better-suited for a macrocscopic organism. Superficial resemblance doesn’t prove exact equivalence.

I find it incredible that people are more bothered by an oversized tardigrade than they are by a space drive based on magic mushrooms.

@120/John Kwok: “I haven’t forgotten about Season 5, but I’ve focused on Seasons 2 through 4, since they deal with the Shadow War and B5’s independence from Earth Alliance.”

Yeah, but that’s about the storyline. If your intent is to praise the achievement of J. Michael Straczynski writing so many consecutive episodes all by himself, then season 5 counts as part of that achievement, a lot more than season 2 does.

As for the tardigrade, I already addressed that. I don’t need the square-cube law explained to me; I read Isaac Asimov’s essays on the subject decades ago. As I said, there’s no need to assume that the creature’s internal anatomy is identical to a tardigrade’s — I mean, it’s an alien, for Pete’s sake. Alien means different. You’re taking the analogy far too literally.

As for “respecting the canon,” that means adding to it, not just making an elaborate fan film like The Orville. There’s no point in doing a new Trek series if you don’t reveal new things about the universe. Creativity is not just homage and giving people what they expect. It’s trying new things and taking the audience new places.

@127/John Kwok: Huh? Make up your mind. You’re the one who brought up allometry (i.e. isometric scaling and the square-cube law) as the basis of your objection, and I was referring to Asimov’s discussions of that very subject. Asimov would’ve agreed with you. Obviously it doesn’t make sense to scale up a creature’s external and internal anatomy, and I’m saying I understand that. What I’m trying to do is offer a way around that problem by pointing out that its internal anatomy may be different. We’re not talking about a literal tardigrade that was enlarged by Pym particles or something — we’re talking about an alien life form that happens to resemble a tardigrade. So that resemblance could be superficial. Its internal anatomy could be quite different, in ways better suited for an organism of that size.

My motto has always been, “Don’t complain, explain.” If something in a story doesn’t make scientific or logical sense, it’s a waste of time and energy to just gripe about it — it’s more constructive to take it as a challenge to your creativity and try to imagine a way to make it make sense. It doesn’t do any good to talk about a problem if you can’t offer a possible solution. And that approach has worked pretty well for me, since I’ve been a professional science fiction author for nearly two decades now.

@141/John: You keep stubbornly treating this as if it were a literal tardigrade. That assumption makes no sense. It’s an alien. Logically, it just looks like a tardigrade. Calling it that is an analogy, a convenience. It has certain similarities to the Earthly equivalent, but as an alien life form, it also must have differences. What I’m saying is that, despite its outward resemblance to a microscopic creature, it’s logical to expect that its internal organs are more logical for a macroscopic being — lungs, heart, an endoskeletal structure of some sort, etc. Because that’s what physics demands of a macroscopic being. Whatever it looks like on the outside, that can’t dictate how it’s built on the inside.

As for “purple Klingons,” I have no idea what you’re talking about, unless it’s “The Vulcan Hello”‘s reuse of the purplish-pink Klingon blood color previously seen in The Undiscovered Country.

@147/John Kwok: I’ve been a fan of TAS for 44 years, I rewatched the whole series earlier this year when Keith reviewed it, and I have never seen any such scene. I even checked the TrekCore screencaps to make sure. There are no snow-covered forests and no feathered T. rexes anywhere in TAS. Whatever you saw, you’re misremembering.

“There’s no reason why there should be a creature like an alien tardigrade, period.”

There’s no reason why there should be an alien that looks exactly like a human either. Except that this is a work of fiction and not a dissertation on speculative xenoevolution. Trek has been giving us unrealistic aliens for 51 years. Science fiction in general has been doing so for far longer. We can’t know what real aliens will look like, so fiction generally tends to extrapolate from known Earthly forms — humanoid aliens, felinoid aliens, reptilian aliens, insectoid aliens, you name it.