“We are still Starfleet” — Star Trek Discovery’s “The Wolf Inside”

One of the better ones, probably my favorite so far after “Lethe.” Good character work and effective story progress, good use of the Mirror Universe as a backdrop against which to reaffirm the Starfleet values that have sometimes been hard to find in this show. Although a lot of the dialogue got overly speechy, stilted, and pretentious. Man, that “tether” analogy was clumsy.

As for Georgiou being the Emperor, I’m surprised there were any other candidates considered. It was obvious from the get-go. Nobody else would’ve had as much character impact for Burnham, except maybe Sarek, but the preview for “The Wolf Inside” gave away that he was with the rebels.

Hmm… I wonder how we get from a racist Empire where Sarek is a rebel traitor to an Empire a dozen years later where Sarek’s son is the first officer of the ISS Enterprise. I suspect we’ll see a political change within the Empire next week (assuming that’s the conclusion of this arc).

So now we know what Discovery Andorians and Tellarites look like. The Andorians are a pretty conservative redesign, basically a cross between the TOS and ENT makeups but with some pointy cheekbone spurs added. Tellarites, though, are apparently warthog people now. 

I am getting tired of this show constantly breaking one of Roddenberry’s rules from TOS: Don’t treat deep space as a local neighborhood. In TOS, starships generally needed days or weeks to get from system to system, but DSC routinely has starships and even shuttles hopping all over the Federation in a matter of hours, making it unclear why they even need spore drive. When Burnham got orders to attack the rebel base, Detmer ordered torpedoes loaded immediately as if they were already in orbit. That made no sense.

I’m also getting tired of the “bodies in vacuum freeze instantly” trope. Anyone who’s ever owned a Thermos should know that vacuum is an insulator! You lose heat more slowly in vacuum than you do in air or water, because there’s no medium to conduct or convect heat away. That’s why spacesuits and orbiting ships and stations need cooling systems, not heating systems. Yes, “space is cold,” but only in the parts that have had time to cool off completely. In direct sunlight, space is actually pretty damn hot.

@14/Jason: They’re not going to return to the future. Burnham asked Mirror Voq what it would take for Klingons to pursue peace with other races, and Voq answered that unifying the Klingon Great Houses was the first step. They wouldn’t have included that scene if it weren’t intended to pay off toward a resolution of the war arc. As I see it, Burnham will return to the Prime timeline with this new insight into the Klingons, and will use it to help guide the Great Houses toward unity, probably with help from Tyler/Voq. And thus she’ll end the war she started and thereby redeem herself to Starfleet.

@39/Crane: Honestly, it didn’t even occur to me that the title implied maleness. Although I can’t seem to find much in the way of prior real or fictional examples of women going by “Emperor.” There are a bunch of articles referring to Wu Zetian as “China’s only female emperor,” but she’s generally known in English as Empress Wu.

 @46/Sunspear: Speaking as someone with a history degree, I’m not convinced that humans really do fight wars over religious beliefs that often. “Holy wars” tend to use religion just as an excuse to pursue wealth or territory or political power. Certainly religion has been used as a motivation for systematic persecution, oppression, and mass murder, but that’s ultimately just about power and control. There are just as many instances where religion has inspired people to seek peace or alliance or social justice. Or people of different religions may coexist as neighbors for generations until some new societal or economic factor intervenes to make them redefine each other as enemies, such as poverty or manipulation by an outside oppressor. They only start using religion as an excuse to turn on each other once they’re already afraid or angry or desperate enough to want an excuse to turn on each other. If it weren’t religion, it would be ethnicity or nationality or some other excuse. Religion doesn’t make people good or bad; people make religion good or bad by using it as the excuse for whatever good or bad things they would’ve done anyway.

@49/ghostly1: Did they recognize her on sight? I think the attacking ship was identified as the Emperor’s flagship before they heard Georgiou’s voice or saw her face. And Burnham and Lorca recognized her because they know her Prime counterpart, and she apparently knows their Mirror counterparts. I don’t think we saw anyone else recognizing her.

@53/WTBA: “I find it sort of humorous that some of the same people (across the Trek boards I read) who cry foul that the so-called twists are too “shocking” also claim that the same twists are “predictable.” Can you be shocked by predictable things? Can I be shocked the sun came up today? I guess if you think the writers think they are being shocking, then they might fall short…”

I think the intent in comment #45 (and probably elsewhere) was to use “shocking reveals” sarcastically — to point out that if the producers intend the reveals to be shocking, they’re not doing a very good job of it, because they’re too predictable.

Although part of the problem is that audiences have gotten too used to expecting shows to have big secrets and revelations and things not being what they seem, so they’re actively trying to guess the twists in advance, and that makes it harder to pull off a really unpredictable twist. That’s one of the drawbacks of serialized television — it relies so much on secrets being kept for weeks or months before they’re finally revealed, and as you say, that gives the audience plenty of time to work them out from the clues. Maybe that approach is better suited for a Netflix-style show that drops the whole season in one chunk.

If God were going to be anywhere, the center of the galaxy seems like a more plausible place than the top of a mountain. Heck, “The Magicks of Megas-tu” posited (based on an old physics theory that was already discredited at the time) that the center of the galaxy was a point where new matter was being created, which is pretty much the secular equivalent of God.

@65/Jana: “It bothered me more that apparently every major race in the known galaxy has a personal god and a paradise. Not even all Earth religions are like that.”

First off, just because Sybok claimed every culture shared a similar belief, that doesn’t mean he was right. After all, he was a fanatic trying to justify his own belief system, so obviously he was not an unbiased source.

On the other hand, Earth has many different religions, including both theistic and non-theistic ones. Despite Trek’s unfortunate and lazy tendency to portray alien species as culturally monolithic, it stands to reason that any other given species would also have multiple different faiths with a similarly broad spectrum of beliefs. So most major civilizations would probably have some religion in their history that had those features. Even if a planet’s dominant culture doesn’t have such a religion, there may be a subculture that does, or there may have been one in the planet’s history that did.

Indeed, that’s implicitly clear with the Klingons, since the “Qui’Tu” mentioned in ST V as Klingon heaven seems distinct from the Sto-Vo-Kor later established in the shows as part of Kahlessian religion (or whatever it’s called). So Sybok may have been referring to a different Klingon religious tradition, a minority faith or a pre-Kahlessian historical belief system. He was cherrypicking Klingon beliefs for the closest equivalent to his own belief.

@84/Sunspear: “Georgiou (why does she have a Greek/Mediterranean  name again?)”

Why did Leila Kalomi and Noonien Soong have non-European names? Sometimes the casting goes a different way than the script intended. But it’s not implausible. In real life, Kristin Kreuk is a Chinese-American actress with a Dutch name. The lead actor in Big Hero 6, Ryan Potter, is Japanese-American. In college, I had a friend of Appalachian ancestry whose given name was Vietnamese, because her mother taught English to Vietnamese immigrants. In a society where different ethnicities and cultures mix, so do people’s names. And the Federation is even more culturally intermixed than the US. If anything, there should be more characters with such seemingly incongruous names.

Alternatively, many Chinese people adopt Western given names or nicknames for the convenience of English-speakers, like how Lee Jun-fan went by Bruce Lee and Chan Kong-sang goes by Jackie Chan. Perhaps Philippa is just her Western name. And Georgiou could be her married name.

@96/Sunspear: Yes, obviously I know she’s from Malaysia, which is how I know what accent she has. It was a rhetorical question.

@98: The IDIC symbol was introduced onscreen in “Is There In Truth No Beauty?”, though Roddenberry put it in the show so that he could sell it as merchandise through Lincoln Enterprises. It’s been used extensively since then, from Spock’s wall mosaic in The Wrath of Khan to a symbol used by the Syrannites in Enterprise‘s Vulcan civil war arc.

@99/WTBA: “Some Earth kids should be playing kal-toh, for example. (Or is that cultural appropriation?)”

I think it’s only considered appropriation if it’s done by a more powerful culture with elements from an oppressed culture, especially if it’s done insensitively or in a way that perverts or misrepresents the original meaning. (For instance, non-Native Americans using the concept of a “spirit animal” as a metaphor, taking something deeply sacred and culture-specific and making a joke out of it.) Just learning another culture’s games isn’t bad.

@102/Chazwuzzuh: “There have been lots of non-Western names in Trek already.”

Statistically speaking, not really. The overwhelming majority of character names in the Trek franchise are of English, Scottish, or Irish origin, to a hugely disproportionate degree:

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/human_names.htm

@108/Jana: Surak was the Vulcan equivalent of Jesus or Buddha, or at least Gandhi and Dr. King. Would you expect most humans to be as wise and benevolent as Jesus or Gandhi? If not, then why expect most Vulcans to be as wise as Surak? He’s the ideal they aspire to, but that doesn’t mean most of them achieve it, any more than most humans do. It would be stereotyping the Vulcans to write them that way. They should be as variable and imperfect in living up to their cultural ideals as humans are. You use the word “Vulcans” as if it applied to a single, monolithic entity, and it can’t. It shouldn’t. Far too much of Star Trek treats alien races as one-note stereotypes, in a way that would be deeply offensive if it were applied to human ethnic or religious groups. I’m quite glad that Enterprise fleshed out the Vulcans as a people as varied and imperfect as humans are.

Amanda was happy to be on Vulcan because she lived with a husband who (relatively) respected her humanity, and she and Sarek probably tended to associate with other Vulcans who felt the same way. But it stands to reason that there would still be more conservative, prejudiced Vulcans as well, in the same way that America or Germany has both progressive and reactionary voices in its population. And if those more reactionary types managed to gain control of important institutions, then that would be something that the more progressive factions would have to contend with and try to change.

@116/trajan: Again: Yes, I know all that.

@126/MaGnUs: I’m pretty sure we saw several tusked Tellarites in the resistance group. But fans have been using the “different races/subspecies” excuse to rationalize different Klingon/Andorian/etc. makeup designs for decades now.

As for Georgiou’s imperial trappings, I read an article saying that they were based on what Empress Hoshi Sato probably established before her, which would’ve been based in Japanese tradition. That’s why one of Georgiou’s imperial titles is Iaponicus, the Latin for “of Japan.”

But then, Japanese imperial trappings probably have a Chinese influence to some extent.

@135/Jana: “There’s the son-of house-of naming pattern the Klingons use, but I guess you could argue that son-of is a patronymic and house-of is a family name, which would make the Klingon names akin to Russian ones.”

There are a lot of surnames that are “son of” patronymics. MacDonald is “son of Donald.” O’Brien is “son of Brien.” Fitzpatrick is “son of Patrick,” as is Kilpatrick. DiMartino is “son of Martino.” Then there are Hebrew names with “ben” and Arabic names with “ibn” or “bin” meaning “son of.” It’s pretty common. Russian is different from the European examples because the patronymic is a middle name rather than a surname.

“As for actual non-Western names, ENT had Hoshi Sato.”

But that is a Westernized name order, putting the surname second. There were one or two early ENT novels that called her “Ensign Hoshi,” since the author(s) apparently assumed it was a Japanese name order, but Sato is one of the most common Japanese surnames and Hoshi is a moderately common given name. If she did use Japanese name order, she’d be Sato Hoshi.

“Perhaps the only Asian Star Trek character who wasn’t somehow westernised”

You mean East Asian, since South Asian characters like Khan (supposedly), Captain Chandra from “Court Martial,” Mr. Singh from “The Changeling,” etc. would count as Asian too.