You Can’t Go Back to the Way Things Were — Star Trek Discovery’s “Vaulting Ambition”

“And when he does manage to find the way out of the network, the two Stametses wind up switched, with mirror-Stamets now on Discovery, and the mainline one on the imperial flagship in mirror-Stamets’s lab. Oops.”

I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen. The one on the Charon muttered to himself, “He did it” when he awoke, not “I did it.” He also had the Mirror Stamets’s cocky attitude. So that one was Mirror Stamets, right where he was supposed to be.

“the emperor… kills her entire court of advisors”

In one of the fakest-looking CGI effects this show has done yet, as well as one of the most gratuitously gory ones.

“My favorite part of this episode, though, is the thread with Saru, L’Rell, and Voq/Tyler.”

I agree — that subplot had some of the best writing I’ve seen in this show.

A bizarrely short episode this week, less than 38 minutes. Surely the shortest live-action installment of the Trek franchise, unless those TNG Hallmark-ornament commercials count. I wonder if next week’s episode will be longer to compensate. And I wonder how much longer this arc is going to go on. They’ve got to get back to the Klingon War by the end of the season, surely.

The light-sensitivity thing is bizarre, yes. Given how tight the continuity was with “The Tholian Web” and “In a Mirror, Darkly,” I’m surprised they’d introduce such a random retcon. Well, maybe it just applies to a subset of the population that Georgiou and Lorca happen to belong to, maybe due to an augment experiment gone wrong.

At first, I assumed the corruption of the mycelial network would explain why spore drive was never used again, but Culber’s ghost (what the hell?) said its destruction would destroy everything, so presumably they have to save it. Maybe they abandon the drive because the drive’s continued use is what corrupts the network?

Anyway, I’m reluctant to believe that was actually Culber’s “soul” or whatever in the network. I don’t want Star Trek to be turned into blatant fantasy, and I don’t want the mycelial network to be the afterlife or whatever. I’d rather believe the Culber we saw was just a construct of Stamets’s subconscious telling him things he hadn’t consciously sorted out yet. But he did seem to know one or two things Stamets shouldn’t have been able to know, which is a problem.

Also, oh, joy, one more “You’re in your mind but it conveniently looks exactly like the standing sets for mumblemumble reasons” story. Twice in one week, since Supergirl did it last Monday — and it felt more plausible there, because it was explicitly her own mind doing it, not “the network” doing it for Stamets’s benefit as if it were sentient.

@21/Mike Kelm: “…we have two of them who are in fact NOT who they’re supposed to be.  While the foreshadowing has been very good, the fact that 33% of your prime crew are in fact imposters?  Ugh.”

That doesn’t really bother me, because there’s a correlation between the two impostors, so it isn’t exactly random. That is to say, Tyler is only part of the crew because Lorca bent the rules to make him security chief. Maybe Lorca sensed that Tyler was more aggressive or amoral than a typical Starfleet officer, and therefore supported him and expedited his appointment when another captain would not have done so.

Although that doesn’t quite fix it, since there’s still the major coincidence of the two impostors being brought together in the first place, through L’Rell capturing Lorca and contriving for him to meet “Tyler.” But Lorca was targeted because of his success with the spore drive, and it looks as if the Terran Empire’s spore drive research was ahead of the Federation’s. So maybe it was Lorca’s knowledge of the drive from the MU that enabled him to get the drive project going in the Prime U.

By the way, Burnham restated in this episode that the full name of the drive is the Displacement Activated Spore Hub Drive — which is clearly meant to spell “DASH Drive.” So I wonder why they never call it that.

“If I have to give a season one MVP award, it’s either [Anthony Rapp] or Doug Jones.”

Jones, definitely, though Rapp’s pretty good.

If Culber’s consciousness was somehow captured in the spore network, there is at least one “scientific” Trek precedent — VGR: “Coda,” where an alien tried to capture Janeway’s neural energy pattern in its “matrix” and passed it off as the afterlife. And we’ve seen other instances of neural patterns being preserved outside the body, e.g. “Return to Tomorrow” and “Lonely Among Us.” So it’s conceivable that the circumstances of Discovery‘s recent and persistent use of the drive, or the presence of so many spores aboard the ship, allowed Culber’s neural pattern to be preserved in the mycelial network somehow. But if so, does that mean every fatality aboard Discovery is in there too? Is Landry still hanging around being a jerk somewhere?

Speaking of Landry, was she from the MU too? Or did Lorca somehow manage to find a Starfleet officer who was just as heartless as he was?

“Last week we found out that Vulcans were rebels, including Sarek, which is problematic only in that Sarek’s son Spock is already a comissioned officer (unless mirror Spock somehow entered the fleet after this point, whereas prime Spock joined in 2250 if memory serves)- I can’t believe that as paranoid a society as the Empire would allow the son of someone who is either a traitor or whom is a subordinate race to be a serving officer.”

As I’ve said before, there’s enough time in between episodes for there to be some sort of coup or power shift within the Empire, one that improves conditions for nonhumans.

@41/roxana: Like I said, fans today have gotten way too rigid about continuity vs. discontinuity. Most works of series fiction I’ve seen in my life have been somewhere between the two, making changes and pretending it all fit together anyway. Like the original Planet of the Apes film series, where none of the first four films were made with a sequel in mind, so every sequel had to retcon facts from the previous movies (for instance, turning what was explicitly 2000 years of cryogenic sleep in the original film to a quick hop through a time warp in the sequel), yet they still pretended to form a continuous whole. Or Marvel Comics pretending that all its stories from the 1940s onward have all happened in a single ongoing reality, yet using a sliding timescale so that everything from 1961 onward happened in just the past 10-15 years, with details constantly being retconned forward in time (for instance, Tony Stark’s injury happening in Afghanistan rather than Vietnam, and Flash Thompson’s Vietnam War service being quietly ignored in more recent stories).

And Star Trek has always been like this too. The original movies played fast and loose with continuity — TWOK contradicts “Space Seed” and other TOS in numerous ways, like changing Khan’s followers from a multiethnic group to a bunch of blond Aryan types, and somehow making them all in their mid-20s even though they were stranded as adults 15 years earlier. And TNG was pretty loose with continuity too; I’ve even heard that Roddenberry considered it a soft reboot, an opportunity to purge the universe of the bits of TOS and movie continuity he was unhappy with and just keep the parts he liked. It was later on, when TOS fans like Ron Moore became producers on the shows, that they started to tie more explicitly into TOS. So the idea of Trek representing a consistent whole is a conceit that’s evolved only gradually, and has always required squinting at the various inconsistencies and reinterpretations that different creators have introduced along the way.

@42/noblehunter: “I think any form of serialized storytelling needs to be allowed to revisit previous decisions. “It seemed like a good idea at the time” is a terrible reason to set something down in stone.”

Very well put. Everyone should have the right to fix their mistakes and try to do better over time, creators no less than anyone else.

@60/Dante: “It’s an interesting retcon, giving further difference between humans and Terrans.”

There is no difference. Terra is the Latin name for Earth. A Terran is an Earthling, pure and simple. It’s been a common science-fiction demonym for Earth humans since the late 1940s. Star Trek has used the word to refer to Prime-universe Earth humans on numerous occasions. The Commander in “The Enterprise Incident” asked Spock “Do you call yourself Terran or Vulcan?” The Vulcan bullies in “Yesteryear” insulted Spock by calling him a Terran, though the child actor pronounced it “tuh-ran.” The Sol System was referred to as “the Terran system” in The Voyage Home and “The Best of Both Worlds.” Ambassador Talbot was twice referred to as Terran in ST V. And so on. So “Terran Empire” just means “Empire of Earth.”

@62/TheNewNo2: What bugs me about the “looking at a miniature sun” scene — aside from what the hell is that miniature sun supposed to be? — is, why is Georgiou even opening that viewport at that moment? There’s no story reason for it — it happens purely so that Burnham can see her reaction to the light.

@72/soursavior: That doesn’t work, because the Emperor’s titles refer to her conquests, the civilizations she or her predecessors have put down or enslaved, including Andor and Qo’noS as well as Vulcan. It’s not saying “These cultures are equals in our society,” it’s saying “These cultures were forced to their knees by our Emperor’s might.”

@86/robinm: There are two pieces of evidence that Tyler’s personality is the one that survived: Tyler switching from Klingonese to English at the end of his rant, and L’Rell giving the death howl right afterward, something she would only do to honor the death of a Klingon warrior.

There’s also just real-world TV logic — the only way Shazad Latif can stay on as a series regular is if he’s Tyler. This show doesn’t have a very large regular cast, and it’s presumably going to lose Lorca, so they might want to keep Tyler around.

@114/Wizzl: The problem is not that a single show had a single LGBT relationship end in the death of one of the partners. The problem is that there are rarely, if ever, any shows where that doesn’t happen. The problem is that audiences keep waiting for an exception and it never comes. That is not treating LGBT relationships the same as any other relationship, because other relationships on TV only occasionally end in the death of a partner, not routinely.

@121/random22: Berman & Braga never “left” Enterprise. They did hand the day-to-day showrunning duties to Manny Coto in season 4, but Coto still answered to them as the senior executive producers, in the same way that showrunners Maurice Hurley, Michael Piller, Jeri Taylor, Ira Steven Behr, Braga, and Kenneth Biller had answered to Berman on TNG, DS9, and VGR. So every episode of season 4 was developed, written, and made under their supervision.

And Trip & T’Pol’s relationship saga was ongoing right up through the penultimate episode of ENT. The only reason the series finale claimed they’d broken up in the interim was because, for some strange reason, they didn’t want the characters to have advanced in any way in the intervening 6 years. I think it was originally meant to take place in 2155 and was hastily rewritten to be in 2161, which is why so much about it makes no sense. So if the show hadn’t been cancelled, we wouldn’t have gotten TATV in that form, and there’s no telling how Trip & T’Pol’s relationship would’ve developed if allowed to continue organically.

@122/MaGnUs: “Beaming Voq/Tyler into the cell was pure genius, by the way.”

But technically problematical, because what’s the point of a force-field security cell if it isn’t transporter-shielded? Plus, this is not the first time that DSC has contradicted TOS’s assertion that point-to-point intraship beaming was a rare and dangerous practice in the 23rd century. I’d be happier if they’d wheeled Tyler in on a gurney.

As for Lorca being MU, I’d think that would reduce “hate” for the series, not increase it. After all, one of the main complaints about the series has been that its characters, mainly Lorca, didn’t live up to Starfleet values, and that seemed to be a repudiation of what ST stood for. But now we know that Lorca wasn’t Starfleet after all, and we’ve seen the other Starfleet characters still living up to Starfleet values and refusing to be dragged down to Lorca’s level. So I’d say that Lorca being MU makes the show truer to Trek, and invalidates one of the main “hater” complaints against the show.

Yes, “It’s good to be the captain” was probably a reference to History of the World, Part I — which is disturbing, because Brooks’s King Louis said “It’s good to be the king” in reference to how his kingship gave him the power to sexually exploit women at will. Lorca seemed to be implying something similar about his own treatment of women — which suggests that maybe the MU still fits Jana‘s view of it as a society that victimizes women, even though some women within it have managed to gain power.

@124/roxana: I don’t know about the real king, but I’m only talking about the version in Mel Brooks’s movie, which pretty blatantly portrayed Louis as a cartoonishly caricatured sexual predator. Brooks’s films have never been known for their subtlety.

@127/ground_petrel: “Alex Kurtzman, showrunner of STD”

Incorrect attribution. Alex Kurtzman and Heather Kadin are the executives of Secret Hideout, the production company that produces Discovery (whose initialism is DSC). They are senior to the actual showrunners, Gretchen Berg & Aaron Harberts. In the same way that Rick Berman was senior to showrunners Maurice Hurley, Michael Piller, Jeri Taylor, Ira Steven Behr, Brannon Braga, Kenneth Biller, and Manny Coto on TNG, DS9, VGR, and ENT, and perhaps roughly the same way that Herb Solow was senior to Gene Roddenberry when Desilu produced TOS.

Alex Kurtzman is currently an executive producer on Hawaii Five-0, Scorpion, and Salvation as well as Discovery, and until recently he was heading up Universal’s development plans for its “Dark Universe” franchise. He’s way, way too busy to concentrate on the day-to-day showrunning of any single series.

@133/phillip_thorne: You’re oversimplifying. Yes, “executive producer” is often a vanity credit for a financial backer, pilot director, or the like, but it’s also the title used for a showrunner, the highest-ranking logistical producer (i.e. on the practical end of turning the script into an episode rather than the writing end), or the head of the production company making the show. “Producer” is a junior rank in the hierarchy; above it come supervising producer, co-executive producer, and executive producer.

https://johnaugust.com/2004/producer-credits-and-what-they-mean

I know that Heather Kadin’s executive producer credit on Discovery, at least, is more than just a vanity title. Based on what I hear from my friends Kirsten Beyer (who’s a staff writer on the show) and David Mack (who wrote the first tie-in novel in close coordination with the staff), Kadin basically supervises the whole production, makes the hiring decisions, etc. A lot of writer-producers like Kurtzman have business/logistical partners like Kadin who are in charge of the brass tacks of putting ideas into practice, much like Bryan Burk does for J.J. Abrams or Sarah Schechter does for Greg Berlanti (if I understand correctly). That was basically Rick Berman’s role on Trek, the guy responsible for the practical production and business decisions, though he had input on the creative side as well.

Basically, the way these partnerships work is that the writing EP brings in a showrunner, co-creates the show with them, then puts its production in the hands of the showrunner and their practical/logistical production partner and moves on to the next show while maintaining a supervisory role over the current show (and any other concurrent shows).

@136/Kate: Thanks, and I agree. I often think that if fans put as much mental effort into finding ways to solve plot holes and continuity problems as they put into complaining about them, they’d be much happier overall. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

@149/Jana: “I would have loved if the writers had used the serialised format to show the exploration of an alien planet in much more detail than previous shows could.”

Ooh, yeah, I’ve been saying for years that I’d like to see that in a serialized Trek show — a whole season arc devoted to the in-depth exploration of a single planet. Too many sci-fi productions treat entire planets as cultural, political, and ecological monoliths, but with a whole season, you could give a planet multiple cultures and conflicting nation-states and religions, explore various different cities and ecosystems, get to know various recurring characters on the planet and get involved in their problems… it would be easy to get a whole season’s worth of stories from a single planet. After all, we’ve gotten hundreds of entire series’ worth of stories out of Earth.