My introduction to Michelle Yeoh was when Jackie Chan’s third Police Story movie was released in the United States in 1996, retitled Supercop. It was released here to cash in on Chan’s newfound American popularity following Rumble in the Bronx. I went to see the movie for Chan, but was completely captivated by Yeoh, who was as good as Chan as a choreographed fighter and as an actor. In fact, she was a better actor, and Chan’s actually quite good…
I’ve followed her career with assiduity ever since, from her amazing turn in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to her being the primary reason why Tomorrow Never Dies is the only Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie I like. Her movements are elegant and beautiful, and ones I’ve grown to appreciate more the last thirteen years since I started training in martial arts.
So I freely admit that my second-favorite moment in “What’s Past is Prologue” is when Lorca throws a knife at Georgiou, and she uses an inside roundhouse kick to knock it aside. I totally cheered.
My favorite moment was, for the third episode in a row, a scene involving Saru. The speech he gives to the crew about how the ship isn’t Lorca’s anymore is wonderful—and then he makes it more so by not saying that it’s his ship now, instead saying that it’s all of theirs. I just about got goosebumps from that. Saru is simply a magnificent character, and a perfect Star Trek character, and I really hope that season two of this show puts him in the center seat where he belongs. He’s struggled with being in charge before, being overly analytical about it in “Choose Your Pain,” and being subsumed by an alien consciousness in “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum,” but with that speech, Saru had his Captain Moment. It was right up there with Kirk’s “risk is our business” speech to the senior staff and Picard’s “you’ve made your choices, sir, you’re a traitor” confrontation with Jarok and Sisko silently climbing back into the box rather than give in to Alixus.
A major complaint about Discovery has been that it’s not nearly Star Trek enough, that it’s too dark, too much Battlestar Galactica and not enough Star Trek (ironic, given that the guiding force behind BSG was Ronald D. Moore, one of the best Star Trek screenwriters in its five-decade history). These last two episodes have shone a light on that and proven it to be a feature rather than a bug. Mirror-Lorca has been able to take the war with the Klingons and use it as cover to further his own agenda of getting back. He gloats in this episode about how he’s molded Discovery‘s crew into a fine bunch of soldiers, and it’s to Doug Jones’s credit that you can still see the disgust on Saru’s face even through all that latex covering his face.
But war has a disruptive effect on even a utopian society—that was one of the running themes of the final two seasons of Deep Space Nine, writ large in “In the Pale Moonlight” and a few other episodes. In the end, though, this is still Star Trek. The solution to the Dominion War wasn’t military might, it was Odo’s compassion shown toward the female Changeling.
And Discovery is a ship of science, not a ship of war. The conflict with the Klingons forced them out of that, and Lorca encouraged it in service of getting himself home. With Saru’s speech, it looks like they’re going to try very hard to get back to their true mission statement.
First, though, there’s a war to deal with. This episode ends with Discovery back home, but nine months later, and the war’s gone very badly. Be curious to see how that resolves, though I’m way more interested in how mirror-Georgiou deals with being in the mainline universe.
My third-favorite moment in the episode was the scene between Emperor Georgiou and Burnham in her little sanctuary. The emperor is holding mirror-Burnham’s insignia, which is all she has left of her protegée. Burnham is still holding Georgiou’s insignia. One of the things I liked best about “The Vulcan Hello” was the mentor/mentee relationship between Georgiou and Burnham, and one of the things I liked least about “Battle at the Binary Stars” was that Georgiou’s death meant we wouldn’t see any more of that, except maybe in flashbacks and tie-in fiction.
That relationship is why Burnham is unwilling to once again stand on an enemy ship and see herself live and Georgiou die, so she grabs the emperor and pulls her along in the transporter beam. She winds up in the mainline universe, which I can’t imagine will make her happy. The emperor had already lost her throne—Lorca’s very public takeover of the Charon pretty much spelled the end of her reign even with Lorca’s defeat—and she was looking forward to an honorable death. This isn’t that, and I can’t see her thanking Burnham.
There are still plenty of problems with this episode. There’s the perpetual Mirror Universe issue of death being meaningless because we’ve got another one, so it’s impossible to get worked up over mirror-Owokusen and mirror-Stamets being disintegrated. After the joy and wonder of “Captain Killy” in “Despite Yourself,” I was hoping for lots more of Tilly being evil, and we got precisely none of it, which is a huge disappointment and missed opportunity for Mary Wiseman. (Having said that, we still don’t know what happened to the I.S.S. Discovery—is it in the mainline universe? Might we see the actual Captain Killy?)
While I had no issue with Burnham being able to move freely about the Charon thanks to her mad Starfleet skillz (I especially liked her spoofing her signal so Landry went to the wrong place while Lorca thought he was stalling her), I had a serious problem with how easily she was able to escape the throne room and all its armed guards.
I was hoping that the shot we saw of Landry in the coming attractions last week meant we’d be seeing flashbacks to Lorca and Landry’s coup attempt and then they were sent to the mainline universe and took the places of their counterparts. But no, it turns out that the racist Landry we met in “Context is for Kings” and who died due to a terminal case of stupidity in “The Butcher’s Knifes Cares Not for the Lamb’s Cry” was the actual prime Landry, and really? She was as big a dink as Lorca, and her death was more of a relief than a tragedy, and I don’t say that lightly. (Having said that, we also have Stiles in “Balance of Terror.” But where Kirk upbraided Stiles, Lorca would just encourage Landry, especially since she looks just like his lieutenant in his home universe. It’s easy to see her thriving due entirely to Lorca being her rabbi.)
The one death of an MU character that does hit is that of Lorca, because it’s the Lorca we’ve been following all along. And he mostly dies because his fatal flaw is seeing Burnham as a replacement for mirror-Burnham. They’re not the same person, and his inability to see that is what leads to being impaled on Georgiou’s sword and his body disintegrated in the mycelial orb. Burnham, of course, has the same flaw, as she insists on saving the emperor even though she isn’t her Georgiou.
It also raises the question: is the mainline Lorca still alive? Perhaps we’ll find out next week…
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s Patreon was updated this past weekend with reviews of Proud Mary and The Alienist, as well as a vignette featuring the Super City Police Department. Check it out!
One thing that bothered me was the stakes laid out. It’s not enough that the entire mycelial network will die off, or all life in the Main and Mirror universes will end, but ALL life in the ENTIRE multiverse.
First, it hasn’t been established that the network sustains life beyond allowing instantaneous travel. If it does, it’s still a fairly ridiculous concept: an organic layer underpinning astrophysics. Ok. But the threat has to be an infinite one. “To infinity! And beyond!” Just saying it out loud doesn’t make it so.
Otherwise, yeah, the time jump happened. The hyperbolic critic on another site suggested that they would time jump back to the beginning to resolve the Klingon War. Otherwise, we have no invented history for the Federation basically ceasing to function, or becoming a rebel alliance (…) less than 10 years before Kirk and Co.
We truly never will accept the no-win scenario. We were given the choice of no-Trek or bad-Trek, and we embraced The Orville as the alternative, beating CBS’s Kobayashi Maru of badness.
My favorite moment is when Lorca tries to fall into Burnham’s arms, and she’s like, “Nope” and steps out of his way.
My one quibble with the episode is we never see the Shenzhou again. It should’ve been in the same area as the Disco and the Charon, but neither Burnham nor the Emperor thought of calling them for an assist. Just promise Detmer the governorship of Andor, I’m sure she’d do it.
Oh well, hopefully we’ll return to the Mirror Universe at some point and learn that the the new Emperor is Gingerius Maximus. Failing that, there should be a novel series filling the gap between Disco and Mirror, Mirror.
Hmmm. We got a ruthless Emperor in need of something constructive to do and an empire in need of unifying… Naw, that couldn’t possibly work… could it?
I share your love of Michelle Yeoh as an actress and martial arts performer. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was great. I like a lot of the Bond movies, but I agree with you on Tomorrow Never Dies being one of my favorites.
My one (Yeoh-related) complaint about that movie, though, is how often they made Yeoh yell “Hyah!” as she performed any sort of action. It’s one thing to have it used sparingly as she delivers a particularly powerful blow, but they even had her do it just as she jumped out of cover and shot with a pistol. And you could tell it was added in post-production, as her mouth isn’t moving anywhere remotely close to how it would need to. She even yells it when she empties a machine gun into a computer. Ugh.
I’m not convinced that we’ve seen the last of mirror-Lorca. He died bathed in spore energy, the stuff of life in the multimeter. What might it have wrought?
random22: first of all, nobody “beat” anybody. Both Discovery and The Orville were renewed for a second season. I think a world in which we get both is best, and I would think someone who purports to be a Trek fan would feel the same.
Second, do you walk into restaurants, find people who are eating food you don’t like, and berate them for eating that food? Because that’s what you’re doing here……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“Multiverse”, of course
@2. random22: I’ve wondered why The Orville doesn’t get covered on this site. Is it considered too lightweight? It’s mostly just an homage to and nostalgia for the TNG era. Which is fine, but has not yet attained much depth, while containing some duds and simplistic messaging. The social media episode was truly laughable. Black Mirror covered the same ground in the Bryce Dallas Howard episode to far greater effect.
And speaking of Black Mirror, the “USS Callister” episode this season was essentially a TOS Mirror Universe story (except no one has genitals).
Some subtlety with Lorca would have been nice. Not everyone in the Mirror Universe is awful; I didn’t expect him to be a good guy, but why does he have to be a serial rapist who is even more speciest than the Emperor herself? He served for months at Saru’s side, and he praises the competence of the entire crew including him: is he going to go back to eating Kelpians? It would have been a good point for a transition to the Terran Empire we know from Mirror Mirror: a meritocracy, where the only merit that counts is to be a ruthless killer. Also: “make the Empire glorious again”? “Light her up”? I’d rather have the episode show why Trumpism is bad than just equating it to an evil empire for superficial reasons.
I wonder what they can do with emperor Georgiou. Has she committed any crimes the Federation can prosecute her for? Can they really release such a dangerous person?
@10,
hm, would citizen Georgiou be dangerous (if the plot didn’t require it)?
She has some engineering and tactical knowledge of Starfleet and starships, but no access codes or passwords. Her ID would say “citizen”, not “Captain” or anything else, and surely the Federation ID database would have her account flagged with a big red notice “Capt. Georgiu of the Federation was KIA. This person is a genetically identical doppelgänger from another universe” (cause that happens a lot) “and is not authorized to access Starfleet systems.”
Hard to get in trouble that way.
Now of course, if the plot requires that she impersonate the prime Georgiu and cause all kinds of trouble, the security protocols will miraculously melt away.
@9 This is a site that has people who are professional Trek fans on it, people who work professionally for the Trek franchise writing books for them. It is no surprise they are very pro-STD in their approach and do overlook ORV. There is a great deal of anger at MacFarlane’s show from parts of the Trek fandom, and I can only assume that extends to the higher levels too, because STD was supposed to come out in a blaze of glory and sweep the board because it was Trek and there was nothing even remotely Trek-like out to compete with it, and it was this big grown up version of Trek for this tightly serialised and gritty Trek show with fancy movie like graphics, and then suddenly there was this jokey fun show which was very old-Trek like and it completely stole the glory, spotlight, and made STD have to fight to justify itself to the fans. And STD coming out the loser in many fancircles.
It is certainly understandable that a site with so many deep ties to Trek and at a professional level, that, even unintentionally, ORV would be overlooked in the rush to make sure STD gets taken seriously as the only Trek to Trek right now. There is certainly a very understandable urge to quash criticism too. I’m sure it isn’t done on purpose, and that there is a lot of SF to review and only so many column inches available for writers, so it is kinda understandable.
I thought this was the worst episode so far, not because it’s BAD, but there’s too much combat, too many action scenes (despite Yeoh’s beautiful fight moves). I did love Saru’s bit, and the way Tilly and Stamets technobabble their way out of the Mirror Universe. I understand that this is the climax bit of the serialized season, and not intended to actually stand on its own as an episode, but still.
Another let down, yes, is seeing less Captain Killy. I hope we see the ISS Discovery and the actuall Killy. Keith, how did you expect this Landry to be the same as the one that died in Butcher?
Back to Saru, I loved his speech, and when he said “We will not accept a no-win scenario.”, my son and I cheered, and I said to him “Saru is going like <<Kobayashi Maru? More like Kobayashi NU-HUH!>>”.
Keith, you are correct in saying that the darkness in Discovery was a feature and not a bug, and that, “in the end, though, this is still Star Trek”. Some people were unable to see that this was a whole narrative, not episodic TV. They were unable to give the writers and the characters the opportunity they deserved. Their loss, I hope some day they enjoy Discovery.
I sure hope Prime Lorca is alive, and we get him for the rest of the season and season 2 onwards.
@1 – Sunspear: Both Stamets think that is true, it doesn’t make it true.
@2 – random22: Bah-humbug! A lot of us love Discovery.
@@.-@ – princessroxana: Yeah, sure, Klingons will follow a human.
@6 – Bruuuuce: My son says Mirror Lorca might be part of the network now.
@7 – krad: Clap, clap, clap! At least random22 has tried the food, I think.
@9 – Sunspear: “No sex please, this is Starfleet”, as Keith rewatches say.
@10 – Athreeren: As we settled in to watch the episode, my son posited that perhaps Mirror Lorca wasn’t as racist, and I said that if he took over the Empire, that would explain Spock and other Vulcans in Starfleet ten years later. Then he ranted about aliens encroaching the Empire, and yadda yadda, and he seemed as racist as everybody… or he might have been spewing that for the benefit of his follower. And then he died.
But I did think he had some nuance… he seemed to inspire loyalty in his people, not just fear like the Emperor.
@14 – random22: It’s DSC, or even DIS, no matter how much you want it to be STD.
@11: I was rather thinking about her political skills. Lorca has managed to use the war to turn a science vessel into a warship. Now, the Federation is losing the war against the Klingons: it’s possible that enough citizens of the Federation would start being sufficiently afraid to go back on their ideals and support a ruthless dictator who has lots of experience at war in general, and against the Klingons in particular.
I don’t think that they will “support a dictator”, but at least, the preview seems to suggest she will use her ruthlessness to help win the war. A bit similar to the plot of Star Trek Into Darkness, I must say.
Klingon racism would be a problem, but Voq is available and the technology to impress a personality. I wonder if Voq would like to be an empress?
They’re not going to do that.
So, we find out what the fiery orb at the center of the Charon is: not an unjacketed fusion reactor, not a miniature star, but a direct tap into the energy of the mycelial network because … um… technobabble. Which can be destroyed by the power of spores. Anybody else hearing echoes of “protoculture” from Robotech? (Next season, the Discovery crew learns to use song to transform the ship and punch enemy starships.)
@1/Sunspear: I agree that “a threat to the multiverse!” stories are a problem. One, they sound overblown; two, if the multiverse is truly that fragile, aren’t the odds that somebody in one of the universes should have already triggered an apocalypse that wasn’t stopped by the local heroes?
The VFX for the flight through the mycelial network from the MU to PU looked a lot like “slipstream” in Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, 20 years ago.
Given the number of witnesses to the MU, I’m wondering how Kirk and the P-Enterprise are unfamiliar with it ten years later. Starfleet might imprison M-Georgiou, but will they slap a gag order on the entire P-Discovery crew? Or did the advisory get misfiled in a technical update with the wrong keywords (“Bulletin 2261.34, Transporter operation during ion storms”)?
@10/Athreeren: Without an empire and loyalists, ex-emperor M-Georgiou is no more dangerous than any other ambitious, clever, martial-agile, homicidal-when-necessary human — that might be how P-Starfleet and the UFP would view her. Her main concern was to die in fittingly imperial fashion, but now that she’s in a new universe where that’s irrelevant, maybe she’ll welcome the chance to reinvent herself.
Regarding the Discovery coverage vs the lack of Orville coverage. Does Tor want to give more coverage to the official new Star Trek show that is telling their story in a new way (completely serialized) while updating the look to reflect the time the show is produced and set in a beloved universe, or the show that is basically a nice, if occasionally juvenile, homage to a 30 year old TV show. Not really a mystery that DSC is getting more coverage.
@17, No doubt you are right.
@13. Magnus: ” Sunspear: Both Stamets think that is true, it doesn’t make it true.”
I said that! “Just saying it out loud doesn’t make it so.” Not sure why you would say it back to me.
No offense intended to your exuberant commenting, but slow down and see the context sometimes.
@12. random22: “then suddenly there was this jokey fun show which was very old-Trek like and it completely stole the glory, spotlight, and made STD have to fight to justify itself to the fans…”
Completely? That’s hyperbole, wish fulfillment, plainly subjective, not objective, no proof… Take your pick.
Saru’s speech to the crew was one of the most pure bits of Star Trek writing ever. Before, I wasn’t sure I’d want him to take over as permanent captain, since I liked him as first officer. I have now changed my mind. I also like how much focus we got on the Discovery bridge crew, who have tended to be shoved to the background in the past.
The corridor battle between Lorca’s and Georgiou’s forces, conversely, was striking in how new and different it was for Star Trek. It had a military discipline and strategy to it that I’ve never seen in onscreen Trek — although it felt very much like a David Mack Trek novel battle scene brought to life.
It’s surprising that they got rid of Jason Isaacs before the end of the season — and brought back Michelle Yeoh. It’s symmetrical with the first two episodes, which had Yeoh but not Isaacs.
And we got to see another Michelle Yeoh fight scene! One that made better use of her martial-arts skills than the one in episode 2 did, which is fitting for the two different versions of Georgiou, one a scientist and the other a warrior.
I like how they managed to explain Lorca’s transporter/ion storm transfer to the Prime universe in a scene with no Starfleet characters in it — indeed, he explains it to two characters who end up dead, so now nobody in either universe knows about it. That way, it gets explained to the audience without contradicting “Mirror, Mirror,” where that phenomenon is unknown until it happens.
I feel the show is getting more consistent in the back half of the season. I found it wildly uneven in the first half, with “Lethe” being the only episode I really loved, and far too dependent on random continuity porn. Now, this whole story arc has been one long exercise in continuity porn, but it’s been based specifically on one thing for four episodes rather than casting a wider net of random references, so it’s worked better. And the writing overall is feeling more consistent. The first part of the MU arc was weak because it was just sterile exposition for most of the episode, and the third was oddly truncated and thus a bit dissatisfying for its brevity, but parts 2 & 4 have both been solid, satisfying episodes, and Saru has really emerged as the MVP of the show.
Oh, and Saru calling Burnham “my friend” was a pretty important moment, given how much tension there’s been between them in the past. He’s bonded with her again as he’s bonded with the rest of the crew, and now they’re all a unit in the way they never were under Lorca. That’s a great foundation for the show moving forward — the adventures of Discovery under Captain Saru and (maybe) First Officer Burnham, along with Stamets, Tilly, Detmer, Owosekun, Airiam, and Rhys. (And maybe Tyler? Hard to say.)
@krad: “A major complaint about Discovery has been that it’s not nearly Star Trek enough, that it’s too dark, too much Battlestar Galactica and not enough Star Trek (ironic, given that the guiding force behind BSG was Ronald D. Moore, one of the best Star Trek screenwriters in its five-decade history).”
I wouldn’t call that ironic, since Moore approached BSG as his reaction against the strictures he was under on ST. It was intentionally the anti-Star Trek, so there’s nothing ironic about fans perceiving it that way.
@13/MaGnUs: On your point about the Empire’s racism, keep in mind that Lorca rebelled against Georgiou because he thought she wasn’t racist enough toward aliens, that she was letting them encroach on their human-supremacist paradise and he wanted to, shall we say, build a wall. So that reconciles it well enough for me — the reforms that let aliens gain more presence in the Empire were already underway under Georgiou, and presumably will continue now that Lorca’s coup is over.
Tor.com exists to sell Tor books. Everything else is window dressing, or a sweetener to increase visitor counts. I suspect the reason they don’t host Orville recaps is that no one on staff (who is paid to sell Tor books and promote other Tor content) feels like doing that particular bit of extra work for free.
@18/phillip_thorne: “I agree that “a threat to the multiverse!” stories are a problem. One, they sound overblown; two, if the multiverse is truly that fragile, aren’t the odds that somebody in one of the universes should have already triggered an apocalypse that wasn’t stopped by the local heroes?”
Exactly how I see it. If it were at all possible to destroy the entire universe, then it’s a statistical certainty that someone or something somewhere would’ve done it already.
And I think it was an unnecessary escalation of the stakes. The mycelial fungi and their symbiotes like the tardigrades have been established as alive and somewhat sentient, so that alone should’ve been sufficient stakes to motivate the Starfleet crew to save them — along with the fact that they’d never get home without the network.
“The VFX for the flight through the mycelial network from the MU to PU looked a lot like “slipstream” in Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, 20 years ago.”
A bit over 17 years, rather, but thanks for making me feel really old. ;)
As for the lack of TOS characters’ knowledge of any of this, I think the whole thing is going to end up classified. Starfleet let itself be compromised by an impostor for months, which isn’t the sort of thing they’d want to let out. And given that tapping the mycelial network for space drives creates a risk of destroying the multiverse, they’ll probably abandon the technology and classify it to keep anyone else from experimenting with it.
Something I enjoyed about this episode that I haven’t seen anyone else mention: At the end of “Mirror, Mirror,” Kirk tries to talk Mirror Spock into rebelling against the Empire by saying that a government based on tyranny cannot endure. And in this episode, Lorca tries to talk Burnham into joining him by telling her that a government based on idealism cannot endure. I thought it was a brilliant callback to “Mirror, Mirror” to reverse the direction of the speech and have a Mirror character tell a Prime character that THEIR government is doomed to failure! (I disagree, of course, but that doesn’t keep me from admiring the parallel.)
My husband and I both found over-the-top evil Lorca way less interesting and way less compelling than Stealth Mirror Lorca. I thought watching Lorca trying to contain his evil, only to have it leak out from time to time, was way more interesting than having him be openly evil.
That reminded me of how much I adore Spock. :) It occurs to me that part of what I enjoyed about Lorca — until this episode — is a similar dynamic. Spock is trying to contain his emotions, but we see hints of them that tell us there’s a LOT more under there. Stealth Mirror Lorca was trying to contain his evil, but we see hints of it that tell us there’s a LOT more under there. The difference — for me, at least — is that I enjoyed Spock’s fully letting go in episodes like “This Side of Paradise” more than I enjoyed watching Lorca fully let go in the current episode. But then, I like emotions better than evil. :)
Michelle Yeoh! Damn, the lady still has it! Just HOW high can she kick? I usually just put up with the TOS fight scenes, because I knew the network thought the show needed some hand-to-hand combat to attract viewers, so the sometimes-laughable fight scenes were just the show paying its dues to the network. But the Shatner Flying Kick is not as interesting — to me, at least — as the Yeoh Mile-High Kick. IMDB says she’s 55 years old? Geeze, that’s amazing!
Doug Jones manages to act his socks off even when his entire head is encased in rubber. The guy’s a genius. Saru has stepped up really well, and it’s nice to see the bridge crew beginning to jell and beginning to look to Saru as their leader. He’s come a long way from the guy who had to look up how to lead in the computer!
I was actually crying during the part where Georgiou was giving Burnham time to escape, facing down all those people alone; I didn’t think I could stand to watch Georgiou die a second time. But of course she didn’t. At least, not yet. ;)
Shades of “The Enterprise Incident,” to have one person piggyback on another’s transport. I have to wonder what Saru is going to have to say about Burnham’s bringing Mirror Georgiou back with her. I mean, he misses Prime Georgiou, too, but this is NOT Prime Georgiou. I have to say that Burnham’s Vulcan logic seems to be melting faster than an ice cube in hell. :P
All in all, a fun episode, and one where I thought Burnham and Georgiou really shone. Makes losing Lorca a little bit easier to bear.
That was an excellent episode, and it felt like Star Trek, something Discovery hasn’t done too regularly. OK it’s set in the darkest timeline, but consider what it has:
* Bridge scenes
* Captains telling named subordinates to do stuff
* Inspirational speeches
* Warp drive
I’m very disappointed to lose Lorca (also damn you Jason Isaacs, the first thing I saw online this morning was you saying Lorca was dead!) as he was my favourite character (well, apart from Killy). The moral ambiguity was something which we learnt from Sisko could do very well, as does casting a British person as we learnt from Picard. This does however, hopefully, leave us Saru as captain, which I should point out means that, while Star Trek still doesn’t have an LGBT captain, IT HAS AN ALIEN CAPTAIN, and that’s frankly long overdue.
What I am getting from this series of episodes is a Stargate SG1 season 8 vibe, wherein there’s a really big episode which could quite conceivably have finished off the season, but then there’s a few more wherein the main characters muck up the timeline. Of course they’ll have to do that by spore, as the Enterprise has yet to perform the slingshot manoeuveur.
Love love love this series.
Is it perfect? no, but which Star Trek show was in its first year? Although TNG was a great series, not so the first year.
But the icing on the cake certainly is seeing Michelle Yeoh doing her amazing kicks. I’ve not seen much of her movies in a long while and like Keith was introduced to her with the Jackie Chan movie, then saw her in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (which incidentally has amazing music by Yo Yo Ma). As a martial artist, I remember going to the gym (with a matted floor) and trying to do the sequences of moves from her movie. Much fun and laughs was had…
I very much hope that she will be involved in the fighting with the Klingons as I want to see more!
While as an individual episode of a science-fiction series it wasn’t awful, I hated this as an episode of Trek. I kept on hoping that the arc was going to come to some sort of smart conclusion – despite the pedestrian writing in the wind up. And I was sorely disappointed.
Some of my issues.
1. Lorca was initially portrayed as a flawed, textured individual. We find out that all of this is a ruse. Instead of going with a more complicated answer – that he’s a MU antihero for example, seeking to reform Terran Empire – he’s just another lame TEH EVILZ Mirror Universe dude out for himself. Worse, he transforms from a master tactician who cons everyone for nine episodes to a Bond villain who makes stupid mistakes – mostly because he has to in order to make way for Burnham’s arc.
2. Mirror Georgiou was established as “space Hitler” in the last episode. She eats other sentient beings, bombs planets, and kills her loyalists just for overhearing conversations. Yet now the show wants us to believe that she’s the lesser of two evils and capable of redemption? Maybe it’s just to show how Burnham isn’t using logic – that she’s letting her sentimentality make her think that MU Georgiou is somehow like her own. But either way, it’s such a quick turn it gives me whiplash.
3. As was noted the whole “the collapse of the mycelial network will cause all life as we know it everywhere to die” is just idiotically stupid. First, if it connects all multiverses, then anything that could happen has happened. Hence, ships similar to the ISS Charon were constructed billions of years in the past by alien civilizations, and the network died. Worse yet, even if you somehow discount this, every action splits off alternate universes. Discovery failed in some alternate universes, meaning the network must have died at that moment.
4. Related to the above, while Saru gave a great speech (or rather, Doug Jones gave a great performance as Saru, who gave a mediocre speech) the tone of it was all wrong. It is not a “no win scenario” if you save the entire multiverse but are going to have to sacrifice your ship. It’s a tremendous victory. The speech should have been something more along the lines of every Starfleet officer being prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, but being sure we aren’t at that point yet. The way it was written came across as incredibly shallow – that all the Discovery crew cared about was saving their own skins.
5. Although I initially kind of liked the Stamets scenes in this episode, someone pointed out to me after the fact they’ve basically turned the mycelial network into The Force. The levels of woo are very strong here, and Trek has seldom been about quasi-mysticism.
In the end, it seems like Discovery is settling into being a well directed and choreographed, but inexpertly written, action movie. Basically a comic book movie in the Trekverse. If you just turn off your brain, it can be enjoyable, but the show turns to ashes in your mouth if you try and analyze it at all. I’ve never liked “action Trek” so it isn’t doing much for me as of yet.
@27: Sulu has been captain, and LGBT. But not in the same timelines (or at least not yet)
@10:”Some subtlety with Lorca would have been nice. Not everyone in the Mirror Universe is awful; I didn’t expect him to be a good guy, but why does he have to be a serial rapist who is even more speciest than the Emperor herself? He served for months at Saru’s side, and he praises the competence of the entire crew including him: is he going to go back to eating Kelpians? It would have been a good point for a transition to the Terran Empire we know from Mirror Mirror: a meritocracy, where the only merit that counts is to be a ruthless killer.”
Yeah. That would have been an interesting direction to go in: Lorca, after spending all that time in the Federation Universe, has an idea for a more inclusive Empire, one where, Vulcans are free to rise to the highest levels….
Early on, it was reported the show would take on the current political climate. Most just assumed it was only the “remain Klingon” speech. Now that the season is almost over, it seems the show wanted to address how society deals with charismatic authoritarians.
Burnham mutinied against a good captain. Interesting that no one on Discovery mutinied against Lorca. Saru even called him a good man (I think in Ep 3). While Stamets and Culber figured him out, they never went farther with it. Starfleet even put up with his regular disobedience.
But let’s get more personal: how many of us in the audience made excuses for him? How many of us still liked him until his reveal?
Think about current politics. How many people, who should no better, enable the current President? Think of Evangelicals who sell out all of their so called morality to embrace Trump.
It isn’t until Lorca goes full on evil that Discovery (and audience) wakes up and starts to return to Starfleet’s ideals. Think of Republicans who didn’t speak out against the moral decay of their party until someone like Trump seized control.
The problem is, it should have happened much sooner.
Does everything have to go back to current politics?
@23 – Chris: I didn’t take it as if there were actually any reforms, but Georgiou being a bit softer towards aliens might have started things.
@24 – StrongDreams: I’ve been a Tor.com reader for years, and there are several writers here who never cover Tor books at all. For example, Keith himself. Maybe once or twice in several years he has, but his topics are completely unrelated to Tor books; besides the genres they touch. Actually, Keith does lots of superhero adaptation reviews, and there are many articles on comic books on the site… Tor doesn’t publish comics, much less superheroes. You can call it “window dressing”, but the fact is that it’s pretty obvious that Tor.com is more than a window for Tor books.
@26 – Corylea: They can’t muck up the timeline, because they’re in their future.
@30 – Athreeren: Not of the main ship of a show. Not of any show, in fact, and Trek’s natural habitat is TV.
@32 – M: Unfortunately, people are still supporting Trump, and with much more evidence against him.
@32/M — Excellent analysis, M. Yes, it’s true, people were willing to excuse Lorca a lot of things because they liked him. Isaacs has said in articles that the point of his character is to get us to think about the Mirror aspects of our own hearts and to realize that we have to be vigilant about the darkness in our own selves.
On After Trek, both Ted Sullivan — the writer of this episode — and Jason Isaacs said that the Mirror universe in “Mirror, Mirror” was laughable, and they wanted to make THIS Mirror universe plausible, not silly, specifically to get us to think about our moments of weakness, when we could find ourselves acting like or agreeing with a Mirror character.
I said a long time ago that Lorca disturbed me and wasn’t Starfleet enough, and people shouted me down. It turns out that his not being Starfleet was the point. :-)
Well, it’s not very encouraging that it took fewer than five comments to start another DSC vs. ORV deathmatch…I agree with Keith’s sentiment. If you don’t like something, why do you need to berate others who do?
As for the episode, it was a g-damn thrill ride. Edge of my seat the whole time. I anticipated this episode all week, maybe more than any TV episode in recent memory (save for Doctor Who finales).
Some thoughts:
Saru was fantastic. The crew of Discovery is really coming together.
No Ash/Voq. It took my reading some stuff about an hour after watching to even realize that that plot was not touch on.
Thrilled that we get more Yeoh. There seems to already be a narrative that we are supposed to cheer that Burnham saved her and that despite her evil, the former-Emperor is redeemable. I think Burnham saved her in a split-second emotional decision because she didn’t want to see Philipa die again. I doubt the Emperor will be let off the hook for her actions completely. (Though, can you charge someone with crimes in another universe?)
The preview for next time looks less exciting, though I am still eager for it. Sarek and Cornwell(wall?) seem pissed and afraid. Could the real ISS Discovery have been stirring stuff up these last nine months? Or it is just a Macguffin based on the fact that OUR Discovery is still painted with the ISS markings (they wouldn’t have time to change everything back over yet, right?) and they will quickly diffuse the tension either with a quantum signature or a quick mindmeld (a la what happened at the rebel base).
Corylea,
This is why I think Lorca being full evil was the right decision, because it doesn’t let the audience off the hook.
While we have seen our Trek heroes commit questionable moral acts before, we had seen enough of their characters to know they were still fundamentally/overwhelmingly good people.
With Lorca, many in the audience saw the Starfleet uniform and then got swayed by his personality. They gave him the benefit of the doubt too quickly.
@25/Christopher: “[…] they’ll probably abandon the technology and classify it to keep anyone else from experimenting with it.”
Yes, perhaps. It’s a common way to deal with dangerous technology in stories, but it always bothers me, because it wouldn’t work. Someone else is bound to invent it again. As you said, if the universe can be destroyed, it will be destroyed.
@35/Corylea: “Ted Sullivan […] and Jason Isaacs said that the Mirror universe in “Mirror, Mirror” was laughable […].”
That’s a suprisingly arrogant thing to say.
Yeah, I can just see a scientist giving up his/her life’s work because some government man says it will destroy the universe.
@38/JanaJansen — I think by “laughable,” they meant that the Mirror universe in “Mirror, Mirror” was just for fun and wasn’t meant to be taken too seriously. Although I, personally, adore “Mirror, Mirror” — it’s justifiably a fan favorite — it IS true that if assassinating one’s superior officers were encouraged, they’d have trouble keeping enough crew on the ship to actually run the darned thing. And that’s okay; there are a number of TOS episodes that are just for fun and shouldn’t be taken seriously (e.g. “A Piece of the Action,” “I, Mudd.”)
@33/roxana: “Does everything have to go back to current politics?”
Have you met Star Trek?
@36/WTBA: “(Though, can you charge someone with crimes in another universe?)”
Only if they were committed against an inhabitant of this universe, I’d think. Although it would be difficult to convict without the ability to gather evidence and testimony from the other universe.
I think this entire MU arc was made just to showcase Michelle Yeoh’s fighting skills. Which is completely fine, that was one of the shining moments in the episode.
The other being Saru’s we can do it speech.
And honorable mention goes to techno babbling their way to a solution in getting back to the prime universe.
I’m not sure how I feel about them coming back to a failing war on the Federation side, was that most of the Federation, or just that sector? I mean, I’d think “we almost lost the war” would be a big footnote in Federation history, yet this is the first time we see it.
@33, you must be new to Star Trek.
Man, that ending. First they’re not in their right universe, now they’re not in their right time. In my head I’m going to start calling the show Star Trek: Wrong Turn at Albuquerque. ;-)
Saru’s speech was nice, but I don’t think it’s quite the powerhouse of a Picard or Kirk speech. Saru isn’t that character. Yet. But I’m perfectly fine with watching him grow into the role of captain. Jones is a great talent.
@26 I find that over-the-top evil characters are rarely as interesting as more nuanced villains, so I know what you mean here. I find that the more nuanced, more interesting villains are the ones that are easier to identify with–or at least, if you can’t identify with them, you can at least understand where they’re coming from. I mean, that’s my experience, anyway.
If I may make a comparison to another Jason Isaacs’ character: Lucius Malfoy is at the top of his game in the second Harry Potter movie, lording it over everybody and using his political influence (read: money) to get what he wants, but as Isaacs’ himself said he’s basically “a Nazi,” and not that interesting. He’s a lot more interesting to me in the last two movies when you see him at his low, terrified and just desperate to save his family. Those last movies give him more nuance–he’s still a terrible person, but he does genuinely love his wife and son, and right at the end of the movie, given the choice between family and the Dark Lord, he chooses family.
@23:”@13/MaGnUs: On your point about the Empire’s racism, keep in mind that Lorca rebelled against Georgiou because he thought she wasn’t racist enough toward aliens, that she was letting them encroach on their human-supremacist paradise and he wanted to, shall we say, build a wall. So that reconciles it well enough for me — the reforms that let aliens gain more presence in the Empire were already underway under Georgiou, and presumably will continue now that Lorca’s coup is over.”
Had I been writing the show, I would have really emphasized the idea that Lorca fears what “liberalizing” the Empire will mean:”Remove the boot from the neck of the alien creatures that we rule? And then what? Does the slave love his master for freeing him? No, he plots revenge for the indignities that he has endured. If we go soft, if we relax our grip, we will become the subject species, our planet occupied, our people scattered.”
Which would basically be what happened to humans after the fall of the Empire, as shown in DS9.
38,39, I have read a short-story where an advanced alien (or maybe it was a government man, or an alien pretending to be a government man), tries to persuade a scientist to give up his research. He ends up leaving with a message by example.
Then again, there’s always the Vorlon solution.
I guess they had to wrap things up in some fashion. At least they had a coherent storyline, and some good combat. And Lorca even captured the throne for a little while, as he surely deserved! I never understood all the Saru love here, but he was good in this episode.
But! The biggest thing was the sheer irrationality of the various premises. As many have pointed out, if any of a billion separate universes can make a reactor to blow it all up, then it would have blown up at some point. This would ACTUALLY have made some sense AND explained some things if the reactor would have just stopped use of the network for transport. But no, gotta have mindless multiverse jeopardy.
Second, surfing the hyper-nuclear spore explosion in a warp bubble and somehow using the energy to power the spore drive… ridiculous even for Star Trek.
You know what might have actually worked? Telling whichever Emperor came out on top that they needed to power down the reactor or they would blow up the universe, a prospect to which even the evilest of evil emperors would be averse. (And how come Mirror Stamets didn’t know this – his study of the network was more advanced than Prime’s?)
The jibes related to current-day US politics were pretty infantile.
47, unless the multiverse is acting to preserve itself! By um…creating people who will be there in time to save everything. Or moving them.
Or it’s the Q. Yeah, the Continuum likes to continue on. So they’re behind it.
Actually, I’m trying to remember another instance of a disruptive energy wave besides the one in Star Trek VI. Was there something where they blew up a sun or caused a solar flare?
random22: There is nothing in your comment #12 that is in any way, shape, or form correct.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m actually very old in Star Trek. Old enough to remember when the Original Series was on the air. But it seems to me that the political references were never personal, aimed at an individual.
More thoughts on MGeorgiou:
On Burnham saving MGeorgiou: It was clearly an emotional, impulsive decision. She didn’t want to watch her die “again.”
For those decrying this move because MG is a terrible person, did you also decry Lorca leaving Mudd in the Klingon prison?
Is Mudd worth saving despite his questionable ethics simply because he is a Fed citizen but MG is not because she is a Terran?
Mudd was not (necessarily) left to certain death (we did see he got free soon after), but MG was as good as dead.
Isn’t the whole point of Burnham’s “I’m not going to kill you” to Lorca about the Federation being more ethical than that?
Isn’t the ethics of the situation independent of consequences after? MG might be jailed or kept under lockdown in the PU, but it doesn’t really matter to the decision to save her.
In the moment, was Burnham supposed to let her die?
I was so pleased that Yeoh finally got to show off her martial arts skills on the show and those were some awesome action scenes. Now I’m just waiting on Rapp to display his real life vocal chops. However, his character seemed to detest his partner’s taste in opera so perhaps the show is being ironic in that the Stamets character isn’t all that musical.
@50/roxana: It’s not about an individual — it’s about the larger societal trends that enabled that individual to come to power on a platform of blatant hate speech. The individual is just the celebrity figurehead for a more insidious movement. He never would’ve gotten anywhere if there weren’t a much larger problem in society.
Besides, when a dangerous movement focuses around an individual, it’s entirely valid for allegorical fiction to be about that individual and what they represent. I offer Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator as an example. Given how dangerous cults of personality have been throughout history, we can’t be afraid to confront them for fear of “getting personal.”
Personality cults are very undemocratic. It’s the celebrity culture I assume.
@WTBA: “Isn’t the whole point of Burnham’s “I’m not going to kill you” to Lorca about the Federation being more ethical than that?”
That moment when Burnham lowered her phaser didn’t make much sense. Don’t they have stun settings on those things anymore? Forget the talking. Stun his ass, talk later. Unless that’s why stun settings are added by TOS era. (Don’t remember that detail from ENT.)
Overall: Despite some notable strong points and fun action, this was a disappointing turn and a distressing waste of potential. I am still enjoying the series overall, but I had much higher hopes for the season.
The Good:
* Saru’s arc from tentative commander to thoughtful leader comes to a satisfying and stirring conclusion. The moment when he was speaking to and inspiring the Discovery’s crew was moving and had a very Trek feel. The moment was sullied somewhat by the exaggerated stakes and a slightly muddled message, but this was a highlight of the episode.
* The action was very sharply done and was unusually effective for Trek. The hallway fight scene was especially good, and it was nice to see Michelle Yeoh in combat.
* The visuals were striking.
* It was nice to see the bridge crew get more attention.
The Bad:
* Lorca. This was what I feared would come from having Lorca be a MU denizen. Lorca was an interesting character, against the federation type, displaying some repugnant actions, yet capable, charismatic, and one who could inspire loyalty from his people (including Burnham and Saru). As a prime universe starfleet character, he represernted a moral tension that the federation needed to face, and I had hoped that his arc would represent an interesting resolution of that tension. But as a MU mustache-twirler, all that tension was eliminated, and his writing in this episode eliminated all interesting nuance.
* Burnham. Burnham is setup in the series as a competent and logical person who is struggling to accomodate the emotional and social realities of human society. The failing in the first two episodes is that she displayed none of these features whatsoever. But over the ensuing run, she has developed a more interesting balance. The MU arc promised to challenge that with what I hoped was a chance for significant character development. Instead, she falls right back into that first-two-episode overly-emotional behavior. Georgiou’s presence, rather than serving as a catalyst for growth led to regression instead.
* Stakes. As others have pointed out, making the stakes multi-universal catastrophe is both silly and logically self-falsifying. As importantly, it undercuts the moral value of the Discovery crew’s willingness to sacrifice themselves. The implications for the “network” could have been some uncertain badness, leaving flexibility in the story, keeping moral weight, and giving a way to discount the use of the network in the future (e.g., “it will take millenia for the network to repair itself”).
* Love will guide you. The quasi-mystical navigation of the network was rather disappointing.
* Georgiou. She was far too “good” this week after all the efforts to demonstrate her ruthless savagery.
* Culber. Culber’s death was not redeemed narratively.
* Empty Lab. For a science vessel, the Discovery has a shortage, not ony of doctors, but of scientists and engineers who can take a crack at an existentially vital problem. But they have a great cadet. Sure it’s fine for Tilly to solve the problem, but would it hurt to have a few extras there working on it too, perhaps with Stamets clearly supervising a full-on effort.
* The War. There are many ways the war narrative could have been impactful and interesting but the quick fix that seems to be coming (mix a little Terran ruthlessness with some pablum that Burnham “learned” from Mirror-Voq) can very easily be unsatisfying. Better than jumping *back* in time and erasing the whole thing, I suppose.
@CLB: you’re right, of course. Things like misogyny and racism were prevalent before the rise of the Orange One. At least in some darker corners of the internet. Take Gamergate as an example.
Media reflecting and commenting on current leaders and political climates has always been around. Cinema 101: legit argument can be made that German Expressionism prefigured the rise of a Strong Leader who claimed to be able to fix everything that ailed society.
#54
I’d say it’s more of a commandeering or opportunistic use of celebrity culture. Much in the same way Lorca lied and used everyone around him to get what he wanted, the Orange One is exploiting the culture and the ailing political system to get what he wants for himself and his cronies. Despite the cries of a new political landscape, it’s quite old-fashioned. Boss Tweed all the way.
My husband and I call the spore drive the Infinite Improbability drive – although we’d prefer whales and petunias to the spore network and that stupid tardigrave.
@55/Sunspear: Phase pistols with stun settings were introduced in the first episode of Enterprise. However, there have been other Trek episodes and movies where writers seem to have forgotten the existence of the stun setting, though I can’t remember which ones I’m thinking of at the moment.
Although, realistically, even a “stun” weapon can potentially be lethal in certain cases. Any disruption to the nervous system, respiration, and the like can cause a deadlier reaction in some people than others, or under certain unfortunate combinations of circumstances. Thus, even a reduced-lethality weapon creates some risk to the person it’s used against, and so actually shooting them with it should be a last resort. Of course, most fiction that uses stun weapons ignores that real-world principle and assumes they’re always safe to use.
Even as non USA resident I found the “Make the Empire Glorious Again” mustache twirling line ridiculously crude. In the past Star Trek has been more thoughtful in dealing with current issues and hence more effective. This was about as helpful as calling everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders “literally Hitler”.
Disappointing episode. They turned an interesting flawed character into a cartoonish villain. Because he was M.U. he HAD to be all evil and gloriously so. *snore*
As for the fighting? Physical fighting and pew-pew bore me.
Saru shone this episode with his very Trekkian speech. Burnham was her usual able self, although for someone raised logically, she sure makes decisions based on the feels too often (and often too wrong).
Now about that green spore…Culber? Lorca?
And what about ISS Discovery, or Lorca, or Killy-Tilly, in the P.U.?
Things to ponder.
But what a waste of Lorca. :(
@62. T’bonz: Killy-Tilly? I prefer Emperor Gingerius Maximus from comment #3.
I’d normally go with Silly-Tilly but I must be mellowing in my old age.
@40/Corylea: “I think by “laughable,” they meant that the Mirror universe in “Mirror, Mirror” was just for fun and wasn’t meant to be taken too seriously.”
Yes, I get that, but I couldn’t disagree more. Just like you, I adore “Mirror, Mirror”, but I don’t think it’s a fun episode. I think it’s an allegory. It doesn’t have to be realistic in every detail to be taken seriously. Like much of TOS, it’s a blend of the theatrical and the realistic, the thoughtful and the adventurous, and I’m disappointed that the current Star Trek writers are not seeing that. Especially since I had the impression that DSC tries to recreate this blend at times.
And honestly, I find a martial-artsy dragon queen emperor and a threat to the multiverse more cartoonish than anything in “Mirror, Mirror”.
On a more specific note, I’m not convinced that “assassinating one’s superior officers [is] encouraged” in the Empire. I know that Kirk suggests as much in his log (“I command an Enterprise where […] assassination of superiors is a common means of advancing in rank”) but I’ve always taken that as a piece of gallows humour. What actually happened is that Chekov used an opportunity that presented itself because Kirk had refused to kill the Halkans (“No one will question the assassination of a captain who disobeyed prime orders of the Empire”). The accompanying advancement in rank is simply a way to encourage everybody to watch everybody else, similar to the “each of us is […] always under surveillance” of the Klingons. It’s just a little more hands-on than the usual practice of encouraging people to inform on their superiors.
@60/Christopher: According to TUC, phasers on stun kill at close range. This bothered me when the film was new, but in light of your comment, it seems plausible.
@62/T’Bonz: “Burnham was her usual able self, although for someone raised logically, she sure makes decisions based on the feels too often (and often too wrong).”
Well, the last part at least makes sense. If she’s been raised logically and decided for some reason to base her decisions “on the feels” instead, she’s bound to be wrong quite often. She’s still practising.
Whether or not stuns kill at short range, I’d still take the shot. Drop him to the ground, then figure out what to do with him next. But then it wouldn’t be a dramatic moral stand.
@49 – krad: Reminded me of Luke in The Last Jedi: “Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong.”
@52 – Garret: Stamets doesn’t like Kasseelian opera, but perhaps he likes other kinds of music. Like 20-21st century Earth musicals…
@61 – phonos: Star Trek has a long history of being less than subtle.
@62 – T’Bonz: I don’t think that green spore is meant to be someone.
@56 “The quasi-mystical navigation of the network was rather disappointing” – So I’m not the only one who thought “use the force Luke, let go!” at that moment. :)
Intrigued by the green spore… I’m routing for Culber rather than Lorca; what have people on Twitter said, they hadn’t finished with Culber (though that was before his ‘afterlife’ appearances) as well as Lorcas dead…?
65, when it comes down to it, the plausibility of a universe where after perhaps hundreds of years of divergences, the same people are being born is unlikely.
To some extent, even two people meeting and having children would be unlikely, let alone having the same child.
That’s why Sliders was always a bit silly. But like in Trek, where they just coincidentally were around the same planet, nobody really bats an eye at it.
Just a gentle reminder that the focus of the discussion should be on the show–please try to avoid any tangents about the state of current politics in themselves. That way madness lies (at least for the moderators.) And of course, in discussing the political context as it relates to Discovery, thank you all for keeping the overall tone civil and respectful.
It’s a shame we’re probably not going to get any more Captain Killy, and Tyler/Voq was conspicuously absent this week. Still, they tied this little arc off nicely, and hopefully we get to find out what an ex-Emperor from a parallel universe thinks of a brainwashed ex-klingon in a human body (or whatever Tyler is now).
@69/LordVorless: Yep, that’s the one thing that’s definitely unlikely. Just like being split into a good and an evil half or beings that live off hate and can turn phasers into swords. A lot of classic SF starts from an unlikely premise and proceeds realistically from there, and I love that.
@29 if you think Trek hasn’t had much mysticism, you must not have watched much DS9. Prophets and Pah-Wraiths and Orbs, oh my.
I really liked this episode. I think I have been hung up on serial nature of Discovery, and I’m pretty happy with how things have played out. Saru’s speech was great. I did enjoy the fight scenes especially the hallway battle. And Michelle Yeoh is back! Like many others I was very annoyed when they killed her character back in episode 2. I still wish we saw more of Captain Georgeou (she showed a great deal of dignity, wisdom, and emotional depth), but Yeoh plays Emperor Georgeou magnificently. Finally although, this episode was plenty violent, it wasn’t quite as emotionally and physically gruesome as some of the other shows, which had high doses of graphic killing, rape, Burnam killing her mirror comrades, Kelpian eating, and torture. I might be a sensitive soul, but i has been a little much for me.
I’m finally on board with Discovery. And for the first time I’m genuinely excited about the next episode!
72, I’d say less realistic, and more thematic. Though even the good/evil halves of beings once was semi-accepted pseudo-science.
@62/T’Bonz: “Disappointing episode. They turned an interesting flawed character into a cartoonish villain. Because he was M.U. he HAD to be all evil and gloriously so. *snore*”
I read an interview somewhere saying that the point was that sometimes people who are truly evil can seem like reasonable, nuanced, likeable individuals, and that’s how they manipulate us into trusting them. By all accounts, Hitler was a genial host and a hit at parties. The fact that so many viewers still want to cling to the idea of Lorca as sympathetic even after the truth was revealed just shows how dangerous that kind of manipulation is. We don’t want to accept that other people (at least charismatic ones) can be just evil; we want to see ourselves reflected in them, want to see something we can reach and relate to. So that makes it easy for them to trick us into thinking they’re better than they are. If evil were obvious, if it were always cackling maliciously and twirling its mustache, it wouldn’t be so seductive and insidious.
It’s Gul Dukat all over again. The DS9 writers had so much fun writing to Marc Alaimo’s charisma and charm that they lost sight of the fact that Dukat had been a genocidal tyrant responsible for the deaths of millions and the enslavement and torment of hundreds of millions, and that casting him as a figure worthy of redemption and forgiveness was falling into a dangerous trap. Granted, they went overboard in the other direction by making him a cartoon caricature of evil, but they had to do something to avoid being guilty of the fictional equivalent of Holocaust denial.
In this case, by contrast, the writers always knew their endgame for Lorca, at least in broad strokes, so it’s not a desperate overcorrection but something that was always built in. He was always worse than he seemed, and the signs were there all along. Every time Lorca did something that seemed supportive or kind in order to motivate Burnham or Stamets or whoever, there was always enough ambiguity to make us wonder if he was just manipulating them to get what he wanted — but we resisted that interpretation because it was less appealing. We even shrugged off the several clearly dishonest and blatantly awful things he was shown to do — torturing a sentient alien, leaving Harry Mudd in Klingon captivity, leaving Admiral Cornwell in Klingon captivity to cover his own ass, hijacking Stamets’s last spore-drive jump to throw them into the Mirror Universe. All the signs were there all along, but we resisted accepting the truth they were pointing us toward, because it was more comfortable to believe that we were misinterpreting what we saw, that maybe Lorca had a good reason for it.
The hard truth is, Lorca was never a nuanced, sympathetic character. The writers were telling us all along that he was a cruel, manipulative bastard, a liar and a killer who used people to get his way and was only nice to them when they could do something for him. But they let us fool ourselves into denying the evidence, into looking for the best in him and convincing ourselves it was there. And that’s really a damned good illustration of how easy it is for decent people to fall for the manipulations of evil people and allow them to rise to positions of power, because we resist accepting the evidence of their evil.
Once again, let’s avoid tangents about current politics, per @70. Thanks!
@75/LordVorless: ” Though even the good/evil halves of beings once was semi-accepted pseudo-science.”
I’d call it more philosophy than pseudoscience, but yes. That notion of an intrinsic moral duality in human nature was the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and, to an extent, for Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
80, the duality probably does have its origins in a more religious bent, but there’s a period (beginning around the Time of the Enlightenment) when such ideas became subsumed into the more scientific paradigm. I could also throw in the Island of Doctor Moreau as another example.
And I believe there’s at least on Star Trek episode where somebody references giving up antiquated ideas…
CLB@78: I think you are right on target in analyzing the pitfalls of writing a charismatic but evil character. There’s a lot of thematic potential, but also the possibility of redeeming someone who should really be held accountable for monstrous crimes. Gul Dukat’s the Trek example. Darth Vader, anyone?
Now they have the same situation with Mirror Georgiou. Are they going to soften her character and forget that she was a genocidal dictator? I hope they do as well with her as they did with Lorca.
@@@@@ 78/Christopher L Bennett — Thank you for that beautiful analysis of the situation. I think this is vitally important, and I hope you will publish this as a separate essay here on Tor or on Trek Core or Trek Movie or someplace. I think this is a message that needs to get out, and it’s one that I’m not seeing in most reviews.
@82/rm: I don’t think anyone can say Vader wasn’t held accountable, because he sacrificed his life in his redemptive act. Now, if Vader had somehow survived and Luke had gotten him off the Death Star, naturally he should’ve been tried for his crimes, but as it stands, the issue never came up. Unless you’re talking about his Force ghost, but that’s more a matter for theologians than courts of law, probably.
#82: The question of Mirror!Giorgiou’s redemption (if any) is interesting, especially in light of Christopher’s observations about Mirror!Lorca and Gul Dukat.
Two factors argue for a degree of sympathy for the Emperor. One is that for all that she’s been a tyrant, she’s evidently an honorable one — as it’s turned out, she did in fact deal sincerely with Prime!Michael on all points, even going beyond the scope of her original bargain in Michael’s defense. Second, now that Mirror!Giorgiou has been cut off from her universe of origin, one might argue that there’s a nature/nurture question in play — and that without the paranoia and inborn indoctrination imposed by Mirror!Terran culture, the more honorable Giorgiou, the one that clearly values and believes in Michael, has a chance to come to the fore. (Also, I don’t quite know how you’d ‘prosecute’ the Emperor-in-exile for crimes committed in another universe; the jurisdictional issues would be a genuine challenge. Sam Cogley would have a field day….)
On the flip side, a couple of logistical factors suggest to me that we’re not likely to see how that arc might play out. For one thing, it seems unlikely that Michelle Yeoh would agree to become a series regular going forward; even on the more abbreviated operational schedule of a streaming series vs. broadcast, that’s a deeper time commitment than I’d think she might accept (also, one that the DSC budget might not be able to afford).
In addition, with the Klingon war still to resolve, it occurs to me that one very, very plausible season-climax for the Giorgiou/Burnham character arc would be for Mirror!Giorgiou to finish the season by sacrificing her life for Michael’s (and actually getting away with it this time) in whatever we get for a final battle. That would be consistent with what we’ve seen of her character this past week, and would also resolve the lingering problem of what Starfleet does with the “evil twin” of one of their most celebrated starship captains once all the other loose ends are tied off.
###
Unrelated thought: no doubt the continuity-hound segment of the fan community is about to go bonkers attempting to figure out what sorts of retcons are needed to explain where the pre-TOS Federation went during the year we were “now” evidently losing a war with the Klingons. On one hand, this does inspire a number of questions about how the Federation we initially see in Discovery disappears so completely that our heroes can’t find any sign of its existence on their return to the primary universe. OTOH, at the same time…
…it conceivably offers a very good explanation for why the shiny, powerful, advanced Starfleet we see in Discovery becomes the relatively less polished and distinctly more thinly-spread Starfleet we see “ten years later” in the original series. If the TOS-era Starfleet is just a few years out from a disastrous war with the Klingons, it’s not implausible that they’re relying on older, less cutting-edge tech and have fewer ships to deploy across their immediate neighborhood than appears to be the case during Discovery‘s timeline.
Can’t you redeem somebody and still hold them accountable? If they’re really redeemed they should be willing to accept their punishment. religiously speaking that’s what purgatory is for.
@85/John C. Bunnell: What a depressing thought! Turning the better future of TOS into an impoverished postwar society would be such a cynical move that I don’t think they’ll do that.
@86/Roxana: Agreed. One of the things I liked about the TAS episode “The Survivor” was that Kirk told the Vendorian that he would have to stand trial.
@24. StrongDreams: “Tor.com exists to sell Tor books.”
Reminded me of one of the Coode Street podcasts (wonder why those aren’t being posted here anymore?) It’s Episode 302: the State of Short Fiction from Mar 19th 2017, with Irene Gallo as one of the guests. The discussion is generally interesting, but can skip ahead about 45 min in where she says Tor.com is a marketing vehicle for Tor and Macmillan Publishing.
Early on, she says the bloggers get paid, but the site doesn’t make money. That may have changed during past year when the novella program started taking off and Tor.com is selling actual physical books.
So we’re all here as a bit of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play actors generating views. I kid, I kid.
@73 soursavior. I think there is a difference between mysticism and spirituality.
Religion played an important role in Bajoran society and the Prophets and (regrettably) the Pah-Wraiths were observable phenomena, though poorly understood. The show was careful to be non-committal as to their nature (alien or more).
And if the Prophets or the Q or that guy who killed all the Husnack were quasi-magical in their power and thus mysterious, it was not mysticism. Surrending thought to the force/love/the universal oneness to navigate home in a complex physical transition is something else entirely.
@Magnus: “…there are many articles on comic books on the site… Tor doesn’t publish comics, much less superheroes”
Yeah, but how many here actually pay attention to those. The last comics post has 3 comments, and two of those are mine. People really should be reading Mister Miracle.
Re: Lorca’s motivation, and the tradition of Star Trek being political — The thing is, in prior Trek series, when an episode is an allegory about some current social or political topic (domestic terrorism, gender identification, euthanasia due to age or injury, etc.), it’s the topic of the entire episode, so the audience can get a grip on it. In this case, Lorca declaims his raison de rebellion in a single paragraph (“Emperor Georgiou, you’re too soft on non-Terrans”), partially by intercom voiceover. It’s out of left field, and it’s not buttressed — he doesn’t show any discomfort or disdain for non-humans (*) while captaining P-Discovery; his partisans don’t get the chance to show the same philosophy; we don’t see any evidence of Georgiou’s policies — no Imperial cities, and aside from the Kelpian herd, no non-Terrans aboard the Charon. (We don’t see enough crew to make its enormity convincing, period, but that’s another matter.)
(*) Well, for sapient humanoid Federation-types, anyway. His behavior toward the Gorn skeleton, Tardigrade, Gormagander and Pahvans is borderline.
Re: Lorca-as-monster and “the signs were there, but we were blinded by his charisma” — a dramatic necessity will be a denoument. The protagonists (Burnham, Saru, Adm. Cornwell, etc.) need to discuss Lorca’s deception and how they were taken in — otherwise the audience will be left scratching their heads (as we’re doing here) and asking “what exactly were the writers getting at?” The point needs to be reinforced (not belabored) otherwise it’ll be forgotten in the urgency of other plot-threads (the Federation lost the war? Tyler is now a vegetable? how long does Saru keep command?).
@89 fair points. Given that the spore network seems to have some sort of consciousness, embodied by fake Culber, I interpreted it as more of letting the network stick him back in the right place rather than him leaving it up to hope and good feelings.
@88 Sunspear,
I read something about either Twitter or Facebook to the effect that if you aren’t paying for the service, you aren’t the customer, you’re the product. (The customers are advertisers and the product is personal data about the buying habits of their users.) I thought this was brilliant and is probably pretty much a universal observation.
So basically, we commenters are part of the product, we generate comments sections that are lively and interesting to read and draw in more readers, but where the ultimate purpose is still to sell books to the people drawn in thereby.
(I’m not sure that gets us any closer to why no one covers Orville, but then again coverage of things like OAAT, Lucifer, the CW DCU, the Marvel TVU, and many other TV shows is equally absent or much more low key. I think the main reason we get DSC recaps is because krad is on staff and writes ST books, among other things. Maybe Ruthanna or Liz or CLB needs to pitch a line of Orville books to Fox.)
#88/93: Let’s not overcomplicate the equation. There is a link labeled “Submissions” at the bottom of this very Web page; surely the easiest way to get Orville recap/review posts on this site would be for a qualified freelancer to offer to write them, just as KRAD writes these posts.
ETA: And there has been coverage of the CW/”Arrowverse” series, as well as of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Inhumans; again, one simply needs writers to watch the episodes and write the columns, and there are only so many hours in the day.
@91. philip_thorne: “His behavior toward the Gorn skeleton, Tardigrade, Gormagander and Pahvans is borderline.”
What about the tribble? I think Lorca ate the tribble.
@93. StrongDreams: I’ve watched most of the CW DCU shows and I still get lost. For instance, Michael Emerson’s character is a mystery to me. His character name used to refer to someone else. Was that his son? Dunno. Regardless, he’s essentially Harold from Person of Interest gone bad.
Btw, the new Black Lightning show is well worth watching.
@94. JohnCBunnell: “the easiest way to get Orville recap/review posts “
I’m not asking for that. in fact, I said earlier that there’s not enough depth there to justify it. I was making more of a meta comment.
Although, it has it’s truly weird moments, like a DS9 actress having sex with a sentient jello blob. Or Rob Lowe as a bisexual alien. Hmm, a juvenile theme here…?
@96/Sunspear: I don’t know what you mean about Cayden James on Arrow. The name has only been used for a single specific character, who was referred to but not seen last season (because he was being set up as a major character for this season and they hadn’t cast him yet), and who finally appeared on-camera this season.
(By the way, in the episode last year where he was introduced, James was being held at an ARGUS black site as a “person of interest.” So I think casting Michael Emerson in the role was an in-joke on a couple of levels.)
I wonder if you might be confusing Cayden James with another character with a similar-sounding name. The only one I can think of is Adrian Chase, aka Prometheus, who was last season’s big bad.
I like my Trek with a message, especially if it is a humanitarian one and if it involves a clash of cultures. Check, check, check. As already pointed out, the Saru speech was gold. There are still problems with the ep and some stylistic choices I really dislike (as usual too much gore and a general sense of rushing through things; and what’s with those shaky cameras?), and yes, the messages tend to be more sledgehammer-y rather than subtle. But let’s face it, even in those Trek series we love the most the “perfect” episodes are few. So I’m very much willing to say that this was a very good episode, perhaps even great, and definitely one I see myself rewatching in the near future. Quite a big turnaround from the first MU episode which I hated so much I was almost ready to give up, sincere congrats to the team on board DIS! Or I dunno, perhaps I’m just happy that we’re out of the MU, hopefully for good. :D Looking forward to exploring the clash of cultures angle with the Klingon War even more.
A belated but important correction (I only just got back to CBS All Access to check my memory):
The correct title of this episode is “What’s Past Is Prologue” (from Shakespeare’s Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1).
@98. CLB: Yeah, think I confused him with the guy who operationally ran Helix while Felicity was a member.
Are we supposed to know who Cayden’s son was at this point?
@90 – Sunspear: It was an example. Tor.com also publishes tons of Star Trek and Star Wars articles, and they publish no books of either franchises.
@101 – Sunspear: No, he’s supposedly a bystander that got killed by a stray arrow, IIRC.
@101/Sunspear: Actually, yes, Cayden James was the unseen leader of Helix, the one they rescued from the ARGUS black site with Felicity’s help. That is exactly the same character Emerson is playing now. I don’t know why you think it’s a different character. Remember, Felicity’s Helix friend Alena came to her earlier in the season and told her James had gone evil as a result of his captivity.
He might be conflating him with Felicity’s ex-boyfriend hacker gone evil, or with one of the guys we briefly saw at Helix.
John: Thanks for that. I’ve edited the text — someone higher up the food chain needs to fix the headline. (I’ve already pinged the appropriate parties about it.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@71 – who says we’re not going to get more Captain Killy? As far as we know, she’s still in the main line universe with the I.S.S. Discovery and even if not, she’s presumably still alive for future appearances in Mirror Universe-based episodes.
So an ISS ship is running amuck in the Prime Universe, yet Kirk and company have no clue over what happened to them?
#106/107: Actually, per Mirror!Lorca, we can be fairly sure that the ISS Discovery is not in fact in the Prime universe, since he got there via a transporter glitch just as Kirk & company did in “Mirror, Mirror”. So apart from those who visibly perished this last week, everyone’s evil twins are still safely in their own universe, goatees and shiny uniforms and all.
@104. Magnus: “conflating…” Yeah, I was. Guess I should put down my 30 Words with Friends games while watching that show. It hasn’t had my full attention in some time. Although, I like the current new team split from the main one, with the Outsiders name dropped both on Arrow and Black Lightning. Maybe they’ll go for a spin-off.
@108/John C. Bunnell: It’s not about how Lorca got there. In the first episode of the arc, after the winter break/cliffhanger, it was explicitly stated that Discovery must have swapped places with its counterpart ship. But that hasn’t been followed up on since — except insofar as the real I.S.S. Discovery never showed up to challenge the fake one, which strongly implies that it was no longer in the MU.
Anyway, given that the jump in both directions was done via spore drive, it could be that both ships swapped back to their proper universes at the same time, just as they were initially transposed. Although that would mean that the Prime crew are going to have a heck of a time convincing Starfleet who they really are, if their evil twins have been running around wreaking havoc for the past 9 months.
@109 – Sunspear: Loved the Outsiders being name dropped on both shows, and I think that new team on Arrow should end up absorbing the other team, and having someone other than Oliver leaded it. Didn’t like Black Lightning mentioning DC characters as if they’re maybe fictional… but we’ll see.
@110 – Chris: Get we’ll see something about that this weekend.
@111/MaGnUs: “Didn’t like Black Lightning mentioning DC characters as if they’re maybe fictional… but we’ll see.”
It was ambiguous enough that it could go either way. I thought they did that rather deftly, cracking open a door without limiting their options.
Yeah, there is a possibility. Back to Discovery, I just watched After Trek, and the preview clip of Sunday’s episode definitely hints at the ISS Discovery having caused some mayhem.
This episode was inept hackwork.
Major Complaint #1: The writers have no sense of moderation. Why does this never-before-mentioned space fungus have the potential to wipe out the multiverse? Because the writers are too incompetent to wring dramatic tension out of anything but artificially high stakes. Fail.
Major Complaint #2: Mirror Georgiou is a psychopath who casually murders her own supporters For the Evulz and literally makes the woman she creepily projects on as her surrogate daughter people (also, why the cannibalism? Totally unnecessary, we know the Mirror Universe is evil). Why is she a good guy now just because she has feeeeelings for Burnham? Mirror Georgiou is a monster! We see her do spectacularly evil things apparently for kicks. If she doesn’t end up locked away forever I’m going to be really pissed.
Other crap:
–Why is Lorca suddenly twirling his moustache like Snidley Whiplash? This guy fooled all of Starfleet into thinking he was a Federation dude and now he’s going full Make the Terran Empire Great again? Bullshit. Also, this is the dumbest, laziest, biggest gorram waste of a twist ever. Has the Federation changed Lorca? Has he had any reaction to being stranded in another fucking universe, maybe he wants to make the Terran Empire into something or maybe he wants to try to actually do something good even if he has to do bad things to reach a good end….
Or he could just be a lazy attempt to imitate the Orange Idiot. Yawn.
–Still a really harmful approach to Culber’s death and the aftermath, great job burying your gays, STD.
–Why did ANYONE give Alex Kurtzman any level of creative or executive control over this show? He’s literally never made anything good and everything he’s made has either been “dumb action” or outright unwatchable.
–Calling it now, the last two episodes will involve time-travel and preventing/preemptively winning the war that we never really saw.
In a nutshell, this show is as subtle as a brick to the face, as intelligent as an ant infected with cordyceps fungus, as enjoyable as repeatedly punching myself in the nuts, and as intellectually stimulating as repeatedly banging my head against a wall.
Thanks, CBS. Thanks a lot. I was genuinely excited for this show, I wanted something with gay characters and trans characters and something bright and uplifting and hopeful to counteract the terrible world we live in, and you gave the world a cheap ripoff attempting to lazily ape the last two seasons of nuBSG while centering the entire show around a Mary Sue long-lost sibling character who kills any attempt at an ensemble cast stone dead the moment she gives the first log entry in the first episode.
Your main character’s backstory was literally banned from fanfiction anthologies, you fridged a gay man for cheap drama, all your characters are annoying, jerks, or both, and you don’t have a single character moment or trait that isn’t there solely to advance the plot.
Great job. Absolutely brilliant. You may just have killed this franchise for another decade with this incompetent hackwork.
Every time I hear a new episode synopsis, Discovery just keeps getting worse and worse. One of the best decisions regarding dedicating my free time to entertainment was to never embrace this series. It sounds like not only is it bad Star Trek, it’s bad SF.
114. ground_petrel May I suggest you give up on this show? No program in the history of television could possibly live up to your expectations for DSC. I’m curious if you watched TOS or TNG with this critical an eye what would happen.
115. Troy James Martin, You are judging this show based on the synopsis done by a person watching it with a critical eye, then not bothering to watch it and judge for yourself. Not to be a dick, but your opinion on this show is not based on fact at all. Give it a try and see for yourself. It may just surprise you.
There’s one thing which hasn’t been pointed out often and clearly enough. The supposed advantage of the supposed new Golden Age of TV series is the ability to tell more complex and coherent stories.
That’s exactly what Discovery isn’t doing – instead it’s rushing through the plot points like hell. Tons of plots, subplots and characters are thrown at us and disposed within 90 minutes. Deep Space 9 managed to develop a feeling for the place and to show the changes over seven seasons. There were some drastic shifts in the power balance and surprising developments and not all of them for the better but they were stretched out over seven years.
The new serialized Trek however feels ironically more episodic than any Trek I’ve ever seen. It’s … random. Here we have a super spore drive and a network which connects the whole universe plus other universes. There’s a Klingon war, a torch bearer, his follower, his girlfriend who suggests a surgery, the result of that falls in love with our lead character, has flashbacks … meanwhile we are in the mirror universe where our lead character is really from … oh and the dead doctor is a magical sage who apparently sends messages of with a road map to Stamets … Discovery returns nine months too late, oh and they have the evil emperor on board who is Burnham’s former mentor mirror character …
Honestly are you folks kidding me? Why are they telling all of this stuff? They aren’t dealing with any of it in any meaningful or deeper way, they just tick off narrative boxes at high octane speed and pile event upon event. Every decent soap opera would be embarassed to lay it on so thick.
As for this episode I’m no Michelle Yeoh fanboy and I don’t care if she can kick five metres high. She’s a modestly impressive actress. Also this episode has some of the absolutely worst fight choreography I’ve seen in a long time in a big budgeted affair. Have a good laugh looking at the background fight between Burnham and Landry while the Lorca-Empress fight goes into its decisive stage. There are some incredibly sloppy and fake moves by the actors which apparently went unnoticed until it was too late.
@117/Lubitsch: This has baffled me too. I haven’t watched much serialised TV prior to DSC because it isn’t my cup of tea, but I expected something like a filmed novel. This isn’t like that at all.
!117. Lubitsch: “Deep Space 9 managed to develop a feeling for the place and to show the changes over seven seasons.”
Yes, seven seasons. The first season’s not even over for Disc and people are raging at it like their momma or their dog just died. Sheesh. It’s just entertainment. I pick at it too, like the first post in this thread, but can’t say I’ve ever been “pissed” at it, as ground_petrel has said. I wouldn’t waste my time watching a show that angers me or evokes negative emotions, unless it was serious subject matter worthy of consideration.
So give this show a break. Wait till we see how the first season wraps up. Maybe watch another season. Maybe by season seven, like DS9, there will be plenty to praise. Relax a bit, people. There’s lots other things to worry about in the world.
@119/Sunspear: “[…] people are raging at it like […] their dog just died.”
That’s an apt metaphor. It describes exactly how I felt after watching “Context is for Kings”. Which is silly – I kinda agree with you – but then, Star Trek has been more than “just entertainment” for many people right from the start, or there never would have been a letter-writing campaign. So at least I’m in good company.
That said, I see very little raging in comment #117. I see a valid critical review of the way this show handles its plotting. Surely critical reviews of TV shows have a place even in a world with “lots other things to worry about”?
Personally I have the impression that the writers are simply insecure. They don’t trust their story or their characters and therefore try to dazzle the audience with weird twists and turns and too many reused TOS elements. Perhaps they will calm down somewhat in the next season. The problem is that the way this game is played, everything established in this season will be part of the fictional universe from now on. Since I’m still not willing to accept a major war ten years prior to TOS, this may be where Star Trek and I part ways.
@JanaJansen: You’re right, the comment was addressed to 117 but was meant as more general one. Those of us following these reviews have seen some heightened negativity (better than nerd raging?) expressed.
After the season’s over, I’m prepared to do a post-mortem. There are plenty of flaws in the writing. Maybe some of it will make more sense with a complete story. Maybe some of it never will and will ultimately be ascribed to a troubled production that seemed wobbly many times before it launched.
Maybe the entire concept of a prequel series was misguided. It may take a deus ex machina to sQuare this with accepted chronology. I still think there’s a chance they aren’t in the Prime universe after all.
Nevertheless, wanting this show to be like other Trek shows seems a bit unreasonable to me. DS9 had room to breathe because of more decompressed storytelling. DISC compressed too many elements in trying to be Action Trek, but it’s still learning. It will get better. Perhaps the streaming model was a mistake and it should be on network, with a longer, less hectic, decompressed season.
Still, after all that, some of the negative reactions are unreasonable. The ones on this site aren’t even the most extreme (see the io9 reviewer who was asking everyone involved (production and viewers) to rage quit the show).
@117, the so called arc does sound a little crazy, okay a lot crazy, when boiled down. It’s just To Much .
@121/Sunspear: “Maybe the entire concept of a prequel series was misguided. It may take a deus ex machina to sQuare this with accepted chronology. I still think there’s a chance they aren’t in the Prime universe after all.”
You’re repeating exactly what people were saying about Enterprise 15 or so years ago. But now Enterprise is just being treated as part of the whole, referenced along with everything else in newer productions like Beyond and Discovery. Fandom goes through this exact process with every new series. All new incarnations introduce retcons that are hard to reconcile with what came before, and many fans initially want to reject them; I once saw a 1982 letter in Starlog or some such magazine insisting that The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan couldn’t possibly be in the same reality as the original series because of all the intractable contradictions. But over time, we learn to rationalize them and convince ourselves they fit after all. The newest series always seems more incompatible because we haven’t had time to go through that rationalization process like we have with all the others.
After all, “accepted chronology” is a moving target. What’s currently “accepted” about the history of the Trek universe is massively different than it was before Enterprise, and the way it was then was massively different than it was before TNG, and so forth. Heck, before TNG, it wasn’t even settled what decade TOS took place in — fans were divided between a 2260s setting and a 2200s setting (the latter being an attempt to reconcile the 23rd-century references in the movies with the “200 years” references in TOS season 1). “Accepted chronology” has been reinvented with every new incarnation of Trek.
Wholeheartedly agree with you, Christopher.
123. ChristopherLBennett *slow clap*
123, or we know they can’t fit, know they never fit, and just realize that Paramount doesn’t care, so what’s the point of worrying?
It’s a different form of rationalization. It’s being post-Wizard. Also Lucy Lawless can fly.
@126/LV: CBS, not Paramount. The companies split a dozen years ago. CBS owns Trek and makes the show; Paramount only has a license to make the feature films.
And I’m so sick of the hackneyed old line that rationalizing contradictions in Trek is somehow a new thing. James T. Kirk was originally James R. Kirk. Vulcans were Vulcanians, dilithium was lithium, Starfleet was UESPA, and the franchise was 22 years old before they finally established an unambiguous calendar year.
Like I said: We’ve been through all of this before. Everything you’re saying was said pretty much verbatim about Enterprise, and before that about TNG, and before that about the movies. Some fans always react as though the new contradictions are somehow the first of their kind, and they’re always forgetting their Trek history when they do so. The new contradictions are no greater; we just haven’t had years to rationalize them away, so they feel greater. Trust me, 10 or 20 years from now, you’ll be complaining that the next new incarnation of Trek doesn’t fit into canon as well as Discovery did.
127, of course it’s not a new thing. It’s a practice that predates Trek, going back into the days of antiquity when the Romans were still trying to make themselves out to be the descendants of Troy. And it’s probably older, I’m not too sure about the Babylonians to be honest. Or the Egyptians. Or the Toltecs or the Mayans.
However, I must note that you’re likely going to be wrong about what I may be thinking in the future, I’m reluctant to think I’m certain, and I know myself better than you(I have a signature advantage in that field that you would find it very difficult to overcome short of the actual existence of psychic powers), but 10, 20, 30 years from now, assuming I’m alive and caring, I’ll believe I’ll be as resigned to the rationalizations about whatever Trek is or is not extant as I am to the ones that exist today across the spectrum of fiction from Avatar: The Last Airbender to Zorro: Some will be amusing, some will bemusing, and some will be confusing. I suppose a few might even be defusing.
@123/Christopher: “But over time, we learn to rationalize [the contradictions] and convince ourselves they fit after all.”
We do? I thought we learn to ignore them and go on.
And of course the writers could easily spare us and themselves the uproar if they weren’t so keen on rewriting history.
@129/Jana: That too.
And my point is, every Trek series’ writers have “rewritten history,” going back to TOS. After all, they are literally writing all this. It isn’t “history” at all, it’s just stuff people are making up. And everything that gets written is subject to being rewritten. Laypeople use “rewriting” as if it were a bad thing, but any writer knows that rewriting is the only thing that makes writing any good. Any work in progress needs the freedom to refine itself. One-shot works like novels and movies get to do the refining before release, but ongoing series have to do it on the fly.
130, there’s defining, and there’s also diluting, and sometimes polluting. And sometimes I’ve even seen it come up in a singular novel or movie. Though sometimes it can be well done, there are times where you wish they’d just left it alone.
@130/Christopher: Calling it “rewriting history” was a bit tongue-in-cheek. My point is this: If you want people to engage with a work of fiction, you have to make it feel real. Changing established “facts” years or decades later, especially “facts” that are dear to peoples’ hearts, undermines this feeling. Therefore, it should be done only sparingly and with good cause. The fact that the outrage always dies down eventually does not mean that it’s unjustified.
My favourite Star Trek example of a good change are the Trill. The TNG Trill were a minor alien race that only appeared in one episode, and they were terrible – the symbiont took over the host’s body, and nobody on the Enterprise seemed to think that this was a problem. The DS9 Trill gave us a wonderful character and enabled the writers to write lots of interesting stuff about gender and age and identity. Yet I remember being initially annoyed – wait, this is all wrong, the Trill aren’t like this! I eventually accepted the change because I liked it.
In contrast, I am still annoyed about the changes established in TWOK. I never rewatch it, and whenever I watch “Space Seed”, I try to actively forget that it exists.
@123. CLB: “You’re repeating exactly what people were saying…”
Sigh. Context is well and truly dead.
I have far less trouble with this series than some here. I’m a fan. I was trying to offer some comfort to Jana, and others, who cannot reconcile this series with older Trek, who say they will part ways with the franchise because it’s too jarring.
Also, because of the wackiness of some of the writers’ concepts, there’s room for some out of left field storytelling still. Imagine if Q does show up. More howling. (And to forestall some more lecturing, that’s just hypothetical. I don’t truly think it’ll happen.)
There’s some fair points in what Lubistch said and a lot of the glaring problems may ultimately come down to bad writing. Or bad work at the conceptual stage. I have yet to read a discussion of why a fungus network in space that is apparently magic and links all life in the multiverse was a good idea. This may get reconciled with the rest of Trek but it is still a truly ridiculous idea.
There are a lot of wacky hijinks in DSC, the spore drive, the Mirror universe, the Uruk Klingons, frankly it puts me off.
133, alas, poor Context, I knew him. Infinite jests, excellent fancies, a burden carried, yet abhorred and lost and gone.
And worst of all none of the wackiness is any fun! It’s all sounds too dreary and grimdark for words.
@133/Sunspear: “I was trying to offer some comfort to Jana […].”
I noticed that, and it’s appreciated.
You’re right, the story isn’t over yet, and perhaps the second season will be better.
#133
Yeah, I don’t have an issue with a mysterious, dangerous network linking universes and timelines, conceptually speaking. Linking them so closely to mystical spores… oy, that’s a tough mushroom to swallow.
This is one of the those instances where some phony Treknobabble would be welcome. Call it transwarp, protomatter, red matter, Mad Hatter, I don’t care. Just don’t have your MacGuffin propulsion system sound like something created by a couple of bored roadies at a Grateful Dead concert.
@132/Jana: ” The fact that the outrage always dies down eventually does not mean that it’s unjustified.”
That’s the thing, though. Over the decades, I’ve heard a ton of outrage that absolutely was unjustified. People screaming about relatively minor changes as if it were the first time any Trek production had ever changed anything. Even worse, people screaming about things that were completely consistent with actual canon and only conflicted with their extracanonical assumptions about Trek continuity, because they couldn’t be bothered to check the actual texts and determine which was which. Frankly, I got sick to death of it with Enterprise, and I’ve had to sit through it twice since with Kelvin and DSC, and it’s not getting any better.
Am I happy with all of the changes Discovery has made? Hell, no. But then, I was unhappy with the changes The Wrath of Khan made too, as you were. It happens. By this point, Trek continuity is such a mess that it’s disingenuous to pretend it has any consistency left to violate. The only thing that gives it any consistency is our willingness to gloss over the continuity clashes and pretend it all fits anyway. And we will do that with Discovery‘s changes, both good and bad, just as we’ve been doing with the good and the bad of Trek continuity for half a century. So it’s pointless to argue over whether those changes should happen. That’s like arguing over whether rain should fall. It will happen, and nothing we say will prevent it from happening. We just have to cope with it.
Oh people still complain about the weather you know. You won’t stop that either.
@140/LV: People do complain about the weather. They don’t insist that it’s wrong for weather to exist.
141, you haven’t met my mother.
@138: Redd” “…oy, that’s a tough mushroom to swallow.” And I love mushrooms. Just imagine the size of the Portobellos…
“MacGuffin propulsion system…” Yeah, Stamets was basically tripping.
@139. CLB: “So it’s pointless to argue over whether those changes should happen.”
Serious question then: why are you so assertive/adamant sometimes about what the writers will or won’t do. Exhibit 1: insisting that there is “zero chance” there would be a time jump this season. Next episode, it happens. It may happen again before season end to reconcile continuity with TOS.
“By this point, Trek continuity is such a mess that it’s disingenuous to pretend it has any consistency left to violate.”
Yes, absolutely. It’s similar to comic book continuity. Marvel and DC have both retconned their respective universes so often that it’s better not to try to untangle it. It’s spaghetti continuity. (Tastes great with mushrooms.) Trek’s may not be so bad (fewer cooks with their hands in the pot, but still a crowded kitchen), and you make good arguments for letting glaring inconsistencies go, yet you also argue against what the current writers are doing.
139. ChristopherLBennett – By this point, Trek continuity is such a mess that it’s disingenuous to pretend it has any consistency left to violate.
Exactly. It’s time to go full Grant Morrison “embrace the weirdness”. When they do a time travel story, let’s get rid of the “Should we change the past/future?” because we know that no matter what they do, it’ll be the very thing that will return the timestream to “normal. Ditch the worrying and just tell the story.
Same with the Prime Directive. It’s to the point that when someone brings it up, you know that they’re going to break it and come up with some reason why it was right thing to do. Dithc the PD and simply let our folks go down and show the poor aliens why they’re wrong and we’re the ones who know what’s best for them. That’s what most PD stories end up being about anyway. The only reason it exists is for the heroes to break.
Stop coming up with fake reasons why our heroes have to break the rules because we know that there will be no lasting consequences, at least not for the regular characters.
@144/Sunspear: “Serious question then: why are you so assertive/adamant sometimes about what the writers will or won’t do.”
Not what I meant. Obviously the reasons for a single specific decision can be analyzed. What I meant was that it’s foolish to say “The creators of a sequel series should never change anything at all,” as so many fans insist on doing. Just because they don’t like this change or that change, they indict the generalized concept of change, which is as nonsensical as condemning the existence of sandwiches just because you didn’t like one sandwich.
Yes, yes, the One Trope versus the Other Trope.
This is why we’re going to end up in a Volcano you know.
@146. CLB: And yet you went there, too, denying that a particular sandwich could even exist. (These food metaphors getting confusing.)
I think you are of two minds about this series. You argue for assimilation of its new elements down the road, Borg style, and at the same time, rail against some of them.
Can’t have your cake and eat it too. (Damn, it happened again.)
@LordV: I’d upvote you if I could. Good style. Made me laugh.
I think most issues we have with Discovery will be ironed out in the second season. What with the kerfuffle behind the scenes over the past couple years, I’m willing to give it some slack for now. And hopefully sooner rather than later we’ll get that “Best of Both Worlds” moment when the series has fully come into its own, using new and unique aliens and situations that has people talking. No more Klingons and mirrors and surprise villains, please.
Amen.
150 you know I’m imagining every single cast member of Discovery with a beard, right?
Anyone else tired of being lectured about how wrong we are to care about continuity? Especially when the same people are the ones telling us that we can’t expect the show to use the designs, colors, etc. of a 60s tv show because of modern audience expectations. Same for everything else–we need to stop complaining because we’re expecting a 2018 show to do what DECADES-old shows used to do.
Yet these same lecturers accept the same old crummy continuity of a 60s show in this 2018 tv show.
If we’re supposed to accept all the other modernized bits and changes because a 2018 audience has difference expectations and media/tv has just changed, then that means we should be able to expect MODERN approaches to continuity.
I don’t understand why certain people here are okay with changing all the visuals and other details because “it’s not the 60s anymore” but they want to keep the same 60s-style lack of continuity in place.
Well, SOME of us want DSC writers to approach the show with a more modern approach to continuity. By now, we all know that fans–especially Trekkies–obsess about continuity. Audiences expect modern effects and serialization, but we also RIGHTFULLY expect modern world building, which means a greater degree of concern for continuity and canon.
That’s what canon and continuity are all about–world building, crafting a fictional world with enough consistency to help viewers/readers to suspend their disbelief and experience that world.
153, yes, many people are. And the converse.
I’m thinking of making the USS Irritation, the Grouchiest Ship in the Fleet, and staffing it with a crew of Trek Fans.
#154- The USS Irritation would make a great skit for a Trek convention or a great YouTube video! I love the idea–bickering fans arguing about how the ship runs, which buttons do what… :)
“Space, another #&%^!% frontier! These are never-ending miseries of the Starship Irritation…”
155, heh-heh, yeah, if anybody else wants to use the idea, feel free, I don’t even need the credit.
@153/PaulB: Your last paragraph conveys perfectly what I tried to say in comment #132.
@154/LordVorless: Ooh, can I be the miscommunications officer? I own a red minidress with lieutenant’s stripes.
157, sure. Here’s your first line:
And the first creature they encounter in space is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The plot is about its beef with the Flying Spaghetti Monster with Meatballs.
@158/LordVorless: Great, I do that all the time anyway.
@159/Sunspear: This fits nicely with Discovery’s fungi drive.
@160. Jana: It does. And just wait till the Magic Mushroom Dominion War starts…
Also, the theme song will be called “Spores Away,” sung to the tune of “Sail Away.”
Edit: damn, didn’t know there were so many songs with “sail away” in their titles. The Styx version has these lines:
“I thought that they were angels, but to my surprise
We climbed aboard their starship, we headed for the skies”
I foresee a reset button. Eliding a war with the Klingons in post-Disco canon is one thing. But where the Feds lose the war? That’s a whole other ball of wax.
I hope we get a few episodes (in season 2?) of fish-out-of-water ex-Empress. Though she probably won’t survive to the end of the season.
If we don’t get Captain Saru, I will be crushed.
162, I have always enjoyed the chances for actors to play, if not quite the opposite, an altered version of the same character, but also the times when they’re having somebody play an outsider from a place that can spoof all the accepted conventions for their frauds.
Or the ghost of Culber directed them to a universe where Culber is alive and Stamets is dead and Starfleet losing the war is just a coincidence. Get the couple back together and nobody in the “prime” universe knows what happened to Discovery or the fact that there’s a mirror universe. Lost in Space, Trek style mixed in with Quantum Leap or Sliders.
I really don’t get why everybody likes Yeoh so much. She may be good at choreographed fighting, but as an actor she’s probably the worst ever to appear on Trek. Total plastic.
@162/noblehunter: The Federation didn’t lose the war. It was losing the war, at risk of defeat, but the war was stopped before that defeat became actual. (Again, just like the Dominion War.)
@Krog: The emperor was over the top caricature. Not Yeoh’s fault it was badly conceived (written). Re-watch the first two episodes, where we got a warm, wise captain. That’s why I lament the loss of Captain Georgiou.
@ChristopherLBennett, Ira Steven Behr’s comments over the years affirm that he never lost sight of Gul Dukat being, in fact, Space Hitler, during the production of Deep Space Nine. It was Alaimo who thought Dukat was redeemable, not Behr.
@114. That’s your story. I like it. Pass the popcorn.
As for this episode, loved Saru’s speech, and I too noted his use of the word “our” rather than “my” when referring to the ship. But I don’t think the speech in general had quite the gravitas of Krad’s description. Saru is more of an everyman in his leadership style, and I think that humility is what makes him appealing.
I’m not a millennial, or even a Gen-Xer, so I get really bored really quickly with extended choreographed fight scenes. This one was obviously set up to highlight Michelle Yeoh’s well-deserved reputation in that regard, but still…. zzzzzzzz
Someone earlier mentioned the lack of humor generally speaking with the series, and I was hoping that after the MU crisis was overcome, there might be at least one episode of taking a breath and visiting life on some new planet that wasn’t necessitated by the quest to save the universe and all its mirror counterparts from Eternal Extinction, but we jumped right back into the present, give or take nine months, and now it looks like the Klingons have won the war, so there is no time to relax. Ah well…. there’s always popcorn
@169. fully: I forgot about the Kelpians for dinner thing. Does the Emperor mention eating them like any other flesh or just specifically their fear ganglia as a delicacy? This has implications for season 2.