One of the constant complaints about Discovery that I have seen online is that it isn’t “real” Star Trek. We’ve been down this road before, of course. In 1979, people wrote letters to magazines about how they had “Star Wars“-ified Star Trek and how this couldn’t be the same universe as the beloved TV show. Gene Roddenberry spent much of 1982 telling fans to boycott The Wrath of Khan because it wasn’t “real” Star Trek and it violated his vision. Fans howled in 1987 at the notion of a Star Trek TV show that didn’t have Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and how it would never work and it wasn’t “real” Star Trek, and then again in 1993 at the notion of a Star Trek TV show that wasn’t on a starship. And many of the complaints levied against Discovery now were also levied against Enterprise seventeen-and-a-half years ago.
To all those people, I say this: watch “The War Without, the War Within,” and if you don’t think this is real Star Trek, then your definition of real Star Trek is radically different from mine. (Please note that this is independent of whether or not you think the episode is any good.) Because everything that makes Trek special is on display here: hope, forgiveness, acceptance, finding a solution to a problem rather than giving up, love, compassion.
I had only two real disappointments with the episode. One was that the I.S.S. Discovery was apparently destroyed by Klingons very soon after arriving in the mainline universe. Rest in peace, Captain Killy.
We find that out from Cornwell and Sarek, who board the ship in a hostile manner. The former asks the latter to engage in a forced mind-meld with Saru to find out where this doppelgänger came from—and it turns out that they’re the real one. While I appreciate the use of a mind-meld to move the story along, this is a pretty appalling violation. I mean, yeah, there’s a war on, and yeah, they think this is some kind of weird imposter or something, but still. (Then again, like father, like son…)
Cornwell immediately classifies the concept of the Mirror Universe, which explains both why Kirk and Co. knew nothing about it in “Mirror, Mirror,” but also why the notion of parallel universes wasn’t completely unfamiliar to them in the episode, either. (The computer knew all about the notion and they were talking about field densities between universes in the TOS episode, so the general concept was obviously known, just not the specifics of the MU.)
The Discovery has several issues to deal with. Tyler is recovering from his experiences, trying to figure out who he is—he has Voq’s memories, but no longer his personality, and he’s having a major identity crisis. Emperor Georgiou is confined to guest quarters and nobody’s quite sure what to do with her. The Klingons are winning the war—but they’re not a unified front. All the major Houses are running their own offensives, so the Federation isn’t so much losing one war as it’s losing twenty-four simultaneous wars. Cornwell shares this with L’Rell in a wonderful conversation between two enemies who actually have respect for each other after what they went through as Kol’s prisoners. L’Rell parrots a line Worf had in “The Way of the Warrior,” that in war, victory is always honorable, and also answers Cornwell’s plaintive query as to how the war ends with a very blunt, “It doesn’t.”
Saru’s line from last week about this isn’t Lorca’s ship, it’s theirs is perfectly exemplified by the mess hall scene. First off, prior to that, Saru tells Tyler that he won’t put him in the brig. He isn’t an officer anymore, and his movements are now restricted, but Voq is responsible for the horrible things he did, and Saru won’t imprison Tyler for Voq’s crimes. And then Tyler goes to the mess hall. On Lorca’s ship, Burnham was a pariah, treated with utter disdain; on Saru’s ship, Tilly gets up and sits with Tyler. When Tyler tries to give her an out, saying she doesn’t have to do that, a) Tilly doesn’t move and instead says encouraging things (without belittling what he’s been through), and b) Detmer and several other crew members follow Tilly to the table to join him for lunch. It was an absolutely beautiful moment, putting a stake through the heart of a ship run by a guy who leaves people behind, enslaves sentient beings, and was just generally a shit, and instead making it recognizably a Starfleet ship again.
James Frain hasn’t always been a perfect Sarek, but holy cow, was he channeling Mark Lenard in this episode, most especially in his my-kid’s-better-than-your-kid scene with Georgiou. The conversation between the two of them is one of several beautifully written two-person dialogues in this episode, starting with Saru and Tyler, continuing to Tyler and Stamets (the former apologizing to the latter for killing his boyfriend, and the latter showing an interesting mix of the old snotty Stamets and the hippy-dippy Stamets, all without actually accepting the apology), Saru and Burnham, Tilly and Burnham, Burnham and Tyler (and brava to Burnham for not giving in to Tyler’s attempt to guilt her into helping him, as if his trauma was somehow more important than hers), and, as stated above, Cornwell and L’Rell.
Meanwhile, we have our movement toward the endgame of the war with the Klingons. Stamets figures out a way to grow new spores super-duper-fast (with a nice callback to Straal, Stamets’s counterpart on the Glenn from “Context is for Kings“), and Georgiou provides intelligence to Burnham about Qo’noS that the Federation doesn’t have. (Georgiou conquered the Klingon Empire; nobody from the Federation has set foot on the Klingon homeworld since Archer, another nice callback to “Broken Bow” and “Judgment.”) The plan is to use the spore drive to appear in one of the large caverns beneath the surface of Qo’noS, then map it so that Starfleet can engage in a surgical strike on the planet.
At the end we have a third disappointment—Sarek and Cornwell have made a deal with Georgiou for further intel on Qo’noS, in exchange for which Cornwell will allow Georgiou to pose as her mainline counterpart, miraculously rescued from the sarcophagus ship. My disappointment is not so much with the action—which is questionable to say the least, but justifiable from Cornwell’s perspective—but the fact that Saru and Burnham were surprised by it when Cornwell brought Georgiou onto the bridge. It makes no sense, none, that Saru and Burnham would not have been briefed on this ahead of time, if for no other reason than to minimize the risk of either of them blowing Georgiou’s cover.
This is an excellent episode on its own, one that moves several of the characters forward—Tyler’s identity crisis, the war effort, Georgiou’s attempt to assimilate into the new universe, and Burnham’s multifaceted problems—and sets everything up nicely for the finale next week. In particular all of Burnham’s issues are brought to light here. She’s completely forthright with Saru as to why she rescued Georgiou, and it’s to Saru’s credit that he doesn’t really give her a pass for it, but doesn’t really ding her for it, either. Tilly spells out to Burnham the lesson of the MU in facing your own darkness. Then Burnham manages to help Tyler by giving him brutally honest advice on how to get through trauma—in particular that it’s solitary—without forcing herself to still be in any way involved with the person who tried to strangle her a couple episodes ago. Even with all that, though, she’s still doing what Lorca challenged her to do when she first came on board in “Context is for Kings,” for all that Lorca had a completely different agenda: stopping the war. So she mines Georgiou for information, trying to find a way to end the war.
This is definitely real Star Trek. You may not like it—and it’s not perfect, by any means, and I’m not blind to its many flaws—and you may not enjoy it, but it’s definitely Star Trek. And from the looks of the trailer to next week, those ideals will continue to be challenged, but our main character will be the one who stands by them, and you just know that Saru and Tilly, at the very least, will be right behind her.
Really looking forward to it.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be an author and musical guest at Farpoint 25 in Cockeysville, Maryland this weekend, alongside Star Trek actors Nana Visitor and Matt Frewer, and fellow authors Timothy Zahn, Peter David, Robert Greenberger, David Mack, Marc Okrand, Aaron Rosenberg, Howard Weinstein, and tons and tons more. Check out his schedule here.
I think the reason Burnham and Saru weren’t briefed on “Captain” Georgiou because they’d realize that she’s pushing for a permanent solution to the Klingon problem. Springing it on them makes it more of a surprise and gives them less room to argue.
I think Disco does a lot better when it gives itself room to breathe. They actually managed to warp someone without it sounding like they were flying around a small solar system. Though I’m not sure they meant to say 100 AU.
Two points, none of them very original because they have been pointed out elsewhere.
First you don’t win a war by attacking randomly being split into 24 parties. Lack of coordination between the Klingon houses should make it supremely easy for the Federation to dismantle them piece by piece. This is such nonsense, it’s embarassing. Also losing 20% of the available space and a third of the ships isn’t yet disastrous if you have enough space to withdraw, see Russia. Whoever wrote this has no clue about military strategy.
And Georgiou getting command of the Discovery? Oh god, is there really no one in this script staff meetings who immediately shoots down such an idea? Those who say that Lorca was from MU and he was successful in the war … remember the outcome. Why would anyone do this??? Yes, Cornwell looks pretty desperate, but again this series is moving narratively at light-speed rushing from plot twist to plot twist. I can see that the writers were so enamored with all the parallels and character mirroring, with narrative symmetries and ironies that they couldn’t resist … but they should have. I think we all can guess from the preview into which highly ironical position our lead will be forced.
I see the pride of the authors in all the clicking wheels and twists of their script and I shudder …
The episode felt somehow disjointed. This might be a consequence of tightly plotted arc storytelling: what would be considered the A-, B- and C-plots are fragmented across multiple episodes. (I have the same trouble following Game of Thrones whenever it’s a Hugo nominee.)
Or it might be too much “tell, not show.” We’re told the Klingons have made advances, but aside from the shot of Starbase One with the sigil of House D’Ghor, we don’t see it: no archival footage, a bunch of generic planet-names. The cast doesn’t have any friends or family outside the ship to bring the points home. (Maybe the “Kodos the Executioner” famine on Tarsus IV, a pivotal moment in the life of young James Kirk, is part of this war? Do the dates align?) The same idea was sold more effectively with the aftermath of Wolf 359 back in TNG.
The “we need to grow more spores” subplot felt like a belabored diversion, a fetch-quest in an MMO. It was too easy, and yet came out of nowhere — none of the prior spore-centric eps mentioned where Stamets and Straal originally located the space-fungus or if it would be difficult to repeat. (Also, the mycological technobabble was unconvincing.)
The whole Voq/Tyler subplot — what was the point? Will there be a culmination in which he has a role to play, or is PTSD the best he can hope for? At this juncture, his story function appears to be exclusively to put Burnham through a wringer …
… Which would make sense: when the showrunners describe Burnham as the central character, they’re not kidding. All the relationships center on her (father, mentor, other mentor, mentee, fellow officer/resentful rival, boyfriend). This feels weird because most of the time, prior Trek shows are written as ensembles.
If Starbase 1 is 100 AU from Earth (as stated), then what’s the sunlit blue planet behind it? It can’t be Earth, because it’s also stated that the Klingons aren’t there quite yet. This might be an isolated honest mistake but I choose to see it as another example of a puzzlingly disjointed, uncoordinated production (starting with imagery in the title sequence that’s only partially plot-relevant).
@3/Phillip Thorne: No, the Tarsus IV famine was twenty years before TOS.
They’ve given the Empress command of Discovery? Seriously? Surely not.
I had a mixed reaction — one the one hand, yes, the individual crewmembers did reaffirm Starfleet’s values here, but at the same time, we saw the Federation portrayed in the most dystopian state we’ve ever seen it in — losing a war and being slaughtered, so desperate that Cornwell and Sarek were willing to make a deal with a tyrant and plan for what’s undoubtedly an act of genocide against Qo’noS. It’s a given that next week will see Burnham and the crew stand up against those orders and find a better way, but the fact that they’re in this situation at all left me with a wounded, sinking feeling at times. Did the writers really have to make things this bad?
Also, it seems like they’re forgetting their own recent continuity. Just 3 weeks ago, Burnham had that talk with Mirror Voq about how getting the Houses to reunite was the key to making peace with the Klingons. Here, she seemed to completely forget ever having that conversation, even though it should’ve been her top priority to bring that intel to Cornwell. So they had to artificially suppress that plot thread in order to contrive the apparent need for a more desperate and brutal solution, and it doesn’t feel organic to me.
This show keeps getting trickier and trickier to reconcile with Trek continuity as we’ve known it. I guess that, technically, we saw so little of the Federation proper in TOS — mostly just the occasional starbase and starship, since the focus was largely on the frontier — that we can’t really say it wasn’t recovering from a brutal war a decade earlier. But it’s a pretty massive event to go unmentioned, and hard to reconcile with the claims in “The Infinite Vulcan” and The Wrath of Khan that the Federation and Starfleet have kept the peace for a century. Oh, well, there are bigger contradictions over the decades of Trek, like all the claims that Kirk’s Enterprise was the first being overwritten by ENT.
I just discovered another continuity issue while entering this episode in my chronology file, though. “Obsession” is presumed by the Star Trek Chronology and Memory Alpha to be in early 2268, which means that the Farragut, lost 11 years earlier, was destroyed somewhere around early 2257. The Klingon war began in May 2256, and between the 6-month jump between episodes 2 & 3, the couple of months evidently spanned by the next set of episodes, and the 9-month jump between episodes 13 & 14, we should now be in roughly October 2257. So that means the Farragut‘s loss must have happened during the war, possibly not long after Discovery disappeared. I suppose that’s not impossible, but it’s a pretty major recontextualizing of what we knew before.
Meanwhile, I continue to be frustrated by the FX team’s failure to do basic astronomical research. How can a starbase 100 AU from Earth be in orbit of an Earthlike planet? That’s within the scattered disc in the outskirts of our system, populated by remote, icy dwarf planets like Sedna. The visual of the starbase orbiting a planet just doesn’t fit the dialogue. The verbal description reminded me of the version of Starbase One in the DS9 novel Time’s Enemy, where it was an antique space station in Sol System’s Oort cloud. It’s conceivable that the writers may have been thinking of that, and there was a miscommunication with the FX team, who stuck a planet in the shot.
Keith, I can’t agree about Frain’s Sarek. Frankly, I think he’s rather bad in the role. Some English actors become totally uninteresting when they assume American accents, and Frain appears to be one of them. Or maybe it’s just that he’s making the common mistake of playing a Vulcan as emotionally and verbally flat instead of internalized.
@3/Phillip: In fact, the Tarsus IV incident is the focus of Dayton Ward’s just-released Discovery tie-in novel Drastic Measures, in which a decade-younger Commander Georgiou and Lt. Cmdr. Lorca work together to deal with the crisis. Meaning that the book is our first look at the real Gabriel Lorca, and yes, Dayton wrote it with full knowledge of the show’s big secret about Lorca.
Let it be noted that the Tarsus famine is the subject of the latest DISCOVERY novel, DRASTIC MEASURES by Dayton Ward, which goes on sale this week.
While the AU issue was pretty blatantly annoying (also, didn’t they say “100 AU away from Earth” and “over a light-year from our current position”)… I mean he did say “over a light year” which is technically true even if it’s a million light years, but if we assume he didn’t round ridiculously down, and they’re just over a light year from their current position… that means they’re closer to Earth than any other star, so why was it so dangerous to warp there? If the Klingons are that everpresent so close to Earth, you’re screwed.
I can maybe stretch my disbelief and assume that “AUs” referred to some other unit of measurement (maybe for a brief period they decided that ‘Astronomical Units’ should be scaled upward to a meaningful measurement), but… this is just unforgiveably sloppy for a Star Trek show in the modern age.
So, this was a chess episode, moving pieces into place for the finale. Some characters got to confront each other, to varying effect. And some portentous dialogue was delivered.
First, once again, how nonsensical is the spore tech. We were asked to be devastated by the loss of the crop on Discovery last episode, only for Stamets to pull a Genesis type event and seed an entire planet with the stuff. This makes it even harder to reconcile why ships in TOS era don’t use spore drives.
Then, we get references once again to Vok being a test case for the surgical procedure to create human-looking Klingon spies. We know he’s not the last because such a spy shows up in the Tribble episode with Kirk’s crew.
(Side note: how idiotic is it for Tyler to accuse Burnham of not being able to love Klingons, when they murdered her family. Then we get some very in-Vulcanlike comments from Sarek about grace and loving the enemy.)
Can’t take credit for this one, because commenters have mentioned it elsewhere, but how likely is it that “Captain” Georgiou will unleash the Augment virus? It’s probably what she used to subdue Klingons back in her M universe. In some ways, it would also justify Tyler’s presence in this story. More so, if L’Rell ends up looking human. Now that’s a love triangle in space.
Other details suggest this will take place. Archer and Enterprise are name dropped, perhaps a link to secret Starfleet intelligence from ENT’s era. The blood of Khan and other augments from the Eugenics Wars blending with Klingon DNA would help align the change in appearance from DISC Klingons to later ones.
Also, it would perhaps poetically brings us back to the start where T’Kuvma said, “They are coming. Atom by atom they will silence us. Cell by cell our souls will become theirs. We must fight to for one thing above all – to remain Klingon.” L’Rell says something similar here, to the effect that the Federation “assimilates” other cultures. A nicer form of the Borg, I guess.
Another possible rhyme with the start of the series could be if Burnham is forced to mutiny against her captain again.
Last portent: Cornwell saying there’s no possible way Prime Lorca could have survived in the Mirror U. Dun dun dun… Despite all the easy linking of “mirror” versions to “evil,” it’s basically a nature versus nurture question. Of course Lorca had it in him to survive.
There were some great moments in this episode, but a lot of it didn’t click for me. Last week, I was beginning to feel a sense of relief that they were closing the chapter on teleporting space mushrooms. The loss of that technology was a devastating blow to the Federation’s war effort, but it only took a short side trip for them to get it back. Needless to say, that whole sequence felt unearned.
The scene with Burnham confronting Tyler/Voq also felt a bit overwrought and went on for too long. I get that the writers want to include strong character moments, but in a season that’s had far too much conversation leading nowhere, this could have benefited from being leaner.
Starfleet going dark could be interesting, but this is one of those concepts I think could have been better explored if they had chosen to set it in a future time instead of sticking Discovery between two existing series.
You really go to bat for this show and I respect that, and usually my opinion gets tempered when I read these reviews.
In an episode full of darkness and people being dramatic, the mess hall scene reminded me this was Star Trek. Now, my complaint is with this war going as badly as they keep saying, complete with a Klingon takeover of Starbase 1. Does this all be come a footnote or something? I mean, yes I’m completely aware that past shows don’t need to explain ever nuance and detail of Star Trek’s fictional history, and alot of that was created on the fly anyways so there’s room to add things in, but those things need to reconciled if the show you’re making is touted as 10 years before The Original Series. I’m open about it, I mean I kind of like Discovery, but I don’t have a connection to it like I do with say Classic Trek and DS9.
I do agree with a lot of this review, except about Sarek, I agree with CLB. BUT any actor playing Sarek has the disadvantage of being compared to Mark Lenard who embodied Sarek so well that its nearly impossible to divorce that fact.
The spore drive has always suggested that there would be some sort of shenanigans to explain how Disco fits into the rest of the canon. I think the last two episodes puts the show into an interesting narrative space regarding audience expectations. For people who are familiar with Star Trek “history,” the show introduces the question of how it’s going to resolve its apparent contradictions. The question going into the final episode is not just, “will our heroes defeat the Klingons?” but will they re-shape the events of the series to be more compatible with established continuity? Maybe they won’t because the creators aren’t interested in maintaining any continuity. The first question can be answered fairly easy with a look to conventional storytelling in SF TV (yes, they probably will beat the Klingons). The second question is a much thornier issue.
@10/Sunspear: How could releasing the Augment virus do anything? Phlox cured that a century before, which is why it didn’t kill off the entire Klingon population. Presumably the modern Klingons are vaccinated against it. And we don’t need a second dose of Augment virus to “explain” smooth-headed Klingons when they’ve already canonically existed for a century at this point. Presumably they’re just a minority sidelined from the halls of power.
Besides, if the reason for the war was T’Kuvma’s false belief that the Federation would assimilate the Klingons, then clearly proving him right is the last thing that would end the war. No, they have to convince the Klingons that they don’t need to fear cultural assimilation from the Federation.
@13 noblehunter
Good questions. Continuity is much less of a concern for me since I didn’t really start following Trek until Next Gen. By then, the original series was too cheesy and too remote for it to have much of an impact on me. I just want the plot decisions to feel like they could fit together without too many questions.
The introduction of magic mushrooms and some of the Klingon design choices strain that for me right now.
@15 Most of what I know about TOS continuity is from the reviews on this website. You could probably gloss over the Klingon stuff by the time of TNG (it actually implies some pretty neat cultural shifts) but the Fungdrive has to go.
@CLB: I agree with that, except for the involvement of the Emperor/Captain. We didn’t hear what she said to the higher ups in Command. It would be a viral strain from her universe if used. And it would further explain the TOS era Klingons, who were not physically superior to humans. It’s not just ridges. They acquire even more human traits, like weakness and cowardice (in their eyes). That’s highlighted (foreshadowed?) by the doctor’s report to Saru.
Lotta secrecy in this Starfleet. I’ve even seen mention of MGeorgiou joining Section 31.
I’m amused by Christopher and Greg commenting just a few minutes apart about Dayton’s new book. :)
I really enjoyed this episode, but now I have to figure out what to do with my subscription between seasons. Does anyone have info on how long it’s going to be before new Trek? I am happy to pay for Discovery, but there’s nothing else on CBS All Access I want.
Just watched this on Netflix, and thought the whole “Jumping into Qo’noS” idea was borderline Batshit crazy, I remember ‘The Pegasus’: General rule of thumb, taking Starships into Spatial bodies does not end well.
Then they put Emperor Georgiou back in the chair as ‘Captain’ Georgiou, well, I hate to cross franchises, but to quote Dr McKay “We’ve crossed the border!”
My favorite two person conversation was the one between Sarek and Burnham, where he avoids answering her questions by deflection, derailing it into emotional territory. As I said to Keith – This must be what he’s learned from Amanda.
I still was surprised about the choice to attack the Klingon home world, and the seemingly confirmed conclusion that that was what happened in the Mirror universe. It seemed to me that with the confirmation that (with Starbase 1) that the Klingon Houses were not united, that the next step would be to try and pit them against each other, not do the one possible thing that would unite them for you.
@20: Wrenn; “…that the next step would be to try and pit them against each other, not do the one possible thing that would unite them for you. “
Yeah, that’s where the writers seem to be going. L’Rell said, “Klingons have tasted your blood, conquer us or we will never relent.” And MGeorgiou compared Klingons to cancer and Qo’nos to a tumor that must be eradicated.
A diplomatic solution is still possible. Perhaps Sarek’s speech about grace will win out and restore sanity to the Federation and perhaps unify the Klingon houses. But putting the Emperor in charge, not even making clear what leash they have on her, is pointing in a different direction.
Good episode, I liked the character interactions a lot, and the fact that the war is still against fragmented Klingon houses, and not against a unified empire. I liked the visual and thematic aspects of terraforming the moon for the fungi, but I didn’t much like the whole idea… although it could be one of the works the Genesis Project is based on later.
I loved that we saw Andorian and Tellarite Starfleet officers. Was the Andorian in the holoconference wearing gloves?
Sarek’s interaction with Michael was sweet… for a Vulcan. But yes, his semi-forced mind meld with Saru (Saru did not resist, though he was being held at gunpoint) was rapey. And it’s understandable how both Michael and Stamets are reacting to Tyler.
The idea of passing Mirror Georgiou as Captain Georgiou is a nice bookend to a whole season of Mirror Lorca pretending to be Prime Lorca. I do like the idea of transporting a whole effin’ starship into an underground cave in Q’Onos, but it’s a bit too much… we’ll see how it turns out. BTW, how are we gonna fit both cave jumping and space cantina exploring into a single episode? Will it be extra long, since it’s the finale?
Too bad the ISS Discovery was destroyed, no more Captain Killy… or is she in a Klingon prison somehwere? Lastly, that scene in the crew lounge mady me cry, and it’s fitting that Tilly had been the first to approach Tyler; and also that Detmer was the second. Tilly embodies Star Trek, and Detmer shows that healing is possible. That show of solidarity, forgiveness, and friendship is PURE STAR TREK.
@18 – Meredith: Season two will be released in 2019.
@17/Sunspear: You’re projecting a lot of assumptions of your own onto TOS Klingons, none of which were suggested in TOS itself. And again, I don’t understand why you think they’d need to recapitulate the Augment-Klingon origin that Enterprise already did a decade and a half ago in real life and a century ago in-universe. The smooth-headed Klingons are already there. They’ve been there for a century; they just don’t happen to be on camera in Discovery. The explanation already exists.
@20 & 21: I think you’re both forgetting Burnham’s talk with Mirror Voq. He clearly said that the only way the Mirror Klingons were able to trust and make peace with other races was by first becoming united within themselves. Only then would they feel strong enough not to be threatened by other races, so only then would they be open to alliance, or at least detente. So the writers already told us explicitly that the key to ending the war is uniting the Houses, not dividing them. Which makes sense, since it was a divided empire that started the war in the first place, and it’s the jockeying for power between the different Houses that’s driving their aggression against the UFP.
@23,. Not my idea originally. And don’t forget, we’re dealing with some wacky writing here. Our common sense and wishes for consistency mean squat. We’ve already talked about spaghetti continuity. This will not align perfectly. For all I know, this will reboot the Federation into a Kelvin-like timeline.
“Starfleet tactics have failed us. We must adapt.”
What are the Emperor’s plans if not to duplicate her pacification of Klingons in her universe? She has genocide on the brain and command is going along with it. How is anything we saw of Sarek in this episode consistent with later Sarek? It’s not even internally consistent. He force mind melds Saru when his daughter is standing right there and can ask her questions. Or ask for a meld. Don’t they share a link already established? He’s prepared to go along with a potentially genocidal plan, while also speaking of grace and love.
I’m not saying I want this outcome. I’m saying don’t fall into the trap of expecting these writers to go beyond high school kids saying, “This will be so Awesome, totally Rad!”, when designing their plot points. we’ve been here before. Be a bit more skeptical.
Maybe they’re going to kill off all the Uruk Klingons and leave us with the ones we know/
Hmm, an admiral using a tyrant to wage war against the Klingons… where have we seen this before…? This isn’t going to end with Burnham and the Emperor fighting atop a moving platform, is it?
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23. There’s the issue that more than one “smooth-headed Klingon” from TOS canon returned as ridgehead Klingons in DS9, which implies either plastic surgery became a necessary requirement for advancement in the Empire (and would be weird given that Kor was supposed to be from a Noble House, and you wouldn’t think there would be a lot of sidelined minority Noble Houses) or the lingering effects of the virus were eventually reversed (or oddities of changing special effects budgets, but whatever).
Then again, as Sunspear said, continuity is not and will not align perfectly here.
@10 Sunspear/ “We were asked to be devastated by the loss of the crop on Discovery last episode, only for Stamets to pull a Genesis type event and seed an entire planet with the stuff.”
Did anyone say “entire planet” in the actual episode? Seems like they just grew a small patch and then harvested it. It was a quick and dirty version of what they had been doing on the ship, enhanced by [technobabble] to speed things up. It was a clever idea on the part of Stamets and no more/less over-the-top than dozens upon dozens of episodes where Geordi or Belanna or whoever comes up with some never-before-used technique for whatever they happen to need at the moment.
This is where I feel DSC outdoes TNG in plan plotting. Instead of a dry meeting where everyone throws out an idea, and one is chosen (seemingly arbitrarily), here the guy who knows the spore drive best (he basically invented it with that Stall guy and has been INSIDE it) comes up with a solution and they go with it.
I was kinda pleased by this episode, if a tad aggravated by it. What annoyed me? That minor, unimportant thing, consistency. The dialogue descriptions of distance of location compared to the concepts of same that were employed. The dialogue description of the state of the war, compared to the figures given for the loss of territory and vessels. Judging by the dialogue emphasis of the state of the war, and Cornwell’s desperation, the Federation is already lost, but the facts given to support this do not mesh up. A 20% loss of territory on the Klingon border is practically nothing in terms of a major conflict, and where is Starbase 1 supposed to be anyway? Whoever was Scientific and Technical Advisor for this episode needs firing.
Other than that, I really enjoyed the dialogue, I enjoyed the story concept they were trying to build, I enjoyed the acting, I enjoyed the use of warp drive to get about, I enjoyed the world-seeding (see below), I adored Tilly (again), I loved Saru (ditto) and I’m infatuated by how Star Trek that Discovery is becoming. I even enjoyed how Sarek, Sarek was, in behaviour if not tone. I even enjoyed the fact that (of course) they put the Emperor in the command seat.
@30 WTBA: I agree for the most part and it’s nice to hear someone iterate my feelings on the spore-solution, though the TNG era’s crews had a lot of cross-trade skills and experience. It made sense for them to throw ideas at the wall like handfuls of mud to see what stuck (under the moderation and veto of their captains), but this crew is different and Stamets leading the ideas-charge works.
On the other hand, whilst it’s not said that they are seeding the whole world, we do see a number of graphics that show the entire planet being affected. Also, unlike Genesis, there’s not even a vague implication that this will make the planet hospitable and I think I remember Stamets in a previous episode saying something about how the spores and/or fungi can thrive in a vacuum.
P.S. to my last post.
@krad and co: Comments of the ‘coming up next week’ variety are kind of aggravating.
– 1: there is no preview on Netflix, so they’re confusing to those of us that haven’t seen them (and I cannot stand that awful After Trek show).
– 2: I don’t want to know what happens next week until I actually watch the episode. I feel they were trying to be a bit suspenseful with this episode and that’s kind of been spoiled by comments about what’s been seen in the previews.
Don’t get me wrong, spoilers about the episode being critiqued are one thing, people can watch the show and read the review in the order of their choice, but I can’t watch next weeks episode till next week, and even if Netflix pasted previews into the end of each episode I wouldn’t want to watch them, but I would have the choice to skip them or watch them at my discretion. That is something I cannot do if you start talking about them in the review without any prior warning, so please: stop commenting on them.
I can only speak for myself, but if it comes to reading the review or my enjoyment of the series, the Disco will win; which is sad, Keith, because I really do like your reviews and look forward to each and every one.
@39. WTBA: “Did anyone say “entire planet” in the actual episode?”
Tilly said “terraform a moon” and Stamets talked about a terraforming field. The screen graphics showed at least a hemisphere pulsing from the probe waves. So yeah, not far off from the Genesis effect. Certainly larger than a “small patch.”
Thanks to those of you who mentioned the show’s continued inability to understand how distances work. That’s something that has been a minor annoyance, but still an annoyance, and I’m sorry I haven’t mentioned it.
BTW, after next week’s episode, I will also be doing an overview of the season, and I’m also gonna take a look at the tie-in fiction that’s been done, including various comics from IDW and two novels from Simon & Schuster.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@33/Sunspear: I’m trying not to take the graphics too literally. For one thing, apparently the holographic map of the “moon” they terraformed was actually a map of Pluto, or so I read. For another, when they said Qo’noS was riddled with caves and large voids, the graphic showed those voids extending all the way to the core of the planet, which is ridiculous and impossible for a planet of that size and gravity.
Interesting show. I did not like the mind-meld rape any better than I did when Spock did it to Valeris in STVI. Couldn’t they have just ASKED some questions first? And wait – wasn’t there some quantum signature (I forget the actual term) that distinguished M.U.ers from P.U.ers? No mind invasion necessary!
For once, Sarek wasn’t a prick to Burnham. Other than the “grace” and “loving your enemies” speech (which really was lame particularly after he gave Georgiou seeming carte blanche to destroy the Klingons), his talk with her made me a bit weepy. Acknowledging her humanity in a positive way (and mentioning his wife, *aw* *sniffle*) made it a great scene. Don’t be ashamed of loving someone. Not her fault she got a hidden Klingon as her lover. She finally got “daddy” to show some affection (Vulcan style) and for a Vulcan, it was as openly affectionate as it gets. About time, Sarek. Poor Burnham. I’m normally not a big fan of this Sarek (as Frain’s Sarek generally looks like he’s expecting someone to shank him), but I really liked that scene, minus the dumb “love your enemy” bit.
But hey, Burnham, bringing back the horrible M.U. Georgiou because she looks like your old mummie-mentor is just effing DAFT. I know you boohooed to Sarek about bad decisions, but QUIT MAKING THEM. Being human doesn’t mean being a total dummy. Georgiou had signaled her readiness to die and was ready and you did her (and ultimately the Federation) no favor. Because no way will they let her go free. They can’t. She’s too clever and dangerous. If they can’t send her home, she’ll have to die and let me guess who will end up having to do the deed. I doubt she’ll sacrifice herself for the P.U. Federation.
M.U. Georgiou is utterly untrustworthy and this could come back to bite them, hard. And making her Captain? This is even dumber than Abrams-‘Kirk’s rise to Captain in one day.
This “On Lorca’s ship, Burnham was a pariah, treated with utter disdain; on Saru’s ship, Tilly gets up and sits with Tyler,” I disagreed with Keith’s conclusions. It wasn’t because of Lorca. It was because the natural tendency would have been (on most ships) to avoid Burnham the mutineer/war starter at first. It was only in working with her repeatedly and Burnham proving her value that the crew realized that hey, she wasn’t all bad and maybe they should have given her a chance. And so by having this experience with Burnham, when another “screwup” came along, they had already learned from Burnham to look beyond that – give someone a chance before condemning them
It was NOTHING to do with Lorca – or Saru. All due to their experience with Burnham.
Now someone who is rapidly learning from mistakes is Tilly (unlike Burnham!) and that showed in that scene. In the old days, never would she have stuck her neck out like that lest she lose the respect of the Kewl Kids on the ship. But now, Tilly is mature and more confident and doesn’t need anyone’s approval; she merely does what she think is right, not necessary what is best for Tilly. Now I admit I couldn’t stand Tilly at first but I’m warming to her as they have toned down the more annoying facets of her personality. I think instead of Burnham being a mentor to Tilly, Tilly should be a mentor to HER.
Spores. Zzzz. Green spore. Guess we have to wait (do NOT be Culber). Klingons, Zzz. Hope the war wraps next week, but they have to have something to make us interested to return in (dang!) 2019.
Thinking about Tyler’s reintegration among the crew:
I really did like the mess hall scene, though I think it says more about Tilly and the Feds than about Ash himself.
The quandary of what to do with Tyler is a complex one.
If we accept that any wrongdoing (Culber’s murder, attacking MVoq, Michael) was only the work of the Voq part of his consciousness, then it is difficult to justify jailing Tyler. He lost his rank and arguably should have (certainly until further, fuller tests are done at the LEAST).
When it comes to Tyler’s culpability, if we accept the above, then he has no culpability. In the myriad of Trek episodes where a member of our beloved crew is possessed by the Alien of the Week, we do not seem to blame the possessee. Sure, Geordi (or whoever) threatens the entire ship/station/planet-of-the-week, but no one says after the ordeal is over, “Sorry, Geordi, but you punched me in the face while possessed, so you are dead to us now.”
Here I appeal to those who know more readily than I (Keith or Christopher, especially): Did a possessed crew member on any of the other Treks ever kill anyone (like TyVoq killed Culber) while under the influence of an outside presence? I can certainly remember fights and incapacitations, but have we had a murder?
The closest I can remember (especially on-screen and leaving aside villians like Dukat, Sisko’s actions in In the Pale Moonlight or For The Uniform and the bunch of Prime Directive, Delta Quadrant, in-battle type decisions) is when we see Garak TORTURE Odo (yes he murders folks in ITPM, but they occur off-screen). He isn’t Federation and has a sketchy background, of course, and he isn’t POSSESSED when he does it. There does not seem to be any type of consequences for the torture, though, despite that.
I’ve been thinking of starting a DISC novel. Working title, A Fungus Among Us.
I find quite jarring that nobody seems to care about the many commanding orders issued by a now known non-captain, starting by taking Burnham out of prison.
@35. CLB: “I’m trying not to take the graphics too literally.”
Yeah, they’re kinda Star Trek Online bad. No sense of the scale involved. From a distance planets in STO look cool. But you can literally bump up against them with your ship. Completely not to scale.
As far as the Pluto graphic, I wondered if the names we saw on the map corresponded to any known space bodies.
@32 – berthulf: Sorry, but comments about the promotional scenes for next episodes are not spoilers. We haven’t seen the episode either. I can understand you not wanting to see any promos, but it’s just not fair or logical to keep us from discussing them, promotional materials are fair game.
@37 – WTBA: Legally, there shouldn’t be any consequences to Tyler once specialists make sure he’s no longer under the influence of Voq’s psyche. Now, when it comes to personal relationships, like with Michael or Stamets, then I welcome the fact that there’s no clean slate and magic reconciliation. Just because we’ve seen that in TNG or VOY or whatnot, it doesn’t mean it should keep happening in Trek for ever.
To answer your question, Picard as Locutus helped the Borg kill hundreds, if not thousands of Starfleet officers, and perhaps, civilians.
Aside from the fact that putting Mirror Georgiou in command makes very little sense — my sense is that Cornwell and Sarek just want her tactics, why do they need her in the center seat? was it a condition of her helping them? — I really liked this episode and agree that it felt like “real Star Trek.” Even the goofy, not-quite-right science stuff pointed out above; that’s often been a hallmark of Trek, as well (remember that, until the Director’s Cut of STTMP, V’Ger was “82 AU in diameter.” Maybe AU has been redefined by the 23rd century, who knows? – why should the distance from Earth to Sol continue to be the galactic standard? Oh, well…)
Loved the mess hall scene, and really loved Burnham telling Tyler that the work of reclaiming life and meaning sometimes has to be done alone, and leaving him. Now that, I guess, is maybe not “pure Star Trek” — generally characters don’t leave each other to struggle through existential crises on their own — but it rang true in the moment and felt right dramatically. I also thought Stamets’ corridor conversation with Tyler was spot-on and very Trekkish: not denying the pain Stamets feels (although we really haven’t seen as much of that as one might have suspected), but Stamets also not out for any kind of revenge or retribution.
@36/tbonz: “And wait – wasn’t there some quantum signature (I forget the actual term) that distinguished M.U.ers from P.U.ers? No mind invasion necessary!”
The admiral and Sarek didn’t know about the Mirror Universe until Sarek got Saru’s memories through the meld. All they knew was that Discovery had apparently been destroyed 9 months earlier and now a ship claiming to be Discovery had appeared. For all they knew, they were beaming onto a ship of Klingon impostors who would attack them any moment. In their minds, they had to find the truth as quickly as possible.
And I think you’re wrong about the crew’s reactions to Burnham being “natural.” Yes, it would be natural for someone in our paranoid, fearful era, but that’s not the way Starfleet officers are normally trained to think. Lorca’s crew had become more hostile due to the war and due to the mindset he’d tried to instill in them. He’d made them more like us. Now, they’re becoming more like Starfleet again.
@37/WTBA: “Here I appeal to those who know more readily than I (Keith or Christopher, especially): Did a possessed crew member on any of the other Treks ever kill anyone (like TyVoq killed Culber) while under the influence of an outside presence? I can certainly remember fights and incapacitations, but have we had a murder?”
I was going to mention Locutus, but I was beaten to it. In VGR: “Warlord,” Tieran killed his planet’s Autarch while in control of Kes’s body, but that wouldn’t be a crime under Starfleet jurisdiction.
The thing is, though… Strictly speaking, Voq is not the outside presence. Tyler is. The person currently on board Discovery is a Klingon named Voq who was physically altered to resemble Ash Tyler and given a personality overlay modeled on the real Ash Tyler. He’s not Tyler with Voq inside him, he’s Voq remodeled to look and think like Tyler. His personality isn’t even the real Tyler’s mind, it’s a construct based on Tyler’s neurology and memory engrams. So that complicates the question of whether he’s culpable for his actions.
I suppose there’s a science fiction precedent or two for this, like Babylon 5‘s execution by “death of personality,” where murderers had their minds wiped and reprogrammed into entirely new people. The idea being that the person is the mind rather than the body, so if you erase the psyche that committed the act, you erase the guilt, and the new psyche is not culpable.
@42/Mike: V’Ger’s energy cloud being 82 AU across wasn’t an error; it was meant to be as huge as a star system, to be awesomely vast. Roddenberry’s TMP novelization, in the scene where the cloud’s size is mentioned, explicitly defines an AU as the distance from the Sun to Earth. As for V’Ger itself, the vessel as opposed to the energy cloud it generated, it was stated to be 78 kilometers long.
#37: I am amazed that no one has yet mentioned the TOS episode “Wolf in the Fold”, in which Montgomery Scott is possessed by the alien ‘Redjac’ in order to commit a series of murders. Scotty is vindicated, of course, with no consequences.
@44/John C. Bunnell: It was never clear to me whether the murders were committed by Scotty or by Hengist.
The entire Enterprise crew save for Kirk committed mutiny in “This Side of Paradise” while under the influence of the spores. Kirk’s “evil half” committed assault both physical and sexual in “The Enemy Within.” Riley committed mutiny and sabotage and Sulu committed assault while suffering the Psi 2000 virus in “The Naked Time.” Several crew members committed assault while possessed by Landru in “Return of the Archons.” McCoy altered an entire bloody timeline while under the influence of cordrazine in “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Scotty and Sulu committed assault while possessed by Sylvia and Korob in “Catspaw.” Scotty committed two murders while possessed by Redjac in ‘Wolf in the Fold.” Spock committed all kinds of nasty acts, including attempted murder, while possessed by Henoch and Mulhall committed assault on McCoy while possessed by Thalassa in “Return to Tomorrow.” The entire crew committed murder and Chekov also committed sexual assault on Mara while under the influence of the swirly thing in “Day of the Dove.”
None of those actions had any adverse consequences for the people who did them.
And that’s just TOS………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Jana: the first two murders were Scotty. The third was Hengist.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@46: On the other hand, Sisko resented Picard for his role in the death of his wife Jennifer as Locutus. Also Nog did not want Garak to walk behind him in Rocks and Shoals because of the events in Empok Nor and Garak even appreciated this (“there may be hope for you yet.“). So it is not without precedence that not everything done under some alien influence or under some drug is immediately forgiven an forgotten by everybody.
@47/krad: Thanks!
@43: “Lorca’s crew had become more hostile due to the war and due to the mindset he’d tried to instill in them. He’d made them more like us. Now, they’re becoming more like Starfleet again.”
It also might have been a deliberate strategy to Lorca. Tell the crew (either directly, or through Landry) “This is a dangerous mutineer, we may let her on board, but we do not trust her!” But then, in person, he’s nice to her, trusting.
What better way for a manipulative MU person to bind her to him, like the Burnham of his universe, than by priming the crew to reject her while her acceptance comes solely through him (of course, Tilly was pretty accepting too, but just because it didn’t work in all the particulars didn’t mean it wasn’t a goal).
Did anybody ever look at Riker strangely after he gave up the power of the Q?
@51: I imagine Beverly probably a little, just from “I can get where you were going with with Geordi and Data, but WTF were you thinking, suddenly turning my teenage boy into an adult?”
“… who looked nothing like adult Wesley ended up looking.”
@52/ghostly1: Is there a teenager who doesn’t wish they could jump right to being an adult? And Wesley, with his ambition to be appreciated for his gifts and earn the responsibilities of a Starfleet officer, clearly shared that desire as much as anyone his age. Riker was just giving the others what he knew they wanted, both from his prior familiarity with them and from his Q senses.
@48 Nikias
I appreciated DS9 going down that route with Sisko, because it felt at the time that the fact that Picard had been the face of the Borg’s actions at Wolf 359 had been hand-waved and ignored completely (they did make an effort to deal with Picard’s trauma, but it didn’t change how anyone else reacted to him), but it is noticeable that it took several years and a new series before anyone thought ‘hang on a minute, this might change how survivors of Wolf 359 see Picard.’
That said, even then, they went for a new character, someone who had never met him before the battle, whereas I’d have thought that the whole thing would be just as difficult for people who knew Picard as Picard – not because any of what happened was his fault, but because they’d heard his voice being used by the enemy.
I much prefer the way Discovery has tackled it.
@54: I don’t have any problem with the wish, it’s Riker’s deciding to use his Q powers to grant it that’s dodgy (and, if I recall, not just granting it, but saying, “I know what you want” and turning him into an adult). I mean, I suppose, considering it’s Riker, it’s a good thing he didn’t assume Wesley wanted an orgy with the hottest Enterprise crew members, but still, ‘being a grown up’ is the kind of wish that doesn’t need granting and, in fact, loses more than you gain.
@56/ghostly1: Yes, that was exactly the point — that Riker was misguided to change people that way, that he was abusing his power and had to recognize that and give up the power. So I don’t see what you’re objecting to.
@@@@@. krad: Holy shit, that’s a lotta possession! You’d think Magneto-like helmets would be standard issue for Starfleet given how often crews lose control of themselves. But then it’s an easy shortcut when writers want to skip characterization. Like the tension between Picard and Beverly Crusher. They don’t just develop the relationship, but skip ahead to outside influence (or was it inside, a virus or something) that makes them want to get it on.
Side note: was wondering what someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson thought of the spore drive. Turns out he assigned that to an intern. Interesting discussion of SF modes of travel: the Epstein drive from Expanse most realistic (and nearest to us in time; to BSG simply calling it FTL and leaving it at that.
Discovery’s spore drive is nonsense
Re; Possession. It’s not just Star Trek. I remember a line in a Blake’s 7 filk ‘This is Cally – or is it? It all depends on whether she’s being absorbed today.’
Thanks to someone in here, Tyler scenes are now ruined for me. Instead of whatever is on screen I see:
Tyler: Burnham
Burnham: yes?
Tyler: Burnham can you hear me? This is Ashe Tyler.
Burnham: yes Ashe Tyler, I can hear you. What do you want?
@43/Christopher – Ok, strictly speaking, not a mistake. But Wise and company thought better of it in 2001 and saw fit to change it — and if I recall the commentary correctly, it was because the feel was 2 AUs was plenty vast enough.
Regarding the complaints about the use of AUs:
The nearest star system to our own is 4.3 light years (or 27200 AUs) away, so the writers probably just confused AUs and light years. Starbase One being a hundred light years from earth would make a lot more sense, as that would put it at the edge of the imperial core of the Federation – where its founding members (Earth, Vulcan, Andoria, Tellar and Rygel) are located (extrapolated from what I remember of Star Trek: Enterprise). To employ a real world example, the Klingons having advanced this far into the very heart of the Federation and seizing a major military base near Federation industrial and population centers is equivalent to the allies crossing the Rhine, or the Vandals moving into Italy. Still some ways to go to Rome or Berlin – or for the Klingons to Earth – but at that stage in the war, victory is almost certain through superior numbers. It’s not a matter of *if* the war is lost, but *when* – hence the hail mary of a desperate attack on the enemy home world. As a dramatic finale, this is a popular trope in Science Fiction for a reason, from Ender’s Game to Wing Commander 3, from Babylon 5’s “The Long, Twilight Struggle” to Outer Limits’ “The Light Brigade”. Snatching victory from the mouth of defeat – what greater triumph is there?
To be fair to Discovery, every other Trek show plays fast and loose with scale, speed, distances and the overall logistics of the Federation as well. It takes the USS Voyager (the Federation’s fastest ship) a year to travel a thousand light years at full speed, but in “Little Green Men”, Quark travels a farther distance from DS9 to Earth within a matter of days – and in a derelict old shuttle no less. Whatever the plot of any particular episode requires. If the speed of Voyager *were* accurate though, the Federation would be unmanageable from a logistical standpoint (length of supply chains), as it would take decades to move supplies from one end of the Federation to the next.
To use another real world example, there’s a reason why the Roman Empire stopped expanding after Emperor Trajan, even though its military might would have afforded it to aquire more territory at its frontier – the exponentialy rising logistical costs of maintaining such border provinces farther and farther away from the imperial core simply outweighed the economic benefits, and that is true for every historical empire and would be true for the Federation and every fictitious Science Fiction empire as well. A good writer can plan ahead for a more realistic logistical background of his empire – like Asimov does with his Galactic Empire in the Federation trilogy, Dan Simmons in Hyperion or Niven and Pournelle in their CoDominion series – but a big, diverse TV writer’s room doesn’t seem to have that luxury and is always slave to the needs of the next episode’s plot. If characters need to be moved quickly from one end of the galaxy to the next in order for the plot to work, then they’ll either ignore established lore about scale, speed and distances, or make up some new MacGuffins – like Trans Warp in Star Trek III, or the Spore Drive in Discovery – to facilitate that outcome.
We Trek fans love to nitpick about this stuff because Trek covers the technical, sociological and economical background of the Federation in far greater detail than a fantasy universe like Star Wars ever bothers to. You’d think with the technical and science advisors that Trek shows have on hand, they could do better, but apparently those considerations take a back seat to the necessities of the plot of the week in Discovery – just like they have in every other Trek show.
@61/Mike: Yes, I know that very well, and I approve of the change. But that is an entirely different issue from knowing what an astronomical unit is. It’s a complete non sequitur. If someone decides their backyard has too many trees and cuts most of them down, that does not in any way imply that they didn’t understand what a tree was. You’re the second person I’ve seen trying to lump the TMP change into the category of “doesn’t know what an AU is,” and that just doesn’t make any sense. You’re just picking out the two Trek anecdotes that involve AUs in some way and pretending that alone makes them equivalent. It doesn’t, not even slightly.
@62/Tim Werner: “The nearest star system to our own is 4.3 light years (or 27200 AUs) away, so the writers probably just confused AUs and light years. Starbase One being a hundred light years from earth would make a lot more sense, as that would put it at the edge of the imperial core of the Federation”
No, that doesn’t make sense at all. They said outright in the episode that capturing Starbase 1 puts the Klingons right in Earth’s backyard. 100 ly is actually pretty far away given the assumptions about Federation cartography that the show is using. The map graphics in the show are based on the book Star Trek Star Charts, and in STSC, the nearest Klingon border is only about 70 ly from Earth, and Qo’noS itself as little as 95 ly away (if it’s in the plane of the map; if not, it would be further).
The writers probably assumed that the starbase was on the outskirts of the Sol system — as I mentioned before, they may have based it on the version of Starbase 1 depicted in the DS9 novel Time’s Enemy, which was in the Oort cloud. And the VFX designers made a blunder — hardly their first — and put a planet there because they didn’t understand what the writers intended.
“– where its founding members (Earth, Vulcan, Andoria, Tellar and Rygel) are located (extrapolated from what I remember of Star Trek: Enterprise).”
The founding members are Earth, Vulcan, Andoria, Tellar, and the human colony Alpha Centauri. Rigel is one of the early members in some conjectural tie-in works, including my own Rise of the Federation novels, where it’s the seventh member to join (Mars being the sixth), but it’s never been canonically established as a founding member. (Rygel is the name of the deposed Hyneerian monarch from Farscape.)
@57: My point is that the other wishes (giving Geordi sight, making Data human… things they wanted but were never likely to happen without Q-like intervention) made Riker fall into the “well-meaning, but misguided” category, turning Wesley into an adult put him into the “WTF are you insane, thinking this is a good idea?”
Someone who made the first two offers, I’d think, “Yeah, I could see doing that.” Someone who made the last, I’d never trust their judgement again, particularly if I were the kid’s parent (as my point when this all started, that Beverly might have looked at Riker differently after those events) and if there was no evidence of any mental coercion or anything else at play, just Riker legitimately thinking that aging a teenager into an adult, just because he wants it, might be a good use of wish-granting powers.
@64/ghostly1: I don’t understand what you think is so different about that specific wish. If anything, making Data human is a far greater change than making Wes an adult, because the latter is just speeding up an inevitable process while the former is something that would never naturally happen. Are you concerned that an artificially aged Wes would be too immature to handle adult responsibilities? I suppose that Riker could’ve advanced his neurological maturation along with his bodily maturation.
I mean, I can see one problem with it, namely that Riker imposed the change without getting overt consent, but the same goes for restoring Geordi’s sight, and the only reason the same didn’t go for Data was because Data was quicker to speak up. (And maybe because they wanted to save “Data becomes human” for a bigger story later on. We did eventually get it in the novel Metamorphosis by Jean Lorrah.) And if you want to get into consent issues, what about that Klingon female Riker conjured up as a sex toy for Worf? Was she a real, living being? Was she sentient? Was she programmed by Riker to be sexually obedient? What about her consent? (The more I think about the scripts Roddenberry wrote for Trek, the more I realize what a misogynist he truly was, despite his pretense of feminism.)
Speaking of bodily changes, I thought it was interesting that the doctor in “The War Without, the War Within” referred to Voq’s surgical transformation into a human as “reassignment,” the term used for sex-changing surgery today. I guess the fact that they accept Tyler as his current identity goes hand in hand with that, just as people who’ve been through gender reassignment are correctly identified by their current gender instead of what it appeared to be pre-surgically.
@43. Point taken on the need for a speedy identification but even so, given that a forced mind-meld is rape, they could have asked first and given Saru a chance to answer before the forced mind-meld. PLUS – they had control of the ship at that point, so no super hurry to get the answer. They could have spared a few minutes.
“And I think you’re wrong about the crew’s reactions to Burnham being “natural.” Yes, it would be natural for someone in our paranoid, fearful era, but that’s not the way Starfleet officers are normally trained to think. Lorca’s crew had become more hostile due to the war and due to the mindset he’d tried to instill in them. He’d made them more like us. Now, they’re becoming more like Starfleet again.”
I disagree. A normal reaction (Starfleet or not) to a former Starfleet mutineer who also was deemed responsible for starting a brutal war AND who was a stranger to everyone on board would most likely be to avoid that person and that is exactly what happened. They didn’t know her personally and what they did know didn’t incline them to want to know her better, particularly since she was brought in with other obvious prisoners. People tend to avoid unknown prisoners.
As for Ash formerly Ash/Voq, a normal reaction to a man who had killed a fellow crewmember (I’m sure word of that got around) and who once had a Klingon in him (that probably also got around quickly too) would be to shun the guy, if nothing else, out of self-preservation. Ash/hidden Vok had been with them for a while, but not long so he was almost as much a stranger to them as Burnham had been.
So this was nothing to do with Lorca and everything to do with self-preservation and an abundance of caution.
And frankly, as quickly as Lorca accepted Burnham (for his own reasons), it would be more likely that if the crew was to be influenced by his actions, they would have been more accepting off the bat, not less.
“someone in our paranoid, fearful era”
Seriously? Other than people being sharply divided on politics, things pretty much go on the way they have. No one I know is fearful or paranoid. They’re just going about the business of living – going to work, socializing, etc.
@CLB: “(The more I think about the scripts Roddenberry wrote for Trek, the more I realize what a misogynist he truly was, despite his pretense of feminism.)”
Reminds me of an interview with Marina Sirtis where she says she was going to be fired the first season of TNG because “Gene felt that there was one too many women on the show.” To be fair her role wasn’t very well developed as a counselor. Hostile alien on screen. Troi: “Captain, I believe he’s angry.” As it turned out, she stayed because both Gates McFadden and Denise Crosby left the show.
Sirtis almost being fired from TNG
As far as the “reassignment,” I think it’s an unfortunate use of the word. Tyler says he still has access to Voq’s memories. What else is a personality than the sum of memories and experiences? I still think Voq is dormant like he was before. L’Rell would not so easily extinguish him.
#66
For some people, being paranoid and fearful is the business of living, and is incorporated into work and socializing. They make time for it.
@67/Sunspear: “Tyler says he still has access to Voq’s memories. What else is a personality than the sum of memories and experiences?”
That’s kind of like asking “what else is an operating system than the sum of its stored data files?” The operating system is the set of programs and processes that use those data files and act upon them. Personality is not only memories; personality is behaviors, choices, feelings, what we do with what we know and remember. People like to say we’re the sum of our memories, but that’s an oversimplification. Our life experiences shape our personalities, yes, but they’re not the same thing, any more than the sculptor’s tools are the same thing as the sculpture.
Besides, we’ve seen memories and personality treated as distinct things in Trek before. Data downloaded Lal’s memories into his neural network, but that didn’t give him Lal’s personality. It just gave him more information that he could access.
To make another computer analogy, maybe it’s like how I was able to use my current e-mail client program to import my old messages from an older client program. The new client has the “memories” of the old one — it can access the same mailboxes and messages, stored in their own subdirectory — but that doesn’t change its own “personality,” its functions and features and design elements that are specific to it.
69, think of it like having a dual-boot OS though, if you still have the files for one, even though you installed the other, you can run them both, depending on which switch you flick.
@41/43 Magnus/Chris: Of course, Locutus is a great example. I should have thought about that. I was too focused on random aliens of the week. As far as the Borg go, with Seven and other liberated Borg, they seem to not blame them for any crimes (assimilation = mass murder), as they were under Borg influence. In Picard’s case, he got to STAY captain. Of course, he was also tortured among other things during his tenure, and yet stayed in charge of the E-D.
More on TyVoq:
The thing about L’Rell procedure (assuming a twist isn’t coming) is that Starfleet is able to do basically the same stuff in later Treks.
Bashir wipes Worf’s brother’s memory selectively during DS9 (seems he can pinpoint only the identity and episodic memories, rather than procedural ones). It is not exactly the same, but if memory is that obviously measurable medically, then what L’Rell did is in the ballpark (seems she was separating consciousnesses rather than memories, per se?).
I believe there are other instances of memory wiping (I am thinking on TNG?), but I can’t recall them.
Of course, as Christopher pointed out, it is less than Voq incurred on Tyler, as the original Tyler only had his memories taken. If Tyler sticks around for Season 2, there could be some great existential character work done. Though, I cannot see how they can justify keeping Tyler around. He lost his rank/commission. Are they going to let him hang out and clean the conduits?
@70/LV: Yeah, you can, but that doesn’t mean you have to. The point is, having Voq’s memories doesn’t require Voq’s personality to still be part of Tyler. The memories alone are not the entire “program.” As WTBA mentions, even memory has several distinct types, like procedural and experiential. There’s a lot of the human (or Klingon) mind that has nothing to do with memory, if we apply actual neurology instead of just popular cliches.
@CLB: “Besides, we’ve seen memories and personality treated as distinct things in Trek before.”
Unfortunately, the fact that Trek has done it before is not a solid argument. Consider this group’s grasp of astrophysics.
Trek writers are not experts in scientific fields. Their understanding of minds and psychological identity is at the level of laypeople. Even using digital metaphors for personality storage is not far off from saying our minds are like steam tech, with pressure building up that demands release. In fact, that Freudian view is closer to what the DISC writers are doing with Tyler/Voq than any modern understanding. It’s far too violent a personality transplant or graft or whatever invented concept to be just a set of stored files.
72, I am merely providing a potential frame for understanding which you seemed to miss, so they can certainly choose to make whatever decision they wish, including the one you didn’t seem to catch.
Also, based on feeling and nothing else, someone significant dies in the finale. Way too many ominous words were dropped for that not to happen. It could be Sarek. It could be Burnham. It could be Georgiou. It could be Tyler.
It’s why I think Voq will reappear. His storyline will be resolved this season and it may be part of the solution to the Klingon War.
I’ve said before, we should stop anticipating what should happen or want to happen. We should look at what the writers have laid out so far and guess where they are going. All the reasonableness in the world will not save us from what these writers have wrought. We should have learned that by now. This is all about their storytelling methods, not common sense.
@75Sunspear/ Sarek can’t die for good, because we know he is alive in TNG. If he did die (temporarily), I guess he could be revived like he revived Burnham (though by who? maybe Burnham since they are linked?). They would be sort of cheap, though it would mirror the aforementioned event.
Far more likely that Tyler or the Emperor die (maybe L’Rell too). If Saru or Burnham or Tilly or Stamets die, then it sort of guts the cast even more than it probably will be for Season 2 anyway.
That being said, if anyone die in the service of a great story, it might well be worth it.
#75
I think you’re onto something with Voq-Tyler being the solution to the war. Maybe it will be something along the lines of him sacrificing himself or somehow demonstrating compassion and bravery he learned from humans that impresses the Klingons and causes them to end the war. I feel like I’ve seen that ending in several movies and TV shows before, but I can’t name any of them offhand.
Or you know, they could just time travel and reboot the whole thing! It wouldn’t surprise me. We shall see.
@74/LV: I’m not “missing” anything. I’m not saying it’s impossible that Voq could still be in there — I’m simply saying it’s not required, that Tyler having Voq’s memories doesn’t automatically mean that Voq’s mind is in there too. I agree with you that it could go either way. Voq’s mind could potentially still be in there, but Tyler having Voq’s memories is not enough to prove that he is, because “we are the sum of our memories” is a facile bromide rather than a neurological fact. It would take more evidence to prove it.
78, I merely pointed it out because you used so many computer analogies, but didn’t cover the obvious one that identifies the situation most aptly.
Beyond that, it awaits further development.
@67/Sunspear: Oh god. Roddenberry thought 33% women was one woman too many? That’s almost funny – I remember that when I saw the first TNG cast photo, I was disppointed that they didn’t have 50% women. I had fully expected 50% women. I could understand that most of the characters were male in a show made in 1966, but more than twenty years later? And depicting an utopian future and all that?
@78. CLC: “bromide can mean a commonplace or tiresome person” (wiki) hmm
You are splitting some fine hairs here. “It could potentially go either way.. could still be in there…” … I could be wrong (don’t wanna go back over your posts), but I think you asserted elsewhere that Voq was dead. So again, have cake, eat it too. Seeing the mirror Voq as a rebel and seeing the conflicted Tyler should give you a hint as to where the writers are going.
I get hat you have to process and absorb this stuff for possible professional endeavors, but c’mon man, speed it up. I still fail to understand why you are so over the top assertive about how you would do it. It’s irrelevant to the outcome of this series. Either enjoy the ride or stop being so insistent.
@65 – Chris: I thought the same about the doctor’s use of “reassignment”. For all intents and purposes, that is Tyler’s psyche in there, or at least a being that thinks of himself as such. And that’s enough for me, as long as we can prove he’s not dangerous. (And if he is, get him treatment.)
@80 – Jana: You were too kind on 1987’s gender awareness…
An aside:
In all the discussion of continuity and consistency in the show (disclosure: of which I am not a fan), I see a lot of discussion of how this could be happening 10 years before TOS.
This seems strange to me, as it has been obvious to me from the get-go that we are in the Abramsverse here, or Kelvin-verse if you prefer. We are not in any way 10 years before TOS; rather, 10 years before the destruction of Vulcan. Therefore, none of the continuity issues with events mentioned in TOS are in any way relevant…
It doesn’t matter what is “obvious” to you, or what inconsistencies there are: This is not the Kelvinverse, because the people in charge of Star Trek TV have said it’s the Prime universe. Period.
@83/Shloz: Discovery cannot be set in the Kelvin timeline. Star Trek Into Darkness is set in 2259, two years after the current time frame of DSC, and in that movie, Admiral Marcus speaks of a war with the Klingons as something that’s likely to happen soon, but clearly has not happened yet. Marcus says “Since we first learned of their existence, the Klingon Empire has conquered and occupied two planets that we know of and fired on our ships half a dozen times.” So obviously the war shown in DSC did not happen in that timeline.
Also, if DSC were in Kelvin, then Bad Robot would presumably have to be a production partner, and it isn’t.
@82/MaGnUs: The following decades weren’t much better.
@85/Christopher: What a pity that no admiral ever said that in TOS.
That’s my point, if the following decades weren’t much better, 1987 had no chance. (Although, as Chris has commented before, the 80s had some nice female action heroes, but then we backslided a bit.)
@86/Jana: As I’ve said before, there is a general sense in TOS that the UFP and Klingons have a lot of bad blood and a fairly recent history of conflict. In “Errand of Mercy,” Kirk has a kneejerk animosity toward them and a willingness to fight them that seems a bit too intense to be just the result of an intellectual distaste for their political system. In “Friday’s Child,” a well-trained security guard immediately panicked and drew his weapon at the first sight of a Klingon. In “The Day of the Dove,” Chekov manufactured a false memory of his brother being killed in a Klingon attack on a Federation colony, but while Sulu recognized that the brother was fabricated, nobody questioned the reality of the colony attack. Of course it doesn’t perfectly fit, since the makers of TOS didn’t have a clear sense of what the history between the two powers was, but it was certainly implied that there was much more history of conflict than Marcus’s “fired on our ships half a dozen times” would explain. Having that conflict be a huge, 17-month-long war that devastates Starfleet is a bit much, yes, but at least there should be something within the fairly recent lifetimes of the characters mentioned above.
@88/Christopher: The fact that Klingons organise the planets they conquer “into vast slave labour camps” seems enough to justify Kirk’s attitude towards them, IMO. He’s never been portrayed as the type who’s only horrified when something bad happens to himself or his own people. But you’re right about the colony attack.
@89/Jana: Sure, but like I said, that’s abstract and impersonal. Kirk’s encountered plenty of other oppressive societies and still striven to find peaceful solutions. The Eminians had been marching their own people into disintegration booths for 500 years, a horrific atrocity, yet Kirk wanted to help them make peace. He was furious at the Gorn for destroying the Cestus III outpost, but he stopped himself from fighting and chose to try for peace. Yet he was so bitter toward the Klingons that he needed the Organians to slap him down before he turned off the soldier mentality.
I’m not saying that can’t be explained in the context of what we knew before. But I’m saying that it could be the result of Kirk having fought the Klingons in a war when he was younger. This new information lets us look at TOS in a new light and find new ways to interpret it. The fact that it’s different from what we’ve always assumed doesn’t make it wrong. On the contrary, getting to see a familiar story in a new light is exciting. It makes it fresh again. I do wish the Klingon war in DSC hadn’t been quite so massive and prolonged, but its existence does give new meaning to certain things from TOS.
It’s kind of like the difference between WWII and the cold war. Up to now we’ve been assuming a history of hostile relations punctuated by incidents and small conflicts in out of the way places. Now we’re expected to envision a huge honking war raging through the centers of the Federation creating major damage and misery, a war they nearly lost, a mere ten years before TOS.
Big difference. But since continuity isn’t important….
@90/Christopher: One of the things I like about Kirk is that he takes others’ suffering personal. So it wasn’t abstract and impersonal. I have the impression that there’s a tendency in modern TV that things have to happen to the characters themselves to matter to them, and I don’t approve of that. As for the Eminians, the difference is that the Klingons enjoyed violence, whereas the Eminians had simply resigned to it.
So… I prefer the old meaning. I find the new one more shallow and too bleak. But to each his own.
@91/roxana: Continuity is important, but it shouldn’t be a straitjacket on creativity. Trek continuity has evolved many times over the decades. I mean, for more than the first 20 years of the franchise, there wasn’t even a unified consensus on what decade TOS took place in. Some fans thought it was the 2200s, others the 2260s. It wasn’t until TNG: “The Neutral Zone” in 1988 that an exact calendar year was given, and that was when the timeline was finally pinned down — TNG was in 2364, Admiral McCoy was 137, therefore TOS had to have been in the 2260s or so. And I was a proponent of the 2200s theory at the time, so I had to rewrite my entire Trek chronology — in pencil and paper — because of that one episode. So don’t complain to me about continuity changing. Every new Trek series changes how we interpret the continuity, because that’s just how fiction works. It’s how life works. We’re always learning new things and having to refine what we thought we knew. And that is not a bad thing, especially in a series whose mission statement is literally about seeking out the new and going where we haven’t gone before.
And since I dislike this change I am erasing DSC from my personal continuity. That’s the great thing about fiction, you don’t have to accept what you don’t like.
@94/Roxana: Discovery is a novel written by Lieutenant Mary Sue in between work hours. It was inspired by the events of “Mirror, Mirror” and “The Trouble with Tribbles” (the Klingon spy). We all know that Lieutenant Mary Sue is half Vulcan. It turns out that, like you, she is also half Hobbit, which explains why mushrooms feature so prominently in her story.
I approach Discovery very differently. For me it’s Star Trek. It takes place before TOS. There are references. That’s where I stop. I let Discovery be it’s own show on it’s own terms and I am having a blast watching it! Sometimes being so critical of every aspect will do nothing more than cause us to dislike it. My two cents.
This is not real Star Trek, and it sucks.
Mostly for the same damn reason: “Oh, hey, you know the evil pointlessly sadistic carpet-bombing cannibal who killed her own minions for no reason? Let’s put her in charge! No way this could POSSIBLY go wrong!”
Bull.
Oh, and Lieutenant Love-Interest still has no actual personality, which is remarkably irritating.
Calling it now, the last episode they’ll go back in time and reset-button the entire season with only Burnham remembering because she’s Very Speshul and possibly Stamets if they remember that he’s still technically a main character here and have the brainpower to undo the fridging of Culber.
But I doubt an impressively inept writing team helmed by congenital incompetent Alex Kurtzman (who has literally never written, produced, or directed anything that wasn’t crap), that has already shown a truly mind-blowing ability to take potential for high drama and casually throw it away to find something dumber and more cliched to do, will have enough intelligence to just pretend the entire season never happened.
God, I’m so disappointed by this whole show. I can’t even hate it anymore, it’s like they learned nothing from Voyager and Enterprise. Well, OK, they did learn from Enterprise not to treat sexual assault as comedy, but that’s like not even an accomplishment, that’s basic bare-minimum common decency.
I expected a Hell of a lot more from a Trek show in 20-effing-17. It’s the 21st century, where’s my openly trans character? Where’s the pansexual genderfluid alien we had on DS9 in the ’90s? Come on, Discovery. You can’t even live up to your advertising and be diverse.
“Real Star Trek”, pfft.
I love ST:Discovery. Yet I feel empty! Where are those episodes that made Trek fans gasp and awe? Discovery is high quality but where is its version of The City on the Edge of Forever, Inner Light, Duet, etc. I don’t feel I’m watching ST but another SciFi show. I love Discovery but I sadly feel I’m missing something. Can we have one perfect stand alone story of perfect truth?
@@@@@ 95, Very funny :D
@97, Damn! Tell us how you really feel.
Edit: Actually all this “Not Real Trek! Trek is RuIIIINED!” talk reminds of Transformers fans. Every time there was a new iteration Transformers fans would yell and scream about how the franchise was entirely ruined, 1986 movie, Marvel comics, Beast wars, Michael Bay’s Transformers, it didn’t matter, Transformers was ruined. Nevermind its still going strong and making a profit. Its not just Transformers, its any fandom. People just fear change, and when something they loved from the start looks extremely different than what they remember, or maybe its an offshoot, or someone’s interpretation (which I think Discovery actually is even though it’s 10 years before Kirk’s 5 year mission.) they’ll find anything at all to give them justification to hate it. Case in point, I think the Klingons in Discovery are boring. I could use that as a reason to hate Discovery, I could use the streaming platform to hate it, yes it doesn’t seem like it fits in with the 60’s TOS show. Someone somewhere loves the things in Discovery I don’t, and that’s okay since in movies and TV its all opinion and we’re both right and we’re both wrong. I’ve watched Discovery, and like 99 it feels empty, IMO fun to watch, then shrug and move on. It’s about on par (for me!) with Enterprise and its Xindi/Time Wars arc (arcs? Don’t remember) where was fun but I’ve forgotten most if not everything about it, and that’s how Discovery is for me.
Really fans of every franchise need to sit back and chill.
Edit 2: Besides, when they’d first announced Trek’s return to TV, I was hoping they’d expand on Abrams Nu-Trek universe and just leave the Prime Universe to the novels.
I’ve been saying for a while now that DSC is good story, but it is playing fast and loose with continuity. It played fast and loose with it in the mirror universe and the prime universe. Like CLB said all the way @6, it’s hard to reconcile all of this with TOS, especially if the war is as big as possible. The capture/destruction of Starbase 1 for example. It may be presumption on my part, but I always assumed Starbase 1 was the thing hanging out in the Sol system. I don’t think it’s ever been fully established on screen, but the giant mushroom spacedock we saw in Star Trek the Movie, IV, a few TNG episodes… that isn’t starbase 1? Why would the Klingons put to the sword the entire population of STB1, and then just leave the planet earth alone? I know that TOS takes place 10 years after discovery, but if we still have Enterprise crewman upset about the Romulan War which was 100 years ago (Stiles has to be dressed down by Kirk about it) but there isn’t a corresponding outrage about the Klingons a decade earlier?
I wasn’t as bothered by the outrage that a third of the fleet is lost- presumably TOS era fleet is much smaller than it is by the time of TNG/DS9 when we see hundreds of ships on screen. “Tomorrow is Yesterday” establishes that there are only a dozen Constitution class ships in 2267, and given that they were the front line heavy cruisers you can extrapolate that the entire fleet might only be a couple hundred ships. Also we can presume that the Federation has been fairly peaceful since the Romulan War, it could be any losses are shocking to the admiralty, especially since they haven’t been able to come up with a defense against the cloaking device and the attacks are incredibly random due to the fractured nature of the Klingon empire.
I do hope that the season ending episode has at least some level of outrage by Burnham and/or Saru about putting the Emperor in command of a starship, even if it’s in private. I’ve loved Michelle Yeoh as both herself and her mirror counterpart, but I hope this isn’t a way to put her back in the show full time. Let Saru be captain or introduce a new captain to be a foil, but not the evil emperor.
Lastly, while none of the continuity issues are uncorrectable, I do worry that the writers and producers aren’t just ignoring them deliberately. Maybe it’s too much to hope that a TV franchise fully respects it’s fans, but just ignoring the world building that has been done for the last 5 decades burns up the trust that has been built up between fans and the franchise and could have huge repercussions moving forward. One of the things that has made the MCU so successful for the last 10 years is that each of the movies (not so much the TV properties) has built on the world made by the movies before it and haven’t told the fans that what they spent their time and money on doesn’t matter (unlike say the DC Universe with it’s multiple batman/superman reboots or Marvel/Fox with Spiderman and X-men). Fans get turned off by that, and if you damage the prime universe too much with William Shatner/Kirk, TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise in it, you might not ever get the fans back. Fans will overlook the small stuff- visuals, costuming, etc.- but ripping down the world that was built for the convenience of the current group of writers might be too much.
@102/MikeKelm: ” Like CLB said all the way @6, it’s hard to reconcile all of this with TOS, especially if the war is as big as possible.”
And like I also said, it’s far from the first Trek project that’s hard to reconcile with TOS, including other parts of TOS. The Wrath of Khan is quite hard to reconcile with TOS in a number of ways, but fans still love it for some reason. Trek fans have been reconciling the hard-to-reconcile for half a century, and I refuse to believe our collective imagination has suddenly fallen short of the task.
” It may be presumption on my part, but I always assumed Starbase 1 was the thing hanging out in the Sol system. I don’t think it’s ever been fully established on screen, but the giant mushroom spacedock we saw in Star Trek the Movie, IV, a few TNG episodes… that isn’t starbase 1?”
Some tie-in and fan works have called it that, but that’s pure assumption. Canonically, it’s just Spacedock. The corresponding structure in the Kelvin Timeline is called Starbase One in the script (though not in dialogue), but there’s never been a Prime-universe Starbase 1 established in canon before now.
Personally, I’ve always thought it was silly to refer to Spacedock as Starbase 1. I mean, a starbase is a support facility for starships in deep space, the equivalent of a frontier fort. Ships in the Solar System would have the entire Earth/Solar government and infrastructure to support them, so a starbase would be redundant.
As for the fleet losses, they make sense to me, since the number of ships Starfleet had on hand in the first couple of episodes of DSC seemed disproportionately large compared to TOS. So if that number of ships was severely reduced by TOS, that helps explain why the fleet seemed sparser then.
I still have the impression that something major will happen in the last episode that will reset the universe to something more in line with the TOS universe. Perhaps related to MU Emperor Georgiou trying to reach her universe. (but first she must fight klingons!! :) :) )
One way or the other, major perceived “flaws” in the season have been explained with new information and a different context than expected.
As for jlp_bedford @99
Perhaps you should wait for season 3 or 4 to ask these questions? If I remember correctly, none of these great episodes were in the first season of a show
@103/Christopher: “As for the fleet losses, they make sense to me, since the number of ships Starfleet had on hand in the first couple of episodes of DSC seemed disproportionately large compared to TOS. So if that number of ships was severely reduced by TOS, that helps explain why the fleet seemed sparser then.”
And that’s why I’m not willing to reconcile DSC with TOS, and will never be, unless they reset the universe in the last episode. Those twelve starships were supposed to be the shining beacons of human/Federation achievement. Turning them into the sorry remains of a major catastrophe is incredibly cynical. Just like turning Kirk into a dreamer when he talks about a time when “they’ll take all the money they spend now on war and death and make them spend it on life” in “The City on the Edge of Forever”.
@104/Kaboom: “The City on the Edge of Forever” was in the first season. TOS had a very strong first season.
@104 I’ll happily remove Inner Light from my list of 3 episodes so the comment about Season 1 works; Duet was also Season 1 in DS9 – I love this episode and even Krad gave it a 10 in his DS9 Rewatch. We shouldn’t however have to wait for “season 3 or 4” for amazingly written episodes – why can’t they occur in the first season?
I’m looking forward to Krad’s overview of the Discovery’s first season as when I run the plot so far through my head it feels quite outlandish… a mirror universe counterpart finds himself in our universe, takes command of a highly secret science ship that just happens to have the potential to take him home, which he wishes to do in order to kill the Emperor of that universe while generating a relationship with our universe version of his consort after he manufactured their meeting.
The positives of Discovery is that I do look forward to each episode every week and then afterwards reading Krad’s reviews (always on top form). I think it is the brilliant acting (especially by Michelle Yeoh and Sonequa Martin-Green) that keep me watching.
Yes, that’s definitely more outlandish that many other Star Trek plots. *rolleyes*
@107 True. Very very true – you’re making me cringe over my memory of some of those plots. My view is more of an overview of the season as a whole. Granted Discovery is more structured than its predecessors with stories that have lasted 10+ episodes, but I can’t think of an arc spanning more than 2 episodes on the predecessors that is quite as ‘outlandish’ as this.
@105/Jana: You misunderstand. I’m not saying anything about “sorry remains.” Of course the Connies are still the prestige ships of the fleet, and Discovery has explicitly said as much. I’m just talking about why we didn’t see any of those other ship classes that were so abundant at the Battle of the Binary Stars, the ones that look like evolutionary stages between the NX class and the Miranda and Constellation classes.
After all, the Connies are meant for deep-space exploration, charting the frontier well beyond the UFP’s borders. The ships we’re seeing here are probably the ones that stay behind patrolling the UFP’s territory and borders while the Connies fly well beyond them, which is why we haven’t seen any Connies fighting in the war. (A similar situation to how we never saw a Sovereign-class ship fighting in the Dominion War, while the Enterprise-E in Insurrection seemed to be focusing on diplomatic missions rather than combat missions.) Maybe the loss of so many of the border-patrol ships is why the Connies a decade later are called on to handle border-defense missions and the like as seen in “Balance of Terror” and “Errand of Mercy.”
For anyone interested, The Magicians just did their version of an “Inner Light”-type episode. It’s touching and, incidentally, not heteronormative. May have a bit too much backstory for those not already watching.
@109/Christopher: Sorry about the misunderstanding, and also because I inadvertently accused you of being cynical. My comment was badly phrased. I didn’t mean you, I meant the DSC writers. And I don’t even think that they do it on purpose. I think they simply like the “Darkest Hour” trope too much.
The Mirror Universe has ruined this season- the question is, will the show be able to recover? We ended up with Mirror Lorca, because someone (Kurtzman pehaps, maybe under pressure from CBS) decided Fuller’s notion of a morally questionable, wartime captain was too risky, and could alienate Star Trek fans. Thus the cop-out reveal- “just kidding, he’s a James Bond villain from Mirrorverse” – thereby trivializing this supposedly important period of Federation-Klingon relations. The writers tried to justify to themselves that they could salvage this by making timely sociopolitical commentary on Trumpism or fascism. But here’s the thing – the Terran Empire isn’t really fascist – fascism entails total domination by one political party or regime. In the Terran Empire, you assassinate your superiors to advance yourself – if you tried that in fascism, you would be executed because it would encourage individual autonomy and chaos. Yes, there are attempted coups in authoritarian regimes – but that’s at the top of the food chain; it’s not allowed to happen among the rank and file. I supposed we could posit a fascist state wherein anyone could murder whomever they wanted, but that would be a failed fascist state, not a functioning one.
Crucial point – ALL PREVIOUS STAR TREK WRITERS REALIZED THIS. Jerome Bixby said his idea of the Mirror Enterprise was a PIRATE SHIP (granted, the producers made the Nazi reference of the salute, but also maintained the pirate theme, as seen in the sashes and daggers). Ira Behr and Manny Coto understood the campy nature of the Mirrorverse and that it was not suited for incisive social commentary, and treated it as such. The writers of Disco Trek don’t seem to understand this, or were under pressure from above to dumb things down. They also fail to substantively develop the Mirrorverse, despite spending 4 episodes there. Worth noting is that the idea of a parallel universe with evil doubles is a badly shopworn cliche in the annals of sci-fi and fantasy. It was a commonplace idea in the 1950s when Bixby wrote his parallel story ‘One Way Street.’ In 2018, it is nearly impossible for the premise of meeting your evil moustached doppelganger to rise above the ridiculous or parodic. One of the only successful recent examples is Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which is treated as pure surrealism. Thus Disco Trek’s treatment of the Mirrorverse gives us a hackneyed concept devoid of serious political insight which serves to cheapen the epochal clash of Klingon and Federation. (Note: I don’t mean to diminish the episode, “Mirror Mirror,” which was a fine hour of television by the standards of 1967, and still entertains today.)
@112/Gippels Goopels: “The Mirror Universe has ruined this season- the question is, will the show be able to recover?”
I think the MU episodes, on the whole, were more consistent in quality than the first half of the season.
“We ended up with Mirror Lorca, because someone (Kurtzman pehaps, maybe under pressure from CBS) decided Fuller’s notion of a morally questionable, wartime captain was too risky, and could alienate Star Trek fans.”
You’re making a lot of assumptions there, considering that we never saw a version of Lorca written by Fuller. True, Fuller has a story credit on Lorca’s first episode, but no teleplay credit, so the only version of Lorca we’ve actually seen is the one written primarily by showrunners Gretchen Berg & Aaron Harberts. And that version of Lorca was always intended to be from the MU, at least by the time they cast Jason Isaacs in the role. So as far as I know, we don’t actually have a clear portrait of what Fuller’s Lorca would’ve been like, and whether he would’ve been as “morally questionable” as the one we got.
“The writers tried to justify to themselves that they could salvage this by making timely sociopolitical commentary on Trumpism or fascism.”
That’s been built into the show from the start. T’Kuvma’s xenophobic personality cult was a clear parallel of the rhetoric Trump used in his campaign. Don’t forget, he was campaigning since June 2015, so writers have had a lot of time to do allegories in response to his politics and attitudes. Supergirl did a pastiche of his campaign rhetoric in a January 2016 episode, with an anti-alien senator promising to build a dome to keep the aliens out. And I worked some commentary on that kind of fearmongering politics into my TOS novel The Face of the Unknown, which was written between November 2015 and January 2016 and published at the end of 2016. Discovery was announced around that same time, in November 2015. So it’s been influenced by the current US political climate since its very beginnings.
“In the Terran Empire, you assassinate your superiors to advance yourself – if you tried that in fascism, you would be executed because it would encourage individual autonomy and chaos.”
I read a comment somewhere recently (possibly in another of these review threads?) that it doesn’t make sense to take Kirk’s line about advancing through assassination too literally. Chekov said “No one will question the assassination of a captain who has disobeyed prime orders of the Empire.” That implies assassination is only an acceptable way to advance if the victim has already been compromised through disobedience or failure, so that the system will no longer protect them.
So, yeah, the Empire is fascist, or at least authoritarian — that’s pretty much built into the definition of the word “empire.” It doesn’t make a lot of sense to reject that based on Kirk’s lines alone. He wasn’t declaring it from the position of a historian or sociologist with an expert understanding of the Empire, but from the position of a guy who’d just been subjected to an assassination attempt, which hardly makes him an objective observer.
“Worth noting is that the idea of a parallel universe with evil doubles is a badly shopworn cliche in the annals of sci-fi and fantasy. It was a commonplace idea in the 1950s when Bixby wrote his parallel story ‘One Way Street.’”
Actually the parallel universe wasn’t evil in either “One Way Street” or Bixby’s original “Mirror, Mirror” proposal. In “One Way Street,” it was just a slightly different universe in some ways, and the protagonist was actually much happier there until the universe started to “reject” his presence. (Although it did have a doppelganger with a goatee!) In the “Mirror, Mirror” pitch, again, the parallel was only slightly different, except one of those slight differences meant the Federation was losing a war, plus Kirk was married.
I tried tracking down early examples of the “evil twin universe” trope specifically, and the only one I could find that predated “Mirror, Mirror” was DC Comics’ Earth-Three, home to the Crime Syndicate of America, the evil opposites of the Justice League. It was introduced in 1964. I suppose Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle from 1962, depicting a timeline where the Nazis won WWII, is sort of a precedent for the idea of an evil parallel reality coexisting with ours, but it doesn’t go all the way in showing people crossing universes or meeting evil twins of themselves. It probably had an influence on later “evil parallel world” fiction, though.
“In 2018, it is nearly impossible for the premise of meeting your evil moustached doppelganger to rise above the ridiculous or parodic.”
I’m pretty sure that only Kira and Stamets have actually met their doppelgangers. Generally they either swap places with them or impersonate them after their deaths — or just read about them, in the case of Mirror Archer and his crew.
And I think this arc did a good job of getting away from the more comical approach of the DS9 episodes and using the situation to explore the characters’ struggles with morality and advance their interpersonal arcs. No concept is permanently used up; it just takes the right approach to make it work again.
In Andre Norton’s Star Gate, does have something like that. Travel to alternate universe where one of the character’s father was doubled and enslaved the native aliens.
Doubles were in HG Well’s A Modern Utopia, but they weren’t evil. There was also some parallel worlds switching places with Earth in Sidewise in Time by Murray Leinster.
I think doubles came up in HG Well’s Paratime, but I’m not sure. And Asimov’s Living Space certainly had a parallel world where a German Tribal Chief was around at the beginning of the Atomic Age.
@114/LV: Yeah, parallel realities have been around in SF for a long time, but “evil twin” universes have become a much more frequent trope after “Mirror, Mirror” — and no doubt partly because of it — than they were before it.
Quick, we must find a way to an alternate universe to test your supposition!
@112/Gippels Goopels: I think the Mirror Universe only became “campy” in the DS9 episodes. The original episode was quite serious. And the “moustached doppelganger” wasn’t evil. He was the one Kirk persuaded to start a revolution, remember? (Okay, he was bearded, not moustached.)
“Yes, there are attempted coups in authoritarian regimes – but that’s at the top of the food chain; it’s not allowed to happen among the rank and file.”
The Chinese Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966 by the guy “at the top of the food chain”, made young people attack and replace established leaders everywhere. Of course, that isn’t the same thing as the situation presented in “Mirror, Mirror”, but it shows what paranoia in authoritarian societies can lead to. And since it happened while the episode was written, it may have been in the writers’ minds.
There was a similar discussion last week, where I wrote this (comment #65):
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 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. 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.
“I don’t mean to diminish the episode, “Mirror Mirror,” which was a fine hour of television by the standards of 1967, and still entertains today.”
Personally, I think it’s a fine hour of television, period. It argues that heavily authoritarian government is inherently unstable. It shows to which degree people are a product of their environment. It makes a statement about the Federation by showing us everything it is not. It has nuanced characters like Mirror Spock and Moreau. All that in fifty minutes, and while being highly entertaining too.
Hmm, if that was the point being made by Mirror, Mirror, then it’s probably ruined by the resulting failure of Spock’s Revolution by the time of the DS9 episodes.
@118/LordVorless: Unsurprisingly, I don’t like the DS9 episodes.
I actually like it, because it’s not just assuming that all you need is a good heart and a little light to show the way and everything turns out fine.
On the other hand, it’s still the same people around, which irks me, but that’s true about Mirror, Mirror. It’s not uncommon though, the only work I know offhand that avoids it was Alternities where nobody born after the divergence exists in the alternate time lines.
@120/LordVorless: A good heart, a little light and a Tantalus Field.
I wouldn’t have liked a sequel where everything turns out fine either. The open ending of the original episode was perfect the way it was.
@117/Jana: “It argues that heavily authoritarian government is inherently unstable.”
@118/LordVorless: “Hmm, if that was the point being made by Mirror, Mirror, then it’s probably ruined by the resulting failure of Spock’s Revolution by the time of the DS9 episodes.”
No, because the failure of Spock’s reforms doesn’t contradict Jana’s point. The Empire still fell either way. At least Spock’s reforms gave humanity the idea of hope and a better future, and without that, they might not have been as able to rise up against the Alliance.
Besides, as Orson Welles said, getting a happy ending depends on where you choose to end your story. Solving one problem doesn’t guarantee happily-ever-after; it just means you’re able to move on to the next problem. Every government that succeeds in making things better in one generation will face new crises and threats in a later generation. That doesn’t invalidate the principles behind the original victory. It just means they have to be fought for again. We live in a universe governed by entropy. Things don’t automatically stay fixed; they inevitably break again unless we keep working to maintain them.
121, I think in the greater scope of media, there are few others where they came up with a follow-up story that had things not turn out so well.
122, that might be why Frank R. Stockon’s Lady or the Tiger ended. Or didn’t end. Maybe Spock’s actions actually broke things for more people. Maybe there was no victory. Perhaps it was just a bunch of things that happened.
@109 – Chris: Please never refer to Constitution-class ships as “Connies” again. :)
@110 – Sunspear: Great episode, that one.
@113 – Chris: Just want to say that not all DS9 MU episodes were comedic. The one (“Through The Looking Glass”) where Sisko replaces his double in that universe and meets his wife’s counterpart, or the one (“Shattered Mirror”) where Jake gets to spend time with her, his mother’s counterpart, are far from goofy. That last one is pretty touching, BTW.
Authoritarian states may be inherently unstable but unfortunately that doesn’t help their subjects since that tend to mean one authoritarian Regime following another in dizzying succession.
@125/Roxana: Not always, but too often.
I thought that was Kirk’s argument in “Mirror, Mirror”. “If change is inevitable, […] doesn’t logic demand that you be a part of it? […] Tyranny or freedom? It’s up to you.” In other words, he asked Spock to guide the change so that it would be a change for the better.
Okay I’m just watching this and had to pause it at around 20 minutes, after the scene where Tyler walks into the mess hall and the crew, starting with Tilly, slowly gathered around him in support. What he did while under mind control was not his fault, and these people realize that. (Stamets, of course, has a personal emotional reason to take longer to come around.) This depiction of camaraderie and graceful acceptance is the kind of Trek I love. Literally put a lump in my throat. I’m also reminded of Galileo 7 in TOS, where the crew was so racist towards Spock, which was something I didn’t understand and commented on in Krad’s re-watch.
Definitely a highlight of the season.