One of the things I particularly love about Discovery is something that was established when the titular ship first appeared in “Context is for Kings”: it’s a science ship. Most of the main characters are science nerds, and indeed Burnham, Saru, Stamets, Reno, Adira, and Tilly are all science geeks of the highest order.
What’s fun about “Rubicon” is that the events are driven by knowledge: Burnham’s knowledge of Book, Book’s knowledge of Burnham, the science of the spore drive and the interior of the DMA, and a math problem that Stamets and Zora work out.
And we get a devastating ending.
Most of this episode sees our heroes making smart decisions and taking actions that are thought-out and not reckless, and also trying to do their best not to harm anyone. Both sides of this fight—Discovery and the rest of the Federation vs. Book and Tarka and their big-ass weapon—are in this to save lives primarily.
Discovery first tries to board Book’s ship covertly, using the tracker Burnham put in last week to find them, and they try to board. But they’re done in by a security protocol Tarka put in that even Book didn’t know about. It almost destroys the shuttle that contains the boarding party of Saru, Culber, Bryce, and Rhys. Book is appalled—and actually helps Burnham rescue her people—but the element of surprise is gone.
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Sisters of the Forsaken Stars
The chase continues to the DMA itself, and the race is on to find the control center, as that’s what Tarka wants to blow up.
Because there’s an obvious conflict of interest in Discovery going after Book and Tarka given the relationship between Burnham and Book (and, indeed, between the ship’s entire crew and Book), Vance sends in someone to backstop Burnham: Nhan.
This is a brilliant move. Because of the spore drive, Discovery is the only ship that can get to Book and Tarka in time. And they can’t just replace the entire crew. So they send Nhan—last seen in “Die Trying” last season, and now back in the saddle as part of Federation Security, a welcome return of Rachael Ancheril to the show. She’s someone Burnham (and the rest of the crew) knows and trusts, she doesn’t really know Book all that well, and she’s security, so she’ll do what’s right.
I like this notion a lot, because it takes a cliché of the franchise and makes it far less annoying. The outsider who messes with our heroes’ mojo is a tired Trek trope (“A Taste of Armageddon,” “The Pegasus,” “Much Ado About Boimler,” etc.), and Discovery has been good about mostly avoiding it (with exceptions, like this season’s premiere, “Kobayashi Maru”), and that continues nicely here. Nhan is a professional doing her job, and she and Burnham and Saru have several intelligent—if sometimes intense and argumentative—discussions about how to proceed. Nhan has the authority to relieve Burnham if Nhan thinks she’s compromising the mission, but she never has to take that step.
In particular, I like that Burnham is completely transparent with the crew: she lets them know right away why Nhan is there and what she is empowered to do.
One of Burnham’s strategies is to try to figure out how long the DMA will remain in this spot. Now that they know its purpose is to mine boronite, Stamets and Zora are tasked with creating a mathematical model based on how much of the boronite in the area it’s mined to figure out how long it will need to remain in this particular location before it finishes the job. And Burnham’s strategy—which Nhan goes along with, though she needs to be talked into it—pays off, as they determine that the DMA will be here for another week. That gives the Federation seven days to try a diplomatic solution, after which they can try Tarka’s crazy-ass plan.
The problem here is the one part of the episode that doesn’t work: Tarka. Early on, Culber points out that the wild card in all this is Tarka—they know Book is, at heart, a good person, but Tarka’s an issue here. That’s brought into sharp relief when the security protocol that Tarka installed in Book’s ship nearly gets four people killed.
And then the rest of the episode is spent completely not taking Tarka’s single-mindedness into account. This is a problem, since in the end Tarka’s the one who fucks everything up, an outcome that was so predictable that Culber actually predicted it, and yet none of our heroes took it into account when dealing with Book and Tarka throughout.
Which proves fatal. After Book agrees to wait a week, Tarka goes ahead and beams his isolytic weapon into the DMA’s control center. After everyone busted their ass to find a peaceful solution, Tarka plays the wild card and blows everything up anyhow.
This made me crazy, because as we’re watching this, both my wife and I were screaming at the TV, “Don’t just worry about Book, worry about Tarka.” And nobody worried about Tarka and he screwed them.
However, this is slightly made up for by the fact that Tarka’s plan winds up being a disaster on both a microcosmic and macrocosmic level. His plan was to use the DMA’s power source to travel to the alternate universe he and his friend found—but there’s no sign of the power source after he detonates the device, and he realizes belatedly that the power source is on the other side of the subspace corridor through which the DMA is sending the boronite to Species 10C.
The bigger issue is that, after the DMA is blown up, Species 10C just sends another DMA to replace it. Because when your dredge breaks down, you don’t stop mining, you bring in a new dredge to finish the job. (In a cute touch, the ship that detects the new DMA is the U.S.S. Mitchell, which I’m guessing is a tribute to the character of Gary Mitchell, who was a victim of the Enterprise‘s encounter with the galactic barrier—just outside of which Species 10C is currently hanging out—back in the original series’ “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”)
The revelation that the DMA is just a piece of mining equipment already indicated that Species 10C is very very far advanced from the Federation, and the dismissive ease with which they dealt with Tarka’s destruction of the DMA is an even bigger indication. These guys probably view the Federation the way you or I would view a colony of ants. Or maybe a bunch of amoebae…
One of my favorite lines in any Trek production is something Picard said to Data in the TNG episode “Peak Performance“: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.” The Discovery crew was pretty good at doing things right here, and they still lost, admittedly in this case because they did make one mistake, to wit, underestimating how much of a selfish asshole Ruon Tarka is. And Tarka himself made no mistakes when it came to the execution of the plan that he proposed back in “…But to Connect,” but it still fails utterly.
I’m heartened to see that the crew isn’t all united against Book and Tarka. Rhys—at least in part motivated by the backstory we learned about in “The Examples“—is very much on Book’s side, and he gets into arguments with Nilsson and especially Bryce on the subject.
Saru does important work reminding everyone to stay on mission when Bryce and Rhys get into their first argument on the subject, and indeed playing the role of rational peacemaker is Saru’s function throughout the episode—he keeps Nhan and Burnham on point, for starters, and is the one who gets them to try to find a middle ground. Doug Jones, as always, kills it both here, and in his other little bit of business.
The latter is an absolute delight, moving forward with a theme that’s been running since Ni’Var President T’Rina was introduced in “Unification III,” to wit, the spectacular chemistry between Saru and T’Rina. The latter helps Saru with some meditation techniques at the top of the episode, and the holographic communication ends with T’Rina inviting Saru out on a date. The mission precludes Saru being able to answer immediately, but it takes Culber giving Saru a metaphorical clubbing over the head to convince him to say yes. The two of them are an adorable couple, and Doug Jones and Tara Rosling have been magic every time they’ve been on screen together.
This is an episode that is equal parts frustrating and wonderful. On the one hand, it’s true to Discovery’s mission statement as a ship of science, and the crew tries to use their brains to solve the problem. More to the point, they try very hard to maintain Trek‘s trademark compassion, finding solutions in which the fewest number of people are hurt or die.
On the other hand, they totally should’ve seen Tarka’s final gambit coming.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is one of the contributors to the anthology The Fans are Buried Tales, edited by Peter David & Kathleen O. David, currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. It’s about a bunch of cosplayers snowed in at a convention who gather in the bar and tell stories in character for who/whatever they’re cosplaying as. Keith’s is “The Carpet’s Tale” (the cult of the Marriott carpet lives!!!!). Besides Keith and Peter, other Star Trek prose stylists contributing include Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, Aaron Rosenberg, John Peel, Rigel Ailur, and Robert T. Jeschonek. Please consider supporting it!
I had lots of small issues with this episode (though I enjoyed it) but two very big issues bear mentioning.
First, Michael and Book are boring as a loving, supportive couple who never lose trust in one another, despite being on opposite sides and literally engaging in ship-to-ship combat here. Real long-term relationships have irritation, miscommunication, strained feelings, etc. From Michael’s position, Book has betrayed her, and from Book’s position, Michael has failed to back him up. Last week at least hinted at some strain in the relationship, but it’s gone entirely here. Discovery really seems to love making everyone perfect allies, but sometimes we’re short-sighted jerks (and that makes for better character writing).
The bigger issue is, as you noted, this mission was a failure – a big fucking one. Starfleet was worried that Michael was too close to Book to be objective, and they were right. Michael had a chance to kill Book, and she didn’t take it. Now, it’s understandable – the conflict between duty and love is strong material for a character arc. But Michael should have faced consequences. She should have been dressed down by Nhan or maybe even Vance, for the mission ending in failure. But instead the episode ends with a weird heart-to-heart and a “you win some, you lose some” – along with Saru’s dating travails (which could have been left to next week). It’s just…argh! We know Michael will end up being proven right at the end of the season – can’t she have a temporary setback now?
A lot of dialogue that doesn’t stand up to reason in this one. Beyond that, Burnham’s diplomatic moment would be akin to someone in Biden’s cabinet getting Putin’s chauffer’s assurance that Russia won’t further invade Ukraine. “Mission accomplished people! Oh wait what, they attacked? But his driver said…” Absolutely absurd.
Further, didn’t Tarka posit that the power source was likely a star, like, I don’t know, the one contained in the solar system sized shielded bubble outside the galaxy? Shouldn’t he have known the power source was on the other side of the wormhole? I had already assumed that personally, had you? Is there any mining equipment that stores its power source in the business end of the drill? Last Tarka note – if getting the power source for the weapon was as easy as they made it here, why the casino subplot last episode?
Not surprised Burnham had time for a nice heart to heart with her former crew mate, completely free of the weight of the critical and potentially apocalyptic mishandling of their relatively simple mission for which they were arguably over equipped.
Not much has happened in the past couple episodes. A lot of treading water up to this moment. Let’s pick up the pace, please.
This was much better than last week’s. I love how much the focus was on finding the middle ground, always one of my favorite themes. I love it that their strategy for dealing with Book and Tarka was to send in a counselor to de-escalate rather than a security team with guns blazing. Maybe that’s a commentary on America’s hypermilitarized police forces.
Also great to see Nhan back, and I agree, it was a good idea to have the outsider at odds with the captain be someone we know and like rather than just a stock obstructionist.
And yes, it was screamingly obvious that Tarka was going to launch the bomb anyway. When Book backed down, I was mentally urging him to get between Tarka and the console.
But you know what I’m tired of seeing in sci-fi? Holograms that constantly glitch to remind us that they’re holograms. There’s no good in-story reason for their image quality to be so damn bad. 24th-century holograms could maintain perfect image quality indefinitely, but 32nd-century ones are so bad that they fritz out every ten seconds? It’s dumb. And it insults our intelligence. We saw T’Rina’s and Book’s holos materialize. We knew they weren’t really there. We don’t need a constant reminder.
@1/Karl: I disagree — I think it’s lazy, cliched writing to make people act like immature jerks to create problems that could otherwise be easily solved. The more interesting, meaningful conflicts are the ones where two reasonable, well-meaning people end up on opposite sides for equally good reasons, because there is no clear, simple answer.
And finding an alternative to violence should be a Starfleet captain’s default practice with anyone, whether it’s a lover or a stranger.
@3/CLB – I like to think the glitch is added on purpose to holograms by the users, like a fun retro filter. I mean, on video chats today I can overlay virtual items and video effects. Why not for a full hologram? Or maybe that’s the default setting for the holo-chat, so you remember you are not there with someone face-to-face. And we know how many people keep the default settings!
Another decent if not outstanding episode. I’m over-ready to meet species 10C, but maybe that won’t happen until the end of the season. Maybe it won’t happen at all. If they’re so much more advanced than the Federation, perhaps no meaningful contact is possible (unless they feel like talking down to our heroes’ level, like other superbeings the franchise has featured).
@5 – As it’s very unlikely that 10-C could be unaware of sentient life, a few options emerge. We can assume they’re either callous as a people or singular entity, or their leadership is callous. As for potential reasons for their uncaring nature, they’re either arrogant higher brings, purely logical synthetics, or extremely similar to humanity but with more advanced tech. Additionally, they might figure that since some other catastrophy is about to strike the Milky Way there isn’t an ethical concern with collecting materials before said catastrophy strikes. The last item could pair with any of the others.
I decided during the standoff that if the weapon didn’t get launched, the story would feel too anticlimactic and too neat. The conceit that Tarka fucked up and didnt anticipate the power source wasn’t there was novel. For all this planning and modeling, he overlooked that possibility. Too much ego and too much desperation.
I thought leaving the outcome for next episode (10Cs reaction) would be best, but them just placing another DMA as fast as you or I might change a drill bit or vacuum bag was not something I considered. They might have DMAs in multiple systems/galaxies. Even if you get them to leave the MW galaxy alone, they might be wiping out lives elsewhere!
Finally, one thing I really wanted to mention: in the scene where Book does the explodey thing and Discover has to avoid it, Burnham anticipates what is coming and orders Detmer to go down, under the shockwave. A fantastic use of the 3D aspect of space. Much better than the usual, here we are facing/fighting each other as if there are only two axes. A welcome sight.
@7/WTBA: “They might have DMAs in multiple systems/galaxies. Even if you get them to leave the MW galaxy alone, they might be wiping out lives elsewhere!”
“All In” established that the cloaked region occupied by Species 10-C is within the diffuse stellar halo around our galaxy — basically the near orbital space of the galaxy, technically still part of the galaxy itself, and no more distant from the Federation than, say, the Dominion or the Kazon would be, just in a more “vertical” direction. So it’s unlikely their influence reaches to other galaxies, aside from maybe some of the nearer small satellite galaxies around our own.
“in the scene where Book does the explodey thing and Discover has to avoid it, Burnham anticipates what is coming and orders Detmer to go down, under the shockwave. A fantastic use of the 3D aspect of space.”
I felt just the opposite, because any explosion in space would be 3D, an expanding sphere rather than the stupid, stupid, stupid flat-disk “shock wave” trope that was introduced in Star Trek VI and has unfortunately become a routine sci-fi gimmick ever since. It would expand in all directions, so there’d be no way to dive “under” it.
Plus, of course, there’s no such thing as a shock wave in vacuum, since a shock wave is a propagation through a medium. There would only be an expanding front of superheated gases and a burst of radiation, both of which would be pretty much in all directions. Well, strictly speaking there would be a shock wave through the diffuse interstellar medium, but it would be far too feeble to have any effect on a starship and can thus be discounted.
@8 – Additionally, I was thinking, even if a flat radial shockwave were to be caused by that explosion, the idea that it would expand across a vacuum in such a specifically predictable horizontal fashion in relation to the angle of the shot, so as to allow you to dodge it, would require a very specifically shaped charge, and would also require that the warhead load somehow resist reorientation by the continuous force of the explosion, regardless of the elements involved in the explosion. You’d be extremely lucky to pull it off once.
@9/Transceiver: I can imagine that maybe you could constrain the gas/debris wave (again, “shock wave” is a misnomer) to a roughly flat plane with some kind of shaped magnetic field, although you’d be more likely to get a pair of jets shooting out from the poles. If so, the ship might be able to detect the orientation of the magnetic field and predict the alignment of its equatorial plane. But the question is why you’d bother to design an explosive that way.
Anyway, I thought that the way Burnham and Book kept predicting each other’s moves was a good argument for why someone else should’ve been in command of Discovery for this mission, or at least why someone else should’ve been in charge of strategy for that part of the mission. He knew her playbook too well, so she couldn’t outmaneuver him. They needed someone whose strategies he didn’t know, someone who could take him by surprise.