A word about Michael

Now that I've had time to poke around the responses to the Disco S2 finale, I want to respond to one line of criticism I've seen. There are some who feel the finale does Michael a disservice, since her existence, and Discovery’s, are made secret. I think that's an unfairly selective reading, given the accumulated weight of events and the way her story plays out:

•  Her achievements are recognized and celebrated by everyone who has personally experienced them.
• She turns out to have been the moving force of the entire, season-long story arc --  the person through whose agency every other event occurs. 
• Michael is accompanied into the future by people who willingly sacrifice their 23rd-century lives out of personal loyalty to her.
• Michael's relationships consistently humanize the story for us, and...
• Michael's relationships are two-way streets. 

That last point is very important, and relates to another criticism I've seen: that Michael's role fulfills the trope of the female black character who carries the emotional burdens of others. But Michael gets as good as she gives; others carry burdens that make it possible for her to grow and achieve. Unlike those who feel that Spock and Pike steal the show from Michael, I find that, to a large degree, they carry a lot of water for her. Michael pieces Spock back together, but he does exactly the same for her. And, while Pike's sojourn on Discovery helps him come to terms with his past (sitting out the Klingon war) and his future (his TOS destiny), it is through his insistent belief in the message of the Red Angel that Michael fulfills her destiny. It's Michael in whom he's been placing his faith all along, a fact that comes as no surprise by the time it's made explicit, because we've watched him come to know her and believe in her week by week. 

By the time we get to the end of the season, Michael, having confronted her sense of abandonment and despair and grappled with the reappearance of a dead parent, has overcome a Hamlet-like funk (which I suppose makes Spock Ophelia) and is ready to take center stage and bring the story to its heroic conclusion. She can do that because the people around her have supported her along the way. It's too big a stretch to say that, from a narrative point of view, Michael is being denied the recognition or the centrality due the hero. Her erasure and that of Discovery are necessitated by a convoluted story half a century in the making, and were inevitable from the start.

Where Michael's story is weakest in S2 is in her failure to connect with the series' regular characters, especially Tyler and Tilly, with both of whom she's supposed to have a special bond. That, I do attribute to the presence of Spock and Pike. They're the ones with whom Michael forges the deepest bonds this season. I'm not saying it was a bad choice to bring them into this story. They lift Discovery out of the weird, negative place Lorca left it (both the ship and the show). They take away the bad aftertaste of dysfunction and mistrust. But their presence comes at a price, and other characters pay it. That, too, is down to Michael's central role. It's an ensemble cast, but Michael is its heart, and everyone needs time with her. 

My sense is that the writers manage one exception, Saru, whose episode early in the season, as sketchy as it is, sets up an interesting dynamic for him going forward. Tyler doesn't fare as well; I have no idea what his journey has been about this season, other than working for the wrong guys, hanging around in the background a lot, and not really dealing with the massive shit he remains saddled with from S1. Tilly seems to have landed in comic-relief land as everyone's goofy, brilliant kid sister; her relationship with Michael advances not at all.

S2 has other problems, too. As in S1, we're given an intriguing antagonist, Control, who could have represented a deep, philosophical problem -- something about the moral danger of an unwitting act of creation, maybe? -- but...doesn't. Meanwhile, the deep, philosophical problem left over from S1, in the person of Mirror Georgiou (Do we all embody the potential for good and evil, or is there some inherently different nature in each? Can evil be redeemed? What role does forgiveness play, if any?), fades into frustrating ambiguity and cliched fetishwear.

I think from the outset, Disco intended to move its central characters out of TOS continuity; there’s no other explanation for the big canon issues raised by the spore drive tech from day one. But in the meantime, Disco juices the TOS time frame with a more inclusive, enlightened group of characters who should have been there from the start. I have my doubts about the leap to the future -- I can live without Voyager redux -- but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. I think what the show needs more than anything else is to avoid bringing on any more major, single-season characters, so the regulars finally get a chance to take and hold center stage. All of them.

The Circle of Trek

First, the news: An animated Star Trek series is coming to Nickelodeon. Cool!

And now, a long, seemingly pointless story. The dots will be connected by the end. Promise.

A couple of days ago, I stumbled across this MeTV list of forgotten, mostly short-lived 1970s sci fi shows. To me, it was like unearthing buried treasure. That’s my TV generation, and I do dearly love me some cheesy sci fi. In this glorious age of YouTube, most of this stuff is readily available, so I randomly picked one to watch: a live-action Saturday-morning kids’ show from Filmation called Ark II. It's about some young scientists and a talking chimp (no, really), all of whom have biblical names (even the chimp), driving a futuristic RV called -- surprise! -- Ark II around a post-apocalyptic Paramount Ranch…ummm, I mean, Earth…to bring salvation…ummm, I mean, science…to a humanity that has reverted to primitive, ignorant lawlessness. It was reeeeally something. Like much of the TV of its day, it's a bizarre combination of entertaining ideas, social commentary, cheesy writing, bad acting, cheap production values, and some choices that do not hold up well after 40 years (like guest star Jonathan Harris (aka Dr. Smith) doing a dreadful Irish accent as the adult leader of a group of vagrant boys, many black, who call him...I kid you not...Master Fagin).

So anyway, my friend Chris (god bless Chris, he’s into pop-culture nostalgia even more than I am) comments that he thinks the futuristic RV was made for the George Peppard sci fi movie Damnation Alley, to which I respond, "Apparently not," because by then I’d watched the behind-the-scenes Ark II documentary made for the DVD release (NB: I have no life), where I learned that they actually built the vehicle for this series (and that it kept falling apart and was nearly undrivable).

So then – stay with me – my friend Cory pipes in with, “Wasn't there an RV-themed SF movie with John Saxon and Lurch? Was it Planet Earth with the Dinks?”

Now THIS is where it really starts to get interesting, because all kinds of bells go off in my head.

Cory is correct. Not only that: Planet Earth was a Gene Roddenberry TV movie/series pilot, a reworking of an earlier pilot he did, Genesis II. Both were set on post-apocalyptic Earth and dealt with the decline and rebirth of civilization. This is how Wikipedia describes Genesis II: “The film, which opens with the line, ‘My name is Dylan Hunt. My story begins the day on which I died,’ is the story of a 20th-century man thrown forward in time to a post-apocalyptic future, by an accident in suspended animation.” And Planet Earth "was the second attempt by Roddenberry to create a weekly series set on a post-apocalyptic future Earth. The previous pilot was Genesis II, and it featured many of the concepts and characters later redeveloped and mostly recast in Planet Earth.”

I have to rewatch to see if there was a futuristic RV in either or both. It’s been decades since I’ve seen them. In fact, I think the only time I’ve ever seen Planet Earth in its entirety was in a screening at a Star Trek convention sometime in the mid-1970s, when I was about 13 or 14. Everything about the experience weirded me out. Not only had Gene Roddenberry made something other than Star Trek (somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that that was possible), but he’d made this thing about a bleak future where women oppressed men by keeping them drugged, which, I suppose, in hindsight, was meant to be some kind of feminist statement made via relatable role reversal, but to me back then just seemed ultra-creepy and misogynistic. At least, that’s my recollection some 40 years later. (Seems like my memory is pretty good. From Wikipedia: “The pilot focused on gender relations from an early 1970s perspective. Dylan Hunt, confronted with a post-apocalyptic matriarchal society, muses, ‘Women's lib? Or women's lib gone mad?’”) Be that as it may, it was pure Roddenberry, moralizing on a contemporary issue in the context of a futuristic sci fi setting.

Anyhow, it certainly seems likely that Roddenberry’s two pilots inspired the kid-friendly, dumbed-down, talking-chimp-inclusive, morality-play-of-the-week Ark II. After all, it’s not like post-apocalyptic sci fi was common on TV. And the dates line up: Genesis II was 1973, Planet Earth was 1974, and Ark II was 1976. The similarities in the heavy-handed biblical titles between Genesis II and Ark II are surely not coincidental, either. And of course, the influence of Star Trek itself is apparent, in everything from the costume design to the cast diversity (a white man, an Asian woman, a Latino teen, and, of course, a chimp) to the thinly veiled social commentary. To seal the deal, Filmation, which produced Ark II, also produced Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974).

Which brings me back to where I started: the announcement of a new Star Trek animated series, to be produced by CBS’ Eye Animation Productions, Secret Hideout, and of course -- Roddenberry Entertainment.

So what's it going to be like? Here’s a description from Indiewire: “The series will feature CG animation and follow the adventures of a group of lawless teens who discover a derelict Starfleet ship. Faced with such temptation, these young rebels will use the ship and along the way, learn life lessons and search for meaning and salvation.”

So basically, Ark II with a spaceship instead of a futuristic RV? (Cue music: “It's the circle of life,
And it moves us all…”)

And...hang on...didn't Discovery just get thrown into the distant future? Will there be some Federation-style civilization rebuilding? Hmm...

See, I told you I’d connect the dots.

Compare the opening of Planet Earth:

to the very similar opening of Ark II:

both cousins to the traditional Star Trek opening we know so well (here from TAS), about finding new civilizations rather than rebuilding an old one:

Disco Sliders and other post-S2 thoughts

It’s impossible to talk about the Disco finale without starting at the end, given the seismic shift involved. No matter what you think of the idea of jumping the show 1,000 years into the future, you have to admit, it’s the gutsiest move any Trek series has ever made. That’s one very big series reset button. So what will it mean? This calls for some of my unique, bold, mostly incorrect speculation.

Since Discovery has the technology and the know-how to do both time and multiverse travel, and since Control seems to have been destroyed, could the series be heading toward a Sliders-type scenario, with our heroes leaping around different time lines and universes trying to find their way home? They can’t actually make it, of course, because if they did, the whole retcon that wipes Discovery and her crew out of Federation history would be undone.

But here’s a thought: They could turn up in the Kelvin timeline, which has far less established continuity and is freer to play fast and loose with the characters’ back stories. This would be a great way to resurrect Kelvin, which at the moment seems to be destined for the scrap heap. It would be cool if Kelvin Spock has never had a sister, and Michael has to start a new relationship with a brother who never knew her. (I think this actually works, timeline-wise. According to Memory Alpha, the Kelvin timeline diverges in 2233; Spock was born in 2230, so the divergence occurs before Michael would have come into his life.)

Meanwhile, the question that’s been bothering me: Why did Discovery have to time travel once Georgiou had (suspiciously easily) destroyed Leland/Control? Sure, maybe they just couldn’t be certain whether the AI still existed in some form somewhere else; when the stakes are end-of-all-sentient-life big, it does seem better safe than sorry. But what if the whole thing was something Georgiou had set up from the start, because she wanted to get the hell out of Dodge into some other time zone, where there might be less nanny-state Federation thwarting her designs on galactic domination? A great story line next season would be the crew of the Discovery discovering (it’s what they do) that Georgiou intentionally set Control on its destructive path in the first place. (Do not take your eye off Philippa Georgiou. Can we all try to remember that she is not your edgy, snarky, leather-clad favorite aunt, but an evil super-genius from an evil mirror universe? Why has everyone gone all warm and fuzzy about the woman for whom Kelpian ganglia were snack food?)

I guess this is where I try to evaluate the season as a whole. But that’s really hard to do, because it somehow managed to succeed wildly in the same moments when it was also being kinda disappointing. Some character and relationship arcs were just crazy good, the kinds that your brain instantly files under “things I will mentally replay whenever I’m having a sleepless night, on a long flight, or am otherwise bored and incapacitated.” Others were left to languish or were treated haphazardly.

Michael/Spock shot to number one with a bullet on my list of all-time favorite Star Trek relationship stories. It wasn’t perfect – there were moments when they ran inexplicably hot and cold for reasons that can only be described as, “because the script said so” – but when it was working, it was riveting. Sonequa Martin-Green and Ethan Peck played the friction so well, so uncomfortably, that the emotional resolution felt like a physical relief. (Case in point, that moment in “Perpetual Infinity” when Spock gets Michael to live in the present and play 3D chess: “The board is yours, Michael.” Melt.) I absolutely love how much of the T’Pol dynamic they brought to Spock – how deep and scary a Vulcan in mental distress can be, and how difficult the struggle to come back must be.

Captain Pike’s story is another high point. It was an absolutely brilliant idea to show us the crew of Discovery through his outsider’s eyes and, at the same time, to let us watch him become one of them. Pike could have easily been an irritating, goody-goody Boy Scout, but the writing and Anson Mount’s portrayal made his fundamental decency and honor not just believable, but profound. And for a lifelong Trek fan, closing the circle on his storyline, with him reconnecting with Vina and then witnessing his own future, was worth the price of admission alone.

It was also a joy to watch Saru develop into a confident leader. Yeah, the story of how all that came about was kinda wonky, but Doug Jones played the hell out of it, winning me over by the sheer magnetic force of his total commitment to the character.  Nice doesn’t have to be meek. I love that.

I’m also crazy about minor characters who are so appealing that I start building a whole mental picture that’s mostly me filling in copious blanks, sure, but with just enough onscreen meat to put on those bones. These are often some of the most fun characters to think about because there’s not enough to disprove what I want to believe. Detmer and Owo, I’m looking at you. Also Kat Cornwell, whom I love so much that she could be the subject of a whole separate post. (Yeah, I know she’s not exactly a minor character, but she’s more blanks than fill-ins.)

But then there’s a whole range of bobbles and total misses:
• Georgiou lurking about, being oddly one of the team despite her obvious ulterior motives (see my speculation above), her actions and acceptance by others being basically utterly inexplicable.
• Ash/Michael just fizzled. We’re meant to see continued interest there throughout the season, but with so little onscreen time and development, it became unconvincing. It started looking more and more like a legacy S1 relationship that the writers now and then had to acknowledge with a quick will-they-won’t-they scene. L’Rell, too. What a waste of a truly excellent Klingon.
• Tilly devolving into a caricature of an insecure adolescent whose babbling and lack of professionalism is mysteriously tolerated, and who seems to now play the role of the weird kid sister everyone is fond of in the way one is fond of…well, weird kid sisters. I started out thinking she was very Bashir-like, but instead of growing into her role, she seems to be going the other way. I’m starting to wonder if she isn’t more intended to be an answer to the absurdly perfect Wesley Crusher (later TNG retcon notwithstanding). But if so, they seem to have leaned too hard in the other direction. Mind you, my Tilly love is hard to kill, so I fully hope and expect for her to come roaring back in S3.
• Culber and Stamets, whose relationship disintegrates unconvincingly and then is reconstituted even more unconvincingly.
• Jet Reno, whose promise of dry humor in times of crisis never fully pays off, and who winds up bringing just one trick to the party: “Hey look! It’s Tig Notaro!”
• The whole Airiam thing, which wasn’t awful, but which could have been so much better if her character development hadn’t been smushed into the one episode where they also killed her off.
• Sarek and Amanda. Seemed like they had a big role to play – but it turned out to be just a well done, affective, but not very germane farewell scene.

As to the season’s story line: It was entertaining, but I can’t help thinking, if you’re going all out to do a continuing story line in a season that’s much shorter than conventional American TV, shouldn’t making it tight, suspenseful, and well paced be a huge goal?  And yet too often, we got hand-waving or blind alleys. One of my biggest complaints was Control itself. This Big Bad kind of fizzled. By the end, it was just an enemy fleet led by a guy whom Michelle Yeoh could beat in a cool fight sequence, which made the whole escaping-to-the-distant-future thing seem a lot less pressing.

I could go on: the dropping of the entire Klingon empire from the story; the sketchy interference in Kaminar; the spore drive that we must not used except when the script calls for it; the reduction of the entire mycelial network to a plot device to torture Culber. I was really hoping that some of the plot wonkiness of season 1, which I figured had mostly to do with behind-the-scenes show-runner drama, would have been ironed out. But then, from what I read, there was still more behind-the-scenes show-runner drama in S2. Even so, the overall result was more satisfying than S1. (Nope, I am not letting go of the seemingly careful development of Lorca as a complex character, only to reduce him to the cartoon villain. Cannot get past that.)

There was more than enough to love in S2 to make me come down on the side of yay, but I can’t help wishing for that one mind-blowingly perfect season of new-golden-age-of-television Star Trek perfection, and this wasn’t it. I’m also not quite reconciled to the fact that Disco keeps making me say goodbye to characters I’ve fallen in love with (dear god in heaven, please create a spinoff with Pike, Spock, and Number One!) and story lines that don’t quite feel complete.

Thus begins the looooooong hiatus.

Disco Daystrom

With the Disco S2 finale just days away, I'm thinking about a Star Trek episode that aired just over 51 years ago.

I've seen a lot of speculation that Disco's Control might be the Borg origin story – but I never see mentioned the TOS episode that this story line resembles even more: “The Ultimate Computer.” That’s the one where the experimental M-5 computer is tested on the Enterprise, only to go berzerk and kill people in self defense. Sounds familiar, right? (This is one of those classic episodes where it turns out Kirk can defeat the crazy AI by talking to it, a dramatic choice that doesn’t really fit with the more action-packed, contemporary approach.)

When you get right down to it, the Control story line in Disco owes as much to “The Ultimate Computer” as Star Trek: The Motion Picture did to “The Changeling.” No doubt many current fans and critics don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of TOS – but some surely do. Yet now, instead of generating the kind of criticism for unoriginality that the movie did, Disco's obvious parallels to a TOS episode don’t even come up. I guess the passage of time and all the additional Star Trek that’s been created in the interim have made the reworked story seem more like an homage than a rip-off. TOS episodes are no longer individual stories so much as progenitors of entire genres.

But anyway, at Disco’s point in the Star Trek timeline, Doctor Richard Daystrom, creator of M-5 and namesake of the Daystrom Institute (which, the Memory Alpha wiki informs me, is actually mentioned in the Disco episode “Choose Your Pain,” so it already exists), is somewhere between his duotronic breakthrough and the rollout of M-5. He is undoubtedly considered one of the Federation’s preeminent AI experts. Right about now, he’s probably in the process of developing the technology to program an AI with human engrams (unfortunately, as it turns out, his own, which tend toward instability and paranoia – hence the M-5 debacle).

So as we head into the S2 finale, I’m hoping for, at the very least, a significant Daystrom mention, if not an actual appearance. That would be a very cool piece of canon continuity.

OTOH, it's damn near impossible to explain Spock’s failure to mention Control when M-5 comes along. So either this will just remain a big canon continuity problem (and hey, what would any extensive sci fi franchise be without big canon continuity problems?), or it’s another clue that there is a huge reset coming, with events of this season entirely erased from the timeline, probably as a result of Discovery's imminent trip to the future (which I speculated about in my previous post). We’ll find out soon enough!

I can't let any discussion of "The Ultimate Computer" go by without mentioning one of the most touching Kirk/Spock moments in all of TOS, and here it is.

Such Sweet Reset?

Ten things about Such Sweet Sorrow. Spoilers ahead.

1. If this is a setup to fling Discovery into the future long-term (after getting Spock off the ship -- maybe he’s on that unexploded photon torpedo that’s going to hit the Enterprise?), will this be some kind of time-travel reset button that wipes Discovery out of the past, fixing all continuity problems regarding the spore drive, knowledge of the mirror universe, and Michael herself? OK, I think I like this. Also I think I've had enough of falling in love with single-season characters, and stranding Discovery in the future could be a way to stop doing that. (Oh, who'm I kidding?)

2. Why does bringing the sphere knowledge into the future make it safe from Control? Presumably an AI that can inhabit anything/anyone is immortal. Can’t it just wait until it catches up with Discovery in the future?

3. It feels like Disco does a hurry-up-and-wait thing a lot, where there’s a giant danger -- no time to lose, Leland is right behind us! -- but somehow plenty of time for touching character scenes.

4. I love that eyes-up thing they did. Twice.

5. The Michael/Sarek/Amanda scene: I cried. I’m not ashamed.

6. If this is it for Ash/Michael, they're going out with a whimper, not a bang. That spark hasn't been burning very bright all season.

7. Where did the Enterprise come from, anyway? And how did it get there with this giant Section 31 fleet in the way?

8. If you need to distract from a dodgy plot framework on which you've hung some gloriously shmaltzy character scenes, you could do a lot worse than have Sonequa Martin-Green and Anson Mount doing the distracting.

9. I really, really need more Number One. And more Pike. Basically, I need a whole series on the pre-Kirk Enterprise.

10. I’m not getting that ENT tie-in I’ve been dreaming of, am I?

ADDING: Bonus 11. On second thought, Discovery isn't staying in the future. Or at least, its crew isn't. I can believe that one person -- Spock -- somehow gets off the train just as it's pulling out of the station, or gets returned through the wormhole, or whatever. But this can't possibly be the end for Hugh and Paul...can it? That it's Michael and Ash's last goodbye I can believe. That relationship had "ill-fated" stamped all over it right from the start. But Hugh and Paul? Not bloody likely. While their relationship is peripheral to the main story, it's central to Disco's vision of IDIC. I can't believe they'd just let it fizzle. Unless Discovery's trip to Tomorrowland is not permanent, but not brief, either -- like, a season or two? The writers wouldn't make us wait that long for a Hugh/Paul reconciliation...would they?