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.
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