Ruk-roh! Picard finale speculation

Next week will be the season finale of Picard (!!!!!), set up by a twisty "Et In Arcadia Ego part 1," in which we meet Dr. Altan Inigo Soong, son of Data-daddy Dr. Noonian Soong. Brent Spiner is great as Data, but because Data is so gentle (as Picard rightly says), Spiner is even more fun to watch chewing the scenery as Lore or as a Soong (Arik Soong in Enterprise was fabulous).

Soong the younger reveals that there are higher-level, synthetic beings out there, watching us, and that the sub-space frequencies needed to contact them are encoded in the Admonition, the crazy-making ancient vision the Romulans have been passing on for millennia. Conveniently, Soong has already created the necessary beacon to summon these beings.

Meanwhile, we also learn that Soong has been working on a “golem” that requires mind-transfer technology. Now, where have we seen this before?

In the TOS episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of,” Christine Chapel's ex, Roger Korby, has found an ancient android, Ruk, tending machines that can make androids -- and can transfer people's minds into them. Ruk (you remember Ruk -- he's Lurch!) is the survivor of an ancient battle with the “Old Ones, the ones who made us.” But is Ruk the only survivor? Or have his people been out there, waiting and watching, maybe as self-appointed defenders of all future synthetics, knowing that eventually organics will always turn on them, as the Old Ones did? Has Soong been working with information about these beings all along? Is that how he’s making the golem, as Korby once did, and how he conveniently creates a beacon so quickly?

Meanwhile, there’s the question of Discovery and Control, and whether Picard ties in with that story, as I and many others have speculated. Is this an alternative to that theory, or could both be true? Might Control have reached back in time to manipulate Ruk's people into serving its purposes? Or might a message from the Red Angel somehow have called on past synthetics to come to the aid of organic life? The message in the Admonition is ambiguous:

"Life begins, the dance of division and replication. Imperfect, finite. Organic life evolves, yearns for perfection. That yearning leads to synthetic life, but organics perceive this perfection as a threat, when they realize their creations do not age, or become sick or die. They will seek to destroy them and in so doing, destroy themselves. Beyond the boundaries of time and space, we stand, an alliance of synthetic life, watching you, waiting for your signal. Contact us and we will come. You will have our protection. Your evolution will be their extinction."

Who will seek to destroy whom? Who will have their protection? Whose evolution will be whose extinction? (Putting on my copy editor hat for a moment: Kids, this is why pronouns need clear antecedents!)

Maybe -- and this would fit the theme of Picard, that fear of the Other is the root of all evil -- there will be a spiritual evolution, which will cause the extinction of a false distinction between different kinds of life? Tune in next time...

I love that Picard is leaning into the theme of another of my favorite TOS episodes, “Errand of Mercy,” in which fear of the Other drives each side to believe in the absolute rightness of its own cause,  inevitably leading both sides down the path of violence and hatred. In Picard, that's exactly what happens to the Romulans, the Federation, and now, the synths. I doubt it's a coincidence that the Federation-Klingon conflict in "Errand of Mercy" only ends with the intervention of superior beings, the Organians, and now, in Picard, we're getting some outsider superior beings, too.

One of the things I hated most about TNG (especially in its early seasons) was the idea that somehow, humanity achieves a level of perfection that makes it immune to such basic failings as prejudice and tribalism. That didn’t feel believable or true, so it felt like the show was pushing Utopian Kool-Aid; I mistrusted its rose-colored vision. By contrast, in TOS, there was a sense that we can make huge strides forward, but goodness will still be a struggle, and no matter how far we come, there will always be more to go. I love that Picard is restoring that sense. It seems so much more honest, and in a way, more hopeful, because it speaks to the possibility of improving ourselves despite our weaknesses.

A unified Discovery-Picard theory

At this point (post Picard episode 7, "Nepenthe"), I find the theory in this article (click and read; I’ll wait) to be pretty convincing: Discovery and Picard are part of a unified canon dealing with Control, a malevolent AI that evolves from a Section 31 system. Now that we’ve seen the vision Commodore Oh shares with Jurati in a mind-meld, which resembles Spock’s apocalyptic visions, that’s not very farfetched. But I think the theory as presented in this piece might be wrong about at least one thing.

In considering how the Romulans of the past might have developed the mythology of a future AI apocalypse, the author theorizes that it has something to do with the supernova that destroys the Romulan homeworld and, in the first Abrams movie, throws Spock and Nero into the past. But if we're looking to explain information being transmitted through time, why look any further than the method established in Discovery: the Red Angel? We know that Michael Burnham acts as the Red Angel, jumping through time to guide Discovery and make sure events develop in a way that will ultimately defeat Control.

In Discovery, Control is after data from an ancient sphere that is now stored in the ship's computer -- data Control will somehow use to become fully sentient, or all-powerful, or something. At the end of S2, Discovery jumps into the distant future in order to keep that data from Control. But there’s a gaping logic hole in that resolution that's been bothering me ever since S2 ended: Control is immortal and doesn’t care how much time passes. (I keep thinking of Marvin waiting a billion years at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe). Control will eventually catch up to Discovery and go after the sphere data again. How does jumping to the future solve the problem? All they’ve really done is buy some time.

But for what?

My theory is that Picard is beginning to answer that question. Maybe the Red Angel spreads a vision through time of a future synthpocalypse in the hope that, with multiple civilizations working on the problem over millennia, a solution might evolve organically, a way of defeating Control that Discovery’s crew couldn’t hope to devise and achieve in the limited time available to them. The universe is a quantum computer, and the Red Angel feeds it a problem that it works on in the background for millennia.

How better to defeat an AI than with another AI? Maybe there’s something about the work AI developers have been doing for centuries – something in the work of the Daystroms, Soongs, and Maddoxes, which they may not even have been consciously aware of – that addresses the problem of Control. Maybe the impulse to create an AI with empathy for sentient organic life, an AI that actually emulates sentient organic life, is sentient organic life's inevitable response to the threat of an AI bent on its total annihilation. That kind of AI would serve as our defender. What if Ramdha’s reaction to Soji, calling her the Destroyer, isn’t referring to the destruction of the Romulans, but to the destruction of Control? If Control created the Borg (which Discovery hints at with the subtlety of a falling anvil), that might very well be what Ramdha, an ex-Borg, means.

So that’s my theory of the day: Soji is the anti-Control, or at least, a step toward the development of one. With my track record, though, I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

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?

The Red Angel Wrinkle

In my last post, after expounding on how the Red Angel was probably Michael, what with her archangel name and all, I said, "Maybe Michael is more red herring than Red Angel?" And...yup. It was!

So I'm stopped at a red light, thinking about the Red Angel (which seems appropriate, I guess), who turns out to be Michael's long-lost parent, a scientist who got lost in time because of a science experiment, and it hit me -- the probable inspiration for the left turn this story just took: A Wrinkle in Time. Sullen, troubled Michael (Meg) and cranky, troubled Spock (Charles Wallace) set off on a crazy adventure to find the absent parent. There's even a dangerous Big Brother A.I. called Control (in Wrinkle, CENTRAL Central Intelligence and/or IT) controlling stuff and eventually destroying all sentient life if it can just get the right software upgrade. (ADDING: I suppose that makes Pike Calvin.)

Will the rest play out along these lines? Was Michael's mother lost and/or captive, as Meg's father was, or has she actually been controlling events? Will Michael have to save Spock as Meg does Charles Wallace? Will the message be about the importance of love and individuality over complacence and conformity? Fair warning: Whenever I come up with a brilliant literary basis for my speculation, I'm generally wrong. But still...I mean, think about it. Especially, Spock is Charles Wallace. He so is.

On the whole, not my favorite episode. Mostly, I was confused. Why did they have to trap the Red Angel? What exactly is Control up to and what is its relationship to the Red Angel? If they thought the Red Angel was future Michael, then wouldn't she know that they were planning to use her as bait, because she was there? But maybe that's exactly what Spock realizes -- that he has to stop anyone else from saving her, so that she would know he's going to do that, so she has to come back and save herself. (Don't you just love time travel stories?) Hopefully, some of those answers are coming, but I would have liked to have a clearer idea of the point of the trap they were setting.

Also, am I supposed to be warming up to Georgiou now? I interpreted her flirting with Stamets and Culber as an attempt to make them jealous and get them interested in each other again, which is...nice? I think? I really don't know how to feel about this, what with her eating Kelpians and all.

Also also, Burnham being all pissed off at Ash for being in Section 31 seems kind of harsh, given that he probably doesn't have a whole lot of options as a part-Klingon sort-of murderer.

One last thing: They need to stop this nonsense of all Tilly's scenes being about her inappropriate nervous babbling. It's not funny anymore, and they're just reducing her to a running gag. I will not stand for that. Just stop.

Oh wait, no, there was one other thing: Trembling lips and soulful singing at Airiam's funeral. Sob.

Post-Daedalus Project (SPOILERS!)

So far this season on It Started With Trek…my blogging ambitions have flagged miserably. But after “Project Daedalus,” the motivation is strong. Because holy shit, that was so good but so upsetting.

Poor Airiam. We hardly knew ya. And I mean that quite literally. As much as I liked this episode, it commits a sin that really, really bugs me – painting a character’s backstory in broad strokes immediately before killing them. This would have been so much better if her story had been revealed gradually throughout the season. But oh well, I still cried. Once again, proof that Jonathan Frakes is better behind the camera than in front of it. (But am I the only one who thinks Sonequa Martin-Green's stage-fighting always seems fake?)

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk Red Angel. I imagine everyone has a theory. Mostly, I’ve avoided them, but I have run across the most obvious: that the Red Angel is Michael herself, presumably from one possible future. And TBH, it’s hard not to go with this one, because:

a. Michael is the protagonist, so it makes sense for the Big Thing to be All About Her.
b. The Red Angel is clearly stalking Michael’s ship.
c. Spock says it’s human.
d. It seems to be benevolent. But mostly…

Archangel Michael Defeating Satan, by Guido Reni, 1636

e. The name. Michael. Y’know, the archangel? In the Old Testament, Daniel (Spock) has a vision of Michael (Michael), which he alone can see. It's an apocalyptic vision, and it leaves him very shaken up. Something about him battling something terrible in the End Time. Like maybe when all life in the galaxy is going to be wiped out? And in Revelation, Michael fights Satan (evil Georgiou?). I can’t be the only one who’s noticed this.
f. It’s mentioned that Michael Burnham "died" in the bombing of the Vulcan Learning Center by the Logic Extremists (OMG Logic Extremists! More on them later). So she’s been resurrected. Did I mention that the big battle led by the Archangel Michael involves resurrection?

NB: I’m always amazed by how many sci fi writers crib their stories from the Bible.

But with all that said…maybe Michael is more red herring than Red Angel? (HAHAHAHAHA. See what I did there?) Maybe Spock is the Angel. He says the angel is human, and he is acting awfully emotional and human at this point. Maybe future-human-identifying-Spock is trying to warn now-Spock that he mustn’t go down that path because it will lead to the apocalypse. The upshot is going to be that Spock must reject his human half and live as a Vulcan to save everything, resulting in the Vulcan-identifying Spock we see in TOS. And that’s why he never talks about his sister, Michael – because it was his childish love and worship of his big sister that led him down the human path, and it’s too painful for Vulcan-identifying Spock to think about her.

I feel compelled at this point to mention Sybok. I mean, Sybok had visions. Sybok rejected logic. Sybok wanted to make Vulcans more…well, human. OK, granted, I really have no idea how this would fit in with Sybok as we meet him in ST V (or as I like to call it, The Movie That Shall Not Be Named). But there’s too much religious mumbo-jumbo about Sybok to dismiss his relevance to the religious mumbo-jumbo here. Does it seem likely that Sybok is explicitly part of this story? Not really. But he sure is a flashing neon question mark in the background.

But anyway, the Michael = Red Angel theory does seem to have the most going for it. If I were a betting Trekkie, that’s where my money would be. And certainly, whoever the Red Angel is, they are trying to make sure Discovery achieves certain specific things. The kinds of things that will keep a time line chugging along as it should.

Hey...maybe the Red Angel is Crewman Daniels?

Back to the Logic Extremists. Who are they? What are they? Why are they?  A reactionary backlash against the Syrannites, of course! I mean, I really, really hope so. Firstly, because it makes so much sense. The Syrannites of ENT were all about reintroducing ethics, mysticism, and spirituality into the Vulcan way of life. The cold, pragmatic logic-extremist Vulcan admiral Parr is such a throwback to the Vulcans of ENT. And secondly, because this would be the perfect way to bring T’Pol (and dare I say, possibly even Trip?) into Disco.  PLEASE MAKE THIS HAPPEN!

One more thing: I need to resurrect a season 1 theory here. When it was revealed that the Section 31 HQ is a former penal colony, the alarm bells in my head were deafeningly loud: “Dagger of the Mind” was set in a penal colony for the criminally insane. Pike says that Section 31 is going to torture Spock at this location with some infernal device (sorry, I don’t have time to find the exact quote). In the TOS episode “Dagger of the Mind,” a “neural neutraliser,” supposedly a therapeutic device, is used to manipulate, read, and wipe minds. The thing is, in season 1, I was already seeing echos of “Dagger of the Mind.” I’ll just quote myself here and let you draw your own conclusions:

“Disco gave us an episode named "Lethe," which dealt a lot with Admiral Cornwell, prompting fans to speculate that she might somehow become the Lethe who was a character in the TOS episode "Dagger of the Mind" -- a woman on a penal colony for the criminally insane who describes her former self, before treatment with the neural neutralizer, as malignant and hateful. Seeing Emperor Georgiou snatched by Burnham and brought along for the ride to the Prime Universe, I speculated, mostly facetiously, that she, not Cornwell, seems more likely to become Lethe. Certainly, the words malignant and hateful describe MU Georgiou pretty well.
And then something hit me -- something I somehow had never noticed in my four-plus decades as a TOS fan.
The penal colony in "Dagger of the Mind" is on Tantalus V. The Mirror Universe device used by Kirk to destroy his enemies in "Mirror Mirror" is the Tantalus Field.
Tantalus is a figure from ancient Greek mythology -- he invited the gods to a feast and cooked up the body of his own son to feed them. ("Here, have my ganglia. You deserve a treat.")  This offended the gods, causing Zeus to hang him forever above a stream for which he eternally thirsted, but of which he could never drink.
Also from ancient Greek mythology, Lethe is one of the rivers of the underworld across which the dead were ferried by Charon. Emperor Georgiou's palace-ship is the ISS Charon.
That's a whole lot of coincidence going on right there, unless it's not. Could Emperor Georgiou actually become Lethe, and somehow her Tantalus V experience find its way back to the MU in the form of Kirk's Tantalus Field?
Crazy, right?”

Other random stuff:

1. While it makes no sense that Tilly would have gotten as far as she has without a bit more self control, I love her outbursts. When Admiral Cornwell appears on the bridge, and Tilly takes it as an opportunity to vent her anxieties and make it known that she is NOT a rule-breaker…I just want to give her a squeeze. (Tilly reminds me so much of one of my own kids.)

2. When Cornwell reassures Pike that he’s what’s good about the Federation, that he’s what they need to preserve, it’s endearing because it’s so rare to see the Man In Control look that insecure. In that moment, you can see him “let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding,” as the fanfic would say. He needed that reassurance from a powerful woman. So refreshing.

3. The fact that they have the Stamets/Culber relationship on the back burner in such a tense, unresolved state makes me so sad every time I see Stamets. Like, how does he keep showing up for work?

4. Cannot end without taking a moment to react to the “Previously on Star Trek” opening of “If Memory Serves.” SQUEEEEEEEEE. Sometime in the mid-1970s, having only just learned that the original pilot had been turned into the two-episode “Menagerie,” teenage Me sat in a NYC hotel meeting room with a bunch of other colossal nerds for a screening of “The Cage,” which had almost never been seen before by the public. Last week, I got just that excited about it ALL OVER AGAIN.

On Disco season 2 so far and other Trek news

Four episodes into season 2 of Discovery, and I haven't updated this blog once yet. Bad me.

Basically, I like a lot about it. I really like that they're letting the crew feel like a crew; bringing Pike in to facilitate that was not a bad idea. I like Anson Mount in the role. I continue to love all these characters, and I especially like the way the story keeps them off balance so much of the time. I like the way their personal stories and the larger story arc are intertwined and feed off each other. But I'm not so sure that the mysterious Red Angel thread is strong enough to carry the season. It feels very MacGuffin-y. Worse, it feels like it's edging toward something I hated about TNG: A plot that is barely more than a premise, which provides a pretense for characters to do what they're known for doing (Picard calls a meeting to discuss; Data is superhuman but endearingly innocent; Troi feels feelings; etc.), and the audience is beaten over the head with the Message. How much more unfortunate if that kind of thing were to be dragged out over a whole season. So let's hope the Red Angels get a whole lot more development and are more meaningfully explored.

OK, to be fair, Disco is nowhere near that TNG extreme. But I think An Obol for Charon comes closest. The plot unfolds mostly by being discussed, with too many talky, unearned emotional moments; much of the dialogue tries to be witty but falls flat. I love big character moments as much as anyone, but not when they’re shoehorned in by hitting pause mid-crisis to discuss feelings. It all feels uncomfortably like TNG's telling-not-showing writing style. That said, I loved the universal translator snafu. And the way the Saru subplot echoes the larger (and classic Trek) theme about overcoming fear and not seeing everything alien as a threat. Doug Jones and Sonequa Martin-Green manage to  spin some gold from a lot of really straw dialogue, but sadly, the Stamets-Tilly-Reno scenes do not work, and the humor bombs.

Let's see, what else? I don't have the energy to go into that whole primitive-religion-is-really-just-mythologizing-science story, other than to say that, if you're going to tread that well-trodden path, you really should dress it up with some better scenery. I'm very intrigued by the betwixt-and-between state of Tyler's relationship status, and who doesn't like a problematic baby now and then?

I have big reservations about Bad Georgiou. The existence of Section 31 has always been problematic, but this, presumably, is its genesis. I always assumed the Section 31 we see in the TNG era evolved from something that was originally well intentioned but misguided, something that started down a slippery slope and eventually ended up in a very bad place. But if they started with Bad Georgiou from the get-go, then the Federation is both stupid (they really think she's going to stay on the side that hired her?) and evil. And that would be a whole different show. (Not to mention that just seeing her reminds me how pissed off I was that Lorca turned out to be a cartoon villain all along, but I suppose I just need to let that go).

In other Trek news:

I missed the story a month ago that the 4th Kelvin movie is dead. I am sad. I like those movies. Just as they get to the part where the characters come together into a tight, boldly going unit, they pull the plug. Feh. But OTOH, if it means I can stop worrying about a Tarantino Star Trek, that’s some consolation.

 While I did catch the news about the Picard and animated spinoffs, I also missed the news about the Bad Georgiou one. As I said above, I have serious reservations about her character within the ST universe. I guess they’re trying to segment the audience and give them targeted versions of the franchise, a la Marvel: Picard for the TNG crowd, the animated series for their kids (and grandkids), and dark-n-edgy Bad Georgiou for the all-important  millennial demographic (that’s my theory, anyway -- why else do a villain-centered show?). The tentpole for the time being, I suppose, is still Discovery.  Sure, there would be a ton of fannish overlap, as always with these massive franchises, but they’re not going to crank up multiple series simultaneously without painting some bright lines between them, because that’s what mainstream entertainment factories do. All of this within the crazy-ass context of the All Access business model (which, I read somewhere, may owe whatever success it’s had so far more to football than Star Trek). Seems insanely ambitious.

It’s hard not to worry that they’re going to wind up sacrificing one really good series for a bunch of mediocre ones. Even though I have my reservations about Disco, it has the potential to take Star Trek storytelling where it hasn’t gone before (ha! see what I did there?) -- to a more nuanced, thought-provoking, dramatically satisfying place. Hope springs eternal.

Quick thoughts post Will You Take My Hand?

I liked the Disco season finale, I really did.

1. But the MU Georgiou story echos the problem I had with the Lorca story. I was sure there had to be more to him, because it made no sense that Starfleet would trust a guy who killed his own crew. I was sure there was some big mystery to be revealed about the Buran. But no. Not only did Starfleet go with that really poor plan, but even after their mistake is revealed, they figure handing Discovery to evil Georgiou is a good plan? Hmm.

2. I wonder if the Enterprise just left Talos IV? (Hello Alexander Courage!) Will Burnham become involved in the fallout from the events of The Cage, and will that explain why Spock doesn’t talk about her? Hmm. (Adding: According to Wikipedia, the timing doesn't line up; The Cage would have been two years earlier (or three, now that they've jumped ahead nine months?). But maybe that's wrong?)

3. Culber. Mycelial network. Terrraforming. Genesis. Green spore on Tilly. Resurrection? Hmm.

4. I absolutely can’t wait to see what’s next for Burnham, Saru, Tilly, and Stamets. A new captain? Possibly a Vulcan? Or has Prime Lorca been hanging out on Vulcan? Hmm.

5. I’m still pissed that Lorca was so summarily discarded. I'm not getting over that. It's a grudge and I'm nursing it.

Adding:

6. I'm not entirely comfortable with the fact that Starfleet just released a genocidal maniac. Can we not try people for war crimes committed in other universes? Someone get Samuel Cogley on that.

7. When Tilly announced she was very high, at least two generations of fans for whom watching Star Trek stoned was a rite of passage achieved a moment of perfect joy.

Is Disco Trek enough?

ADDING: For the record, now that season 1 is complete, I stand by this analysis.

NOTE: I write this just hours before the finale of Disco’s first season. It’s dicey to offer an overview before getting the complete story, but what the hell. I will happily revise and recant as needed.


There is an entire book to be written — more than one, probably — about how each iteration of Star Trek extends the vision of the original while correcting perceived shortcomings of previous versions. Discovery is certainly no different, but people are having a harder time seeing it as part of this pattern. That’s because it feels so different; by Star Trek standards, so dark. But what many seem to have forgotten is how very different TNG felt from TOS when it first appeared, and for exactly the opposite reason: It was maddeningly bright. I think it’s fair to cast Disco as the anti-TNG. And just as that series started at an extreme and eventually moved back toward the center, I’m sure Disco will, too.

When Roddenberry launched TNG, he made a rule: No conflict among the good guys. The results were obvious and immediate: bland, uninspired storytelling, as seen in what is now widely agreed to be its weak first couple of seasons. Roddenberry had reportedly developed a giant ego, what with the whole Great Bird of the Galaxy thing and the adoring fans and all; some say he misunderstood his own creation. I think that’s only partly true. Roddenberry was not wrong about people wanting to believe in a hopeful, optimistic future for humanity. But he was wrong about what his job was — not to create an actual future, but to create fiction that illustrates why such optimism matters. They’re actually not at all the same thing.

Utopias do not exist. They never have, and it’s probably safe to say they never will. For that reason, fictional utopias always smack of authorial arrogance. They proclaim for all to see, “Here’s a guy so full of himself that he thinks he’s got all the answers.” Perfection being impossible, all utopias read more like religious visions than practical blueprints, and TNG was no different. And of course, the more the author tries to portray a utopia, the more the cracks show. In TNG, female characters were reduced to embarrassing stereotypes (Tasha Yar and Deanna Troi). The way the corporate boardroom replaced the chain of command was cringe-inducingly naive. The show's idealistic vision of the perfect futuristic community meant that vulnerable civilians, including children, were schlepped into the cold vacuum of space to face all the hostile aliens, disasters, diseases, and other assorted threats of the unknown. In its simplicity, this utopian future was excruciatingly unconvincing. (Arguably, poor Wesley Crusher, the embodiment of everything that seemed juvenile about TNG, paid the price in fan hatred.)

And the jingoism. Good lord, the jingoism.

If we’re perfect and without conflict, then all the conflict has to come from elsewhere. All bad is without; most good is within. You can see the problem there. In TNG, Roddenberry’s secular, utopian vision inevitably and ironically starts to look exactly like what he’s railing against: cultural imperialsim and a sense of human supremacy (mitigated only slightly by the inclusion of aliens who are ultimately very much like us; Star Trek has always struggled with the fact that the Federation looks more like a human-led empire than a coalition of true equals).

What Roddenberry had forgotten — or more likely, never knew, but his TOS writers did — was that in storytelling, the negative space is crucial. There must be both yin and yang. Not only are we more keenly aware of what we perceive to be absent; we value it all the more for the lack of it. When crafting a tale designed to illustrate a moral compass, the tricky part is to give the audience enough positive input to make that compass clear, but enough negative input — space that has yet to be filled with the goodness we seek — to make us understand why it matters, and why the struggle to achieve it is worthwhile. TOS, for all its many flaws, did extraordinary things with that negative space. Its best stories demonstrated the heroes’ struggles to find the way forward without compromising their values, to battle their own demons and confront their own biases. Kirk is at first ready to kill Gorns and Hortas before realizing his error; Spock is forever tempted by the emotions he rejects; our heroes are shown to be not so different than Klingons through Organian eyes (or whatever Organians have). Not all endings are happy.

TNG started with no negative space — or more accurately, with all the negative space assigned to Them and all the positive space assigned to Us. Perfection is not a good look on the heroes of a supposedly progressive drama. (Aside: I think that it’s interesting how, in DS9, notable for being the first Trek sequel to commit to darker storytelling, Sisko is obsessed with baseball, a game weighted toward yin, its perfect form a no-hitter, in which what doesn’t happen is more important than what does. But I digress.)

Which brings us to Disco. In season 1, Disco is nearly all negative space, so much so that it’s disorienting. Burnham’s mutiny and the Battle at the Binary Stars set up a starting point of Star Trek values in near total collapse, and the culture aboard the Discovery is downright dystopian. We get the tiniest glimpse of positive space, and the moral compass that creates it, with Captain Georgiou, only to have it — and her — brutally cut down and eaten for breakfast (both metaphorically and, we eventually discover, literally).

Understandably, this was all too much for a lot of fans. I started the season as an avid defender of this choice because, frankly, I had so detested TNG’s flaws, and I welcomed a series that recognized them and was committed to doing it differently. Of course, there’s a danger in going too far in the other direction. If all that negative space — all that absence of morality — obscures the moral compass entirely, you enter nihilistic territory, the dark ’n edgy place of which contemporary storytellers are so fond. Everything is felt very viscerally in those kinds of stories because the threat level is always turned up to 11. But they’re grueling experiences precisely because they offer no hope of redemption and no promise of joy. The question is, did Disco wander too far into that territory? If so, those who say it’s not Star Trek are right.

I’d argue it didn’t. Those tiny glimpses of positive space, of Star Trek’s native moral imperative, are yanked away early in the story and then carefully, bit by bit, returned. There are acts that are clearly evil (including some that go for real shock value, like Tyler/Voq snapping Culber’s neck and Georgiou offering Burnham a ganglia “treat”), and there are acts that are ambiguous (nearly everything Lorca did, until his big reveal). But there is good, and we certainly know it when we see it. There is love (Stamets/Culber, Burnham/Tyler); there is joy (Burnham’s dance with Stamets); there is friendship (Tilly/Burnham); and there is growth (Captain Saru). And then there are the words in the title: Star Trek. When something has entered the cultural consciousness as much as Star Trek has, the name alone does an awful lot of heavy lifting. Invoke it, and you invoke half a century of storytelling that carries volumes of authority, for all its flaws. That accrual of meaning is why people revisit fictional universes and delight in creating new chapters there, both building up and chipping away at existing foundations. It’s not enough to expect the words “Star Trek” to constitute all of Disco’s positive space, but they carry an awful lot.

That said, I’m not sure the writers got the balance exactly right. As the season went on, I began to feel that they were rushing through the moments that should have provided clarity. For the sake of a breakneck pace and an overabundance of plot twists, they barreled through some story beats they should have paused on, and set up parallels that don’t seem to play out. The worst offender is the Lorca/Burnham parallel. Lorca’s arc bends from redemption to betrayal (having lost the Buran, he gets another chance with the Discovery, only to emerge as the ultimate traitor); Burnham’s, from betrayal to redemption (no explanation needed). But neither feels complete. I can’t help feeling that, at the end of it all, I don’t really understand why either character does what they do, so the significance of the parallel remains a mystery. (If the finale proves me wrong, I’ll be ecstatic.)

What’s more, too much of Disco’s self-awareness comes not from within the story, but from its creators talking about the story. What with the immediacy of the After Trek interviews and the extensive social media campaign, it’s been too easy to tell the audience what the creators are thinking rather than actually craft the story in a way that shows them. So when Harberts, Berg, Sullivan et al reassure us that they “get” Star Trek -- or Wilson Cruz assures us they haven't buried their gays -- you can’t help wondering if they themselves are not sure they’ve done enough to convince us in the story itself.

In however many years’ time, when Disco has aired its series finale, I’m going to revisit all this. Nowadays, the arc of serialized TV plots is long and designed for binging, and thank goodness for that. I’ll be very glad to find that the long game makes perfect sense of a first chapter that, for all its flaws, has hooked me.

The War Without, the War Within, the mystery of Michael's sin

There’s something I was really hoping Disco would examine more closely, but it’s not looking likely at this point. Burnham’s main motivation throughout the season has been her deep remorse for her mutiny, but she’s never been shown to have been wrong. I mean, clearly she was insubordinate, and wrong in that sense. But her purpose was to implement a controversial strategy in order to prevent a horrible conflict. The plan was morally gray, certainly, but it might have worked. We’ll never know. She was stopped, and the horrible conflict turned out to be even worse than anyone could have imagined.

Since then, the series has operated on the premise that most people, including Burnham, believe she is responsible for the massive loss of life at the Battle at the Binary Stars, and for the whole Klingon War in general. But the story really doesn’t support that. It sure looks like all of that would have happened whether Burnham had attacked Georgiou and tried to fire first or not. The huge weight of guilt on her is kind of baffling. I had assumed we’d circle back to this, because otherwise it’s just bad writing. But now that I’ve seen Lorca’s long and intriguing arc cut short so glibly, I’m not so sure.

If anything, Burnham's choice to return to the Prime Universe with Mirror Universe Georgiou in tow seems like a much worse idea than her original mutiny, and it's weirdly compounded by Cornwell's decision to...make Georgiou captain? Really? WHY? OK, so she has strategic value. She can't offer her guidance as a civilian advisor -- and under close guard, at that? Again, if this were half a dozen episodes ago, I'd think there was some really clever plotting going on, with a cool twist soon to be revealed. But the way things have gone, and with not much time left in the season, I have to assume that, at best, the resolution will be kinda cool but rushed, and at worst, it won't make any sense of these bizarre decisions.

Unless these decisions are rendered moot when the season ends with a reset, where the Discovery time-travels back to the point of Burnham's mutiny, but this time fires on the Klingons first and the war never happens. But the Klingon war is canon, so that doesn’t seem likely, and they'd still have to figure out what to do with MU Georgiou. (However they end the season, I still like my batshit theory that MU Georgiou will end up as the Lethe of "Dagger of the Mind," but what are the chances?)

Tantalus

This is totally batshit, admittedly. But still...

Disco gave us an episode named "Lethe," which dealt a lot with Admiral Cornwell, prompting fans to speculate that she might somehow become the Lethe who was a character in the TOS episode "Dagger of the Mind" -- a woman on a penal colony for the criminally insane who describes her former self, before treatment with the neural neutralizer, as malignant and hateful. Seeing Emperor Georgiou snatched by Burnham and brought along for the ride to the Prime Universe, I speculated, mostly facetiously, that she, not Cornwell, seems more likely to become Lethe. Certainly, the words malignant and hateful describe MU Georgiou pretty well.

And then something hit me -- something I somehow had never noticed in my four-plus decades as a TOS fan.

The penal colony in "Dagger of the Mind" is on Tantalus V. The Mirror Universe device used by Kirk to destroy his enemies in "Mirror Mirror" is the Tantalus Field.

Tantalus is a figure from ancient Greek mythology -- he invited the gods to a feast and cooked up the body of his own son to feed them. ("Here, have my ganglia. You deserve a treat.")  This offended the gods, causing Zeus to hang him forever above a stream for which he eternally thirsted, but of which he could never drink.

Also from ancient Greek mythology, Lethe is one of the rivers of the underworld across which the dead were ferried by Charon. Emperor Georgiou's palace-ship is the ISS Charon.

That's a whole lot of coincidence going on right there, unless it's not. Could Emperor Georgiou actually become Lethe, and somehow her Tantalus V experience find its way back to the MU in the form of Kirk's Tantalus Field?

Crazy, right?

The trouble with Lorca

Not gonna lie: The Disco writers have disappointed me.

It turns out Lorca's story was simply, "He was fooling everyone; he's evil." So all the things that didn't make sense...just don't make sense. And not just on a plot level, which I could easily forgive under the right circumstances, but on a thematic level, in a way that leaves us dissatisfied and disbelieving the internal logic of this world.

A captain destroys his own crew, ostensibly to save them from torture at the hands of the Klingons. So Starfleet claps him on the back and gives him the most important command in the fleet. He goes on to run that ship in a decidedly un-Starfleet-like way, and the only person who's especially troubled by this is Cornwell. He throws her to the Klingons and gets away with it easily. He dupes his own crew handily, threat ganglia notwithstanding.

All the while, the story is peppered with signs that none of this is as simple as it seems; things that make us think that all this is about a leader in a time of war making tough decisions and sacrifices in order to achieve the larger goal; a man tormented by something (PTSD?) but trying to power through. How else could they expect to keep the audience on the hook? They have to make us feel that there's a reason this character is getting away with it; that there's some internal thematic logic playing out, and there will be redemption in the end.

I had assumed we were in Search for Spock territory: Kirk disobeys the rules because of his internal moral compass that places loyalty and friendship even above duty. He risks everything to save Spock. It made so much sense to me to think that the crew of the Buran was alive in the MU, and Lorca, Kirk-like, was going after them. Better yet, in The Undiscovered Country, Kirk is chastened; he must confront his own failings and prejudices; he hasn't always been right. That same kind of story arc would have made sense of Lorca's story; you'd still have had to squint to accept Starfleet's lack of concern about his actions and the Discovery crew's credulousness, but at least you'd have a sense of thematic logic that justifies all that squinting.

[EDITING TO ADD: Then there's that memorable Spock quote from the end of "Mirror Mirror": "It was far easier for you as civilized men to behave like barbarians than it was for them as barbarians to behave like civilized men." That should have counted for something; Lorca should have been able to pull off the charade only because there was something more to the story.]

But...no. Lorca is simply a very sneaky villain; Starfleet and his own crew just look foolish. Hence my disappointment. It feels like the writers crafted an interesting, complicated character on a meaningful arc, and then just tore his page out and threw it away unfinished. It's a shame. While I'm still interested in the rest of the characters, the spark is a little dimmer. Next season they're going to face an uphill battle getting me to re-invest in them. Burnham, Tilly, Saru, and Stamets all seem worth the effort, but despite Lorca, not because of him.

And then there's Emperor Georgiou. If she's the one who gets the redemption arc, I'll be dumbfounded, because she's a known genocidal psychopath who eats sentient beings. Hey, maybe she, and not Cornwell, turns out to be the Lethe of "Dagger of the Mind." Now THAT would be a neat twist. It certainly fits that, in the Prime Universe, Georgiou would wind up in a facility for the criminally insane, mind-wiped, describing the person she once was as malignant and hateful. But it sure seems like Burnham should have just left her to die in the Mirror Universe.

Aside: There's a certain glee in evidence on social media from those who've decided that Lorca "stans" have just been mindlessly fan-girling the white man and have now gotten their come-uppance. But the writers worked hard to misdirect the audience about this character, so you really can't blame the audience for being misdirected.

Last thing: That speck that fell on Tilly’s shoulder? Either Culber, who was last seen wandering the mycelial network, or Lorca, who was last seen disappearing into the heart of the mycelial engine. Or Tilly hears a Who. Or something else. With my track record, I wouldn't put much faith in me.

Vaulting Ambition, Vanishing Optimism

Before I get into the Lorca stuff: I keep meaning to write something long and profound about how Disco has lulled us into identifying with the Federation and its values of justice and equality, and then pulled a gigantic switcharoo, forcing us to wonder if we are in fact more Terran than Federation, which also forces us to wonder whether our enemy is more Prime Universe Klingon or Mirror Universe rebels. Insert all the appropriate parallels (America/Western democracy/multiculturalism or imperialism/Trumpism/fascism? Radical Islamic fundamentalism/brutal warmongers/xenophobes or spiritually motivated anti-colonial freedom fighters?) So I'll just leave that there and move on.

Me being Team Lorca ‘n all, there’s a lot about his story that looks like it’s not going my way, unless there’s a further big reveal about how he’s not as bad as all that (and I do hold out some hope on that score, given that the bad report comes from Emperor Evil herself. Though that whole Ava thing didn’t sound good at all...sigh...).  As I said elsewhere:

I hate it when they pull the “We made you love this character just to freak you out when we reveal he’s evil” trick. I mean yes, obviously there were lots of warnings. But I figured there were too many for the truth to be quite so simple. Of course, at this point we only have Mirror Georgiou’s word for it, and she’s hardly an entirely reliable reporter. (This is suddenly and weirdly taking on a Woody Allen/Mia Farrow vibe, a situation I try never to think about because everyone is so fucked up.) Further twists are possible, and I’m hoping for one that shades Lorca with more complex motives. But it seems more likely that, if we’re to get anything positive about Lorca at this point, it’ll be the rescue of Prime Universe Lorca, which I’m pretty meh about. I’m feeling…deflated.

But at least there's this: I called the MU Lorca/Burnham connection -- specifically, that he, not Sarek, was her father figure in the MU -- way back in October, after Lethe (which was when the evidence for MU Lorca became too compelling to dismiss -- especially when he chose not to rescue Cornwell). That one was all mine. I didn’t see it anywhere else. So yay me. Here’s what I said then:

“And then I saw this interview in which Jason Isaacs says: 

‘The relationships get richer and deeper, and there are surprises, there are turns, there are secret agendas and reveals, and that’s my roundabout way of saying, I can’t tell you about my relationship with Michael, other than she seems to mean quite a lot to me, maybe more than is apparent when we first come across her.’ 

“So…. 

“We know that Lorca has gone to great lengths to waylay Burnham, bring her to Discovery, and get her on his crew. The only explanation for this so far has been that he sees her as potentially useful. But if Lorca is from the mirror universe, then it would make a whole lot of sense that he already knows Burnham, and she is already very important to him. Or at least, mirror Burnham is. That’s why he found her and brought her to Discovery, and that’s why he indulged her desire to find Sarek. We know from Enterprise that, in the mirror universe, humans have subjugated Vulcans, so maybe there, it’s not Sarek who is her adoptive father – it’s Lorca, and he would do anything for her. If he plans on staying here, maybe he hopes he can cultivate Burnham as an ally – one to whom he might eventually reveal his true history, even?”

Given the nature of the relationship we’ve seen between Lorca and Burnham up until now, I wonder if MU Georgiou’s claim about him “grooming” Michael and having a sexual relationship with her is overstated, the product of Georgiou’s jealousy? Maybe it was really paternal? Of course, this could be me clutching at straws, because the whole hero-turns-out-to-be-secret-villain thing is a bulletproof squick of mine, especially if you throw sexual predator into the mix, and I will not concede this point until there are no more outs.

That said, I’m calling this now: Discovery is returning with Prime Lorca and some or all of the crew of the Buran.

Other miscellaneous things:

• I always thought it was "vaunting ambition," not "vaulting ambition." Apparently both are used, but the quote from Macbeth is "vaulting." 
• "Here, have my ganglia" is the new "REDRUM."
• So we know that Tyler is physically Voq transformed, but now his mind is all Tyler -- so he's going to have to live the rest of his life in a body that isn't his? That's disturbing.
• I can't imagine Culber isn't returning to the land of the living. Kudos to those who caught the name of MU Stamets' ship, Charon, the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron. I didn't.

You do what you must

This piece covers a lot of ground on the mirror-Lorca theory quite well -- and I really hope it's wrong. Because if we've been watching mirror Lorca, and the other Lorca is dead, then I can’t see how any Lorca will be on Discovery in season 2. Even if mirror Lorca were to survive, the series is going to move on from the Klingon war and this particular story line, and there won’t be a place in it for him. And I really want to keep him. More than just keep him -- I want to be right about him. I’ve gotten really invested in the idea that he is not a bad guy; that all the bad-guy signals are misdirection; that there’s some greater good in play; that he's complicated, not evil. And I hate being wrong.

But obviously, Lorca has known about the mirror universe all along and has some reason for bringing Burnham and Discovery there. So I concocted a theory about a mission to rescue the Buran crew (more on that here). I'm trying not to think about the fact that I have a history of overthinking; of seeing misdirection when there's just plain old direction; of looking for a redemption arc where there isn't going to be one (hello, Tenth Doctor).

But I take heart from these lines: “From now on, we're Terrans. Decency is weakness, will get us killed. And the lives of everyone on this ship and in the Federation are at stake. So you do what you must. Whatever you must. To anyone. Understand?” He says it like he means it -- like a guy who’s had a lot of experience repressing his natural decency for the sake of the greater good. And sure enough, the next thing we know, Burnham has knifed her former friend’s doppleganger, then two seconds later stepped out of the lift, put on her game face, and hailed the Empire. If she can do it and still be the hero underneath, so can he. Right?

Lorca, Lorca, in the booth, what you up to? Tell the truth.

After "Despite Yourself" (SPOILERS AHEAD), it's more obvious than ever that Lorca has brought Discovery to the mirror universe intentionally, and that he has an agenda there. We learn that mirror-Lorca (who may or may not be the Lorca we've been watching all along) has been on the run after mounting a coup against the mysterious emperor (who people seem to feel might be Philippa Georgiou, and I guess that makes a certain amount of sense). Obviously, he's known all along that he needs Burnham to accomplish whatever he's trying to accomplish, because he's gone out of his way to get her on his ship and make sure she doesn't get herself killed.  He needs something that only Burnham can get, that much is clear. Presumably, he knows that mirror Burnham is dead, so he has to bring this Michael back with him. (ETA: Come to think of it, there's no reason to assume this, only that he knows mirror Burnham wouldn't get him what he wants, but this one will.) What exactly he needs from her, I don't know.

And what is he trying to accomplish, exactly? Could he be an agent of the anti-Terran rebels planning to use Discovery to overthrow the empire? Was that the nature of mirror Lorca's coup, and he's out to finish the job? If so, he won't succeed, because we know the empire will still be there when Kirk & co. arrive a decade or so later. Or does he simply want to seize power for himself? Maybe, but I don't think so (I'll get to my reasons in a minute).

I think it's far more likely that he has a smaller, more specific agenda, and, as I've been saying for ages, it has to do with the Buran. As I pointed out previously, when Burnham brings up the mirror-Buran, Lorca jumps at the chance to ask if the crew is alive, and he seems genuinely not to know. Whether the Lorca we've been watching originated in the mirror universe or ours, it seems clear that whatever happened to the Buran is the driving force behind everything he does. It's the only thing we know about him, really.

From "Choose Your Pain," he says of the Buran crew's fate: "Degradation. Torture. Slow, public death. It's the Klingon way to spread terror. Not my crew. Not on my watch." (Was he really talking about the Klingons there? Or the Terran Empire? Noteworthy similarity.)  And there's this: "Tyler: Your eyes. That happened when you destroyed the Buran, didn't it? Lorca: We choose our own pain. Mine helps me remember." There's a sincerity and a depth to this part of Lorca's story that is missing from every other aspect of him. I feel it has to be the key.

Whether this is a rescue mission and the crew is not actually dead (my preferred theory), or this is simply an attempt to avenge them, or he's after something else related to his crew's fate, I feel sure this is about the Buran. That's why I don't think we're watching mirror-Lorca just making a power grab. Everything about this guy's motives feels personal; his loyalty to his crew feels utterly sincere. I have drunk that Kool Aid. I'm buying it. It's why, no matter how devious he is and how much he manipulates events, you can't quite despise him. Leastwise, I can't. I just can't shake the feeling that, whatever it is he wants, it's not for himself. And if I prove to be wrong -- well, boy howdy, will I be disappointed.

The burning question is, which Lorca is this? Have we been watching mirror Lorca all along, and if so, will Discovery return to its own universe with him, with his doppleganger, or with no Lorca at all?

I just can't shake the feeling that this is not mirror Lorca. I know there are lots of sign pointing to yes, but I have a gut feeling that it's intentional misdirection. As Spock said in "Mirror Mirror": "It was far easier for you as civilized men to behave like barbarians, than it was for them as barbarians to behave like civilized men." Could a mirror-universe barbarian pull this off in command of the most important ship of the fleet through an entire war? Doesn't seem likely. And there's something else. If there's one thing we learn in "Despite Yourself," it's that Terrans don't apologize. But what's the first thing Lorca says when startled awake by Cornwell in "Lethe?" "I'm sorry. I'm not used to having anyone in my bed." Maybe mirror Lorca is so good at playing the part that, even in an unguarded moment, he thinks to apologize, but again, doesn't seem likely. So much about Lorca just doesn't fit the Terran mold, especially if I'm right about the authenticity of his feelings about the Buran. Because another thing we know with certainty about mirror Terrans, other than that they don't apologize, is that they are treacherous, self-serving back-stabbers, and they don't make captain by being fiercely loyal and self-sacrificing. They're not the types to voluntarily step into an agony booth so that others may live. So either this Lorca is a freakishly deviant mirror-universe native -- or he isn't, and there's some other explanation for the scars, the deceit, and Cornwell's conviction that he's not himself.

One last point. Tyler and Lorca's stories of subterfuge are set up in parallel. One of them is such a nice, sensitive guy that he earns Michael Burnham's affection. The other is such a sneaky bastard that he alienates Kat Cornwell's. I'm guessing that, by the end, we'll be meant to see some irony there.

Random thoughts and speculation: Despite Yourself

Before I get into my usual bananas-cuckoo speculation, a few things (SPOILERS AHEAD):

1. All hail Captain Tilly!

2. What have you done to Rickie, you bastards?!?! (Is this the end for the Dynamic Duo? Tune in next time…Same bat time, same bat channel…)

3. Lorca in the agony booth: If you didn’t believe he was working for some greater good before, that should change your mind, because it takes some serious commitment to something to volunteer for that duty.

4. This isn’t going to end well for Tyler, is it? Poor Burnham.

5. Am I the only one who caught the reference to Organia? Lorca: “What happened, here? I don’t remember reports of battles anywhere near Organia.” So apparently Starbase 46, to which they had intended to jump, is near the future birthplace of the Organian Peace Treaty. Significant plot point, or just a passing nod to canon?

Now that that's out of the way, let's look a this snippet of dialogue:

Burnham: I was the captain of the Shenzhou, and you had the Buran here, too, Sir.
Lorca: My crew? Are they alive?
Burnham: No.
Lorca: Well, there’s me hoping hoping I’d find a better version of myself over here.

If that doesn’t support my theory that Lorca brought the Discovery to the mirror universe to rescue the crew of the Buran, I don’t know what does. A better version of himself – i.e., one who didn’t get his crew killed, the way this Lorca got the mirror-universe Buran crew killed in his own universe. 

We learn that this Discovery probably got switched with its mirror twin, which suggests that the same thing could have happened with the Buran. If my theory is correct, Lorca, having figured it out and brought Discovery to the mirror universe on a rescue mission, obviously believes the Buran crew to be alive. But if they are, why does the Klingon ship’s database say they’re not?

The secret to returning to their own universe lies in whatever the Defiant did – which involved not just universe hopping, but also time travel. Soooo…the Buran crews from both universes may be dead now – but now may not be where this story ends up, if you see what I mean. With a little time-travel magic, the Buran crews might be returned to their native universes before they die. What’s more,  they’re saying the Stamets/Culber story isn’t over yet. Given that little…incident…in sick bay, perhaps the Discovery is destined for a little time travel as well. Though, if they return to a time before the Buran is destroyed, they’ll have to do a lot over again. Hmm.

ETA: I just realized…duh…if Discovery’s return to its own universe involves time travel, that could not only solve Culber’s little neck problem and bring the Buran crew back to life, but also explain why Kirk & co. never heard of the mirror universe. The Discovery crew may return and remember nothing about it. For that matter, Ash Tyler may not remember having been Voq – or intimate with Michael Burnham. That would be one really big reset button.

Welcome to my crystal ball

Five more episodes in the season, and now we have titles. Carefully considered predictions (i.e. wild guesses) we can all laugh about later:

10. Despite Yourself  Implies someone meets their double. We're in the mirror universe and we encounter alt-Stamets, who peeked out of the mirror so creepily at the end of "Choose Your Pain." Possibly other doppelgangers as well?  We learn that Lorca intentionally brought the Discovery there; tension is ratcheted up as the story feeds mistrust of Lorca. (I'm betting that, while this is the mirror universe and the crew does encounter some of the locals, the contact is very limited,  in order to preserve the TOS premise that Kirk et al arrive in the mirror universe with no knowledge of the place.)

11. The Wolf Inside  Resolution of the Voq/Tyler story line. I'm betting that Tyler is really human, not a surgically altered Voq, but Voq's mind has been implanted in him (resulting in the death of the real Voq, who has in fact sacrificed everything). Something activates the Voq inside; Voq/Tyler team up with L'Rell in an effort to steal the Discovery; they fail, and inner Voq is vanquished, leaving Tyler as himself again.

12. Vaulting Ambition  A Tilly episode, as the concept of ambition seems most closely associated with her and her very specific career goals. No idea what it's about, but hoping she saves the day and receives the recognition she deserves.

13. What's Past Is Prologue  This is where my pet theory about Lorca's motives being all about rescuing the crew of the Buran, trapped in the mirror universe, plays out. The past to which the title refers is the supposed destruction of the Buran at Lorca's own hand, which could be prologue to the destruction of the Discovery. But in fact, the past is Lorca never giving up on his crew, which is prologue to the successful rescue of both the Buran's crew and Discovery itself, which safely returns to its own universe.

14. The War Without, The War Within  The resolution of the war without (with the Klingons) and the war within (the conflicts on Discovery). Along the way, Burnham (yet again) renders a vital service at great personal risk and is pardoned.

15. Will You Take My Hand?  Couldn't begin to guess at the story, but it ends with a peacetime Discovery (the spore drive having been abandoned and its existence buried in never-to-be-opened top secret files, lest it open a gateway to dangerous universes), a unified crew, Burnham restored to her Starfleet rank, and a new mission of discovery.

The pointing and laughing begins January 7,  2018. I'll go first.

Interesting choice of words

I'm still nursing the theory that, when Disco returns, we're going to learn that the reason Captain Lorca has brought the Discovery to an alternate universe is that he's on a mission to rescue the crew of his previous ship, the Buran, which was somehow trapped there. So I was interested to note that, in this promo video, Jason Isaacs says, "We find out that he lost his entire crew, and I am sure in his mind he could have made different decisions to save them." Lorca lost his entire crew -- not that he saw them die. Hmm....

Going back to "Choose Your Pain," his exact words regarding the Buran are, "I didn't let my crew die. I blew them up." I could be dead wrong (pun intended), but both Lorca and Isaacs seem to be choosing their words carefully and avoiding saying that the Buran's crew is dead.

DS9: Duet and the Jewish Question

"Duet" is a brilliant episode -- DS9's first truly great one, and one of the best of any ST. ("What you call genocide, I call a day's work." That is a fantastic line by any standard.)

 But as I watched it again, I found myself wondering how it came to pass that DS9 incorporated Jewishness in such divergent and discordant ways. How in god's name did the same series morph every negative Jewish stereotype ever into the greedy, cowardly, lascivious, latinum-and-shiksa-craving Ferengi, and also transform the Holocaust into the Bajoran/Cardassian conflict? How did this crazy thing come about? Googling, I found this fascinating piece, with this insight: "To me, DS9 was largely about the Jewish diaspora. Cardassians are Nazis, Ferengis represent Jews as the world sees them (i.e., anti-Semitism), and Bajorans represent Jews as they see themselves (i.e., Israel)."

Now that has more than a soupcon of truth. But it got me thinking....

DS9 is Star Trek breaking away from Roddenberry's legendary, meshuganah commitment to a conflict-free universe. It brings back the untidiness and rough edges that make characters and situations believable and relatable. And intentionally or not -- I tend to think, mostly not -- the Jewishness of it is revealing in its messiness, too. We are outraged at the antisemitic caricature of the Ferengi, and yet somehow they refuse to be defined by our pearl-clutching. Quark just won't stay in that bottle. Armin Shimerman won't let you reduce Quark to the ugly stereotype that is so clearly his starting point. There's too much humor, exuberance, and sheer humanity about him. Who doesn't like Quark? NOBODY. Kira may embody the Jewish resistance, the Haganah, the early pioneer spirit, but she's kind of...well, dull. Quark is irrepressible. On a gut level, we know that, for all Starfleet's hoity-toity "we've evolved beyond money and materialism," and for all Bajor's spiritualism and feisty can-do attitude, you want to stick close to the guy with a backup plan. The universe could not possibly be that sincere, earnest, and perfect. The goyim and the idealists may deride the merchants, but we all know it's because they haven't figured out how not to need them.

Which is not to say that playing in the sandbox of racist stereotypes and casual bigotry is to be hand-waved. Too much about DS9's Jewishness feels accidental, like the writers didn't know how many cliches, inane conventions, and outright bigotry they were regurgitating. I will always wonder how it is that no one stood up in the writer's room and said, "Houston, we have a problem."  DS9 is a mess of contradictions that seem to have been created, at best, by shockingly unaware people. Nevertheless, that messiness somehow beats the hell out of TNG's sterile, WASPy, unconvincing niceness. They imitate, co-opt, distort, and conflate -- and it's so much better than the alternative.

One last point: As Disco's writers explore the ghosts of Star Trek past, they are clearly in the market for the aspects of the ST universe that don't quite fit the idyllic myth -- the exceptions that prove the rule. The Mercenary Outsider who doesn't buy into Starfleet's selfless altruism clearly fits that bill. Quark has a precursor: Harry Mudd. "I'm not siding with anyone. But I sure as hell understand why the Klingons pushed back. Starfleet arrogance. Have you ever bothered to look out of your spaceships down at the little guys below? If you had, you'd realize that there's a lot more of us down there than there are you up here. And we're sick and tired of getting caught in your crossfire." Without a doubt, we've not heard the last of that weltanschauung.