setsuled

Jeri Taylor passed away a couple days ago at the age of 86. She wrote the above episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Drumhead", of which she was particularly proud. Not seen in the clip is legendary screen actress Jean Simmons who played a key role in an episode about a witch hunt and subtle racial discrimination.

Taylor wrote for three Star Trek series: Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, the last of which she co-created. Her work was often very thoughtful, political, but not ever, as I recall, truly polemical. I don't remember Voyager very well, I tend not to re-watch it. But her two parter for Deep Space Nine, "The Maquis", introduced the rebel group that remained a part of Star Trek for years afterward. It facilitated many of the show's signature, thought provoking analyses of war and attendant issues of loyalty and retribution. Taylor was certainly integral to what was best about that silver age of the franchise.

X Sonnet #1893

Permission froze the words to mean enough.
The heart cannot escape the metal arm.
The coat was cold from sleeve to ruffled cuff.
Embedded code creates computer smarm.
The hand contains intentions weird and dull.
A ceiling swarm attracts the blinding drunk.
A group of eyes were clustered 'round the hull.
Assorted lives fulfilled the secret trunk.
A secret word was passed amongst the mob.
To threaten ants was normal work for men.
A candy corn erodes the wholesome cob.
The holiday was rife with feinted sin.
The pastry shop displayed imprisoned rolls.
Pervasive fear creates reflexive trolls.

Whoever heard of a virus that kills the old but spares the young? Anyone who remembers "Miri", a first season episode of Star Trek, aired in October, 1966, in which the crew beam down to an Earth-like planet inhabited only by children. I've always liked how this episode condensed and recontextualised the psychological differences between young and old and the resulting conflicts between them. Now, of course, the story takes on some new resonance.

Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), McCoy (DeForest Kelley), and Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) find empty, ravaged streets on the Earth-like world before they're attacked by a deranged young man who promptly dies in front of them.



Finding a laboratory, Spock and McCoy uncover the history of the place and how, long ago, its inhabitants tried to genetically engineer a way to extend their lifespans. They succeeded in making something that causes the body to age much more slowly--about a month's worth of aging for every century--but once puberty is reached the pathogen reacts by tearing its host apart, physically and psychologically.



The mental deterioration starts to affect the Enterprise crew and they become increasingly irrational (except for Spock) even as they struggle to develop a vaccine. It also makes it difficult for them to work with the children who inhabit the ruined streets.



They look like kids but they're really hundreds of years old. But they also behave like children, turning life into an endless series of games and supporting their mutual belief that what's happening to the old can never affect them. In a way, they're like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, but crueller and pettier. They haven't spent their time building anything beautiful or useful; they play hide-and-seek and "bang bang", wasting time away with idle pleasures.



But inevitably they do grow up and are affected by the frailties and hazards of age as much as any adult. Miri (Kim Darby) is now a young woman and of course she starts to fall in love with Kirk. But when the disease starts to affect them, she has the horrifying realisation that he and the others are truly "grups", the kids' word for grown-ups. This word shows that, like racists, they're avoiding distressing sympathy by seeing the sufferers as an inferior species. So tightly do they cling to this that Kirk has trouble convincing Miri of the truth even though she's seen with her own eyes some of her playmates age and die.



I like how gentle Kirk is with Miri, and with Rand, whose anxiety is to do with the loss of her beauty. As the disease disfigures her leg, the advantage of the short skirted uniform for the women of Starfleet becomes a curse. She says she always tried to get Kirk to notice her legs, now they draw notice for the wrong reason. It's an interesting moment that reveals how the uniform facilitates the dating culture in Starfleet and how cruelly the virus thus prematurely deprives someone of a sign of attractive, youthful vitality.



But of course, this isn't the end for the crew of the Enterprise who finally manage to convince the kids to help them. For this we have to credit Kirk's diplomacy and not his fists, despite what's been said of the relative strengths of Kirk and Picard. He goes among the children and reasons with them respectfully despite their childish insults. Obviously, that is the mature and only path to cooperation.

Twitter Sonnet #1397

Observant air remains beyond the wall.
Selected hairs complete the thinning skull.
Reversing leaves includes a leafy fall.
A tapping told of cups beyond the hull.
The bigger shirt becomes the bigger man.
Alerted horses cook the special brew.
A bouncing cat redeems the static plan.
The richer green was closer yet to blue.
The absent voice acquires help in space.
With metal shoes, the egg ascends to law.
The good and true assort the station face.
The claws retire 'neath the fluffy paw.
The science built a smaller kind of kid.
The lines were spliced with timely aid of fid.

What a wonderful episode of The Orville last night. Once again patterning itself on 90s era Star Trek--I was particularly reminded of "The Die is Cast", the 1995 Deep Space Nine episode, but The Orville hits the sweet spot of character and pacing that defies any attempt to explain it by breaking it down to the sum of its parts and influences. I guess you could say it's sentient.

Spoilers after the screenshot



That battle scene in the climax, wow. As it was happening I was brought back to how excited I was to watch a showdown between the Dominion, Cardassians, and Romulans on Deep Space Nine. I remember my friends and I in high school talking about how great it would be to see something like the Battle of Endor from Return of the Jedi on Star Trek but knowing a television effects budget would never accommodate something like that. Even in The Next Generation's "Best of Both Worlds", most of the battles were off-screen as the Borg cut their bloody swath to Earth--we didn't really get a sense of the scope of battle until a flashback in the pilot episode of DS9 years later.



Now we have cgi and we can have those large scale battles any day of the week but I realised it's more than the relative cheapness that makes such things generally feel less special. Too often we get the spectacle without the context that gives it any real weight, the established relationships with characters and their problems. Last week "Identity part 1", written by Brannon Braga and Andre Bomanis, presented a captivating sequence of events and this week, "Identity part 2", written by Seth MacFarlane, picked up with another set of linked subplots, all of them effective, building to that climax.



In one moment I really liked, Ed (Seth MacFarlance) tries to give a coded message to another Union ship while the Kaylons have custody of the Orville. It's one of those gambits seen from so many episodes and movies--in this case, it fails and Ed has to bear the burden of responsibility for his gamble; the loss of a whole other Union ship. Then the Kaylons decide to punish Ed by murdering another crewman, something that finally forces Isaac (Mark Jackson) to switch sides.



I said last week I didn't want Isaac to switch sides by suddenly discovering he has emotions. In the crucial turning point in this episode, when Isaac saves Ty (Kai Wener), I realised I didn't mind so much though it's worth wondering if it's really emotions that Isaac is discovering or if he simply decided the Kaylons have become irrational. Whether or not Isaac is capable of sympathy or empathy, he's the one who's stepped outside Kaylon 1 and breathed the fresh air of varied experience. The Kaylons are forever locked in the experience of their former suffering under their biological enslavers and are content evaluating all other potential relationships on those terms.



It's telling that Kaylon Primary (Graham Hamilton) refers to Roots, the 1976 novel by Alex Haley, for knowledge about slavery on Earth. Roots is a work of fiction--why not examine one of the many actual slave narratives from the 18th and 19th century? He could have examined the works of real former slaves such as Ouladah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, or Frederick Douglass. For a species dedicated to decisions based on real data, they curiously prefer a work that is manifestly a commentary rather than a primary source.



Meanwhile, Gordon (Scott Grimes) and Kelly (Adrianne Palicki) are on a risky mission to Krill space where they deal with a people unabashedly devoted to an irrational religion. Despite my dislike for MacFarlane's unnuanced perspective on religion, I did like the idea of the more complex Union being caught between the two hostile factions of the extremely rational and the extremely irrational.



I wonder how much this episode will affect future episodes. There's plenty of material to digest now with Isaac, the Krill, and the Kaylons. With this episode, the universe MacFarlane created really feels like it's taken root. Happy Arbour Day.

Thursday's new episode of Star Trek: Discovery was a pleasant surprise after the season première. A solid episode directed by Jonathan Frakes, it continued the series' tendency to introduce issues without actually exploring them, in this case a conflict between faith and science, but with this episode the second season's effort to bring the intriguing background characters more into the foreground really started to bear fruit. Though the episode, called "New Eden", might've been even better if it had this song:

Spoilers after the video



Yes, the supporting characters are not only bearing fruit, they're throwing away the rind.

For a show widely considered to wear modern progressive politics on its sleeve, the crew dynamic this season surprisingly seems to be that of a level headed patriarch surrounded by childlike, adorable women. I find it amusing more than anything else, only the continued infantilisation of Tilly (Mary Wiseman) really annoyed me.



Miss Butterfingers is the one dissecting the unstable dark matter asteroid with a powerful laser? Alone? Why not get Inspector Clouseau while you're at it? The idea that she's going to be a captain one day just seems more and more absurd. But she is cute.



So's her ghost friend (Bahia Watson) and the young women on the bridge. There's a marked difference in how the men are played compared to the women, though Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) generally seems calm, thanks to her Vulcan upbringing, as does the intriguing cyborg lady we still don't know anything about, Airiam--though maybe we'll learn more this season as apparently she's changed actress from the first season, where she was played by the unknown actress Sara Mitich. Now she's played by Hannah Cheesman, who has a much longer filmography, including a prominent role in the Guillermo del Toro produced 2013 film Mama (she played a different version of a character also played by Doug Jones). Mitich has been demoted to playing a human background character. I have this info via Memory Alpha which also has a collection of contradictory quotes from production crew about Airiam's background.



Owosekun (Oyin Oladejo) also generally seems to keep her head and I thought we were going to learn more about her in this episode since she accompanies the away team specifically because she grew up in a "Luddite collective". What? Sounds like she really might have something to say about the strange community of humans on an alien planet with inexplicably antiquated technology. Sadly, she never gets the chance.



We learn that Pike (Anson Mount) might be a bit religious and his disagreement with the more secular Burnham forms the centre of the dramatic conflict that almost happens in this episode. But I guess there's no reason it should really come to a head when The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and the original series have already done this kind of plot several times. "New Eden" felt like an ode to those episodes, an ode that didn't have the impulse to actually build on the discussion. But why should it? Maybe the fact that the show knows its place is commendable. Especially since the conflict was basically part of the backbone of the series concept for Deep Space Nine, the ideological conflict alongside professional respect between Sisko and Kira leading to several nice episodes. Maybe the best way to look at Discovery is a televised Star Trek Experience; something primarily designed to augment the sensation of the Star Trek universe rather than creating genuinely new stories in it. It sure is pretty. I like the colour scheme in Pike's new quarters.



Twitter Sonnet 1199

A box of roads were used in careful chunks.
On jumbled paths the molecules'll walk.
The matching pods were lined along the bunks.
A giant stone begins to slowly talk.
As rungs appeared the lines a ladder made.
For model stripes were nothing like a cage.
In human form the morning made the grade.
To sleep to make a dream beyond the age.
A brush's bristles turned to arms of sleep.
Across the bed a glory waits in grammes.
Fatales were queued to cut the glitter heap.
Detectives claimed the cold and bundled hams.
The metal unexplained remained aboard.
A flute was more than finger tapping chord.

After pointing out the scarcity of female writers on Star Wars: Rebels a couple days ago--the series had only one, Nicole Duboc, who wrote two and a half episodes (the series finale also had Lucasfilm producer Kiri Hart credited alongside five male writers)--I thought to-day, being International Women's Day, would be a good time to assemble a list of outstanding episodes from various Sci-Fi/Fantasy series written by women. Here are four, listed chronologically:



Star Trek, "The Enterprise Incident" by D.C. Fontana

Even the original Star Trek series had more female writers than Rebels, among them one of the best of any gender, D.C. Fontana. She wrote several episodes and worked on Next Generation as well. "The Enterprise Incident", a third season episode of the Original Series, also featured one of the best female characters on the series. The Romulan Commander played by Joanne Linville was essential, coming off as a capable and cagey rival for the Enterprise crew in an episode that defined many aspects of the Romulans as a people for the Original Series and its descendants.



Doctor Who, Englightenment by Barbara Clegg

This 1983 story was the first Doctor Who serial since 1966's The Ark to have a credited female writer and the first to have a woman as the sole credited writer. It was also directed by a woman, Fiona Cumming, who took Barbara Clegg's keen scripts about an interstellar boat race between omnipotent alien aristocrats and gave them some of the most memorably fantastical visuals from the series' history.



Farscape, "A Clockwork Nebari" by Lily Taylor

Lily Taylor's second season script brought a satisfying expansion on the backstory for series' favourite, Chiana (Gigi Edgley). We learn how she and her brother escaped from their homeworld's oppressive system of behavioural modification (thus the title's reference to A Clockwork Orange). Filled with Farscape's usual visual splendour and amazing practical effects, this episode was an excellent showcase for the series' most fascinating species and one of its best characters.



Star Wars Clone Wars, the Dathomir arc by Katie Lucas

There's no mystery about how George's daughter, Katie, got a job working on Clone Wars but she did more than hold her own among the other writers. Taking the world established in the old Expanded Universe novel The Courtship of Princess Leia, Katie Lucas gave audiences a great origin story for the popular character, Asajj Ventress, by creating one of Clone Wars', and the Star Wars universe's, most memorable places and cultures. It's a shame Ventress doesn't seem to be around anymore but, then again, maybe it wouldn't be the same without Katie Lucas around writing for her anyway.

Twitter Sonnet #1091

In limits red the body bounds a ghost.
Horizon's tree presents a brocc'li great.
A forest pooled to pour a paper host.
With cherry limbs a spider laces bait.
In stocking minds a footless shape ascends.
Unlikely moons absorb the sun and Earth.
The fire text in forests late appends.
A fading ship in iron halls was birthed.
Unchosen lamps discreetly lead the lost.
A swaying branch amassed a soil path.
Above, some walls of leaves were lightly tossed.
As rocket crews would take a sonic bath.
Rerouted veins deploy the ore to Oz.
The toughest clouds are really made of gauze.

Star Trek: Discovery has been many things over the course of its 15 episode run. Finally becoming a stoner and sex comedy in last night's season finale, it really felt like the creative team got together and said, well, we might as well have a party. And it was fun.

Spoilers after the screenshot



This is more like the Klingons I know and love. Klingons having fun being fucking brutal. I even liked Ash (Shazad Latif) better when he was letting his hair down and speaking Klingon. Though, on that note, they really need to do something about the Klingons' hair, or lack thereof.



The Klingons get a big redesign but for some reason the Orions are still basically humans with green skin? Well, okay, it's fine. I just wish the camera had stayed on the strippers longer and there'd been more of an effort made to make them titillating. I know Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) would agree.



I don't care now that her being made captain doesn't make any sense, this lady is fun. She's almost Kirk. Well, Kirk was a lot more complex, which would've been nice for Mirror Georgiou. Her immediate attempt to control language on the Discovery bridge was interesting, though. The tactic is a classic one designed to reinforce hierarchy in war, to dehumanise the enemy to make it easier for them to kill. This is why Winston Churchill banned The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, because it portrayed Germans sympathetically despite it being unambiguously a pro-British film. It's a conversation worth having--does the population need to be sold on a simpler version of reality so they're more comfortable with killing?



Context is for kings, Lorca told us early in the season--Lorca, who only gets a brief mention in this episode, and only from Mirror Georgiou. This flies in the face of the idea that the Federation is a perfectly functioning socialist utopia. So this naturally leads to Burnham (Soneque Martin-Green) confronting Cornwell (Jayne Brook) in full view of the bridge crew. Was this meant to be the moment where Burnham shows she's finally learned the lesson that Lorca was wrong, that someone taking matters into her own hands is always the wrong thing to do? Her calling on support from the bridge crew would seem to support this idea. "A year ago, I stood alone," Burnham says, "I believed that our survival was more important than our principles. I was wrong." Ah, case closed, guess context is for everyone, not just for kings so--

"Do we need a mutiny to-day? To prove who we are?"

Oh. So don't take matters into your own hands, unless you really want to. I guess it's a bit like "Only a Sith speaks in absolutes" being in itself an absolute.



Later, the soft hearted Sarek (James Frain) gets emotional talking about how he'd given into the idea that destroying the Klingon homeworld was the only way. I thought the Vulcans being portrayed as open with their emotions was a result of sloppy writing but now I think it was a conscious creative decision. I don't recall any mention of the Vulcan philosophy of emotional suppression, or of how strong emotions once tore Vulcan apart before they came up with this way of life. Maybe the creators felt this didn't look good in the face of the popular pseudo-scientific metric of "emotional intelligence".



In all the discussion of what Burnham did wrong back at the beginning of the series, though, no-one mentions that she was following Sarek's advice, that apparently the Vulcans kept the peace with Klingons by always firing on Klingons first, the so called "Vulcan hello". In other words, what Burnham was ultimately trying to do by getting the Shenzhou to fire on the Klingons was to keep the peace in a language the Klingons understand. Which makes what she did at the end of the series . . . pretty much exactly like what she did at the beginning of the series. So it looks like Lorca was right, it's just that Burnham is more suited to a leadership role than Cornwell. Context really is for kings.



It really is odd how we don't have any reactions to Lorca's absence. This crew had served under him for some time. We saw him save at least one planet under attack by Klingons and Burnham seemed really pleased when he praised her decision making in "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad". Shouldn't we see some people dealing with the fact that this man they respected and served is dead and gone? Aren't they upset at all? I would have thought dealing with these kinds of issues would've been the whole point of having him being secretly from the mirror universe. It really feels like the makers of the show somehow didn't realise he was the best character on it.



Meanwhile, Tilly (Mary Wiseman) encounters Clint Howard who seems to be playing Cheech Marin in this episode. Wiseman is really funny getting high off volcano vapour.



Twitter Sonnet #1083

Banana leaves at ease confirm the beat.
The shadow lines demure 'neath candy sun.
A Lazy Susan brings to odds a heat.
And back to kitchens baked into the bun.
A shoulder shape suspends the weather sky.
A hardly felt interpreting returns.
In giving pins the ball obtains a try.
To bowl in clouds we flew asleep in turns.
In times of gummy air the moth'll rest.
Beside the bark of choc'ate ash it grew.
To shape a pigment east of scarlet crest.
A hopping bead revealed the cup of true.
An eager recipe ignites the stove.
Electric glass compels the brain to rove.

Last night we may have seen the point where the writers just completely stopped trying to tell a coherent story on Star Trek: Discovery. Abruptly swerving into a clumsy political allegory, characters that fly completely off any semblance of tracks, and with some awkward action sequences, "Past is Prologue" did have some nice performances, some kind of nice call backs to Star Trek II to remind us Nicholas Meyer was working on this show, and the show finally introduced a few of Star Trek's best qualities that'd been lacking on Discovery so far.

Spoilers after the screenshot



It was nice to see the rest of the bridge crew finally being able to make substantial contributions to the conversation. They all looked pretty intriguing, I don't see why Tilly (Mary Wiseman) had to be doing a one woman show on the ship for the past few episodes. Maybe we'll get to know that cool looking cyborg lady better.



Meanwhile, on the Charon, a story that probably needed at least five episodes is crammed into one. Lorca (Jason Isaacs), who, as was established last week, has been Mirror Lorca all along, sets loose a small army of his followers who were conveniently stashed in nearby Agoniser booths. He assumes somehow that Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) has already figured out he's Mirror Lorca and that she's chosen to side with Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) despite the fact that this Georgiou eats people and wanted to have Burnham killed.



Was anyone else hoping to hear Georgiou play Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" on her pipe organ throne?

I hate allegory (for the reasons J.R.R. Tolkien has eloquently given) but I can't deny it's a classic Trek thing to do. But the hasty measures taken to turn Lorca into Donald Trump were exceedingly unwieldy. For one thing, I don't think Trump has the mental dexterity to pass as a Starfleet officer for so long. But his argument that Georgiou is allowing aliens to flood over the border--how does this argument gain traction in even the most delusionally racist minds? This is the Georgiou we saw recently slaughter a group of alien rebels.

I have to say, though, if aliens are trying that hard to get into the Terran Empire the alternative must be pretty horrific. Maybe they're running from the Cardassian-Klingon alliance that eventually took over the Terran Empire on Deep Space Nine?



I'm glad to have Michelle Yeoh back on the show but I would've liked more development of Mirror Georgiou's relationship with Burnham. Maybe instead of a Burnham who seems instantly absolutely certain of everything really fast, we could've had a period where she was studying Mirror Georgiou to find some hint of humanity, with moments where Burnham's preconceptions about human nature were challenged as she gradually was forced to admit she still feels a connexion with this woman. Though, since that's also probably the story that needed to happen with Tyler, there may be too many ingredients in this soup to leave any room for base.



Why does Burnham side with Georgiou instead of Lorca? All she knows about Mirror Lorca at this point is that she had a pretty good working relationship with him before she knew he was Mirror Lorca and that before that he was trying to overthrow Mirror Georgiou, the racist mass murderer. It's uncertain whether she figured out that Lorca had deliberately brought Discovery to the Mirror Universe but he would still seem a better ally than Georgiou. I'm forced to conclude she's fighting him entirely because he had a relationship with Mirror Burnham that went from parental to sexual. Which might be creepy though we know very little about it. He still seems a better bet than the Emperor who wanted to kill Burnham, the Emperor who thinks Saru (Doug Jones) is an entrée--Lorca, meanwhile, seems to have genuine respect for Saru. Maybe if, over a series of episodes, a rift had been established between Burnham and Mirror Lorca, maybe one were his sexual attraction to her was related to some patronising sense of superiority, this would have all played out more coherently. As it is, all we have is the memory of him complementing her ingenuity and courage when they first met. When he said "Context is for kings" he was clearly including Burnham in the "Kings" column.



Lorca kind of reminds me of when Derek Jacobi played the Master for an episode of Doctor Who. Up until the newest incarnation of the Master, Missy, he was one of my least favourite aspect of Doctor Who because he was such a two dimensional villain (though I have come to appreciate the complexity suggested by some of the hints at friendship between Roger Delgado and Jon Pertwee). But Jacobi had some layers to work with due to the Master's lose of memory and it was genuinely intriguing watching the cracks starting to show as the old personality started to assert itself over the decent man he thought he was. Then John Simm took over and he was just the boring old Master again. Jason Isaac's performance on Star Trek: Discovery has been similarly intriguing, forcing you to watch him to try to figure out what his motives really are, the ambiguity hitting just the right note to seem like a genuinely mysterious character. The flat character he abruptly becomes in "Past is Prologue" is inevitably a let down. I am hoping we'll get to meet Prime Lorca, though.

It is nice to see everyone seems to be using viewscreens now instead of holograms.



Twitter Sonnet #1079

Misplacing sums retires mice to tails.
A passing lock rebuffs the largest grief.
To pepper soup's to loose the baby's wails.
The standard tea by half is all too brief.
The amber pudding held a gummy bug.
In op'ras sprung the dates for haste delay.
To fires draw the frozen shadows snug.
For giants wrought of eyes the songs allay.
The scarab rows reformed in jelly wine.
For fixing rows of ceiling tombs recall.
The scalps're lately spun in thinning twine.
More lakes than springs could salad days forestall.
The river brings the brains to party shops.
The fractured marble surface clouds the stops.

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, everyone. It seems appropriate to talk about Star Trek since it's well known that King was a fan--even better that Star Trek Discovery has a black lead. It's only a shame last night's episode, "Bad Wolf"--I mean, "The Wolf Inside"--kind of sucked.

Spoilers after the screenshot



At least Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) had some kind of sexy lingerie though this is perhaps the only area where Discovery is technologically behind the Original Series, at least in the mirror universe.



Meanwhile, back on the Discovery, Saru (Doug Jones) and Tilly (Mary Wiseman) are dealing with the aftermath of Culber's murder, doing a brain analysis of Stamets (Anthony Rapp) for some reason without assistance from the doctor Lorca (Jason Isaacs) had assigned to him in the previous episode.



Tilly really does seem to be doing everything now. She insists she, and she alone, should try her spore drive solution on Stamets because of her experience with the spores. The Discovery medical staff must be notoriously meddlesome jerks, I guess.



Burnham, on the Shenzhou, is trying to figure out how to save a "coalition of hope", a team of rebels to the Terran Empire, while still seeming like she's a perfectly decent psychopath. I did kind of like her internal monologue about having to pretend she's something she's not. Lorca insists she and Tyler (Shazad Latif) beam down to the planet without any mirror universe away team to complicate things.



Oh, look, quarry. Classic.

After being cleared thanks to a mind meld from mirror universe Sarek (James Frain)--who apparently doesn't learn everything about the prime universe the way mirror Spock did when he mind melded with McCoy--Burnham's allowed to ask the rebel leader, Voq (Shazad Latif), how he manages to lead such a diverse group of people. Unfortunately, Burnham turns into Joe Scarborough and turns her question into a really long speech so Voq barely has time to say something vague about honour in response.



I'm not sure what Burnham expected. Being the targets of a murderous Empire seems like it might have a unifying influence on a diverse group. I'm also not sure what Burnham was trying to do in complimenting the stereotypes of every race present. Nice to see the Andorians haven't been changed too much for Discovery though it makes the hairlessness of the Klingons stand out even more.



I guess when Voq was changed into Tyler facial hair was implanted in the process? What was that discussion like? "I want to be a little scruffy. Not a full, thick beard, but like one of those humans who doesn't shave very often, you know what I mean."



And, oh, yeah, Tyler is Voq. What a shock. It's a Voq Shock!



It was nice to see Michelle Yeoh back at the end and I look forward to some hopefully juicy scenes between her and Burnham. She's the Emperor, it seems. Not the Empress? I'd have never thought the Terran Empire would be so politically correct.

A very nice Star Trek Discovery last night. It made absolutely no sense and yet it felt like the most coherent episode of the season. Maybe this is where Nicholas Meyer started exerting his influence after the previous episodes burned off the remains of Bryan Fuller's ideas because the excitement, action, and violation all put me in mind of Star Trek II.

Spoilers after the screenshot



So the Klingons are on their way to destroy that organic trasmiter along with the whole blue will-o'-the-wisp civilisation from last week and Lorca (Jason Isaacs) does the heroic thing and disobeys Starfleet orders to stick around and save them. Lorca seems like an old fashioned Star Trek captain at this point, even Kirk seemed more Hawkish in Star Trek VI. Trillions of lives being at stake does seem like a good reason for Stamets (Anthony Rapp) to risk all those spore drive jumps, though it's weird the straw that broke the Stamets back was the one they apparently took for no reason at the end.



I saw on the io9 review that Stamets had to use the spore drive instead of just warping because there was some talk about a Klingon fleet following them back to Federation space if they just warped. But since the Federation and the Klingons are at war anyway wouldn't the Klingons be doing that regardless of whether the Discovery was around?



But I liked Lorca in this episode and I liked him before. Jason Isaacs hits it out of the park. I didn't mind the fact that Lorca had been gathering scientific data on the spore jumps and Stamets doesn't ask why it'd been a secret--not to mention it doesn't make sense that Stamets himself wouldn't be gathering the same data. But the relationship between Stamets and Culber (Wilson Cruz) is nice despite the fact that every beat of it made clear exactly what was going to happen. The actors pulled it off really well and the balancing of private life with professional life Stamets had set up in his confession to Tilly (Mary Wiseman) is a nicely handled thread on an otherwise inconsistent show. Though Tilly blurting out Stamets' secret seemed awkward and unnatural even by 80s daytime sitcom standards.



The final battle between Kol (Kenneth Mitchell) and Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) was nice though woodenly choreographed to allow for Kol's cumbersome costume, the actors' evident lack of training, and the fact that tiny Burnham looks ridiculously outmatched. But that Klingon bridge set is gorgeous.



The scene allowed Kol to reiterate the perplexing motive for the Klingon's going to war, something about the Federation robbing them of their identity. Maybe the Klingons in this are meant to be an allegory for anti-immigration rednecks or Brexiters or something but the circumstances are too vastly different for that to work. But if that was the idea it would explain the incoherence of it.



Voq (Shazad Latif) is still masquerading as human Starfleet officer Ash Tyler though incredibly this episode doesn't give us the "reveal". I mean, it's so damned obvious I don't even know why people are calling it speculation or a theory anymore. One guy accuses George Takei of sexual assault and we're supposed to believe it on no evidence but somehow Voq and Ash being the same person is just speculation. Maybe the more severe the theory, the more we're supposed to take it as true?



This episode dealt with sexual assault, sort of, with Voq remembering what he seems to think was essentially non-consensual sex with L'Rell (Mary Chieffo). I think it's in this episode they decided Voq in his Ash persona has had his memory manipulated so that he really believes he's human until he's presumably "activated" at some point. He always seemed really douchy before this episode, like he was well aware of a joke he was playing on the crew of Discovery, now he seems like he means what he says. I suspect his and Burnham's relationship is going to end up being something like the 1946 movie Black Angel. Which would be cool, it'd be the closest to noir that Star Trek's ever come and with the appearance of Klingon breasts in this episode, after the use of the word "fuck" in a few episodes previous, this is clearly not designed to be a family show. Though I guess the gruesomeness of Voq's surgery flashbacks are no worse than Khan putting those mind eating worms in people's ears.

I guess they figure there's no way kids would be into Star Trek now. I wonder if that comes from cynicism? There are some examples of children's literature that are way beyond most kids to-day, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, for example. And maybe instilling optimism in kids, something Star Trek was once known for, is kind of a bad idea since we're all very likely doomed. Still, I somehow wish there were more smart people who believed we weren't.

Last night's new Orville, "Into the Fold", was the most Star Trek-ish episode yet--no surprise considering it was written by Brannon Braga and Andre Bormanis and the episode was directed by Braga. It felt very much like an episode of Voyager where Janeway or someone else, having crash landed on a planet, has to rely more on her wits than technology to survive but "Into the Fold" brings in the element of a single mother in an interesting way coming, I suspect, from the insight of at least one writer who's a parent. It also distinguished Isaac a bit from Data in that, while his business with the children at times felt like Data's awkward interactions with kids in episodes of TNG like "Hero Worship", Isaac seems much more like a parent's wish fulfilment; he's a character who's free to say those things an exasperated parent would love to say to kids but hopefully has too much of a sense of responsibility to actually say.

Spoilers after the screenshot



Braga was a showrunner on Voyager and also worked on Star Trek: The Next Generation and the character interactions, particularly between Dr. Finn (Penny Johnson Jerald) and her kidnapper, felt like something from 90s Trek in a very effective way. The way Finn deduces and acts on the kidnapper's attraction to her when she convinces him to go and get the first aid kit from the shuttle was nicely done. I like how much it trusts the audience to pick up on that subtext without directly explaining it. Mind you, I have seen a few people on the internet criticise Finn for shooting a guy who was just trying to help her, apparently choosing not to consider the significance of the fact that Finn was locked in a cell and not permitted even to use her communicator. It's nice that The Orville, isn't pitching for the lowest common denominator. I still have some hope that if you treat an audience like they're intelligent even the normally less intelligent might be inspired to improve.



I'm still not completely sold on Penny Johnson Jerald and I don't quite understand why I'm the only one who seems to find her a bit flat and unconvincing. Maybe she's a Robert Forster type, I didn't appreciate him at first either, specialising in playing a kind of low key, emotionally walled off person I'm not attuned to. But I loved Forster on Twin Peaks where I kind of got him as a Gary Cooper type, maybe I'll get to that place with Jerald, too. Certainly her character, Finn, shines in the episode being saavy and quick. She is a bit like John Wayne or Gary Cooper in a 50s western, able to draw and shoot on someone when she has to but remembering to teach her children to use stun when they can on principle.



I guess the nearest equivalent on Star Trek to Finn's relationship with her kids would be Benjamin Sisko and his son Jake on Deep Space Nine but never on Star Trek did you get the credibly messy rivalry dynamic you see between Ty and Marcus--not even in "Disaster" when Picard was stuck in a turbolift with a bunch of kids. Finn casually saying that she decided to be a single parent raises eyebrows when considering she has to corral these two and work as the ship's doctor. In a world where no-one has to work for money, such a decision doesn't make a whole lot of sense so it's a lucky thing Isaac (Mark Jackson) seems to have earned a place in the family by the end of the episode. I'm not a parent but I've had enough dealings with kids to get some catharsis when Isaac took Marcus' game and blasted it.



"Into the Fold" was co-written by Andre Bormanis who has serves as a technical consultant on The Orville, a job he also had on Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. I suspect this is why the suspenseful shuttle crash sequence had a nice feeling of authenticity to it that helped create that tension.

Twitter Sonnet #1050

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