Ephraim and Dot

 

***(3 warp core poached eggs out of 5)

Sometimes you really just have to let things drop. Sometimes people probably are trying to be respectful of the classics and even when they work hard to make a thing it sometimes still doesn't appeal to me. Pobody's Nerfect.

I am that pathetic, tactless jerk who remains irritated by irrelevant minutiae. There is no window in Enterprise sickbay and it's not in the secondary hull. Why are there laundry bins unattended in a kilometer-long Viper launch tube? How does a pile of eggs remain undisturbed in Main Engineering for decades? How does a tardigrade that can travel instantaneously (much faster than warp drive) through the mycelial network fail to catch a ship that stops at planets every week? Or when the ship stopped dead for a 2 year overhaul AND STILL nobody swept up the eggs? How does the droid follow the mama tardigrade back in time while we watch classic episode clips passing in the background all higgledy-piggledy? The 2250's style (he typed ragefully with both clenched fists while grinding his teeth to a fine powder) vented nacelle pylons weren't a part of the Enterprise design in the 2260's as I very distinctly recall and can check at any time on Crave or iTunes because it's the method I've chosen to waste my entire spare time for my entire life. It wasn't the Enterprise-A that self destructed in battle with the Klingons. And the primary hull markings are skewed way off center at one point, just like most tiny toy decals I've ever applied like a giant lummox.

But there's also a time to Shut the Vulcan Up and say it's fine. IT'S FINE. You've got a great Star Trek story here about a misunderstanding between a merchandisable little robot that wants things neat and tidy and a cuddly doodlebug that wants to lay colourful eggs in inconvenient places and they beat each other up for a couple of decades or minutes because time is meaningless. And in the end it all works out. It's even a little bit of fun. Especially the music and the narrator.

How do people manage to just enjoy things?

Ask Not

 ***(3 head bags out of 5)

Ooh, is that an extreme close-up and the sweet ringing of a concussion in my ears? It's time for another short Trek. 

Black bag ops and prisoner mutinies are... normal? I guess? In Starfleet, I guess? Amidst explosions, Starbase Cadet Sidhu is told to guard that mutinous sexy dog Captain Pike because... the security guards are busy... something something. Congratulations, no more boring inventory- You're the Brig now, Cadet!

Keep that phaser trained on Pike no matter what lies he tells- like he's the hero in all this, or join me and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son...

Or Tholians have seized the Bouman, where Sidhu's husband serves. That's especially crummy luck because Tholians killed everyone but the two of them a few years ago on planet Berillium, vital source of Galaxy Quest's berillium spheres. Won't somebody brave set Pike free from his unjust imprisonment to run off and blast nasty old Tholians into gorgeous glittering peachy particles?

Under a barrage of torpedoes, Pike and Sidhu exchange a barrage of rules to see who is right and who should wear kinky tesseract masks and handcuffs. Charmingly, many of these rules are previously established as "real" and seem to actually ground this story in Star Trek's dimension or near enough for me. 

Sidhu passed the test by standing her ground and will serve on Enterprise. As I should be expecting by now and is still not to my taste, the engineering department is a dazzling circuitry temple chamber I don't see anywhere on my old timey Enterprise blueprints. Ask Not what your effects department can do for you, ask what you can do to keep the effects from making sense in context.

Well performed minisode, unfortunate that I've been waiting so long for Pike to return. But soon we will be rewarded.

The Trouble With Edward

**(2 hairy scallops out of 5)

If the story of Alien: Resurrection was compressed to 14 minutes, recast with tribbles, and was scored with a slide whistle, would it be a comedy? Let's find out!

Genial Captain Pike sees his officer Lynn Lucero off on her first command. Starship Cabot is seeking to cure a famine among the Calatians of Pragine 63. The crew includes a dangerously unstable... scientist, I suppose, named Edward, who found a slow breeding, potentially intelligent variety of tribble. It does not seem to match the tribbles Dr. Phlox already used last century as a quickly replenished meat source for his pets, possibly without telling anybody else, as was the style at the time. It does not carry the same scientific name as the ones from Keiko's classroom a century hence, letting them slightly off the hook, canon-wise, if not morally. Against Lucero's orders Edward genetically modifies the creatures with his own DNA to become rapid breeding because... Edward can breed rapidly, I guess? Also maybe his DNA defies the laws of mass conservation since these Edribbles reproduce faster than Mogwai in a town swimming pool and it doesn't seem like the Cabot crew were even feeding them, let alone feeding them after midnight.

Anyway, for some reason, this all goes awry, until not even vacuum backpacks can get rid of all the adorable monstrosities. Edward dies suffocated under his creations, and the ship is lost, and the planet is lost. Evacuated, I guess, but evacuating a starving planet sounds like it's just going to mean more lingering deaths. Tragedy plus Time equals Comedy!

At the now-standard Shadowy Board of Inquiry, Captain Lucero places all the blame on Dead Edward the Idiot. Don't say it is a poor workman who blames his tools, for Edward was certainly a tool. Edward’s “study” included skinning the creatures, eating one or two, feeding one to his colleague without telling him, and observing that these Cuddly Meatballs are slow and die easily in a fall from a desk. If they were intelligent (and nobody seems interested in determining that one way or another) Edward claims he could cause them to be born brain damaged. All of these things are jokes, you see.

How was Edward in Starfleet without being fired? What am I supposed to make of Lucero trying to put Edward (a Protein Specialist, unless that’s more of his bullshit) onto Climatologist duty? Let’s assume I don’t have the training to be a Starfleet captain or a scientist, yet I feel like changing the man's entire field of study overnight during a planetary disaster was an unrealistic expectation on the Captain’s part, especially if she already thinks he's an idiot. Was there realistically no earlier way Lucero could have solved this verbally? Firing Ed before he can make mistakes this big, or killing the mistakes themselves with fire, or stunning him and dragging his pasty ass to the escape pod and detonating the ship would also have been acceptable. And funny!

There's a post credits commercial for Tribbles Cereal. What is that meant to be? Who is the target audience, in universe? Television is not even supposed to exist in this century. Did Edward shoot a breakfast food commercial in the insanely retro style of the 1990s and cast somebody’s kids and mock up cardboard boxes and genuinely expect everyone to buy and eat live, unskinned animals first thing in the morning?

I have to believe none of this was ever sent out on the news services otherwise WHY has nobody on the Enterprise in “The Trouble With Tribbles” EVER. HEARD. OF. TRIBBLES???

These are talented performers who make me laugh, but I'm sorry, I don't buy it. And by it, I mean spicy tribble breakfast cereal.

 

Q&A

 **** (4 stars out of 5)

Flashback, as evidenced by starting with hazy formlessness like we're all just waking up after a long weekend. It’s probably 2254, pre-The Cage, and we've doubled down- this is the Enterprise uniform now. Oh, Discovery crew called it the "new uniform" 4 years from now? How do you define "new" anyway? New like New Ensign Spock, full of shouting and smiles like Spock was in 'The Cage'.

His new boss, whose NAME is Number One, demands he ask questions until it gets annoying. Where did Spock beam over from? Why all the close-ups? Why are the internal works of Enterprise cavernous and twisted? You know this isn’t a TARDIS, right? Why is the turbolift inside Willy Wonka’s Night Factory? Oh, never mind, now it's broken down. What's Upjohn? Not much, what's up wi' ye? Engineer Upjohn's no help until she fixes the busted cyfrifiadur. Looks like Spock and Number One are stuck until they have a genuine conversation or some sex.

Why is the sky black? Which of us loves Pike most? Can we agree that our breathless, desperate insistence that we are each the smartest in the room is true but not getting us anywhere, sex wise?

Ensign Spock proposes (as devil’s advocate?) that the Prime Directive is unethical, illogical, and morally indefensible. And that the universe is a simulation. He stops short of looking directly at the camera. I mean, he's a smart guy.

How does one achieve command? "Keep your freaky to yourself even if it’s painful." says Number One, whose name is Number One. She is hiding her singing talent, as Spock must hide his Vulcan glee. Which is Vulcan for sex.

It took 3 years to get back here, but this is maybe a glucose matrix taste of the upcoming series that a lot of Trekkies pinned their hopes on, including me.

Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2

***(3 sorrows out of 5)

Thanks for spinning the camera like a top on a stick. It’s so hard to know what is happening that I’m forced to assume it was something cool! It was Emmy Nom worthy, anyway!

If only we hadn’t spent our last hour saying tearful goodbyes, we wouldn’t need to have a dozen people frantically throwing together a Red Angel suit all at once during a fire fight. 

It’s quite a fight. 30 Section 31 drone ships that (surprise!) split up into swarms of small drone ships versus 200 heroically manned fighter ships which somehow fit inside Enterprise, a ship with 200 crew, who are therefore all cross-trained as pilots? Apparently the ship’s cavernous interior workings are packed with factories and Wall-E droids who can build shuttle fleets at the drop of a hat? That might’ve been nice during ‘The Enemy Within’, but as we know Scotty ripped it all out to store thousands upon thousands of whiskey bottles.

Incessant noise and whirling lights! Queen Po intuits the method to destroy Leland’s drones- two fighters must simultaneously hit a drone at each end. How? With help from Ash and L’Rell on an ever-loving ding dang dongus called a Klingon Sleeve Ship. And noted SPACE FIGHTER PILOT Saru’s little sister, fresh from a lifetime of training as a gardener priestess.

The exact episode mid point is a Culber/Stamets hurt/comfort scene that would have disqualified this from fan fiction publication in earlier decades and is really rather wonderful. “You’re my home. I’m your family. Wherever we go from here. We go together.”

Enterprise gets a face full of torpedo, and because literally all the crew are off being fighter pilots, Admiral Cornwell becomes their munitions guy and explodes while saving the ship, which doesn’t seem to give anyone any feelings.

“I’m good,” says Michael, despite being made entirely of concussions by this point. With Spock’s assistance, she blasts vividly back in time to accomplish 5 previous Red Angel events, then opens a 6th wormhole to take Discovery 930 years into the future.

I’d hate to lose the Barzan security officer in the Georgiou/Leland fight but otherwise I do not care who wins in Genocidal Emperor v. Venom Symbiote. I feel like whoever won you’d still want to keep them well away from any position of power. Why does Saru trust Georgiou with computers on his bridge? Oh, right. Everyone has concussions. Plus without Georgiou, Control would have won, as she now kills misogynistic infiltrator Leland with magnets.

If Control is neutralized, why does Discovery continue on through the Devil’s Anus? And bring along Leland’s Control-riddled corpse? Not our problem!

Everyone left behind in 2258 claims Disco exploded. We’ll also swear each other to secrecy- Discovery never existed in the first place. The Authorities claim Control is definitely gone forever and we’ll all be very careful not to make any more brilliant killer computers… named Control… again.

Such Sweet Sorrow

*** (3 out of 5)

With a ticking clock to save all living things, and a Section 31 Skynetfleet bearing down upon them, Discovery evacuates to Enterprise with the intention of scuttling the ship. 

As holographic communications are now equated with Control’s trickery, Number One has sworn Enterprise off them forever. We still trust our good chums Georgiou and Ash, of course, who spent a ton of time with Leland the Roiling Mass of Infectious Nanomachines. Georgiou even has a new dungeon guard uniform, and Ash can wander off, on his own, with any shuttlecraft he fancies.

The self-destruct is not responding, because the priceless Sphere data has self-preservation skills, so we're back to "throw all this volatile knowledge far into the future to be safe". The 5th Red Angel Signal of 7 takes Discovery to Xahea, the planet with a Midgard Serpent eating it or something. A real Van Art planet. Tilly's whiz kid chum Queen Po hands them her recrystalizer to power their journey, so Georgiou doesn't get to set off a supernova with a ghastly death toll.

 

“I love you. All of you. Thank you for the greatest moments of my life.” says Michael to the bridge crew. When??? Which of these ceaseless explosions and fraught horrors and upsetting concussions have been the greatest moments of your life?

"I wish there was more time... there isn't." They have SO MUCH SPARE TIME FOR TEARFUL GOODBYES! Sarek and Amanda even heard with their souls that there was trouble and drive up in their personal spaceship just ahead of what is about to be a baby tribble in a kill zone!

Instead of a solo suicide mission, everyone on board (as represented by a double handful of familiar faces) agrees to follow Michael into hell, unless they’re getting a Spin Off... into Space… with Section 31.

Hang on, those evacuation walkways seem ludicrous to me. The effects are shiny & elaborate, but why stretch them out from the FARTHEST point from the other ship? Why not dock saucer edge to saucer edge? 

Speaking of docking, my first thought and last thought when Ash and Michael kiss was “Gross”. Unless Klingons are big teeth brushers, can she still taste Georgiou from when Ash ate her? Mentor- The Freshmaker! 

Detmer’s best friend is Tazzy. How do I know? I'm a big fan of superanemic.

Oh, when did we arrive on the control deck of a TRON Recognizer? Nope- this is the Enterprise at Red Alert, I’m afraid. Enterprise bridge is a fine new design, but incapable of activating my nostalgia. Building an entirely new & different thing is not how nostalgia works. But at least it's colourful and at least Georgiou disdains it. 

And I get a few seconds of Pike back in nearly the right uniform. 

No! Don’t you dare kill Jett...

Cliffhanger! Hashtag Shave Spock. 

Through the Valley of Shadows

 ***(3 out of 5)

“I’m not angry, I’m enraged.” says Michael Burnham, running off on an unsanctioned solo mission chasing Leland, which very nearly gets her taken over by Control. Spock badgers his way into coming along on the side quest, where they find more frozen space corpses and a slightly alive former Shenzhou officer turned Section 31 goon, Kamran Gant. Well, maybe less than slightly alive. 

Gant is a Control puppet, like Leland. Were they rebuilt from corpses? Entirely made of nanobots completely beyond the ken of the present day Starfleet? Unclear. They fool tricorders, they're fast and strong, they don’t have nerve endings, and they don't stop when you put big holes in them. Spock finally stops the fight scene with magnets. Would Gant have been susceptible to phaser vaporization? For some reason our heroes aren't using that setting. Just the energy bullet setting. Because it's cool.

Poor Jett Reno lost her Soyousian wife with all her irritating vegan steaks- she died in the Klingon war. She urges Culber to get off his existential mope and use his second chance at love. 

Pike (since Burnham isn't around and Ash and L'Rell think it's crazy risky) quests for a time crystal on planet Boreth, where Ash and L'Rell banished their very pale baby. 

Tenavik, son of none, was a very pale baby a few months ago, and is now a Dungeons and Dragons cleric. He's full of doom and assures Pike that taking a crystal will lock him into a horrible destiny. Confirmed by terrifying visions, its curse will seal Pike’s fate. He will be melted by radiation and confined to an iron lung chair. Is that better or worse than the Arnold Rimmer uniform that also awaits him? 

Pike fears no evil, he's pretty amazing. Reno is always welcome, coming to Culber with a hangnail to share some important thoughts on love. Spock and Michael are young and brave and they're working through some things, very admirable.

So it turns out Boreth is secretly full of time crystals and Klingon Timekeepers have been guarding them for generations, accelerating the lives of trees or inconvenient babies. Klingons seem like responsible, sensible people who wouldn’t ever use these crystals to erase human hist

Perpetual Infinity

***(3 out of 5)

Michael Burnham lost her parents at age 10 or 12. In an attempt to go back one hour and save Mike and Michael, Dr. Gabrielle Burnham in her experimental Red Angel temporal armor ends up 950 years in the future, alone among many totally dead worlds.

She was the one who moved an Earth church to Terralysium, but remains unable to save her family in multiple attempts. Unable to destroy the Sphere called Sphere (which contains the knowledge that will give Control the power to destroy all living things), Dr. Burnham undoes the Sphere's gravitational binding and puts it in Discovery’s path. When and how she achieved this is unclear- is setting a boiling moon thrice the size of a Death Star in motion easier than waving a big magnet over the Control AI before it can become a supervillain?

After briefly arguing that destroying the Sphere Data is like burning the Library at Alexandria, Saru gets out a digital cannister of digital gasoline anyway... and finds that the data is inflammable. Gabrielle has seen Michael die hundreds of times (and presumably hundreds of ways, despite her growing pessimism with temporal mutability.) She's seen it and prevented it at least once, in Michael's youth on Vulcan.

While Ash fiddles with a glowing pog, Spock hatches a plan to use dark matter particles to keep Dr. Burnham in the present, and put the dangerous data into the Red Angel suit and throw it back to the future.

I can’t understand why “The Distant Future” is declared inaccessible to Control. There are several dozen ways to time travel in Star Trek, and just the soup of the day, Klingon Time Crystals, have already been in Section 31's wrong hands for decades.

Leland, now riddled with Control's nanites, stabs Ash, kills some dudes, damages the Red Angel suit, and gets away with half a copy of the Sphere Data, more's the pity.

They nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Torpedoes reach the surface in what looks like one second (probably using warp speed, although I think that raises further questions.)

This maybe was their last chance to paper over why young Michael, hiding in the closet, heard her father die, and then heard her mother die longer. Possibly Michael is remembering the sound of her mom making a paradox-inducing number of curtailed attempts to change this moment? Just horrifying.

Anyway, now the empty Red Angel suit and Mom by herself are each yanked back through the wormhole into the bleak and foreboding future. Just horrifying.

Spock sets up a game of chess with Michael, which is pretty cool. Not as horrifying. "We have only now... we will find a way."

The Red Angel

 **(2 red angels out of 5)

Depending on what the vague images of autopsy and funeral mean, Dr. Pollard probably did everything she could and/or intentionally deleted Airiam’s digital memories to stop the AI Control’s infection. 

Everyone bonds over Airiam's funeral, including Michael & Nhan, Michael & surrogate-surrogate-mom Georgiou (interplanetary genocidal mass murderer), and Michael & handsome Ash (who ate the righteous version of Georgiou). Also both Ash and Georgiou are working for the dirty tricks squad who are most directly responsible for Control and thereby Airiam's death, so they should always be involved in all of our efforts to fight Control.

Tilly brings a bombshell from Airiam’s files- the Red Angel is Michael.

Because sick days and mental health days don't exist, Dr. Culber is back at work. He's getting some therapy regarding his separation from Cdr. Stamets. This advice comes from Admiral Cornwell, the paragon of making good choices in love. Also on the subject of love, Georgiou claims she’s had both Culber and Stamets, whose Mirror Universe selves were pansexual rather than gay. And Michael kisses on Ash for reasons that escape me. For handsomeness, I think.

Leland reveals that Michael’s parents were not killed because Klingons kill and eat parents whenever girls like telescopes and science, but because Section 31 and Leland personally had the Burnhams building a classified, wormhole-based, winged, time-travel spacesuit powered with a stolen Klingon time crystal. Michael clobbers Leland real good.

To set a trap for the Future Michael, they agree to kill the Present Michael as slowly and painfully as possible with toxic atmosphere and radiation, as you do. It's so horrible that everyone tries to back out except Spock, who pulls a gun to make sure no one will save Michael except the Red Angel. Which happens after the last possible second, but the Red Angel who zaps Michael back to life is Michael's mom instead.

And then Control stabs Leland in the eyes. There doesn't seem to be a reason. For handsomeness, I think.

Project Daedalus

****(4 frozen corpses out of 5)

Admiral Cornwall brings hovering, glowing orbs for a truth scan on Lieutenant Spock. Admiral Patar, the Logic Extremist who runs 31, is known to Cornwall (Did Cornwall learn all this recently? Are Logic Extremists legally allowed to serve in Starfleet at the Admiral level?) and Discovery heads for 31 HQ, because of course Cornwall knows where it is.

Airiam, it transpires, is a Robocop. Badly injured in a shuttle crash that killed her fiancé, she must weekly save the memories she likes and delete the boring hallway walks and elevator rides. She keeps games with Tilly, working out with handsome Rhys, and that one time Michael smiled. She revisits the beach vacation where marriage was proposed. Tilly’s “Half Robutt” is a less welcome term to Airiam than “Cybernetic Augment”, and one wonders how she’d feel about “Black Mirror Cookie”?

The Federation used illegal mines against cloaked ships during the war. Pike objects on moral grounds, Cornwall flatters Pike’s top-notch morality, and nobody shuts down the mines. 

Spock and Michael verbally spar over chess. It gets very heated, and Spock angrily claims Michael takes on responsibility for everything because she can’t bear the grief. “We will never relate as equals so long as you attempt to assume every burden is yours alone.” 

Airiam’s internal “Because” Dots seize her mind, and the ship is rocked by mines. The Landing Party finds the frozen bodies of the admiralty. Saru’s eyes spot the lack of heat signature changes in recordings, proving Spock’s been framed by Section 31. Using hologram puppets, Control has been running the show for two weeks since killing the Board of Shadowy Figures. 

Suspicious Tilly finds Airiam has suspiciously left her memories behind on Discovery. Airiam/Control attacks Nhan, pulling out one of her breathing implants. The robutt moves on to choking Michael and some punchy kicky.

Control wants all the knowledge from Old Sphere the Sphere, in the hopes of going full galactic Skynet- as Spock’s visions warned. Tilly reaches Airiam’s real self, who can’t control her body (except for disabling her own helmet) and Airiam begs Michael to kill her via space ejection. Her last words are “I Love Everyone” and “Find Project Daedalus”. The shock and horror seems to make everyone forget that transporters and Dr. Pollard exist. 

Best of season? Discovery’s skill at high octane tragedy’s finest flower? Yes, probably.

If Memory Serves

 ***(3 illusions out of 5)

Showing me real footage from “The Cage”, albeit chopping it up like a paper doll puppet show, made me briefly happy, then they dropped me back into wildly spinning cameras in the dark and redesigned holographic Tellarites before I got too nostalgic.

Why are Section 31 taking orders from Starfleet brass? I thought in Section 31 the chain of command was: “We have chains to hit you with, so we’re in command.”

Over Michael’s objection, Spock takes their shuttle straight into an amazing-looking black hole- oh, wait, welcome back to Talos IV where you can’t trust your senses and the spindly locals are barely this side of wanting to breed you in cages as workers.

The singing plants are charming. Spock is unable to deal with time as a fluid and I fully empathize as nobody makes the rest of this look like it did in 1965. Why redesign the Talosian heads and robes? Why is mangled Vina barely twisted at all and obscured by lens flares? 

Spock saw and heard the Red Angel in childhood, and melded with it a few months ago, sharing the Angel’s apocalyptic nightmare. And the entire universe, as always, is at stake. 

Having been murdered by Voq, Culber attacks Ash in the lunch room, which fearless Saru allows to play out for catharsis while Pike makes tut-tut sounds. Let’s see where this goes and if anyone’s shirt comes off. Culber has taken “till death do us part” literally, and moves out on Stamets to get his head together.

Vina appears to Pike and tells him she’s shacked up with his illusion- a lifetime together in these few years. Oh, and sends an untraceable S.O.S. from his buddies, it’s either romantic or awkweird.

Section 31 has invasive neurologic tech from or based on the Terran Empire. They love things from the Terran Empire! Georgiou tells Leland how she did a genocide on the Mirror Universe Talosians. Talosians allow 31 to capture Michael & Spock’s vanishing projections as Michael and Spock return to Disco by shuttle.

Nhan takes Ash off the bridge. Discovery disobeys 31s orders and turns fugitive to save the galaxy.

I cried at Michael and Spock’s miserable emotional rift, very well performed, very painful.

This episode won an Emmy for outstanding makeup, proving that I am petulant for wishing they’d honoured Star Trek’s original designs.

Light and Shadows

 **(one light and one shadows out of 5)

Pike and Mike recovered Spock's shuttle with Georgiou inside, so when Mike recaps this for Pike as "we know the shuttle that he stole disappeared somewhere in the Mutara Sector" it doesn't really track. My headcanon also probably doesn't work, but it will have to wait. 

Pike and company do forensics on the Red Angel's time travel antics, having Saru's visual evidence now that it's a person in a suit. There's a Time Hole spewing time back into the universe, so be alert for Groundhog Day radiation.

Commander Burnham uses a shuttle with Star Wars or even Dune speed capabilities to make the Kaminar to Vulcan trip during a commercial break, simultaneous with Ash and Pike's 5 minute trip to the time hole.

Sarek's deep in meditation to find Spock in the Force, but Amanda has been hiding him in their standard Kir'Shara basement cave while he has a standard severe mental breakdown. You've heard his voice, now enjoy his beard.

When Sarek learns of this, he continues his bizarre track record of emotionalism and logic leaps by declaring Section 31 is their best bet to heal his unresponsive and raving son! Their Noggin Technicians wear clear plastic raincoats in dark metal rooms and defer to the unseen "Control", so that's clearly legit.

Forced by questionable circumstances to work together, Pike and Ash fight a Matrix Squiddy from the 27th century before Stamets the Tardigrade Time Powers guy saves their bacon. In case the grabby Doc Ock arms were getting a little too Marvel, Lt. Com. Airiam is secretly compromised by literally the three dot sigil of DC's Brainiac. (Oh, shows what I know- that's the mathematical symbol for "Because"!)

Georgiou seizes command of Section 31's Leland with blackmail- she knows Leland had Michael's parents killed.

Michael, knowing of her brother's form of dyslexia, discerns Spock's repeated numerical sequence is backward coordinates for planet Talos IV. Road Trip!

The Sound of Thunder

 ***(3 big lies out of 5)

The poor Kelpians have every right under the equitable Ba'ul system! In the Great Balance all people can scoop up kelp to eat, enjoy the outdoors, worship the benevolent Watchful Eye, and die horribly at the onset of space puberty to feed the just and fair Ba'ul.

Was it always thus? Lo, these thousands of years ago, Kelpians were real ass-hats after space puberty and they were predators to the Ba'ul, probably. So, it's all for the best and since the Kelpians haven't been permitted the chance to develop anything more advanced than baskets they CERTAINLY don't qualify for Starfleet defense against the warp-capable Ba'ul. 

In fact, Starfleet didn't see nothin' and they better move along because the Ba'ul have full bellies (or whatever the equivalent is in a rod puppet covered in mucilage and ink or whatever the heck is happening there) and great big guns.

Michael and Saru pay a nonchalant call on Saru's priestly sister Siranna and have some tea and make some waves and get the Ba'ul nervous enough to try to buy their silence with a free dissection. 

Saru's new lease on life has grown him bigger claws in the form of neck darts, and he more or less forces this same transformation upon a goodly portion of the entire unsuspecting populace of Kelpians with some quick button pressing. Fortunately no one has enough time to kill themselves as Saru had intended to do when this happened to him.

Also fortunately, the Red Angel appears and deactivates the Ba'ul's big guns, barely an inconvenience, don't even worry about it.

Kaminar's Cattle learn painfully today that they don't need to die at va'harai and that the Ba'ul had better switch to beef alternatives right goddamn yesterday.

Vive la Revolution! 

      

Saints of Imperfection

 ** (2 magic teardrops out of 5)

Because the audience hopes to see Spock on our Spock chase, we chase Spock's shuttle a little more and who should turn up inside it but Emperor Georgiou, now an agent of Section 31?! Pike knows what 31 is. Mike knows what 31 is. We all know what 31 is! More Covert than Covert, my rump.

Pike gets on the hologram with Leland, also an old chum from Section 31, like it's a an ordinary branch of Starfleet Intelligence that Archer or Sisko should've easily known about a century ago and a century from now, no biggie. And also here's a Section 31 liaison in the person of handsome Ash Tyler and this lovely Section 31 gift card redeemable nowhere because we surely don't exist.

Nhan is mentioned to be chief of security, so watch out- because on Discovery that's the Defense Against The Dark Arts post.

Speaking of space magic, Tilly was kidnapped by the Spore People into the Mushroom Kingdom through a cocoon, and her Spore buddy May has to convince the local Spores not to eat her alive in tiny painful bites because their natural approach to new things is eating them. They need her to fight a monster named Culber. A monster the Spores found awhile ago and chose to revive instead of just eating him. The monster has covered himself in poison bark to stop them eating him, which they want to do. Won't Tilly help them?

Culbers are friends, not food! Why did the jahSepp heal him just to start trying to eat him again? No time! 

Pike rides to Tilly's rescue, Stamets bringing the whole ship half in, half out of the mycelial network like a doorstop. Try to avoid getting a hundred people twisted into flesh and blood pretzels like the crew of the Glenn!

Tearful reunion of traumatized Stamets and Culber, which is always good, especially when the prevailing theory is that Stamets' mushroom soup tears transported Culber's energy into the mycelial network "like a lightning rod" where the locals gave him a body that can't leave their dimension.

"I need you to make it make sense," says Captain Pike, a tall order which no one fulfills. But on the bright side we still get Culber back, thanks to more cocoon shenanigans.

Admiral Cornwell pops in to tell us she knows about Section 31, and she condones its terrible, weirdly public, sly, sexy nastiness, so Pike should too, and maybe subscribe to any streaming service that gives us more of it someday.

 

An Obol for Charon

** (2 obols out of 5)

Number One! The number one number two Number One! Sort of. I mean, it's just a glorified cameo but there she is. She dropped by to tell Pike that nobody has found Spock yet. Because maniacs like me never stopped screeching about it, Pike orders Enterprise Chief Engineer Louvier to rip out the holographic systems throughout the ship (Were they even the cause of the malfunctions? Or only the malfunctions in my own head?)  

Commander Nhan also appears at a staff meeting, seemingly having transferred over from Enterprise but your guess is as good as mine. Saru maybe has a rhinovirus and Pike has to order him to take rest because capitalism. Saurian Linus’ cold was last week, but this will turn out to have been a coincidence.

There are some welcome antics with a broken translator, leading to an excellent scene with Jett v Stamets: Dawn of Snark. There's an important exchange where Stamets praises humans for having barely saved their own lives by switching over to solar panels, and he likens this Earth catastrophe to the terrible damage dilithium mining is currently wreaking. He hopes his spore drive will be the clean alternative, although it is full of shrieking ghosts.

Speaking of which, a shrieking 100,000 year old semi-organic sphere triggers Saru's Vahar’ai “death process”. He and Michael discern that The Sphere is on its last contact. The Sphere told them everything it knew except its own name which had to have been better than "The Sphere" and then The Sphere exploded.

Michael balks at the insanity of cutting off Saru’s ganglia when he asks her to, (I mean, I don't understand why we aren't taking these health problems to Doctor Pollard?) and it turns out the terrible people who eat Kelpians are lying to the Kelpians. Vahar’ai only makes a Kelpian stronger and braver. And kickier. Some Ba'ul's house is gonna get kicked down!

 

First contact with May begins, she turns out to be a scout for the jahSepp. This nugget is gleaned via the Trepanation of Tilly, for the appalling shock factor, I guess. Certainly it was terrifying for me. Discovery wouldn’t know what to do with itself if these poor folks weren't always in the middle of a high-stakes disaster where the answer is drilling holes in each other's heads.

Now the jahSepp distract Stamets and Jett by blasting them with psilocybin and making off with Tilly. On Discovery, Mushrooms Eat You.

Point of Light

*(1 point of light out of 5)

4000 throats may be cut in one night. Unless you have to saw through that web of sinewy throat armour Klingons suddenly grew in the mid-2250s.

Oh, Klingons. The war is done! Deflate your heads to half-mast… AND DON THE WIGS OF PEACE! And build a ship of war! And fight amongst yourselves in grim, dark Fire Caves until we can find a dragon or a white walker... Oh, what luck! L’Rell had an out-of-wedlock, out-of-uterus, secret albino baby and this is apparently a threat to her reign, as is her human-looking lover Voq (Ash).

Spock’s mother Amanda has impulsively stolen his medical files and brought them to Michael to decrypt. Michael wisely gets Pike involved, who calls Spock’s hospital. Captain Diego Vela of Starbase 5 teases Pike & his bisabuela Nena as the only ones in the quadrant who still communicate on screens. Are we sure the patients aren’t running this asylum? Screens are a Starfleet standard for decades in the past, present, and even centuries to come. Screens are cost-effective and a lot less distracting than Star Wars holograms. But do go on, tell us how everyone’s been using holograms forever in this tiny window of future history and Pike’s the weirdo.

Anyhoo, speaking of weirdos, Spock was diagnosed with “Extreme empathy deficit” and they say he killed his doctors while escaping. Amanda and Michael each think this could be their fault. In childhood, Michael was pursued by Logic Extremist terrorists who bombed her school. In an attempt to keep Spock safe she drove him away from her with cruel words that are still hanging between them. The mysterious Red Angel was also involved because none of this is complicated enough.

May Ahern, from Tilly’s junior high, is long dead but big as life. Tilly stops dead for not less than 40 seconds to scream at her noisy hallucination during a footrace, then she catches up to and surpasses the other runners in moments. On Take a Cadet to Work Day, Tilly also yells at May in front of Pike. Stamets conducts a space exorcism revealing May as a Multidimensional multicellular fungal parasite. (Which I can’t say twice or spell once.)

Section 31’s Georgiou arrives on Ko-Nosh in a technologically advanced whirl of destruction, killing L’Rell and Ash’s foes. She insists on Mother L’Rell strengthening her rule by faking Ash & the baby’s deaths using some icky cloned heads and dumping the kid on the Boreth monks. “The freaks are more fun,” says Georgiou (to eat, she does not add).

For no reason I can determine, Emperor Georgiou is claiming to be “Retired Captain” Georgiou to the very people in whose digestive tracts Captain Georgiou “retired”.

I could have gone the rest of my life without more of the Giger-style people-eating isolationist Klingons and I’m sure not thrilled by the approach of even more Section 31 stories. That said, Chieffo, Yeoh, and Latif are very talented and lovely performers.

New Eden

 *** (3 stars out of 5)

Discovery is chasing down the Red Blue Blur... uh, Red Angel phenomenon observed by both Spock and his sister Michael. Seven to find. Gotta catch em all!

Spock’s been secretly but voluntarily committed to psychiatric unit in Starbase 5. Did season 1 drive him mad like it’s done me? Whatever the cause, we’re going to follow Spock’s nightmare journals and keep toying with Fun Guy Stamets’ mental health on the fungi high speed highway. 

Their first stop is Beta Quadrant, 150 years away at conventional warp, essentially impossible without the spore drive which we’ve sworn off now because it takes a horrible toll on the human interface. Who has just lost the love of his life and is talking disconcertingly about suicide. Just one more trip couldn’t hurt. 

Unless you count hurting Tilley who’s looking for a means to spare Stamets with more mad science. Concussion watch: 2. Tilley just about dies while getting her rocks off a dark matter asteroid with enough Metrion particles to slay the Talaxians. 

What luck! It’s another pre-warp human society subject to General Order 1. We can do some covert ops with the help of Joann Owosekun, raised in a Luddite collective which I still hope to hear anything about someday.

Pike put chairs in the ready room, the better to subtly promise that people will try to talk more. Pike says he’s from a confusing household because his father taught science and comparative religion. Michael inwardly, logically, says hold my Vulcan ale.

If you believe Pike, Clarke’s Third Law was garbled by churchies into basically “Any powerful spaceman is God.” I am very much on the side of Michael’s interpretation using Arthur Clarke’s original words. It makes me worry that the people Pike is talking about would still be worshipping the Vulcans. But Michael strikes me as admirably diplomatic here. 

“I’ll scan the text...” says Burnham, logically. “Or we could look at the pictures.” muses Pike. Do you want an illiterate populace like the Star Wars galaxy? Cause this is how you get an illiterate populace like the Star Wars galaxy. Of course, the pictures Pike is talking about are church windows, and I’m glad the ancient litany of G.I. Joe cartoons are still being taught and represented in stained glass. In 2053, a red angel saw a church, saw a steeple, opened a wormhole and carried off hundreds of panicked people. Away from the nuke-dropping jets of World War Three to planet Terralysium where they relied on a buffet-style combo religion more than ever. Oh, good! Religion never hurts anyone! 

The All-Mother of New Eden doesn’t appear bothered that nobody has managed to recreate the electric light for 200 years, or that as far as they know humanity is virtually extinct, she leaves those concerns to fringe science types like Jacob. Also, a kid immediately plays with a phaser forcing Pike to play Captain America. The jumping on the grenade part, not the plentiful guns lying around for everyone part.

Did Dr. Pollard save the Hiawatha survivors from last episode? I would dearly love to know if Jett Reno’s unconventional first aid had worked or was only there for the gross-out factor.

Tilley is seeing the ghost of her old school chum May Ahearn who has an in-joke about “Lunches like mini earthquakes. Bounce, bounce, bounce.” For some reason, May repeatedly calls her “Stilly”. Is it because she built a still? That would make your stomach bounce.

Apparently Earth had stun grenades in 2053 and they’re still good after 2 centuries in a dank basement, like the video records from a soldier’s helmet cam for which Pike breaks cover, trading Jacob a power cell to run the church lights.

Detmer’s had her pilot’s license since 12, and you’d think Saru might know that by now, but Lorca horsewhipped people for making small talk. Saru has learned 90 Federation languages to impress people at the parties he never attends. And I love it when they give him opportunities to be brave & kind.