Category Archives: Television

Television, The Shannara Chronicles

The Shannara Chronicles: “Warlock” and “Amberle” are a mixed bag of set up for the season finale

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This week’s pair of episodes don’t match as well as last week’s and not as consistent in quality, but by the end of the second one it seems as if the likely outline of the season finale is taking shape. That’s not to say the show has gotten predictable, however. There were several genuine surprises in “Warlock” and “Amberle,” and if those surprises don’t necessarily make me think the show is turning over an ambitious new leaf in terms of upending tropes and breaking out of storytelling conventions, they do make me wary of making too many predictions for the final two episodes of the season (and, let’s be real, possibly the series) that will be airing next week. “Warlock” is definitely the weaker of these episodes; it’s plot-focused and shallow, at times feeling like a run-on sentence of happenings, whereas “Amberle” has a strong central theme and packs some emotional punch. Together, though, they make up another solid couple of hours of high fantasy entertainment, without some of the lows that characterized the show’s first season, even if they don’t reach any new heights.

**Spoilers ahead.** Continue reading The Shannara Chronicles: “Warlock” and “Amberle” are a mixed bag of set up for the season finale →

Star Trek: Discovery, Television

Star Trek: Discovery – “Into the Forest I Go” is a strong winter finale for a different show than what we’ve been watching

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On its own merits, “Into the Forest I Go” is a solid, even excellent, episode of Star Trek: Discovery, exactly the sort of thing I want this show to be, but after the previous six episodes of wildly varying quality and success, it’s also somewhat baffling. Weeks of inconsistent characterization, confused motivations, and other strange writing decisions can’t simply be undone or redeemed with a single great episode. It just ends up feeling like a fantastic hour of another, different and overall better show, and that’s exactly what happens here. Optimistically, maybe this means the show will have solved some of its more pernicious problems going forward, but the garbled preview for the show’s return in January isn’t especially encouraging.

**Spoilers ahead.**

The episode starts with a little bit of anticlimax after last week’s sorta-cliffhanger ending. Instead of launching right into an epic space battle with the Klingons that are en route to Pahvo, Captain Lorca is ordered to return with the Discovery to a nearby Federation outpost. The Pahvo plan has failed and, logically, it doesn’t make much sense to make a stand there, especially if it means risking the incredibly valuable Discovery, which is the only ship of its type. Still hoping to strike a blow against the Klingons, however, Lorca gives the crew three hours to come up with a way to crack through the Klingons’ cloaking technology so they can prevent any more of the devastating ambushes that have been such a problem for the Federation.

They quickly hammer out a plan that would let them see the Klingon ships, but it requires that they place a pair of sensors at each end of the Ship of the Dead. Burnham and Tyler, being the only ones on the Discovery who are familiar with the inside of Klingon ships, are up to the task, but there’s one more problem: the data and calculations from the sensors will take hours to collect, and they can’t just hang around next to the Klingon ship while that’s going on. To speed things up, they decide that they’re going to use the spore drive to do dozens of short jumps around the Klingon ship, which will, somehow, enable them to collect the data they need in about five minutes instead of three hours.

It’s not a bad plot if you’re willing to suspend some disbelief about how sensor data collection works, and it’s generally well executed in terms of episode construction, acting and production values. The thing is, it’s also a plot that exists primarily as a framework on which to hang character development. The episode is packed with character moments for Burnham, Tyler, Lorca and Stamets. Unfortunately, though all of these moments work well within this episode, not many of the have been earned by the material that we’ve seen the last several weeks. The Stamets material comes closest to feeling like a real, natural progression for what we’ve seen of his character so far, but Lorca, Burnham and Tyler all suffer from inconsistent characterization or just plain lack of any characterization whatsoever.

Stamets’ secrecy about his condition since his injection of tardigrade DNA has gotten a little tiresome, especially since it’s hard to believe that he wouldn’t be being closely monitored throughout this whole time, so it’s nice to see that ended at last. While Stamets’ reasons for keeping secrets from his doctor husband are a bit specious, the way their conflict plays out over the episode is pleasantly low-drama. It’s easy to see how much these two men love each other, and their ability to separate their personal relationship from their work is commendable. I can’t say I think their relationship is altogether healthy, considering Stamets’ secret-keeping about the effects of the tardigrade DNA and the usage of the spore drive, but it is something of an extenuating circumstance, and Stamets and Culber’s style of conflict resolution is a refreshing change from the more explosive styles of romantic conflict that are usually popular on television. I can even forgive that shamelessly on the nose reference to La Bohème (Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz starred together in Rent).

What’s harder to make sense of is the interactions between Stamets and Captain Lorca. Frightened by his deteriorating condition from using the spore drive, Stamets needs some convincing to take part in Lorca’s plan to use the ship’s teleportation abilities to collect the sensor data from the Ship of the Dead, and Lorca is up to the task of persuading him. What’s difficult to understand is what we’re supposed to understand about Lorca from his arguments to the effect that Stamets needs to do this for science because once the war is over they’ll have the whole universe to explore. In any other Trek, it would make sense to take Lorca’s statements at face value and accept them as earnest. Even in the context of just this single episode, that reading holds up; Lorca even cedes his award to Stamets in the wind-down of the episode as a gesture of appreciation for Stamets’ extraordinary service, and Lorca reiterates his earlier sentiment at that time. However, we’ve been shown all season that Lorca has a strong manipulative streak and that he’s willing, at least sometimes, to do difficult things for the greater good, and Lorca’s understanding of “the greater good” is both self-serving and big-picture-thinking enough that Lorca is able to abstractify the value of other people’s lives in ways that make it possible for him to justify all kinds of unethical behavior.

So, is Lorca a fundamentally principled leader bonding with Stamets over a shared interest in science and exploration and expressing a real desire for peace? Or does Lorca just know the best ways to manipulate someone who he sees as less sophisticated than himself? Or is the truth somewhere in between these extremes? And if the most generous interpretation of Lorca’s actions in this episode is true, are we meant to understand this as character development for the Captain? Because this ambiguity in the portrayal of the man has existed all along. It’s one thing to make a character a little mysterious or morally gray and inscrutable, but at some point it’s important that the audience is able to actually form a real opinion about the character or all that ambiguity simply becomes bad, inconsistent writing. Seven episodes into Lorca’s tenure as Captain, it should at least be clear whether he’s a protagonist or villain, and while villain protagonists and anti-heroes and redemption arcs are a thing, it should also be clear by this point if Lorca was one of those character types. Nothing about Lorca is clear, and that’s deeply frustrating.

For all that Burnham is billed as the most important character on the show, this mid-season finale was decidedly light on character development for her. We do get to see her kick some ass aboard the Ship of the Dead, but her battle with Kol is somewhat anticlimactic. Visually, it borders on magnificent; though I’d like to have seen more fighting, what we do get to see is well-choreographed, and the set for the Ship of the Dead’s bridge is a gorgeous backdrop for it. Emotionally, though, it leaves something to be desired as a conclusion to Burnham’s grieving-over-Georgiou arc, mostly because there just isn’t enough groundwork laid in previous episodes to support Burnham’s desire to fight a personal duel against Kol. The audience was told, back in episode three I think, how Kol defiled Georgiou’s body, but there’s no way that Burnham could have known about it. We could understand her to have inferred it from previous knowledge of Klingon cultural norms, but it still doesn’t quite work as a motivating factor for her here. Once Kol taunts her with Georgiou’s insignia, it makes sense that it would become personal for Burnham, but that wasn’t effectively communicated as the turning point of the scene. Instead, the show seemed to rely on the audience’s meta knowledge to give the moment emotional impact, an irritating bit of lazy writing that shouldn’t occur in professionally produced media.

The most memorable storyline of the episode belongs to Tyler, who goes with Burnham to the Ship of the Dead, only to have an attack of PTSD when they stumble upon the dead body room, where they find Admiral Cornwell (still alive, yay!) and L’Rell, whose appearance trigger’s Tyler’s PTSD episode. Setting aside what a bad idea it is to send someone who was tortured by Klingons on an important, time-sensitive mission to infiltrate a Klingon ship, and also setting aside how strange it is that L’Rell isn’t locked up in a secure place but was just chucked into the random room full of dead bodies and left there without guards or even a decent lock on the door, the exploration of Tyler’s PTSD is interesting, if not necessarily well done. The big issue here is that the portrayal of Tyler and his PTSD struggles with the same problem of ambiguity that Captain Lorca does. I don’t know if the show’s writers think this ambiguous treatment of characters is clever or insightful, but it’s mostly just too confusing to be either of those things.

There has been speculation for weeks that Tyler is the Klingon Voq in disguise, and there’s some compelling evidence to support that theory in this episode. At the same time, there’s very little of that evidence that can’t also be interpreted as Tyler being exactly what he appears to be: an unlucky human man traumatized by months of torture and rape at the hands of a Klingon woman who has become obsessed with him. Even L’Rell’s promise to protect Tyler at the end of the episode isn’t conclusive proof that he’s Voq; it could just as easily be more evidence of her obsession. What we do know is that either Ash Tyler is who he believes himself to be or he’s Voq, but so changed by whatever procedure made him human that he has no recollection of his former self, whether because he’s a sleeper agent or because the transformation procedure has damaged him, which could account for his PTSD as well and would explain why some of his flashbacks look like they could be of surgery rather than torture. But this all still leaves Ash Tyler’s identity as something of a question mark for now, and this is incredibly frustrating after weeks of speculation and build-up and with a long wait before we get more episodes of the show.

Miscellany:

  • I’d love to learn more about the unnamed members of the bridge crew. Alright. I guess they do have names on IMDb, but I don’t think they’ve been said aloud on the show yet. I want to know more about them, either way.
  • No Saru material at all in this episode. I can’t recall if he even got a line. He’s such an interesting foil to Burnham and their shared history is emotionally compelling, but it’s been either played for melodrama or ignored for most of the season so far. Disappointing.
  • The props they made for the sensors that Burnham has to plant on the Klingon ship will never not be hilarious to me. They’re like a foot and a half tall with bright glowing lights. They beep. And they have Starfleet logos right on the tops of them. Because no Klingon will ever notice the large, bright, noisy sensors labeled “Property of Starfleet.” Very stealthy.
  • What is certain from Tyler’s flashbacks is that L’Rell is a rapist. Whether Tyler is human or whether he is Voq robbed of his identity has no bearing on this fact, and yet it seems as if the show doesn’t actually recognize it as a fact at all. Tyler’s flashbacks to his rape at L’Rell’s hands are eroticized in a way that suggests that it’s not being taken very seriously, either because he’s a man raped by a woman or because someone thought this was another area where they could create ambiguity as to Tyler’s identity. It is not. And just because you can show a Klingon boob because you’re on a streaming service instead of broadcast TV doesn’t mean you have to.
Television, The Shannara Chronicles

The Shannara Chronicles: “Paranor” and “Crimson” are a new high point for the series

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The thing I love most about The Shannara Chronicles is how unabashedly it is what it is. It doesn’t put on airs or pretend at depth that it doesn’t have, and it’s pretty consistently fun and entertaining. Season 1 of the show was a little erratic in terms of quality, but Season 2 has been stronger and more reliably good every week. This week’s back-to-back episodes, “Paranor” and “Crimson,” work so well together that it finally feels as if the show is really hitting its stride, both narratively—with genuinely good, if not terribly innovative, storytelling—and creatively—being full of fantastic costumes and set dressings and with multiple excellently choreographed fight scenes. While the show still has its fair share of silly subplots and iffy character beats, the world of Shannara is finally starting to feel as big and lived in as it needs to be in order to support the enormous amount of story being told. (And it really is a wild amount of story in these two episodes.)

Let’s dig in.

**Spoilers ahead.**

Mareth, Wil, & Allanon at Paranor

It’s probably best to understand these episodes as a single two-part story, and this is nowhere clearer than in the parts that take place at the old druid stronghold, where Wil, Mareth and Allanon have traveled to rescue Wil’s uncle Flick from Bandon. This story takes up the majority of screen time across both episodes, and it’s the most complete of the two major storylines this week. (The other ends on something of a cliffhanger.) It’s also the riskier of the two storylines, with a time travel plot that I was highly skeptical of when I heard about it, but I have to admit now that it worked much better than I expected.

So, Wil, Mareth and Allanon arrive at Paranor, but before they head in, Allanon decides that Mareth can’t in because he doesn’t fully trust her. Wil isn’t thrilled about this, but he accepts it because he’s anxious to save Flick and they don’t have much time left. Time and trust are the main themes of this storyline this week, and those things become even more important when Wil and Allanon meet with Bandon inside Paranor. Bandon doesn’t trust them to give him the Warlock Lord’s skull, so he cuts Flick’s face with his evil magic sword, infecting the older man with a disease that only Bandon can cure in order to ensure that Wil and Allanon deliver on their promise. They aren’t happy about this turn of events, but Allanon does some magic that reveals the skull in a small chamber. Once Bandon is in the chamber as well, however, the skull disappears and a door closes, trapping both men in a magical prison. It turns out the skull was only one of Mareth’s illusions and that she and Allanon planned this from the beginning, with leaves Wil feeling angry and betrayed; Bandon is still the only one who can cure Flick’s disease, and he’s firm on being unwilling to do it until the skull is in his hands.

Fortunately, there’s still a way for them to get the skull, but it requires the blood of a druid and a Shannara to open the way, and it has to be done without Allanon, who is very against this plan. Allanon still doesn’t believe Mareth is his daughter, but she’s able, with Wil, to activate the device that will take them to the Warlock Lord’s skull. What they don’t expect is for the device to take them back in time to the village of Shady Vale before Wil’s birth, where they meet Wil’s parents, Shea and Heady, who are the key to finding where the skull is hidden. By the time Wil and Mareth return to Paranor with the skull, Flick is in bad shape and Allanon has started to age and weaken while trapped in the magic prison with Bandon. When Bandon is set free, he still refuses to heal Flick before getting the skull, which leaves him and Wil at an impasse that’s broken when the dying Flick impales himself on Bandon’s sword. Wil and Bandon fight, Mareth tries to use her illusions to hide the skull, the Sword of Shannara shatters, Allanon is injured and Bandon manages to escape with the skull, leaving the rest of them to mourn for Flick.

It’s a busy couple of episodes, especially for Wil and Mareth. I expect the time travel plot won’t be popular with devoted fans of the books, if there are any of those still watching the show at this point, but I rather liked it. There’s nothing groundbreaking being done here, and there are times when Wil and Mareth seem confused about whether they are in a hurry or not (they spend a lot of time saying they have to hurry), but it’s nonetheless an overall likable interlude. Wil initially wants to change the past and prevent the suffering he knows is in store for Shea, but Mareth nips that idea in the bud and they mostly focus on finding the Warlock Lord’s skull. The interactions between Wil and his parents (his mother, Heady, appears in these episodes as well) are a little cheesy at times and hit basically all the expected emotional beats, though the tone is kept light enough that it never becomes maudlin. The parallels between Wil and Shea as the reluctant heroes of their respective generations are nicely portrayed, and this whole adventure provides a great opportunity for us to see just how much Wil has changed and matured since we first met him in season one.

If I have one quibble about the time travel storyline—aside from the inconsistency over whether or not Wil and Mareth are supposed to be rushing to find the skull—it’s the introduction of Mareth’s crush on Wil. On the one hand, it’s cute to have it pointed out by Shea, and I’m not opposed to the idea of Wil and Mareth together. I ship it, truly. On the other hand, the show has not done nearly enough groundwork for that romance. Also, book readers know that Wil and Eretria end up together, and the show has always felt a bit as if that pairing was going to be endgame, so I’m concerned about what a Wil/Mareth pairing could mean in that context. It’s fine if the show wants to go in a different direction than the books, but it would be infuriating to have to watch Mareth have unrequited feelings or, worse, to see her fridged or otherwise conveniently disposed of to make room for the endgame ship later on. If they’re serious about Wil and Mareth, however, the relationship needs more room to develop. The pair have been constantly on the move and dealing with crises since they met, and the addition of even a couple of quiet, romantic moments, especially if they showed us more about Mareth, would go a long way toward making this relationship work.

While Wil and Mareth are time traveling, Allanon has to deal with Bandon and Flick, two men who both bear grudges against him that are at least partially justified. Bandon has ceded his moral high ground by trying to resurrect ancient evil, but Flick’s grievance against Allanon is real and definitely calls into question Allanon’s tactics and his history with the Shannara family. It’s always been clear that Allanon sees himself as a hero, protecting the world from evil and preserving the secrets and magic of the druids in order to do good, but this season has really been all about picking apart at that self-image and forcing Allanon to reckon with his past and be accountable for his recent and current actions. Here, he’s confronted, again, by Bandon, but it’s Flick’s indictment that carries real emotional weight this week. Allanon’s sad assertion that “some are born for sacrifice” isn’t very comforting to Flick as he lays dying, and the juxtaposition of Flick’s final act of selflessness with a younger Allanon arriving in Shady Vale and meeting a very young Flick right as Wil and Mareth are leaving is a thoughtful and powerful way of bringing this emotional arc full circle.

Eretria, Garet Jax, Lyria & the Crimson

The episode opens with Eretria and Garet Jax running from Queen Tamlin’s guards. Jax has something important to do elsewhere, so he peels off and leaves Eretria to fight off several guards on her own. It’s a reasonably impressive fight that ends when Cogline shows up to help. It’s a bit of plot convenience theater, but Eretria is happy to see her friend, hoping that he’ll go to Paranor with her to help Wil. Cogline has other ideas, however. He needs to see Queen Tamlin, though it turns out to be mostly for expository purposes. We learn that Cogline is an ex-druid who uses both science and magic, and, more pertinently, we learn more about Tamlin’s deal with the Warlock Lord: she promised him access to “Heaven’s Well,” a place that is the source of a major river but also a source of magic, and there’s basically no chance that the Warlock Lord isn’t going to expect Tamlin to deliver.

After warning Tamlin about the Warlock Lord, Cogline takes Eretria to an abandoned bunker for more exposition, this time about Eretria and her past. We learn that Eretria’s mysterious tattoo signifies that she’s one of “Armageddon’s Children,” a demon hybrid, and this makes her both potentially powerful and vulnerable to corruption by the Warlock Lord. Cogline has brought her to the bunker, where he’s imprisoned one of the less powerful mord wraiths, so Eretria can train herself to command demons and to resist the influence of the Warlock Lord. I don’t recall any of this stuff from any of the Shannara books I read fifteen to twenty years ago, so I’m pretty sure this is wholly new mythology invented for the show. It’s fine, I guess. It essentially sidelines Eretria for an episode and a half, disconnecting her from all the other characters, but it also provides her with a history that ties her intimately to the war between good and evil in the Four Lands and creates an internal conflict for her to wrestle with going forward. There’s nothing particularly special about any of her scenes in these two episodes, but this is a set-up that ought to pay off well later in the season.

After splitting up with Eretria, Garet Jax goes to visit the family of one of his dead Border Patrol men. While it’s been some time since he’s been there, it’s apparently his habit to support the family as much as he can, and he’s brought some money for them. While he’s inside talking to the widow, however, her son is playing outside only to be captured and murdered by General Riga’s lieutenant, Valcca, who has tracked Jax to the little house by the seaside. The death of the little boy is a senseless bit of grimdark for the sake of grimdarkness, but it does motivate Jax to capture Valcca and take him back to Leah, where Jax bonds with Slanter and the now-engaged Lyria and Ander over torturing Valcca for information.

Things take a wrong turn when Valcca manages to escape before Lyria and Ander’s wedding, but Tamlin sends Jax out to hunt Valcca. Jax catches up to Valcca quickly, but Valcca has already reconnected with Riga. The two Crimson men easily defeat Jax, and Riga tells Valcca to “take care of” Jax for good. Before Valcca can kill the bounty hunter, though, Jax wakes up and kills him instead. Then Jax leaves to, we quickly learn, find Eretria, who has been left alone with the mord wraith in the bunker. Jax shows up just in time to see Eretria kill the creature, and he whisks her away so they can try to warn Tamlin about Riga.

“Crimson” ends with the royal wedding in Leah, and it’s so dramatic. Right as Ander and Lyria are about to say their vows, the priest whips his hood off and it’s General Riga, which kicks off a major battle with everyone in their wedding clothes. Ander and Riga square off, but the elf king is mortally wounded almost right off. Lyria picks up a sword and tries to fight Riga, but she’s a small woman in a ballgown and no match for a seasoned fighter half again her size. Garet Jax and Eretria show up right at the last minute and just in time to see Lyria almost get killed by Riga, but Ander manages to use his final burst of strength to save her. The episode ends with Ander dying while a chaotic battle still rages on.

Miscellany:

  • Wil’s “condolences” to Mareth on it being proved that Allanon is her father was a perfect moment.
  • I really appreciate that the group of guards that Eretria fights in the beginning of the episode are a mix of men and women. It’s such a simple thing that there’s really no excuse for shows like this not to do.
  • It was nice that Catania got to have a memorial, though it’s a bit too little too late to make her murder feel really emotionally consequential, especially as the show moves right past it to Lyria and Ander committing to a political marriage.
  • Why does Lyria’s actual wedding dress look so wildly different than the one Tamlin was having made before the wedding? Like, it’s a gorgeous dress, either way, but it was significantly different.
  • Meanwhile, Slanter has no nice clothes at all, I guess.
  • Everyone is having visions these days: Shea has visions of the future, Wil has visions when he returns to Paranor, and Eretria has a short vision when she kills the mord wraith in the bunker.
  • How great can the Sword of Shannara be if it just shatters like that?
  • I’m gonna be pissed if Allanon dies.
Star Trek: Discovery, Television

Star Trek: Discovery – “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” is a bunch of nonsense

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“Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” is the episode of Star Trek: Discovery that has forced me to finally admit that I am hopelessly confused about some important aspects of this show. Namely, what is going on with this war between the Klingons and the Federation. There’s an awful lot that doesn’t make a ton of sense, and this episode (the title translates to “If you want peace, prepare for war”) builds up to a cliffhanger that leaves us set up for next week’s fall finale, after which we’ll have to wait until mid-January for the final six episodes of the season. I’m not optimistic that one more episode will be enough to untangle this mess, but that would be less of a problem if the garbled plot and inconsistent characterization of the show’s main players didn’t combine to make it difficult to become emotionally invested in the story on screen.

**Spoilers below.**

This may be the most “classic” Trek episode of Star Trek: Discovery so far; it’s the first episode since the premiere to take our heroes to the surface of a planet, and it’s the first episode in which that planetside adventure is the primary plot. “Si Vis Pacem” starts with the Discovery failing to save hundreds of lives that are lost when a couple of Federation ships are ambushed by Klingons using stealth technology. As much as the Discovery’s spore drive gives the Federation an edge by making the ship incredibly swift and nimble, the Federation is still struggling with the dangers posed by the Klingons’ invisibility shields (“cloaking” technology comes years later, from the Romulans). To help allay the problem, Burnham, Saru and Tyler travel to the planet Pahvo, which houses an enormous (-ly phallic) crystal resonator that they hope to use to boost a sonar signal that would, theoretically, allow them to detect invisible Klingon ships within range. It’s a scientifically dodgy-sounding proposition, but okay. At this point I was just thrilled to get to see them go to a planet. It’s a nice change after eight episodes taking place almost entirely on ships.

When Burnham, Saru and Tyler arrive on Pahvo, they quickly realize that the planet is not, as previously thought, uninhabited. The planet is well known for its peculiar “singing,” which is channeled through the crystal antenna I guess? But it’s somehow never been thoroughly investigated enough for anyone to learn that there are creatures that live there and that appear to be the people responsible for the sounds that have been heard from the planet all this time. I suppose this oversight can be forgiven, since the Pahvans are incorporeal beings made of a sort of glittery blue mist, but it still kind of begs the question of how anyone in Starfleet could come up with an important plan that utilizes a feature of a planet like this without knowing a little more about the place. In any case, though hooking up the sonar thingy to the crystal thingy is important, the mission immediately switches to first contact protocols once they realize the Pahvans exist.

Though Burnham is the first one to insist that they follow first contact procedures and ensure that the Pahvans consent to the use of their crystal antenna, it’s Saru who does most of the communicating with the Pahvans, through a kind of telepathic connection. It’s awkward to watch, and things take a weird turn when Saru is seemingly mind-controlled by the Pahvans, who are purely peaceful beings dedicated to harmony. When Saru destroys Burnham and Tyler’s communicators and expresses his desire to stay on the planet, where he insists they can live in harmony, they’re forced to think fast and come up with a plan to escape so they can get back to the war with the Klingons. While Tyler distracts Saru, Burnham heads to the crystal antenna to contact the Discovery for help. Unfortunately, Tyler’s distraction of Saru doesn’t last long enough and the first officer chases after Burnham, attacking her and trying to destroy her communication device when he finds her at the antenna.

Before either Burnham or Saru is seriously injured, but not before Burnham has to use a phaser on Saru to defend herself, the Pahvans show up. Saru reiterates his desire to remain on Pahvo, but the Pahvans are, as apparently as possible for clouds of blue glitter to be, receptive to Burnham’s plea for permission to use the crystal antenna in order to bring an end to the war with the Klingons. This is about the time that the Discovery gets in contact with its away team and transports them back to the ship, where they quickly realize that the Pahvans aren’t transmitting a sonar signal; they’re sending out a message that is drawing the Klingons to Pahvo, presumably in the interest of forging a peace between the warring factions. We’ll find out next week how that works out for them.

There are a number of weird things about the whole ordeal on the service of Pahvo, and the vague silliness of the science of it is just the beginning. A major problem is what exactly is going on with Saru’s motivations throughout the episode. When they first arrive on Pahvo, Saru is in physical pain from the constant noise, which overstimulates his keen prey-species senses and makes him anxious to quickly finish their mission and get back to the ship. His change to being at peace with the noise and attuned to the Pahvans happens off screen, which makes his sudden desire to stay on the planet forever feel jarring and out of character in a way that suggests mind-control. However, while Burnham and Saru recuperate in sick bay, we find out that Saru wasn’t mind-controlled at all; he was just really into the Pahvans’ message of harmony. Saru’s anger at Burnham as they fight at the foot of the antenna feels real enough, and his fury over her continued “taking” things from him fits with what we’ve already seen of their relationship (although I thought they buried that hatchet several episodes ago), but it’s not an effective bridge between the earlier scenes on Pahvo, where Saru seems mind-controlled and the scene in sick bay where we learn that he’s not.

There’s no natural character progression or arc here for Saru, and the overall effect is to make him seem unbalanced and fragile. What he says, explicitly, is that he’s constantly stressed out by being a prey creature trying to do things that go against his essential nature. Saru’s outburst of extreme rage and violence, coupled with the anxiety and resentment he expresses, is indicative that he may only be barely holding things together most of the time, and this is at odds with what we’ve learned about Saru so far. Previous episodes of the show have touched upon Saru’s species traits and what they mean for him as a character, but the overall tone of that earlier material seemed to be that we should view his peculiarities as just that: peculiarities which, like all such individual traits, have pros and cons. There’s even an implicit message of diversity and acceptance (including self-acceptance) in Saru’s narrative in previous episodes. Sure, he may have traits that seem odd to humans, but he was also portrayed as studious, loyal and capable; his instincts were shown more as an extra sense that could even be useful, but here Saru’s instincts override everything else about his character.

It’s not even that this racial essentialism is uncommon in Star Trek; just look at this show’s Klingons (or DS9’s Ferengi or basically all Vulcans ever) for further examples. What I find frustrating about Saru’s actions in this episode is that I get the feeling the show’s writers don’t grasp the way they’ve undermined their own point. I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising after the way the bungled Harry Mudd as a Lovable Rogue, but it’s irritating to watch. If Saru is supposed to be a sort of ambassador for diversity aboard the Discovery, with most of his portrayal dedicated to the idea that his species traits don’t dictate his fitness to serve in Starfleet or present a barrier to his ambitions there, showing him as unpredictably violent due to those same traits really works at cross purposes with that message. In the end, it’s just nonsensical.

The other big storyline this week belongs to L’Rell, who is trying to ingratiate herself to Kol. Or something? It’s actually not at all clear exactly what L’Rell is trying to accomplish here. I suppose there’s intended to be layers and layers of scheming going on, but what comes across is a confusing sequence of failed plans that end with L’Rell being imprisoned by Kol. First, L’rell offers Kol her services as an interrogator, and she’s given the task of extracting information from the captive Admiral Cornwell. However, as soon as the guards leave the two women alone, L’Rell tells Cornwell that she wants to defect to the Federation. L’Rell claims to have an escape plan, and she escorts Cornwell through the halls of the Klingon vessel, ostensibly on the way to L’Rell’s ship, but they’re caught by Kol, at which point L’Rell stages a fight with Cornwell and kills her, telling Kol that the Admiral had overpowered her. When L’Rell drags Cornwell to, I guess, the ship’s dead body room (I mean, I don’t even know?), she finds her own crew slaughtered and piled up on the floor and vows to avenge them. She returns to Kol and swears fealty to him, but he sees through her, calls her a liar and has her escorted out.

This is all a lot, and it doesn’t make much sense at all. L’Rell’s stated desire to defect to the Federation could make sense as either a ruse, to trick Cornwell into giving her sensitive information, or as a sincere desire if L’Rell really is angry at Kol and wants nothing but vengeance on him for deposing T’kuvma’s chosen successor, Voq. However, L’Rell doesn’t get any information from Cornwell, at least not on screen, and her apparent murder of the Admiral and quick abandonment of the plan is evidence against L’Rell’s desire to defect being for real. It’s also notable that L’Rell seems surprised to find her dead men, and this is the first time we see her vow vengeance, which undermines vengeance as a possible motive for her earlier actions. But, if L’Rell was only trying to insinuate herself with Admiral Cornwell by pretending to be an ally in hopes of getting information, why would she be so quick to murder the other woman? And when Kol calls L’Rell a liar, what lies is he referring to? What evidence is he basing this judgment on? Why isn’t he more upset about L’Rell casually murdering a valuable prisoner? If this is all some kind of extremely layered ruse, what is L’Rell’s endgame here? How does being locked up in Klingon jail get her closer to success? And where is Voq, anyway?

Something tells me that these questions aren’t all going to be satisfactorily answered next week.

Miscellany:

  • Burnham and Tyler finally get that kiss.
  • When Tyler is trying to delay Saru, there’s a moment where Saru calls him out on his deception, and Tyler looked really uncertain and frightened, almost as if he thought Saru might have sensed some deeper deception.
  • Unpopular Opinion: The Tilly/Stamets stuff was the most compelling material in the episode. We know that the spore drive doesn’t survive into later Treks, but it’s a fantastic piece of technology so I’m interested to see what catastrophic drawbacks cause it to be abandoned.
  • Also, why does this show have such a high body count for women characters? If Cornwell really is dead, it was upsettingly abrupt and senseless. Even if it wasn’t especially brutal or bloody, it’s still part of a sad pattern on this show where any woman in a position of power or influence has a shockingly early expiration date.
Television, The Shannara Chronicles

The Shannara Chronicles: “Dweller” is the show at its high fantasy best

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The Shannara Chronicles continues to improve in its second season, giving us a strongly entertaining episode in “Dweller.” I’m a little skeptical of just how much plot is happening per episode in this show, just, you know, in general, and there’s a lot going on in “Dweller,” but it all, somewhat miraculously, worked this week. The show has a tendency to use a lot of storytelling shorthand, and that’s apparent in every storyline in this episode, but most of that shorthand is smart, and the couple of groanworthy instances of coincidence that do pop up are pretty forgivable ones. There’s also a higher than Shannara-average amount of genuinely good acting in this episode, which helps solidify the emotional beats, though there are still a couple that don’t quite land on target. It’s not perfect, but “Dweller” is about as good as The Shannara Chronicles gets.

**Spoilers ahead!**

Bandon (and Tamlin) (but mostly Flick)

The episode opens with Queen Tamlin being visited by Bandon, who is there to tell her that the Warlock Lord hasn’t forgotten the debt she owes him. Apparently, Tamlin was young and new to ruling during the last war against the Warlock Lord, and she bargained with him to help her people and preserve her kingdom. It’s not clear exactly what the terms of the agreement were, but it seems this is a piper who demands to be paid. What will be interesting to see in the coming weeks is whether the threat of the Warlock Lord drives the scheming Tamlin to a genuine alliance with the elves or if she’s going to try for a better deal with the forces of darkness.

The rest of Bandon’s considerable screen time in “Dweller” is spent making his way toward Paranor with Flick Ohmsford. When they stop to take a break so Bandon can get shirtless and show off how ripped he is, Flick tries to make the case that people are actually okay and that maybe bringing back the Warlock Lord isn’t a great idea. Bandon’s a true misanthrope though, and his counterpoint is that people are terrible and Allanon in particular is the worst. To prove his point, Bandon takes Flick on a detour to a farm we soon learn is Bandon’s childhood home. It’s been fixed up a bit since demons wrecked the place in season one, and there’s a new family living there. Bandon approaches the family to ask if he and his “uncle” could get food and lodging for the night and they’re happy to help the travelers, but over dinner Bandon’s simple question about what the family thinks of magic-users elicits a violently hateful response. Worse, it becomes clear that the family knows the story of their home’s previous inhabitants; they’ve even saved the disgusting muzzle Bandon’s own parents had forced on him. It’s not terribly surprising when things take a scary turn. Bandon conjures winds to push the farmer and his wife against the wall of the abode, and he captures their tween son, forces the muzzle on him and then squeezes the boy’s neck until blood starts coming out of the kid’s mouth and nose.

And this is one of the emotional beats that doesn’t quite land the way it seems to be intended. It seems as if we’re supposed to consider Bandon’s experiment here seriously. He basically bet Flick that these common people, of the sort that Flick insists are mostly decent folk, aren’t and that he can prove it, and in a sense Bandon succeeds at this when he prompts the family about magic and their murderous opinions about magic-users come right out. Like many fearful people, this family is full of hateful opinions about what they don’t understand, and they think safety will come from destroying the object of their fear. However, Bandon’s moral reasoning here is childish and simplistic. It’s not ignorant farmers who murder magic-users and craft discriminatory policy, though they may support political or military leaders who do. It’s bad systems that foster ignorance in a populace, allow bigotry to take hold in government, and fail to root out abusers of power. It’s difficult to take Bandon’s grievance seriously when it’s so clearly a case of misdirected rage. Bandon has been a victim of some real injustice, and he’s also been a victim of bad luck, but this family isn’t the agent of his pain, even if they do have some terrible opinions.

Bandon’s decision to kill the young son, in particular, makes it difficult to give much merit to Bandon’s point of view. It’s an especially brutal death and filmed in almost lascivious detail, often focusing on the face of the boy while he’s being murdered, but it’s through dialogue while the murder is occurring that Bandon makes his final point, such as it is. The farmers opined that the son of the previous family was just “born damaged,” and Bandon repeats those words back to them as he murders their child. This is framed as irony, but also as real pathos; Flick’s face as he watches Bandon is sad, and it seems that the audience is also supposed to feel saddened and sympathetic towards Bandon. It’s a moment that doesn’t work for me and shouldn’t work for most people. Bandon is killing a child. Because he’s mad that people dislike and distrust magic. And he’s mad about his parents and about Allanon. But he’s using magic to kill a child in front of the child’s parents. It’s nonsensical. It’s not sympathetic. It’s actually heinously evil, and the only thing Bandon’s actions here should have proved to anyone is that, yeah, magic is powerful and dangerous, but also that Bandon is stupidly, senselessly cruel.

I just don’t have a lot of patience for these sorts of narratives these days, especially when the parallels to real-world current events are as unsubtle as they are here. Any urge the viewer might have to cheer Bandon on for murdering a child to punish the child’s bigoted parents is an ugly urge that ought to be tamped down rather than encouraged. Flick may be overestimating the goodness of the common people, but murdering children isn’t the moral equivalent of being poorly informed and frightened of magic, especially when another major theme of this show is that magic actually is dangerous, that it has a price, and that it’s important that magical power doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. This whole storyline in this episode is a messy metaphor that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny and tries to require the viewer to accept the absurd proposition that Bandon and this family of farmers are essentially moral and ethical equals. It’s a nasty case of both-sides-ism that is as frustrating as it tries to be timely.

General Riga

We don’t see much of Riga this week. There’s just one short scene that pops in back at Graymark to see how he’s taking the apparent loss of his entire force of men there. Trackers were sent after Allanon and his friends after they escaped, but they’ve been unsuccessful. In a fit of rage, Riga kills the man who brought him this bit of bad news and then tells his single remaining lackey that they need to contact Edain to hurry up the shipment of weapons they’re supposed to be getting from Leah. My biggest question here is: who is going to use all those weapons? It looks like Riga and this one captain or whatever are literally the last men standing at Graymark.

Eretria, Garet Jax, Ander, Lyria and Leah

Right after the opening credits, the group that escaped from Graymark last week is already splitting up, with Eretria and Garet Jax being sent to Leah. At Graymark, they realized that all of the Crimson soldiers were using weapons made of Leah steel, which suggests a secret alliance between Riga’s forces and the human kingdom. On the road, Garet Jax wakes up from a nightmare and discloses a little more of his backstory to Eretria, though it’s not much more than we already knew about his being part of the Border Guard and surviving a massacre. When the pair arrive in Leah, they find Ander, who’s worried about Catania and starting to be suspicious of Edain, getting sort-of rejected by Lyria, who is professing her love for Eretria. Seriously. In an obvious piece of plot convenience theater, Jax and Eretria show up right as Lyria is telling Ander that she’s in love with Eretria. It’s silly, but I like Eretria and Lyria, so I’m willing to accept it.

The news and evidence that Eretria and Jax bring about the weapons the Crimson are getting from Leah alarms Ander, but he never doubts them. It’s actually kind of impressive how easily he believes them about Edain’s treachery, and the elf king is quick to come up with a plan that allows them to catch Edain in the act of moving weapons from Leah to the Crimson. It’s not clear how much information they get out Edain and his co-conspirators, but it does seem that Queen Tamlin is working hard to maintain enough plausible deniability to avoid being implicated. She claims that she had no knowledge of Edain or his activities, and she even organizes the execution of Edain and the Leah men he was working with—though it’s Ander who actually executes his former friend.

The final scenes in Leah this week are Lyria and Eretria and then Lyria and her mother. Eretria is leaving Leah again to go help Wil, but before she goes she advises Lyria to rethink her relationship with Tamlin. Eretria points out that Tamlin needs Lyria more than Lyria needs her mother, and this gets the wheels in Lyria’s head turning. After Eretria is gone, Lyria goes to Tamlin and tells her mother how things are going to be from now on. It seems that Lyria is going to pull the trigger on marriage to Ander after all, but she makes it very clear to Tamlin that she intends to be a real ruler and that Tamlin will have to earn her as an ally. I’m starting to get very worried about Lyria’s lifespan, though. Tamlin seems to have at least some real love for her daughter, but she’s also got the threat of the Warlock Lord to worry about, and Ander already has two dead girlfriends, one of them a black woman. It also increasingly feels as if Eretria and Wil are the show’s endgame couple, which would be in line with the books. Sure, the show is rather famously divorced from the source material, but still. I’m going to be extremely pissed off if Lyria ends up fridged to make way for Wil and Eretria to pair off.

Wil, Allanon and Mareth

While Eretria and Jax head of the Leah, the rest of our heroes are off to Paranor, where they hope to rescue Flick. First, though, Mareth approaches Allanon about his being her father, which he denies and rather cruelly rejects her, refusing to even consider training her to control her magic, which is really all she wants. Allanon insists to Wil that the druid sleep ought to have made him infertile, and it made me actually cackle to imagine a younger Allanon telling Mareth’s mom that they don’t need to use condoms because he’s totally infertile, only for her to find out a couple months later that he was incorrect. I can’t help it. It’s just such a line, and Allanon is being such an asshole to Mareth. I mean, even if he doesn’t believe she’s his daughter, he could still help her out with her magic problem since that’s kind of his job and a moral imperative or whatever. Instead, he’s just kind of a dick to her throughout the episode.

It’s a great week for druid detours, though Allanon’s isn’t as sinister as Bandon’s. Allanon is taking Wil to retrieve the Sword of Shannara, which is hidden at the grave of Wil’s father, Shae. The elder Ohmsford’s final resting place is inside a huge, beautiful cave that, from the top, looks like a giant vagina surrounded by trees, which isn’t at all a heavy-handed bit of visual language suggesting rebirth. However, before Wil can get his dad’s sword and symbolically come of age and power as he raises up an inherited phallic symbol he has to defeat the huge tentacle-spider—the titular “Dweller”—that stalks the cave in a sequence that’s shamelessly cribbed from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.

I’m not even kidding about the vagina cave.

I poke a little fun, but I loved this stuff. The vagina tree cave is hilariously on the nose. The visual and even auditory references to the Shelob sequence from The Return of the King are such an obvious homage to a good movie that it’s hard to get mad about them. There’s some great banter and a lot of evidence that Austin Butler is growing as an actor. The Dweller doesn’t look bad; at the very least the compositing is competent so that it feels like there’s a real creature in the scene with decent lighting. The defeat of the Dweller through teamwork was nice. Shae Ohmsford’s “grave” is baffling (I have so many questions), but it looks awesome, and the Sword of Shannara is another great-looking prop. Most importantly, for all that there’s a lot of story and character stuff crammed in here, it never feels perfunctory or rushed and it all makes a reasonable amount of sense if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief and enjoy the high fantasy of it all.

Miscellany:

  • Eretria stole the Elfstones back for Wil when they were at Graywatch, which answers my question from last week, but her explanation was basically “I saw these sitting around and thought you might need them” and that is deeply silly and really stretches the limits of what you can get away with having happen off screen.
Star Trek: Discovery, Television

Star Trek: Discovery – “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” could have been great

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So, “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” is definitely my favorite episode of Star Trek: Discovery to date. It’s a time loop episode, which is one of my favorite genres of sci-fi television stories, and it’s, for the most part, really well done. It’s often hand-wavy about science and logic, but that’s been the Star Trek way since forever and isn’t really a negative to my mind. There’s some interesting character work going on, especially for Lieutenant Stamets, who we’ve seen little of since he injected himself with the tardigrade DNA. It also brings back Rainn Wilson as Harry Mudd, which is rather earlier than I expected but welcome nonetheless. ALSO, there is a space whale. It’s not a perfect hour, by any stretch, but it’s pretty good, and it’s a pleasantly standalone episode that I could see rewatching on its own in the future.

**Spoilers ahead.**

The episode opens with a party that’s notable in Trek history for actually feeling like a party that real young people might go to and enjoy. There’s drinking and dancing and people making out, and it’s nice to get another look at life on the Discovery when there’s not a crisis going on. Of course, right as Tyler is about to ask Burnham to dance, a crisis starts, and it starts with an endangered space whale that needs a lift to, I guess, a space whale sanctuary of some kind. The space whale turns out to be Harry Mudd’s way onto the Discovery, and he comes out, phaser blazing, to take over the ship, find out its secrets, and sell them to the Klingons. He’s only got thirty minutes to accomplish this, but Mudd’s got a time crystal that lets him murder Lorca and destroy the ship time and time again to perfect his strategy. Also, for funsies. Fortunately, through cleverness and teamwork, the Discovery crew foils Mudd’s plans. And they get to talk about their feelings, to boot.

It ticks a lot of classic Trek boxes—time loop, Mudd, weird space creature, feelings, friendship—and these overlap quite a lot with all my personal boxes that are ticked by this episode—time loop, weird space creatures, feelings, friendship, smooching, Rainn Wilson. For Trekkie reasons and personal reasons, I basically uncritically love about the first 85% or so of the episode, but that first 85% is also a smartly constructed, well-executed and highly entertaining bit of television. For most of the hour, it manages to strike a great balance between hijinks, romance, science and the darkness that’s characteristic of this Trek iteration. Certainly, it’s a much better balance than existed in the previous several episodes, and it makes it that much more disappointing when it fails, pretty spectacularly, to stick its landing. I just don’t know what the Discovery writers—and costumers and directors and anyone else involved in the end of this episode—were thinking by tacking on such a tonally dissonant mess at the end of an otherwise excellent hour, but that’s a thing that has happened.

In a lot of ways, this is a Stamets episode. Due to his combining his DNA with that of the giant space tardigrade, he’s now outside the normal spacetime continuum, so he’s the only member of the Discovery’s crew to realize what’s going on. After last week’s brief glimpse of the new, post-tardigrade Stamets, it was nice to get a better idea of how he’s doing these days and how much he’s changed. Here, we find a kinder, gentler Stamets, capable of and willing to give Burnham dancing lessons and relationship advice, but most of Stamets’ time this week is spent trying to convince Burnham and Tyler to help stop Mudd and save the ship. Anthony Rapp does a fantastic job of portraying a coherent character arc for Stamets, and it’s Stamets’ reactions to the experience of being trapped in Mudd’s time loop that are the most interesting thing about the episode. His journey through feelings of anxiety, frustration, resignation, fatalism, and desperation to put a stop to it are compelling and heartfelt.

The stress and trauma of experiencing the ship being destroyed time and time again is conveyed to the viewer largely through confident editing as we see short snippets of many instances of the time loop in the first three quarters of the episode. It’s not always entirely clear how Stamets is supposed to have learned all the information we’re meant to believe he’s learned from each loop, but the episode is fast-paced and fantastically-premised enough in the first place that it’s not hard to suspend disbelief. Rapp’s skillful portrayal of Stamets’ arc is mirrored by Harry Mudd’s arc, in which Mudd starts the hour gleefully murdering Lorca over and over again, only to become fatigued by the experience in the end. By the time Mudd stops the time loop, he’s entirely lost interest in killing Lorca and is simply anxious to get his promised pay-out from the Klingons, and this is what allows Stamets, Burnham and Tyler to trick him into ending the time loop at all. Thinking that he’s captured the ship and Michael Burnham, Mudd cheerfully transmits their coordinates to, theoretically, some waiting Klingons, only to find out that the ship that is coming to meet them contains his wife, Stella, and her arms-dealing father.

And this is where things get bad.

Listen. There’s definitely something a little off, just overall, with the way Harry Mudd is written on this show. I’ve written before about similar characters in other shows, usually white, almost always men, who we’re supposed to understand as Lovable Rogues. They’re crude, sexist, sometimes racist, generally self-serving, often craven and greedy, but they somehow manage to have all these negative qualities in a way that we can be convinced is charming. So, we like these characters, rather in spite of ourselves. The thing is, in order for these characters to maintain their lovableness, their transgressive behaviors can’t be too transgressive. Stealing stuff (especially from the rich and powerful), getting in fights, treating romantic partners poorly, being generally unreliable, that sort of thing works. Gleefully murdering hundreds of people dozens of times over as part of your plan, motivated by revenge and spite and not a little bit of a greed, to sell out the Federation to a brutal adversary is a more than a little outside the “Lovable” Rogue wheelhouse. The cruelty and sadism of Mudd’s actions in this episode are genuinely dark and horrifying, far beyond anything that should be accepted as the sort of whacky hijinks that make Lovable Rogues beloved.

To be fair, Mudd’s actions take a toll on him. However, whereas it’s obvious that Stamets’ desperation to bring the time loop to an end comes from a place of caring for others and not wanting to see any more suffering or experience more pain, Harry Mudd’s fatigue seems more connected to boredom and actual physical exhaustion after well over 24 hours without sleep while he ran and reran the scenario of taking over the Discovery. Mudd doesn’t feel guilty or ashamed of his actions; he’s simply achieved maximum catharsis through murder, and he’s now impatient to be done so he can get his payday and, presumably, hit the sack. It’s also not clear, in the final time loop, how much damage Mudd has actually done on the Discovery. In previous versions of the loop, he killed multiple people on his way to the bridge, but even if he didn’t physically harm anyone this last time through the time loop, Stamets exists as a witness to Mudd’s litany of crimes in earlier iterations of the event. Mudd has proven himself to be unprincipled and dangerous, and by the episode’s end he’s still in possession of sensitive information, even if his ability to monetize that information is greatly reduced.

So, you’d think that Harry Mudd, once his plan was foiled, would be arrested and imprisoned pending trial for whatever crimes he’s committed, even if all they can get him on is “conspiracy to commit.” You would be incorrect in thinking that, however. Instead of facing any kind of actual punishment or legal consequences, Mudd finds himself tricked into ending the device he used to create the time loop and escorted to the transporter room, where he’s not greeting Klingon guests like he expects, but is instead faced with his wife, the mythical Stella, and her father, a wealthy arms dealer. I hate this.

So, apparently, in the Original Series, Harry Mudd’s wife, Stella Grimes, was a famously nagging harpy of a woman, with the punchline of one Harry Mudd episode, in which he’d made a Stella fembot (as part of a whole scheme of selling fembots), being the creation of hundreds of robot Stellas who can all harangue him at once. That’s obviously a damaging (and sadly pernicious) misogynistic stereotype, and it would be a disaster to replicate uncritically in 2017. Still, the ending of “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” is little more than a variation on that theme. The only problem is that Discovery’s Stella isn’t a middle-aged harridan, ready to hound her wayward husband; she’s young (like, young enough to be Rainn Wilson’s daughter young, and looks younger), and she seems to have genuine affection for Mudd. I just… don’t know what they were going for here.

Discovery!Stella, as I said, is younger than her husband by quite a bit, younger enough that it’s hard not to suspect that Mudd has preyed upon her youth and ignorance in order to finagle his way into an advantageous marriage. This perception isn’t helped by the confused portrayal of Stella as both somewhat aggressively overbearing and rather stupid, while her father, Baron Grimes, is portrayed as patronizingly indulgent of his daughter’s foibles. It’s like the people in charge of coming up with this stuff kind of understood that it’s not 1967 anymore, so they tried to soften the trope of the Nagging Wife in several ways and to create Stella as a sympathetic and humorous character. This is apparent in her dialogue, though there isn’t much of it, but also in the costuming of Stella and her father. They’re both in get-ups that could have come straight from the Original Series, Stella in bright synthetic fabric and her father in some kind of pleather old-timey mobster number. Compared to the show’s other excellent costumes, these are retro in all the wrong ways, and contribute to the complete tonal dissonance of this ending when set against the rest of the episode.

For an otherwise strong episode to end on such a strange, regressive note, especially when it’s so at odds with the tone of the rest of the hour, is a huge disappointment. I loved the time loop; I loved Stamets; I loved Burnham’s burgeoning romance with Tyler; I loved the party and Tilly and the space whale; but I hate, with a passion, that Harry Mudd’s “punishment” for all the many crimes he committed in this episode is still, in the year of our Lord 2017, having to return to the mildly unpleasant wife he jilted.

Miscellany:

  • I loved Stamets’ story about how he met his partner. That story, coupled with the sensible advice he gives Burnham, helps to put this new, softer side of Stamets that we’re seeing post-tardigrade in a context where we can see that this sensitivity in him isn’t entirely new or unprecedented and helps to diffuse some of the sense of body-snatching I had watching Stamets in the last episode.
  • I’m starting to reconsider my early perception of Cadet Tilly as neuroatypical. It seems weird that her allergies and mild snoring would keep her from having a roommate before Burnham arrived, but the issue of Tilly being neuroatypical hasn’t been addressed since, and she’s seemed to behave fairly typically in the intervening episodes. Which doesn’t rule out neuroatypicality, but I’m not going to give this show credit for representation if I have to imagine it all in my head.
  • Tilly seems fun at parties. Also, I like her friendship with Burnham better when they are just young women being friends. Because of Burnham’s background as a mutineer, she’s a somewhat inappropriate mentor or professional role model for Tilly, which is a concern, but it also bothered me to see a black woman character, herself so in need of love and guidance, being made to mentor a white woman. I’d much rather see them have a more equitable relationship and, as in this episode, see more of what Tilly brings to the table as a friend and confidant to Burnham.
  • What emotion was Lorca supposed to be expressing as he turned the ship over to Mudd? Seriously? This moment felt like it could be character development; perhaps we’re meant to understand from this that Lorca’s learned from past mistakes and doesn’t want to repeat them. Certainly, in the moment, before it’s revealed that the Discovery crew has executed a plan to foil Mudd, Lorca’s sentiment seems real enough. But we’ve also seen as recently as last week that Lorca has a manipulative and calculating side to him that hasn’t been trained out by Starfleet. His submission to Mudd is feigned, after all, so it’s also possible that Lorca just has a fantastic poker face.
  • I like Burnham and Tyler together. Very cute.
Television, The Shannara Chronicles

The Shannara Chronicles: “Graymark” keeps up the pace but feels a little small

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After a slower, soapier hour last week, The Shannara Chronicles is back with a more action-focused hour in “Graymark.” Short scenes continue to give an illusion of a fast pace, but this is coupled in this episode with an actually fast—one might say too fast—pace. Seriously. A lot of ground is covered in “Graymark,” which is exciting, but the speed with which all this travel and story happens has the unfortunate effect of making the world of Shannara feel remarkably small. This lack of epicness plagued the show’s first season as well, but the first couple episodes of season two involved somewhat less travel and the time-lapses between events within those episodes were handled a little more deftly than they are in this one, making it less notable. In an episode focused largely on a single major event/quest, it would have been nice for it to have more of a feeling of consequence. What I loved about “Graymark,” however, is how unabashedly high fantasy it is. The Shannara Chronicles has always been a show that owned its late-70s-to-mid-80s origin, but it was in rare retro form this week.

**Spoilers below.**

The episode opens at the titular fortress—complete with unsubtly Nazi-ish decoration and a whole lot of razor wire—where Allanon is being imprisoned and tortured by General Riga, who is dead set on rooting out and banishing all magic from the Four Lands. The way to do that, Riga thinks, is by destroying the Codex of Paranor, which is the repository of all remaining druid knowledge. Allanon tries appealing to Riga’s sense of justice and points out that the Warlock Lord is their common enemy, but Riga insists that “the true enemy is magic.” Having no luck with torturing the information he needs out of Allanon, Riga’s plan is to hunt down Wil Ohmsford and torture him until Allanon gives in to Riga’s demands. Fortunately for Riga, he doesn’t have to do much hunting.

I’m not kidding about the lack of subtlety.

Immediately after the opening credits, Eretria has managed (with a little help from Garet Jax) to track down Wil. As great as it is to have Wil and Eretria reunited, this all feels a little too easy and convenient. The two of them do have a couple of good conversations, though some of that was recapping season one events, presumably for viewers who are new to the show this year. The important thing, though, is that Eretria brings the news of Allanon’s capture by General Riga right at the time when Wil needs to find Allanon for his own reasons (to save Flick), so the two of them, along with Garet Jax and Mareth, are going to go extract Allanon from Graymark. And that’s basically the rest of the episode.

It’s a great quest adventure set-up in the high fantasy tradition, with clear stakes and a straightforward plan and it goes about how anyone familiar with the genre would expect. I only wish it had been given a little more room to breathe instead of smushing all this story into a single episode.

It’s not even that there’s just so much story here. There’s just an awful lot of torture, and it’s unpleasant to watch. Depictions of torture in general can be fraught, not least because torture is not a thing that works, which makes it irresponsible to depict in a favorable light. The good news is that’s not what’s going on here. Neither Allanon nor Wil are willing to give in to Riga’s torture. The bad news is twofold: first, the torture is depicted with an almost pornographic relish, which is gross, and, second, it undermines Riga as a sympathetic villain. Even as we learn about the death of Riga’s wife and unborn child (sigh) and his mother being attacked while pregnant by the magical creatures whose influence made Riga himself immune to magic, we see scene after scene of Riga coldly and viciously torturing two of the show’s main protagonists.

One gets the sense that Riga has some fundamental principles that he’s guided by and that his war against magic is something of a crusade that he feels morally justified in waging, but the way he tortures Allanon and Wil seems unbound by any rules of engagement or ethical concerns. If torture was a tactic that worked, it might be possible to accept it as part of the fantasy setting, but it’s shown two or three times over in this episode to be ineffective, making Riga’s continued reliance on it morally indefensible. He learns nothing of value here and doesn’t advance his cause at all, so his decision to use torture ends up feeling either profoundly stupid or indefensibly cruel. If Riga is stupid, it undermines his status as the most compelling villain of the series so far; if he’s wantonly cruel, it makes it really difficult to see him as sympathetic or misunderstood and diminishes the chance of any kind of redemption for him. Regardless, it’s not a good look.

What does work, surprisingly enough, is the plan for how to escape Graymark. It would have been nice to see a little more of the planning process, and the episode is a little hand-wavy about some things (like, how did Garet Jax get that map of the fortress?), but the plot of the episode is smartly put-together and well-executed. While Eretria’s reunion with Wil seemed easily accomplished earlier in the episode, there are enough real challenges in the course of this rescue plan to provide a sense of real drama and concern for the characters. Eretria and Mareth both get opportunities to use their particular skills to further the quest, and they even seem to be becoming friendly after each of them being somewhat suspicious of the other on first meeting. The episode even manages to provide space for some Garet Jax back story, though he’s not completely demystified by the end of the hour. While there’s a lot going on, and I would have liked to see more of some of the non-torture parts, what we did get on screen is nicely balanced between action, exposition and character work.

The best part of the episode, of course, is the final action scene as Allanon, Wil, Eretria, Jax, and Mareth finally escape from Graymark. It’s a well-choreographed fight scene, we get to see some magic, and all the characters get a chance to shine a little. The rain was a bit much, but it looked cool and, really, that’s what matters.

Miscellany:

  • Ander is engaged to marry Lyria.
  • Catania is missing. Ran off back to Arborlon according to Edain, though we know better.
  • Queen Tamsin knows that Edain is Riga’s man. Sounds like she may be funding the Crimson and fomenting this whole civil war thing that’s going on with the elves.
  • Honestly could have done without the scenes in Leah altogether this week. There’s enough else going on that they felt intrusive and out of place rather than truly important or interesting in their own right.
  • It’s not clear if the elfstones Riga now has are the real ones or not. It seems like there have been fake ones used at other times in the show, but they’re never commented on here one way or the other.
Star Trek: Discovery, Television

Star Trek: Discovery – “Lethe” is largely forgettable

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So, the thing about “Lethe” is that, though I really liked some things about it and have a vague feeling that it’s a continuance of the show’s improvement, it’s not an especially memorable episode. Its emotional beats are fine, but they’re pedestrian, and the episode, overall, relies a little too much on well-worn tropes and by-the-numbers storytelling to make its points, which are slight. Add an ending that’s a bit maudlin and you’ve got an altogether forgettable hour that entertains while it’s running but doesn’t stick around to make you think very much.

**Spoilers ahead.**

The episode opens with a look at two new mentoring relationships. Captain Lorca has taken Ash Tyler under his wing in the days since their escape from the Klingons, and the beginning of the hour finds them going through a training simulation in what—contrary to Trek canon—appears to be a holodeck. I’m not a stickler for that sort of thing, though, and I suppose that if there is going to be an anachronistic holodeck it would be on a state-of-the-art science ship like the Discovery. After they get through the sim, Lorca offers Tyler the recently vacated security chief position, which I guess takes care of that loose end that I’d totally forgotten about. Also, obviously nothing could possibly go wrong with this idea. I’m sure Ash Tyler is totally okay and fit for duty and completely ready to take on an important position in the Discovery team. I’m also sure that no one else on this ship with a crew of hundreds had any interest or qualification or familiarity with the job that might make them a better prospect for the position. What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, Burnham is mentoring Tilly, mostly by helping her develop a strict regime of healthy eating and exercise, though they still have time to bond a little over how hot Ash Tyler is. There was a little of this slice-of-life stuff last week after several episodes without it, and I’m glad to see more of it in this episode, though the friendship between Burnham and Tilly still feels a little contrived and perfunctory. That said, it’s early yet. There’s still time for their relationship to develop the real, lived-in quality that other Trek friendships have had, and while I’m not totally sold on this one yet, both women are interesting and likable. Mostly, what I’d like to see is for the friendship between Burnham and Tilly to get the same kind of hour-long focus that Burnham’s relationships with the men around her get. This show initially got me really excited about it with marketing featuring Burnham and Georgiou, and it’s deeply disappointing how devoid of relationships between women it’s actually turned out to be. All this is to say, YES, more, please, of Burnham and Tilly. Maybe go really wild and introduce another girlfriend or two for them.

Burnham and Tilly are introducing themselves to Tyler when Burnham collapses, writhing on the floor in pain. Burnham’s foster father, Sarek, is in trouble; while en route to a secret meeting where he was supposed to negotiate with the Klingons, a Vulcan extremist, resentful over Sarek’s love of humans, tries to assassinate the ambassador. Sarek, injured and his ship knocked off course and lost in a nebula, reaches out with his mind for Burnham. Once it’s confirmed what has happened, Lorca is quick to approve a mission for Burnham, Tilly and Tyler to go retrieve Sarek, which they do, using a device that works like a Vulcan mind meld that allows Burnham to track Sarek on his disabled ship. It also sends Burnham on a trip into Sarek’s subconscious, where he’s dwelling on the day Burnham was denied entrance into the Vulcan Expeditionary Force, reliving it over and over as he lingers near death.

This is fine, but ho-hum. Sarek’s failings as a father have been adequately covered several times over through his relationship with Spock in previous Treks, so there’s not much new here. The irony of Sarek sacrificing Michael’s prospects in favor of his biological child’s only to have Spock reject the opportunity and join Starfleet instead isn’t that great of a shock and doesn’t really justify an hour-long episode to deal with it. Burnham’s sanguine response to the knowledge shows us something about her, but there’s a sense of inevitability about the way she comes to terms with the way parents and children disappoint each other that doesn’t ring true. From the way she reintroduces herself to Tyler at the end of the episode as “Michael Burnham, human,” it seems like this wasn’t intended to be about the fraught nature of parent-child relationships at all but about Burnham’s understanding of herself and her own identity. This, again, is fine, but the whole message, in addition to being trite, is garbled and unclear. And none of this is helped along by the fact of this show being a prequel, which prevents any of the danger Sarek is in from ever feeling truly consequential, which in turn blunts all the emotional moments.

On the Discovery, Lorca has much more interesting problems. They just aren’t particularly Star Trek-ish problems. His friend Admiral Cornwell is so concerned about his recent behavior that she shows up for an in-person meeting with him, where she expresses her observation that he’s changed following some recent traumas and her fears that he’s not competent to captain a ship, especially one as important as the Discovery. On his best behavior, Lorca puts on a reasonably convincing show of being okay and points out that, unorthodox as his methods may be, he does get results. Cornwell doesn’t seem quite convinced, but she’s convinced enough to have a few drinks and sleep with him. It’s only when she wakes up in the night, gently touches a scar on his back, and suddenly finds herself pinned down with a phaser in her face that she’s certain Lorca isn’t fit for duty. Before she can head back to Starfleet headquarters, however, Cornwell has to go fill in for Sarek at the meeting with the Klingons, which is, naturally, a trap.

Either predictably or surprisingly (and I’m leaning toward predictably), Lorca isn’t rushing to rescue the admiral from the Klingons. Cornwell explicitly threatened Lorca’s job before leaving the Discovery, and his plaintive “Don’t take my ship; she’s all I’ve got” had a ring of truth to it that makes me think we might be about to find out what Lorca will do to protect the only thing he’s got. I guess we’ll find out next week if Lorca’s refusal to immediately chase after Cornwell is motivated by a sincere desire to play by the rules in a last-ditch effort to rescue his career or if it’s a cynical choice to leave her in Klingon hands as long as possible. I’m not sure there’s any middle ground here.

Miscellany:

  • So, Stamets has obviously been straight-up body-snatched, right?
  • I’d like to see Amanda Grayson get a little more to do than just be a supportive mother. She seems nice, I guess.
  • I want a “DISCO” shirt.
  • It’s nice to see a man Lorca’s age with an age-appropriate partner, even if the professional ethics of their sleeping together aren’t great.
Television, The Shannara Chronicles

The Shannara Chronicles: “Wraith” proves the show hasn’t forgotten its soapy roots

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One of the things I loved about season one of The Shannara Chronicles was how unabashedly YA the show was, and, while I enjoyed the season two premiere, I nevertheless had some mixed feelings about what seemed to be a turn towards more adult-targeted action fantasy. The second episode of the season, “Wraith,” takes a step back from action in favor of focusing on soap opera and political intrigue, and it’s deliciously fun. It does feel decidedly less YA than last season, with several older characters being introduced and last year’s crop of teens played by twenty-somethings feeling much more their actual age. It’s another aspect of the shift in tone with the show’s move from MTV to Spike, but it still works. “Wraith” is a solidly enjoyable hour that smartly uses short scenes and quick cuts to keep things moving along briskly in a dialogue-heavy episode.

**Spoilers ahead!**

Wil & Mareth

The episode opens with Wil and Mareth running from the wraiths that found them last week. Or, rather, Wil is running to Shady Vale to find his uncle Flick and Mareth is sticking with him because she insists that Wil is her best chance of finding Allanon. When the two of them duck into a very pretty cave to escape the wraiths, we learn that Mareth is Pyria’s daughter and was estranged from her mother before Pyria’s death back in season one. As they continue towards Shady Vale, Wil and Mareth argue over magic, with Wil insisting that he’s just an ordinary guy who wants to live an ordinary life and Mareth opining that having magic is a gift and a responsibility—while also pointing out that no matter what Wil says, he’s still been using his magic and that if he really didn’t want it he would have gotten rid of the elfstones long since. It’s a pretty classic fantasy theme, but it’s perennially interesting to see characters work through the whole magic-as-burden-and-curse vs. magic-as-gift-and-responsibility debate; I only hope the show doesn’t get distracted and forget they brought it up.

When Wil and Mareth arrive at Shady Vale, they find Wil’s childhood home in shambles, but Flick Ohmsford is still alive. Wil patches his uncle up a bit, and Flick gives some more history of Wil’s father Shea Ohmsford, Allanon, and the last war against the warlock lord. It turns out that Shea wasn’t driven mad by overusing the elfstone, but from refusing to embrace his power. It seems that this might be the encouragement and validation Wil needed to embrace his identity as a Shannara, although it’s at odds with everything Flick raised Wil to believe all these years. Still, I’m inclined to forgive this inconsistency in the interest of moving along from this boring ass plot. I’m very interested in Mareth and her hunt for her deadbeat druid dad, but Wil—adorable as he is—has always been the weakest character of the show, and his family drama in deeply boring.

Eretria, Lyria & Leah

Last time we saw this pair, they’d been captured by Rovers, and I was looking forward to seeing them escape this week. Instead, they are “rescued” almost immediately by a bounty hunter named Garet Jax, who hints at Lyria’s secret identity before knocking Eretria out and leaving with Lyria. In a surprising (due to timing only) twist, Lyria turns out to be the princess of the human kingdom of Leah; Garet Jax was sent by her mother, Queen Tamsin, to retrieve her. Tamsin is currently receiving the still-struggling King Ander, and she wants the elven king to marry Lyria and unite their kingdoms after years of disagreement between them. Ander has some reservations and doesn’t want to be trapped in a loveless marriage. We find out that he and Catania are now in a relationship, though she believes it’s his duty as king to do what’s best for his people, even if that does mean a political marriage. Eretria shows up and is justifiably upset with Lyria, which is exacerbated by Tamsin’s manipulation. Eretria’s about to leave with Allanon to go find Wil when General Riga shows up and kidnaps the druid. She decides to go after them, sending Catania to tell King Ander about what’s happened, but Catania is intercepted by one of Ander’s guards, who kills her (or at least stabs her), outing himself to the audience as a Crimson collaborator.

It is a lot to take in.

Fortunately, all this mess of events is delivered in short, snappy scenes that stay laser-focused on their point. If anything, we could have used a handful of interstitial scenes to explain some of what’s going on. I would have liked to see a little of Eretria tracking Garet Jax and Lyria, for example, and it would have been nice to have a little more of a sense of the relationship between Ander and Catania before now. I mean, how did that happen? Still, there’s something rather refreshing about the lack of hand-holding here and there’s a pleasing kind of honesty about the show being willing to just go balls to the wall with this mix of family drama and political intrigue. And it helps that the intrigue is so delightful. Ander isn’t always the most likeable fellow, and we’re still getting a sense of who he is as a king, so it’s not obvious yet whether Tamsin is justified or not in her vendetta against the elves. Her self-interested calculation may be perfectly sensible. Similarly, Tamsin’s assessment of her daughter and Tamsin’s frank statements to Eretria are at least somewhat accurate. Lyria is at best an unreliable narrator, and it will be interesting to see what she does next. It’s a little disappointing to see what seemed last week to be a sweet and healthy same-sex relationship broken up this early in the season, but there’s always the hope of a happy reunion later on.

What works both best and worst about the stuff going on in Leah is probably Leah itself. The wide shots of Tamsin’s castle are almost cartoonish, and there’s a very poorly composited green screen shot right as Ander and Allanon arrive, but the interior sets are decent enough. I suspect these might be reused sets from Arborlon in season one, but changes in set dressing, lighting and costuming help to make Leah feel real and lived in. The bordello scene is surprisingly not disgusting towards women and could even have been a bit more risqué without being amiss. Overall, there’s something of an Emerald City-inspired feel to it all that I liked, for wall that it is derivative. I liked the variety of costumes—even Lyria’s bizarre open-crotched dress. What I appreciated most of all, however, was the diversity. While the first season of the show had a tendency to cast actors of color in significant supporting roles against a backdrop of whiteness (a common criticism of shows attempting to bring diversity to the screen), Leah is full of diverse crowd shots that make it clear that this is a criticism that someone in charge, somewhere, heard and took to heart and has worked to improve upon in this little corner of television.

Bandon

Bandon is still hunting for Wil when he comes upon some of Riga’s Crimson torturing a healer from Storlock. Bandon kills the Crimson soldiers and takes over torturing the gnome, reading his mind to find out where Wil went. He leaves the gnome alive, even heals him, before leaving to go find Wil, who is still in Shady Vale with Flick and Mareth. When Bandon finally catches up to Wil, we find out that he doesn’t want to kill Wil; he wants Wil as an ally, even trying to manipulate Wil into compliance by reading Wil’s mind and bringing up Wil’s own grievance against Allanon, who Bandon insists is the real enemy. What Bandon really wants, however, is the skull of the Warlock Lord, and he’s been told that “the Shannara” knows where it is. It’s not Wil who knows, though; it’s Flick, who was there when Allanon and Shea Ohmsford defeated the Warlock Lord and hid his parts. When Wil refuses to join Bandon, Bandon takes Flick and gives Wil three days to find Allanon and bring Allanon to Bandon.

It’s a difficult task that Bandon sets for Wil, kind of unreasonably so, but this is a fantasy show. I figure next week will be another action-adventure episode, with Wil rushing to find and rescue Allanon so they can go and rescue Flick. What is most surprising in all of this, to be honest, is the fast pace at which events are unfolding. Last season had a couple of very strange side-quest episodes, including the ridiculous “Utopia,” and I’m hoping we don’t get anything like that this time around. At the same time, oh-god-please-nothing-as-godawful-as-“Utopia” is a pretty low bar to clear. I’d much rather see the show sort out its pacing problems and be positively good instead of just not terrible.

Miscellany:

  • I still hate the wraith-vision shots. They’re cheap and lazy and don’t actually work to build up tension or anticipation.
  • I love that bisexuality is treated so nonchalantly in this show. That said, I worry that same-sex relationships aren’t treated with the same seriousness and legitimacy as straight ones.

 

Star Trek: Discovery, Television

Star Trek: Discovery – “Choose Your Pain” tries to have everything at least two ways

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After the clinical, impersonal sterility of last week’s bleakly dull episode, “Choose Your Pain” is a breath of fresh air and a reminder of the great potential this show possesses. The grimdark elements are still firmly and problematically in place, but at the core of “Choose Your Pain” is a glimmer of unironic optimism that is wholly Star Trek and that has been largely absent from the series so far. At five episodes into a 15-episode season, Discovery is, rather frustratingly, still establishing its identity, but it felt much surer of itself this week than last. Though it’s not entirely without problems, it’s an altogether better-constructed episode with a more compelling and complete story than either of the last two episodes, and it certainly works to help regain some of the momentum lost since the two-part premiere.

**Spoilers below.**

The episode begins with a meeting between Captain Lorca and his bosses at Starfleet, who are taking the Discovery out of action for the time being. Though we haven’t seen but the one major mission so far, apparently the ship has already made a name for itself, jumping all over the place to engage the Klingons and defend Federation space, and the higher-ups are concerned that the Klingons might try to capture the ship or figure out its technology. Lorca isn’t happy about having to take this step back from active duty, but there’s no hint of what he might do next because before, he even makes it back to the ship from his meeting, his shuttle is captured by Klingons and he’s promptly tossed into Klingon prison where he meets blatant fan service character Harry Mudd (a great use of Rainn Wilson’s talents) and Lieutenant Ash Tyler, a Starfleet officer captured at the Battle of the Binary Stars who has survived for eight months being raped by the Klingon woman who commands the ship. It’s a weird, excessively dark set-up, and much of what happens on the Klingon ship after Lorca’s arrival is nonsensical.

Harry Mudd is played with less disreputable rakish charm and more genuine pathos and anger at what he perceives as Starfleet’s elitism and lack of care for the common people, and this is a genuinely interesting idea that doesn’t go anywhere. We get some backstory for Lorca, who, it turns out, was famously (or famously enough that Mudd recognized his name) the single survivor when the ship he previously commanded was lost early in the war. The twist here is that Lorca destroyed the ship and its crew himself, to prevent them from being captured and tortured by Klingons, which makes it very weird later in the episode when Lorca bonds with Lieutenant Tyler and the two of them leave Mudd behind while they fight their way off the Klingon ship. Lorca knows exactly what fate he’s leaving Mudd to, and it’s hard to see Lorca or Tyler as sympathetic characters when they are willing to do something so unconscionable for petty revenge.

My frustration with this storyline is exacerbated by the fact that this unlikely escape happens too easily; not only are Lorca and Tyler able to overpower their guards with a simple ruse, but they are able to commandeer a small, two-person fighting ship with such minimal trouble that it happens entirely offscreen. By the time they are found by the Discovery, however, they’ve got four or five more small fighters chasing them, which means that there are personnel to fill them and that those personnel were able to launch their ships quickly enough that they are right on top of Lorca and Tyler. This points to a relatively large crew on the main Klingon ship, but they only encountered their two guards, a couple other Klingons in the hallways, and the Klingon captain herself. It’s a level of silly, hand-waving whiz-bang storytelling that depends on its audience failing to think even the least bit critically about the basic mechanics of how the story is supposed to unfold, and I hate it.

Meanwhile, on the Discovery, we get a more Saru-focused storyline. In Lorca’s absence, Saru is acting captain, and the Discovery is the only ship with the capabilities needed to locate and rescue Lorca once he’s captured, so the burden of managing this task is on Saru’s shoulders. It’s a time for Saru, potentially, to shine in a leadership position, but he’s suffering from a lack of confidence and comparing himself to other successful captains as he tries to ascertain whether he’s doing a good job. Complicating matters for Saru is Burnham’s report that the spore drive is depleting their tardigrade navigator to such a degree that it may jeopardize their continued ability to travel. Saru won’t hear of suspending use of the spore drive, however, even when Burnham’s theory about the tardigrade is supported by Lieutenant Stamets and Dr. Colber. Burnham is banished to her quarters, perennially doomed to Cassandra status, which effectively cuts her out of the story for much of the episode’s second half, during which time the ship’s final jump using the tardigrade practically kills the poor creature. Even that (with the added likelihood that the tardigrade is sentient, to boot) isn’t enough to sway Saru away from wringing every last drop of life from the creature if they need to in order to accomplish their mission.

Frankly, it’s not a great look for the first officer, for all that it’s a humanizing and compelling story, and once again Burnham is proven correct by the end of the episode, even as she’s castigated in the narrative for her high-handed methods. It’s deeply frustrating to watch her be right, over and over again, but also being constrained by a hierarchical system that punishes her for stepping out of line. It was tolerable enough when she was in trouble for mutiny; that’s a major offense, and her actions had severe consequences. But it’s starting to feel like Burnham is right about something new every week, only to have her every action and motive distrusted and second-guessed and criticized. Saru confining her to quarters this week was especially upsetting as it meant that Burnham wasn’t able to help implement her own solutions to their problem; Stamets takes the risk of injecting himself with tardigrade DNA so he can navigate the ship. Sure, he’ll almost certainly have to deal with consequences at some point for violating Earth’s anti-eugenics laws, but he also gets much of the credit for saving the day.

Burnham, on the other hand, gets to clean up the mess, of both the tardigrade, who has gone into a deep hibernation, and of Saru’s feelings—it turns out he’s angry and jealous and resentful towards Burnham for robbing him of his chance to study under Captain Georgiou. I’m very interested in the ways in which Burnham’s story is about how she chafes in the strictly hierarchical structures of Starfleet, and I think there is plenty of potentially useful commentary that could be made on the Starfleet ideal and the Trek vision of the future in general, but I’m not entirely confident that this show has the capability of examining those things in the way they deserve. There are glimmers of insight every now and then, and there’s interesting set-up for these big ideas—for example, Saru’s clear disdain for Lorca, which takes on a new depth of meaning when set against his obvious love and respect for Georgiou—but there’s not much payoff so far. Still, the Star Trek optimism shines through in spite of itself, in moments like the Burnham’s revival of the tardigrade or in her ability to bury the hatchet with Saru.

My major takeaway from this episode is that the people behind this show still aren’t certain what they want the show to be. At times, it’s as if they envision it as the unholy love child of Game of Thrones and Battlestar Galactica, but at others it’s Star Trek through and through. I’m just not sure if all those different stylistic and philosophical parts are ever going to make a coherent story.

Miscellany:

  • I want to know more about Harry Mudd’s little scorpion friend.
  • Lorca’s vision problems are seeded at the beginning of the episode, there’s a reminder when he’s captured and drops the injector he uses for his medicine, and the Klingon captain tortures him by shining bright lights in his face, but there’s no actual payoff? The bright light torture is obviously uncomfortable, but it doesn’t even do any serious temporary damage that would hinder Lorca’s escape or force him to make a decision about getting proper medical care for his condition.
  • Cadet Tilly: “I love feeling feelings!” (I loved the scene with Tilly and Burnham having lunch together, which is exactly the sort of slice-of-life stuff I’ve been missing so far on this show.)
  • Also Cadet Tilly: “That’s so fucking cool!” (On the one hand, I appreciate the sentiment; on the other hand, it’s very weird to hear the f-bomb on Star Trek, which in my day was a family show.)
  • The final scene with Stamets and Colber was nice, both confirming the characters’ relationship and providing more of the domesticity I love in Trek and that provides reasons to care about the characters.
  • So… Burnham and Tilly are the only major female characters at this point, but I guess good job for not killing off any more women of color this week?
  • Speaking of two ways, looks like we’re getting some Mirror Universe funtimes soon!