Star Trek: Discovery 2.12
Apr. 5th, 2019 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakIn which Christopher Pike is told that if he goes to Z'ha'dum, he will die unpleasant things about his future (again), Michael and Spock continue to be a fabulous sibling double act, and L'Rell's description of the Klingon attitude towards time travel is the exact opposite of what Leland claimed it was. (My gold-pressed latinum is on L'Rell.) Also, Alexander Roshenko's record gets broken.
Why so doomed by canon, Christopher Pike? I never had any particular feelings about your TOS version; then I really liked your Reboot movie version; and this latest episode brought home that I've fallen for your Discovery version as well. Which means I felt duly heartbroken during those flash forward versions. Also, I thought Anson M. was fantastic both during Pike's moment of acceptance of his fate (so easy for that to have felt cheesy, but it didn't, not to me), and later in the aftermath when the audience and Pike know about his future but no one else does, and you can tell, but not so blatantly that the crew would notice. I do love my stoic/iron woobies, the prime example of which on this show is of course Michael Burnham.
Michael gets a comforting holocall from Amanda (and I continue to love how often Amanda gets featured on this show) and brotherly support from Spock through the episode. But what I also love is that she's not angsting about her found-and-lost-mother as such, she's, as she tells Spock, enraged, and I think we haven't seen this before. We have seen her in various stages of distress through both seasons and usually trying to put a stoic face to it, and we've seen her angry (for example with Sarek in 1.05), but that usually didn't last long, as opposed to this seething rage (at Control, at fate) barely bubbling beneath the surface.
Quick continuity question: if Control is already this good with the nanobots, why then is it such a big deal when Wesley Crusher makes his invention less than a century later? Then again, the whole Control thing is as good a Watsonian explanation as any why all Federation technology in TOS seems somewhat less advanced than on Disco; presumably they had to reboot everything and reinvent computers from scratch at the end of all this.
Incidentally, Control telling Michael, while still in disguise as her old shipmate from the Shenzou, that Section 31 wanted to anticipate wars that hadn't even started yet and that Control could make that possible basically affirms that it is a case of the "tell an A.I. to protect civilisation from dangers and it will end up concluding humans - or in this case all organic life - is the biggest danger of them all" trope. And for what it's worth, given that L'Rell in this same episode presents time travel as a big nope for the Klingons, I'm tempted to conclude that Leland's (and he was still Leland then) whole spiel about how the Burnhams needed to develop time travel tech because the Klingons were already working on it and wanted to change the past was code for "we thought the Klingons might and also that was a good motivation for our scientists to get on it, because we really wanted to do it ourselves".
(Because US scriptwriters love their WWII parallels above all else: kind of like the Manhattan Project, no?)
Speaking of the Klingons: since Alexander (son of Worf) on TNG and DS9 already demonstrated an incredible fast growth and since genre tv loves its magically grown up kids, it was guessable L'Rell's and Voq's baby would not stay a baby for long, but I hadn't anticipated THIS fast a growth (I thought he'd reappear as a surly teenager, not a middle-aged mystic). I'm still awaiting the larger plot purpose of the kid, though, because it can't just have been guiding poor Pike to the time crystals?
Meanwhile, in the mess (in both senses of the word): Jet Reno, caustic engineer, makes a welcome return and this occasion decides that in order for Stamets to be a decent co-worker, he needs his love life fixed, which leads us to the ultra wry pep talk she gives Culber. (And we get a neat casual exposition mixed in when she mentions her wife; on screen confirmation of same sex relationships are always welcome, keep at it, Disco.) As much as I liked the scene, I also regret nothing ever came of my hope that Hugh and Ash might help each other.
Cliffhanger ending: I suppose the Discovery from Calypso could have been a later version (much like the Enterprise has an A, B, C, D, and E), but I still doubt they'll actually blow up the ship in season 2 already. Still, concluding they should is classic Trek. Sooner or later, every Captain starts the self destruct sequence (the first few times as a bluff, and eventually for real).
Why so doomed by canon, Christopher Pike? I never had any particular feelings about your TOS version; then I really liked your Reboot movie version; and this latest episode brought home that I've fallen for your Discovery version as well. Which means I felt duly heartbroken during those flash forward versions. Also, I thought Anson M. was fantastic both during Pike's moment of acceptance of his fate (so easy for that to have felt cheesy, but it didn't, not to me), and later in the aftermath when the audience and Pike know about his future but no one else does, and you can tell, but not so blatantly that the crew would notice. I do love my stoic/iron woobies, the prime example of which on this show is of course Michael Burnham.
Michael gets a comforting holocall from Amanda (and I continue to love how often Amanda gets featured on this show) and brotherly support from Spock through the episode. But what I also love is that she's not angsting about her found-and-lost-mother as such, she's, as she tells Spock, enraged, and I think we haven't seen this before. We have seen her in various stages of distress through both seasons and usually trying to put a stoic face to it, and we've seen her angry (for example with Sarek in 1.05), but that usually didn't last long, as opposed to this seething rage (at Control, at fate) barely bubbling beneath the surface.
Quick continuity question: if Control is already this good with the nanobots, why then is it such a big deal when Wesley Crusher makes his invention less than a century later? Then again, the whole Control thing is as good a Watsonian explanation as any why all Federation technology in TOS seems somewhat less advanced than on Disco; presumably they had to reboot everything and reinvent computers from scratch at the end of all this.
Incidentally, Control telling Michael, while still in disguise as her old shipmate from the Shenzou, that Section 31 wanted to anticipate wars that hadn't even started yet and that Control could make that possible basically affirms that it is a case of the "tell an A.I. to protect civilisation from dangers and it will end up concluding humans - or in this case all organic life - is the biggest danger of them all" trope. And for what it's worth, given that L'Rell in this same episode presents time travel as a big nope for the Klingons, I'm tempted to conclude that Leland's (and he was still Leland then) whole spiel about how the Burnhams needed to develop time travel tech because the Klingons were already working on it and wanted to change the past was code for "we thought the Klingons might and also that was a good motivation for our scientists to get on it, because we really wanted to do it ourselves".
(Because US scriptwriters love their WWII parallels above all else: kind of like the Manhattan Project, no?)
Speaking of the Klingons: since Alexander (son of Worf) on TNG and DS9 already demonstrated an incredible fast growth and since genre tv loves its magically grown up kids, it was guessable L'Rell's and Voq's baby would not stay a baby for long, but I hadn't anticipated THIS fast a growth (I thought he'd reappear as a surly teenager, not a middle-aged mystic). I'm still awaiting the larger plot purpose of the kid, though, because it can't just have been guiding poor Pike to the time crystals?
Meanwhile, in the mess (in both senses of the word): Jet Reno, caustic engineer, makes a welcome return and this occasion decides that in order for Stamets to be a decent co-worker, he needs his love life fixed, which leads us to the ultra wry pep talk she gives Culber. (And we get a neat casual exposition mixed in when she mentions her wife; on screen confirmation of same sex relationships are always welcome, keep at it, Disco.) As much as I liked the scene, I also regret nothing ever came of my hope that Hugh and Ash might help each other.
Cliffhanger ending: I suppose the Discovery from Calypso could have been a later version (much like the Enterprise has an A, B, C, D, and E), but I still doubt they'll actually blow up the ship in season 2 already. Still, concluding they should is classic Trek. Sooner or later, every Captain starts the self destruct sequence (the first few times as a bluff, and eventually for real).
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Date: 2019-04-06 03:26 pm (UTC)Same.