Discovery 3.08

[selenak]

In which Adira comes out, the series introduces us to Book's home planet, Keyla Detmer gets to play Luke Skywalker, and a big bad debuts.



Georgiou being a terrible patient is utterly unsurprising, and I am amused that not only is Michael aware of her core quips now and can recite them along with her but Culber and his colleague are utterly prepared as well. Otoh, Philippa being Philippa, she still manages to pilfer Culber's data access and find out her diagnosis is really bad. Btw, do I think she'll die? Nope. Otoh, this as yet another way to make her confront her past, I can see. Also, the name she yelled invitably sounded to this Farscape watcher like "Zhaan", though I'm sure it's spelled differently. I continue to be intrigued by the Emperor's storyline.

Meanwhile, this week's main adventure introduces the Emerald Chain's leader talked about two episodes ago in person, and to make it clear she's the worst we see her kill off her nephew via transworm in the introduction scene. I do suspect the other reason for this is so we see a difference between her as Mirror Georgiou right away, given the Emperor's track record. The actress feels vaguely familiar, but without looking it up, I can't recall right now where I might have seen her before. (The green makeup does make it trickier.) In terms of content: on the one hand, I'm glad our heroes this time asked the Admiral first and did get the okay for this mission, on the other, as the episode ends up with the new Big Bad - unimpressed by the technicality of Keyla Detmer having been on Book's ship when saving the day - vowing revenge against the entire Federation, I wonder whether the narrative has now handicaped itself. I.e. either the rest of the season is a war story, which given the Federation/Klingon conflict in s1 would feel repetitive, or the newly introduced big bad is given to empty threats, which is also not good.

Otoh: Ryn the Andorian telling Tilly about the terrible reputation the Federation has had during his childhood is a strong hint that things went wrong before the Burn, especially given that Andor, too, was a founding member. Hmm. The original signal triggering the Burn chain reaction having started as a Federation ship distress call: hmmmmmmmm. If they hadn't done the causality loop thing last season with the Red Angel and if it wasn't too dark I'd wonder whether we wouldn't find out that Discovery itself indadvertendly has caused/will cause the Burn. But probably not.

Very relieving to hear: Adira asking to be refered to as "they" and telling Stamets they've always felt like this (i.e. this has nothing to do with the Symbiont or Grey), they just hadn't told anyone but Grey. Given they are sixteen, that's believable, and Stamet's (and later Culbert's) matter of fact immediate acceptance is just how I hoped it would be handled. (And now I can use the designation as well.)

The blatant Star Wars steal homage with Keyla getting to target the one vulnerable spot in the Death Star, err, the Orion ship, with Ryn and Grudge the cat for company, was endearingly blatant, and I did cheer for her. It seems they're really leaning into Keyla being a pilot this season as part of her increased characterisation. Speaking of endearing, Tilly having been charged to find a phrase for Saru that's his equivalent to "make it so/engage" (Picard), "do it" (Janeway) and "hit it" (Pike) was fanservice in the best way, and of course it was Saru himself who ended up deciding on the very Saru-ian "carry on".

Lastly: that forest didn't exactly look Icelandian to me, so I'm assuming the scenes on Book's home planet were shot in Canada or the US?

Comments

[lirazel]

Speaking of endearing, Tilly having been charged to find a phrase for Saru that's his equivalent to "make it so/engage" (Picard), "do it" (Janeway) and "hit it" (Pike) was fanservice in the best way, and of course it was Saru himself who ended up deciding on the very Saru-ian "carry on".

Yes, I loved this detail.

The Keyla pilots scene were SO Star Wars. Strikingly Star Wars.

[selenak]

Keyla: I suppose you could also make a case for a (rebooted) BSG influence, but then again, the Star Wars influence was there, too. :)

[chelseagirl]

Glad to hear that about Adira, and that they felt that way even before the Trill. My partner, who should know better, keeps insisting that Grey is Adira's "gay boyfriend" and I keep saying "they're both genderqueer." (Marty is trans, I met them as a man and they are now out as a transwoman, but I think because they're 50, they have missed out on notions of genderfluidity although I see them very much that way.)

[selenak]

It would have been all kinds of awkward and "there goes the road of good intentions" if Adira had changed from cis to non-binary solely because of the symbiont, so I'm relieved the writers were aware and went another way, especially since Adira is the first openly and textually non-binary character. (BTW, for what it's worth, I think the symbionts - i.e. the worms themselves - and Odo's people the Changelings are non-binary, but that's my interpretation, and DS9 for all its progressiveness in other ways went out of its way to let the Changelings show up either in male or in female shape and stick with the gender we first see them in instead of changing.)

[labingi]

Very relieving to hear: Adira asking to be refered to as "they" and telling Stamets they've always felt like this...

First, apologies: I'm in danger of ranting in your journal. (Disclaimer: I had a lot trouble remembering to use "they" pronouns when writing this, and while I think I corrected my slips, some "she's" might still be in here. That's not intended as disrespect or questioning Adira's identity. I freely own I have trouble keeping up with the "they" grammar and with seeing people who read as female to me as "they." I'm working on it.)

As I recently posted on my own DW, I don't like Discovery (at least S3), so I'm predisposed to be harsh. That said, I did like this episode pretty well. But that scene with Adira made me break my usual rule of silently bearing it and exclaim in frustration, thus annoying my partner.

My problem is not the character is non-binary; that's a reasonable, progressive move. My problem is that it was such bad science fiction storytelling, for the following reasons:

1. Broader issue: In what way is Adira joined to a symbiont? Are they like Jadzia/Ezri and now have much of the life experience/essence of those before, or are they different because they're a human and much less in touch with the symbiont's prior "lives"? It seems to be the latter, in that they're usually written like a genius teen not experienced adult, but the story has not explored this. Rather, in the episode where they first broke through the mental block in the pool, they appeared to really change into an older, more mature person. Then, the next episode, it went away: angsty teen again. This episode was angsty teen, and I wish I could make something of that other than unimaginative SF writing, but I'm not being given anything to go on.

2. That scene is going to age like the TNG episode when the androgynous alien fell in love with Riker. It's "OMG, I'm non-binary" reads just like her "OMG, I'm metaphorically gay." It's going to look awkward(er) and outdated in just a very few years. Which connects to...

3. It's over 1000 years in our future. No difference in mores from 2020? No cultural evolution? I know one might remark that SF is about the present and this is validating to non-binary people in 2020, and I know it is, and that's great. But part of the reason social SF like Star Trek exists, too, is to move us forward or elsewhere, to imagine what the world might be. And the idea that 1000 years in the future, young people are still having to stammer the same coming out speech as today I find unimaginative and depressing.

Ways I think could make this more interesting and imaginative (while keeping Adira as life-long non-binary):

1) Have them be "out" non-binary from the start: normal and unproblematic.

2) Explicitly engage with why this is an issue. Is Earth now regressive? Was their family? How does this compare with Discovery's crew? Was their era more progressive? Are they surprised this is an issue for them? (I probably wouldn't make both era regressive.) Or is their society not traditionally binary but somehow different. Are non-binary people supposed to fit some sort of "third sex" stereotype Adira doesn't match?

3) Maybe Adira never pronoun-corrected before for a different reason. Maybe being non-binary is fine but they come from an oppressive family/community where you don't question your elders (though the character would need to be rewritten from the ground up for this), and so it became really hard for them to speak up and correct Disco's crew.

Basically anything, anything at all beyond a teen having an awkward coming out speech from 2020.

Deep breath. Thank you for letting me unload. Feel free to delete if you'd rather not have the rant vomited in your journal, because I totally get that.

[selenak]

Re: 1), it is of course just my interpretation, but: think of Jadzia in the first season vs Jadzia from s2 onwards, and Ezri in her one and only season. Jadzia went from quiet and serene in s1 to the woman enjoying a party, hanging out with Ferengi and prone to be flippant under stress. Now there are Doylist reasons for this (i.e. the DS9 writers still figuring out how to write Dax in s1), but on a Watsonian level, you can connect this with Jadzia telling her initiate in s2 that she used to be a shy, very restrained person pre joining with Dax and conclude that in s1, the Jadzia part of her was still far more dominant and less integrated than it was in later seasons. Especially given that when we see Ezri shortly after her joining, she definitely comes across as more Ezri than Dax, with her own, different from Jadzia personality and ticks (the babbling when nervous, notably). Throughout her one and only season - i.e. the first year after her joining - she only rarely has Dax moments where she comes across as centuries old. Notably the conversation with Worf near the end of the show about the rot of the Klingon Empire and how it's not just Gowron, and a moment here or there with Sisko. But generally Ezri behaves and acts no different from how a young unjoined woman in her twenties would. Again, there are Doylist reasons - to make Ezri not just into a Jadzia clone - but on a Watsonian level, you can interpret it as Ezri's personality being the one in dominance in the early time after joining, even more so than with Jadzia since Ezri had had no preparation for the joining. But both Jadzia and Ezri had full access to all the Dax memories (minus Joran, in Jadzia's case early on) from the start.

All of which is why Adira despite their breakthrough on Trill still coming across as their physical age in this and the previous episode does not bother me in the same way it irritates you; it rather fits with my personal headcanon about how joining might work. My headcanon could be wrong and jossed in the next episode, mind. And I don't expect anyone to share it - I'm just explaining why Adira so far as a character works for me.

Re: the other points - I agree that the other explanations for the pronoun corrections would have been better sci fi, but I also think that we might find out more in future episodes re: how non-binary people on Earth (since this is where Adira is from, not from the Federation) fare. After all, the way Stamets and Culbert's sexuality was handled as a non-issue (i.e. neither of them had to do a coming out scene, none of their co-worker behaved in a way that would indicate they see a same sex couple in any way as unusual, and the audience learned they were an item and living together through the toothbrushing scene in the fourth or fifth episode of s1). So they could have handled Adira's non-binary-ness the same way, but they didn't; maybe there will be another reason for this.

(Or it could simply be that they wanted to hammer the message of "we have our first openly non-binary character here! Attention, audience!" down the same way that TNG episode was supposed to advance the cause of same sex representation and really didn't. It's absolutely possible! I'm just being an incurable optimist here.)

[labingi]

Sorry for a late reply to your reply. You're utterly correct about Ezri and have a very plausible reading of Jadzia. I guess my criticism there was less of Discovery and more of how ST has handled joined Trills in general, which is less "joined" than I'd personally like, but that is certainly a matter of taste.

I appreciate your optimism, and I hope that we will see some interesting worldbuilding as this season continues.