Camestros Felapton

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Review: Star Trek Discovery – Episode 5

It is a Lorca Episode this week on Dark Trek and also a shout-out episode with references galore to the original series, the animated series (apparently), The Next Generation and for added fun Twin Peaks. Is it a good episode? Mmmm, if you don’t like the antithesis qualities of Discovery as a cyncial mirror to the more ethical federation of Jean-Luc Picard, then you’ll hate this episode – although their are glimmers.

The premise (which is in the episode synopsis so not a spoiler) is that Lorca gets captured by the Klingons and on a Klingon prison/torture ship he meets Harry Mudd, a recurring character from the original series…beyond here spoilers follow.

Meanwhile, back on the Discovery “Ripper”, the alien monster giant tardigrade-like trans-dimensional mushroom eater is not a happy camper. The ship had been jumping about causing trouble for the Klingons all over and Michael Burnham is concerned about its mental state and physical health.

On the other hand acting-captain Saru needs the mushroom-drive working so that the Discovery can jump around Klingon space and get their captain back. Michael and Saru come into conflict as a consequence which is exacerbated by Saru hoping to emulate the qualities of notable starship captains (including Christopher Pike).

Added to the mix this week is an expanded role for the ship’s doctor Hugh Colber. Although he also appeared last week, he takes on more of a role here – standing up for Michael and confirming that Ripper is not well. Colber’s stance is more in keeping with the Starfleet of other Star Trek shows: an emphasis on treating sentient beings with respect and asserting that their are moral, legal and consequential limits on what actions can be taken. Also, Colber turns out to be Stamets’s partner, which helps explain some of the events.

On the Klingon prison ship, Lorca is tortured. Unlike the TNG episode “Chain of Command” there is no deep examination about the psychology and politics of torture. Instead we learn more about quite how dangerous Lorca is. Sadly, the possibility of more complex Klingons is left behind this episode – they are just plain nasty bad guys. In the prison ship Lorca meets Mudd, a man surviving surprisingly well in Klingon prison, and also another starfleet officer “Ash Tyler” who from the credits on IMDB looks like they are a new regular character.

This seems to be the basic level of the show. A bit dark (even Tilly gets to use the f-word) but as a consequence it has less impact. Lorca being tortured in Episode 5 when we barely know him and when he may even be a bad person has substantially less impact than Picard being tortured at a point in TNG when viewers were deeply invested in the character. So ‘darkness’ here can easily become superficial.

The dialogue was a bit leaden also. Stamets, Tilly and Michael do a sf-science info-dump on how the magic-mushrooms work, Mudd gives a lecture on how up-themselves the Federation is and the nasty Klingon captain gets to say bad-guy stuff, all of which feel a bit cliched.

The best bit, is in the final moments and once again the possibility of where the show is going looks interesting.

Rankings:

  1. Episode 3: Context is for Kings
  2. Episode 4: Seriously stupidly long episode name
  3. Episode 2: Battle at the Binary Stars
  4. Episode 5: Choose Your Pain
  5. Episode 1: The Vulcan Hello

Bits and pieces:

  • Starfleet idiot ball: Oh the Discovery’s captain has been captured by the Klingons who are clearly after the secret of how the ship zips about the glaxay. We should definitely send the Discovery deep into Klingon space because he couldn’t possibly be the bait in a trap.
  • Klingon idiot ball: the Klingons don’t actually use Lorca as bait in a trap for the Discovery.
  • Or do they? Seem to be a bunch of theories going around about Ash Tyler. Is he a Klingon disguised as a human? Ooohhhh.
  • Speaking of Klingons, no further advance of the Klingon sub-plot this week. Or…was there…ooohhhh.
  • Michael isn’t sure how to cure the tardigrade so she coats it in mushroom spores and kicks it out of an airlock. What the hell Michael! Luckily it works.
  • Saru’s list of decorated captains is:
    • April, Robert
    • Archer, Jonathon
    • Decker, Matthew
    • Georgiou, Phillipa
    • Pike, Christopher
  • Seeing “Archer” there makes me want to the Archer series but set in the Star Trek universe. “Klingons decloaking.”, “Aww, shit snacks.”
  • I hope Ripper comes back as a Deus Ex-Machina rescue for Michael at some point, in an Androcles and the Lion type situation.
  • The info-dump wasn’t great but the transdimensional galactic mushroom network is a wonderfully bonkers idea. Note it also provides yet another explanation of the genetic similarity of everybody in the Star Trek universe. The mushrooms did it.

camestrosfelapton

23 responses to “Review: Star Trek Discovery – Episode 5”

  1. Wasnt Archer the Captain if Enterprise? I noticed him, but not Pike.
    I forgot all about Mudd.
    The biggest assett of the federation is captured using a shuttle? They have to uppen their security protocols.
    This episode felt a bit neither here nor there, probably because not much happend, except undoing the previous two episodes. The need to get the hang of season arcs!

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    • I believe so but I didn’t watch Enterprise.

      I feel like the magic-mushroom drive story is getting a bit rushed. It was just a dark secret in episode 3. I think the whole series is in danger of being in perpetual prologue mode – pieces being moved into place, cast introduced one by one – without ever getting to being either a continuous story or having good standalone episodes.

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    • …also, for some reason I thought Mudd was in Trouble with Tribbles and he wasn’t and now I feel stupid. I had a great paragraph about Captain Lorca running weaponising experiments on tribbles which made no sense because Mudd wasn’t the one who got tribbles onto the Enterprise.

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      • But AFAIK Mudd was supposed to be in Trouble with Tribbles, but because the actor didnt have a free shedule they invented a new shady character for that episode. So youre good on that point 😉

        Re:Mushroom drive: Its the problem of having a ship with potentially cool experiments and experimental gadgets, but having to make sure these things dont disturb the continuity. This would have been SO much easier if they would have set it after TNG.

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  2. Tyler seemed like an obvious spy to me when first introduced, but then the fight with the Klingon makes that seem less plausible.
    Lorca just leaving Mudd behind didn’t seem very Trek-like, did it?
    I was expecting the plot with the drive and Ripper to go much slower. Maybe that’s a lesson – Discovery is rushing through its plot at a great rate.
    I did like the Teleporting Tardigrade bit. (But horrible science plot hole – how did it rehydrate in a vacuum?)
    The final shot did get me to say “oh, well played” at the TV though

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  3. The whole capture-and-escape thing seemed rushed, to me. Unless it was actually intended to make us think “hmm, that was suspiciously easy.” On the other hand, Lorca continues to be barking mad, which has possibilities. Blowing up his own crew to save them from the Klingons… he is the Keyser Soze of Starfleet.

    Perhaps more importantly, the rest of the crew seem to be opening up and warming to each other a bit more – a few more weeks and they might even start to gel as a team. Saru and Burnham appear to be some way towards a rapprochement, which is a good thing, as their sniping at each other was becoming a regular speed bump for the storylines.

    It looks like it’s not going to be possible to use the Magic Mushroom Drive without serious unintended consequences, which may account for its disappearance from subsequent continuity. Fair enough, I suppose. And it wouldn’t be proper Star Trek without a bit of silly technobabble, would it? – At least Tilly’s (ahem) reaction gave it some sort of human touch.

    Overall, I think the show’s still finding its feet. But it could still turn out OK, I think. (I second the Androcles and the Lion idea, btw.)

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    • My immediate first thought upon hearing about the explodey ship:

      “We had to burn the village to save it.” Not an exact parallel, but uncomfortably close.

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  4. I will not watch this. Some 24 years ago Startrek had a series built on the strengths of a mature woman as Captain of a star ship thrown against every challenge in a galaxy, and overcoming them.

    Now we have an immature women, mentored over 8 years by a mature woman apparently so badly that she behaved in an extremely stupid way, killing, amongst others, her mentor. But fear not; Star Trek have given her a male captain who will put her to rights, so all is well in the Trumpian universe.

    I just do not understand how people who I thought were feminists apparently haven’t even noticed this, much less called it out for this destruction of what Star Trek was created as. The first time a black woman held a position of authority, to the point where Martin Luther King begged her to continue in the role because she was changing history, appears to have slipped people’s memory.

    I feel betrayed, not just by the people who created this, but also by the people watching it who just haven’t noticed that actually they’re happy in a Trumpian universe. Scalzi’s essay on the lowest difficulty setting sums it up…

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      • Quite so; I have, however, read numerous reviews since people, like myself, who read Combined Honours in Drama and Theatre Arts and Sociology at University do read numerous reviews of any production before they comment. It goes with the territory…

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    • I don’t like this show either and feel like it’s peeing all over what Star Trek used to be. I do like Michael Burnham, but that’s mainly because she is the underdog and I tend to side with underdogs and prisoners. I suspect if she wasn’t the obvious underdog here, I wouldn’t like her either. Though she and her roommate are the only remotely likeable people on a ship full of jerks.

      Lorca is a bad captain and a worse human being. It was actually satisfying to see him getting beaten up by the Klingons. Also, why did Michael Burnham get a life sentence for nerve-pinching her captain and doing no permanent damage, but Lorca got handed another ship after what he did to his first ship and its crew? The Federation is not very consistent, it seems. I also don’t get why so many people seem to like Saru. He’s a nasty little backstabber who’s been clearly jealous of Michael since forever.

      And while I’m not sure if this is intentional or not, the racial and gender implications of Star Trek Discovery are hugely problematic. Two women of colour killed in the space of four episodes, one eaten by Klingons and the other dead of terminal stupidity, and the third thrown into prison and humiliated at every turn. Another actor of colour set up as a potential traitor. A white man and a white man disguised as a rubberheaded alien (who behaves like the epitome of the entitled mediocre white dude) bossing our lone surviving woman of colour around. I will be charitable and say that’s not the mesage they want to send, but that’s the message they are sending.

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  5. I wonder if it’s all a big Carrollesque joke (or game, at least). Obviously, we’ve had Michael/Alice being chased *up* the rabbit hole/Jeffreys tube by the caterpillar/tardigrade (which grooves on mushrooms, of course – and does a passable imitation of hookah smoking later) – and all the while she’s reciting the actual Alice in Wonderland.

    But we also have the mad-as-a-hatter Lorca, who always seems to have a meal/tea party laid out before him (never mind that he anagrams out as ‘I B Carroll egg’ – red herring, I think). Alice/Michael then acquires Tilly as a roommate, so we have two of the three sisters who lived in the treacle well – Lacie, Tillie and Elsie. Haven’t figured out Elsie yet. There’s something of the White Rabbit about Saru too, I think.

    So it may be a pick-and-mix of Wonderland and Looking Glass (perhaps with Hunting of the Snark thrown in too – after all, Trek is usually all about a ship’s crew). If so, there should be a game. The 24 Klingon houses hint at something gamey, but the only 24 units I’ve thought of so far are the points in backgammon, which don’t really do much.

    If, OTOH, it’s chess, then the entirely avoidable deaths we’ve seen might make some sort of sense. (Gives me an urge to reread John Brunner’s ‘The Squares of the City’, lots of that going on there). But is it the original chess problem (‘White Pawn (Alice) to play, and win in eleven moves’)? If so, Michael should get a promotion, i.e. regain some sort of Starfleet rank, in Episode 12. Philippa Georgiou’s early death hints at a queen sacrifice, and an early queen exchange is available in Carroll’s original. (If taken literally, it would imply that Starfleet are playing black – ‘black alert’ could be a hint, maybe?) Or it may be another chess sequence entirely.

    Yeah, it’s a bit Procrustean, I know. And I only have one prediction, but that’s better than nothing,I guess.

    (I also have a more po-mo interpretation but that’s kind of orthogonal to this one, still thinking about it.)

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  6. […] But we also have the mad-as-a-hatter Lorca, who always seems to have a meal/tea party laid out before him (never mind that he anagrams out as ‘I B Carroll egg’ – red herring, I think). Alice/Michael then acquires Tilly as a roommate, so we have two of the three sisters who lived in the treacle well – Lacie, Tillie and Elsie. Haven’t figured out Elsie yet. There’s something of the White Rabbit about Saru too, I think.” https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/review-star-trek-discovery-episode-5/#comment-105… […]

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