Camestros Felapton

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Is Discovery on an Alice in Wonderland trip?

I’m quite taken with a theory that was posted in the comments by “tegeus-Cromis” on the last review of Star Trek Discovery. Here is part of the comment:

“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.” https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/review-star-trek-discovery-episode-5/#comment-10577

Here, as a reminder you probably don’t need, is Tenniel’s iconic illustration from Carroll’s book.

500px-alice_05a-1116x1492

As pointed out the fussy Saru has a White Rabbit like aspect to him and Lorca does seem to be mad as a hatter. The comment suggests Tilly as one of the sisters who live in a treacle well but given Tilly’s notable snoring the Doormouse (who if I remember rightly is the one who tells the story of the treacle well) seems like a match. Tilly isn’t actually particularly sleepy as a character but she is shown sleeping (and snoring) far more often than normal.

Then there is the end of episode 5 and…well…the show runners have said that the infamous Star Trek mirror universe (where people are evil and Spock has a goatee) will be making an appearance aka Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Aside from anything else consider this. Michael is *supposed* to be a massive Alice in Wonderland fan, carries with her a paperback edition of the book and recites passages of the book under stress (episode 3) but DOESN’T go ‘OMG a spaced-out caterpillar with on a mushroom!’ when she works out what the tardigrade can do.

However, there does not seem to be any obvious matches with Stamets nor does the Cheshire Cat have any obvious matches with the crew.

 

 

camestrosfelapton

27 responses to “Is Discovery on an Alice in Wonderland trip?”

  1. Stamets could be the March Hare, maybe. Equally barmy, but subsidiary to the Mad Hatter. And – reaching a bit here – but Captain Georgiou’s posthumous message has her smiling a lot, and fading away…? (It’s entirely possible she could be popping up in flashbacks or something, to offer advice and then fade out again. OK, I know I’m reaching, here.)

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      • Yeah, I don’t think they are trying to follow it exactly, but they are definitely drawing images and bits from it, though the creature looked more like a dust mite. And Captain Lorca isn’t the Mad Hatter — he’s the Knave of Hearts, I think. The scientist is more likely the Mad Hatter, or perhaps the White Knight, who invents things.

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    • @Kat Goodwin

      Yes, I absolutely agree that it would be a mistake to be too linear/literal minded. Definitely possible that the limited set of primary characters are rotating through different aspects too. Given that directors and writers are also continually changing, perhaps the best way of looking at it might be that the show is an example of narrative chaos theory; it may be orbiting a set of strange attractors, some of which we are not yet even aware of.

      Holding that theme brings me to that binary system at the start. Don’t want to start on the science. since I now consider this to be thoroughgoing Science Fantasy, what with the spore drive and all. (Don’t get me wrong, I love Science Fantasy, it’s nice to be able to turn off the sciencecrit once in a while, as with Doctor Who too. SF, but not Science Fiction.)

      But… Protoplanetary discs intersecting in different planes like that are insanely unlikely, except for a very short time frame, in the course of a close collision between two star systems – a very very improbable event. They would tear each other apart pretty rapidly. But take a look at these images of chaos theory butterfly plots (Lorenz attractors):

      https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=strange+attractor+butterfly+images

      Coincidence? I don’t think so…

      (Hmm. May have to do that Death Of The Author thing sooner rather than later…)

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  3. Pleased to see that kicked something off. Don’t have to do my po-mo thing yet then (which actually requires casting Death Of The Author, which is really an endgame spell, and we’re only on episode 5…)

    To reply to what cf said on the last post, yes, I very much thought the Klingons resembled gaming pieces – or maybe they’re all just a pack of cards? There seems to be some colour coding there, too, that I haven’t quite got the hang of.

    @stevejwright. March Hare fits quite well for Stamets, I think, I wondered about him. One Alice thing I forgot to mention too, is Stamets’s empty looking glass in the latest episode. (Although that could be all in his head, perhaps implying that his relationship with the doc is a fantasy.)

    @Kat Goodwin. Nice, now I’m looking for the suggestion of a smiley on that saucer section…

    Just to throw in a couple of other things ‘Context is for kings’ has the air of a quote, but I cannot find any source for it. Although it sounds a bit po-mo, the nearest I can get is Bill Gates’s ‘Context is king’. In any case, for a game the context could be taken as the rules of the game. But we don’t know what the game is. Is Lorca identifying as a king (in which case he just escaped from check if the show was acting chessly)? But why put your king at hazard as Starfleet is doing – maybe he is a playing card king? Or perhaps he means he can change the game rules to suit him?

    So is Voq the other side’s King or Queen? Some spoilers have been leaked that may affect this, so I’m not going to speculate.

    Oh, and I should note that in Carroll’s Looking Glass the black pieces are actually red (redshirts? Oh, no, not a nod at the dreaded Scalzi…) as was the fashion. But since (spoiler!) red loses, the Klingons must be red. Well, it’s damnably boring having to go to red alert all the time, so forget that…

    You know, Trek has a bit of a history of all this. It’s rather hard to forget Kirk and Spock singing and dancing:

    “I’m Tweedledee, he’s Tweedledum.
    Two spacemen marching to a drum.
    We slith among the mimsey toves.
    And gyre among the borogoves.”

    -Plato’s Stepchildren (1968)

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  4. @camestrosfelapton.

    Forgot to say, that’s a fine observation. Of course Burnham should have shown some recognition of the Alice parallels with the tardigrade!

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  5. Sorry to go on, but I just thought to check Garcia Lorca, the great Spanish poet (same initials, even). I didn’t think him relevant, but had quite forgotten about his association with Dali and other surrealists like Bunuel. And as it happens, Dali illustrated Alice in Wonderland in 1969. Some examples here:

    https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/11/15/salvador-dali-alice-in-wonderland-1969/

    Yes, it’s a bit of a logical stretch, but who knows…

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  6. Indeed. And I’ve just found that his photophobia is interesting. It’s one of the symptoms of mercury poisoning, which is usually cited as the cause of madness among hatters. Slightly sidewise to the Alice theme, I’d also note that the wince-making ocular torture that Lorca undergoes is more than a little reminiscent of the infamous eyeball-slicing scene in Un Chien Andalou:

    (WARNING: Link below may cause mental trauma)

    And we find (from WP):

    ‘Growing estrangement between García Lorca and his closest friends reached its climax when surrealists Dalí and Luis Buñuel collaborated on their 1929 film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). García Lorca interpreted it, perhaps erroneously, as a vicious attack upon himself.’

    Back to Alice, a final nutty nugget (for now). When Burnham first arrives in Stamets’s (March Hare’s?) lab, there is a bit of rather pointless confusion over seating, where Tilly (Dormouse?) claims workstations are specifically allocated, Stamets says they’re not. I think it seems like a waste of our time and out of character for the otherwise amiable Tilly.

    But in AIW, when Alice arrives at the March Hare’s cottage, just outside which the tea party is ongoing, a similar thing occurs:

    ” The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: ‘No room! No room!’ they cried out when they saw Alice coming. ‘There’s plenty of room!’ said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.

    […]

    ‘It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,’ said the March Hare.

    ‘I didn’t know it was your table,’ said Alice; ‘it’s laid for a great many more than three.’”

    I also wonder if the canteen scene when Burnham first arrives on Discovery (which makes no sense in security terms) corresponds to the Pool of Tears. (If so, we may expect to see those convicts again.)

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  7. Oops. Didn’t realise that Youtube link would expand like that, sorry! Please feel free to delete it entirely, Camestros. Best to replace it with a Google search link, probably.

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      • And Paul Stamets is ‘Lepus at Mass’ Lepus is Latin ‘hare’. March Hare -> Easter Bunny -> Catholicism…

        Oh, please yourselves…

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      • Two angels *named*, I’d think. I thought that there was a reference to Azrael, the Angel of Death who pops up in fantasy stories now and then, but just checked and he’s non-canonical, I find. There’s the guy (? Not sure they’re gendered) who guards the gate of Eden with the flaming sword, but he/she could be Mike or Gabe. Finally, there’s also Satan, of course.

        Well spotted, cf, ashamed I didn’t see those. They also point at another Bunuel film, The Exterminating Angel. If they at some point find they can’t leave the Discovery *for some utterly unknown reason that will never be revealed*, we can chuckle smugly…

        I think we’re all now spinning our wheels until the next segment. Respecting which, I genuinely wasn’t aware that they are only screening 8 of the 17 now, the rest from January. Bit annoying that, but Looking Glass Alice gets promoted to Queen on the 8th row of the board (well, of course), though there are 12 chapters in the book. It’s not a one-to-one mapping even there, as Carroll himself points out. Still, I’d expect Burnham to 1) go up in the world 2) then be dumped into some dreadful cliffhanger.

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    • Have you seen this? http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/10/19/are_voq_and_ash_tyler_the_same_person_on_star_trek_discovery.html
      There are certainly odd things about this character Voq – not least of which is that some reviewers call him Kol. I can’t read the credits at the end of each episode because Netflix insists on starting the follow-up chat show thing.

      I like the idea that they are messing with people’s heads both figuratively and prostheticaly.

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      • Ah. Read it now, but I dodged it before based on the headline, because io9 had a piece on Voq too claiming to be spoilery (I now realise they both mean spoilers for people not fully up-to-date). And, gawd, that blooming follow-up show, surely there’s some way of stopping that, I too like to rifle through credits now and then.

        I agree, there’s a bit of a mindscrew going on, it seems (which may even mean that the Alice stuff is just a complete wind-up, though it does add flavour to the stew). The question is, where on the David Lynch Scale of Mindscrewiness does this fall (giving Mulholland Drive, for example, an 8 or 9)? Perhaps I should just stay with Bunuel, he could manage a 10+ at the top of his game…

        Another thing has crossed my mind regarding Stamets. If he’s acquiring tardigrade powers, he may become capable of, as in Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, ‘jaunting’ (though he’s an unlikely Gully Foyle) – which really is what the tardigrades do. It will be quite funny if this happens because Babylon-5 already did it, as an homage – in which the rogue telepath who escapes by jaunting (though they don’t use the word) is being pursued by Mr Bester, the head of PsychCorps – who in turn is played by Walter Koenig. And so we would have a very pretty referential loop. Oh, I wish…

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      • That would explain the tribble. Who is the Doormouse. Wait, maybe Lorca is the Mad Hatter. Which might make Saru the March Hare and Tilly the White Rabbit. Ow, my head hurts now.

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