Camestros Felapton

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Star Trek Discovery – What’s Past is Prologue

Smash bang@! Pew-pew! Boom! Arrrrgghhh! Zap!

Look you can’t say this wasn’t fun. Sure there were lots of plot holes but they were classic Star Trek plot holes (mainly). Maybe ‘let’s jump the guards’ is not a good plan but canonically it frequently works in the Trek universe.

There’s not much to say about the story, it mainly ran on its own gravity. Lorca is now the bad guy and Emperor Georgiou was the lesser of the two evils. Much scenery chewing and villainous acts in a surprisingly empty starship as big as a city. Sense it didn’t make but for a space opera, it delivered its arias in the right spots.

The best aspect of this episode was that the bridge crew got to say and do a lot more than usual. In some cases, this was the evil versions of themselves. Saru got to make some rousing speeches and even Lorca got to say how great they were. More of the rest of the crew, please.

Less review here but oh so many bits and pieces.

Rankings

  1. Episode 9: Into the Forest I Go
  2. Episode 13: What’s Past is Prologue
  3. Episode 12: Vaulting Ambition
  4. Episode 3: Context is for Kings
  5. Episode 10: Despite Yourself
  6. Episode 4: Seriously stupidly long episode name
  7. Episode 2: Battle at the Binary Stars
  8. Episode 6: Lethe
  9. Episode 11: The Wolf inside
  10. Episode 8: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum
  11. Episode 5: Choose Your Pain
  12. Episode 1: The Vulcan Hello
  13. Episode 7: Seriously WTF Discovery Scriptwriters? [revised title]

Bits and Pieces

  • Lorca does a Darth Vader impression: “I find your lack of vision disappointing” or something like that. The Terran Empire began when Star Wars fans got carried away with the Imperial Stormtrooper cosplay.
  • Nobody likes evil Stamets.
  • I thought we were going to have a sub plot in which the two Stamets had swapped ships but apparently not.
  • The fight scenes were great but Michael needs a better go-to plan than “then I’ll hit someone”.
  • Lorca is not just merely dead but positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably really dead.
  • But we don’t know where good Lorca is though.
  • I mean he wasn’t too bad considering…
  • Michael now has an evil Georgiou of her own. In terms of poor emotional choices, it is rather like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend but without the clever songs.
  • No Tyler-Voq subplot this week but it looks like the Klingon war is back on the agenda next week.
  • Saru’s threat-ganglia tell him that maybe their suicidal attack on the Imperial Palace Ship might not be suicidal…but then his threat-ganglia also said nothing about the psychotic Captain Lorca from an evil mirror universe for several months.
  • Ewwww – I didn’t think about it last week but Lorca was from a society that ATE Saru’s species as a delicacy. Was Lorca spending all that time as captain looking at Saru and thinking “yum”?
  • No great lines for Tilly this week. If she ever does say ‘You did what now?’ I’ll explode.
  • No tardigrade cameo.
  • A bit of global warming analogy going on and some digs at the empire’s short-term thinking.
  • The missing shuttle pilot will take over the empire during the power vacuum.
  • Look, there are multiple parallel universes, so there’s no pointing wondering too much about continuity questions with the mirror universe.
  • There aren’t infinite parallel universes because the universes themselves are finite and therefore the number of possible combinations of stuff that make up a universe is a finite number – even if it is a very LARGE number. If there were infinite parallel universes most of them would be the same and hence not actually different universes. I’m just saying, that’s all.

camestrosfelapton

18 responses to “Star Trek Discovery – What’s Past is Prologue”

  1. I’m not as convinced as you that getting thrown into an orb connected to a multiverse-spanning telepathic network is going to leave someone “positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably really dead.”

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Yeah, definitly entertaining, if you dont think too much. I felt just a bit letdown that they didnt do much with this hue ships and I expected more to come out of Lorcas Long Con then “Im evil – Ugh, Im Dead!”
    What is it with Star Fleet and plotting? IIRC correctly three people said they have a plan: Michael, Stamet (or was it Tilly?) and Lorca (technically not Star Fleet, I know) Michael Plan: Jump the guards. Discoverys plan: Hang around until the force field drops and then lunge into the reactor (?). But orca? After all this elaborate conning to get back on the ship his plan was: “Face the emperor in a corridor, dont get shot by the ships defense system and than shoot at her shield until that collapses”. Somehow, I expected a bit more.

    Back to the war. Im not keen, because I guess we will see a “Going back in time to change the timeline”-plot, which feels like cheating (and is never thought through. More interesting perhaps: Did the loose the war because of the cloaking device (likely but boring) or because Disco-Mirror had wreak havoc after they landet in this universe? That would have the potential for some cool episodes and would put Georgiou in a good use.

    BTW: Stamet (or more precise, the actor who played him) already stated on twitter, that the Stamets (Stametta?) didnt switch places.

    Liked by 3 people

  5. CANON-DESTROYING HEADCANON:

    (a) In accordance with the Trousers of Time theory, there is probably some parallel universe in which Stamets (or somebody) DID continue using the multiverse-corrupting spore drive.
    (b) If the multiverse-corrupting spore drive is used in ANY universe, it destroys ALL universes.
    (c) So, probably all the universes ever are going to cease to exist!

    Liked by 1 person

  6. I felt a lot more forgiving of blatant plot holes in Trek when they weren’t going “You know what’s special about this iteration of Trek? Its gripping, heavily-serialized plot and its shocking plot twists!”

    Liked by 2 people

  7. It was fun. I hope that scenery was low-calorie, though, they chewed so much of it….

    I assumed the ship was deserted because stematS (that still doesn’t really work, does it?) exterminated most of the crew with his foam-at-the-mouth-and-die mist. Which was never mentioned again, even though it would surely have come in useful. I’m also assuming that prime universe Lorca was swapped with acroL during the transporter accident… which would have put him aboard the mirror Buran just as it was destroyed by the Charon. So I’m guessing he’s not a factor. (Unless – he escaped in a freak multi-dimensional accident and became a shuttle pilot?)

    Interesting potential developments in the future. One wonders how uoigroeG is going to adapt to (for example) having to take orders from her lunch.

    Liked by 2 people

  8. I thought there was a bit more time to be spent in the mirror universe (and maybe there will be!) and the move to the full Acrol v uoigroeG confrontation was a bit rushed, to say the least. Extremely silly fun though.

    If we’re going back to the yawnfest of the Klingon war then at least they’ve thrown in an option that may well dodge the yawnfesting. Don’t see how they’ll avoid using a reset button though.

    At the end of Saru’s rousing speech I did wonder if actually he *did* think it was total suicide and he just decided he needed the crew to do what had to be done. If so that’s a much more manipulative Saru than we’ve seen before. (Maybe being in the mirror universe infects you….)

    Liked by 2 people

  9. It was better, good amount of Trek-ness. Burnham was sneaky. Learned the red-head’s name is Demer; we made a note of it. Still don’t know the other ones’ names (suppose I can find them on IMDB,) but they did get more lines in both universe counterparts and it was nice to have the return of the security officer for a cameo.

    But MirrorLorca apparently lost half his intelligence in the torture machine. I mean that was just disappointing. Whether we get PrimeLorca or not depends on what sort of contract Jason Isaacs made. And Michael is officially Cassandra — she tells people smart strategy and they ignore her. They also decided not to do as much of a double weave with the situation of universes as I was expecting them to do, which does indicate that we may have some more mirroring down the road or PrimeLorca, etc., but it seemed very rushed after making us go through the more meandering stuff. (What was the point of the whole thing with the rebel coalition if they weren’t even involved at the end?)

    And then we’ve returned to the torture of the Klingon war. But, they’ve got MirrorG, who is a despicable human being but who also has some strategy skills (when not ignoring Michael,) and who hates Klingons. So they can sick her on the Klingons — that might actually be fun and we get Yeoh for a little bit more. But is it enough to keep me watching another season? Don’t know yet. But at least it wasn’t painful this episode.

    Liked by 2 people

    • They really could have done more with Lorca. After the big reveal, he essentially turned into a one note villain. So he staged a coup against Mirror Georgiou, because she wasn’t xenophobic enough, and he’s obsessed with Michael. As motivations, that’s not all that exciting. And his death was rather anticlimactic.

      On the plus side, the bridge crew actually got something to do and Saru was awesome for once.

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  10. Oops, correction, the red-headed navigator, played by Emily Coutts, is named Keyla Detmer, not Demer. The black woman with the great hair, Oyin Oladejo, is called Joann Owosekun, the Asian man on the bridge, played by Patrick Kwok-Choon, is just called Rhys, one name so far, the android is played by Sarah Mitich and is named Airiam, and the black guy on the bridge sometimes is played by Ronnie Rowe and is named Bryce. So Keyla, Joann, Rhys, Bryce, Airiam — I’m going to try to remember, because frankly, I like them better and want them to have bigger roles. Also, calling them the black guy and the red-headed woman, etc., feels weird.

    Liked by 2 people

    • Yes, definitely, give us more of the Discovery’s cool bridge crew. BTW, I also refer to characters whose names I don’t know or can’t remember by physical or other descriptors. I still have to remind myself that the commander of Deep Space 9 is Captain Sisco, because in this house he has been referred to as Captain Arsehole for more 20 years now. The Discovery bridge crew are scarred woman (Detmer), crashtest dummy (Airiam), cornrow woman (Owosekun), asian dude (Rhys) and black dude (Bryce) to me.

      Liked by 1 person

  11. Been sulking since my Alice theory petered out. Plus Seasonal Affective crap, gah. But anyway, I’m minded that the mycelial network may be a borrow from Alastair Reynold’s ‘Pattern Jugglers’ [1] (in the Revelation Space series). The Jugglers are planet-bound, but they are a strange soupy networked lifeform that can record the minds of those who come in contact with them. It’s hinted that some of the people we may think have died live on in their matrix, though Reynolds doesn’t confirm this. It’s even more useful for Discovery though, Lorca being the prime example, but it kind of suggests they can resurrect anyone else who has come into any kind of vague contact with the mycelium. Very convenient, that.

    [1] Itself a reference to a certain King Crimson track. Which in turn (I think) was influenced by Peake’s Gormenghast…

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