More on Discovery S2 Episode 4: Saruuuuuu

This is just all spoilers. Fewer spoilers are available here: https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/02/09/star-trek-discovery-an-obol-for-charon-s2e4-initial-reaction/

A short recap for those who don’t care about spoilers who didn’t see the episode.

The Discovery is trying to find Spcok who has been accused of murder and is somehow linked to the season-arc story of the mysterious signals. Captain Pike sets the Discovery off at full warp to catch up with the route of Spock’s stolen shuttle (we still haven’t met Spock). Suddenly, the ship is pulled out of warp and everything goes mad. A living planetoid thing is blocking the Discovery’s way. The ship’s universal translator goes bonkers rendering the crew’s speech into multiple different languages. Saru, who had been feeling unwell, returns to duty to help using his skills in multiple languages. Meanwhile, whole sections of the ship shut down. Tilly and Stamets are investigating the symbiotic fungus lifeform that was manifesting as a ghost of a schoolfriend of Tilly’s. Jet Reno (last seen in Episode 1 of this season) arrives to prevent the system shut down affecting the rest of the ship impacting the fungus drive section. Oops, too late! Crash bang etc, the fungus escapes! Meanwhile, meanwhile, Saru’s condition has got worse and he reveals that a kind of final-stage of the Kelpian life cycle has been triggered and he will die very soon…

We can park most of the rest of the story as aside from Tilly apparently being kidnapped by a mushroom, everything resolved itself. [The planetoid was actually trying to give its last-will-and-testament to the Discovery but overwhelmed the system creating a false impression of a hostile act.] The centre of the story is Saru.

Saru (played by the undisputed king of actors-in-prosthetics Doug Jones) was initially presented on Discovery as the token novelty alien. In the original series this was, of course, Spock. Later versions of Trek have expanded this role to multiple characters and/or separated aspects of the role (e.g. Data, Whorf and Troi in The Next Generation). Saru’s thing was that Kelpian’s evolved as a ‘prey’ species and also possesed a kind of sixth-sense that manifested in a fringe of filaments at the back of his neck.

Saru himself, quickly became a well established character. He and Tilly being representatives of the kind and decent aspect of Trek on what was otherwise a much more morally compromised Federation ship than we were used to. However, the Kelpian aspects and his ganglion were not well established. Partly this was because a neat idea (Saru having a kind of spider-sense) couldn’t work consistently on a ship where the captain is actually a psychopathic monster from an evil mirror universe and the nice Ash Tyler is actually a walking body-horror story Klingon in disguise.

This episode drops an awful lot about Saru and the Kelpians. I’d assumed in Season 1 that the whole “prey species” thing was mean to just be part of the Kelpian’s evolutionary history i.e. something in their past. The mirror universe episodes made it clear that in that timeline Kelpian’s were actively being uses as a food source but that particular horrific idea was in a separate universe.

Yeah, not so much. It seems the whole situation with the Kelpians being eaten by another species on the Kelpian homeworld is very much an active and on-going situation. Saru’s backstory is that he is an asylum-seeker from a world where he runs the risk of being eaten (a fate foreshadowed in season 1’s mirror universe episodes). The horror doesn’t stop there. His planet is a pre-warp civilisation and so General Order 1 aka the Prime Directive applies. The Federation cannot intervene in this situation and as Saru is now a Star Fleet officer HE cannot intervene in the situation either and hence can never return home.

With the immediate crisis resolved, Saru returns to his quarters to die accompanied by Michael. I didn’t think Saru would die but I really couldn’t be sure given Discovery’s willingness to murder almost anybody. Saru asks Michael to cut of his ganglia, which will trigger his final death but prevent a more prolonged and painful period of madness and death.

Yes, absolutely this is an emotionally manipulative scene and they already had me tearing up earlier with Tilly singing a heart renderingly fragile rendition of Space Oddity before Stamets drills a hole in her head. Still, it works. Two really strong actors give 100% here and it is really upsetting.

Is it a scene that’s pro- or anti- euthanasia? There’s certainly a general acceptance among the crew that this is Saru’s right to manage his end of life. However, the scene is unequivocal about the emotional burden that Saru is placing on Michael. It’s both obvious that of all people he must ask this of Michael and also a terrible thing to ask of her given everything she knows she has gone through.

And then the plot twist. This was already an ambitious scene that could have been both problematic and as corny as hell. Deciding that Saru gets a last minute reprieve after establishing over the rest of the episode that this was impossible could have felt cheap but it doesn’t. The twist is not that Saru is not actually going to die but that his understanding of his own nature and of biological certainties about his species was simply wrong.

The ganglia drop away before Michael can cut them properly and Saru recovers from the terminal decline. This adds to the ambiguity about euthanasia in the scene: Saru had come to terms with his death emotionally and was prepared to die but his acceptance in the face of death was based on faulty assumptions. I don’t think the writers were going for a ‘rage against the dying of the light’ response to apparent inevitable death but rather letting a complex scene be complex. There’s no pat moral at the end of the story.

Saru’s direction as a character is now far more open and it will be interesting to see where the writers go with him. Also of interest we have the set-up for a genuine Prime Directive moral dilemma.

The Kelpian’s situation is a dystopian horror story. Quite how Saru escaped is another question but the matter at hand is one species habitually eating another one. The Federation’s non-interference policy makes ethical sense and it is a notable departure from the kind of US political assumptions that often go unquestioned on Trek. It’s better, on the whole, for big powerful states not to intervene in less powerful states using their advanced military strength. However, Saru’s people appear to be an excellent counter-example to the broader ethics of the non-interference. It will be interesting to see how the show tackles this — I doubt it will be a satisfactory resolution but at least Discovery can do intentionally morally messy.

Speaking of a moral mess, it also looks like the spore drive may be facing its last days. There was an episode of The Orville where the ship escapes into a bubble of two-dimensional space to hide from Krill warships. The visual effect is really nice and the crew realise they are seeing a whole two-dimensional civilisation. There’s a whole sense-of-wonder moment as the bridge crew look upon the beautiful visuals. I, however, was shouting at the screen because the horrible implication was that this huge three-dimensional mechanical monster was just plowing through this intricate 2d city. It would appear the spore drive has been doing something similar: acting as a giant alien menace that magically appears, wreaks destruction and then vanishes.

We’ve known since the spore drive was introduced that sooner or later it would have to become unusable because Discovery is a prequel series and no other Star Trek series has spore drives or even hints of spore drives. That the drive is environmentally damaging is clever twist for Stamets as it hits him right where it hurts (underlined in the episode when he lectures Reno on all the damage conflicts over dilithium crystals have brought to the galaxy). Still, spore-drive plot lines still have a way to run.

I can’t ignore the universal translator. As I said in my first review, the translator is not a thing we can think about too carefully. It is a plot-fudge to stop shows being overwhelmed with aliens languages. Sure, these can be fun but Season 1 of Discovery showed that long scenes in Klingon don’t really work.

The Tower of Babel scene in episode 4 takes the universal translator a step further. The implication is that the ship is actively translating all of the time and in an almost seamless manner. So rather than hearing ‘live’ speech on the ship, everybody is hearing stuff moderated by the ship’s computer. That does make sense and is consistent with how the translator is depicted. When we ca assume an alien language is being spoken on Trek, the crew hear English directly rather than a separate English translation with audio of the original language going on underneath (which would both be distracting for the crew and audience). So what was depicted (mutually unintelligibly words even between people who both speak English) is as consistent with the universal translator’s usual depiction. Obviously, this is also as bonkers as heck but it’s not really new bonkers, just an implication of existing bonkers.

Is there anything else left? Oh, I forgot that Tilly got kidnapped by mushrooms and that next episode she has to save the princess from Bowser (or at least that’s one possible plot development).