Camestros Felapton

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Star Trek Discovery: Forget Me Not (S3E4)

We have all been asking for an episode about the crew and I suppose this one is it. I’ve no complaints even though it feels like an episode with two B-plots. The show takes some time for healing and for the crew to work out some issues. It isn’t one of those episodes that is an instant classic but it is well paced and avoids the kind of clumsiness of past Discovery episodes.

Dr Culber frames the start of the episode as he carries out routine health checks on the crew. Not surprisingly they (unlike the ship) are structurally sound but, as he later reports, they are stressed out after everything they have been through. Saru must work out a way of raising morale and improving the mental health of the crew and sadly he has no ship’s counsellor to help him…or does he?

Meanwhile, new recruit Adira has a different problem. They have a Trill symbiont but they don’t have Trill memories and those memories contain the location of the remanent of the Federation. Discovery sends Adira and Michael to visit the Trill home world by shuttle (a nod to the original Trill TNG episode where the Trill eschew transporters). There, things do not go well as Trill society is not in good shape.

I don’t want to through out too many spoilers but we get the addition of another new character via flashback. Adira previously lived on a generation ship and had a Trill boyfriend Gray (played by Ian Alexander) around whom they have painful and traumatic memories that they must confront if they are to connect with the symbiont’s memories.

It is moving but it is also another LGBTQI relationship framed in tragedy. In Discovery’s defence, all romantic relationships so far have been framed in tragedy (or worse if we think about Ash Tyler’s relationships). This one goes in some interesting directions though.

Meanwhile, I really do appreciate how well Anthony Rapp plays Stamets as a well meaning arsehole. It is a very difficult type of character to get right. He is a good person and he’s not a ‘lovable rogue’ style of arsehole or badass-psycho-but-we-love-them arsehole like Georgiou.

Keyla Detmer’s mini-arc coping with the horror stress of piloting Discovery through the temporal wormhole comes to a head. Again, nicely done but as always with Discovery perhaps wrapped up too quickly.

I haven’t been doing rankings this season. Currently, I’d probably rank them in episode order but overall the show has been a lot more consistent. This is a good but not remarkable episode and that is remarkable because the show needs some of this character and aftermath-of-truama connective tissue to stop it being just a sequence of crazy-shit happening to Michael.

ETA: I’d intended to track what pronouns Adira’s character uses but didn’t. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw’s review (https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/shows/star-trek-discovery-adira-gray-trans-characters/ ) says the character uses she/her. I’m not going to change the pronouns above but shift to she/her next time.

Cora looks at the plot in more detail here http://corabuhlert.com/2020/11/07/star-trek-discovery-deals-with-trauma-and-recovery-in-forget-me-not/

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9 responses to “Star Trek Discovery: Forget Me Not (S3E4)”

  1. I suspect, but do not know for sure, that the change in Adira’s circumstances at the end of the episode will be used as a in-show justification for shifting from she/her to they/their.

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  2. After a TNG episode last week, this felt like a DS9 episode, especially Equilibrium comes to mind.No complaints, this was a very solid, even consistent episode (but lacking a Wow-factor).

    Speaking of DS9 and TNG: Even in the future Disco is messing up the canon. If my memory isn’t completely shot, the episode got a few Trill facts wrong (River was a host, Equilibrium showed that any Trill could become a host -and wasn’t Daxremoved by force of the rogue Trill?) Although It’s possible that Trill society simply couldn’t remember. And if the main plot holes are obscure canon violations, it’s a step up from previous episodes.

    And I can’t say anything negative about anything with Buster Keaton in it

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  4. They definitely used “she” and “her” consistently for Adira, and the word “boyfriend” was used for the opposite number in the relationship, so hetero there in the sense of one female-presenting and one male-presenting.

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  5. The actor is a non-binary actor using they pronouns but the character has been presented as she/her. That might change due to the Trill memories, but Jadiza, etc., stuck with the pronouns of the host. What’s changed is that something went different with Adira recovering her memories and the past Trill memories in that Gray manifests to her separately as an on-going entity so that will be the big mystery with her character.

    Buster Keaton was cute but again raises the issue that in hundreds of years of pop culture, the Star Fleet people only are into 20th century culture records. Of course, there was a third world war that destroyed a lot but there were subsequent long periods of history that produced pop culture that is once in a blue moon mentioned but mainly it’s the weird 20th century obsession and, like, Shakespeare. It was nice to have a recovery episode, though, and to have Saru grapple with a mostly human crew as captain.

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  6. I’m not sure they’ll be shifting away from that character being a her given that her male companion has reappeared, even possibly in a physical form. The various trill memories do have varying genders but that’s a different story…

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