Camestros Felapton

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Star Trek Discovery: Terra Firma Part 2 (S3E10)

The theme revealed in this mirror universe two-parter is can people change and if so can one person intentionally change another. The answer given is yes to the first and no to the second even using brutal torture techniques to obliterate a personality.

Emperor Georgiou was always going to be a tricky character to rehabilitate but she’s a fun addition to the Star Trek universe. There simply isn’t a good way to go from cruel, murderous dictator to loveable bad-ass without just pretending that eating your crew-mates because they taste nice is a forgivable lapse.

Thanks to the intervention of what turns out to be the Guardian of Forever aka Carl, Georgiou is back in the Mirror universe. She is still pretty damn evil and the empire she runs is even worse but she tries to evily be less evil by not killing the evil traitorous version of Michael Burnham and instead methodically tortures her to try and make her moderately less evil. I’ll spoil the plot a little bit to say that thankfully this doesn’t work, although I didn’t trust the writers sufficiently to not worry that we were going to get an apologetics on torture. I think the plot works better knowing that Georgiou’s plan is definitely going to fail precisely because the apparent direction of the story looked like it was going to be awful.

Anyway, it turns out torturing people is a bad idea both ethically and pragmatically even in the Mirror universe and you a not-as-evil-as-you-could-be Emperor trying to make the empire less evil. Georgiou’s actual act of salvation is almost an afterthought. She reveals to mirror-Saru the secret of the Kelpian transformation — that they can survive their supposed descent into madness and come out the other side a little less timid. It is this act, allowing somebody to change themselves by giving them the tools they need that marks that Georgiou has changed.

I watched it a second time around knowing where the plot was going and I enjoyed it more. The first time around, that apparent theme of ‘maybe we can zap people into being who we want them to be’ was too off-putting to enjoy. Knowing that the episode rejects the idea helps but overall there is always going to be this tension between the campy-fun of the evil empire and the empire actually being horrible and evil.

Given the real world acrimony and claims of betrayal around the original series episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” it was an interesting choice to have the omnipotent being be the iconic Guardian. However, overall it was a mediocre episode that kept wandering into ethical dilemmas without having sensible answers. Making an overt nod to one of the most critically acclaimed Star Trek episodes invites comparisons that this episode can’t live up to.

ETA Cora’s review was equally dissatisfied with the torture element of the episode http://corabuhlert.com/2020/12/19/star-trek-discovery-a-k-a-the-adventures-of-empress-philippa-the-no-longer-quite-so-merciless-on-terra-firma-part-ii/

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10 responses to “Star Trek Discovery: Terra Firma Part 2 (S3E10)”

  1. This was okay, but I thought the final scene, with everyone toasting Georgiou, was a little much.

    Over at Tor.com, they’re discussing the possibility of her ending up (since the Guardian didn’t specify when he was sending her back to, just that it was when the two universes were closer aligned) in the TNG-DS9 era.

    Having said all that, Michelle Yeoh gives an amazing performance throughout.

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  3. A predictable episode unfortunetly.

    Mirror Mirror was the first mirror episode of course, and that worked because it was a nice and surprising switch.
    TNG didnt have any Mirror episodes (in television)
    DS9 had actually a good take on the mirror universe: First -again – it was surprising when it showed up the first time since it was the first time since TOS. Plus Ds9 did not unsually nod to classic Star Trek (which was smart).Second it was not just “everyone else but evil” but had actually evolved – Humans are now the conquered and try to start a rebellion. That means while everyone is still awful they have a bit more motivation and are less campy cardboards. They overdid it though. The first two where good, the third at least offered an interesting dilemma for Sisko (since his wife is alive).. I absolutly cant remember the fourth one and the fifth one was simply a case of “too much mirror!” The mirror universe is only good hwne used sparringly to surprise, not if people are expecting it. Its not an interesting place to linger.
    Voyager did not have any Mirror episodes.
    Enterprise had a double episode, but I havent seen it (I moved countries when Enterprise run and never bothered to watch the latter seasons, because the first two were so uninteresting).
    Now Discos 1st season at least used the mirror universe to a surprise effect and that was nice. But this double episode was utterly predictable in its outcome and it showed the weakness in the concept: It is simply not interesting to see awful people being awful all of the time.

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  4. The Mirror episode of Enterprise is notable for having the best opening sequence of the entire series, since That Song was replaced by Dramatic Instrumental Scoring.

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    • The other thing is that those episodes only feature the Mirror Universe crew of Enterprise. There’s no meeting – which sets it apart from every other take..
      There’s also a major tie to a classic TOS episode. I rate them as on of the better Enterprise stories. Trek often does well with two-part stories.

      Season 4 of Enterprise is a bit better than the earlier seasons, and more what Enterprise should have been.

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  5. So at first when they started the montage of months in the Mirror universe, I was surprised that they were doing this compressed thing, since I had thought their plot plan was to draw the Mirror universe closer to the Prime universe and then also do more substantial changes to the Mirror universe. I thought Georgiou was going to be recruited by Cronenberg’s character into a new Section 31. Instead, the whole two-parter was just a send-off for Yeoh who is going back to her original crossover time to do the originally planned spin-off series of Section 31. That series had seemed to have been nixed back during the previous season when Georgiou instead goes into the future with Discovery. But they must have decided to go ahead with it after all, which meant moving Georgiou back in time to right after the tech monster is defeated by the Discovery’s time jump and Georgiou’s destruction of it.

    https://www.ign.com/articles/star-trek-discovery-michelle-yeoh-section-31-spinoff-georgiou

    I enjoyed the omnipotent being turning out not to be a Q but the Guardian of Forever, which actually made a lot more sense and made more sense that the protective Sphere (database) sent them to it rather than the capricious Q. I am very much enjoying that Discovery does not constantly have to shoehorn in old Trek material, being now in a wide open future, but using this bit of old Trek did work and having the construct construct a Carl persona to talk made it more of a puzzle, which was kind of necessary for the two-parter. I think it could have been very interesting to have sicked Empress Georgiou on the Emerald Chain, but because Discovery is trying to find a new path where they aren’t always the renegades, in some ways Empress Georgiou had simply become a poor fit.

    Georgiou had been changed by the Discovery crew because she saw a “new way to rule.” And though she constantly sneered at that way, she did know that it actually worked better than her empire which she saw crumble. She is able to save Mirror Saru because she’s learned to respect the version of him in the Prime universe. She learned that things and people aren’t set in stone. But when she’s back in the Mirror Universe she tries to combine the two universes she’s learned from to save her empire, refusing to accept that her empire is already broken by its fundamental nature — and that Mirror Michael is already broken. Saving Michael’s life in the Mirror Empire without having a revolt means using torture initially in their culture. But continuing that, going beyond that, the plot doesn’t work. Georgiou already knows that trying to break someone down into a new person with painful torture doesn’t work from both Ash and Prime Michael, among others. And she also knows that Mirror Michael hasn’t really changed — she prepares for Mirror Michael’s second betrayal. The idea is given that she so wants Mirror Michael to be alive that she gambles, but it’s, as sometimes happens on Discovery, sloppy writing that doesn’t entirely fit the character’s history on the show. The show tries to have her be a fool and not a fool at the same time, and so it just becomes torture-kill spectacle. Which was the problem when we had the first Mirror Universe plot on Discovery.

    So yeah, a weak two-parter though it did give Yeoh lots of scenery to chomp on her way off to the spin-off. And the mixed messages did not make Discovery seem edgy but instead scattered and tired. I did like though that we got a chunk of future time Discovery in the second part. I remain a firm fan of Reno’s and the conversation between Saru and the Admiral was the most interesting thing in the episode. Discovery trying to navigate a future it still doesn’t know enough about and reveal its mysteries is the really fun part for me for this season. My husband barely tolerated the Mirror Universe the first time Discovery did it (though he liked Empress Georgiou in the Prime universe and the original TOS episode.) He spent most of those parts buried in his iPad or getting mad at the torture stuff.

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    • I don’t think Georgiou will be sent back to the original time (TOS). The Guardian just said it would return her to a time when the two universes were more closely aligned. That wouldn’t necessarily be when they left, e.g. Discovery’s second season. I’ve seen speculation that she might end up in the TNG/DS9 era.

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      • According to the mysterious spy in the future, the Mirror Universe moved further and further away from the Prime universe from the early Discovery/TOS era. Section 31 started during the first Enterprise era on up through the TNG/DS9 era, with some evidence that remnants of it remain in the Picard era. (With it being invented originally by Deep Space Nine showrunners.) To move Georgiou 2 to the point where the two universes were more closely aligned would be the early Discovery/TOS era, which would also allow them to bring back Ash, if possible/desired, and possibly cameos from young Spock and Pike. If she’s taken to the Deep Space Nine era or more realistically a bit after that, that does allow for cameos from the old DS9 crew. But the two universes would have been much further apart since that era was about a century later than the early Discovery/TOS era.

        Which doesn’t mean you/the rumors are wrong. Setting a Section 31 show in that era would let them bring in Cardassians, etc. And technically the two universes would still be in shouting distance then so that Georgiou might not be damaged by it. But if she isn’t sent back to the time period in which she crossed over from one universe to the other, but instead to a later time jump period (future jump), then there is still the problem of her having both time and dimensional space crossings affecting her body. The Guardian said essentially that they were eliminating the time aspect, so that she only had the dissonance on the multiverse part. That should mean sending her back to the time where she crossed from one universe to the next. But of course the Trek writers can jiggle it to work out however they want.

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