Star Trek: Discovery - 'The Wolf Inside'

Between a Voq and a head case.

Since everyone else probably watched the latest episode of Discovery last night, I'd best review the second part of the Mirror arc, 'The Wolf Inside', before I hit 'Vaulting Ambition' tomorrow.

Dr Culber was still dead, to begin with. I'm still not happy about that.

Burnham is also in a pickle, being forced to spend days swaggering about the ISS Shenzhou, banging Tyler, getting bathed by Mirror Saru, and presiding over executions which seem so routine that it's amazing the ship has any crew left at all, while she looks for a way to get the data on the Defiant to Discovery. It's established that she can't transmit it, because it would take up too much bandwidth, and can't decrypt it locally without tipping her hand. I'm pretty sure they had a plan to get them off the Shenzhou, which could presumably be expanded to include, you know, a thumbstick, but that might be giving them too much credit at this point.

Then orders come down from the Emperor in person, instructing Burnham to saturation bomb a planet where the Klingon leader of the resistance, known as the Fire Wolf, is hiding. Instead, Burnham opts to go special ops with Tyler, ostensibly to get the intel which will let the Empire eradicate the resistance, but actually to tip their hand and let the rebels escape, while also learning how such an alliance of different races could be possible. They let themselves be captured and are taken to meet the Fire Wolf, an albino Klingon called Voq, son of None. Voq preaches a creed of acceptance to survive; his followers fight together, since the alternative is to die apart. This finally sparks off the core of Tyler that is still the regular universe version of Voq, to whom it is better to die if that is the only way to remain Klingon.

Behold, the goatee!

Back on the Discovery, Tilly tries to use the spores to regenerate Stamets' misfiring brain. It fails, and Saru pulls the plug when the rest of Stamets' body starts to shut down, but something happens and Stamets appears to connect with his mirror duplicate in the forest of his own brain.

Thanks to Voq's 'prophet' - Mirror Sarek - Burnham is able to win his trust, but Tyler lashes out at his alternate, precipitating a confrontation in which he admits to being a Klingon infiltrator. Burnham wants to believe that he was brainwashed, but then he drops the bomb that he murdered Culber - a fact Saru was hiding from her - and only the intervention of slave-Saru saves her. Tyler is condemned to be transported into space for incompetently attempted assassination(1) and Burnham manages to get him picked up by the Discovery in order to use him as a mule for the thumb drive (and to prove that Star Fleet is still above summary execution, at least when Lorca is still in the agoniser.

And then the Emperor shows up and nukes the planet from orbit - it's the only way to be sure - before the resistance have time to evacuate(2). Oh, and the Emperor is Philippa Georgiou; with a sword(4).

"I will space walk over there and cut you."

So, this week was a proper kick in the head for Burnham, who lost her tether to humanity when the only man she has ever loved turned out to be a Klingon zealot, but I admit I was struggling to care after last week's slap in the face. I'm still hopeful that something will come up - Tilly explicitly referred to the spores bridging life and death - but it would be hard to actually bring Culber back from beyond without taking all the sting out of death. The other thing to remember is that, although they have basically buried 50% of Trek's out gay characters in a single blow, it would be hard to kill of anyone in Discovery without hitting a minority. There was rage that tough, female POC characters were being introduced just to be killed, but at the time they were all the tough characters there were. I'm not saying that there isn't a problem - burying the gays has been a serious issue for many, many years - but at least Discovery has enough representation that we can say that it's complicated. There really is just the one cis-het white man in the series, and I can't help but feel that it's significant, and deliberate, that he's the morally dubious, Teflon-coated authority figure.

(1) I am really not sure what distinguishes a culpable act of mutiny from a legitimate promotion opportunity in the Imperial Star Fleet, besides success.

(2) Possibly? I mean, if I were the resistance, I would not be looking to get out on the dot at the moment agreed with a Terran officer, however many goateed(3) Vulcans said she was okay.

(3) It's often overlooked, but the one with the goatee in the original 'Mirror, Mirror' episode was Spock, who was relatively speaking a decent bloke.

(4) Fun fact: Michelle Yeo basically designed her own sword, because no-one else on the production crew knew as much about swords.