Star Trek: Discovery - 'Lethe'

Manly bonding.

A little later than usual, it's time for the review of this week's episode of Star Trek: Discovery.

New boy Ash Tyler is bonding with the crew of the Discovery, shooting guns in the holodeck(1) with Captain Lorca and getting quite the rep among the crew. Cadet Tilly, doing her best to be like Mike (Michael Burnham, that is,) during their morning run, is pure Tilly as she introduces herself and her roomie to the new hotness. A super awkward breakfast is interrupted when Burnham collapses, thanks to the joys of a long-distance Vulcan mind meld and an attempt on the life of her foster father Sarek by a Vulcan zealot, one of a movement(2) that believes in the superiority of Vulcan logic to the point of suicide bombing and racial hatred (because logic.) In the vision, she sees the day she got rejected for the Vulcan Expeditionary Fleet, before Sarek kung fus her out of his brain.

"Please let one of them suffer a telepathic seizure to break this awkward
silence."

Learning that Sarek was attempting to open diplomatic relations with two of the Klingon Houses that have not yet sided with Kol, Lorca goes against orders and protocol to take the Discovery on a rescue mission. Stamets, apparently as high as a kite, notes that while he can do as Burnham suggests and rig a device from the navigation harness to boost the mind meld, it's dangerous in all kinds of ways, and will have to be done from a shuttle in the middle of an explosive nebula. The plan is, they go in, she contacts Sarek and wakes him up long enough to set off his emergency beacon. To do this, she has to engage in a kind of mental jujitsu which manifests in the telepathic landscape as actual jujitsu (but, like, Vulcan jujitsu,) and get to the bottom of why he is flashing back to this moment, the moment that she let him down, as he lies dying.

At first shattered that his last thoughts are of how she screwed up, Tyler - piloting the shuttle - assures her that in their last moments, people think of those they loved, not those who let them down. This gives her the energy to beat Sarek's id kung fu and contact his conscious mind. He admits that he is dwelling on the moment that he failed her. Offered a choice of letting one of his 'experiments' join the Expeditionary Fleet, he chose his half-human son, Spock, who went off and joined Star Fleet anyway. Did we mention that Vulcans were dicks?

Yet still less of a dick than he was in Gotham.

Sarek wakes and triggers the emergency beacon; the shuttle picks them up and it's home for tea and crumpets. 

Meanwhile, Lorca gets a super-judgemental booty call from Admiral-with-Benefits Cornwell about the whole 'breach of orders and protocol' thing. One post-coital phaser-threatening later, she's convinced he's losing his shit (to indulge in technobabble) and tells him she's going to see he gets the help he needs... right after she finishes the obvious trap peace mission that Sarek was on. Sure enough, she gets captured by the Klingons as a sort of hazing to join Kol's Unified Klingon Empire, while her guards and the neutral mediators get chopped. Being a man of action rather than protocol, Lorca naturally... goes back to Federation space pending further orders.

Lorca, it turns out, is also a dick.

Burnham decides she can be chums with Tyler, which hopefully won't sideline Tilly, but is likely to be a bit of a headfuck if/when he's revealed as Voq(3), what with her having killed his Messiah and all.

'Lethe' is a decent episode, with a lot of action, as has become the hallmark of the series. It's interesting, watching old TNG episodes, to note just how much more physically happens in Discovery. Less goes on in terms of character development. Lorca continues to be dodge AF, and neither Burnham nor Tyler seems quite human in their reactions; presumably this is on purpose. Our main character notes are that Burnham is unbending a little and Lorca has taken to packing a phaser on the velour safety. The Logical Extreme - who turn out to have been responsible for bombing the education centre in an attempt to kill Michael back when she and Sarek got melded - are an interesting insertion, and between them, Sarek and the Vulcan Council, we now have three largely separate styles of Vulcan dickishness, and two of racism.

Also, the Discovery crew have workout t-shirts with 'DISCO' on them. Apparently no-one wants the 'VERY' design.

(1) Some people might complain, but the original Enterprise, confirmed this week to be currently in service, had a holodeck. It's in The Animated Series.

(2) Which in my head at least is called the Logical Extreme.

(3) I'm pretty sure, although it occurs to me to wonder if he knows that.

DC Roundup: Supergirl - 'Girl of Steel'; The Flash - 'The Flash Reborn'; Legends of Tomorrow - 'Aruba-Con'; and Arrow - 'Fallout'

Random in a cornfield (possibly replacement Supermom.)

Okay then, here we go. DC is back.

We begin with Supergirl, and the 'Girl of Steel' is feeling the aftereffects of making her adopted planet a lethal toxin to her honey, and I don't mean the fact that filling the atmosphere with lead is likely going to give a lot of apex predators a really bad few days down the line. Heartsick, she's avoiding people and, it turns out, basically burying herself in Supergirl so she doesn't have to be Kara Danvers, the one who feels things.

Meanwhile, Douchey McSuit - he has a name, no doubt I'll learn it - a capitalist vulture of the first water, is intent on profiting on the damage done to Capital City by forcing through a waterfront development. He seems willing to hire goons to attack the unveiling of a Supergirl statue to do it, and going after alien tech as well (including a Daxamite ship held against protocol by the army without telling the DEO.) He also sets out to buy Catco, with the company being held in blind trust while Cat Grant acts as White House Press Secretary(1), but is pipped to the post by Lena Luthor, who continues to be pretty damned awesome and I really, really don't want her to heel turn.

Douchey McSuit (real name Morgan Edge, but he's a douche in a suit) is the
poor man's Max Lord.

Kara starts to come through by the end of the episode, and thankfully Alex and Maggie get past a bump in the road when Alex admits she's wobbling about their upcoming wedding because her dad isn't there to give her away, having become the cyborg henchman of a human supremacist hate group. Once she's opened up about that, however, she's able to move past it and ask J'onn to walk her down the aisle. Also, a random woman at the ceremony which gets attacked hefts a beam off her daughter, and may be sharing dreams with Kara, or dreaming about Kara's mother, or something.

Designer hobo.

Having been called on to enter the Speed Force at the end of last season, Barry Allen is recalled after a mysterious samurai appears in Central City and knocks all the other superheroes around, demanding they produce the Flash or else the city will be destroyed. Cisco calls on Caitlin to come home - finding her working in a bar and dark of hair and eye - and they modify the Speed Force Bazooka to release Barry while at the same time stabilising the Speed Force. Barry returns, but is all kind of grungy and amnesiac, until Iris lets herself be captured, believing - correctly - that Barry will find a away to rescue her, even if that means overcoming some massive psychic trauma.

Barry saves Iris by running at unprecedented speed, up and down collapsing wind turbines, and takes out the samurai, which proves to be a robot someone sent in as a test of sorts. Barry recovers his memory, and Caitlin quits from what appears to be some sort of mob bar. When the boss's heavy tries to muscle her, she goes all Killer Frost and at this point seems to have two largely separate personalities going on.

Look, Rip; you're just lucky I've already assigned 'Douchey McSuit.'

In Legends of Tomorrow, the whole dinosaur mess from last season's finale is cleaned up by Rip Hunter and the Time Bureau, a bunch of prissy, suit-wearing transtemporal bureaucrats who relieve the Legends of their duty and confiscate the Waverider. Some time later, the Legends are going stir crazy trying to live normal - ish; Nate is pursuing the rather thankless task of being the third string hero of Central City - lives when Mick gets into a fight with Julius Caesar in Aruba. Having located an anachronism that the Bureau missed, Sara and the others try to get reinstated, only to be snarked at and generally put down. Thus they steal the Waverider, currently locked down as a training station(2), and try to set things right themselves.

The Legends capture Caesar and recruit Jaxx (and a rather more reluctant Stein, who is about to become a grandfather,) to get the Waverider back to fighting trim. They drop off Caesar and wipe his memory, but he deftly steals Nate's book on 'how the Empire fell' and determines that Brutus and Cassius are going down the first chance he gets. Gideon reports that the timeline is fooked, and the Bureau turn out to straighten up. Unfortunately for the Time Bureau's rep, they walk right into a trap, forcing the Legends into action to rescue them in their classic, low-profile style.

Reluctantly, Rip allows the Legends to keep operating because, as he tells Lead Agent Stick-Up-Her-Butt, sometimes you need a scalpel, and sometimes you need a chainsaw. The lead field agent is so snarky at Sara over her team's 'abilities', and yet so in tune with her in combat, that I would be very surprised if they didn't sleep together by the end of the series (on which front, a keycadr boosted from a male Time Agent 'in the morning' confirms Sara still bi and still keeping her hand in, in more ways than one.)

Tough episode to image search.

Last, but not least, Arrow reveals that almost everyone survived the bombing of Lian Yu. The al Ghul sisters have vanished, so are probably alive, but other than that no-one named seems to have bought it on the good side, apart from Will's mother, and Thea, who is in a coma. Not all is rosy, however, as Quentin is suffering from PTS after having to shoot his daughter's double to protect Dinah, only for her to turn up again at the precinct - having been retrieved by an unseen rando in a helicopter - and blow it up. This in turn seems to be a means to an end; luring the team out of the bunker to break in and steal a prototype T-sphere. Other fallout in the episode 'Fallout' includes Diggle suffering an injury that has affected his ability to shoot and Rene getting a new suit and a new custody hearing. Will is living with Olly, as per Samantha's dying wish, but blames Oliver for his mother's death. Finally, someone leaks a photo of Olly in costume and sans hood and the world knows who the Green Arrow is.

The three Arrowverse shows have so far made a fairly weak showing off strong season finale, with Supergirl the only one of the four to really carry the impact of its closer forward. Arrow in particular, while I don't want any of the characters to be dead, feels like a soft-pedal after threatening a TPK. There's a lot of work to do to match those wrap ups, and we're slow out of the blocks.

(1) Another pop at POTUS, I think.
(2) While many of Rip's criticisms of the Legends are fair, I find it hard to forgive him for allowing Gideon to be put in indefinite sleep mode after making out with her virtual avatar last series. Dick move, Hunter.

Once Upon a Time - 'Hyperion Heights' and 'A Pirate's Life'

New beginning, new adorable moppet believer.

So, for six seasons I haven't been reviewing Once Upon a Time, but I figure that since Hanna and I - well, mostly Hanna; I've not seen everything since about Season four - have now caught up with the series, we could watch it together, and thus we come to the firts two episodes of Season seven: 'Hyperion Heights' and 'A Pirate's Life'.

We begin with Henry Mills, a slightly successful author, getting an unexpected visit from his self-proclaimed daughter Lucy, who tells him that he needs to come to the gentrifying Seattle neighbourhood of Hyperion Heights to be reunited with his true love, her mother Cinderella, and break the curse which has robbed him and the folk of the Heights of their memories. Flashbacks reveal that, after the happy ending of the original six-season arc, Henry went off in search of his own story and almost literally ran into Cinderella, a fiery Latina who stole his motorcycle and tried to assassinate a prince, only for her stepmother Lady Temayne to jump in after she had a change of heart and pin the killing on her anyway.

"We should probably exchange insurance details."

In Hyperion Heights, Henry is accosted by a strange girl, who is the cursed analogue of Alice, a woman who drugged him in the fairytale realm and now works for Weaver, an apparently recursed Rumplestiltskin introduced half-drowning a man in a bucket. Now, the attentive will have picked up that Once Upon a Time already had a Cinderella, who fell foul of Rumplestiltskin and was on the whiter side, and that Once Upon a Time in Wonderland had its Alice. Well, as Henry remarks early on, there are many versions of every fairy tale, and they are all out there somewhere(1), so what we have here is a chance to reuse some of the old stories since the past six seasons have come perilously close to running the well dry. This is a little disappointing as compared to the option of looking to lesser known fairy tales, but I suppose they are looking to keep it as Disney as possible.

This is Alice. She spikes drinks.

Henry meets the local bartender, Roni, who is his foster mother Regina, if only he knew it. Jacinda - Cinderella's Earth name - tries to get out from under her stepmother's thumb - Lady Tremayne presenting as Veronic Belfrey, businesswoman and mastermind of the gentrification which, Lucy explains, is forcing the fairy tale folk out of the neighbourhood and replacing them with regular Earth folk - by running away with Lucy. Henry, well-meaning, but a dope, turns them in. Jacinda loses custody and Henry loses any shot at a snog. His only apparent allies are Officer Rogers - a cursed Captain Hook and the Heights one honest copper - and Roni, who refuses to sell out to Belfrey after seeing Jacinda stand up to her. Rogers himself is promoted to Detective and partnered with none other than Detective Weaver, or as I like to think of him, Gene Huntlestiltskin.

Like the anti-Cheers, this bar is literally a place where nobody even knows
their own name.

A few things come clearer in 'A Pirate's Life', as flashback Henry is captured as Cinderella's accomplice, but uses a message bottle given to him by Hook to summon help. Hook and Regina rescue Henry, but are all mysterious about Emma. Then Hook is bushwhacked by an alternate version of himself from a universe created by a wish - because why the fuck not - who wants to take his life and steal Emma away from him. He gets Lady Tremayne to use a stolen wand to change him into the semblance of his other self, but has a change of heart when he learns that Emma is pregnant. Killian Jones Hook goes home with Emma, while other Hook - healed of a stab wound by Emma after he allows himself to believe in her - teams up with Henry and Regina to find both Cinderella and Hook's missing daughter.

Lawful evil is just the worst.

In the present, Belfrey tasks Weaver and Rogers with getting rid of Henry. They search his flat, with Rogers giving away that he has visited before. Meanwhile, to make amends for his mistakes, Henry arranges for Jacinda and her friend Sabine to get pick-up work at Lucy's ballet recital, which Belfrey has turned into a $200 a ticket charity gala in order to shut Jacinda out of Lucy's life. At the recital, Weaver tells Rogers to plant a stolen bracelet on Henry, but having been inspired by the swan pendant on Henry's keychain, Rogers doesn't go through with it. Weaver tells Belfrey not to make the mistake of thinking that she owns him, and Rogers that he is looking for someone with a moral core.

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do?

Henry, Rogers and Roni get together in Roni's bar and form an anti-Belfrey coalition, sadly not called Operation anything, so Henry must really have lost his mojo to the curse. Rogers also recounts his cursed backstory, in which his daughter is replaced in memory by a kidnapped girl he has been looking for since he joined the force, and a woman whom the swan reminded him of once saved his life by holding pressure on a wound until the ambulance arrived.

This big reboot is a gamble for Once Upon a Time, and it's hard to say whether it's writer-driven or the result of unavoidable cast changes. Either way, it's interesting, and gives us a fresh take without Emma constantly talking about her superpower and acting all holier than thou. It remains to be seen if it will go the distance - to quote one of the source properties of the series - but it's got potential.

(1) Although a stickler might point out that, as a work of literary fiction, Alice really only has the one identifiable source version.

Star Trek: Discovery - 'Choose Your Pain'

"Aways worked better when we used Gelflings."

Discovery has been kicking Klingon butt for a while now, but there are two problems: First, Starfleet wants Lorca to back off until they can get more spore drives online, which in turn means finding more tardigrades. They are worried that the Klingons will recognise Discovery’s importance and target it. Second, Burnham has noticed – as the viewers did last week – that Ripper does not like being the navigator; it hurts, and seems to be having a deleterious effect on the tardigrade’s health.

The latter problem is pushed into the background when the former results in Lorca’s capture by L’Rell. Thrown into a cell with civilian prisoner and TOS alumnus Harcourt Fenton ‘Harry’ Mudd, and Starfleet POW Ash Tyler, Lorca butts heads with the anti-Federation entrepreneur. Tyler, meanwhile, admits he has only survived so long because L’Rell has ‘taken a liking’ to him, which is creepy. Lorca determines that Mudd is spying on the Starfleet prisoners in exchange for not being beaten up so much, as well as allowing others to take his beatings when the Klingons ask him to ‘choose your pain.’

Saru tries to be a man of action, overriding concerns for the tardigrade’s wellbeing and insisting that they need the spore drive, which results in Ripper entering a defensive state of cryptobiosis. Against the advice of medical officer Hugh Culbert – later revealed as Stamets’ boyfriend – he insists that Stamets rouse the tardigrade ready for their escape.

Lorca and Tyler break out of their cell with almost laughable ease, but refuse to take Mudd with them because... Well, it’s about 50:50 because Mudd is a dick and because Lorca is an opposed kind of dick. L’Rell tries to stop them and gets knocked down by Tyler, then blasted in the face by Lorca, which looks like it’s going to leave a mark. The two officers steal a raider and flee, and Saru makes up for his misguided decisiveness by using his real strengths to identify that the lead raider in an approaching group is carrying the captain. The Discovery then nopes the hell out of Klingon space thanks to Stamets using illegal gene therapy to make himself into a part-tardigrade mushroom Khan.

"When people learn you sold us out, your name will be... Oh, wait."

Burnham and Tilly release Ripper into the universe with Saru’s blessing, and Stamets’ reflection starts to lag behind him in a most alarming fashion.

This has proven a divisive episode, both for Lorca’s cold-blooded abandonment of Mudd, and for Saru’s treatment of the tardigrade. The latter was owned as a mistake, however, while the former may yet come back to bite Lorca, and not just inasmuch as it would have been handy to have someone to help carry Tyler, who was on the point of collapse despite having the strength to punch out a Klingon. I think – I hope – that in keeping with Star Trek’s traditional worldview, abandoning someone to torture will prove to have been an error, however much of a pill-pushing, borderline people-trafficking douchebag Mudd might be. Much has also been made of whether characters in Star Trek ought to describe something as ‘fucking cool,’ but that’s more a matter of taste(1).

There has also been some speculation that Tyler might be a spy, given the ‘not a Klingon’ treatment seen in ‘Trouble With Tribbles’, given his good condition, the ease of their escape, and L’Rell’s promise to Voq that he would learn much from the Matriarchs of Clan Mok’ai, but at the cost of everything, which is what losing his Klingon-ness would be to a zealot of House T’Kuvma. It might explain L’Rell’s attachment, but there are plenty of gaps in the theory as well, not least that any plan would have had to include Lorca fortuitously not hitting her square on with the disruptor.

Characterised by some as too far from Star Trek, honestly it’s fairly equivalent to some of Deep Space Nine’s bleaker episodes, particularly ‘In the Pale Moonlight’. If Lorca looks like someone who is never going to learn the error of his ways, then everyone else is more clearly aware of their sins.

(1) I’m against it, simply because it makes me wonder why people didn’t swear at some of the shit they’ve seen during the run of the other shows.

Killjoys - 'The Wolf You Feed'

Oh,but of course it's the eyes...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but there’s a man with two wolves in his heart...

As the Ferren arrive to honour their oath to Dutch, things start to go a bit Pete Tong for the Killjoy army. Three Racks have been blown up, Dutch is off on a personal mission, Turin has alienated Fancy and the other Cleansed by treating them like traitors waiting to happen, and the Black Root ships have a kind of neural networking that lets them fly in incredible formation or – for those lacking the correct cerebral architecture – fly into one another. The Cleansed could fly them, but see above.

Dutch’s thing involves getting Zeph to patch Aneela’s memories into her and so learn whatever Khlyen wanted her to know. This is a dangerous prospect, risking getting lost in someone else’s memories and/or suffering irreversible brain damage, but had you noticed that Dutch is a little bit obsessed about this subject. ‘The war is all,’ she declared previously, and for her it’s even more personal. So, in she goes, to discover the truth of Khlyen and Aneela’s Qreshi origins, and also her own ‘birth’ as a Green-powered recreation of Aneela’s younger self, birthed by Aneela’s will alone to alleviate her loneliness after Khlyen conceals her from the vengeance of a mysterious other ‘her’ by isolating her in one of his cube vaults.

“She’s the me I should have been if we never went to Arkyn. She’s your good wolf, Papa. Maybe now you can forgive me for not being good enough.”

I can not begin to tell you how happy it made me that they used the old story that the episode is named for, but that it doesn’t try to make the moral of the story a revelation.

While Johnny races to break through Zeph’s locks and contact Lucy, D’av struggles to restore faith with the Cleansed, which in the end requires him to take down Turin, arresting his former commander for arresting other Killjoys, specifically the Cleansed, without warrant. This impressed the Ferren enough to transfer their oath to him, and the Cleansed enough to get the army their pilots. Once Johnny has recovered Dutch from the rabbit hole of her own mind by re-enacting their first meeting, he lets her finish her business and get that last revelation, because he’s got her back; always has done, even after she caught him trying to steal her ship.

Back at the Rack, D’av tries to get Dutch to shape up, but she tells him that she’s always going to have to take this personally, which means that he has to lead the army. Once more, Killjoys knocks it out of the park with its relationships. I absolutely adore the way our three leads interact, the way they know and trust one another. I’m way behind on it at the moment, but hopefully I can get my shit together and close out Season 3 before DC season sets in hard.

Preacher – ‘Sokosha’

What? No. You're crying.

Okay, I apparently left this one for a while, so...

The Saint of Killers comes gunning for Jesse, but Viktor’s daughter puts him off just enough for our ‘hero’ to escape. However, his friends are not so quick, and Denis ends up in the crosshairs; Denis whom Tulip misidentifies as Cassidy’s father, only to learn that he is in fact the vampire’s son(1). Despite his mission and all that, Jesse proves that he isn’t an unmitigated jerk and agrees to meet the Saint. This is all set to go very badly, but Jesse turns it around by showing the Saint the video of the God audition to prove that his ‘fee’ was never sanctioned.

Jesse then offers an alternative. The Saint, it turns out, can not enter the Kingdom of Heaven ever, because he doesn’t have a soul. Jesse offers to bring him one, and is given an hour (I think; as I say, been a while since I watched it,) to do so. He contacts a soul broker, who purchases parts of souls for resale on the occult black market, but can not find a matching donor for the Saint’s specific spiritual DNA... until he offers his own soul. 10% of Jesse’s soul later, and the Saint is primed for a true afterlife, but also – as Jesse no doubt foresaw – vulnerable to the Voice, allowing Jesse to trap him in the back of a van and drown it – although presumably not the Saint – in a swamp.

‘Sokosha’ shows that Jesse is not without empathy, compassion, and even a willingness to sacrifice; he’s just really self-righteous and a dick pretty much most of the time.

(1) Preacher’s thing is kind of letting you think that a thing is a silly thing and then turning it around on you, in this case Cassidy’s abusive relationship with Denis all apparently stemming from the fact that neither one of them has ever unbent enough to learn the other’s language (and the father’s cardinal sin of not aging as his son becomes old.)

Star Trek: Discovery - 'The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry'

Saru... Well, let's be frank. He puts up with a lot of bullshit.

We begin this episode with a totally unexpected crossover with LEGO Dimensions(1), before cutting to Burnham getting her new uniform, with science division silver panels and no rank insignia. Then Ensign Tilly turns up with a package for Burnham, which turns out to be Captain Georgiou's last will and testament. Burnham shoves it under the bed, despite it beeping continuously like a high-tech howler waiting to go off.

I've been predicting that Captain Georgiou herself would return, in fact or as a clone, and that this would prove to be the reason for leaving her body behind. Turns out... Yeah, the Klingons ate her when the food in the stranded sarcophagus ship began to run out. Voq, the albino, and T'Kuvma's other protege L'Rell have been scavenging parts from the destroyed Klingon ships left behind by the battle, but the only dilithium processor is on the Shenzhou, and Voq is reluctant to pollute the purity of the vessel. L'Rell is a more pragmatic sort, and suggests that there is no purity in death.

Lorca assigns Burnham to the creepy autopsy room to find out what makes the beastie from the Glenn so good at killing up Klingons, although to his disgruntlement she determines that it's actually not all that aggressive. It's a kind of massive tardigrade, basically indestructible, but itself destructive only in a basic, instinctive fashion. It is, however, a demon in self-defence, as Landry - who dubs it 'Ripper' - discovers when she tries to sedate it and cut off a claw for study. Ripper ignores the sedative and mauls Landry to death in the time it takes Burnham to turn on the lights, which Ripper hates. While most of our red shirts have been white boys, that makes two named women of colour under the bus in four episodes to one named white man, a fact which is causing more than a little muttering.

Ripper is kind of adorbs when he's not... ripping.

As Lorca pushes for a working spore drive in order to relieve the beleagured dilithium mines of Corvan II(2), and Stamets struggles to work out what sort of computer could have driven the navigational rig recovered from the Glenn, Burnham realises that Ripper is attuned to the panspermia micelium trails that the spore drive utilises, and indeed likely appeared on the Glenn in search of more spores to consume. The navigational rig is a harness for the tardigrade, which allows the Discovery to make a quantum spore jump into battle, then back out again, apparently squishing the Klingon attack force in its wake or something.

L'Rell's dress is by Skesis at C&A.

Meanwhile, back in the binary system, Voq and L'Rell retrieve the dilithium processor from the Shenzhou with some flirty engineering, only to discover that fair-weather zealot Kol has bought off the remaining crew of the sarcophagus ship with food and intends to rule the Empire once the war with the Federation is done. L'Rell apparently turns on Voq for a turkey leg, but instead engineers his survival and sends him to the matriarchs of her mother's house, where he will learn things he never imagined, but at the cost of everything.

We wrap up with Burnham opening her bequest, which turns out to be Georgiou's badly scorched optical telescope, and a recorded message congratulating her on the command Georgiou was sure she would have earned. It's a sobering and melancholy reminder of just how little Phillipa Georgiou anticipated any of this shit happening. She was a proper Starfleet Captain, and now she's been eaten and the fate of the Federation lies with dodgy bastards like Lorca. Meanwhile, Burnham walks a line between proper and dodgy, willing to shoot first and put Saru in danger to see if his 'threat ganglia' respond to Ripper, but also able to look beyond the obvious and see something more than a killer in Ripper itself.

'Is it Star Trek?' my girlfriend asked after we watched this episode, and I believe that it is, although it is not, to borrow a phrase, your grandaddy's Star Trek(3). This is not to say that it is wholly divorced from its predecessors, but certainly it owes more to the films - Prime and Kelvin timelines - than it does to the immediate legacy of TOS. Mind you, the same could be said of everything post-TNG, when the creators really began to get into evolving universes and arc plots. And what about representation? I think it's made a good fist of it, but casting two non-caucasian in ablative guest star roles would have been a lot less problematic if the surviving bridge crew were a little less pale.

(1) Okay, actually it's a quantum-scale closeup of a replicator in action, but it looks exactly like the opening scene of LEGO Dimensions.
(2) Which I think are the ones that the other prisoners speculated they were being taken to last week.
(3) For generational values which mean that, solely in this instance, I am your grandaddy.

Star Trek: Discovery - 'Context is for Kings'

Discovery.

Some time after her court martial, Michael Burnham is being transferred to what is rumoured to be a dilithium mine(1) when the shuttle is caught in a field of electricity eating micro-organisms. The pilot is lost in space, but the shuttle is rescued by the USS Discovery, an advanced science vessel. The Discovery is under the command of Captain Gabriel Lorca and First Officer Saru, who is understandably perturbed to see Burnham again. In addition we meet the former helmswoman of the Shenzhou - now sporting a cranial implant of some kind - Engineering chief and astromicologist Paul Stamets, security chief Landry and super-perky allergen sufferer Sylvia Tilly, whom I will probably end up either adoring or despising.

Burnham is assigned to work in engineering, working numbers for some weird spore-based technology, and then placed on an away mission to investigate the wreck of the Discovery's sister-ship USS Glenn. What they find is the crew, twisted and torn apart by mysterious torsion forces, and a Klingon boarding party ripped apart by parties briefly unknown, and eventually revealed to be some sort of mutated spore-pig. Cornered by the beast, Burnham risks her own life to distract it and allow the others to reach the shuttle, while she crawls though the Jeffries tubes reciting passages from Alice in Wonderland.

"Please don't murder me in my bed. Please don't murder me in my bed..."

The away team escapes and Lorca offers Burnham a job. He admits to engineering her 'rescue' - the fate of the shuttle pilot is never discussed, by anyone, incidentally - but denies that the Discovery and the Glenn were researching bioweapons. The spore-based technology is, rather, a new form of propulsion, intended to permit near-instant travel by following the panspermia network created by drifting interstellar sores. It's shiny AF, with only a slight side-effect of occasionally turning people inside out, and would let them pop out of nowhere on the Klingons and go boo with impunity.

The shuttle leaves without Burnham, Saru has a prey moment, and Tily asks Burnham to be her mentor on the quiet. Landry delivers the spore pig to Lorca in his unsettling autopsy room.

Discovery continues to impress technically, and presents us with a cracking away mission plot this episode. With the relative gore and violence levels now well-established, the big reveal this time is that the USS Discovery herself is effectively terra incognita, in her totality for Burnham, but in part for pretty much everyone on board, since she is running some 80 war-critical secret projects at any one time and everything is compartmentalised and locked up behind easily-defeated breath locks. Only time will tell what she has up all of her sleeves, or what the spore drive can really do.

"You're very tall."

We still only have a passing understanding of who Michael Burnham is, but that question has been pushed aside by 'what the fuck is going on with Lorca?' Gabriel Lorca is a sinister and slightly magnificent bastard, all about the science and the mind-games and the constant testing. He has he skeleton of a Gorn (not supposed to have been encountered yet) and a single tribble (not supposed to be possible) and keeps secrets with the same unthinking ease that most humans apply to breathing. Also, he's Draco Malfoy, so he's got that working against him.

Creepy Title Quote: "Universal law is for lackeys. Context is for Kings." Apparently Captain Lorca considers himself exempt from the rules which bind lesser souls, and it's hinted that he sees Burnham as a potential protege in this regard, after her actions at the Battle of the Binary Stars.

(1) Apparently we're still before the Starfleet Penal Reforms which will see Tom Paris convicted of treason and sentenced to an extended outward bound course in New Zealand.