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.