Doctor Who – The rest of the season

Aliens rarely dress for the weather.

NB. I’m way behind on these reviews, so I’m going to rush through this.

This review will contain spoilers

‘The Tsuranga Conundrum’
"Whole worlds pivot on acts of imagination."

Incapacitated and rescued by a hospital ship, Team Tardis have to rally the crew and patients to stave off three kinds of disaster, before one of them claims all of their lives.

There’s a good bunch of supporting characters and a nicely Doctorish solution, although this is one of the Thirteenth’s more erratic episodes, perhaps the most extreme of her ‘adjustment’ episodes, and the all-consuming pting is a little too adorable a death machine.

Easily my favourite thing in the episode is when the Doctor is trying to turn the ship around to get back to the Tardis, and the doctor (small d) gives her a chewing out about the other sick people who need to get to the main hospital, and she listens. That last bit is important.

Rating - 6/10

‘Demons of the Punjab’
"This is all that remains of our home. Our people. Every ancestor. All one dust.... They died unwitnessed, unsaved. We were too late to grieve or honor them. But we, who returned, gave up 100 generations to sift, to remember the lost dead, the unmourned. In time, it was all we knew. And now we travel beyond, seeking the unacknowledged dead. Across all of time and space. This is now the Thijarian mission -- to bear witness to those alone. To see. To bear pain, honor life as it passes."

Yaz persuades the Doctor to let her visit her grandmother, Umbreen, to solve a family mystery. Despite her promise not to get involved, Team Tardis find themselves part of Umbreen’s wedding to Prem, a Hindu man who is not Yaz’s grandfather. But the year is 1947, and the partition of India is about to rip the country – and this marriage – apart. Also, there are aliens.

‘Demons of the Punjab’ covers some of the same territory as ‘Rosa’, but this time the racism is all home-grown – Prem’s brother is a Hindu nationalist, violently opposed to Prem marrying a Muslim – and the aliens are there as observers, and perhaps a link to the arc plot (their world was destroyed, possibly by Stenza weapons.)

This is another strong, Earthbound episode, with a solid historical message which, come at me haters, is what Doctor Who exists for. It also gives Yaz the character workout that she has been missing.

Rating - 8/10

Free existential terror with every order.

‘Kerblam!’
Jarvis Slade: How would you like a warning for insubordination?
The Doctor: I'd love one. I could add it to my collection.

Someone sends the Doctor a gift via Kerblam! (basicallt space Amazon,) but the packing note contains a cry for help. The team go undercover at Kerblam!’s fulfilment centre, where they discover a broken system and a possibly misguided conspiracy.

Playing to modern fears of human redundancy, Kerblam! is elevated above lazy satire by making fear and mismanagement the villains, rather than simply taking aim at corporations in general, but unfortunately it does sort of let the corporations off the hook entirely by doing so. A couple of very sympathetic sacrificial characters add emotional involvement, but it isn’t as powerful as the recent pseudohistoricals.

Rating - 6/10


‘The Witchfinders’
"We want certainty, security. To believe that people are evil or heroic but that's not how people are. You want to know the secrets of existence? Start with the mysteries of the heart."

The Tardis team land near Pendle Hill in the midst of a witch hunt, but it’s not the Pendle witch hunt known to history. As the fanatical magistrate Becka Savage drowns her way through the population, no less a figure that James I shoves his oar in, but the Doctor detects an alien hand as sentient mud begins to animate the dead.

Bringing its pseudohistorical game to a more remote time, but more local place, ‘The Witchfinders’ once more looks at the politics of fear and hate in a drama that stands a step above the pure SF episodes of the season. Honestly, I’m curious to see what they current team could do with a pure historical.

Rating - 7/10


‘It Takes You Away’
"This woman is clearly an alien force, collapsing two realities and impersonating your dead wife. Time to move on, mate!"

The Tardis lands in Norway, where the team discovers a young, blind girl, living in an isolated house and menaced by a snarling monster that took her father away. Creepy enough, but then they find a mirror that leads into an alternate dimension, and it all gets even weirder.

Doctor Who gets a bit Scandi-Noir, before bringing in a sentient pocket universe looking for companionship, one of the few beings lonelier than the Doctor. The episode is Graham’s turn to shine, as Bradley Walsh puts in his Bafta nomination performance for his character’s confrontation with a projection of his late wife, Grace.

Rating - 6/10

Another planet, another quarry.

‘The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos’
Ryan: What happened to 'never do weapons'?
The Doctor: It's a flexible creed. Door, locks, walls, buildings. Fair game. If it can be rebuilt, I'll allow it.
Following many, many distress signals, the Doctor brings the Tardis to Ranskoor Av Kolos, where a large number of ships have crashed and a psychic field alters perceptions. Here they discover Tzim-Sha of the Stenza has managed to masquerade as the god of a two-person race called the Ux, who have the power to manipulate reality, using them to shrink planets and store them in glass jars. While Graham declares his intent to kill Tim Shaw, the Doctor struggles to win over the Ux and send the planets back where they belong.

A strong episode for Graham and Ryan, and a cap to the season arc, there’s a lot happening in ‘The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos’, and some of it is a little too familiar. Stealing planets is reminiscent not only of ‘The Stolen Earth’, but of the classic series serial ‘The Pirate Planet’, and as much as persuading powerful religious characters to rethink their life is classic Doctor, it’s really Graham’s confrontation with Tzim-Sha that gets the best of the writing, and the result is somewhat uneven.

Rating - 5/10

Doctor Who – ‘Resolution’

I'm not sure what I'd say about the new look, but I can't help imagining the
response would be: "THANKS! IT HAS BOBBLES!"

"Where's your kitchen? I just need to get some eggs to check the protein alignments in the goo."

Once again, archaeology threatens the foundations of human civilisation, as a fragment of monster is dug up and reconstitutes itself. Now, a Dalek is loose on Earth, and the Doctor races to find it before untold destruction ensues. Meanwhile, Ryan’s dad turns up looking to reconcile.

This is a surprisingly strong festive showing, proving once more that a single Dalek can be more effective than an army if used correctly. There are strong shades of ‘Dalek’, although this lone Dalek – a reconnaissance scout sent out in the early years of Dalek expansion – is a remorseless foe with none of the pathos of that sole survivor.

A strong end to a strong season, I would say, and a good start for the 13th Doctor. Now, roll on 2020.

Rating - 8/10

Final Space

Jaded space-jerk Gary Goodspeed is working off the last of a five-year(1) prison sentence aboard the spaceship Galaxy One, watched over by the ship’s AI, HUE, and an annoying drone called KVN. When he befriends a mysterious alien that he names Mooncake, he finds himself cast into the middle of a Galactic Conflict. Mooncake is an artificial lifeform, designed to destroy planets, and sought after by a tyrant called the Lord Commander. Aided by alien bounty hunter Avocato and renegade cop Quinn Airgone – also the subject of Gary’s unrequited love – Gary must keep Mooncake out of reach of the Lord Commander, to prevent him harnessing the power of Final Space to become a god.

Final Space is a weird gig, evolving over ten episodes from ‘a slob in space’ to an epic, save-the-universe adventure. To be fair, there’s an element of that all the way through, as every episode begins with one of Gary’s last ten minutes of oxygen as he drifts in space at the climax of the final battle, but a significant character death half-way through ups the ante. It’s a lot more interesting than I was honestly expecting, and worth checking out if you’ve got a few hours and an internet connection.

(1) Same duration as the original Enterprise mission. Coincidence?

Lost in Space - 'Impact', 'Diamonds in the Sky' and 'Infestation'

Where it all began (except that it began in black and white.)

There are so many reboots these days, and Irwin Allen's classic 1965 scifi family soap Lost in Space - recounting the oddly domestic adventures of the space-stranded Robinson family, their hunky pilot Don West, comedy villain Dr Zachary Smith and an unhelpfully excitable robot - has already had one; or two if you count a failed 2004 pilot as well as the 1998 feature film, with Matt LeBlanc reinterpreting upright 60s chauvinist Don as 'Joey-from-Friends' in Space. Repeats of the original were a part of my childhood landscape, so I have a certain fondness for the property, and for my money the film at least shouldn't count against the possibility of a new version, since it was both bad and highly forgettable(1), so I'm excited to see what Netflix makes of the property.

What they make of it is a gritty, SF survival drama, eschewing the somewhat cosy affects of the original, while keeping the optimistic family togetherness vibe and occasionally inappropriately upbeat theme tune. In a near future in which the world is going to shit, the Robinson family are part of an interstellar colony mission which hits rough skating and a possible wormhole. The family consists of engineer Dr Maureen Robinson and her three children - Judy, an eighteen-year-old medical prodigy; Penny, a more conventionally troubled teen; and Will, who against the tendency of prior versions is a modestly intelligent boy who questions his place alongside his more gifted siblings - as well as her somewhat estranged husband, military man John.

The new hotness.

When something goes badly wrong with the colony transport, Resolute, they evacuate on their lifeboat, Jupiter-2(2), and crash on an unknown planet. Across the opening episodes they learn that not only are they off course; they seem to be in the wrong galaxy. The Robinsons struggle to survive freezing conditions with the Jupiter submerged. Will is separated from the family while searching for magnesium to melt Judy out of a glacier and runs into a damaged alien robot. At first hostile, after he helps it self repair, it assumes a more human form and seems to imprint on Will as its master. A flashback shows us that the robot attacked the colony ship, the Resolute, during which attack a sociopathic identity thief adopted the identity of one Dr Z. Smith (the original played by original Will Robinson Bill Mumy.) She came down with engineer Don West, later ditching him to improve her own chances and hooking up with the Robinsons during a rain of deadly, falling diamonds.

And then there are fuel-eating space eels! Because of course there are.

With a strong, diverse cast - Judy is half-sister to the younger Robinsons and step-daughter to John, played by Taylor Russell(3), and Don is Hispanic, as well as Parker Posey's Dr Smith making the main cast 50/50 male and female, if you count the robot as male based on the voice actor for its three words of dialogue(4) - and a much stronger range of characters than the original, in which Maureen and Judy Robinson basically made meals and gushed over John and Don respectively. In this version, each of the character has earned a place on the colony mission, so they all have skills; apart from Smith, who is a phoney, and Will, whose place was wangled by his mum bending some rules. Not sure what's going to come of that, but it must be something.

'Danger, Will Robinson.' It's the new 'I am Groot.'

Three episodes in, and Lost in Space is definitely justifying my investment.

(1) Apart from the Apollo-440 remix of the theme music; that was baller.

(2) In this series, the lifeboats are all Jupiters.

(3) And don't think that there hasn't been the usual furore about having a mixed-race family. Blah, blah, diversity for the sake of it, blah, blah.

(4) Yes, those three.

Star Wars: Rebels - 'A Fool's Hope' and 'Family Reunion... and Farewell'

"Right. You and that army."

Wow. Here it; the end of the road for the Rebels.

With Kanan gone, Ezra puts into motion his plan to free Lothal. It's his plan, details by Sabine, with Hera and Zeb forced to allow that their kids have grown up. Unfortunately, time is tight to deal with Governor Pryce before Thrawn returns, so the crew pull in as many allies as they can, including Sabine's ex-partner Ketsu, dyed-in-the-wool scoundrels Hondo and Visago, Rex's fellow clone troopers Gregor and Wolfe, and the former-agent Kallus.

Ezra lays out his plan to hit the Imperial compound, but the odds against them are high and Rider Azadi contacts Pryce, offering to sell out the Rebel cause. Come the morning, Pryce brings a gunship strike force to the Rebel base, and a brutal firefight ensues, while Hera and her reinforcements sneak past Thrawn's blockade, painfully slowly. After a fierce resistance, the Rebels are subdued, but Ezra tells Pryce that Azadi's betrayal was a fake to draw her out. She is dismissive, but then the Ghost drops in, and when it looks like the ground fight might still go badly, Rukh and the stormtroopers find themselves outmatched by the Loth-wolf pack.

"You do remember that I saw what you really look like, right?"

'Family Reunion... and Farewell' then picks up with the mission itself. Using codes extracted from Pryce under threat of Loth-wolf, the crew infiltrates the Imperial dome. The plan is to issue a planetary evacuation order, drawing all of the Imperial troops into the dome, then launch it - because it does that - and set a self-destruct to take out all of the occupying troops and armour on the planet, which is pretty metal, and plays to the future Rebel strength of blowing up round things full of Imperials. Pryce is snide about their chances, but Kallus manages to bluff through the evacuation order and they prepare to launch. Unfortunately, things go south, as Thrawn's command ship, the Chimaera, pops up above them. Unable to launch without crashing into the Chimaera and raining flaming metal across the city, and with the dome's shield generators disabled by Rukh, Ezra has little choice but to surrender to Thrawn. Most of the crew try to talk him out of it, but Sabine lets him slip away.

Future cute.

Ezra goes aboard the ship, while Sabine coordinates a strike on the shield generators to get the defences back on line. Ezra is show a reconstructed chunk of the Lothal Jedi temple, and meets the Emperor, albeit in a prettified holographic form. The Emperor wants him to reopen the World Between Worlds, offering in exchange the chance to go back, save his parents and remake his life. Although tempted, Ezra ultimately refuses, while below, Zeb is able to trap Rukh on a power converter, and the rest of the crew get the shields working, even though their position in the command deck is now under fire.

Following a secret mission for Ezra, Mart brings the hyperspace whales to the fight, mashing the bejeebus out of Imperial blockade fleet, with one of them reaching its hyperspace whale tentacles(1) in to grab Thrawn and so fulfil the Bendu's prophecy. The whales jump to hyperspace, dragging the Chimaera - and Ezra - with them, while the Imperial dome detonates with Pryce aboard, having refused to switch sides.

Okay; this is my fantasy PI spin-off for the series.

In an epilogue, Sabine explains that with the increasing pace of the Rebellion, the Empire never came back to Lothal. Hera and Rex fought at the Battle of Endor, alongside Spectre 7, Jacen Syndulla, the son of Hera and Kanan. After, Zeb took Kallas to the new home of the Lasat to find his own peace. Sabine herself thought that Ezra had asked her to look after Lothal, but eventually realised that he wanted her to coms and find him, which - accompanied by Ahsoka Tano - she sets out to do.

So, that was Star Wars Rebels, and it's been one hell of a journey. The story of Lothal and its defenders has touched on many corners of the Star Wars universe, and brought us a family of memorable characters, engaged in thrilling shenanigans and some serious character growth.

(1) Full disclosure, I'd practically forgotten these things, but it was all set up back when.

Star Wars: Rebels - 'Jedi Night', 'DUME', 'Wolves and a Door' and 'A World Between Worlds'

This is going to hurt, isn't it.

Having finished The Librarians, we're now winding up to the series finale of Star Wars: Rebels, although in this case it's not due to a cancellation, but the natural conclusion of the series in time for Rogue One to pick up the story.

'Jedi Night' follows from 'Rebel Assault', with Hera in Imperial custody and facing off against Grand Admiral Thrawn before being handed off to Governor Pryce for torture. Kanan, Ezra and Sabine infiltrate the Imperial compound using gliders, the younger Rebels securing transport while Kanan - sporting a severe new do - rescues Hera and steals back her kalikori. For the first time, if not ever then certainly in a while, they declare their feelings for one another, and the audience start to get sinking feelings. It's all looking pretty slick, but they reckon without Pryce, who opts to order her AT-AT to fire into an Imperial fuel depot rather than allow them to get away. As the tanks rupture and the fuel ignites, Kanan draws on the Force to hold back the flames, and to push the others into the transport and away from the blast. Kanan, however, is consumed by the blast, leaving the rest of the team bereft.

"You're very tall."

In 'DUME', the Rebels are basically in shock. Hera retreats into herself and Ezra is eaten up by guilt and despair, while Sabine and Zeb decide to head into the city when they realise that the Imperials are throwing a parade. Ezra is contacted by the Loth-wolves, in particular a gigantic wolf that speaks, calling itself Dume, which tells him to return to the Jedi temple. Hera, meanwhile, beats back her own grief by adding to the kalikori, symbolically bringing Kanan into her family. At the city, Zeb and Sabine encounter Rukh, and after a bad start are able to knock him out and send him into the city tied to his own speeder. They also realise that the destruction of the fuel depot has shut down the TIE Defender plant; they have lost many comrades and a dear friend, but their mission succeeded (and indeed, Thrawn angrily contacts Pryce to make it clear that the death of Kanan does not make up for delaying his programme, which may lead to his funding being reallocated to 'Project Stardust'.)

Apparently early Jedi art had some sort of Eastern Orthodox influences.

In 'Wolves and a Door', the team return to the temple, with the aid of the Loth-wolves, and find the site being excavated by Imperial engineers. The doors of the temple are long gone, but a great mural of the Mortis Gods(1) - the Father, the Son and the Daughter - stands on the wall, and Ezra recognises an owl that was often present when Ahsoka was around. Sabine works out that the hand gestures and star patterns in the mural form a kind of lock, which Ezra is able to manipulate using the Force. Sabine is captured but the Imperial Minister in charge of the dig, while Ezra is able to escape through a portal made of art, because that's the sort of thing you expect in Star Wars if your awareness of fantasy culture is such that you think it's fundamentally indistinguishable from Harry Potter.

Huh.

Which leads us to 'A World Between Worlds', in which Ezra finds himself in a strange, extra-dimensional space full of paths and portals, in which he can hear the voices of Master Yoda, Obi-Wan, and also Rey and Kylo. Shit has officially got weird, and I mean weirder than when giant wolves started talking to people and running through hyperspace. While Hera and Zeb rescue Sabine from a heated academic debate with the Minister, Ezra follows an owl and finds a portal which opens onto the climactic fight between Vader and Ahsoka, allowing him to pull Ahsoka away from the fight. Ezra at once sets out to try to save Kanan, but Ahsoka helps him to see that if he does so, all of the Rebels will have died in the fuel dump.

Or Force flames.

The Emperor starts throwing Force lightning into the void after Ahsoka and Ezra, but with an effort they are able to escape; Ahsoka to the aftermath of her duel(2), promising to come and find Ezra, and Ezra to the temple, where Sabine is able to guide him in sealing the void once more. The temple itself collapses into nothing, and the Rebels, their sense of purpose reaffirmed, determine to continue their fight on Lothal.

With three more episodes to go, Rebels has hit us hard in the feels and just got so... goddamn weird. I mean, Star Wars can be a little floaty-mistic sometime, and the Force clearly transcends space-time with its instantaneous communication and prophecies, but damn this was some next level shit. I don't know how well it meshes with stuff from The Clone Wars, but it's pretty left field for a primarily movie fan. I think I like it, but I confess I'm not entirely sure. In the more mundane arena, however, Rebels continues to excel. The team emerge from a tragic loss bloodied but unbowed, while the Imperials are undone once more by their reliance on an absolute command structure and the personal failings of their leadership, in this case Pryce's viciousness and tunnel vision.

I'm going to be so sad to see this series go. I wonder what, if anything, will follow it? I may also try to catch up on The Clone Wars after all this time.

(1) Deistic religion in Star Wars; who knew?

(2) Which explains her seeming appearance after the duel back in Season 2.

Star Trek Discovery - 'The War Without, the War Within' and 'Will You Take my Hand?'

"Well, that doesn't sound very likely."

Okay; let's bring this back home.

Returning to their own universe, the crew of the Discovery are boarded and subjected to involuntary mind meld to find out where they've been and what happened to Captain Lorca. To my great sorrow, this wasn't because they'd managed to transpose the Mirror Discovery and Captain Killy had been up to shenanigans, but rather just because the ship's disappearance was the start of everything going to shit. The Klingons have been running roughshod over Star Fleet, taking out starships and star bases all over the place, but there is one possible saving grace: Fragmented after the death of Kor, the Klingons are not securing territory; for all the loss of life, the invasion could still be defeated; and Discovery has a passenger who can tell them how. Two, in fact.

Ensign Tilly. Upholding the Federation way, one dinner table at a time.

Emperor Georgiou crushed the Mirror universe Klingons, and where the prime version of Qo'noS differs from that in the Mirror, they have a new source of information in Lt Tyler. It turns out that what L'rell did was excise the personality of V'oq from beneath the Tyler graft, and now what remains is Ash Tyler with an added layer of Klingon memories (who gets cold shouldered in the mess until Tilly steps up to be awesome,) and for some reason minus the Klingon hyperaggression and muscle endurance; apparently physiology and biochemistry are all in the mind. Anyway, a plan is planned: Discovery will seed a dead world with magic mushrooms, harvest the spores and then jump into the volcanic caves beneath Qo'noS to create a map of the planet's military installations so that Star Fleet can launch their own pre-emptive strike before the Klingons can reach Earth.

I'll be honest, I'm not clear how this actually works. If the Klingons are heading flat out for Earth, then how can Star Fleet get from a defensive line around Earth to an all-out attack on Qo'noS before they arrive and...? I know it turns out that this isn't the real plan, but how does it convince anyone who has to be involved? It takes a special kind of dodgy spatial logistics for 'oh, hey, look! Captain Georgiou is still alive!' to not be the hardest sell to the crew.

Cue the music.

In the finale of the season, Georgiou leads Burnham, Tilly and Tyler onto the surface of Qo'noS to send a mapping drone into an extinct volcano system. This involves infiltrating an Orion trading settlement, so it's green-skinned strip club ahoy! Tyler embraces his inner V'oq in pursuit of a key volcanic shrine, which weirds Burnham out, and while Geogiou gets the intel from a pair of bizarrely knowledgeable hookers - like, no one knows where this shrine is, except for one zealot in the street and a couple of pole dancers - Tilly figures out that they aren't delivering a probe to an extinct volvanic system, but a bomb to an active system, with the aim of utterly devastating the planet in a catastrophic cascade reaction.

Welp; this is gratuitous.

With the planet ready to blow, Burnham confronts Star Fleet Command on this grievous breach of protocol/being a bunch of genocidal dicks. She then ropes in L'rell, shows her that Star Fleet has the power to annihilate the Klingons, and hands over the detonator, allowing L'rell to take control and actually unite the Empire. Having demonstrated that the war with the Federation was not the way to bring the houses together, she urges L'rell to try another way of realising T'kuvma's dream. Tyler goes with her to try to work out his many, many issues, and the rest of the crew are hella heroes. Replete with medals, they head out to Vulcan to drop off Sarek, but are interrupted by a distress signal from Captain Christopher Pike aboard the USS Fanservice... I mean Enterprise.

So, that was Star Trek: Discovery, boldly going where no Star Trek series has gone before. It definitely had a pacing problem, in particular firing off all of its big plot guns over the course of a couple of episodes. I was also disappointed that it took the morally complex character of Gabriel Lorca and threw him hard under the bus, basically portraying him as everything short of a puppy-murderer in order to justify Emperor Georgiou's role as 'the slightly sympathetic one,' when really opposing the Terran Empire should have been a prima facie – albeit not absolute – argument for making a common cause. Then there's the death of Dr Hugh Culber, which still stings, and feels like the miscalculation which will most dog the series moving into the confirmed second season.

Star Trek: Discovery - 'What's Past is Prologue'

"Come at me, bro."

This week on Discovery, shit gets real as Lorca makes his move and Saru leads a last ditch bid to save the universe(1).

Lorca frees his captive supporters from the agony booths, including Mirror-Landry, who has of course not been savaged to death by a tardigrade. Rallying secret supporters aboard the Charon, he captures Mirror-Stamets and turns his work - a nasty set of bioweapons - against the Emperor's supporters. Michael escapes from the Emperor and is able to warn Discovery that Lorca is a Terran, while the Emperor's attempts to subdue the rebellion prove less than successful, allowing Lorca to take the throne room. Having done all he can usefully do to aid Lorca, Mirror-Stamets is summarily executed as part of an episode-long campaign to remind us that Lorca is the bad guy.

"There may come a day when the principals of Star Fleet fail, but it is not thisday!"

Stamets-Prime explains to Saru and Tilly that the Charon's big ball of glowy power is in fact a mycelial reactor, drawing power from the network and, in doing so, killing it. If the damage is not checked, the network will die and take all other life in the multiverse with it, so that would be bad. The reactor is impervious to their weapons, thanks to a containment field, and even their most photonic torpedoes would barely scratch it. Saru declares against the existence of a no-win scenario and plans are drawn: Michael joins forces with the Emperor to retake the throne room and shut down the containment field, while the torpedoes are primed with spores to massively increase their yield. This means using up all of their harvested spores, however, leaving their only hope of getting home a mad attempt to ride the detonation of the reactor.

Aided by Lorca's obsession with destiny, and with making Burnham his Empress, Burnham and Georgiou make it to the throne room, where they are able to take down the guards. Burnham refuses to kill Lorca, because Starfleet, but Georgiou has no such qualms, running him through and dropping him into the mycelial reactor for good measure. The Emperor then offers to hold off Lorca's remaining supporters until Discovery can retrieve Burnham, but at the last moment Burnham opts to grab her, so that they are both beamed to relative safety as the reactor detonates, taking out the Charon and flinging Discovery into the network. An overwhelmed Stamets is once more guided to safety by Dr Culber's voice, leading him to 'the clearing in the forest' and bringing Discovery back to its own universe.

"This is fine."

Unfortunately, they are nine months into their own futures and it looks as if the Klingons have pretty much won the war. It's also entirely possible that the Terran ISS Discovery has been jobbing around for the last nine months, trying to find a tongue for Captain Killy to lick her boots with.

Discovery continues to dangle increasingly vain hopes - this time the potential timey wimey of the mycelial network, vs. the loss of the spore stock - as well as messing with our sense of continuity - no-one in the Mirror, Mirror episode knew anything much about mirror universes or creation-critical mycelial networks, and there was no sense of a Federation recovering from near-total collapse less than nine years later. I guess one of these suggests a solution to the latter, although I am increasingly, if not contentedly, resigned to the loss of Dr Culber. Prove me wrong, Discovery; please.

This episode didn't have Shazad Latif in it at all, which is quite a come down from two of him just a couple of episodes ago, but we have Michelle Yeo back and I am sure that nothing could possibly go wrong with trying to integrate the genocidal ruler of a fascist empire into Star Fleet. This is what I mean about trying to make sure we know Lorca is the bad guy, by the way. While he is obviously an evil, manipulative motherfucker out to seize personal power and cop off with as many women(3) as he could, his cause was against an oppressive regime and who is to say that he was any worse than Georgiou? We were shown a lot of the latter's honour, against Lorca's ruthlessness, specifically to create a false moral divergence between the established and incoming fascist overlords. Notably, Emperor Georgiou didn't eat any Kelpians this episode, but I can't help feeling that Burnham would have done better by everyone to let her go down in a blaze of glory.

(1) Yeah; the damage to the mycelial network constitutes a threat to all life in the multiverse. Way to bury the lede(2).

(2) It is entirely conceivable that I just got distracted last week.

(3) Revealed as our villain, he yet remains unabashedly cis-het and white.

Star Trek: Discovery - 'Vaulting Ambition'

"Look at the size of that thing!"
"Yes, Jamie; it is a big one."

In the Mirror Universe, Burnham is summoned to bring Lorca to the Imperial Palace, a colossal starship called ISS Charon which is apparently powered by some sort of artificial sun (because apparently, despite having a fleet largely consisting of precise duplicates, decor notwithstanding, of the Federation Starfleet, the Terran Empire has made mad gains in the field of really fucking huge starships.) While the summons is their excuse, Burnham also needs to go on another data search to look for the original Defiant files, since the ones on the Shenzhou are heavily redacted(1). She gives Lorca a custom analgesic, designed to insulate against the effects of an agoniser, which is just as well. The Emperor welcomes her foster daughter, invites her to 'choose a Kelpian,' and sends Lorca to Cell Block C; the worst of all the cell blocks.

Sooo awkward.

Over a meal of tasty, tasty Kelpian(2), the Emperor tells Burnham that she knows she was Lorca's accomplice, forcing Burnham to come clean about the whole 'parallel universe' thing. This triggers the Emperor, who knows what the Federation is, to murder basically her entire ruling council. She reveals that the Defiant files wouldn't be any use to Discovery's crew on account of interphasic space throwing them through time and driving them all completely insane(3), but offers to trade the spore drive specs for the files and the freedom of the entire crew. Nevertheless, the Emperor keeps Lorca stuck in an agoniser booth.

Back on the Discovery, Tyler/Voq is literally tearing himself apart. Saru puts him in the cell with L'Rell to break through her warrior stoicism about sacrifice and prompt her to don a pair of laser mind-fuck gauntlets(4) to fix his persona, although as his last words before lapsing into unconsciousness are a Klingon prayer in English, I guess the jury is out on which way he's fixed; perhaps a blending of the two?

Also in brain-fix city, the two Stamets compare notes. Mirror Stamets was trapped in the mycelial network while working on a project aboard the Charon, but obviously not a spore drive. When Stamets accessed the network, Mirror Stamets was able to contact him, giving him flashes of the Mirror Universe, and now wants his help to get out of the network, before he is consumed by a toxic element sweeping through it. Culber appears, sadly not trapped in the network, but somehow preserved there, past death, to warn Stamets that his Mirror double is responsible for the damage and the toxic element. With Culber's support, Stamets wakes up, causing his double to wake on the Charon, and discovers that the fungus forest is dying.

He is evil, after all. That's... slightly disappointing.

Lorca is double-tortured by a Terran officer who is pissed that he seduced and abandoned his sister. He's demanding that Lorca say his sister's name, but of course he doesn't know it, except OH FUCKING SNAP! Emperor Giorgiou reveals that lighting is all muted and sinister in the Mirror Universe because Terrans are more sensitive to light(5), just like Lorca, who busts out and kills his torturer even as Burnham realises that he has been the Mirror version all along, and that his whole deal has been aimed at getting her to the Mirror Universe, in order to use her to get into the Imperial Palace.

Now, I admit, I didn't see that one coming, but it does make perfect sense, so props for that. Presumably, he must have been working with Mirror Stamets to have escaped through the mycelial network to the aftermath of the Battle of the Binary Stars, although I wonder if Mirror Stamets wasn't working on either the Tantalus field from Mirror, Mirror, or an attempt to duplicate it, which would explain his introduction of a destructive element into the mycelial network.

"And then I will kill all of you with a fidget spinner."

On the question of Culber, I'm still mad, and saddened that it looks like he won't be returning, save perhaps in the network. I'm on the fence whether this is a case of burying the gays, since Discovery's push for diversity makes it pretty much a given that significant deaths will be of minorities (especially now that the sole cishet male of note turns out to be an evil Mirror Universe wannabe despot whose reasons for choosing Saru as his first officer are now highly suspect(6),) but I am pretty pissed off that Culber has been shoved in the fridge; killed off not as part of his story, but of Stamets', and his ghost moved into the magical negro mould. On the other hand, I'm a cishet white guy, so I'm not going to be laying down the law about what's wrong with this death of gay African American Hugh Culber.

To finish on a more positive note, as I appreciated that Captain Killy did not owe her position in any way to sex or wiles, based on past use of the Mirror Universe, it was pleasing to see the relationship between Burnham and Giorgiou very definitely one of mother and daughter. Yes, Mirror Burnham was both Lorca's protégé and lover, but the sleaze factor is way down from DS9's cavalcade of glamorous lesbians(7), and the focus very much on the ruthless political machinations.

(1) So glad we had a week and a half looking for those.

(2) This is going to make for some awkward conversations.

(3) Time well spent.

(4) LMFGs for short.

(5) Which is some snarky metahumour right there.

(6) Although this ought not to be seen as a reflection on Saru, who is being pretty awesome as acting captain.

(7) This was literally the cleverest phrasing I could come up with. It's been a long week.

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.

Star Trek: Discovery - 'Despite Yourself'

"You are walking through a red forest and the grass is tall. It’s just rained.
Most of the blood has washed away."

And we're back, with the first post-break episode of Discovery.

Following up on last episode's cliffhanger, the crew of Discovery realise that they are where they should be, but sans starbase and surrounded by wrecked Klingon vessels. After they are attacked by a Vulcan ship, they come to the realisation that they are in an alternate universe; the mirror universe, where the Terran Empire is the dominant power in the alpha quadrant and Star Fleet promotion is via dead men's boots(1). Fortunately, they are able to grab a data core and learn before things get embarrassing and/or lethal that in this universe, Lorca is a fugitive after apparently murdering Burnham, who was the captain of the Shenzhou, and that the Discovery is commanded by none other than Sylvia 'Captain Killy' Tilly.

The first half of the episode is pretty light, as the crew redecorate the ship to look like its MU counterpart - assumed to have been transposed into the regular universe when Discovery accidentally unlocked the interdimensional axis of the mycelial network(2) - and Tilly taps into her inner bitch queen from hell. Unfortunately, all is not laughs and light, as Culber struggles to treat Stamets, whose over-exposure to the spore drive has left him pale-eyed and largely unresponsive. In addition, Tyler's fugues are not helped by L'Rell using a Klingon prayer to try to help him 'remember who he really is.'

"She's like a twisted version of everything I've ever aspired to be.
I'm gonna have nightmares about myself now."

Finding references to the visit of the USS Defiant, Burnham suggests that details of that visit could give them a clue how to get back without the spore drive. To get these records, she plans to board the Shenzhou, announce that rumours of her death were greatly exaggerated in order to allow her to capture Lorca, present him as a bounty and retake command. Then she can access the secure files aboard the Shenzhou and it's home for tea and crumpets (and to hand over the critical anti-cloaking equations.) Tyler will act as Burnham's bodyguard, since he has no known MU counterpart - funny that - and he desperately tries to get Dr Culber to find out what was done to him without getting pulled from duty. Alas, Culber learns that Tyler has undergone extensive bone reshaping, and Tyler kills him.

Not going to lie to you, I am not happy about this. There's been a lot of backlash against Culber's death, since he's both an excellent character and one of the few who straight up butts heads with Lorca over his dodgier decisions, and one half of what is a) the franchise's first on-ship gay couple, and b) the most adorable couple on the Disco(3). I'm not happy for both these reasons, although I will allow that the high level of representation on the series - there are only one and a half cishet white men in regular speaking roles and one of them is an alien - means that minority characters will catch a fair percentage of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune(4). Now, After Trek insists that he is 'not 100% dead', so since they've ruled out his mirror version I'm thinking some sort of fungus-based or even tardigrade miracle cure for a snapped neck, but I guess we'll find out.

Damnit.

Anyhugh. Tilly threatens to rip a man's tongue out and use it to lick her own boots, and thus Burnham is placed aboard the Shenzhou, where she is forced to allow Lorca to be placed in an agoniser booth and then to kill her replacement as captain(5) when he tries to protect his promotion. What with one thing and another, she's kept super busy until late in the day, at which point she retires to her cabin to get all The Bodyguard with her bodyguard(6), while Lorca frankly languishes.

So, it would appear that we were right about Tyler. Shazad Latif is a good enough actor and a big enough woobie that you still feel bad for his confusion and pain, just a lot less bad than you do for Culber suffering the fate of those who are too clever for their billing. I wait to be convinced on that one, because right now it felt like a shock for shock's sake, which is a bad reason to kill anyone, let alone to traverse the perilous waters of killing your gays.

For the future, we have the aftermath of Cuber's death to explore, the way back to the main universe, whatever damage the Witch of Wurna Minor may have done, and the mystery identity of the Terran Emperor, the anonymity of which has been referenced so often that we can't possibly go home without a shocking reveal.

(1) Or dead women's boots, because thankfully there are no 'captain's women' in this incarnation of the MU, just captains and women, often both at once. Possibly this is a result of the Constitution-class USS Defiant making a time-slipped journey to the MU and encountering the Enterprise NX-01, and Hoshi Sato subsequently overthrowing her male colleagues.

(2) I'm starting to realise why no-one ever replicated the spore drive.

(3) A title they were unlikely to lose so long as Tilly remained single, and even then with anyone currently on the ship.

(4)My next essay on fan reaction is totally going to be called 'The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fandom.'

(5) A fresh-faced youth whose alternate she had to watch die in the brig in the two-part opener.

(6) Apparently this too is time she couldn't be spending retrieving the information from the secure terminal which, presumably, the captain has in her cabin.