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.

TV Roundup - Discovery, Inhumans, The Good Place, and not Stranger Things

Having spent November doing NaNoWriMo, I've fallen behind a bit on both my new TV watching and my reviewing. I'm going to do a bit of a catch-up here before getting back into it for December.

First up, Marvel's bid for Kinga Forrester-style global media domination continues with the opening quartet of episodes from Inhumans – ‘Behold… The Inhumans’, ‘Those Who Would Destroy Us’, 'Divide and Conquer' and 'Make way for… Medusa'.

We begin our story in Hawai'i, where a fish-looking dude named Triton fundamentally fails to rescue a newly changed Inhuman from men with guns. Then we transition to the Moon, and the hidden city of Attlian on the far side of Earth's only natural satellite(1), where the Inhuman Royal Family rules over a high-powered elite and a massive underclass of those Inhumans who turn out to have rubbish powers. Maximus, brother to Black Bolt(2), king of the Inhumans, came out of his terrigenesis purely human. He argues that the Inhumans should go to Earth and take over, allowing them to live and breathe free and liberate the toiling underclass. By replacing them with a toiling underclass of humans, certainly, but honestly in the early episodes he's scoring major points against the other Royals, whose interactions with their social inferiors are limited to patronising those who gain cool flying powers and dissing servants for being attracted to them.

Who is this girl? We will literally never know.

So, spoilers for this review if nothing else, I don't like the Inhumans. I'm going to watch the remaining four episodes of Inhumans, but the characters themselves I do not like.

With Triton vanished and Gorgon, leader of the Royal Guard, on Earth looking for him, and a young seer falling into his influence, Maximus launches a coup. He directs the Inhuman-hunting mercenaries to kill Gorgon, which doesn't go well for them, captures and shaves Queen Medusa's animate kung-fu hair - because what would this series be without a man forcibly divesting a woman he has expressed desire for of her power? - and tries to kill his brother to prevent him using his power, a voice which annihilates everything in its path. Since this power is basically uncontrolled - he can whisper or shout, but not focus the blast - Black Bolt has the ultimate power of awesome uselessness.

 

The hair is cool, but ind of moves around Medusa, instead of with her. The
result is to make Medusa herself seem a very passive character.

Medusa's sister, ice-slinger Crystal(3), uses her teleporting dog Lockjaw to send Black Bolt, Medusa, and douchebag quasi-Vulcan prognosticator Karnak to Earth, but she and Lockjaw are captured for a time. Black Bolt gets arrested after walking off with a suit, and he and Medusa try to find one another by basically treating the world like they own it. Black Bolt is broken out of prison and escapes with an Inhuman named Sammy to a compound run by Declan, a geneticist who is generally well-meaning, but working with Maximus, where Medusa finds them after generally being a dick to space scientist Louise. Gorgon hooks up with some surfing military veterans and barely fights off an attack by the Royal Guard, including Mordis, an off-brand version of Cyclops. Karnak gets a bump on the noggin and works on a cannabis farm while his powers are on the fritz, getting his freak on and apparently provoking one of his fellow farmers to start a lethal buyout of his comrades. Crystal escapes when called on to give a speech supporting Maximus, who uses this to accuse the Royal Family of being quitters wot run when the going gets tough. She gets to Earth, but Lockjaw is hit by a car, introducing her to friendly locals Dave and Audrey, to whom she is a dick about them accidentally hitting and failing to instantly heal her dog.

In short, a bunch of Inhumans who were dicks to their fellow Inhumans on the Moon come to Earth and are dicks to humans. Our heroes, folks. Inhumans is a massively ambitious show, with a cast full of superpowered characters, but there just isn't that much to like. Anson Mount's Black Bolt is a complete stiff on the Moon. He's better once he gets into prison and starts to look baffled by stuff, but a mute character is tough to do well in television, especially as part of a speaking ensemble. All of the Royals treat the underclass like crap, and it's not as if it’s a small divide. The Royal Family aren't the upper levels of an all-around crapsack society, they live in a glorious, artificial paradise, while the peons work in the mines and starve. There is some indication that Black Bolt may have been trying to make changes, but it's hard to see him as a man of the people and Maximus will always have that over him in terms of sympathy. The rest of the Royals are just as bad, always slagging off those who are 'only human' and looing down their noses at anyone whose powers aren't cool. No place here for Arm-Fall-Off Boy(4).

Inhumans: Ultimately, far more Agents of SHIELD than Legion, but with the saving grace of a short season.

Next, the last two episodes leading to the mid-season finale of Star Trek: Discovery - 'Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum' and 'Into the Forest I Go'.

"I talk to the trees..."

The war is going badly for the Federation. The Klingon sarcophagus ship is back in action, which means that the Federation fleet is struggling to cope with waves of cloaked enemy vessels. They need a new edge; a means to detect and target the cloaked vessels before they pop out and murder your friends. They need - and bear with me on this - sonar. There's a world, right, which is all one big forest, except for what appears to be a naturally occurring antenna. The trees in the forest sing and the antenna broadcasts this song into space. The crew of the Discovery believe that this signal can be used to detect the cloaked vessels because gosh darnit it just can, THAT'S WHY, okay!

Burnham and Tyler accompany Saru to locate the source of the song, which turns out to be a kind of collective tree consciousness, which gets into Saru's head and makes him feel safe. This causes him to go mental and try to trap his away team on the planet, but Burnham and Tyler are able to stop him and Burnham seems to persuade the mind that they have good intentions and just want to bring an end to the war. Meanwhile, creepy Klingon interrogator L'Rell tries to defect while rescuing Admiral Cornwell, but is forced to abort and smack the Admiral against a thing that sparks, seemingly killing her, only to be condemned herself by Kol. Luckily for her, Kol is distracted when the forest planet sends a subspace shout into the void to invite the Klingons to attend a peace summit, because apparently trees are total Pollyannas.

It seems shocking that an M/M kiss is somewhere that, in Star Trek at least, no
man has gone before.

This brings us on to 'Into the Forest I Go'(5), in which the Discovery faces off against the sarcophagus ship. Stamets is getting burned out and intends to quit soon for the sake of his health, but not before undertaking one last mission. In order to defeat the sarcophagus ship, Burnham and Tyler will sneak aboard as it briefly appears to shoot at the Discovery and plant a few large, blinking and flashing sensor buoys in largely public spaces. Then the Discovery simply has to make a few hundred consecutive jumps in order to conduct a vast number of sensor sweeps from all angles.

The boarding party find L'Rell and the not-entirely-dead Cornwell, and Tyler freaks out a bit and has flashbacks to what is either him having sex with L'Rell back when he was Voq(6) or L'Rell committing what would be a very serious offence outwith the framework of a brutal military regime. Burnham has to go on alone, then to distract the Klingons by revealing herself as the killer of T'Kuvma the One and Only. She fights Kol and manages not to just fall down in the face of his slightly greater skill and vastly superior strength and resilience, buying time for the Discovery to bounce around it like a mad thing, vaguely reminiscent of Scrappy Doo.

Nice set. Shame if it were to... catch fire.

Anyway, Discovery transports Burnham, Tyler, Cornwell and L'Rell aboard, then blows the crap out of the Sarcophagus Ship. Lorca ships Cornwell off to a medical facility, L'Rell assures Tyler that she won't let anyone hurt him, and then a final black alert jump takes the ship... elsewhere.

The theory has long been out there that Tyler is in fact Voq, transformed into a human aspect like that dude in Trouble with Tribbles, and if this much is true then also brainwashed to believe that he is a human. I still subscribe to this theory, although I'm starting to hope that I'm wrong, because if I am then Star Trek is looking like it's going to tackle a serious subject in a serious manner (in contrast to previous series, which have tended to be played a bit more as Arthurian love potion plot than as sexual assault.

Anyway; now we're into the mid-season break, so Discovery reviews will return some time in January.

I watched the first episode of Season 2 of Stranger Things, but I want to take another pass at that when I have time to get a few episodes in, so finally for this time I caught Season 1 of The Good Place, a Netflix sitcom about the afterlife.

Eleanor Shellstrop (Frozen's Kristen Bell) finds herself in the afterlife after a particularly humiliating death, but learns that her sterling work as a human rights lawyer has earned her one of the small number of places in the Good Place. She will spend eternity in an idyllic neighbourhood under the direction of architect Michael (Ted Danson) and virtual guide Janet (D'Arcy Carden), cohabiting with her soulmate Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper). The only problem is that Eleanor Shellstrop is not a human rights lawyer, but a self-absorbed, manipulative saleswoman who resents her compact, 'Icelandic primitive' house and envies on every level her perfect neighbours, Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil) and Jianyu (Manny Jacinto). As her thoughtless bad behaviour appears to be plunging the neighbourhood into chaos, Eleanor struggles to learn to be a good person, with the aid of Chidi.

Actually, I call it a sitcom, and it has many of the hallmarks of the genre, but it becomes apparent through the course of the season that it is actually a developing series, which develops its characters and situation before finally throwing a massive curveball in the season finale(7). The leads are all excellent, and even though none of the characters are intrinsically very likeable, Bell actually manages to make us root for the vaguely reforming horror show that is Eleanor. The show is witty and fast-paced, and notably features a widely diverse cast - the leads are a white woman, a black man, an Asian American man and a British Muslim woman.

Also, the running gag that no-one can swear in the Good Place could be annoying, but is forking hilarious. That must have taken some doing.

So, in summary: Discovery is a definite keeper, Inhumans has the virtue of smallness, and The Good Place is a gem to set alongside The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

(1) A status I would not be surprised to see challenged by the revelation that it was put there by the Kree in a later instalment.

(2) As near as I can tell, this is his given name.

(3) Who is painfully princessy.

(4) Admittedly this is at least partly because he's a DC character.

(5) The title is taken from a poem by naturalist (John Muir https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YInfr0hm4A): 'Into the forest I go, To lose my mind and find my soul.' It's a beautiful line, although probably the 19^th century equivalent of those 'this is an antidepressant' memes if you really analyse it. It is also widely attributed to 'unknown' for some reason.

(6) See below for theory discussion.

(7) Season 2 is making a strong showing, despite the immense challenge set by this twist cliff-hanger.

Star Trek: Discovery - 'Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad'

"I own you like I own this doughnut!"

It turns out that being a dick to someone breeds a certain resentment, even if they’ve been just as much a dick to you.

Burnham and Tyler are called away from a crew party(1) and the associated forced romantic development by the sudden appearance of a kind of space whale. Compelled by Starfleet regulations to transport said beastie to a sanctuary, they beam it aboard, whereupon Harry Mudd comes out of the whale in body armour and starts shooting his way through the ship. Once trapped, he blows himself up, taking the ship with him and, in a not entirely surprising twist as soon as the ship explodes, we’re back at the party.

That’s right, fellow nerds, it’s time to do the time warp again. Mudd is using a fancy crystal hidden on a ship inside the whale to create a time loop - and, seriously, how did they not see that one coming – allowing him to repeat his attack over and over again, learning the ship’s security codes and going deeper and deeper into the ship each time, learning more and more about the spore drive with the intention of eventually rejoining the time stream and selling the information to the Klingons. The only obstacle to his success: Lieutenant Stamets, whose tardigrade DNA not only allows him access to the panspermia and makes him a more touchy-feely sort of guy, but sets him somewhat outside of linear time. Unfortunately, it also makes him a little less than convincing as a witness, since he’s acting like he’s a little crazy most of the time.

As the iterations progress and Mudd becomes rapidly able to utterly suborn the Discovery’s computer, Stamets and Burnham must convince their colleagues to take drastic action to prevent the exposure of the ship’s secrets.

‘Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad’ is a fun episode, but suffers from exposure to fridge logic; especially the time turner question. As low-grade grifters go, Harry Mudd is one hell of an overachiever, using a truly staggering piece of technology to pull off bank jobs and revenge espionage, and if this technology is known, then why isn’t the Discovery at least exploring that? Also, the crew send Mudd back to his fiancée and her arms dealer father as punishment for mass murder and espionage, as well as seemingly letting him walk away with at the very least vast anecdotal information on the spore drive.

On the other hand… it’s pretty Star Trek.

Also on the down side, the Burnham/Tyler thing is so-so, and cuts into our Burnham and Tilly bonding time. On the upside, Stamets and Culber are delightful, and their meeting story positively adorkable.

(1) One’s a lieutenant, the other’s a notional specialist. How are they at the same parties? Why does Burnham room with Tilly and eat in the officers’ mess? I know Starfleet is supposed to be egalitarian, but then why do they even have enlisted grades?

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.