Despite Yourself

Star Trek: Discovery returned last night, with an episode that showed you don't necessarily need surprises to entertain the audience. Fans had been ahead of many of the plot developments revealed last night, but that didn't stop the episode from coming together wonderfully. (There was, of course, one big surprise no one saw coming, but I'll come back to that.)

As many expected, the Discovery has spore jumped its way into the Mirror Universe, that recurring Star Trek reality that gave us a goateed Spock, vampy Kira, and other joys over the course of three series and nearly a dozen episodes. Not for a moment did I feel a sense of "been there, done that" as the episode unfolded. Any sense of familiarity was more like welcoming home an old friend.

If anything, the Mirror Universe feels like a far more vital narrative device to engage with in this decade than ever before. It's a place where totalitarian, xenophobic, and violent instincts are allowed to run amok, and this feels like a very topical thing to explore in 2018. Moreover, Discovery seems poised for the most lengthy and introspective examination of the Mirror Universe than Star Trek has ever done before -- the original series addressed it, but only in a single episode; Deep Space Nine went multiple times, but mostly just for campy fun; Enterprise did a two-parter, but being self-contained in the Mirror Universe without having any "regular" characters go there really kept things from getting all that introspective. Discovery seems poised to be there for a while, and to be really engaging with the morass the whole time. It's a set up for serious moral exploration, what Star Trek does best.

There were loads of callbacks to thrill longtime Trek fans, from the return of the Terran Empire salute to a truly horrifying reimagining of the original series' agony booth. It's not all going to be grim and dark, though. There was plenty of fun throughout the episode, most of it courtesy of Tilly, who was forced out her shell to become "Captain Killy." Hilarious stuff, but also great for the arc of her character, to be forced into a situation where she must "defy every instinct."

Elevating an already strong concept and script was Jonathan Frakes, who returned to the Star Trek director's chair to helm this installment. The episode was full of great camera work and great performances. The biggest moments landed with their full weight -- particularly effective were the brutal turbolift fight involving Burnham, the disturbing new glimpses at Tyler's buried memories, and that closing shot of Lorca in the agony booth.

But one twist -- the big surprise I alluded to earlier -- didn't sit too well with me. (And in case I really needed to say it after you've come this far, SPOILERS here.) The death of Dr. Culber was a particularly cruel twist (pun not intended). The "Bury Your Gays" trope of television, in which LGBT couples are never allowed to have a happy ending together, it a sadly pernicious and insidious one. To be fair, there aren't very many couples in a long-term relationship on Star Trek, gay or straight, and most of the straight ones have met unhappy ends too. So I don't really think this is the darkest instance of the trope, punishing the gay couple while straight ones are left untroubled. Still, it's really toying with the emotions of LGBT fans to finally give Trek series a gay couple, finally show them kiss in a powerful and dramatic moment, and then kill one of them off in literally the next episode.

I'm seeing some talk this morning online that the After Trek show (which I don't watch) specifically addressed this, with the writers coming on to beg our indulgence. They say they're aware of the trope, and are telling the story the way they think it needs to be told. Have patience. Well, I'll give them that they certainly got shock value out of it. And certainly, this didn't enrage me to the point of dropping the show. But writers, I am truly and deeply disappointed on this one.

As I said, it's not like the straight couple here isn't having troubles. Burnham and Tyler slept together for the first time at the end of the episode, but in truly ghoulish circumstances, not long in the aftermath of each having killed a person. And Tyler, of course, is still wrestling with a revelation many fans saw coming, that he's really a Klingon sleeper agent. (Though the episode didn't specifically confirm it, he's surely Voq, the albino Klingon "torchbearer" from Discovery's early episodes.) In an earlier blog post, I noted that I'd heard about this twist (without specifying what it was), and commented that if true, it might be the dumbest plot twist ever. Fortunately, context has rendered that prediction wrong. Tyler doesn't know he's Voq, which keeps all the honest examination of PTSD and torture in play, and adds a provocative dose of split personalities to the mix as well.

I don't usually spend much time trying to predict where the story will be heading next, but a few things seem clear to me:

• Stamets is seeing the future in his visions. He called Tilley "captain" when he began to lose his mind in the previous episode, and he tried to warn Culber of the "enemy" there in the room. So when he's warning them not to go to the "palace," know that he's right, and know that they're going to go there anyway.

• The palace is probably that of the Emperor, alluded to enough times in this episode that it pretty much has to be someone we know, yes? I'm ruling out a woman, since when Hoshi Sato took the throne in the Enterprise Mirror Universe episodes, she called herself an Empress. So, what noteworthy guys could show up? Culber, "back from the dead?" One of the main cast? Some prominent guest star?

• Another popular fan theory is that Captain Lorca is from the Mirror Universe originally. What we got in this episode didn't disprove it; indeed, it added a fun wrinkle to it by suggesting that if he is from the Mirror Universe, he could actually be one of the good guys there, a Terran rebel.

• By specifically mentioning how the Defiant traveled through time to reach the Mirror Universe, they've set up that whenever Discovery returns to our universe, it might not return to the same point in time. This could certainly explain away some of the "continuity errors" that have been seemingly introduced by this series -- if Discovery returns at some future point, none of its tech or (heh) discoveries would have been a part of history.

I enjoyed this episode a great deal, and would grade it an A-. The "minus" is pretty much specifically for the gross and disappointing fate of Dr. Culber, so I suppose if there really is more context there yet to come, as the writers promise, I might feel differently down the road. We'll see.