Some of the lights on Discovery are screwing up, possibly because they’re having to run on mirror-universe technology. It is over the course of fixing them that the crew finally discover Culber’s body – Stamets is lying clutching him in a corridor, still gibbering about the forest. Exactly how catatonic Stamets is seems to vary from scene to scene, but more importantly, apparently there’s no mechanism to tell if someone’s been murdered in sickbay, or if the patient you’re keeping there for observation wanders out holding a corpse.
Meanwhile, on the Shenzhou, Michael’s getting worried by how well she’s acclimatising to acting as an evil captain – including having Seru, who’s a slave here, bathe her. In the original mirror universe episode, Kirk noted that the people from the good universe could successfully pretend they belonged in the evil universe, but that this didn’t work the other way around (due largely to the evil universe people’s lack of impulse control and violent tendencies). Still, Michael probably has a point about the experience being wearing – and as if to really hammer home the point about the difficulties of going undercover, there’s Ash snuggled up in bed with her.
This week, the adventure is to track down the coalition of aliens who lead the resistance. The reasons are twofold – it’ll bolster Michael’s credentials as an evil Terran captain, and, since the mysterious and charismatic leader of the resistance known as ‘the firewolf’ is a Klingon, they might just provide a path to peace back in the normal universe. The difficulty, of course, will be in juggling these two tasks. Michael very nearly gives the game away when she doesn’t just bombard the planet from orbit, but recovers nicely when she asks how dare anyone question her orders.
When she and Ash beam down, they immediately have laser blasts and explosions coming at them from all sides and narrowly missing. While they surrender quickly, it begs the question of why the rebels didn’t shoot to kill in the first place, especially as in this universe Michael is well-known as a butcher. They get taken to the hidden rebel base, and meet the firewolf – who turns out to be mirror-universe Voq, a situation which is profoundly awkward for Ash, who’s having Voq’s memories and personality creep closer and closer to the surface.
Understandably, Voq isn’t inclined to trust these Terran scum who’ve killed many thousands of his people and now want to come and talk turkey. But luckily, there’s a way around that, and he brings out the local prophet – mirror-universe Sarek, with the obligatory evil goatee – to do a mind-meld with Michael and see if they’re for real. For obvious, adoptive-daughter-related reasons, Sarek then vouches for Michael, although he sensibly leaves out the mirror-universe stuff, since that would just be opening up a whole new can of worms.
Voq agrees to evacuate all the rebel bases in the system before Michael starts blowing them up, so she keeps up the bloodthirsty warlord image, nobody dies, and everyone wins. In exchange, she asks him how he ended up banded together with a bunch of non-Klingons. He bluntly states that it’s because the Terrans provided an obvious common enemy. As this isn’t particularly useful advice back in the good universe, she pushes further, asking how he can reconcile this alliance with the Klingon ideas of honour, and of chopping people up – with Ash getting visibly more distressed at every mention of Klingon customs.
Eventually – half-blind from constantly flashing back to everything T’kuvma said that contradicts all the reasonable things mirror-Voq is saying now – it all gets too much for Ash, who barks out some of his old Klingon-supremacist dogma and goes for Voq’s throat. But with only a puny human body to work with, Voq easily knocks him on his arse, a process which is only delayed by Voq’s surprise at being addressed in his lost native language. Against all odds, and thanks to Sarek, this doesn’t end up torpedoing the entire meeting.
Amazingly, Michael doesn’t confront him about this immediately, waiting until they’re back on the Shenzhou and alone together before broaching the subject. He starts off by talking about L’Rell in a way that seems more like Stockholm syndrome, but eventually it all comes out – including how he murdered Culber – in another string of jumpy, dimly-lit flashback shots, the clearest of which are all fairly graphic shots of the invasive surgery that turned Voq into Ash. Honestly, the sheer volume feels unnecessary – I know that Discovery is now a gritty big-boy show that says ‘fuck’ and everything, but really, they could have accomplished more by trimming it back to flashes of scalpels and gore running across a table. Showing many, many close-ups of open flesh (which, knowing how SFX works, is likely actually insulating foam and food colouring) adds nothing except an age rating.
Despite having pulled her phaser on him some time ago, Michael is unwilling to just shoot him – so Ash tries to throttle her, and is only stopped when mirror-Seru intervenes and throws him contemptuously aside. Chalk up another loss for the puny humans. Ash is sentenced to what appears to be the Terrans’ standard execution, being beamed out into space – but just as he’s beginning to freeze, Discovery beams him aboard. Normal-Seru is there to greet him, and, more importantly, to grab the data-chip Michael stashed in his holster. It contains all the Terrans’ records on the USS Defiant, the last ship to end up in the mirror universe – and, with a bit of luck, details on how it got back.
Discovery hasn’t just been waiting in the wings this week – they’ve also been trying to treat Stamets, who has some alarming red things going on in the scan of his brain. Tilly assumes responsibility, since it was caused by the mushroom drive, and tries to cure him by sticking him straight back in the mushroom drive. The old saying goes that when all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. The exact reasoning she uses isn’t a whole lot better – something about mushrooms being the only organism to link life and death, which is only an eyelash away from reversing the polarity of the neutron flow.
Tilly explains to Seru how after a previous session in the mushroom drive, Stamets had called her ‘captain’, suggesting that he’s been having visions of the mirror universe for a while now. Despite a minor health scare in which all his vital signs cut off, Stamets doesn’t seem to be actually dying, and all those red things on his scan are calming down a bit. We last see him in some kind of mushroom-based astral plane, where he meets the evil version of himself.
Back on the Shenzhou, there’s more bad news for Michael, as the Terrans, not wanting to leave anything to chance with the rebel base, bomb the entire planet before they get the chance to flee. And then Michael gets a call from the emperor, who, as it turns out, is mirror-universe Georgiou, wearing what’s possibly the silliest outfit yet. She’s incredibly miffed at Michael fumbling around and not blowing up the planet herself, which will hopefully prompt some real heavy villain overacting next week.
The Trek essentials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBL3WWVX4Hk
‘to explore strange new worlds’: Pretty much what you’d expect from a rebel base in the evil universe – a gravel quarry with a hidden Mos Eisley-style base, which is then blown up.
‘to seek out new life and new civilisations’: Mirror-Voq is given a bit of time to set out how his rebellion is held together – largely by pragmatism, but still, it gives a good look inside.
‘to boldly go where no one has gone before’: While we’ve technically been there before, Stamets’s journey on the astral plane is likely to go to strange new places.
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