Star Trek: Discovery: Season 1 – Episode 12 ‘Vaulting Ambition’ REVIEW

After last week’s reveal that Georgiou is the emperor in the evil universe, now Michael and Lorca are off to pay her a visit. The information they got about the Defiant has had some crucial details redacted, but the imperial flagship is the obvious place to look for it – so Lorca, despite having been held in a pain booth, seems suspiciously chipper. Michael is more wary, as this is her first time seeing Georgiou since getting her killed, which is an odd sentence to write, but then it’s always been touch-and-go telling the difference between Star Trek characters and their evil universe equivalents.

Georgiou receives her about as warmly as possible, coming from an evil emperor – and, as if their dynamic wasn’t confused enough, reveals that in this universe that Michael is her adopted daughter. (Though Lorca goes straight back in the agoniser after Georgiou belts him a couple of times.) Michael and Georgiou sit down to dinner together – it’s a hearty stew of roast Kelpian, as in, the species Seru’s from. Georgiou feeds Michael a gland in a way that, to put it politely, seems less than motherly – then almost immediately holds a knife to her throat and starts accusing her of having been in league with Lorca the whole time.

While this twist seems unnecessary – if Georgiou was going to confront Michael over being a traitor, why not do it straight away? – Michelle Yeoh does a wonderful villainous job with the script she’s been given. It’s not the overacting villainy you might expect from someone wearing that much cloth-of-gold, or indeed from Star Trek generally, rather it’s a more subtle, understated performance that turns out incredibly effective. Chalk up another reason they killed her off too soon.

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So, Michael is hauled back into the throne room, and Georgiou prepares to execute her in the most merciful way this spacefaring evil empire has to offer – with a sword. Now thoroughly out of options, Michael falls back on how this has nothing to do with her, since she isn’t even from this universe. What’s more, she can prove it, as she’s been keeping her Georgiou’s Starfleet badge as a totem, and like all material from the other universe, its quantum readings are all wrong.

With Michael’s story proved, Georgiou immediately murders everyone else in the room, bar one guy who she orders to get rid of the bodies and tell nobody – again, something which seems unnecessary coming from an evil emperor. She tells Michael that they in the evil universe are well aware of how the USS Defiant came to visit them – and crucially, that the Defiant’s crew all went horribly insane. Logically Discovery must have some fancy new engine, and so Georgiou offers to help them get home in exchange for the plans to the mushroom engine.

Speaking of, back on Discovery, Stamets appears to be recovering in the mushroom chamber – and things are getting interesting inside his head, now that he’s met his evil counterpart in dreamland. Evil Stamets explains that he too was working on mushroom technology, and ended up trapped here, but normal Stamets is the key to escaping. In classic sci-fi form, the landscape here quickly changes from full CGI to the ship’s corridors, that is to say the cheapest option available – although in a nice touch, a background panel has the ship registered as the USS Stamets.

Evil Stamets wants him to get right back in the lab and get working on a way out, because the mushroom network is collapsing in on itself and has given him a horrible rash – but then Stamets spots Culber wandering down a corridor, and makes the obvious choice and goes after him. So, even as evil Stamets bangs on the door and complains, Stamets and Culber get to share a farewell scene and a last kiss. With Culber’s encouragement, Stamets finally manages to wake up from his coma – although way the waking-up is shot seems to suggest that the Stametses have swapped bodies.

It’s very unclear from what we’re given, but if so, this would place our Stamets on the imperial flagship, not far from Michael and Lorca. Either way, one Stamets goes into Discovery’s mushroom room, only to find the whole crop grey and dying with the blight that’s destroying the mushroom network.

Elsewhere on Discovery, Ash/Voq is reacting very badly to having two consciousnesses crammed into his head, and is having to be held down in sick bay. Seru goes to ask L’Rell just what’s going on, and if she can possibly help him. She gives a tirade in return, about how he’s a warrior and they’re fighting in a war. Even Seru informing her that they’re in the evil universe and the war’s long since over here fails to move her – so, eventually, he beams Ash/Voq right into her cell, and seeing how badly he’s torn himself up finally makes her relent.

With some four Starfleet people holding guns on her, they let L’Rell operate on Ash/Voq to sort him out. He finds it agonising, but then that’s what you’d expect from Klingon surgery that involves jabbing electricity into the brain. Over the course of the operation he screams out prayers in Klingon, but then towards the end is murmuring them in English (or possibly space-ese, which is astonishingly the same as English).

On the imperial flagship, Lorca’s still in the agony booth, and the controls have been taken over by a captain with a grudge against him. It seems Lorca corrupted the guy’s sister and left her to die, and now he wants her to say her name and admit it – going as far as melting another rebel in front of him. And this all seems terribly awkward, since this is the Lorca from the normal universe, and won’t even know who he’s talking about, right? R-right?

At about this time, Michael notices that, like Lorca, evil Georgiou is surprisingly sensitive to light – which Georgiou helpfully confirms is the only physiological difference between humans in the good and evil universes. Like the denouement of any detective drama, this seemingly innocuous clue prompts Michael to have a series of flashbacks that make it all too obvious Lorca’s been up to something the entire time – that he very deliberately got Michael onto his crew, that he very deliberately got them into the mirror universe, and especially deliberately made sure he ended up on the imperial flagship.

Cut back to the torture chamber, where – this revelation having been made – Lorca suddenly turns the tables on the captain, beats the guy to a pulp, and says his sister’s name. And just to taunt, says that she was ‘good’, but that someone better, i.e. evil Michael and now normal Michael, came along, adding an absurdly creepy edge to his vaguely paternal relationship with her. It is of course very interesting and complicated that everything was all part of someone’s evil scheme, but he is still alone on a ship full of enemies, so next week’s likely to concern how he had planned for that all along too.

 

The Trek essentials:

to explore strange new worlds‘: We had a teaser of the mushroom astral plane last week, so no points there. The imperial flagship sort of counts, as it seems to be pulling double duty as battleship and palace – although this begs the question of why the Terran empire isn’t based on, you know, Terra.

to seek out new life and new civilisations‘: Not much beyond a further look into the complicated family situation of Emperor Georgiou.

to boldly go where no one has gone before‘: Lorca having been from the evil universe all along hasn’t strictly been done before, but is very similar to the DS9 plotline where Dr Bashir is replaced by a shapeshifter and nobody notices for some months. However, it does beg the question – what happened to the Lorca from the normal universe? Did he end up on evil Discovery as part of his own master plan?

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