Star Trek: Discovery: Season 1- Episode 6 ‘Lethe’ REVIEW

We join Discovery this week in the middle of some jolly bonding sessions – Michael is taking Tilly on a run, on the basis that her sparkling personality alone may not see her to Captain-level. Their workout gear includes shirts that read ‘DISCO’, which sort of makes sense, but if you’re going to abbreviate ‘Discovery’ why would you do it like that?

Meanwhile, Lorca and Ash are seeking catharsis for their misadventures last week by splattering a bunch of Klingons on the holodeck. Despite Ash’s awkward modesty in trying to pretend Lorca got more than he did, Lorca is making him chief of security, because of course, they need a replacement for Landry (remember her?).

Now, shippers and fanfic writers won’t have failed to notice that Michael and Tilly’s relationship has settled into Michael telling Tilly what to do, and Tilly doing it, because she cares about Michael and wants to make her proud. So it’s perhaps with this in mind that the script then has Tilly abruptly gushing over how Ash is so hot, you guys – the classic no-homo move. Even in the future apparently one gay couple per show – excuse me, starship – is enough.

This brings up how Ash seems to be supplanting Michael as Lorca’s new favourite/surrogate child/chosen one. So it is as they’re introducing themselves – and this may or may not be the universe thinking nobody’s paying enough attention to Michael – that Michael collapses, having been hit by a fearful premo-vision.

This is prompted by what’s going on elsewhere in the universe. Sarek – Michael’s original foster father – was en route to a peace summit with the Klingons, but has been betrayed by his copilot, a Vulcan radical who was willing to blow himself up in order to torpedo the peace talks, and by extension, the Vulcans’ alliance with humanity. Sarek survives the blast, but it leaves him drifting on a crippled ship, unconscious, in the middle of a nebula. If you’re not a sci-fi fan, nebulas basically work like a mix of rough seas and thick fog.

So, Discovery – since they don’t have much else to do, apparently – zip off towards the nebula. They’re still plugging Stametz into the mushroom drive, and it’s taking its toll on him in exactly the way you’d imagine. When they approach him with an idea for a device to let Michael track down Sarek using mind-powers, he thinks it’s mindblowing, and like, way cool, man. And you really have to feel for Culber, here, since the uptight square he fell in love with has now become Shaggy from Scooby-Doo (which by all logic makes Tilly Velma), or possibly Dr Denzil Dexter. Such is the terrible price of war.

On that subject, Lorca gets a visit from Admiral Cornwell. While she’s mainly dinging him for taking over what should have been a Vulcan rescue mission, she does also find time to mention how by sticking Ripper’s DNA into Stametz, they’ve cheerfully breached the federation’s ‘no eugenics’ rule. In Star Trek canon, this dates back to the eugenic wars, an incredibly destructive conflict that ravaged the earth in a far-off, futuristic time called the 1990s – and while this timeframe now seems a little incongruous, our society does indeed now frown upon eugenics. Hey, give them their due, they predicted flip phones too.

But even this latest cockamamie scheme to rescue Sarek is only the tip of the iceberg. Cornwell is fairly evidently here to get the measure of Lorca, to see if he’s gone mad with power having been given a wicked-cool starship powered by hallucinogenic mushrooms and left to roam the universe. He has, as she points out, leapt straight back in the saddle after being captured and tortured. So, while Michael, Ash, and Tilly go out into the nebula, Lorca invites Cornwell for a drink.

Stametz’s invention basically works by hijacking the mystic Vulcan connection that already exists between Michael and Sarek, because he saved her life that one time with mind-stuff and mysterious things. Essentially it lets her go into his thoughts – and currently, he’s reliving the day Michael was turned down to be part of the Vulcan expeditionary force. Initially Sarek physically pushes her out. Her second attempt goes better when she busts out the Vulcan kung fu, but that time Ash has Tilly pull her out when her life signs start to dip into the red.

Naturally, reliving what was a profoundly disappointing day for her is putting Michael off a bit – but then Ash comes in with the alternate interpretation, that nobody would be focused on a disappointment as they lay dying, and what’s far more likely is that it’s actually one of Sarek’s regrets. With this in mind, Michael dives back in, and this time really knocks Sarek about a bit to get him to cooperate.

As it turns out, Michael was perfectly qualified for the expeditionary force – but bigoted honky Vulcans weren’t happy with a human being in there, particularly in the light of Spock, Sarek’s biological son and half-human himself, getting in as well. In the clutch, Sarek chose to disappoint Michael for Spock’s sake – which, in one of those ironic twists, didn’t help anyone, since Spock chose to fly the nest and join Starfleet instead.

There’s the possibility that anyone new to Trek will be left terribly confused by everyone talking about Spock like we’re meant to know him, but to be fair, he’s easily one of the most iconic and well-known parts of the franchise, rivalled only by Kirk, Picard, and possibly the Enterprise itself. And on a pleasant side-note, at one point during this episode Michael – whose Vulcan cultural credentials tend to be a little shaky – pulls off a dramatic eyebrow raise that’s worthy of the late Leonard Nimoy himself.

With this emotional revelation blowing all the doors open, Sarek – physical Sarek, not imagination Sarek – comes to his senses and manages to to turn on his distress beacon. The Discovery gang pick him up and everything’s fine – even if, as he recovers, he point-blank refuses to have the emotional conversation that he and Michael are long overdue. Now there’s your Vulcan cultural credentials.

Back in the other plot, Lorca and Cornwell’s psychiatry session-cum-drink has turned in short order into sleeping together, and almost certainly not for anywhere close to the first time. When she touches his scars, he goes from ‘asleep’ to ‘sticking a phaser in her face’. Something which, as she isn’t slow to note, kind of justifies her theory that he’s more messed up inside than he’s letting on.

More ruffled than we’ve ever seen him before (and that includes under torture) he begs her not to take Discovery away from him, since he has nothing else. Like many a captain before him, he’s obviously seeing it less as a military vessel and more as a source of cheap labour, like a family – and having lost his last ship, couldn’t bear to go through that again. But, tragically – since he’s almost certainly been lying his way through every psych evaluation Starfleet’s thrown at him – Cornwell can’t even believe that.

The morning after, with Sarek still in traction, Cornwell is off to represent the federation at the peace talks in his place. She and Lorca agree that when she gets back, they’ll discuss when, not if, he’s going to step down and take some time to recover. More astute viewers may be screaming ‘it’s a trap!’ at their screens at about this point – and of course, it is, with the Klingons being incredibly pleased to have bagged a Starfleet admiral instead of Sarek. She might as well have said she was retiring tomorrow after thirty years on the force.

(And spare a thought for the host of the peace talks, the neutral planet, whose representatives died the way they lived – neutral.)

Obviously the narrative simply couldn’t allow Lorca to be booted out of the captain’s chair only six episodes in – this isn’t a British series, after all – but, in a shock to everyone, he’s actually taken Cornwell’s advice on board. On hearing she’s been kidnapped, he doesn’t rush off half-cocked into a wild crazy rescue mission, and possibly more controversially, has Seru call it in to Starfleet command to see what they say. Though we do get a scare chord when we see a phaser tucked in his belt – which, considering he’s a military man and they’re literally at war, seems undeserved.

Elsewhere, Michael tells Tilly she can get to captain her own way – surely melting her heart. Then Michael and Ash get to talking about the day’s events and decompressing, and, at long last, introduce themselves to each other properly, without the plot interfering. It’s nothing special but it genuinely feels friendly, and suggests their dynamic won’t be simply them jockeying for position as the captain’s favourite – for one, Lorca clearly has other concerns, and for two, Star Trek already did that dynamic with B’elanna and Seven in Voyager.

 

The Trek fundamentals

‘to explore strange new worlds‘: There’s the neutral planet, for about thirty seconds.

‘to seek out new life and new civilisations‘: The neutralians themselves get even less time onscreen before the Klingons chop them up.

‘to boldly go where no one has gone before‘: Star Trek has been having the action take place on the astral plane and other dimensions of reality since Shatner first overacted a line about particles and pulses.

As an afterthought, I noticed a press release about this episode that claimed it had too much ‘Star Trek’ and not enough ‘Discovery’. Ho ho, good line – but I fear what’s actually going on here is the insidious influence of Stephen Moffat. There’s an excellent takedown of his works on Youtube by hbomberguy if you have two hours spare, but to summarise, Moffat’s problem is that whenever he has full creative control, he starts leaning the focus more towards long, convoluted character backstories at the expense of what’s actually happening in the narrative.

Example, and actual plotline from Sherlock: ‘oh, Sherlock Holmes actually had an evil sister all along, and she planned that all of this would happen and has taken a bunch of hostages, but uh-oh, none of it’s real…’. Moffat’s tenure on Sherlock became, towards the end, increasingly defined by disdain for that stupid business about actually solving mysteries.

Now, while I’m not attributing this to any direct influence from Moffat, lord knows he’s been successful enough for other people to take note. And given this episode delving deep into both Michael and Lorca’s pasts, you can see why I make the comparison. The weird thing is, when Moffat was writing for Doctor Who under Russell T. Davies, his episodes would inevitably be series standouts – it was only once they made him showrunner that he showed his true colours, which turned out to all be a sort of shit-brown.

The acid test will come next week. If Michael and Ash lead a rough, tough strike team into the heart of Klingon space to rescue Cornwell, we’re probably good. If we’re treated to an episode-length flashback where Lorca remembers his and Cornwell’s first heady days together, start to worry.