Star Trek: Discovery: Season 1 – Episode 8 ‘Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum’ REVIEW

War…war never changes. And one of the ways it never changes is that it can change an awful lot from moment to moment. Last week, Starfleet was getting the better of the war against the Klingons – now we open on a whole gang of Klingon ships popping out of invisibility to jump the USS Gagarin. Discovery moves in to help, but even having turned up in the nick of time and put themselves between the Gagarin and the oncoming torpedoes, they can’t save the day and have to mushroom back out of there.

Lorca – for whom ships being blown up with all hands is a bit of a sore spot – demands answers from the brass, answers as to why Discovery was the only friendly ship anywhere nearby. The horrifying answer is that they weren’t: the Gagarin had two sister ships not far away, both of which were also jumped by the Klingons and destroyed. The Klingons’ invisibility cloaks seem to be giving them the edge at the moment, but luckily, Lorca already has Discovery’s top people working on a countermeasure.

What this means is that Michael, Saru and Ash have gone for a hike on Pahvo, a planet with blue trees. Pahvo plays host to a great big crystalline structure that works as a sort of space antenna, and which – hopefully – can be adapted into an interstellar radar system to let them spot cloaked ships. Due to astro-interference, they’ve had to beam down thirty miles from the crystal, which gives Saru a chance to taunt his puny hu-mon companions with how fast his species can run.

This isn’t the only thing Saru’s better at – he’s also on fine form complaining about the weird background noise, due to his heightened senses. But what could be causing this static? Even though they hadn’t detected any sort of life forms, within minutes they’ve stumbled across a swirly, ethereal special effect-being, who look eerily similar to the effects used in the mushroom chamber.

The Pahvovians take the away team to their village of kitsch rustic huts – which, as weird nature-ghosts, seems like an odd choice on their part. Given that by all appearances they’re sentient beings, this takes the away team past their usual prime directive of non-interference (you may have noticed Discovery occasionally bending this rule) and into first contact protocols – the upshot of which is they can’t use the antenna without the Pahvovians’ permission. A challenge rendered harder by the difficulties they’re having with actually communicating.

Ash, who seems to be quite enjoying this walking holiday, starts reminiscing about trout fishing – which puts Michael on a bit of a downer, since, even though she’s been recruited into a secret and incredibly shady military operation, she still somehow thinks she’s going back to prison when it’s all over. (Readers interested in real-life counterexamples of this may wish to look up the glittering careers of mafioso Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano and former Nazi Wehrner von Braun.)

Despite their heartfelt talk about what they’re going to do when this senseless mess is all over, they aren’t immediately killed – in fact they have a kiss and a cuddle and then curl up to sleep. Saru, however, is still having the noises of the forest grate on his living brain. Unable to take it any more, he asks their spectral hosts to turn it down a bit – at which point their magic sparkles invade every orifice in his head and he starts getting some wild, crazy visions. Come the next morning, Michael and Ash find Saru worryingly zen and with a newfound love of nature.

I’d obviously make a Stametz comparison at this point, except the mushrooms have been taking such a toll on him that he’s come full circle and is back to being snippy. More interestingly, though, after his latest session in the mushroom chamber he stumbles out and – without thinking – addresses Tilly as ‘captain’. So we’re left with the question ‘delusion or prophecy?’ – and we may find a hint in the curiously Christlike pose Stametz assumes when he’s actually plugged into the chamber.

But as with Christ, ascension into godlike power comes with a heavy toll. By weathering his snaps and grumbles, Tilly eventually gets him to admit that it’s getting to him, and worse yet, given how medical ethics work if he lets Culber know it’ll be putting him in an impossible position that almost certainly ends with them losing their jobs. Star Trek‘s always tried to break boundaries, but when the gay best friend has to seek advice from the geeky redhead, that’s turning all given convention upside down.

Say no to drugs, kids.

Back on Pahvo, Saru asks to get a look at Michael and Ash’s space-phones, then promptly destroys them because they won’t be needing them any more. A member of the away team getting their brains scrambled is a plot as old as Trek, but Saru sells it pretty well due to his natural aversion to conflict. His plan, it seems, is to stay down here and live in peace and harmony with the Pahvovians, by force if necessary. Unfortunately – and, of course, being dangerously high – Saru hasn’t quite taken into account that he’s trying to maroon them all on a planet with a huge natural radio mast.

So, Ash serves as a bizarre distraction while Michael makes a break for the antenna – a ruse Saru sees through almost instantly, knocking Ash about a bit before going after Michael with uncanny Doug Jones-like speed. And for a species that evolved as prey, he seems pretty deadly – trying to bash apart the radio with the classic double-fisted Kirk strike, and taking two phaser blasts for Michael to incapacitate him.

Discovery picks up her message and beams them up – even though it couldn’t beam them down to the antenna, because of cosmic radiation or whatever it was. Saru is absolutely mortified at having gone hippy.

Unfortunately, this mess is far from over – the Pahvovians learned all about the Starfleet-Klingon war from Saru, and, in what seems to be an ill-advised attempt to get everyone smoking the peace pipe, they’ve messaged the Klingons to come along and hash things out with Discovery.

Lorca calls everyone to battle stations, reasoning – and his disgust here is palpable – that Discovery is the only thing standing inbetween the Pahvovians and the immediate consequences of their actions. Fade to black on this cliffhanger, just like that first two-parter, with no clear path ahead other than a full-on shooting war…

But wait! What wacky adventures have the Klingons been getting themselves into in the b-plot? Still no sign of Voq – hence the theory that Ash is actually Voq in disguise, and if so, he’s gone full deep cover – but everyone’s pal L’Rell has been accepted back into Kol’s inner circle, even after having lost Lorca and Ash. Kol needs good interrogators, and wouldn’t you know it, they just happen to have a prisoner who needs a good interrogating.

They take her over to Cornwell’s cell, and she starts off by telling her to scream. Cornwell doesn’t want to give them the satisfaction, but when L’Rell turns it into a screaming competition, well then that’s a different story. The guards on the door do a little muted chuckle and move off, at which point L’Rell moves onto the real reason she wanted a one-on-one with Cornwell.

L’Rell wants – or claims to want, anyway – to defect, and is willing to bust Cornwell out of Klingon jail. This ups the ante from her playing both sides of the Klingons, to both sides of the overall conflict. Unfortunately as she’s walking Cornwell out, the guards spot them, so she roughs Cornwell up a bit to make it seem convincing. Anyway one thing leads to another and she has to drag Cornwell down to the meat locker.

Kol has L’Rell brought before him for wasting a perfectly good prisoner – which does mean that L’Rell has so far let everyone she was meant to hold captive or kill slip through her fingers. He seems willing to forgive even this, accepting yet another loyalty oath and treating her to his house’s facepaint – but then turns on her, and is having her taken away by his goons when all of a sudden they get a certain transmission from the Pahvovians.

Voq immediately sets course for battle and glory, naturally wanting to top T’kuvma. There’s every possibility this could grant L’Rell a reprieve, whether it’s by being sent in as phaser fodder, or just creating enough chaos for her to escape. Either way, if I’m any judge, big climactic battle next week. Be there and be square.

 

The Trek essentials

‘to explore strange new worlds’: Yes! Finally, yes! Even if Pahvo is a common-or-garden earth-type planet with some of the trees painted blue, it’s just as much a relief as it surely is for the away team to finally get out of Discovery.

‘to seek out new life and new civilisations’: Yes to the one, probably to the other? Nobody ever actually confirms that the twinkly crystal ghost people built the twinkly crystal radio mast, but it suggests a far more advanced society than their yurts do.

‘to boldy go where no one has gone before’: Michael’s been grooming Tilly for command for a while now, but Stametz’s momentary flash-forward all but confirms it. Debatable that no one’s gone to that point before, particularly as the bulk of the Trek canon will take place during or after that timeframe, but as we should have learnt last week, if you take chronology too seriously you go cross-eyed.