Star Trek: Discovery: Season 1 – Episode 9 ‘Into The Forest I Go’ REVIEW

Discovery‘s titles so far have been a mixed bag – some classically Trek-style melodramatic, some short and blunt, some Latin. This one, unfortunately, just makes me think of that classic It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia line when Frank is tripping and trapped in the McPoyles’ trailer, sees only one way out, and muses ‘into the toilet I go’. So we can only hope the gang don’t end up anywhere quite that bad.

This is of course the midseason finale, and having set up a big battle to defend Pahvo last week, Lorca surprises everyone by actually listening to Starfleet’s orders to stand down. He’s not taking it all that seriously, of course, and sets sail for home using the warp drive instead of the mushroom engine, so they have time to work out a new gimmick to see through the Klingons’ invisibility cloaks.

Lorca decides to officially blame their delay on the terrible, terrible side-effects Stamets has been suffering from the mushroom drive – without knowing that it really is taking its toll on him. And, if you’ll remember, this opens a can of medically unethical worms for Culber.

Before long, they’ve come up with a device. The only snag is that it’ll need to be planted on the Klingon flagship as part of some sort of brave, exciting stealth mission. This is why people say that every crisis is also an opportunity. Obviously Lorca selects Ash – the golden boy, the ideal man, Lorca’s ideal man – to go off on this day trip. Ash demands that Michael comes too.

The Spartans famously placed couples in the same regiment, hoping it would inspire both halves to fight harder. Nonetheless, there are many reasons not to do this – if one becomes injured the other may freak out and abandon the mission to save them, they might get distracted by kissing, or even get tied up in bickering and screw up everything. Lorca raises precisely none of these objections, he just goes ‘no, Michael’s staying here’, until Michael gives a little speech and he relents. Maybe he’s just a softy at heart.

The ship of the dead turns up, and Kol is pleased to finally be able to have a crack at Discovery. Michael and Ash beam onboard, wearing big glowing medallions to mask their life signs. In spite of that, and that it’s a combat vessel crawling with angry Klingons, they stay undetected manage to plant the first of the two beacons. The beacons, which they don’t even attempt to hide in a nook or cranny, glow bright blue, but then I guess that blends in quite well in this future.

Then Michael picks up a human life sign in the meat locker. Yes, it’s Cornwell – who apparently didn’t die last week, which makes Kol turning on L’Rell a little odd. Surely when Klingons take prisoners, everyone takes it as read they’re going to get banged around a bit? Anyway, Cornwell is largely intact, but can’t move her legs. As Michael tends to her, Ash spots L’Rell in the opposite corner, and the sight of her triggers some unpleasant quick-cut flashbacks.

They’re too fast to really tell what’s going on, but do appear to involve a surgical-looking circular saw and a lot of blood – which will surely add fuel to the fire of the theory that Ash has been Voq in disguise the whole time. Particularly since it contradicts the story that Ash has always given, that he was spared the worst of the torture because L’Rell decided to use him as a personal sex toy. On the other hand, his post-traumatic paralysis here is mighty convincing – but then, if he’s been acting human this well, it would be, wouldn’t it?

Either way, Michael zaps L’Rell with her phaser before things get any worse. With Cornwell unable to move, and Ash unable to do anything in particular right now, Michael leaves them to look after each other while she plants the second beacon – which has to go on the bridge. Even though it’s fully crewed, and Kol’s there, and – you’d hope – is on the lookout for sabotage after everything he went through with L’Rell, she manages this with no trouble.

This means that Discovery can put their part of the plan into action – some one hundred mini-mushroom jumps around the ship of the dead, to get the readings of its invisibility cloak from all angles and work out an algorithm to spot the imperfections. Curiously, at no point does anybody explain this with a simple analogy – but then, they’re more worried about putting Stamets through this fresh load of hell. Culber, of course, has to be on hand as a medic – which effectively means that he has to watch.

(There’s a delightful moment when Culber is prepping Stamets for the mushroom chamber, and Tilly blurts out the whole ugly mess of the side-effects, thinking he already knows.)

Michael breaks out the universal translator to hear exactly what Kol’s booming villainously on about now – which, I’m sure to the Klingon actors’ joy, lets them start speaking in English at last. Upon hearing that they’re about to flee, she – at this point cowering behind some boxes – starts shooting. Kol orders her to come out, and she taunts him with the obvious superiority of the universal translator.

Kol taunts her right back – he’s still got Georgiou’s Starfleet badge, which he’s using as a toothpick (like, actually using it right then). He’s about to have Michael taken away and probably eaten, when she calls him dishonourable. This is the rough cultural equivalent of calling a Scotsman English. Even a villain as obvious as Kol can’t take that in his evil-laughing stride, and he challenges her to knives at no paces.

There will doubtless be those who reckon a little girl holding her own against someone quite as pointy as Kol, in a knife fight – which is after all their national sport – is evidence of Michael being a Mary Sue. I respond as I’ve always done, that this is what you’d expect any given protagonist to do at this point. Plus, we’ve just established she managed to murder T’kuvma – and for all his faults, T’kuvma seemed like the kind to lead from the front, whereas Kol is far more the ‘bring me more cigars’ type of villain.

Anyway, having bloodied each other, Michael gets in an attack of opportunity, sticks him in the leg, then grabs Georgiou’s badge from him and leaps off the balcony. At this very moment, Discovery finishes jumping, and beams them all back – including Cornwell, and also L’Rell, who managed to grab hold of Ash at the last second.

With the ship of the dead now lit up like a Christmas tree, Lorca fires off a barrage of torpedoes. His grim satisfaction is something to behold – as is Kol’s impotent rage. Before the fireball tears through the ship of the dead, you almost expect him to cry ‘I’ll get you next time, Gordon!’

But, as the admiralty are quick to remind us, the war isn’t over. However, Lorca’s getting a medal for his flagrant disregard of a direct order – which, for one reason and another, he wants to give to Stametz instead. Poor Stametz, having been on the business end of several tubes of distilled mushrooms, has parked himself in front of the biggest window with the most eye-popping view of the cosmos on the ship – because you would, wouldn’t you?

Elsewhere, Michael comforts Ash, since he clearly still has some stuff to work through. Case in point, he has an even more vivid flashback – this time of L’Rell raping him. And just as this series had Star Trek’s first use of the word ‘fuck’, this scene gives us our first exposure to Klingon titties (not that the franchise has been shy about Klingon cleavage in the past) – which are less jagged and gnarly than you might imagine.

Alien sex organs aside, though, Discovery deserves credit here for treating woman-on-man rape as something serious and unpleasant, something depressingly rare in the media. Compare how another big-name show, Game of Thrones, handled Margaery’s marriage to Tommen (who was very clearly written and played as underage) – which was presented as nothing other than erotic. If you imagine L’Rell taking the place of Natalie Dormer, it may become clearer how dark that dynamic was.

Following this, Ash goes to visit L’Rell in the brig, and actually kneels before her. They have a brief and cryptic conversation, so if he isn’t really Voq, he’s in an incredibly bad place mentally. And if he is Voq, he’s may well be in an even worse place mentally, given that he’s shacked up with Michael, the very woman he saw killing his beloved spiritual leader. That revelation – when and if it comes – is really going to be awful for both of them.

But all this incredibly foreboding stuff can wait – they’ve taken down Kol and the ship of the dead, now they’re heading back to federation space for parties and well-deserved props. And they’re taking the fast way home, with what Lorca has agreed must be Stametz’s last jump. His ‘one last jump’.

You might hear that and worry something’s going to go wrong. Well, don’t worry about that – just before Stamets gets into the mushroom chamber, he gives Culber a passionate kiss and they talk about how when they get home, they’re going to spend a night at the opera together like Culber had always wanted. So if everything were to go wrong, it would be just awful for them – alright, I’ll stop being coy now.

They realise it has gone wrong quickly, when Stamets starts screaming – though really, they should count themselves lucky this didn’t happen in any of the previous jumps, given that the last hundred or so happened while they were in ship-to-ship combat. They drag him out of the mushroom chamber – his eyes are now pure white, and he claims to be able to see everything. Saru scans their surroundings, and they find themselves in an uncharted region of space – surrounded by Klingon wreckage. It is on the image of them adrift among twisted metal that we close the first half of this season.

 

The Trek essentials

‘to explore strange new worlds’: They’re still in Pahvo’s neighbourhood, but they don’t set foot on it – having had more than enough of that last week.

‘to seek out new life and new civilisations’: Nope – it’s all established characters in familiar settings at work this week.

‘to boldly go where no one has gone before’: Decidedly yes in the last scene, where they end up in strange and unknown waters. Here be dragons. Also, lest we forget, Klingon titties.

 

Roundup

So, how’s Discovery shaping up in the light of established Trek canon? A common criticism is that it’s flying too close to the film reboots, given the fancy sets and fancy props – at its harshest this can get into claims that it’s just generic hour-long sci-fi series using Trek as window dressing. And granted it’s playing fast and loose with the canon (the mushroom drive), but it’s also grounded firmly in what we know (the federation-Klingon war, the ban on eugenic research).

The final scene in this episode was very similar to the setup of Voyager, the central premise of which was that through science and mysterious things, Voyager had ended up stranded many parsecs from home. The main criticism people had of that concept was that the show didn’t do enough with it – it all turned out a bit cosy, we were only rarely reminded that they were decades from home or that half the crew were made up of dangerous radicals (which got neatly defused when their charismatic leader fell in love with the captain). With that missed opportunity in mind, we could be looking at a very interesting second half of the season indeed.

However, there’s clear faults in play. Discovery has, so far, gone for more of a series-long narrative arc than the more episodic adventures of previous Star Trek serieses. While this does make sense against the backdrop of the Klingon war, this also by nature invites comparison to Deep Space Nine. While largely episodic, DS9 was by far the most arc-y pre-reboot series, and really there’s no contest here. DS9, at its best, was John le Carre-style cold war intrigue, a long game with moments of exquisite tension, but in space – meanwhile Discovery’s had the Klingon war wildly vacillating between going well and going badly, which we learn when characters tell us in voiceover.

Another way the overarcing narrative disadvantages Discovery is that it doesn’t get silly enough. There are none of those profoundly silly ones where they visit a gangster planet or a cowboy world, or even the breather episodes where they do stuff like get into a race with space hot-rodders, play baseball against a bunch of snooty Vulcans, or mess around on the holodeck pretending to be James Bond (this last is particularly galling, seeing as they’ve gone against Trek chronology to have a holodeck on Discovery). Now, god knows these weren’t the episodes that were winning Saturn awards, but they were just as much a part of the charm as Kirk grappling with a moral quandary or Picard doing a monologue.

Likewise, a big part of the charm was traditionally the ensemble cast on the bridge – well-established character archetypes playing off one another. Discovery has fallen down a bit in this regard – Tilly, Stametz, and Culber tend not to be let anywhere near the bridge, and Culber in particular hasn’t had much material beyond worrying about what they’re doing to Stametz. Meanwhile, the woman with the elaborate braids, the woman with the metal bit round her eye, and the robot, who actually are part of the bridge crew, haven’t even been introduced by name. This, more than anything, is why Landry was such a tragic loss.

And as for the other side, these Klingons are distinctly different from the ones Kirk originally encountered at this point in the chronology, and that’s probably best, given that they were originally guys in yellowface with Fu Manchu moustaches who were (like the bugs in Starship Troopers) a crude analogy for Red China. These ones, on the other hand, are a well-polished update of the forehead monsters we all know and love. However, it would have been nice to see further into their society, rather than them just being baby-eating villains – Kol was, for all intents and purposes, a Game of Thrones character who’d come through the wrong door.

To return to the Voyager comparison, there’s plenty of potential here (everyone’s waiting for the other shoe to drop regarding Ash’s real identity) – the question is whether they’ll pull their fingers out and do something with it. That’ll mean Lorca beginning to succumb to his own hubris, that’ll mean Tilly stepping up to the plate and making some tough decisions (much as she might hate it), and, if they keep up the war arc, that’ll mean a leaderless Klingon insurgency dying hard.

Still, whether you think I’ve been too harsh or not harsh enough, one thing’s for certain – it’s nowhere near as bad as Enterprise, the unfortunate post-9/11 instalment in which Captain Scott Bakula played at being Jack Bauer and bounced around space so recklessly that he destabilised the franchise itself.