Nothing like an episode that starts with the classic “we’ll follow orders, but in a way that gives us time to find a justifiable reason to do what we want. Oh…also we’re going to fake having a problem so that if you question why it took us so long we’ll be able to justify it.” I mean, how many times would the Federation have been destroyed if crews actually followed their orders? However, even though the crew does find a way to do what they want and not get in trouble for it, the outcome is not positive for everyone involved.
Let’s start with the lie. Lorca and Stamets agree that they are going to say that spore drive has a problem. However, Lorca wants a paper trail and Stamets knows that while this will cover the ship and crew for the delayed arrival at the starbase, it is about to open a can of worms in Stamets life. Stamets follows orders knowing that the full examination will result in his problems, as a result of interaction with the spore drive, being discovered. This mean problems between him a Culber along with the potential of becoming a lab rat for Starfleet doctors for the foreseeable future. Stamets goes beyond just keeping his secret by lying to Lorca and Culber about side effects he has been experiencing. Clearly, he may not have intended to lie to Lorca, but he wasn’t going to admit in front of Culber that he knew something was happening to him. He knows that Culber’s concern for him would only be compounded by anger if Culber were to find out that Stamets knew there was a problem.
Ultimately, Discovery has 3 hours to do what Starfleet scientist have been unable to do, break the Klingon cloak. Again, another trope, our crew is able to do something no one else can do and in an unbelievably short amount of time. I will give the crew credit in that they have access to a technology to achieve their goal that others trying to solve this problem do not, but it still seems a stretch that no one involved in researching the cloak at Starfleet has knowledge about the spore drive and how it could be used to solve this problem. It is a classified technology, but some of Starfleet’s top scientist must have been brought in on it.
Now, as soon as you hear the solution to breaking the cloak, you know it will be bad news for Stamets. If he is already feeling wear and tear, there is no way 133 microjumps won’t have have a negative impact. Stamets is even skeptical. However, Lorca does what he does best, appeals to his crewmans true desires. For Stamets this is his desire to help others and pure scientific discovery. This is helped along by the reveal that Lorca has been accumulating data on the jumps and has found evidence that the network may connect to parallel universes (Maybe the mirror universe. Is that where they end up at the end of the episode?).
Lorca
I noticed a few things about Lorca that we haven’t really seen before. First, while discussing Pahvo with the Admiral, we see Lorca making a strong case for protecting the defenseless and the responsibility to defend the Pahvens because they don’t know that the Klingons will interpret the signal as alignment with the Federation. Next is the jump data and the fact that Lorca has been doing his own scientific study to try to see what else is out there. We see him truly embracing some core ideas of the Federation we know, defend the defenseless and discovery and exploration. I think it gives us a sense of he may have been before the war and who he may become after. I think it provides some hope for a character that often times seems lost to the traditional Starfleet values. Also, near the end of the episode we see that Lorca truly does value his crew and the sacrifices they make when he has Starfleet give the medal for the success of the mission to Stamets instead of receiving it himself as they suggest.
The assignment of members to the away team seemed an odd Lorca moment to me. Lorca seems to always want to put the best people in their most effective roles, so I am confused by his apprehension at letting Burnham join the away team. He has been willing to risk whatever it takes to achieve his goals, putting his command, crew, and ship in significant harms way, but now he doesn’t want Burnham on the Klingon ship. Does he have a concern we aren’t aware of or, more likely, a plan for her that is risked if she is lost on this mission? And, if so, why does he relent and allow her to go? This whole sequence left me scratching my head.
Stamets and Culber
Culber is an unbelievably patient and supportive partner. He is willing to support Stamets and this plan despite his disagreement with it and the fact that it may result in irreparable harm to his partner. His reluctant support even holds through Tilley’s accidental disclosure of Stamets’ side effects. Culber is pissed, but knows all he can do in that moment is keep Stamets alive. He knows that any attempts to stop Stamets or get the captain to stop the plan will fall on deaf ears, so he does the one thing he can, try to keep Stamets alive. This dedication to Stamets does not go unnoticed as we see Stamets is changed after the jumps. We don’t know how much of that change is because of his experience and how much is due to the strain he put on his relationship, but it appears that Stamets is ready to cast aside working on the spore drive to seek treatment to figure out what is happening to him. He also appears to be rededicating himself to his partner and making an effort to show that he loves Culber by attempting to plan a date that Culber will love and he will not particularly enjoy. However, we see that the last jump to get the crew home may have made none of the changes Stamets wanted to make possible.
Breaking the Cloak
We know this takes place before the original series and, as a result, these cloaking devices are not as good as the ones we see in other series. Ships using the cloaks can be tracked to an extent, particularly while at warp. I’m curious about how much of the improvements we see in the future are a result of this episode. With Discovery finding a way to break the cloak, it would only drive the Klingons to develop better technology or steal better technology from the Romulans (again?). This push to see through this cloak may be what results in the cloaking technology which plagues the Federation for generations.
Is Tyler Voq?
Tyler experiences PTSD upon seeing L’Rell on the Klingon ship. At first, I thought it was just a result of the torture he experienced under her, but upon seeing the scene at the end where he goes to see her in the brig, I developed another theory. I believe Tyler is Voq. His PTSD is actually the resurfacing of his memories of the process of being altered both physically and mentally to be Tyler. This also explains why L’Rell and Tyler had an intimate relationship while Tyler was her prisoner. He may not remember it clearly or truthfully because of what was done to transform him, but I think this is where those memories are coming from. I beleive this is the plan Voq and L’Rell developed to hide Voq from Kol and to undermine the Federation by exposing Discovery’s secrets. This adds a lot of complexity to the developing relationship between Tyler and Burnham and raises questions about how much he may remember about his previous life as L’Rell remains on Discovery. In particularly, since we can see the true pull that his relationship has as his memory of it breaks him out of his PTSD trance and allows him to reengage with the threat he and Admiral Cornwell are facing.
Final Thoughts
Really quick, I liked the detail on Georgiou’s delta pin that we see when Kol shows it to Burnham. The fact that the delta pins are also dog tags is a really nice touch that makes sense.
I did not expect that the sarcophagus ship would be destroyed this early in the series. I assumed it and Kol would be ongoing threats and there would be continued sparring with Discovery and the crew as the war continued. However, the ship’s destruction and the death of Kol is a game changer. The series could be about anything now. This is the second time we have seen a unifying force among the Klingons die in these nine episodes and I doubt they will go back to that well again this season. So what does the story become from here. We know Discovery is somewhere unknown and we don’t know how long they will be there. This could be the real storyline of Discovery and the first nine episodes and the war were simply a story to get us where we are now. I honestly don’t know but I’m curious what we will see in the last seven episodes this season.
Finally, where did the last jump go wrong. Stamets, the ship, Lorca’s coordinates, some combination of them all. Stamets has clearly not recovered form what he had been through and very well could have been overtasked. The ship has never done anything like what she was just put through and a malfunction is completely believable. There was a shot of Lorca putting jump coordinates into the computer but we don’t know if they were the correct ones to the starbase, if he made an error, or if he purposefully sent the ship somewhere since Stamets has said this would be his last jump. I wouldn’t put it past Lorca, knowing this may be his last chance, to use this jump to try and get to one of the places he found through the jump data he had been analyzing. However, we won’t know what happened for sure until Sunday at the soonest.
LLAP
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