The Benevolent Society of Angry Misanthropes: Star Trek: Discovery

You know what? Last week might have just been them shaking off the last of season one. This week we're back to some definite Star Trek. Not what I'd call great Star Trek, but it definitely felt pretty damn Star Treky. They're starting to bring the bridge crew into the show more, the main story of the episode was centred on a one-time weird thing they encountered in space, and they had people working together and trying to avoid resorting to violence.

As soon as I saw this woman I asked myself "Is that Number One?" and it totally was Number One.

So unfortunately they're still chasing Spock because even if we are getting some proper Star Trek we're still stuck with this Spock and the Red Angels plot. But as they're chasing him they get pulled out of warp by this mysterious ancient creature. It's a big red thingy floating in space and it's got them trapped. They then spend most of the episode trying to figure out what it wants and how to get away from it.

I told you it was big.

There's a really neat bit where the entity scrambles the universal translator and everyone's speaking different languages and can't understand each other, except Saru, who speak 96 languages or something and is all like "didn't any of you bother learning a second language?" It goes on long enough to be cool and not long enough to get annoying. Really well done.

I think the fish guy got more lines than any member of the bridge crew, which says a lot.

At the same time, Saru's sick. He claims at first that it's a cold but it quickly becomes clear that it's much worse than that and then he admits that he's dying. This part of the episode really didn't work for me because obviously Saru's not going to die. But this subplot ends with him just not dying and he's like "this means that my people have been lied to all along!" and I'm like "uh, yeah. Did you not get that? I thought that was pretty well established." But now he doesn't have his stupid threat-sensing ganglia any more and says he no longer feels afraid 24 hours a day, so hopefully this is just their way of writing out some of the dumber aspects of his character.

His ganglia get all swollen and then just as he thinks he's about to die they drop off and he's fine.

The thing is, I really like the character, but everything about his species and backstory is just dumb as fuck. They're not rewriting his backstory, so that's still looming, but at least now we presumably won't have to deal with his erratic spidey sense or his digressions on how he's always afraid and ready to die or whatever. We're probably still going to get at least one really bad episode where he visits his home planet though.

That cool engineer they picked up a couple of episodes back is still around, so that's nice.

The episode's B plot takes place in engineering, which is isolated by whatever the big red thing's done. They have to try to do some engineering thing to make the ship safe somehow, and also the spore alien thing that was in Tilly gets out and latches onto Tilly again.

Tilly gets zapped with some electricity too.

They realise they've got to try to communicate with it, so they try to link it up with Tilly's brain so it can speak through her, but the signal's too weak so they've got to drill through her head. And they don't have any proper medical tools so they just use a power drill. Tilly's not having a good day. They manage to talk to the alien but it's not really clear what it wants and it manages to drug them and kidnap Tilly. Into the spore network I think? Whatever that means.

Do we have a laser scalpel? No? Well, I guess it'll have to be the drill then.

Once again I'm optimistic. This episode wasn't great, but it seems like they're actually trying to make a Star Trek show now. There's still too much emphasis on Michael and neither the Spock and the Red Angels stuff or the spore drive stuff seem like they're going anywhere good, but if they keep doing individual episodes where those stories are in the background or in B plots and the main focus is some new weird thing in space then I expect the show to get a lot better.