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Star Trek: Discovery reviews — season 1

Star Trek: Discovery — 1x12 — Vaulting Ambition

Synopsis

Burnham heads to the ISS Charon with a special "gift" for the Emperor. With the help of an unexpected source, Stamets gains clarity while trapped inside the mycelial network. Saru asks for L'Rell's help.

Remarkable scenes

  • Mirror Stamets toying with Stamets.
  • Burnham's reaction to realizing that she's eating Kelpien.
  • Mirror Georgiou executing her lords to prevent knowledge of the prime universe from spreading.

Review

Despite being a historically short episode and jam-packed full of exposition and revelations, this episode still comes across as remarkably slow-paced, perhaps because nearly every plot development is executed remarkably clumsily. Not just the big developments, but even small things too. For example, in the scene depicting mirror Georgiou and Burnham eating Kelpien, it's tough to tell whether or not they were eating mirror Saru or just some random Kelpien. It sure looked like Saru, but if it was him, how did he get aboard the I.S.S. Charon? And what the blazes was that artificial sun thing at the center of that ship anyway? These details were supposed to be small but compelling emotional beats in the story, but just ended up being distracting. As was the repeated use of horror movie aesthetics in Stamets' and Tyler's scenes.

Speaking of Tyler, it's still pretty hard to know what to make of this plot thread, as L'Rell's actions continue to not make much sense. The exposition in this episode seems to fully confirm the likely hypothesis from previous reviews that Voq was surgically altered to look human and the personality of Tyler was grafted onto him. L'Rell once again insists that this was all part of some grand plan and Saru even agrees referring to her actions as "devious designs." But as mentioned before, it was anything but. Again, it seems L'Rell and Voq are only in this position due to bumbling, dumb luck. And with their covers fully blown now, it's hard to see how they'll gain any advantage from this mission whatsoever.

One perhaps remote possibility for how L'Rell could come out on top is that L'Rell was feigning weakness to Saru and used the surgery supposedly meant to save Tyler to once again repress Voq's emerging personality beneath the Tyler imprint. That way she could bring Voq back to the surface later at a time that is more useful. And in order to convince Discovery's crew that Voq was truly gone, she publicly mourned Voq's death with the signature Klingon howl after the surgery not because Voq is truly dead, but as a ruse to make the Discovery crew think she did as they asked. The fact that it's hard to tell if the narrative expects us to believe that far-fetched hypothesis or believe the perhaps worse conclusion that L'Rell just shrugged, did the surgery, effectively killed Voq in the process, and gave up on her mission on a whim shows how terribly conceived a plot thread this is. No matter which way it pans out, it's still stupid.

Perhaps the most cringeworthy plot thread in this episode though is Stamets' conspicuously unexplained conversation with his dead(!) boyfriend Culber, strongly hinting at some supernatural afterlife stuff. At best, this will be resolved by some technobabble about how Culber's consciousness was somehow preserved in the mycelial network inadvertently by Stamets. At worst, this is Starbuck's ending from Battlestar Galactica all over again. Dead person shows up for tearful goodbye, the whole thing is supernatural, and we're just expected to buy it without an explanation because apparently stuff making scientific sense in science fiction stories is an unimportant detail... Let's hope the show establishes that it's the former in a future episode, not the latter.

What works a bit better with Stamets in this episode is the revelation that the spore drive does damage to the mycelial network, at least insofar as how mirror Stamets was using it. This goes a long way towards explaining why the spore drive eventually becomes an abandoned technology later in Star Trek's chronology, though obviously there is still some work to do here to button it up completely.

The most intriguing though perhaps also the most problematic new development in this episode is Lorca being revealed to have always in fact been mirror Lorca. There were several hints dropped that this could be the case in previous episodes, which previous reviews have alluded to. On the surface, this would seem to explain the numerous instances of shady behavior we've seen from Lorca since the beginning. But unfortunately, there are also several Lorca scenes that are difficult to explain now in retrospect. For instance, there seems to be little point to Lorca failing to remember Ava's name during his torture by Ava's brother. The scene heavily implies that Lorca wouldn't remember Ava's name because only mirror Lorca would know such a detail. Thus we were supposed to conclude Lorca must not be mirror Lorca. When it turns out Lorca was just pretending to not remember and he is in fact mirror Lorca, the narrative expects us to see it as a clever twist. But like many others in this show, it isn't a clever twist. It's a cheap twist. Deliberately misdirecting the audience isn't clever, it's lazy.

This same narrative flaw can be seen with the revelation that mirror Terrans are more light-sensitive than humans from the prime universe. This was explained before as Lorca having suffered from an injury and refusing to get it fixed out of a misplaced sense of guilt. Now it's explained simply as an innate feature of mirror Terrans. While again the narrative clearly acts as though this is clever misdirection, it's more like just lying to the audience. It likewise strains credibility to accept that this quirk of mirror Terran physiology would go unnoticed in all the other mirror universe episodes in the other Star Trek series.

Another scene that's difficult to explain given that Lorca was always mirror Lorca is when in Despite Yourself he almost blew his cover by trying to personally answer the hail from the I.S.S. Cooper. Had Burnham not fortuitously stopped him from answering the hail, his cover would've been blown. If Lorca was always mirror Lorca, wouldn't it have been prudent to simply ask Burnham to look up who their alter egos were before speaking to anyone from the mirror universe? There is simply no way he could've known Burnham would conveniently stop him from answering the hail just in the nick of time so as to make Lorca look conveniently ignorant about the mirror universe. Knowing what we know now, that is an incredibly contrived scene.

Even going as far back as The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry, Lorca's irrational obsession with turning the tardigrade into weapons is even more incoherent now than it already was then back when we were supposed to believe he was prime Lorca instead of mirror Lorca. In the context of prime Lorca seeking to waste the tardigrade's potential for building a functional spore drive in exchange for the uncertain possibility of making weapons, the tradeoff was already dumb. Taken in the context of mirror Lorca only seeming to care about getting back to the mirror universe, that idiotic emphasis on turning the tardigrade into weapons somehow is even dumber than it already seemed.

All things considered, the steam is definitely running out on all of Discovery's plot threads. While there are some moments of intrigue and amusement here, this episode and all the plot arcs in general feel aimless and poorly planned.