S3 E5: “f*ck yeah, mama”
Even if it was at times clumsy, this episode stayed true to Star Fleet
In the latest episode of Star Trek: Discovery, the crew deals with an epidemic that is overwhelming sick bay, and to solve the problem they have to build trust with adversaries and work together. It’s about as subtle as a circus, but Sonia Van Meter explains why this episode stays true to Star Fleet’s roots.
by Sonia Van Meter
Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in several episodes, we’re opening with hope, and I AM 100% HERE FOR IT. Usually we pick up in whatever emotional hole they left us in last week, but today is different. Today, we have an address and we are going home! Home to Star Fleet, to what remains of the Federation, to the only thing that may still be familiar for our time traveling crew. It starts with hope, and exhilaration, and sweetness as they arrive to see all the cool new technology, a rainforest in space, and new ship designs bearing old names like Voyager. Everyone is so joyful at seeing all the new but still familiar surroundings. Smiles abound. There’s so much elation at finally arriving “home.”
But because we live in the Uncertain Now, and Discovery’s writers don’t ever want us to forget it, the elation is short lived. Star Fleet doesn’t trust Discovery or its crew. Their story, one admits, is a little fantastic. You and I would probably look a little askance at a ship and crew who claim to be from 900 years in the past, but all of Star Fleet personnel, from their salty head-honcho Admiral Vance to the minions who bring him his messages, treat the crew like they’re suspicious agents here to undermine them. Their first order of business is to take Adira Tal to the sick bay for a full physical (yet again I’m super creeped out at the entitlement to a young woman’s body) despite the fact that sick bay is currently battling an epidemic that’s taking up all their bedspace.
An epidemic. Taking up all their bedspace.
Subtle.
Naturally Discovery wants to help. They’re raring to go. Burnham and Saru immediately offer to assist, but Admiral Vance shuts them down. He’s cranky, tired, and doesn’t mince words when he tells them he doesn’t trust them. And we’re not talking a gentle sort of affectionate “I want to trust you, it’s just that I need time to corroborate your story” kind of mistrust. It’s straight up “I don’t know you people and I don’t especially care to, just follow my orders and I’ll deal with you later” kind of mistrust.
An epidemic. Taking up all their bedspace.
Subtle.
The emotional toll of The Burn on Star Fleet is immeasurable. It’s like watching a once great athlete have a limb amputated. They’ve become bitter and angry and are pushing away people who would dare to bring them hope for any kind of meaningful future because it’ll never be like their glorious past. But if there’s one great thing about Star Trek, it’s that hope is never allowed to die, no matter how dire things get. And Burnham and Saru may be the yin and yang of Star Fleet leadership styles, but they both excel at keeping hope alive.
And that’s exactly what they set out to do.
But first, the crew has to be debriefed by a bunch of AI doctors who give new meaning to the words “awkward” and “annoying.” Each member showcases their personality in an absolutely delightful manner, even if the overall scenes are brutal to watch. Culber is only slightly defensive while trying to be casual about the fact that he was murdered and trapped in some kind of hellish upside-down spore universe for a good while. Reno dryly demands snacks if she’s going to be subjected to this inconvenience. Stamets, with arms crossed, is his usual scathing self when challenged about his value to the crew. Tilly is so very Tilly, verbally meandering all over the place while trying to keep her discomfort with the inquiry in check. And then there’s my favorite response to this unholy inquisition from Commander Nhan, who flatly recites her last name and rank over and over to every question as though she’s a prisoner of war instead of a soldier returning home. And with a defiant “Throw me in the brigg, Hologram,” she has cemented her place in my heart, which is unfortunate given where this episode is going. But more on that later.
The problem is this-- a disease is killing a ship full of refugees. Burnham wants to dive into their travel logs to see where they’ve been in order to track down the origins of the sickness. Vance says they’re already on it. Burnham pushes back, saying they need to let a science vessel take a stab at it. Vance issues a metaphorical backhanded slap at Burnham. A little more exposition gets us to the point where one of the less annoying AI doctors points out that the only way to extract a cure is to retrieve a sample of the plant that transmitted the sickness before the plant was contaminated with whatever toxic pollutant made it lethal, a subtle nod to environmental preservation and climate change. Unfortunately the whole planet is contaminated. There are no contaminant free plants left. Burnham, never to be defeated by a problem, remembers that several hundred years ago a ship was packed with seed samples of every known plant in the galaxy. Because that’s totally a thing you’d think to do. Problem is that ship is five months away.
Psh. Maybe for you regular ships that run on dilithium.
Discovery can get there and back in a spin and a flash. Yeah, that antique outside the window might still be good for something, as is the only crew trained and ready to fly it.
Vance grudgingly agrees to let Burnham command the mission on Discovery provided Saru stays behind as some sort of collateral, and his #1 Minion goes with them to make sure they stay on track. The mistrust is starting to get pretty thick here. I mean I get it. Humanity has suffered a blow so they’re all retreating to defensive postures. Gone is the visionary Star Fleet of yore. But these humans are only mildly less hostile than the ones back on earth. This can’t stand.
But that’s where our heroes come in. Sure, they may be an epic throwback to a long gone era, but they’ve brought hope and vision back from the dead. And heaven help anyone, even Star Fleet command, who tries to stop them.
Psh. Maybe for you regular ships that run on dilithium.
Burnham and #1 Minion board Discovery and the bridge crew sets a course to rendezvous with the seed ship. #1 Minion makes a snide remark about seeing what this “fossil” of a ship can do, and the entire bridge turns back to cock an eyebrow at her. Burnham smirks and assumes command with a power stance and stares straight into the camera.
“Let’s show them who we are.”
Just when I think my cynicism about this episode was going to kill the rest of the season for me, a “f*ck yeah, mama” flies out of my mouth. God I love this show.
A spin and a flash later, Discovery is at the coordinates, and #1 Minion gives us a gratifying look of dizziness from the instantaneous trip she clearly wasn’t ready for. Unfortunately Discovery needs to yank the seed ship out of a pretty nasty ion storm that knocks them around a good bit, and we catch a glimpse of Detmer’s ongoing struggle with PTSD from the crash after the wormhole. But within a few moments, tractor beams have locked on to the seed ship and pulled her to safety. The seed ship has been crewed over the years by several different species from Federation planets, and as it happens, the current family on board is Barzan, the same race of people as the newly fabulous Commander Nhan. So Burnham, Dr. Culber, and Nhan form an away team and beam over.
Just when I think my cynicism about this episode was going to kill the rest of the season for me, a “f*ck yeah, mama” flies out of my mouth. God I love this show.
Onboard the seed ship, there’s no immediate sign of people, but someone clearly left the door open to the seed chamber because it looks like a floating garden. Vines and plant life are growing everywhere, and if we didn’t get a sense that something was horribly wrong on board, it’d probably be quite beautiful.
Meanwhile at Star Fleet HQ, Georgiou is having a grand ol’ time messing with the AI doctors during her “interrogation,” which is going about as well as an ant interrogating an incoming boot. Georgiou has managed to deactivate two doctors just by blinking rapidly and upsetting their programming. It’s actually kind of cute watching them short circuit. But then she sits down with a more senior AI doc (if that’s even a thing) who meets her more on her level. She hurls a few insults at him, but he fires back with knowledge: The last crossing of a Terran like her into this universe was more than 500 years ago. And the distance between the universes has been growing ever since she arrived in this one. She is very much alone, and despite being an impervious fortress, she’s affected by this information. Hmm.
Back on the seed ship, strange things are afoot. We can’t find the family. A three dimensional visual of the Barzan family sitting together and playing with a deck of cards is emitting from a holographic image device, and one of the daughters is humming the melody Adira Tal played on her cello after connecting with the memories of Tal’s past hosts. How is that melody being played on this ship so far away?
None of that matters at the moment though. Burnham goes to look for the seed chamber. Culber continues looking for the family. Nhan just stands there mesmerized by the images of people who look like her, a look of homesickness washing over her with every uttered word of her native language.
The seed chamber is found, but so is the family. The mother and daughters have been encased in stasis chambers but are clearly dead, and have been for some time. So where’s the father? Burnham is about to meet him in the seed chamber, where after fumbling with a security protocol that’s keeping her locked out of the seed storage units, he emerges from nowhere and attacks her. His existence is erratic. He phases in and out of the room as he tries to fight Burnham. He yells at her that the seeds are not hers, that he needs them. And then he’s gone again.
So we’ve got a dead family, a phasing and emotionally unstable scientist controlling access to the necessary seeds, and a ship overrun with plants. What to do? Well, talking to the scientist about what has happened might be a start, so the away team looks back to Discovery for answers. And as usual, Discovery delivers. Tilly, Stamets, and Reno work the problem while working each other’s nerves, but within a matter of moments have the answers. At some point a coronal mass ejection fried the family, but the scientist had been in the process of beaming into the seed chamber when it hit their ship, so rather than killing him, it just morphed him into a perpetually fluctuating mass of matter and energy, which would be cool in other circumstances, but effectively just destroyed his life. #1 Minion has watched this problem solving episode with a furrowed brow and tells Stamets, Tilly, and Reno that they don’t have a very professional relationship, which, duh lady. But they’ve gotten the job done, haven’t they? How ‘bout you stand back and maybe learn something?
Yep. Even during episodes that stretch credulity and lean obviously on emotional manipulation, they can find a way to yank a tear or two out of you.
Tilly manages to track the scientist's location, grab hold of what remains of him, and beam him back into the seed chamber in a more stable form. He collapses, brought down by the weight of his own broken heart. His family is dead. He’s been looking for a way to save them. It’s been ages, and he still doesn’t know how. Nhan tries to relate to him, but he’s incapable of hearing her, and she’s too close to the situation to be objective or convincing. But Burnham, ever the leader, is able to reach him. She chooses her words carefully. His family is gone. There’s nothing he can do to change that. He knows this. But he’s in a position to save other lives, to keep other people from walking the same miserable path he’s on now. He must help them.
And so he does. He rises from the floor, walks to the control panel, and engages the system by speaking two words: Amma and Tolpra.
Nhan smiles. “The two most beautiful moons in our star system,” she says. The scientist turns to her.
“They’re my daughters.”
Yep. Even during episodes that stretch credulity and lean obviously on emotional manipulation, they can find a way to yank a tear or two out of you.
The system now open, Nhan requests the necessary seeds and the machinery whirrs to life. The seeds procured, Burnham hails Discovery and tells them to beam everyone, including the scientist, directly to sick bay. The scientist’s physiology won’t sustain itself much longer unless he gets immediate medical treatment. But he refuses to leave. He won’t leave his family.
And thus, we have a classic Star Trek moral quandary. The scientist has made his wishes clear, but the mores of his culture are different from those of humanity. Nhan makes the case that his request must be respected, but Burnham points out that if he dies, the ship of seeds will be without anyone to take care of it. It’s a living record of hundreds of years and thousands of species of cultures. It cannot simply be abandoned. And then Nhan does the unthinkable.
“Then I’ll stay.”
I’m sorry, what’d you say Nhan? You’re going to stay on this ship? Alone? And pilot it back to your home planet? Just so the scientist and his family can have a proper burial? I mean, decent as hell of you, but your Star Fleet career would be over.
But that’s what she does, and maybe that’s one of the more subtle lessons the show has for us this week. My first thought was that she was acting irrationally, but following her own culture's social norms instead of Star Fleet’s is something we should pay attention to. There are different ways to live, to serve your community, to honor a tradition, to remember your family. They don’t all look the same. We can still find a way to observe and respect them if we try though. And we should always try.
There’s a powerful goodbye scene between Nhan and Burnham, where Nhan reminds Burnham of something she’d said at a funeral for a fallen colleague-- That one of the reasons we join Star Fleet is to reach for the best in ourselves and each other. Nhan is reaching for the best in herself, and for her, that’s returning to the planet, the people, and the home she once left for bigger adventures. And after nine months of being very much at home, very much with our nuclear families, and living lives of much quieter adventures, I see a beauty in Nhan’s gesture I might not have noticed a year ago.
And that, my readers, is why I keep coming back to this franchise.
Discovery returns to Star Fleet with the necessary seeds, also having fortified the seed ship with a new caretaker. The ever surly Admiral Vance is impressed at Detmer and Owosekun having navigated an ion storm to retrieve the seed ship, and is mystified by Nhan’s sacrifice. Saru, with incredible eloquence, tells Vance that his entire crew was well aware of the potential implications of their time travel mission, and they stand ready for more. Finally, Vance’s icy demeanor begins to soften. Perhaps Discovery and her crew really are Star Fleet family. Perhaps they should be kept together. Perhaps they should be trusted.
I began writing this recap a little annoyed with how unnecessarily emotional this episode had seemed. Dead children, a raging epidemic, a scornful and small minded Star Fleet, these seemed like heavy handed plot devices yanking clumsily at our heart strings. But as Saru demonstrates in his closing conversation with the Admiral, outside perspective can frequently change the way we see things. When a good friend told me before I’d watched this episode that this was a “perfect episode,” the bar was set pretty high. After my first viewing, I was underwhelmed and disappointed. But now I find myself reconsidering what he said. It was that this episode reminded him so much of The Original Series. Having not seen any of those episodes in two decades, I asked him to elaborate:
Implacable adversary takes control but observes as the seemingly inferior crew shows how it is greater than the sum of its parts as it compassionately solves the adversary’s problem - earning admiration and respect.
And you know, he’s right. Even if it was at times clumsy, this episode, and this season, are staying true to the original formula that made Star Fleet something I wanted to join as a little kid, and still use as a north star anytime I have a difficult decision in front of me. Because that’s the great thing about Star Fleet, and Star Trek-- its relentless hope makes doing the right thing, even when it’s hard, the only thing to do.
Sonia Van Meter, Larry Wilmore’s nemesis, is an award-winning political consultant, a partner in the Truman National Security Project, and former aspiring Mars colonist. Follow her on Twitter at @bourbonface.
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