S3 E9: It’s the Philippa Show

A funny thing about mirrors is sometimes they show us what we don’t want to see.

People, I’ve got to admit I asked Sonia Van Meter to write these episode recaps for selfish reasons. I’m the guy sitting next to her on our purple couch when she watches all manner of Star Trek, and I’m like a distracted puppy. I don’t pay super close attention, and I only catch every other word when I am. When the shows lose me, I ask what in the heck is going on, and that’s when Sonia looses a torrent of arcane knowledge about how something something something and she’s lost me. She knows more about the Star Trek universe than, I suspect, the one we actually live in. So I thought getting her to recap these episodes would help me understand Star Trek: Discovery, which impressed me for its inclusive casting, production values, and general derring do. This week’s recap is a great example, because people, I saw this episode and paid attention, but I didn’t see half the stuff she did. This is a good one because she gets to focus on one of her favorite characters, Philippa.

by Sonia Van Meter

In an effort to write Discovery recaps that can be read in a single day, I’ve had to make choices about what to discuss and what, sadly, to just let go. I do my best to find the central theme in each episode while still riffing a little on some of the less germaine but distressingly interesting details. Truly, Tilly’s hair still deserves its own episode. But as I don’t have infinite time and you probably don’t need a dissertation on obscure Star Fleet regulations or parallels between Discovery and The Next Generation every week, I gotta pick my battles. Unfortunately, that has meant, for better or for worse, that we have NOT paid proper attention to the arc of Philippa Georgiou. Despite being one of the most compelling characters on the show, her story doesn’t often contribute to any through lines of the season, so we usually gloss over her activities to focus on plot.

Friends, that ends today. Today, it’s the Philippa show.

First, let us remember that this Philippa is not our Philippa. We may have become accustomed and even attached to her character, but the Philippa of the prime universe died back in the very first episode of the very first season. This brilliant, vicious version is from the mirror universe, where humans are monsters. In fact they’re not even humans. They’re called Terrans, which I’ve come to learn is just a way to distinguish prime universe folks from the mirror one. We’ve seen the mirror universe in plenty of other Trek series, but Discovery has really leaned into the character crossovers between the universes and succeeded in a way other series have not. Mirror universe characters are usually cartoonish cheese-bombs drunk on their own power and angry to the point of comedy. Never forget Evil Spock, or worse, Evil Kira. Woof. But Discovery took a Terran and threw her into the prime universe permanently, thus affording her the opportunity to grow from a two dimensional caricature into a real live human. And that’s the Philippa we’ve come to know and love. 

And she has changed. Quite a bit. If you are the company you keep, it was inevitable that mirror-universe Philippa would absorb at least some small amount of the integrity, honor, and even compassion from the crew of Discovery. By prime universe standards, she’s still evil. She’s calculating, devious, and filled with a rage that seems to emanate from her very molecules. But after years among noble Saru, gentle Tilly, and a Michael Burnham she almost views as a daughter, she’s softened ever so slightly. Not enough that she wouldn’t still open your throat with her teeth if you provoked her, but enough that she can recognize beauty in things other than conquest and power. 

Burnham in particular has had a profound effect on Philippa, though Philippa would cold cock anyone who dared point that out. We know that by the time Philippa arrives in the prime universe, the mirror universe Burnham is dead, and that weighs heavily on Philippa. It makes sense that she would attach to our Burnham in a strange and complicated way. And with Burnham having accidentally caused the death of prime universe Philippa, it follows that Burnham would attach to mirror universe Philippa in a similar way. Neither are what the other needs them to be. They are warped echoes of individuals they loved. Grief makes messes of people. If the face but not the soul of a loved one suddenly walked back into your life, would any of us be able to see them clearly?

Grief makes messes of people. If the face but not the soul of a loved one suddenly walked back into your life, would any of us be able to see them clearly?

Fortunately, this episode is master class in trying to see things clearly. It begins with a revelation about Philippa’s illness. Something bizarre is happening to her. Her body periodically seems to be disintegrating and then coagulating again. She’s suffering not just from time traveling, but dimensional traveling. Turns out our bodies are finely tuned to the time and dimension into which we’re born. Take us out of those confines, and our molecules go a little nuts, yearning to be back where they belong. Philippa is dying, and the only thing more terrifying than a Terran knowing they’re about to die is a Terran Emperor knowing they’re about to die. Gird your loins, Discovery. She wants a glorious death-- anything less won’t do.

The only hope seems to lie on Dannus Five, a planet far from just about everything. According to Discovery’s new super enhanced computer, Dannus Five may have a cure for Philippa’s condition. It won’t say what that cure is, just that Philippa needs to get there. It’s long odds of course, and Discovery is needed elsewhere, but this is Star Fleet and we don’t leave our people to suffer and die alone.

Spin. Flash. Dannus Five. And then we are privy to one of the weirdest goodbyes in the history of the franchise. Saru and Tilly both extend well wishes to Philippa, whom they never expect to see again. And Philippa… accepts these wishes graciously. Not five minutes earlier Philippa was literally throwing her lunch in Tilly’s face and calling her Saru’s biggest command failure. Perhaps the possibility of facing death on her feet rather than withering away in a sick bay somewhere has temporarily mellowed her. 

Awkward hugs and handshakes now concluded, Burnham and Philippa transport to the planet’s surface. It’s a snowy, uninhabited rock dotted with a few trees and a lot of nothing much else. The directions ultimately lead them to a door in the middle of nowhere. Next to the door sits a jovial middle aged dude in a bowler hat chilling out reading a paper. 

You know what? I really hate when Trek episodes wander into this kind of whimsical imagery. It’s a door. It’s not attached to anything. There’s nothing on either side of it. And a goofy man is babbling silly jokes and cryptic riddles about Philippa’s situation. Who is he? Where did he come from? What is the nature of this door? What happens if you walk through it? Do we even have answers to these questions? Nah? No problem, we’ll just ignore all that and let Philippa kamikaze through it and just see what happens. 

You know what? I really hate when Trek episodes wander into this kind of whimsical imagery. It’s a door.

But Philippa has had it with hesitation. She knows that no matter what happens on the other side of that door, it’s at least an adventure, and that beats dying in a hospital bed plugged into a bunch of machines. She waves off concerns from Burnham, gives her an almost imperceptible final nod, and charges through.

...and emerges back in the Terran universe, in her original time. Welcome home Emperor! Welcome back to being the baddest bitch in charge of literally everything! Her army greets her with a shriek of worship and a Sieg Heil salute. The bewilderment on Philippa’s face is fabulous. At first you think she’s just reorienting to her rightful universe, but the longer the episode goes on, the clearer things become: She doesn’t belong here anymore. Even with legions of loyal subjects and all the power in the universe, she’s no longer comfortable in this dimension.

This may be exacerbated by the fact that she knows about Burnham and Lorca planning to overthrow and kill her. I mean it’s gotta suck to come home after a long trip and learn your adopted daughter is conspiring to murder you. And if Philippa’s time in the prime universe had been just a brief stay instead of a years long experiment, she'd probably just shrug and have Burnham murdered and then order herself a nice dinner. But Philippa is no longer Evil Philippa. Somewhere in the middle of her journey through the prime universe she grew a conscience. Rather than accepting the fact that her daughter is betraying her, she’s convinced that her Michael Burnham can be saved.

“I know Michael. It is not too late for her to make a different choice.”

Philippa is confusing Evil Michael Burnham with prime Michael Burnham, and it’d be such a lovely development if this was happening in the prime universe, where good things are allowed to happen, and people have faith in one another, and kindness and compassion aren’t utterly foreign concepts. But here? In the mirror? Philippa, girl, snap out of it.

I mean it’s gotta suck to come home after a long trip and learn your adopted daughter is conspiring to murder you.

It really is something to watch these two reach for each other so relentlessly despite actually kind of loathing what the other really is. Prime Burnham detests Evil Philippa’s cynicism. Evil Philippa despises Prime Burnham’s naïveté. But somehow they both feel obligated to one another, constantly bucking orders, reason, even common sense to save one another. 

Will Philippa succeed in bringing Evil Burnham back into the fold? Something tells me that’s a lost cause. The mirror universe is unforgiving. The strong literally eat their servants when they displease them. Philippa’s time in the prime universe has made her savvier, but it’s also diminished her bloodlust, and that’s rapidly becoming apparent to everyone in her orbit. Even her new slave, mirror universe Saru, admits to Philippa what he sees in Burnham: “She cannot love what she sees to be weak, not if she is to survive.” It’s a dark but brutally honest truth about the Terran Empire and this miserable excuse for a dimension. And I doubt Philippa has enough of her old instincts to do what’s necessary to survive.

But maybe that’s the point. This show has enjoyed playing with time. It starts out before the original series and then zooms into a future so far ahead the audience has a hard time even conceiving of it. And to suddenly send a sick woman across a dimension and back into her past, this journey backwards smacks less of recapturing old glory and more of making things right in the twilight of your life. Perhaps Philippa’s not meant to survive. Maybe this is just about righting what she now considers to be wrongs in her former life. We don’t often get the chance to fix mistakes we’ve made in the past, but Philippa has the opportunity to not just fix them, but prevent them from ever happening. It all hinges on her faith in Michael Burnham to come around on her. She’s spared her life in the hopes that Michael will forge a new path back to Philippa. Then again, maybe her faith in Michael is as ludicrous as I think it is. She seems to be reaching for salvation. I think it’ll be her undoing.

I doubt Philippa has enough of her old instincts to do what’s necessary to survive.

One of my favorite “reflection” metaphors in the Star Trek franchise was the 2002 cinematic flop Star Trek: Nemesis, in which Captain Jean Luc Picard discovers there is a clone of him who’s been raised on another planet and literally bred to commit atrocities against humanity. The two come face to face with one another, and the Captain is horrified at the realization that he is, on any level, capable of the horrors his clone has committed. But the thing about Picard’s reflection is that the context was so wildly different. Captain Picard was raised in a loving community with plenty of resources that encouraged decency and compassion and curiosity about the universe. His clone was raised as a slave, told he was worthless, beaten and abused, and then informed he was nothing more than a shadow of a fully expressed human being. What kind of bitterness might that engender in the heart of an adolescent?

Now imagine an entire universe where everyone is oppressed, creativity is stifled, cruelty is rewarded, and viciousness is a requirement. What happens when you take someone out of that universe even for a brief time? If the Emperor of the most brutal regime in all of science fiction can be made to feel compassion, is it possible she can bring some of that compassion back to the Terran universe with her? Maybe inflict it on her own people?

It’s a funny thing about mirrors though. Sometimes we just see what we want in them. Sometimes they show us what we don’t want to see. And apparently we’re going to have to wait until next week to see what’s in this one.

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.

---

What do you think of today's email? I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback. I might even put ‘em in the newsletter if I don’t steal it outright.

Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Unless of course you were forwarded this email, in which case you should…

Thanks to Noom I am down to my college weight, and haven’t had to cut out any foods. I hit my goal weight before Memorial Day and have stayed within a few pounds either way ever since. This is easy. Noom is an app that uses psychology, calorie counting, and measuring activity to change your behavior and the way you think about food. I’m stronger and healthier than I’ve been in years. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works.

Headspace is a meditation app. I’ve used it for a couple years and am absolutely shocked at how much it’s taught me about managing my inner life. Try it free for a couple weeks. Don’t worry if you’ve never done it before. They talk you through it. 

I now offer personal career coaching sessions through Need Hop. 

We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, hoodies, and even tote bags now.

We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some of the most fun I’ve had. 

Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself comes out June 8 from Penguin Random House. There is no better way to support this book than to pre-order a copy. You’re going to love reading what really happened at the Alamo, why the heroic myth was created, and the real story behind the headlines about how we’re all still fighting about it today.