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Let’s Talk About ‘The Examples’:
- Hey look, it’s the USS Janeway! And over there, it’s the T’Pau!
- When it is determined the DMA is ‘man made’ (for lack of a better term), Admiral Vance rattles off a list of god-like species known throughout Trek canon: the Metrons, the Nacene, the Iconian Empire, the Q Continuum.
- Ruon Tarka name drops the scientists he’s been working with on the new and improved spore drive: Aurelio, whom we last saw on Season 3 played by fan favorite Kenneth Mitchell.
- Owosekun and Detmer have a day off … even if it is a very important mission to save the lives of an entire colony. At least Lt. Commander Rhys is on duty and eager to lead the evacuation team because of his own personal experience of being rescued as a child by the Federation.
- Tarka may have referenced Close Encounters of the Third Kind with his mashed potato model of the DMA.
- One of the colony prisoners’ crime was counting cards at a Tongo Club, a DS9 shoutout.
- With Culber’s crisis of identity, this is the second Trek show this year to deal head on with a long-standing trope of crew members dying and coming back to life and getting right back to work without anyone blinking an eye. Star Trek: Lower Decks made a reference to this in Season 2.
- Tarka doesn’t mention the name but he says he’s from ‘the pleasure planet’. The symbol on his forehead marks him as a citizen of Risa, which was first referenced in a TNG episode. Until now, there’s never been a major Trek character from Risa.
- Book faces a lot of emotional upheaval this week as Burnham is forced to make a life and death decision he doesn’t agree with … at all … and he becomes a subtle target of Tarka, who may see Book’s pent up anger as a tool he can use to his own advantage.
- Book’s emotional state is also teetering on the edge after learning the DMA is not a natural phenomenon, making him question who would want to travel around the universe killing billions of living creatures.
- Jett Reno is back!
- Zora, the ship’s computer, seems to be developing genuine human emotions
It’s hard to understand how a show in its fourth season can become such a mess but it finally feels like, with this week’s fifth episode of the season, the creatives at Star Trek: Discovery have finally regained their footing and dare I say it may have been because of the absence of several characters (Tilly, Adira, Gray) and the reappearance of another (Jett Reno). That certainly gave the writers a chance to focus more on a stand-alone story that still incorporated the season’s anomaly, or DMA as we’re now calling it, arc. And some members of the regular bridge crew even got the day off — in the middle of a Very Important Mission to boot! For me, it was the best episode of the season.
The episode had three storylines to juggle, and it did them all very well. The main involved the DMA and its new trajectory toward a space colony that is home to the Akaali. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell precisely when the DMA will hit until its energy makes all communication and transport impossible, and even though the Akaali are not Federation members Admiral Vance orders an evacuation of the colony with Captain Burnham taking the lead.
The magistrate is grateful to have the Federation’s help since their own vehicles have managed to evacuate only a small percentage of the population, but Burnham is disturbed when six, unmoving life forms are detected. The magistrate bluntly tells Burnham that they are prisoners, the ‘examples’, serving their time — life sentences — and the ‘law abiding’ citizens of the colony do not want to be in the same space with them. Plus the prison crew has already fled and only their biometrics can get anyone in or out of the prison so … c’est la vie. Burnham insists that the Federation will leave no one behind so she and Book beam down and find many obstacles to the entrance, including mechanical land mines that look like beetles that can also launch saw blades from their backs.
Of course they make it in and discover these ‘criminals’ have basically minor crimes — petty theft, card counting at the casino — that don’ merit life or death sentences. But as this is a former Emerald Chain colony, that is still the rules they follow making ‘examples’ of these felons to deter the rest of the population from committing crimes. When Michael insist that they leave with her, they question why the Federation is now concerned with them when they weren’t before. The easy answer is they had no jurisdiction, but there is still a whole other issue of the morality of allowing people to be treated in such a way. And why now should they trust the Federation when it isn’t even a certainty that the colony will be destroyed? If they are to leave with Burnham and Book, they need an assurance that they will not be returned to these life sentences wherever they land. Michael doesn’t know if she can give them that guarantee, but of course she can if they claim asylum and ask that the Federation review their cases. Then they will be under Federation jurisdiction and the Akaali magistrate will have no say in the matter. They agree, and Michael beams five of them up to the ship.
But one, Felix, tells Burnham he is staying because he’s basically been lying to the others about his crime. He, in fact, did commit a crime worthy of his punishment — murder. He tells Burnham how it started as a simply burglary that escalated into the death of the victim, and it was only later that he discovered an orb that the families pass from generation to generation that includes the entire family history. Felix has been burdened with the guilt of taking this record from the daughter of the man he killed, leaving her without any knowledge of who she was, is or will be. He asks Michael to take the orb while he takes his chances on the colony. Book, though, isn’t having it, still struggling with the deaths of his own family and planet. He’s not about to let anyone else suffer that fate, especially when Michael laid out the ‘no one left behind’ policy. But it’s Felix’s life, his choice and she can’t force him to go but she leaves him with a comm badge so she can let him know if indeed the DMA is going to hit. Her decision has definitely caused a rift in her relationship with Book. And they aren’t back to Discovery for too long before Michael notifies Felix that the DMA is coming. Communication is lost and Felix and the colony are consumed by fire … quite a terrifying and shocking image for this show.
Meanwhile on Discovery, Hugh is still having his own personal issues (which are much more focused than Tilly’s ever were) so he reaches out to Kovich to act as his therapist. But when Kovich appears for the holo-appointment, Hugh tries to push it off saying he has to help with the evacuation of the colony. Kovich insists that Hugh asked for ten minutes, Kovich cleared ten minutes, so Hugh is going to talk to him whether he wants to or not. But it didn’t take long for Kovich to lay Hugh out, pinpointing exactly what his problem is — that he’s alive. He’s given himself a savior complex and a martyr complex but he can’t keep putting on a happy face and telling others things will be fine when he can’t even accept the fact that he died and came back. Kovich, seemingly over Hugh’s pity party, basically tells him to deal with it and move on because he’s got a two o’clock. Later, dude. But later, Hugh and Paul finally have a little chat and realize that they are two peas in a pod, and know that they have each others’ backs.
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Paul had his own issues during the evacuation, mainly the arrival on ship of scientist Ruon Tarka, the man who is working on a new, advanced spore drive for the Federation … using all of Stamets’ research but never bothering to actually speak with Stamets throughout the process. And Paul being Paul, he’s taken great offense at having to work with someone he considers the epitomy of rudeness. And Tarka, maybe more blunt than rude, knows how to make an impression once he arrives on Discovery, making observations about Saru, the ship itself and others in a voice that usually stays in one’s head (or ends up on social media). And to make matters worse, he knows more about Stamets and the DMA than even Stamets knows (which seems to humor Jett to no end). But Stamets also takes great pleasure in the fact that Tarka hasn’t yet figured out the navigator problem in his new spore drive.
Looking more closely at the DMA’s recent disappearance and reappearance, Tarka concludes that the anomaly isn’t an anomaly — it’s been created by some intelligent species but to what end is unknown. And the only way to really figure out what the DMA is and how it works is … to create a mini version ON THE SHIP. And Stamets actually is on board with the idea, assuring Commander Saru that the ‘black hole’ will be contained and the ship will be in no danger. The problem is once they get a working model up and running they realize they will need much more power to replicate the real thing. They can’t draw any power from the transporters since they are in use, so Jett finds a way to re-route power from another part of the ship, with the caveat that Saru must have access to a kill switch if the power drain or the artificial DMA puts the ship in danger. They fire it up and Stamets and Tarka are very happy with the results but the longer the simulation runs, the less stable the shield around it grows. As the computer counts down the shield’s strength, Paul keeps begging Saru to hold off but when it gets to 5%, Saru has no choice but to shut it down. Jett cracks that Tilly is going to be so upset she missed Stamets almost killing them all with a simulation just three days after she left the ship.
They have a lot of information, but still not enough to conclude who may have created the DMA. In the ship’s bar, Tarka just happens to bump into Book, the one other person on the ship who can control the spore drive. And it seems that Book might be more than willing to help Tarka continue his experiments. Which may further divide him and Michael. But what was that mark/scar on Tarka’s neck that seemed to give Book pause?
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