In A Glass Of Bourbon, Darkly
or
All Will Be Clear In A Minuet
After a dozen years of waiting, Star Trek is back on television.
But fans aren't too happy with the show.
The producers promised that while we might see things that
seem to violate Trek's historical continuity, everything in the
series would be resolved and lead right into Kirk's TOS.
But things are so counter-continuity, both in characterizations,
motivations, and technology, that we're hard pressed to believe it.
Boldly Going Down The Tube
Discovery (NCC-1031) is a black-ops science/warship obviously associated
with the secret "Section 31" elaborated in some of the previous series.
Some don't enjoy its theme of conflict, personal arrogance, dark realpolitik,
and the descent into evil. Then there are the inconsistencies with the known
history of the Trek universe. Discovery herself has technology that seems
noticeably more advanced than what Kirk's Enterprise will have a decade later.
Trek fandom is the best at rationalizing those kinds of things away,
but there's no getting around the central technology that makes the
Discovery a unique and ultra-powerful ship. The heart of the show
is the ship's Spore Drive. Simple mushrooms are the basis of all
life in the universe, and are simultaneously in our physical world
and on another plane of existence as an infinite living organism.
By transferring some DNA from a mushroom into a sentient being,
one can tap into the mushverse, see Everything, and teleport anywhere.
So the mushroom-mutated scientist-turned-navigator plugs into the ship,
the saucer section spins around spewing mushroom spores into space around
the ship, and Discovery is instantly teleported wherever she needs to be.
We would ask what the writers have been smoking but it's obvious.
And unlike warp drive or transporters, every episode is explicitly about
the spore drive. It's going to be hard to write it out of the story.
And re-runs will always remind us that it was a thing.
What can be done?
Continuity
The producers have sworn up and down that (unlike the recent reboot movies)
Discovery is set in The Original Series (TOS) universe, where in 10 years
Captain Kirk will command the Enterprise.
Of course, those same people also said they consulted with eminent scientists
about the science depicted on the show, and we got the mushroom Spore Drive...
The most recent episode ("
Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad") is a time-loop
story featuring Harry Mudd not as a con man
who never killed anybody, but as a vengeful
time-traveling serial killer who prefers the most sadistic and painful method known.
Specifically, he tosses little gumballs of "weaponized dark matter" at his victims.
Clearly much of what we are seeing on Discovery must have "never happened"
a decade later by the time the series concludes, contemporaneously with the
beginning of the era of James T. Kirk and the Federation we know and love.
Reflections On The Problem
Captain Lorca is exceeding the limits of mere amoral pragmatism,
perhaps descending into unavoidable evil. Starfleet captains are
not known for their evil nature. Except in the "
Mirror, Mirror"
universe. Those guys are a lot like Lorca (although with a
more sadistic edge). And the mirror universe is from Kirk's TOS!
In a transporter accident in 2267, Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura,
found themselves a parallel universe, almost exactly like theirs,
but the federation was evil, and Spock over there had a beard.
Maybe STD is actually set in the mirror universe!
Or maybe at least Lorca is from there.
Mayybe the directors are even telegraphing this to us.
In "
Lethe", Captain Lorca defies direct orders and goes to
rescue Sarek, who is dying and alone aboard a lost and damaged ship.
After this is effected, Lorca's former lover and current commanding Admiral,
Katrina Cornwell, intercepts the Discovery to personally confront him about
his insubordination and increasingly erratic behavior. In his quarters they
reminisce a little, but oddly enough, he doesn't even remember one of their
most memorable tender moments of days gone by. And after they sleep together,
her gentle waking nudge results in him attacking and pulling a phaser on her.
He sleeps with it under his pillow.
"I hate that I can't tell if this is really you!" she exclaims.
At the very end of the episode, the director has us watch Lorca,
in his cabin looking out the window, reflecting upon things.
It's almost like he's looking into a mirror, darkly.
Meanwhile, another crew member has undergone a personality change.
That would be Stamets, who is uncharacteristically positive these
days after altering his DNA and interfacing with the mushroom
plane of existence. Maybe it's just the shrooms, but when he
walks away from his reflection in the mirror, the reflection
lingers there and then actually moves differently.
Those scenes surely mean something, but what?
Kirk occasionally gave orders that were hard to explain and seemed to
defy Starfleet orders. Kirk's mirror doppelganger didn't last very
long on the "real" Enterprise, but Discovery is a black-ops ship,
Mirror Resolution
The problem with just Lorca being from the mirror universe is
that it while it could explain his behavior, it does nothing
to resolve the technical and other continuity problems.
The problem with setting the entire series in the mirror universe is the same.
The subject of not just TOS, but three different Star Trek series,
the Mirror Universe has its own historical continuity. If we assume that
time in our universe corresponds at all to time in the mirror, we simply
have all the same technology problems. By the time Kirk comes along,
the mirror people only have exactly the same ships and weapons in
both realities.
In
Enterprise, mirror-Hoshi ultimately captured a Constitution-class starship
that had been sent back to Archer's time. That's a big head start,
and if they reverse engineered it, they could have technology that
pretty well corresponds to Lorca's Starfleet and the Discovery.
The problem is, in ten years when Kirk encounters the Spock-has-a-beard reality,
the Enterprise over there just like his own: the same Constitution-class ship.
Apparently in the mirror, no significant technology was developed during
the 112 years from 2155 ("
In A Mirror, Darkly") and 2267 ("
Mirror, Mirror").
While they understood the starship Defiant well enough to copy it and
build the Enterprise, they weren't able to improve it or have any
more scientific breakthroughs.
(Maybe it's a little like the Russians using early 1980s computer circuits,
directly cloned from stolen diagrams of the US parts, right down to reproducing
the non-functional etching of the company name on the part!
And being stuck at that level of tech, while the US computer technology
rapidly advanced way beyond that Even though Russia is no scientific slouch!)
Anyway, starship Discovery seems too advanced to be in the mirror universe,
just exactly as it is too advanced in the real universe.
There is one last problem with being set in the mirror universe.
The mirror universe does not have the "Federation".
It has the Terran Empire.
NCC-1701 is the Imperial Star Ship ("ISS") Enterprise,
not the United Federation of Planets Star Ship ("USS") Enterprise.
An Alternate Factor
Maybe the series is set entirely in a third universe.
There must be an infinite number of universes, so perhaps
this is taking place in some other mirror-like universe.
One that wasn't based on the Terran Empire, but on a
version of the actual "Federation" gone wrong.
That would clear up all the continuity problems: historical
event contradictions, Romulan versus Klingon contradictions,
Klingons looking too different from any seen before,
and of course the technology level.
Of course, this alternate-alternate universe solution would
be a pure dodge by Paramount. While it might or might not be
contemporaneous with Kirk's timeline, it's not the TOS universe
and it doesn't lead to any universe we've ever seen before.
Dream Your Troubles Away
or
Story Arch
Star Trek has a history with "And then I woke up" illusion maneuvers,
sometimes to excellent effect. It started in TOS with the recounting
of Captain Pike under the spell of the Talosians in "
The Menagerie".
In TNG, Picard lives an entire alternate life in the beautiful story
of "
The Inner Light". Over the decades, Star Trek has won three Hugo
awards, and those episodes were two of them. Another excellent treatment
of this sort was Riker in TNG's "
Future Imperfect".
Holographic Resolution
Some fans complain that Discovery has a holodeck: we see them using it
for a tactical training exercise and phaser practice.
But this could actually be the solution to Discovery!
Many believe that holodecks came in with Picard's ship on
The Next Generation,
in the 24th century. But Kirk actually
did have a holodeck on his 23d century
Enterprise -- it debuted on
Star Trek: The Animated Series as the "recreation deck".
McCoy, Sulu, and Uhura were trapped on this holodeck once. They knew what
they were experiencing is only virtual reality, just as when Picard and Riker were
enjoying themselves - but got waylaid in TNG's "
11001001".
Most audaciously, in the finale of the
Enterprise series, it is implied that the entire
series may have been a dramatized historical fiction taking place in a holodeck.
It revealed that the never-before identified, frequently off-screen referenced
"Chef" was in fact Commander William Riker of
The Next Generation.
Riker wanted insight about Captain Archer and his crew, and
Enterprise
(or at least the finale episode) was all just him make-believe playing on a holodeck.
(Personally, my disappointment with that episode was not that it implied I'd been
watching a holodeck program, but that Chef didn't turn out to be Issac Hayes.)
Could Discovery be a mere holodeck fantasy?
Or maybe these are all characters in a holodeck that have come alive,
like James Moriarty. Maybe we're only seeing their closed universe.
I swear this series is going to drive me to drink A Ship In A Bottle.
"Computer, exit!"
If the whole thing isn't a Tallosian mind experiment, some Mirror universe,
or something to do with the holodock, I suppose the last possibility is that
the entire series is literally a bad dream. Maybe Michael Burnham is having
a nightmare about what she and the universe could become, if she doesn't change course.
Or maybe it's Captain Philippa Georgiou who is having the nightmare.
We really liked her and would love to see her again.
And she did say off-camera that she would be back, somehow.
Any way that it happens, someone somewhere definitely needs to wake up.
