In late February, I checked Season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery out from the Library. I only had a week to watch it. Although the Detroit Public Library no longer charges overdue fines, I try to return items on time (and besides, you can’t check anything else out if you’ve got even one overdue item).
If I had known about the impending lockdown, I would have held on to Discovery for a couple of more weeks, and then watched it at my leisure. Library items are, for all practical purposes, extended until further notice.
Like the first season, the second season of Star Trek: Discovery is designed for binge-watching. And I got this sense, much more so than with the first season, that the episodes are fast-paced so that people don’t have time to stop and wonder whether any of it makes any sense.
With any Star Trek we have to accept that things like transporters, warp drive, time travel and seamless real-time universal translators are possible. But even with those allowances, some Star Trek episodes test suspension of disbelief more than others.
The cast and crew of Discovery are well-versed in the art of rapid-fire technobabble. Speed through all the technical jargon quickly so as to leave more time for chases, fights and explosions.
There are three mysteries that drive Discovery Season 2: What are the seven strange signals seen throughout the galaxy? Who the hell is the Red Angel? And why did Spock murder two people and escape a mental institution?
Before going any further, I gotta give the spoiler spiel. If you haven’t yet seen Discovery Season 2 and fear that knowing a few random details could completely obliterate your enjoyment of the show, then please stop reading, and please come back after you’ve seen Season 2. Or maybe read the open thread about Season 1.
As usual with these open threads, we may freely discuss anything that happens in Star Trek (the original series and the animated series), Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Star Trek: Enterprise. And of course anything in Discovery Season 1 is fair game for this particular open thread, because we’ll be discussing Season 2.
But with Star Trek: Picard, use commonsense. While it would be silly to regard something in Next Generation Season 1 as a spoiler for Picard, don’t go out of your way to “spoil” the new show. I don’t mind “spoilers,” but some other people regard it as a high crime or misdemeanor, like soliciting foreign election interference, or accepting emoluments.
Okay, so Discovery Season 2 starts with the Enterprise, NCC-1701, damaged. Captain Pike (Anson Mount) comes aboard Discovery and takes command. Commander Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is disappointed that Spock is not aboard the Enterprise.
Pike orders Discovery to the site of one of the seven signals. No one can figure out what the seven signals have to do with anything, or with each other. But apparently, Spock saw the signals in a vision some years before, and is now emotionally tortured by them.
Michelle Yeoh (left) as Philippa Georgiou and Alan Van Sprang as Leland, agents of Section 31.
One of the signals leads the Discovery to a Sphere (not sure if they have anything to do with the Spheres in the Expanse on Star Trek: Enterprise). The Sphere contains the massive archive of an ancient civilization.
There’s this computer called Control that’s supposed to help Starfleet admirals make tactical decisions. But now it seems to be making decisions for the admirals instead. Control has apparently decided that it must have the Sphere archive in order to become sentient.
Wait, what? Can’t Control just find some big data storage, consume that and become sentient? If it’s cutting Starfleet admirals out of the decision-making process, hasn’t it already become sentient? And how do Pike and Burnham figure this out anyway?
Another effect of following the signal to the Sphere is that Commander Saru (Doug Jones) falls ill, terminally so. He asks Burnham to cut off his threat ganglia (as you might remember from Season 1, the threat ganglia are what give Kelpians like Saru their “Spidey sense”). This is a normal part of a Kelpian’s life cycle.
But instead of dying, Saru recovers from the illness and finds a new confidence in this “second” life. And he realizes that everything Kelpians have been told about their life cycle is a lie.
Quite conveniently, one of the signals takes Discovery to Saru’s home planet, where he discovers the truth: a Kelpian losing the threat ganglia is a marker of maturity, not death, and the more technologically advanced Ba’ul are afraid that mature Kelpians pose a threat to their own survival. So the Ba’ul remove mature Kelpians, presumably to kill them.
After several conversations with Sarek (James Frain) and Amanda Grayson (Mia Kirshner), Burnham figures out where Spock is. Spock (Ethan Peck) seems to have lost his mind, but Burnham is convinced Spock did not kill anyone. Spock is babbling some 6-digit number, and Burnham quickly figures out that that 6-digit number backwards somehow uniquely identifies the planet Talos IV.
And so that sets up what might be the first of many unauthorized visits to Talos IV, complete with some footage from “The Cage,” the original pilot for the original series.
Another thread is that Pike must go to a Klingon monastery to obtain a time crystal for some reason or other. So we meet Crewman Tyler’s Klingon son, now all grown up.
Crewman Tyler (Shazad Latif) in a Season 1 episode of Star Trek: Discovery, with the text "¡Jihad Qapla'!" (mixing Arabic and Klingon scripts) added as if it were a subtitle.
And of course Section 31 is now involved in the whole thing with Control. The Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) from the Mirror Universe is now a Section 31 agent with a black Starfleet badge.
At the end, it turns out that Burnham was the Red Angel. But before she can lead Discovery to the 31st Century, she must make the jumps to set the seven signals. Huh? Okay.
Maybe there is a way, using only what’s shown in the episodes, to determine a logical sequence of causes and effects through all the time travel that stands up to careful scrutiny. I would listen to such an explanation, but I’m not interested in coming up with it myself. The writers were more concerned with maintaining the breakneck pace and avoiding the mid-season doldrums that afflict so many streaming shows, than they were with crafting stories you’ll want to revisit in your mind.
The season ends with Discovery flying off to the 31st Century. In the 23rd Century, all knowledge of Discovery is classified. So, you see, we respect Star Trek canon after all, even as we seemed to willfully ignore it.
I don’t know, I don’t like this idea that canon is somehow burdensome. The series and movies hardly form a complete history of Starfleet, much less the Federation. There ought to be plenty of room for the writers to come up with new stories that don’t blatantly contradict previous stories.
Julian Bashir plays dabo at Quark's.
Discovery Season 3 is probably all “in the can” now, but it’s being held back so as to not crowd Picard. I haven’t seen Picard yet, probably won’t until it comes out on DVD/BluRay. But tonight I’ll probably be watching some of “All Star Trek” on the Heroes and Icons (H & I) digital TV channel.
Tonight’s All Star Trek line-up on the Heroes & Icons (H & I) digital TV channel syncs up nicely with this week’s open thread topic. It consists of the original series “The Menagerie” (Part I, involving what we now know to not be the first unauthorized visit to Talos IV), Next Generation “Relics” (that’s the one with James Doohan reprising his Scotty rôle from the original series) Deep Space Nine “Inquisition” (which introduced Section 31 to Star Trek), Voyager “Author, Author” and Enterprise “Vox Sola.”
And by the way, prior to that, H & I reran the JAG episode in which Lt. Commander Rabb (David James Elliott) doesn’t get to fly a space shuttle but does get to help avert a murder in orbit.
The open thread question for this week is for those of you who’ve seen Discovery Season 2. How did you like it? Are you looking forward to Season 3?