Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 83

The Star Trek Discovery Season Finale or “Hey, we finally remembered we’re making Star Trek and not Game of Thrones in Space.”

Star Trek Discovery has finally reached the end of its highly uneven first season (for my episode by episode musing, go here). The season finale was not as bad as I feared – no one died, for starters, which is a good thing – but it still offered a wildly uneven conclusion to a messy and uneven season.

Warning! Spoilers underneath the cut!

When we last left the Discovery crew, they found themselves under the command of yet another genocidal tyrant and mirror universe imposter, namely Empress Philippa the Merciless posing as Captain Georgiou miraculously returned from the dead. Because the Discovery writers have never met a plot twist they didn’t like so much they weren’t willing to use it twice.

Unlike Lorca, Mirror Georgiou doesn’t even try to fit in. Instead, all her worst qualities are on full display. She mistreats non-human crewmembers and taunts Saru both about his ever-present anxiety and about the fact that his people are considered a tasty snack in her universe. Saru dryly tells Mirror Georgiou that he has become so tough that many find him unpalatable, which is a great comeback. Saru has truly improved a lot as a character, considering I didn’t like him at all to mid point of the season.

Mirror Georgiou also proceeds to beat the shit out of L’Rell, who is still imprisoned in the Discovery‘s brig in order to get L’Rell to divulge the location and layout of some caves on the Klingon homeworld Qo’noS (or “the enemy planet”, as Mirror Georgiou calls it). I suspect I should be more upset by Georgiou engaging in Starfleet sanctioned prisoner torture, but then we already know that this version of Starfleet and the Federation consist of horrible people and besides, L’Rell is so unlikable that I don’t particularly care what happens to her. Though L’Rell not only refuses to talk, she also can’t resist informing Mirror Georgiou that she and her fellow Klingons ate the body of the regular universe Philippa Georgiou, just in case viewers had forgotten that disgusting detail. If there was an award for the Star Trek show most obsessed with cannibalism, Star Trek Discovery would win it by a mile. In fact, I can’t recall any mention of cannibalism ever in any Star Trek show. And indeed no TV show with the possible exception of Hannibal (another Bryan Fuller show – I am beginning to sense a pattern here) has ever been so obsessed with cannibalism.

Michael eventually suggests to Mirror Georgiou that maybe she should talk to Ash Tyler, since he has access to Voq’s memories and his knowledge of the geography of Qo’noS and unlike L’Rell is actually willing to help. At least, Michael thinks that Ash would be willing to help. She has no way to know for sure, since she abandoned him last episode to suffer on his own and achieve redemption. And yes, I still can’t get over how shittily Michael treated the only person aboard the Discovery who only ever treated her well. Meanwhile, Ash is making sailor’s knots to remind himself of his human identity (he did mention that he liked to go sailing and trout fishing a couple of episodes ago), when Michael and Mirror Georgiou walk in on him. Mirror Georgiou immediately treats Ash horribly and refer to him as “it”, but Ash nonetheless tells them that the caves they want to access are part of a Klingon shrine located underneath land the Klingons have granted to the Orions. The Orions, so long term Star Trek fans will remember, are the green-skinned aliens who run a crime syndicate and who mainly appear in the form of scantily clad slave girls and dancers. Now I would have no problem believing that there would be a district/quarter populated mainly by Orions and other non-Klingons and given over to gambling, drugs and prostitution on the version of Qo’noS populated by the Klingons as portrayed in Next Generation and beyond. But considering how xenophobic and isolationist the Klingons have been portrayed in Star Trek Discovery so far, it makes no sense that they would tolerate any non-Klingons on their homeworld, let alone give them land on which they can pursue their less than savoury business. Whatever happened to “Klingons must remain pure” and “Make the Klingon Empire great again”?

The answer is that the Discovery writers decided that they wanted to send some of their characters on an undercover mission to Qo’noS. And so they came up with the idea of having a whole neighbourhood on Qo’noS where non-Klingons and even humans are able to walk around unmolested. Who cares that none of this fits with the way the Klingons have been portrayed in this series so far? Besides, the Orion neighbourhood on Qo’noS is an excuse to feature some scantily clad green-skinned women (and – pleasantly – a few men). And we all know that sex sells TV subscriptions in the US.

Mirror Georgiou immediately decides to lead an undercover mission to the Orion neighbourhood on Qo’noS in order to deploy a “drone” to map the caves or some such thing. The away team consists of – no, not a bunch of expendable redshirts (and indeed, away teams in Discovery no longer seem to include redshirts in general, killing off a noxious trope like so many poor redshirts in Star Trek history), but of Mirror Georgiou, Michael, Ash Tyler and Tilly. Ash Tyler at least has an in-story reason for being there, since he is the one who knows where the caves are and how to access them. Michael is merely there for maximum emotional drama, though you could also make a case for the fact that Georgiou wants her around because of the connection they shared in both universes. As for Tilly, I guess the writers simply thought it would be fun to plunge her into a sleazy alien gambling den and brothel. Coincidentally, it takes Tilly all of two minutes to figure out that the Georgiou currently serving as captain of the Discovery is the mirror universe version.

Together, Mirror Georgiou, Michael, Ash and Tilly make an even more awkward undercover team than Michael, Ash and Lorca did a couple of episodes ago. Nonetheless, off they go to pose as human arms dealers, dressed in some really cool leather outfits. And indeed, the costumes are one aspect of Star Trek Discovery that has been consistently great. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw has an insightful interview with costume designer Gersha Phillips here.

I’ve seem some complaints that the sleazy Orion neighbourhood is a science fiction cliché and that the green-skinned Orions are a problematic Orientalist stereotype (because it’s not as if Star Trek, particularly the original series, hasn’t been full of all sorts of problematic stereotypes and the Orions have never been the worst of the bunch), while others are offended by the fact that the world’s oldest profession will still be a thing in the far future. Now I agree that sleazy neighbourhoods are a science fiction cliché, though one that does not stem from Star Trek, but can instead be traced back to the cantina scene of Star Wars and beyond into written science fiction.

However, like many clichés the sleazy science fiction neighbourhood contains more than a kernel of truth. Because every decent-sized city will have a redlight district full of strip clubs, sleazy bars, more or less visible prostitution and clubs where drugs are as easily available as sugar water masquerading as champagne. Mostly, this redlight district will be near a major transport hub, either the central train station or the harbour, if there is one. It doesn’t even need to be a big city – the small village where I grew up had two brothels with a third halfway between our and the neighbouring village. And everybody knew where they were. Just as I bet you know where the redlight district in your city is. And you probably know the names of at least a few of the establishments. You may know the name of the coolest club or the dodgiest dive bar and maybe you can even name drop a strip joint or a brothel. So the reason we have so many redlight districts in science fiction is because we have so many of them in real life – near every harbour or train station, in every city and every town. And whatever your personal stand on sex work, it will always be with us in some form. But why do we take such delight in describing these places in our fiction (and not just science fiction either – crime fiction and thrillers quite often takes us to the sleazy underbelly of society as well)? Because it offers us a safe way to take a peek inside those places, to venture where we would or could never go in real life (women are still banned from the prostitution streets that exist in many German cities). There is a reason why Hamburg’s famous red light district in St. Pauli has been the setting of so many German novels and movies (and some foreign ones, too, e.g. one of the Jack Reacher novels is set there), which usually make it look so much more interesting than the underwhelming reality. At any rate, I love writing scenes set in dodgy spaceport bars (I just wrote one based on what is supposedly the second-roughest bar in all of Hamburg St. Pauli), sleazy gambling dens and the like. I always have, all the way back to early stories written as a teen which will never see the light of day. For me, these scenes were a way of putting into fiction what I saw in the real world (my Dad works in the shipping industry, so I have seen a lot of harbour cities and they all have redlight districts, including open ones like in Amsterdam or Antwerp), taking a peek behind the walls that hide Herbertstraße and Helenenstraße from public view without gawking at the very real women who work there and sending my characters where I cannot go myself. And coincidentally, I’d love to see an SF take on Große Freiheit Nr. 7 or Polizeirevier Davidswache which move the setting from St. Pauli into outer space. Though I guess I’ll have to write that one myself.

And so I did enjoy the detour Star Trek Discovery took into the Klingon answer to Hamburg St. Pauli. Nonetheless, I feel that a side trip like this would be far more suitable to a mid season episode rather than the season finale. In fact, it is as if the Canto Bight sequences in The Last Jedi had been the climax of the film rather than something that happened in the middle. Fun sequence, but the pacing is off. Just as the stakes – will a bomb destroy all of Qu’noS and wipe out the Klingons? – never felt as dramatic as they should have and not just because we know that Qo’noS and the Klingons will survive. Indeed, given how awfully the Klingons were portrayed in Discovery, I found it hard to care about them in general. Except for L’Rell and Voq, I can’t even remember their names. And I only remember Voq’s name, because he’s the one who becae Ash Tyler.

Though at least the characters enjoyed themselves – more or less. Mirror Georgiou drags everybody to a brothel, where she has a threesome with a young green-skinned man and woman, implying that at least the mirror universe version of Philippa Georgiou is bisexual. Coincidentally, Tilly initially assumes that the female prostitute Georgiou orders is intended for her and politely tries to decline. So does this mean that Tilly is lesbian or bi?

While Mirror Georgiou has fun (and interrogates her sex partners at gun point afterwards), Michael and Ash get to spend some awkward moments together. Ash sits down to gamble with some Klingons to get some information out of them and actually seems to enjoy himself for once. When Michael wonders why the Klingons, who are supposed to hate humans after all, accept him so easily, Ash tells her that to the Klingons, a human speaking Klingon is a curiosity, like a waterskiing dog. I guess I know a lot of waterskiing dogs then. Though there are quite a few humans running around the Orion redlight district and none of the Klingons bat an eyelash, which doesn’t fit at all with their supposes insistence on racial purity and their rampant xenophobia. Okay, so maybe L’Rell, Voq and the rest of the gang were extremists (which would also explain why they were so unlike any Klingons we have ever seen) and the rest of the Klingons don’t particularly mind humans or indeed any non-Klingons at all. But none of this is actually explained, the plot simply dumps our heroes into a neighbourhood on a supposedly hyper-xenophobic planet where they can walk around unmolested in the middle of a war.

While Ash actually seems to be loosening up a little, Michael experiences a PTSD flashback triggered by sound of Klingons laughing, which reminds her of the night her parents were murdered. This moment was a good reminder that Michael is a very damaged young woman and was so long before we met her and that she has a legitimate reason to dislike Klingons. I kind of hoped that Michael’s PTSD episode would be a precursor to her and Ash getting back together – after all, Ash is just as damaged as Michael is and both Ash and Michael could use some help and support in overcoming their respective traumata. Besides, I loved the supportive relationship they had before the stupid Voq reveal – and indeed, Ash is still incredibly supportive once Michael tells him about the death of her parents, even though Michael dumped him last episode when he needed help and support. Nonetheless, I hoped that they’d get back together, but no such luck, because the writers believe that trauma is best overcome by suffering in solitude. And of course, they also believe that romantic relationships that work have no place in Star Trek Discovery, since they managed to destroy the two good romantic relationships in their show, and indeed two of the best in all of Star Trek, since believable romantic relationships were never one of Star Trek‘s strengths.

While Mirror Georgiou and Ash are enjoying themselves and Michael has a PTSD episode, Tilly is stuck guarding the “drone”. She also manages to eat some endangered space whale meat and accidentally gets high by wandering into the Klingon equivalent of an opium den. But of course, the “drone” is not a drone at all, but a bomb, as pretty much everybody realised already. Tilly eventually catches on and immediately informs Michael. But when they return to defuse the bomb drone, Georgiou has already taken it to plant it in the caves, the location of which the team was trying to discover. At this point, Michael finally realises that Mirror Georgiou isn’t acting on her own, but with the tacit approval of Starfleet. She confronts Admiral Cornwell about this and tells her that she will not have any part in a plan that involves genocide, because even in desperate times, Starfleet still has ideals that should not be abandoned. Finally, Michael also threatens to stage another mutiny – because that worked so well the first time. And this time, Saru and the rest of the bridge crew even support Michael.

It is clear that the entire arc of this season has been pushed towards this moment. The series started off with Michael committing mutiny for the wrong reasons because she disagreed with the real Georgiou’s insistence on keeping true to Starfleet’s ideals even when faced with a clearly dangerous opponent and now it ends with Michael threatening to commit mutiny again for the right reasons, because Starfleet is about to betray its own ideals in dealing with a dangerous opponent. It’s pretty much a textbook redemption arc, but it still doesn’t work. For starters, because I still don’t believe that Michael needs any redeeming. Okay, so she probably shouldn’t have been let anywhere near a starship bridge with her massive untreated PTSD, but beyond nerve-pinching her captain (something Spock did several times in the original series and the movies without repercussions), she actually never did anything. Michael’s mutiny failed before it had barely started and she never got the chance to fire at the Klingon vessel. And Michael’s completely disproportionate punishment for her “crime” as well as Starfleet using her as a scapegoat for its own incompetence already demonstrated that Starfleet and the Federation abandoned their supposed ideals a long time ago. Of course, it was nice to see Saru and the bridge crew remembering what Starfleet is supposed to stand for, but we already saw that two weeks ago. And besides, the second mutiny just sort of fizzles out. Michael never gets to nerve-pinch Admiral Cornwell nor is the Admiral arrested and thrown into the brig. No, Michael holds her little inspirational speech and the Admiral agrees to give up her plan just like that. As conclusions go, that’s rather anti-climactic.

But of course, Mirror Georgiou still has the bomb drone. Michael eventually tracks her down and informs her that Admiral Cornwell called the mission off. Mirror Georgiou, however, isn’t willing to just abandon the mission so easily. Instead, she plans to use the bomb as leverage over the Klingons to gain personal power. And she asks Michael to join her. Michael, of course, refuses and tells Georgiou that she will have to kill Michael, if she wants to escape with the bomb trigger. However, killing Michael will bring down the might of all of Starfleet onto Mirror Georgiou’s head. Personally, I doubt that Starfleet command gives a fuck about what happens to Michael – if anything they’ll probably be happy to be rid of an embarrassment. However, Mirror Georgiou believes her and hands over the bomb trigger to live and fight another day. Coincidentally, I like the fact that unlike Lorca, Mirror Georgiou isn’t just evil for the sake of being evil, but that she’s mainly a power-hungry opportunist. And so she gets to walk away and will probably have taken over the entire Orion crime syndicate within a matter of months.

However, there is still a bomb to dispose of and a war to end and only a few minutes of the episode left. And so Michael does both in one sweep. She frees L’Rell from the Discovery‘s brig, beams her onto a Klingon vessel and hands her the bomb trigger. Because if you have just retrieved the trigger for a planet destroying bomb from one genocidal maniac, it of course makes sense to give it to another genocidal maniac. But then, this is standard for the level of plotting in this show, considering that Cornwell and Sarek retrieved the Discovery from one murderous mirror universe impersonator, only to promptly hand it over to another (and once more, Discovery repeats its own plot points and twists). L’Rell takes the bomb detonator and uses it as a threat to unite the Klingon houses under her leadership or else… Of course, the Klingon Empire is now under the control of a political and religious extremist, but hey, at least she’s stopping the war with the Federation, so all is well, at least until next season.

That still leaves Ash Tyler as a loose end to be tied off. And so Ash inexplicably announces that he wants to stay on Qo’noS with L’Rell, because his unique status as a human/Klingon hybrid allows him to promote understanding and peace between humans and Klingons (yeah, we know how well that will go). Of course, only a few episodes ago Ash was so traumatised by the mere sight of L’Rell that he became catatonic. And even if the rape and sexual abuse he remembers were actually consensual sex between Voq and L’Rell (which is a real slap in the face of rape survivors everywhere), Ash still basically goes off to follow the person he believes raped him (and we still don’t know if L’Rell didn’t force herself on him, while Ash’s personality was dominant) to live on a planet full of purity-obsessed Klingons who hate people who look like Ash and will hate him even more for having once been one of them. It’s a truly shitty ending for a character who was one of my favourites in this show.

There is an emotional good-bye and one more kiss between Ash and Michael, but I still don’t buy why these two can’t be together, especially since they clearly care about each other and were good for each other. Even if Starfleet is not willing to take back Ash – and remember that they were willing to take back Picard, after he was Locutus and wiped out half of Starfleet, and Scotty, after he killed a couple of women, while possessed by a malevolent entity in “Wolf in the Fold” – he and Michael could still have a future together. But I suspect the production team wanted to get rid of the Ash Tyler character, because he would always serve as a reminder of the stupid Klingon war storyline and the even stupider Voq subplot that I suspect everybody would rather forget. Not to mention that having a Klingon, albeit a human looking one, serving aboard a Starfleet ship ten years before the original series would contradict the claim that Worf was the first. But then, Star Trek Discovery never cared about canon before, so why here? Or maybe Shazad Latif wanted to leave, especially since he has indicated in interviews that he wasn’t happy with the way his character was written. Of course, there is always the possibility that Ash will be back next season, which would be great, though I for one wouldn’t bet on it. In short, the Star Trek Discovery ruined two of their most likeable characters (let’s not forget poor Dr. Culber who met his demise at the hands of Ash while Voq) and destroyed two of best romantic relationships in all of Star Trek for the sake of a cheap twist, which had zero impact on the overall plot at the end.

The episode ends with the Discovery crew back on Earth. Michael is finally pardoned, gets her rank back and is also reunited with her foster parents, Sarek and Amanda, who tell her how proud they are of her. Nice of them to remember, considering that neither Sarek nor Amanda nor Spock were anywhere in sight, when Michael was sentenced to life in prison. Michael and the whole Discovery crew also get commendations and Michael gets to hold a speech about the values of Starfleet. It should be an elating moment, much like the medal ceremony at the end of Star Wars: A New Hope, and indeed quite a few people reported that they got misty-eyed at the final speech. And if I hadn’t actually watched what came before, I might well have reacted similarly. However, while Michael gives her “Starfleet and its values” speech, I can’t help but notice that Admiral Cornwell and Sarek, both of whom were fully willing to commit genocide, are standing right there and that neither of them has experienced any repercussions, though Sarek is at least very sorry for what he was willing to do. Nor can I forget that the very Starfleet whose values Michael extolls totally and utterly screwed her over. And indeed part of me hoped that Michael would end her speech with, “Screw you all, I quit” and go off with Ash or maybe even that Michael, Saru and the entire Discovery crew would go rogue and decide to fight the good fight independently of Starfleet, as Katharine Trendacosta suggests here. It would have been a bold move, allowing the show to move forward into new territory without tying itself too much to (or interfering too closely with) established Star Trek canon. And indeed, I just read the third novel in a science fiction series (not naming the title here because of spoilers), which not only did the “dark Starfleet” thing much better then Discovery, but also came to that very conclusion and had the main not-Starfleet vessel go independent at the end.

However, the producers of Star Trek Discovery apparently finally remembered that the show they are making is called Star Trek and not Game of Thrones in space and so they decided that they want to make proper Star Trek from now on. Indeed, two of the many producers promise as much in this interview and say that in season 2, they will do more of the things that Star Trek does well. This is a reason to be cautiously optimistic, but nonetheless it’s telling that two of the producers basically admit that while Discovery was many things in its short first season (grimdark new Battlestar Galactica wannabe, Game of Thrones in space, Flash Gordon-esque high octane space opera), it only very rarely was Star Trek. The season finale did feel more like Star Trek than much of what has gone before and the overly neat ending gives them a chance for a clean start next season. Even the magic mushroom drive has been shelved, as Stamets declares in one of the very few lines he gets in this episode that it is too dangerous to use. So Star Trek Discovery brought its overly messy first season to as clean an ending as possible. Though I still want Dr. Culber and Ash Tyler back. With Ash, we at least have the chance to see him again. As for Dr. Culber, the actor and the producers still insist that we haven’t seen the last of the character, but then the production team has said a lot this season, much of which did not turn out to be true.

And just in order to remind us that yes, Discovery is a lot more committed to being Star Trek from now on, they drop a massive reference to the original series in its final few minutes. For after the commendation ceremony on Earth, the Discovery with Sarek on board (Amanda apparently decided to go shopping or something) is en route to Vulcan to pick up the ship’s new captain. And talking of which, why can’t Saru stay captain, since he did a surprisingly good job these past few episodes, with Michael as his first officer or vice versa? But maybe Starfleet has discovered another mirror universe refugee and wants to promote them to captain of the Discovery, because that worked so well the last two times. But whoever is going to be captain of the Discovery from now on, we and the crew have to wait to find out, because en route to Vulcan, the Discovery receives a distress signal from another Starfleet ship. Surprise, it’s the USS Enterprise under the command of Captain Christopher Pike.

Okay, so I have to admit that I felt a little shiver down my spine at seeing the Enterprise at the end. And yes, it doesn’t look like the Enterprise we remember, but then special effects have improved a whole lot since 1966. Nonetheless, having the Enterprise itself show up not quite into Discovery‘s second season smells of desperation. For while all Star Trek shows had callbacks (or call-forwards, in the case of Enterprise) to the original series, few of them deployed so many of them in a single season, let alone their first. This season alone, we’ve had Sarek and Amanda, Harry Mudd and an extended sidetrip into the mirror universe, not to mention easter eggs like Lorca’s tribble or the Gorn skeleton in his weapons room. And now, at the end of its first season, Discovery goes for nuclear and gives us the Enterprise itself. It’s telling that the least Star Trek like of all Star Trek shows is also the one with the most references to the original. Almost as if they’re desperately trying to convince themselves and us that Discovery really is Star Trek.

This doesn’t mean that an encounter with the Enterprise under the command of Captain Pike couldn’t be interesting (and indeed, one of the Discovery tie-in novels apparently featured such as meeting). For unlike Kirk’s crew, we don’t know a whole lot about Captain Pike and his crew. Apart from Spock, the most recognisable member of Pike’s crew is his first officer, Number One (does the character even have a name?). And she is recognisable mainly because she was played by Majel Barrett and not for anything the character ever did. So Pike’s crew doesn’t carry all the ballast that Kirk’s does with one exception. Because there is still the Vulcan science officer Mr. Spock, who also happens to be Sarek’s son and Michael’s adoptive brother. Now Spock has always been one of my favourite Star Trek characters. Nonetheless, I don’t particularly want to see him in Discovery (and indeed, I would have preferred if Michael had been the adoptive daughter of some other Vulcan rather than Sarek). First of all, I’m not a fan of recasting iconic characters who don’t have a history of recasting such as the Doctor or James Bond. To me, Spock is Leonard Nimoy and not Zachary Quinto. Kirk is William Shatner and not Chris Pine and indeed, I don’t consider the J.J. Abrams movies proper Star Trek at all. And coincidentally, Harrison Ford is Han Solo, not Alden Ehrenreich or whatever the actor is called.

Besides, if Michael were to encounter Spock on the Enterprise, that would beget the question why the hell Spock never came to her aid, while she was put on trial and given a life sentence? Because I don’t believe for a second that the Spock whose adventures we have followed for 51 years now would let his sister languish in prison. Cause the Spock we know is the sort of person who risks everything for the people he cares about. Spock is the sort of person who hijacked the Enterprise and risked execution to help Christopher Pike in “The Cage” and who actually did die (though he got better) to save the Enterprise crew in The Wrath of Khan. So if his sister had ended up in prison and unfairly at that, Spock would hijack the Enterprise to break her out and afterwards he would explain why it was the perfectly logical thing to do. Because this is the kind of person that Spock is. So unless he spent the past year in a coma or so, any explanation why he did not rush to Michael’s aid will inevitably make the character come across like an arsehole and Spock is no arsehole. And considering that Discovery has already managed to damage the character of Sarek – for while Sarek was never a good father, he clearly did care about his children and he also was a committed Federation diplomat who would never have consented to go along with genocide – I’d prefer if they didn’t damage the character of Spock, too.

So can Star Trek Discovery become a good Star Trek show after all? It’s certainly possible and the production team have done their best to tie up the messy first season to give themselves as clean a start as possible. And Star Trek is rather infamous for weak first seasons. However, this is one area where Discovery‘s serialised structure really harms the show. For while it is perfectly possible to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and skip over dreadful early episodes like “Justice” and pretend they never happened, it’s not nearly so easy to ignore the bad episodes of Discovery‘s first season and watch only the handful of good ones, because the serialised structure means that the episodes don’t stand alone well. Of course, it might be possible to just skip the entire first season altogether, especially if none of the crap that happened this season is ever mentioned again.

But nonetheless, looking at Star Trek Discovery‘s first season, I can’t help but see a huge waste of potential. For even though I have been pretty harsh on Discovery, there were things the show did well. They had a great cast, interesting characters and two of the best romantic relationships in all of Star Trek. And they threw much of that away for the sake of shocking twists (TM) and cheap emotional drama. Discarding the characters of Ash Tyler and Dr. Culber for the sake of a stupid twist is the most grating example (though at least Ash could still be back), but the unceremonious deaths of the real Philippa Georgiou and Gabriel Lorca seem like a massive waste of two fine actors and intriguing characters as well. Particularly, Lorca’s end was a let-down after all that build-up and they could have done so much more with his character rather than turn him into a one-note villain and kill him off. Not to mention that it would have been interesting to meet the real Gabriel Lorca, no matter how briefly. And while Mirror Georgiou is still vamping it up somewhere out there, I still wish we would have seen more of the real Captain Georgiou. Hell, we’ve had more episodes of evil Mirror Georgiou than of the good Philippa Georgiou, caring mentor and highly decorated Starfleet captain.

So in short, Star Trek Discovery is not entirely irredeemable, but it will need one heck of a redemption arc (but hey, the show seems to love them) to become the fine show it could have been.

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In Defence of Wallpaper Science Fiction

A few days ago, Paul Weimer pointed me on Twitter to this post by Charles Stross in which Stross laments the current state of the science fiction genre, because a lot of SF writers these days focus more on plot, action, characters and their relationships than on worldbuilding, particularly on economics, which is the aspect of worldbuilding that is closest to Stross’ heart. It’s clearly an issues that he feels strongly about, since Charles Stross writes variations of this post nearly every year, such as this three part rumination on space opera and its clichés from 2016 or this post on why he prefers urban fantasy to science fiction from 2014.

Here is a quote from the most recent post:

Unfortunately, we get this regurgitated in one goddamned space opera after another: spectacle in place of insight, decolorized and pixellated by authors who haven’t bothered to re-think their assumptions and instead simply cut and paste Lucas’s cinematic vision. Let me say it here: when you fuck with the underlying consistency of your universe, you are cheating your readers. You may think that this isn’t actually central to your work: you’re trying to tell a story about human relationships, why get worked up about the average spacing of asteroids when the real purpose of the asteroid belt is to give your protagonists a tense situation to survive and a shared experience to bond over? But the effects of internal inconsistency are insidious. If you play fast and loose with distance and time scale factors, then you undermine travel times. If your travel times are rubberized, you implicitly kneecapped the economics of trade in your futurescape. Which in turn affects your protagonist’s lifestyle, caste, trade, job, and social context. And, thereby, their human, emotional relationships.

Whenever Stross posts a variation of this “other people are doing science fiction wrong” rant, it inevitably gets my hackles up and also reminds me why I have bounced hard off every Charles Stross novel I tried to read. By now I have accepted that Charles Stross and his work simply are not for me, to the point that I only check out new work by him, when it finds its way to the Hugo shortlist and I am eligible to vote. Where I inevitably bounce off his work yet again. Because the things he values in science fiction are very different from the things I value.

For starters, an overexplanation of any aspect of worldbuilding at all will quickly land you in Alfred and Bertha territory and that way lies madness. After all, there is a reason why the Alfred and Bertha stories are parodies of a certain kind of overly infodumpy hard science fiction (though military SF can be just as infodumpy – it merely infodumps in other areas). And indeed, in The Three Quarters Eaten Dessert, I spent a full paragraph explaining the concept of VAT/sales tax and another explaining the concept of paper money in response to one of Stross’ rants that science fiction writers care too little about economics and never talk about VAT/sales tax.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a kernel of truth in Stross’ post. Because all too often, things show up in science fiction, just because “that’s the way things are”, whether in genre or life, regardless if this makes sense in this particular setting. The prevalence of Galactic Empires vaguely modeled on the Roman or British Empire in science fiction is a result of tropes being imported from other genre works unexamined, as is the fact that every future military ever is either modelled on the US Marine Corps of the 20th/21st centuries or the British Royal Navy of the 18th and 19th centuries and that every starship is modelled on a modern aircraft carrier. Not that there cannot be very good narrative reasons for choosing these particular models over any others that are available, but all too often the answer to the question “Why is there a Galactic Empire rather than any other form of government?” or “Why is the future military modelled after the US Marine Corps or the British Royal Navy?” or “Why does this future starship function like a 20th century aircraft carrier?” is, “Because that’s the way things are done in this genre and besides, franchise X does it that way.” Hell, I’ve even seen writing advice explicitly stating, “Pick an existing SF franchise and use that as a baseline for how things work in your universe.”

But unexamined assumptions also creep into SF worldbuilding in other ways. For example, Star Trek Discovery (and Voyager, for that matter) assume that of course prisoners will be used for forced labour, because that’s the way things are and have been since the late 19th century at least in the US, whence the writers hail. Never mind that using prisoners for forced labour makes no sense in a post-scarcity quasi-utopian system like the Federation, where replicators are common and manufacturing is largely automatised. But prisoners have to do slave labour, because that is just the way things are. Just as prisoners wear overalls in garish colours, a convention that shows up a lot in filmic science fiction (also see the bright yellow prison uniforms in Guardians of the Galaxy), even though garishly coloured prison uniforms are a purely US thing and something that came in only in the last twenty to thirty years. Before that, prisoners wore denim shirts and pants or the traditional striped prisoner garb or the broad arrow on British prison uniforms or the plain white sarees (for women) or pants and shirt combinations (for men) worn by prisoners in India. And indeed, many countries have abolished distinctive prisoner uniforms altogether. But while many readers, viewers and writers would roll their eyes at prisoners dressed in outfits bearing the broad arrow in the far future, the garish yellow prisoner uniforms in Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Trek Discovery pass unremarked, because that is just the way things are and will always be. Just as it is totally normal that there will be such a thing as prisons and prisoners at all, that there is such a thing as a life sentence (common in the US and UK, but abolished or about to be abolished in many European countries) and that life sentences are handed out for crimes such as mutiny (which is of course a very serious crime – another unexamined assumption) rather than that they are reserved for serial killers and rapists, i.e. people who pose a huge danger for society. But while I and other continental European viewers point out that Michael Burnham’s fate in Star Trek Discovery is excessive and grossly unfair, most American viewers just accept it with a shrug. Because that is just the way how things are and always will be.

Coincidentally, Star Trek used to be much better at imagining the future of crime and punishment. The brainwashing shown in the original series episode “Dagger in the Mind” may seem incredibly creepy these days, but it was actually forward thinking at the time and indeed goes back all the way to Doc Savage and his crime college, if not further. Not to mention that the focus of the prison colony in “Dagger of the Mind” is on reform and not punishment or exploitation. But the writers of Star Trek Discovery simply cannot imagine a world where prisoners are not exploited as cheap labour. Just as the writers of the original Star Trek couldn’t imagine a future, even a highly utopian one, without the death penalty, as “The Menagerie” shows, though at the time the series was made in the real world most western countries already had or were in the process of abolishing the death penalty and both executions and support for the death penalty had dropped to an all-time low in the US.

And for that matter, why are Federation citizens so keen to join Starfleet anyway, when the death rate is extremely high and there is no financial incentive to join up, since the Federation’s post-scarcity future has abolished money? And why is Starfleet organised along military lines with a military rank structure and hierarchy, when their main mission is exploration? Why do Starfleet ships have huge crews with hundreds of people, when modern research vessels, the closest real world equivalents to either the Enterprise or the Discovery or the Voyager, have much smaller crews? The answer is probably because the original Star Trek writers and the writers of the works they borrowed from were far more familiar with Navy vessels (there have always a lot of military veterans among SF writers) than commercial or research vessels. And after a while, it simply became the way things have always been done in the genre.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t have aircraft carriers in space (for example, it made sense for either version of the Battlestar Galactica to be based on an aircraft carrier, because the Galactica was an explicitly military vessel in a way the Enterprise wasn’t) or forced prison labour or even chain gangs in space, if you want to. You absolutely can and indeed, an upcoming In Love and War story will be set in a hellish prison camp where the prisoners are basically worked to death. However, if you want to have such a setting, you have to first answer the question “Why is this system in place and why does it make sense?” My answer was that the world in question has a lot of natural resources and exports agricultural products as well as minerals and resources. However, they have little to no manufacturing, so the machinery and software required for automation have to be purchased for foreign currency and the exchange rate is shit, making this extremely expensive. Human labour, however, is cheap and if you can get away with not even paying the humans for their labour, since they are convicts, you can cheaply harvest/extract natural resources and agricultural products and export them for valuable foreign currency. And since violent criminals are not all that good at following orders and complying, you will want mostly non-violent prisoners and you’ll need a way to keep them in line, too. Hence, even small infractions (in one case a parking meter violation, which is borrowed from Cool Hand Luke, the movie where the punishment for demolishing parking meters is death) are turned into crimes that result in lengthy prison sentences. And whole families are locked up, so prisoners can be kept in line via threats to their loved ones. Of course, once I had come up with a reason why there was something very much like a late 19th/early 20th century American chain gang on a planet in the far future, it completely derailed what was supposed to be a simple prison break story, because the system I had come up with was so evil that merely escaping wouldn’t do. The system had to be dismantled as whole. And indeed, Anjali and Mikhail insisted that “we have to stop this, because it is evil.” Which posed all sorts of new storytelling challenges.

So if all that Stross’ post did was implore science fiction writers to interrogate their worldbuilding choices and ask themselves “Why did I choose this?” and “Does this even make sense for the world that I built and if not, how can I make it fit?”, I would probably have heartily applauded. However, that’s not all he does. Because Stross does not just ask science fiction writers to make sure their worldbuilding is makes sense and is internally consistent. No, he also insists that all science fiction, at least the science fiction he is willing to consume, adhere to his personal worldbuilding standards and preferences and dismisses works that fail to match his particular standards. And this is problematic.

For starters, different writers focus on different aspects of worldbuilding. Charles Stross seems to focus on economics. J.R.R. Tolkien focussed on language and linguistics. Hard SF writers like Greg Egan or Stephen Baxter focus on physics. Ada Palmer focusses on philosophy. Brandon Sanderson focusses on magic systems. Military SF writers focus on military equipment and tactics. As for myself, I am interested in food and fashion and culture and architecture and will of course focus more on those aspects than e.g. on economics or physics, both of which I don’t particularly care about. This doesn’t mean that a writer shouldn’t at least have a vague working knowledge of other aspects (or be able to research whatever they need to know to tell the story they want to tell), just that writers will focus more on areas and aspects that interest them than on those that don’t. And if Charles Stross dismisses Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota quartet in the comments to the post with “It didn’t work for me, because the flying cars were not plausible”, he misunderstands the series, because the flying cars in Terra Ignota are just a tool and plot convenience to quickly move characters from one place to another. Flying cars not what those books are about and in fact, you could replace them with a Star Trek transporter, mini-wormholes or even magic pixie dust and still have the same story.

If a work focusses too much on an aspect of worldbuilding (or indeed any aspect) that you don’t care about, it’s perfectly normal to bounce off the work in question. I tend to have this reactions to certain types of military SF and also some thrillers, which make me think, “Enough with the weapons porn. Could we maybe get back to the plot?” Meanwhile, the steamier sorts of science fiction romance or paranormal romance occasionally make me go, “Okay, I get that the sex is great. But could we maybe get back to winning the galactic civil war now? And while we’re at it, could you explain this cool worldbuilding aspect a bit more?” Finally, I once said about Tom Clancy, “I will only read submarine tech specs, when I’m paid to translate them. I certainly don’t want this stuff in my leisure time reading.” Not that it isn’t possible to enjoy a work, even if it focusses a lot on aspects of worldbuilding you normally don’t particularly care for. For example, I’m not overly interested in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, but I nonetheless enjoyed the Terra Ignota books a whole lot, even though the characters spend a lot of time talking about philosophy. Finally, even if I don’t particularly care about a book and find the endless discussion of some worldbuilding aspect I’m not interested in duller than watching paint dry, that still doesn’t make it a bad book or mean that nobody else will like it. It merely means that this book is not for me. And that’s okay, because not every book has to be for me.

But Stross doesn’t merely complain that people are writing books he doesn’t care for, he also pulls out science fiction’s biggest cudgel, namely “This is not scientifically accurate.” And it is a big cudgel, so big that fear of getting hit with it stopped me from writing SF for years (which, to be fair, has nothing to do with Mr. Stross, but was my own reaction to years and decades of similar articles and essays). For as a young person who loved science fiction and desperately wanted to write it and who was scientifically literate enough to realise that movies like The Black Hole or Armageddon were complete and utter bunk and that nuclear reactors don’t require slaves to shovel radium into the atomic furnace (looking at you, Flash Gordon), I was utterly paralysed by the fear of getting the science wrong. Never mind that the sort of SF universe I wanted to create – a big universe with lots of inhabitable planets, alien races and regular FTL travel between them – was scientifically impossible.

It didn’t help either that I read about other science fiction writers who would calculate and plot out the orbits of their fictional planets or who regularly mined science magazines for story ideas. Still, this was the way “real SF writers” did things, so I forced myself to read science articles that often bored me to death, hoping for a nugget of SF inspiration to fall out. And when no nuggets of inspiration appeared, I sadly concluded that I was simply not meant to be an SF writer and focussed on other genres.

Meanwhile, the truth is that I’m simply not that sort of writer. My stories usually start with a character, a situation or a scene, not with a big idea, scientific or otherwise. Nor do I create the story to fit the science, but I research the science to fit the story. It’s a different approach to writing SF (or any other genre), but it’s just as valid as calculating and plotting orbits and drawing GA-plans of spaceships before even writing a single word.

To be fair to Stephen Baxter, he gets this. Take this quote from the article I linked to above about his collaboration with Terry Pratchett on the Long Earth series:

“It was a great idea but Terry’s strength did not lie in landscapes and things,” Baxter says. “He’d get a story by having a basic idea, get two people in a room talking and see where it went from there.”

This is not how Baxter works. His fiction, whether about the colonising mission sent to a planet orbiting a nearby red dwarf star, in Proxima, or the exploration of different evolutions of humanity in the Destiny’s Children series, is meticulously planned and pinned down, rooted in the scientific background from which he comes.

My own way of writing is a lot closer to Pratchett’s than to Baxter’s. I start with characters, too, and not with the science and the worldbuilding. Nonetheless, I found myself paralysed and unable to write in the genre I loved most for years, simply because I was a character-driven and not a big idea writer.

Meanwhile, I was well aware that a lot of the SF I read (or watched) and enjoyed was far from scientifically accurate. A lot of the time I made excuses along the lines of “It’s an old book/movie. They just didn’t know any better back then”, though even I knew that the radium shovelling slaves in Flash Gordon (around the 6 minute mark) made no more sense back in 1936 than when I first saw the serial in 1989. And there was absolutely no excuse for The Black Hole, since everybody should have known about vacuum and decompression by 1979. As for Armageddon, I simply decided to view it as a comedy set in space, much to the consternation of the other cinemagoers, who seemed to take it seriously and were mightily irritated by me laughing out loud during various tense moments.

Even so-called hard science fiction contains mistakes all the time. Here, James Nicoll finds scientific, anthropological and other flaws aplenty in two recent hard SF darlings: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson and Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. And don’t even get me started on novels which get all the science right or at least not glaringly wrong, but still manage to be set in utterly implausible futures entirely populated by straight white American men who never ever seem to eat, fall in love, have sex or indeed experience any human emotions at all.

But even though I saw plenty of other SF works get away scientifically impossible nonsense and had absolutely no problem with lightsabres, aliens crossbreeding with humans, Star Trek transporters and other tech I knew could not exist, I still would not give myself permission do the same and just write the SF I wanted to write. Because I never wanted to be the person who committed the idiocy of the radium shovelling slaves of Flash Gordon or The Black Hole or Armageddon.

Nor am I the only SF writer who ever felt paralysed by the fear of writing something that contradicts currently accepted scientific fact and getting laughed out of the room. In fact, this creative paralysis seems to be quite a common phenomenon, particularly among women and writers of colour who already have a harder time gaining a foothold in the genre and who are more frequently given the message that people like them just don’t get science and so of course cannot write SF. Nor does it help when works by women and writers of colour are disproportionately accused of being “not real science fiction”, when there is a great hue and cry from certain quarters that science fiction is dominated by English majors and MFAs now rather than by the scientists and engineers who used to write it and that those nasty English majors and MFAs are too stupid to understand either science nor what proper science fiction is and want to ruin the genre because they suffer from literary status envy and that any awards won by women, writers of colour and LGBT writers are due to affirmative action rather than merit. In an atmosphere like this, it’s no wonder that budding writers, particularly women and minority writers, are terrified of writing something labeled “not proper science fiction”.

Take for example this post by Catherynne M. Valente, in which she discusses the intense pressure on science fiction writers to keep their work realistic and scientifically accurate and how it paralysed her, wondering whether she was allowed to write something set in a universe that we know does not exist that way. Never mind that anybody who reads as much as the blurb of Radiance, the novel in question, should be able to tell that Radiance is not set in the solar system as it is, but in an alternate solar system as early 20th century pulp science fiction imagined it to be. And you know what? That’s perfectly okay.

Now don’t get me wrong. If you write something billed as hard science fiction, you’d better get the science right. If you write something that is set in our solar system in the fairly near future, then the solar system should look and behave as it does in reality. But hard SF is not the only mode of science fiction out there. And if you want to have steampowered spacecraft, vampires and werewolves in outer space, swordfights on the decks of spaceships, thrilling chases through the asteroid belt, a Mars, Venus or whole solar system straight out of early 20th century pulp science fiction, a planet full of homicidal toys (looking at you, Simon R. Green) or even slaves shovelling radium into atomic furnaces, then yes, you can do that, too. You’ll just have to have find a way to explain it and make it internally consistent with the world you’ve built.

There is also another cudgel hidden in that post, namely the “This story isn’t science fiction, it’s just an adventure story/romance/western/mystery set in space/in the future”. This accusation has always baffled me, because how on Earth is a love story or a murder mystery set in the future or in outer space not science fiction? Sure, if you took away the science fiction trappings, you’d still have a murder mystery or a romance, but it wouldn’t be the same story and this goes even for something like the near future Eve Dallas mysteries by J.D. Robb a.k.a. Nora Roberts.

Nonetheless, the accusation that a given story isn’t science fiction enough, because it uses the SF elements as furniture, is surprisingly common and resilient, from Bat Durston, whose adventures would never see print in Galaxy via Ian Sales’ Ruritanian science fiction to accusations that latter day Cyberpunk tales such as Sam J. Miller’s (lovely) novelette “We Are the Cloud” or the recent streaming video series Altered Carbon, based on Richard Morgan’s eponymous novel, are just a gay love story (“We Are The Cloud”) or a standard noir detective story (Altered Carbon) set in a shopworn and exhausted Cyberpunk future that is in itself a nostalgic retro setting.

My reactions to such criticisms is always “So what?” There is no reason that every work of science fiction always has to focus on new ideas and new technologies and a new, never before seen vision of the future. Sometimes, it is perfectly okay to use science fiction elements merely as furniture or wallpaper to tell a story that focusses on some other aspect of the human experience. Not to mention that saying that “We Are the Cloud” isn’t doing anything new with the genre is wrong (I haven’t seen Altered Carbon and barely remember the novel, so I can’t comment), because what “We Are the Cloud” or other SF stories by Sam J. Miller such as “Things with Beards” do is inject LGBT characters into stories that normally had no space for such characters. And that definitely brings something new to the shopworn urban dystopias of Cyberpunk or the claustrophobic SF horror of Who Goes There?/The Thing. It might not be a new aspect that the critics of these stories care about or even recognise, but it definitely does something new with old tropes.

And indeed, whenever I hear a “my science fiction is purer than thine” critic ask why an author didn’t just write a contemporary or historical novel, if all they do with the science fiction elements is use them as furniture, I always think, “But it’s not possible to move that story to a different time period and/or setting and still tell the same story.” Because if you move a work of wallpaper science fiction (an analogue to wallpaper historical romance) to a different time period, the social and political conditions of that period may well render that story impossible to tell or at least irrevocably alter it. A gay romance between two fighter pilots cannot simply be moved to a WWII setting, because the vicious homophobia of the time would make the story impossible. A tale about a pirate captain who happens to be a lesbian of colour wouldn’t be entirely impossible during the age of sail (there were pirates of colour as well as female and LGBT pirates), but it would still be a very different story and its protagonist would face very different challenges. Or maybe, you simply want to set your story in a world with indoor plumbing, in a world where travelling long distances without grinding the plot to a halt for days, weeks or months is possible (see Ada Palmer and the flying cars of Terra Ignota), where your protagonists don’t have to worry about dying of infectious diseases or other treatable conditions or – if they have wombs and ovaries – dying in childbirth. There are all very good sorts of reasons to set a story in a science fiction world, even if the story itself is a romance or murder mystery or adventure story and the SF elements are merely furniture and background details. Though you should still take some time to consider if you are using these particular SF elements, because your story requires them or just because that’s the way things are done in this genre and whether the elements in question even make sense in the world that you built.

More than other genres, science fiction is always concerned with defining itself and also with policing its borders. Quite often, this involves embracing and absorbing works that use science fiction elements, whether they want to be embraced or not. This is why Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Road, Never Let Me Go, The Plot Against America, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, The Underground Railroad or The Power all came to be considered science fiction, even if their authors occasionally had other ideas. However, this boundary policing is also directed at excluding works for not being science fictional or innovative enough. Even though quite often, the ones attempting to eject a work from the genre cannot even see what is innovative about it (same old cyberpunk, only that the protagonist is gay; same old space opera, except that everybody uses female pronouns, etc…). And you’ll find these boundary policing attempts both on the right (I don’t have to link to that Nutty Nuggets post again, do I?) and the left (many of the links in this post). But whatever direction it comes from, it’s problematic.

If the author considers their work science fiction and if it includes elements generally considered science fictional, then it is science fiction. It may not be the sort of science fiction you like, but that doesn’t make it any less science fiction.

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Star Trek Discovery and the American Cult of Guilt and Redemption

Yes, there apparently was a new episode of Star Trek Discovery last Sunday, though it was easy to forget with the Superbowl and the most important thing about it, the ads and trailers. For previous posts on Star Trek Discovery, see here, by the way.

Though frankly, this episode of Star Trek Discovery also was rather forgettable. It didn’t even have shocking twists (TM), no matter how non-sensical, to keep us on the edges of our seats. Instead, all this episode of Star Trek Discovery dished up was unlikeable people (and aliens) being unlikeable and treating each other like shit. It did feel a bit more like Star Trek – moral dilemmas and people talking a lot – but unfortunately it only seemed to take all the bad aspects of Star Trek – the heavy-handed moralizing of episodes like “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” and the fact that occasionally the solution to the moral dilemma du jour was “Be an arsehole, as long as you don’t violate the prime directive or maybe even if you do” – with none of the good. Camestros Felapton says in his review that it felt a little like an episode of Deep Space Nine, which may be why I didn’t like it, since I never cared for Deep Space Nine at all. Except for Tilly, pretty much everybody behaved like an arsehole in this episode and this includes Michael Burnham.

Yes, this is the episode that made me openly dislike Michael. Though I have to admit I didn’t like her all that much, since Michael was much too passive about accepting what happened to her. I merely sided with Michael almost reflexively, because she had been wronged and treated abominably and I tend to side with characters put in such a situation, even if they are not particularly likeable otherwise. But now it turns out that everybody in this version of Starfleet is an arsehole, including their scapegoat for everything bad that ever happened.

Warning! Spoilers beneath the cut!

So the Discovery made it back into the regular universe, only that the regular Star Trek universe (if that’s what it is, cause I’m still not convinced) is in dire trouble, since the Klingons have all but won the war, though they’re still squabbling among themselves, and the Federation has been driven to the brink of extinction, since the twenty-four different Klingon houses are all trying to one up each other by killing as many Federation citizens as possible. Meanwhile, the Federation is still too bloody incompetent to take advantage of the fact that their enemy is divided among themselves and allow themselves to be slaughtered. Coincidentally, there is also no way that such a massive war with millions of Federation citizens dead happened only ten years before the original series and yet Starfleet and the Federation seem to have completely recovered after having been brought to the brink of extinction and are already back to exploring the unknown and going where no man has gone before. What is more, no one ever mentions this devastating war beyond a vague “The Klingons killed many of our people” comment Kirk makes in “Errand of Mercy”. Looking at real world parallels, rebuilding after WWII happened relatively quickly, but in 1955 you would still have seen some wartime ruins in most German cities (a few of those ruins remained well into the 1980s and 1990s, though usually hidden behind billboards). Not to mention that rearmament as well as the return of the last German POWs only happened in 1955, ten years after the end of WWII. So there is no realistic way for the Federation to suffer a devastating nigh-defeat and extinction and be back to business as usual only ten years later. Which suggests that there is either a big red reset button at the end of the season or that Discovery is not set in the regular universe after all.

The Discovery crew and by extension we, the audience, learn everything that happened in the meantime from Admiral Cornwell (who somehow managed to survive both evil mirror Lorca and the Klingons, more the pity) and Sarek, who beam onto the Discovery bridge with the Admiral’s retinue and point guns at everybody. Turns out that the mirror Discovery under the command of Captain Killy was destroyed by the Klingons (kind of a pity, since I would have liked to see Mirror Tilly wrecking havoc) and now the Admiral and Sarek are understandably confused about the Discovery popping up again. And so, in order to assure themselves that the Discovery and her crew are not imposters (though considering that Admiral Cornwell and Sarek don’t know about either Lorca or Tyler, one wonders how they come to that conclusion), Sarek forcibly mind-melds with Saru. Never mind that we’ve been told by 50+ years of Star Trek that Vulcan mind-melds are an extremely intimate experience, almost like sex, and that a non-consensual mind-meld is like rape, Sarek – who has been established as a crappy father, but generally good man and fine diplomat – basically mind-rapes Saru on Admiral Cornwell’s say-so. He never asks for permission and he never considers mind-melding with Michael, who is standing right there on the bridge and has experienced a mind-meld with Sarek before. Though this is not even the worst or most out of character thing Sarek will do this episode.

Mind-melding with (or mind-raping) Saru quicky brings Sarek and via him Admiral Cornwell up to speed with regard to what happened in the past few episodes. Cornwell is understandably furious that she was taken in (and slept with) an imposter Lorca from a parallel universe (and she vents her fury by blasting the bowl of fortune cookies in Lorca’s office with her phaser in a moment that’s genuinely funny), though she also mourns her Lorca whom she presumes is dead (though that has never been confirmed). We’d like to mourn with her, except that the show never gave us a chance to get to know the real Gabriel Lorca. Personally, I’d like to think that he was like Jackson Brodie from Case Histories (also played by Jason Isaacs in one of his few sympathetic parts), only in space.

After kicking poor Saru out of the captain’s chair and assuming command of the Discovery herself, Cornwell, together with Sarek, also immediately decides to declare the existence of the mirror universe classified (which explains why the Enterprise crew had never heard of the mirror universe when they encountered it approx. ten years later – though Spock may have known via Sarek or Michael, explaining how he was able to catch on so quickly). The reason that Cornwell gives is that with so many Federation citizens dead at the hands of the Klingons, the temptation to go to the mirror universe and grab a replacement would be too great. No word on how the average Federation citizen is supposed to cross over into the mirror universe (since I suspect most Federation citizens don’t have a magic mushroom drive or a malfunctioning transporter at hand) or how they will even locate the counterpart of a dead loved one, once there. Instead, it seems as if Cornwell just drowned her sorrows about losing Lorca by binge-watching Fringe and came up with this explanation. Though coincidentally, couldn’t the Discovery have grabbed Mirror Culber and brought him back, provided he wasn’t evil?

But even though the average Federation citizen has no more chance of crossing over into the mirror universe than the average 21st century citizen has of building a nuclear bomb, the writers still inserted that explanation both to preserve canon with regards to “Mirror, Mirror” and to pile yet more grief and guilt upon Mikhail, who momentarily seems to have forgotten, in spite of plenty evidence to the contrary, that mirror universe people are not their counterparts, even if they look like them, and so grabbed the Empress Philippa the Merciless, as she was beamed from the exploding flagship. And now the Discovery is stuck with an evil Empress from an alternate universe who just happens to look exactly like a highly decorated dead Starfleet captain.

Empress Philippa isn’t the most pleasant guest either. Instead, she presents her haughtiest self and promptly points a gun at Saru – who is, for the moment, acting captain of the Discovery – and tries to order him around. When that doesn’t fly, she informs Saru that his sort are merely a slave species anyway and that they also taste really delicious, as Michael can confirm. Whereupon Saru promptly turns on Michael to accuse her of lying to him, when he asked whether she’d encountered other members of his species, and also to berate her for being so blinded by her emotions to bring Empress Philippa aboard. Looks like Saru still can’t resist having a go at Michael, even if he has otherwise become a much more likeable character. And yes, Michael lied to him, but what should she have told him? “Yes, I’ve met your mirror counterpart, he’s my slave and washes my back. And by the way, why did you never tell me that your threat ganglia are so tasty?”

Talking of Saru’s threat ganglia, it’s interesting that they react to Michael, who is not a threat, but don’t react to Lorca, Ash Tyler, Empress Philippa or Harry Mudd, all of whom are actually dangerous. Nor do they react to the magic mushroom drive, Lorca’s collection of murder weapons or the tardigrade, all of which are still more dangerous than Michael. Indeed, when I discussed this episode with a friend, we both looked at each other and said, “Saru is totally lying about what those things actually are, cause the truth would be much too embarrassing.” Cause the reason he reacts to Michael sure as hell isn’t cause she’s dangerous. In fact, I suspect poor Saru has an unrequited crush on Michael and expresses it by being rude to her. Hell, it makes as much sense as any other theory.

Instead of throwing Empress Philippa in the brig, perhaps into the same cell as L’Rell, she is instead given a guest cabin. Admiral Cornwell and Sarek even pay her a visit to pick her mind on how to defeat the Klingons, since Philippa the Merciless has defeated them in her own universe. What is more, Empress Philippa has also actually been to the Klingon homeworld Qo’noS, where no regular universe human has been since Captain Archer of the first Enterprise. And isn’t it fascinating how Discovery has absolutely no problem with playing fast and loose with established Trek canon, but for some reason slavishly adheres to Enterprise of all things? Of course, taking tactical advice from a monstrous tyrant is a really great strategy. And the Empress isn’t even the most qualified person onboard regarding the Klingon homeworld, since there are two actual Klingons aboard the Discovery, though one of them no longer looks like a Klingon. And L’Rell is at least on talking terms with Admiral Cornwell, since they bonded over their shared escape from the Ship of the Dead, though not exactly helpful. As for Ash/Voq, no one even bothers to ask him. But hey, let’s listen to the genocidal tyrant who’d like to have Saru for dinner.

Empress Philippa happens to know that Qo’noS is riddled with caves, which are conveniently accessible via the Discovery‘s magic mushroom drive. Of course, last episode we learned that the Discovery can no longer use its magic mushroom drive, because all the spores died and besides, using the magic mushroom drive could destroy the multiverse. This week, however, this little obstacle is forgotten, when Stamets reveals that he still has an uninfected sample of the spores left and that he also has a convenient method of growing a whole lot more by terraforming an uninhabited moon via a sort of mini Genesis device. This is a typical example of the level of plotting on this show. “Hey, we seem to have written ourselves into a corner here.” – “No problem, we’ll just pull some never before mentioned ability or device out of our hats, that is vaguely based on something mentioned somewhere in the Star Trek franchise before.” Though Stamets terraforming the moon does make for a cool special effect.

The Federation at least only wants to destroy all military installations on Qo’noS (which considering how militaristic Klingons are, probably only leaves them with a few opera houses). Empress Philippa, however, has another proposition for Sarek, namely wipe out the Klingons forever. Sarek is willing to go along with it – which goes contrary to every other portrayal of the character we’ve seen, cause while Sarek may be a crappy father, he’s not a genocidal maniac. Michael, on whom Empress Philippa had tried her “Hey, let’s commit genocide” line before, is sceptical and tries to talk some sense to Sarek before he returns to Vulcan to work out details of the plan. Sarek deflects the question by pointing out that Michael isn’t exactly objective, since she happened to fall in love with a Klingon, though she had no way of knowing that, when she fell for Ash Tyler. Sarek also babbles something about how loving your enemy is a sign of grace and also potential source for peace and that Michael should never regret loving someone.

This is probably a clumsy attempt by Sarek to offer some emotional support to Michael, though it nonetheless doesn’t fit with how the character has been portrayed everywhere else. After all, Sarek is the guy who said, when asked why he married Amanda, that marrying her seemed like the logical thing to do. From that Sarek, I would have expected something more along the lines of “Well, since you were emotional enough to fall in love with this Klingon, it would be only logical to use this unfortunate lapse in logic to broker a peace between our races.” Okay, so maybe Amanda did coach Sarek on how to talk to Michael about emotional issues. At any rate, on the list of “things Sarek does in this episode that violate everything we know about Vulcans in general and this character in particular”, talking about love still ranks far below mind-raping Saru and suddenly thinking that genocide is a swell idea.

Coicidentally, I suspect that the whole “Hey, let’s commit genocide – after all, none of our other tactics have worked” plan is supposed to offer up yet another patented Star Trek moral dilemma, namely “Is it okay to abandon your core values and resort to horrible acts in desperate times of war?” This isn’t exactly a new moral dilemma, since every Star Trek series ever grappled with a version of this at some point (any parallels to the real world behaviour of the US military in times of war, whether WWII, Vietnam or Afghanistan and Iraq are total coincidence of course), but it can still be compelling. Hell, maybe “How can we remain true to our ideals in times of crisis and war?” is Star Trek‘s core dilemma, which is why the franchise keeps returning to this question again and again. There is just one problem here. The Federation as depicted in Star Trek Discovery is no longer the benign quasi-utopia presented in previous Star Trek shows (and yes, there is a case to be made that it never was that utopia in the first place). This version of the Federation has already given up most of its values, since it condones prisoner abuse, exploits slave labour and hands down ridiculously harsh sentences for fairly minor crimes. So the realisation that this Federation is willing to commit genocide to win a war isn’t nearly as shocking as it should be. And indeed a large part of the reason why the war between the Federation and the Klingons is so dull, in spite of ever increasing stakes and millions of dead, is that neither the Federation nor the Klingons bear any resemblance to way they have been portrayed in the past and that both are pretty horrible, so that I don’t really care what happens to them.

After biding Sarek good-bye, Michael says to Tilly that this time their good-bye felt different, more final somehow. This is probably supposed to be ominous foreshadowing, but for what exactly? After all, we know that Sarek won’t die and will still be around in Picard’s time decades later. Just as we know that the Empress Philippa’s Klingon genocide plan won’t work out, because the Klingon Empire will continue to be a frequent thorn in the side and occasional ally to the Federation for decades to come. So the ominous foreshadowing can only mean two things: a) Michael dies, which is something I wouldn’t put beyond the Discovery writers (plus, a lot of people seem to hate Michael, which I’m sure has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she is played by an actress of colour), even though they’re rapidly running out of castmembers at this point, or b) it is revealed that Discovery is not set in the regular Star Trek universe after all, but in yet another parallel universe, which means they can do whatever they want, including killing off Sarek and the entire Klingon race. Coincidentally, this would also take care of the many canon and continuity issues that have piled up. Of course, there’s also option c) namely that the ominous foreshadowing means nothing and is just as forgotten as the Tribble on Lorca’s desk, which totally fails to detect Ash/Voq.

Once Sarek leaves, he contacts Admiral Cornwell and tells her to proceed with the plan, as discussed. Whereupon Admiral Cornwell shows up with Empress Philippa in tow, now dressed in a Starfleet uniform, to present her to the Discovery crew as the long lost Captain Georgiou back from the dead. And, so Cornwell announces, Georgiou will now assume command of the Discovery and lead the attack on Qo’noS. So after accidentally handing over their flagship and super-secret weapon to a megalomaniac imposter from the mirror universe, Starfleet command now knowingly hands over the same ship to another megalomaniac imposter from the mirror universe. Because that makes complete sense… NOT.

All right, so this version of Starfleet is desperate, not to mention completely incompetent. And yes, Starfleet admirals have frequently been portrayed as dodgy, powerhungry or outright evil in Star Trek, but Cornwell is not just shady, but also completely incompetent. Of course, she may well be completely out of her depth here. After all, she’s a psychologist, so Admiral Cornwell commanding Starfleet is like Deanna Troi commanding Starfleet. Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure that Deanna Troi would not have handed over control of the Discovery to Empress Philippa the Merciless, because this is a horrible idea. Nor would Deanna Troi have agreed to commit genocide for that matter. Even if Cornwell and Sarek want to implement Empress Philippa’s genocide plan, why put her in command of the Discovery rather than letting Cornwell lead the mission herself? What is more, Admiral Cornwell also seems to think the Discovery crew is either stupid or has been asleep these past three episodes, if she expects them to buy that the Philippa Georgiou presented to them is the real one back from the dead. After all, the Discovery bridge crew was right there during the attack on the Charon. They know that the Mirror Empress is Georgiou and that Michael brought her back.

Coincidentally, putting evil mirror Georgiou in command of the Discovery is also a horrible thing to do to poor Saru, who against all odds is proving himself to be a pretty good captain. At any rate, the mood among the crew and the general atmosphere on board have improved significantly, since Saru took over, until the Discovery almost seems like a normal Starfleet vessel. Coincidentally, this also shows that the Discovery crew wasn’t actually made up of jerks, but that Lorca poisoned the atmosphere. But though Saru is doing a good job as captain, he gets kicked out of the captain’s chair first by Cornwell (who also orders Sarek to forcibly mind-meld with him) and now finds himself replaced with Empress Philippa, a woman he knows wants to eat him. This is just cruel. And though he was something of a jerk in the early episodes, Saru has done nothing to deserve this. But of course, Saru wouldn’t go along with genocide, so Starfleet puts someone in the captain’s chair who will. As for why not Cornwell herself, I suspect it’s a lame attempt at plausible deniability. “Oh, the heroic captain returned from the dead turned out to be a genocidal megalomaniac from a parallel universe – twice. Well, it’s clearly not my fault, how was I supposed to know that?”

However, the late Captain Lorca and Empress turned Captain Georgiou are not the only imposters aboard the Discovery. There’s also Ash Tyler a.k.a. Voq, the Klingon. Who, when last seen two episodes ago, was screaming out his lungs in a prison cell, until L’Rell put her hands onto his head and somehow managed to shut him up, apparently by exorcising one of the two warring personalities within him. But which personality remains, Voq or Tyler?

We had to wait for two episodes to find out that the answer is Ash Tyler. Who apparently was a real person whose personality and memories were grafted onto the surgically altered body of Voq. Why didn’t the Klingons just graft Voq’s personality and memories onto the real Tyler, which would have lowered the risk of detection and also would have kept the real Voq around to aid the war effort? Who knows? However, the Klingons are apparently just as incompetent as the Federation, since they thoroughly botched the procedure and ended up with a screaming half-Klingon/half-human personality. And L’Rell just as thoroughly botched the procedure to exorcise one of the two personalities and managed to kill off the personality of her ex-lover Voq for good. So now what’s left is Ash Tyler stuck in a surgically altered Klingon body with access to Voq’s memories, including those of him doing horrible things such as killing Dr. Culber and attacking Michael. But even though, Ash now has Voq’s memories, no one even considers picking his brain regarding the Klingon homeworld, Klingon military strategies, location of outposts and installations, weaknesses, etc… Instead, everybody is far more interested in listening to a genocidal maniac who isn’t even from the same universe and whose intelligence on the Klingon homeworld may just as well be wrong.

Coincidentally, at least one reviewer, the otherwise sensible Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, questioned the morality of saving the grafted on personality of Ash Tyler rather than the personality of Voq, the original owner of the body they both share. I find this utterly baffling, because Ash Tyler, wherever his personality came from (the way I understood it, from an actual Starfleet POW) was a likeable and reasonably well developed character. Whereas Voq was a bland non-character, as instantly forgettable as the rest of the interchangable Klingon leaders. L’Rell is the only Klingon with an actual personality. What is more, like the rest of these Klingons, Voq is a horrible person and ruthless killer. Does anyone honestly wants him back over Ash? And by the way, I’m going to treat Ash Tyler like a real character in the following, even if he is a stolen or constructed personality stuck in a body that isn’t his. Because this is not about Voq, the one note Klingon villain, but Ash Tyler, who until five episodes ago, was one of the most likable characters in Star Trek Discovery.

So the whole stupid “Ash is Voq” subplot is dealt with in five episodes (and Ash/Voq didn’t even appear in one of them, so it was really four episodes) only to end up in almost the same place where they were before the big reveal, namely with a nice young man named Ash Tyler who has suffered some horrible experiences at the hand of the Klingons. Which begets the question, why have this stupid subplot at all, if it doesn’t change anything, beyond unnecessarily killing off poor Dr. Culber? And Culber only died for pure shock value, because the death of an anonymous redshirt wouldn’t have had the same impact. Okay, maybe Voq could have killed a semi-anonymous character like one of the bridge crew people who are recognizable, but about whom no one gives a shit, because they have no personality beyond looking cool. Finally, the “Ash is Voq” twist is also way too similar to the “Lorca is really from the mirror universe” twist that the show decided to dish out only two episodes after the “Ash is Voq” reveal.

The only reason for the pointless “Ash is Voq” subplot is to pile on yet more of the angst and emotional drama this show is addicted to. Though considering that – unlike Michael, who didn’t actually do anything beyond a nerve-pinch and a failed mutiny – Ash actually was a Klingon spy, albeit unknowingly, and actually did horrible things such as killing Dr. Culber and trying to kill Michael, he gets off lightly. Saru immediately agrees that Ash was not responsible for the things that he did, while Voq was in control, and therefore cannot be punished. Nor does he lock up Ash, though he does relieve him of his post as security chief and fits him with some kind of bracelet, which indicates where Ash is at all times, just in case he suffers another outbreak of Voqness. Considering how badly Michael was treated by everybody, including Saru, for much lesser sins, what happens to Ash is extremely lenient. Coincidentally, it’s also much more in line with what Starfleet and the Federation should be like. And indeed, there are plenty of precedents going all the way back to the original series of Starfleet personnel committing more or less horrible acts, while under the influence of some malign entity, without being punished for it. Picard’s turn as Locutus is probably the most high profile example.

Shortly after being released, Ash finds himself all alone in the cafeteria in a situation that mirrors Michael’s in the episode where she first came aboard the Discovery. Coincidentally, I wonder if the writers are aware how American these cafeteria scenes really are, because status inferred via who sits with whom in the school cafeteria is a very American thing. Cause elsewhere, even in countries that have school cafeterias (and in Germany they didn’t come in until long after I left school), the seating in the cafeteria isn’t necessarily a status indicator. For example, in all the schools where I worked, the cafeterias simply didn’t have enough tables so that outsiders would have to sit on their own. The worst case scenario would be having to sit with the teachers.

But while Michael is promptly assaulted in the cafeteria, Ash once again fares much better. Not only does no one try to kill him – no, Tilly even comes over to sit with him. And once Tilly sits down with Ash, the outcast, the scarred red-headed woman from the bridge crew (I think the character’s name is Dettmer) comes over to sit with him as well. It’s a nice moment and probably supposed to show how much the atmosphere aboard the Discovery has changed for the better, now that Lorca is gone. However, there is also something grating about it, simply because the scene mirrors the scene with Michael in the cafeteria so closely and we can’t help but notice how much worse Michael was treated, even though what Ash has done as Voq was much worse than anything Michael ever did. Worse, during the first cafeteria scene Dettmer, the scarred redhead from the bridge, was one of the people who blew off Michael and who hasn’t as much as talked to her ever since (though to be fair, Dettmer doesn’t talk to anybody, since she barely gets any lines). And while Tilly is generally the most likeable character aboard the Discovery and often the lone ray of sunshine in this show, she nonetheless also pulled a “You can’t sit here” routine on Michael in the lab during an early episode. To be fair, Tilly knows Ash and didn’t know Michael at that point and they quickly became good friends afterwards, but that “You can’t sit here” moment still happened. So while it’s nice to see that the Discovery crew is treating Ash pretty well, given what he did while under the control of Voq, the double standard regarding how Michael and Ash were treated in a similar situation is nonetheless infuriating. And yes, I know that the intention is probably to show how much the crew has bonded and how much better the atmosphere aboard the Discovery has become, since Lorca is gone, it still doesn’t quite work, if only because Lorca, though a horrible person, actually treated Michael better than the rest of the Discovery crew at the beginning, if only because she was the mirror image of his dead lover.

But not everybody forgives Ash quite so easily. Paul Stamets is understandably still furious – after all, Ash killed his life partner Dr. Culber in an outbreak of Voqness. And Stamets lets Ash know exactly how he feels, when Ash tries to apologise to him for what he did as Voq. And in fact, the loss of Dr. Culber and with him, the only happy established couple we’ve seen in Star Trek Discovery (and the first gay couple in Star Trek ever) is the most infuriating consequence of that stupid “Ash is Voq” subplot, which went exactly nowhere and had no real bearing on the overall plot arc. So why again was this stupid plot twist even necessary?

And then there is Michael, who’d just begun to fall in love with Ash, when he was revealed as Voq and assaulted and tried to kill her. Whereupon Michael tried to kill him and actually beamed him out into the vaccuum of space, before Saru beamed him aboard the Discovery. Now that Ash is himself again, albeit with a few bad memories more than before, Michael, who has never been good with emotions, flat out refuses to see him. Tilly, once more playing matchmaker, tries to convince Michael to talk to Ash, because Ash could really use a friend right now.

Now remember that Ash was the only person aboard the Discovery who was nice to Michael from day one on. Everybody else, Saru, Stamets, even Tilly, treated Michael like crap initially, while Lorca just tried to manipulate her. Ash, however, always treated her with kindness. Yes, he clearly was interested in Michael, but unlike Lorca he wasn’t sleazy about it. What is more, Ash was always supportive, even when it became clear that Ash was every bit as broken as Michael. In fact, this was what I liked about the Ash/Michael pairing (beyond the fact that the actors have a lot of chemistry), that these were two deeply traumatised people who could find support and strength in each other.

So what does Star Trek Discovery do, when it unexpectedly finds itself with a romantic relationship that works? Well, just as with Stamets and Culber, they break it up, of course. Because now that the shoe is on the other foot and Ash Tyler is the despised outcast (though not quite as despised as Michael was) in need of a supportive friend, Michael rejects him. Even though both Tilly and Sarek try to persuade Michael to give Ash and their relationship a chance (okay, so Sarek probably has an ulterior motive a la “Make love, not genocide”, but Tilly doesn’t), Michael still rejects him. First by refusing to see him and later, when she cannot avoid him any longer, she basically throws him out, because she can’t trust him any longer, since he didn’t confide in her, when he started noticing that something was wrong. Okay, so Ash should have confided in Michael, when the first symptoms of Voqness started appearing. But remember that Ash also pretended that he was totally fine after several months of Klingon captivity with constant torture, abuse and rape, until he wound up nigh catatonic when coming face to face with his rapist and abuser L’Rell aboard the Klingon flagship. So Ash is no more someone who likes to talk about his painful experiences than Michael is. And coincidentally, Ash did open up to Michael about his rape and abuse at the hands of L’Rell. And knowing how often male rape is ignored or minimised, talking about what happened to him with his girlfriend was a big step. By the way, I presume that the torture and the rape really did happen, whether to the real Ash Tyler or to Ash’s personality stuck in Voq’s surgically altered body. And talking of which, since Ash now has Voq’s memories, he probably has some additional memories of Voq having (consensual) sex with L’Rell, whom Ash still views as his rapist. Not to mention memories of killing Dr. Culber and trying to kill Michael and whatever other horrible things Voq did. So Ash is understandably a mess. And unlike Voq, who volunteered for the procedure that turned him into Ash, Ash Tyler did not ask for any of this.

So how does Michael react, when Ash finally gets her to even talk to him? She rejects him, brutally. Ash asks if it’s because he’s a Klingon, albeit altered to look human, and accuses Michael of dumping him, now things are complicated (which is exactly what she is doing). To which Michael replies that Ash needs to suffer to redeem himself, just like she did after her oh so horrible crimes. What she exactly says, is this:

“I had to work through it. I had to crawl my way back. I’m still not there, but I’m trying. That kind of work, reclaiming life, it’s punishing. And it’s relentless. And it’s solitary.”

That’s a truly horrible thing to say to someone in that situation. And indeed, this was the first time where I truly disliked Michael. I understand that she’s damaged and that she has a martyrdom complex. And in fact, the one thing about Michael that always grated on me was her passivity in the face of what happened to her. Michael was treated horribly, by Starfleet and the Federation, by her friends and comrades, even by her own family (since Sarek, Spock or Amanda were nowhere in sight, when Michael was given an undeserved life sentence – and coincidentally, not trying to save Michael is totally out of character for the Spock we’ve known for 51 years). She should be fucking angry, but instead she just passively accepts all the things that are done to her, because she apparently believes that she needs to be punished, though I’m still not sure for what, since Michael neither started the war – the Klingons did – nor got Philippa Georgiou killed – Georgiou got herself killed – nor got 8000 members of Starfleet or however many there were killed – they died because of their own incompetence. And then after all the abuse heaped upon Michael from every corner, she rejects the only person who did not treat her like crap by telling him that since she suffered alone for her crimes, he has to suffer, too.

The scene between Michael and Ash is well acted, but otherwise a stellar example of the Discovery writers creating emotional drama for its own sake and coincidentally also making their protagonist really unlikable. Which is why I was stunned to see that most of the reviewers still covering Star Trek Discovery were pleased with Michael’s rejection of Ash Tyler, including those who usually hate the show. I’ve seen reviews comparing Ash to a domestic abuser who’s really sorry after hitting his partner (domestic abusers don’t – as a rule – share their body with an evil Klingon), reviews calling Ash emotionally manipulative (methinks you have him confused with Lorca), reviews insisting that Michael was right to reject Ash because she needs to deal with her own trauma first (Michael has been traumatised since she was a little kid and she actually got better, since she was with Ash) and reviews insisting that Michael is totally right, because grief and trauma “work” (Oh, how I hate dealing with trauma or grief “work”. Worst sort of psycho-speak ever) must always be done alone without any help. The only reviewers who did not fully agree with Michael rejecting Ash are Gavia Baker-Whitelaw and Zack Handlen. And this is where I realised that the whole Michael and Ash plot arc examplifies a stew of highly toxic and very American attitudes.

First, there is this whole “tough love” approach of interventions and rejecting those who need help and support. I’ve always viewed “tough love” as nothing more than emotional abuse and the first time I saw an intervention, in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the first one I ever watched, too, which negatively coloured my view of the show ever after) I was utterly horrified. Hell, American based treatment programs like Alcoholics Anonymous even advice people to reject family and loved ones in need of help, so they hit rock-bottom. And afterwards, the person on the receiving end of this “tough love” approach most also apologise to those who have rejected them. It’s a horrible ideology. Oh, and by the way, it’s been proven that Alcoholics Anonymous and similar programs have an extremely low success rate (I personally know someone who has been failed by them), which is why I’m always furious whenever I see another book or movie or TV show extolling the virtues of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs.

Several reviewers also called Ash Tyler whiny, emo or a self-pitying mess, which goes neatly hand in hand with the fact that any character who is even remotely introspective or emotional or reacts to trauma and pain with anything other than stoic self-discipline is inevitably called whiny by American reviewers. Coincidentally, this goes doubly if the character in question is male. Hell, I’ve seen plenty of writing advice that particularly male characters should not talk about their feelings or even think about them or indeed talk very much at all, because otherwise they would be considered whiny. Because men aren’t allowed to be vulnerable or show emotions. It’s toxic masculinity writ large.

Finally, there is this whole redemption arc bullshit. Now I’m on record that I hate most redemption arcs, because they inevitably involve shovelling pain and humiliation on some poor character deemed in need of redemption and I hate seeing people humiliated. On a related note, I also hate the so-called “grovel” in many older romance novels, where the hero must apologise to the heroine for treating her like crap. My reaction to these grovels is either cringing at the humiliation involved or – in case of rapist heroes and the like – the fervent wish that the heroine will send the hero packing, no matter how much he grovels. Besides, most of the characters subjected to redemption arcs haven’t actually done anything to deserve the pain and humiliation heaped upon them. Michael and Ash certainly don’t. And those who truly have done horrible things are usually such awful people that I don’t care what happens to them (many grovellers, particularly in older romance novels, fall into this category). There are redemption arcs that work – the Marvel movies have several good redemption arcs and the new Hawaii Five-O of all things also has a couple that work – but they are rare. Because crafting a redemption arc that works means walking a tightrope. And if Discovery really wanted to do a redemption arc, why not try to redeem Lorca? Cause that would actually have been a worthwhile challenge and a far better use for his character than turning him into a ranting one-note villain before killing him off.

Much of the time, redemption arcs and grovelling scenes are actively painful for me to watch or read. They’re also incredibly common, particularly in US media (as I said before, both “redemption” and “grovel” are words that don’t even have an exact German translation), because plenty of people seem to enjoy them, as this post on redemption arcs and this two part post on romance grovels shows. And indeed, one reviewer who has since stopped reviewing Star Trek Discovery, was practically slavering at the prospect of seeing Michael humiliated and abused. So apparently, there are people for whom this whole redemption shit, which so infuriates me, is total catnip. But why are redemption arcs and grovels so popular, particularly among Americans (since you don’t see a lot of this stuff in German works and most German readers and viewers hate this stuff)? Given the focus on guilt and shame and having to atone for ones sins, real or imagined, and having to earn redemption – all of which are very religious concepts – I would suspect that the answer lies with some American variation of Christianity. And it has to be an American variation, because Lutheran Protestantism, the strain of Christianity most prominent where I come from, does not have this focus on suffering and redemption. Hell, we don’t even have a word for redemption and the closest translation is the word for forgiveness. Nor does a focus on guilt and redemption show up in the German version of Catholicism, though in the US Catholicism is apparently associated with guilt, which always baffled me, because that’s not an association I would make at all. But whichever American strain of Christianity this creepy focus on guilt and shame comes from, it has infected even such explicitly non-religious works as Star Trek, where Jason Isaacs had to reshoot a scene for adlibbing “For God’s sake”.

I actually do have a redemption arc of sorts in the In Love and War series. Because when they first meet – in a story I still haven’t been able to finish, because it’s so fucking painful and emotionally exhausting to write – Mikhail explicitly lies to Anjali and poses as someone he’s not in order to capture her for his commanders. And though Mikhail is uncomfortable with his mission, he still goes along with it and even agrees to hand Anjali over to his superiors, knowing that she will be abused and killed. He grapples with this for a long time – they both find themselves isolated, so Mikhail can’t hand her over right away – until something happens that shows him once and for all that what his superiors are doing is wrong and he decides to let Anjali go, regardless of what this will mean for him. And yes, there is some grovelling involved, because Mikhail actually has done things that he needs to apologise for. But once he has apologised, Anjali forgives him pretty quickly and they start working together, even though it still takes her some time to admit that she loves him. Because I’d rather see characters working together as partners and supporting each other through their various traumas (and both Mikhail and Anjali are traumatised people) than suffering alone, just because someone’s idea of redemption requires it. And in fact, a lot of what I write is a direct reaction to tropes that I hate, countering bad narratives by writing better stories. And the In Love and War series in particular is a reaction to a lot of problematic and downright toxic tropes.

Michael’s horrible comment to Ash pretty much encapsulates why I hate redemption arcs. The insistence that one has to hit rock bottom and claw one’s way back, that one has to suffer and be punished and do it alone, all this is a perfect description of why redemption arcs are awful. And besides, Discovery‘s own plot arc, what there was of it, refutes this whole insistence on solitary suffering. Because the atmosphere aboard the Discovery became better, comradery and morale improved, after Lorca and his fear-based style of command were gone. And the Discovery crew were always at their best, when they all worked together, even during Lorca’s time. And Michael seemed happier and more like herself and actually started smiling on occasion, once she started to bond with the crew in general and Ash in particularly. This is another reason why I hate that Michael dumped Ash, because they were good for each other. Even Sarek, who’s not exactly an expert in matters of the heart, says so. So while Michael insists that solitary suffering and punishment are necessary for redemption, the narrative itself actually says something completely different, namely that everything is better with a little help from your friends and loved ones (which is coincidentally the one message that every Star Trek series since the very first one has had in common).

I suspect that Michael and Ash will eventually get back together, once Ash has suffered in solitude enough, provided both characters survive the season finale, which is by no means certain. And in fact, I fear that one or both of them will die, probably in the process of pressing the big red reset button that will restore the Star Trek universe back to the state it should be in at this point in time. Because it’s pretty obvious that the reset button must be pushed, if they want to salvage this utter mess of a show. Though when they push the reset button, I hope that they save all the characters still alive and hopefully bring back Culber, too. Maybe they’ll even manage to bring back the real Philippa Georgiou or the real Gabriel Lorca, whom we’ve never even met.

So can Star Trek Discovery still redeem itself? I’d say it can, though it will probably involve jettisoning this entire mess of a season.

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Star Trek Discovery – Still dishing out Shocking Twists (TM), but at least no one has eaten Saru this week

Yes, it’s the obligatory Star Trek Discovery review cum angry rambling (previous editions may be found here). Though at this point, we should probably call the show Star Trek: What the Fuck?! or maybe Star Trek Rollercoaster. Cause Discovery is increasingly fealing like a funfair ride that was kind of fun at the beginning, but then just keeps on going long after you wish it would stop.

Warning! Spoilers below the cut:

So last week, we and Michael Burnham found out that Lorca, the person we have been given as Captain for the past ten episodes, was actually an impostor from the mirror universe. And this week, Lorca is dead – poof, just like that. And though he only dies just once this time and not 47 times as in the timeloop episode, he really seems to be dead this time around. Though with Discovery‘s addiction to shocking twists (TM), you can never be one hundred percent sure.

Not that anybody, least of all me, is going to mourn Lorca. He was a horrible person in any universe and his death is well deserved, which is more than can be said for any other deaths in this show (okay, there also is that horrible female security chief who is so awful she gets to die twice, once in the regular and once in the mirror universe, and no one ever mourns her). However, to kill him off so quickly after the revelation which would hopefully explain why he was the way he was still seems rather anti-climactic, not to mention like a waste of both the character and the excellent actor chosen to play him. Though Jason Isaacs at least get to act his heart out and chew the scenery once more in this episode and he certainly seems to have fun doing it. Besides, I’ve always been convinced that Jason Isaacs knows exactly how crappy Discovery is and that to him, the show was just a means to an end, namely follow in the footsteps of Patrick Stewart, Anthony Stewart Head, Hugh Laurie and Idris Elba and spend some time acting in a more or less crappy US show, only to return to the UK in triumph, so he’ll be able to play whichever roles he fancies and maybe eventually secure himself a knighthood. And yes, I know not all of them have gotten themselves knighthoods, though at least Idris Elba is clearly headed there. And I certainly look forward to whatever Jason Isaacs does in the UK now that he hopefully has proven that he can act his heart out even in crappy US shows with crappy US morals (since a couple of Harry Potter films apparently did not prove it). Though I still wish that Discovery would have given Jason Isaacs better material to work with.

And in fact one of the most depressing things about Star Trek Discovery is that its cast is so much better than this show deserves. This episode alone had great acting turns from Jason Isaacs, Anthony Rapp and Doug Jones as well as Michelle Yeoh being totally badarse. It’s everything you’d love to see in a space opera show and instead it’s wasted on this steaming pile of crap. In fact, it’s depressing to imagine what a good show could have done with the sheer acting talent assembled here. Too bad that Discovery is not that show.

Getting back to Lorca, the revelation that the Lorca we have been watching for eleven episodes was from the mirror universe all along and also some kind of rebel there who had staged a failed coup against the Empress did open up some interesting narrative possibilities such as “Is Lorca a bad guy or is he actually a good guy by mirror universe standards?”, “Was his attempted coup just driven by ambition or did he maybe try to make the mirror universe a better place?” or “Even if mirror Lorca did start out as a bad guy, did his time in the regular universe cause him to change his evil ways?”

The answer to all three questions is no, nope and no, again. Lorca was, is and continues to be a bad guy. His failed coup was driven not be a desire to improve things in the mirror universe or even by pure ambition, but by the fact that Lorca believed that Empress Philippa the Merciless – you know, the racist and xenophobic dictator whose hobbies include executing prisoners and eating Saru – was not racist and xenophobic enough in her quest to keep the Terran Empire pure. No, she was much too soft and didn’t properly subjugate aliens or rather she merely subjugated them, but didnt exterminate them, therefore a strong man is needed to lead the Empire. And that strong man is – yes, you guessed it – Gabriel Lorca.

Lorca and the Empress quite exhaustively argue their respective points by speechifying to their followers (though Lorca has to free his followers first). Hereby, Empress Philippa continues to give her best Ming the Merciless impression, while Lorca’s speech sounds like a mix of Darth Vader (he even inserts a direct Vader quote at one point, making us wonder whether Star Wars exists in either of the Star Trek universes or whether Lorca made a detour to our universe to watch it), Adolf Hitler (all that talk of destiny and fate), Alexander Gauland and Donald Trump (talk about diminishing returns of villainy). Both Michelle Yeoh and Jason Isaacs clearly have a lot of fun in these scenes, but it still feels very much like observing one of the many inner AfD fights (which would make Georgiou Frauke Petry and Lorca Alexander Gauland. And indeed Lorca’s “We are going to reclaim our Empire” even sounds very much like Gauland’s infamous threat to take back his country and his people). They may argue whether the other is sufficiently racist and xenophobic, but as an outside observer all you can think of is that they are both horrible people and that the best solution would be if they would both just spontaneously explode and take their followers with them. At least, Discovery partly grants that wish. In the real world, we’re still waiting.

Coincidentally, the fact that Mirror Lorca is a rabid racist and xenophobe also makes me wonder how he managed to pose as a Starfleet captain aboard a ship with a multi-species crew without breaking out into hives spontaneously. For that matter, how did Lorca manage to tolerate Saru, who’s not just an alien, but a member of a species that’s kept as slaves and food supply in the mirror universe, as his first officer? Of course, Lorca could probably not have refused to have any aliens on his ship, but I guess he did have some say regarding his first officer. So why did he keep Saru rather than promote a human? For that matter, did Lorca’s experience with Saru, Airiam, the crashtest dummy woman and the other non-human crewmembers of the Discovery change his views regarding aliens at all? Especially since Lorca actually seems pretty pleased to see Saru again. Or maybe he was just thinking of dinner. For that matter, what about Ash Tyler? After all, Lorca did rescue him from the Klingons, even at considerable risk to himself. So did he know who/what Ash was? Or did Lorca actually do one good thing in his misbegotten life. These are all interesting questions to ask, but Discovery completely fails to answer them.

Lorca isn’t the only one who has come home to the mirror universe, though. Mirror Stamets is back as well, after he got lost in the magic mushroom network due to an accident (and Anthony Rapp is fabulous in his double role as regular Stamets and his more sarcastic mirror counterpart), and he’s not at all pleased to see Lorca, since he’d hoped Lorca was dead. Cause it turns out that in any universe, Lorca forces Stamets to work for him and that also in any universe, Stamets really can’t stand Lorca and also cannot keep that fact to himself, because Stamets is a sarcastic jerk in any universe (which isn’t very good for your health, when dealing with Lorca in murderous villain mode). However, for the time being, Lorca still needs Mirror Stamets, because Mirror Stamets has developed some kind of bioweapon for Lorca to wipe out the Empress’ followers. And of course, any good bioweapon needs to be deployed, so we get a huge clash of Lorca’s and Georgiou’s respective followers in a corridor with redshirts dying left, right and centre while Lorca and his followers fire at Georgiou to wear down her forceshield. Which actually works, until Georgiou beams away via an emergency transporter.

Lorca, furious that he didn’t get to kill the Empress, decides to take out his anger on the nearest convenient target, which happens to be Mirror Stamets. Because you see, Mirror Stamets failed to inform Lorca that the Empress had an emergency escape transporter, so everything is automatically his fault. But first, Lorca has to speechify about destiny and fate some more, while strutting around Georgiou’s throne room. Meanwhile, Mirror Stamets makes the mistake to make it very clear that he believes that Lorca has totally gone off the deep end now (well, he has), whereupon Lorca opens up a hole in the floor of Georgiou’s throne room that leads directly to the magic mushroom drive of her flagship. I guess throwing enemies into the magic mushroom drive is another of Mirror Georgiou’s less than savoury hobbies. What is more, the hole in the throne room floor also serves as a sort of Chekhov’s gun (Chekhov as in Anton, the playwright, not Pavel, the Enterprise crewmember). And unlike Chekhov’s Tribble, which appeared in Lorca’s introductory episode and was never used again and also totally failed to detect that Ash Tyler was a Klingon spy, Chekhov’s hole in the floor actually does go off. But first, its effectiveness has to be demonstrated via throwing Mirror Stamets in, after the mirror universe version of the horrible female security chief who got eaten by the tardigrade, shoots him for good measure. For of course, the horrible security chief – her name is Landry, apparently, though it’s telling I can only remember it after she died for the second time – is one of Lorca’s devoted followers. Coincidentally, I also bet that Lorca slept with Landry, both of them probably, when Michael wasn’t around or interested.

Michael, meanwhile, had managed to get herself thrown in the brig again (this happens to her with alarming regularity). However, thankfully, the brig of Empress Philippa’s flagship (appropriately named Charon) is no more secure than the brig of the Shenzhou or indeed any Federation starship. And so Michael manages to escape through the Jeffries tubes yet again. She also find the time to contact the Discovery to inform Saru that Lorca is an impostor. Meanwhile, Saru has more bad news for Michael. Because Stamets has found out that his mirror counterpart exploiting the magic mushroom drive and the interuniverse network it is connected to has not just killed off the magic mushroom spores of the Discovery‘s magic mushroom drive, no, whatever killed the spores could also infect the entire magic mushroom network and end all life in all universes as we know it. It’s probably a testament to how bad this show usually is that I thought, even for a moment, that this would not be such a bad thing.

Meanwhile, Michael, Saru, Stamets and Tilly come to the conclusion that in order to save all the universes, the Charon‘s magic mushroom drive, which is the source of the corruption, must be destroyed. Saru and Stamets get to make a statement about the short-sighted exploitation of resources with zero regard for the consequences, which – though a clumsy bit of moralizing – is also one of the more Star Trek like things in Discovery so far. Coincidentally, though the whole plot was more hyper dramatic space opera adventure than Star Trek, the dialogue with its many stirring speeches and occasional clumsy moralizing actually felt more Star Trek like than Discovery has felt since before the winter break. Not that I ever liked the clumsy moralizing, but it is part and parcel of Star Trek.

The Discovery crew also come up with the plan that Michael, who conveniently is already aboard the Charon, will switch off the forcefield around the drive and then signal the Discovery to shoot at it with photon torpedoes. As plans go, it isn’t even all that bad. There is only one problem. Stamets figures out that just shooting at the Charon‘s magic mushroom drive wont be enough. They need to use the Discovery‘s remaining spores to overload the Charon‘s drive and cause an explosion that will kill everybody aboard both ships. But at least, the multiverse is safe.

The Discovery‘s bridge crew, being Starfleet personnel and therefore used to suicide missions for the greater good, immediately gets to work. In fact, one of the good things about this episode was that it finally gave the Discovery‘s bridge crew something to do beyond sitting at their consoles and looking terrified, when Lorca yelled at them. We even get to see some of them in their evil mirror universe versions as well. The Discovery crew also gets treated to a stirring speech by Saru, who tells the crew that the Discovery is no longer Lorca’s ship, but that it belongs to the entire crew (So will we get democratically voted command decisions now? Cause that would be cool) and that they are the best crew in the universe. Saru also promises the crew that no one will die today, because his threat ganglia aren’t reacting, which means that he isn’t in danger of dying. “We will accept no no-win scenarios”, he says, which makes me wonder how Saru handled the Kobayashi Maru test. Did he just sit there saying “I will accept no no-win scenarios” over and over again, until the computer just gave up and let him pass?

Saru is really awesome in this scene and the character finally lives up to his potential in this episode. There’s also none of his usual passive aggressive behaviour towards Michael or anybody else. No, he even calls Michael “friend” at one point. Honestly, if Saru had been like this throughout the season, I would have liked him a lot more. Okay, so maybe Lorca was what was putting Saru on edge and finally getting rid of him helps Saru to achieve his full potential. Except that Saru also behaved like a jerk in the first two episodes, when he was still aboard the Shenzhou with Michael and Captain Georgiou and Lorca wasn’t even in the picture yet. And coincidentally, his threat ganglia can’t be all that accurate, if they keep reacting to Michael, who merely has the bad luck that the plot is stacked against her, but totally fail to react to Lorca, who is a murderous psychopath from another universe who would enslave and/or eat Saru, if he could get away with it. Just like Chekhov’s tribble and so many other things in Discovery, Saru’s threat ganglia are a concept that probably sounded cool on paper, but is never really thought through, let alone put to use. Still, Saru was awesome in this episode and if he continues like this, he could still become a great character.

Saru’s stirring speech also does its job and galvanizes Tilly and Stamets into coming up with a way to destroy the Charon‘s magic mushroom drive without destroying the Discovery, too. Even better, they can use the wave of the explosion to ride home to their own universe. Of course, the navigation will be very difficult, but Stamets is confident that he can do it, because he doesn’t accept any no-win scenarios either.

I have to say that I enjoyed the scenes aboard the Discovery a whole lot and not just because I hate no win scenarios, too, and no more acept them than Saru, Stamets and Tilly. Because fictional no win scenarios are usually an heavy-handed attempt by the author to stack the deck against the characters to make some kind of point about how hard choices are necessary and war requires sacrifices, blah, blah, blah. No win scenarios are usually a propaganda tool and also a very American thing. At any rate, works from outside the US seem to be much less enamoured with them. What is more, anybody with a bit of imagination can usually figure out a way to beat the no win scenario without anybody dying. And that’s why I always liked Kirk’s response to the Kobayashi Maru test. Because he realised that the “author”, in this case the creators of the test, had artificially stacked the deck against him and decided to hack the system.

What is more, as Gavia Baker-Whitelaw points out in her review of this episode, once Lorca is out of the picture, the atmosphere aboard the Discovery immediately changes for the better. The crew begins to work together to find a way to beat the threat and get home with as few lives lost as possible. In short, they finally feel like a Starfleet crew and Discovery finally feels like a Star Trek show rather than like yet another depressing episode of the grimdark new Battlestar Galactica. There have been moments, where the Discovery crew worked together to solve a problem and felt like proper Star Trek before, e.g. in the time loop episode or in the final episode before the winter break, but this episode really demonstrates how Lorca held them back. So yes, more of the Discovery crew being awesome, please, regardless of who is captain (and I’m still not convinced that Saru is the right choice for the long term, no matter how awesome he was in this episode).

However, while the Discovery scenes feel like proper Star Trek, the scenes set aboard the Charon feel like they come from a completely different show altogether, an updated, high budget Flash Gordon adaptation. Which would actually be awesome, but really not what I expect when I sit down to watch something called Star Trek.

And so, while Lorca is strutting around in Georgiou’s throne room, speechifying to his followers and doing his best to out-Ming-the-Merciless Georgiou, Empress Philippa is alone in her office, wistfully regarding mementos of Mirror Michael and plotting revenge. Meanwhile, Michael is still hiding inside a Jeffries tube, but unfortunately her call to Saru has been picked by the Charon‘s monitoring systems, as Mirror Landry promptly tells Lorca. Lorca smiles his swarmy smile and practically oozes sleaze all over Georgiou’s throne room, as he says, “Ah, that’ll be my Burnham.”

He promptly hails Michael to give her another speech (Lorca really does speechify a lot this episode) about how the Federation is weak and doomed to failure and how she should know that not all species are equal and that she should join him to rule the Empire by his side. In short, it’s another “Fascism 101” speech, though better written and articulated than the frothing at the mouth nonsense most actual fascists sprout. It’s also another wasted opportunity, because did Lorca honestly expect Michael to fall for that crap, particularly considering that she has heard “Not all species are equal” from Vulcan logic extremists who’d prefer that she did not exist for most of her life? How much more interesting, if Lorca had instead pointed out how badly the Federation and Starfleet treated Michael and did she really want to go back to people who’d used her as a scapegoat to cover up their own incompetence and then thrown her into prison for life? Lorca could have told Michael that she’d have been worked to death in a slave mine in order to prop up the faux utopia that is the Federation, if he hadn’t saved her. He could have told her that the Federation doesn’t give a shit about her, that they’ll send her right back to a slave mine, even if she wins the war for them (and they will, cause even if Saru is no longer an arsehole who hates Michael’s guts, he will still send her back to prison, because he is a rule follower). He could have reminded Michael that she owes him and that Lorca was the only person in all of Starfleet who gave a shit about what happens to Michael, when everybody else – including her supposed Vulcan family – deserted her. In short, Lorca could have actually behaved the nuanced and complex character he’s been built up as, a man who is deeply unpleasant and a psychopathic murderer, but who also has good sides. But instead of nuanced Lorca, we get another Fascism 101 speech, as if the other Fascism 101 speeches in this episode hadn’t been enough. Honestly, by this point Discovery was beginning to feel like an AfD party convention with better speakers.

Michael, of course, doesn’t fall for Lorca’s crap. Not that she would have fallen for it otherwise, but maybe she’d at least have been tempted. Nonetheless, she tells Lorca that she will offer herself up as a hostage and will also deliver Empress Philippa to him, if Lorca promises to let the Discovery crew go. Michael also tells Lorca that she is only offering him her mind, not her body or her heart, though Lorca clearly believes that he will be able to seduce her again and get all of Michael. He also oozes some more sleaze, so secure in his victory.

The Discovery shows up at around the same time that Michael shows up with Empress Philippa in tow. Lorca actually seems to be pleased to see both the ship he commandeered and even Saru again (whatever happened to “Keep the Terran Empire pure”?), though Saru is considerably less pleased to see Lorca. And of course, Lorca is extremely pleased to see Michael with the supposedly captured Empress Philippa. In fact, Lorca is so secure in his victory and his powers of persuasion that he completely fails to realise that Michael still has an ace up her sleeve. And so Michael and the Empress turn on Lorca and his guards, while the Discovery opens fire on the Charon. What follows is a well choreographed fight scene. It’s also great watching Michelle Yeoh kick some Lorca arse (and she and Michael do kick his arse).

Lorca still tries to persuade Michael to join him. Michael, however, wants absolutely nothing to do with him, as her disgusted expressions makes very clear. Michael also tells Lorca that he should have just asked Starfleet for help and that they would have helped him to get home, because that’s what Starfleet does. Actually, I have my doubts about that – especially since Starfleet is only ever eager to send mirror universe people home to get their own people back, and there is no regular universe Lorca to get back – but then Michael is a lot more trusting in Starfleet and its inherent goodness than me. And so she also refuses to kill Lorca, when given the chance, because she is a Starfleet officer and Starfleet does not do such things. Interestingly, Lorca is also clearly reluctant to kill or injure Michael. However, Empress Philippa has zero scruples and so she runs Lorca through from behind. The mortally wounded Lorca stumbles towards Michael, clearly intending to expire in her arms. But Michael really wants nothing to do with him and jumps aside, leaving Lorca to tumble into the Charon‘s magic mushroom drive via the same hole in the floor into which he’d thrown Mirror Stamets earlier and is promptly disintegrated.

And that’s it. Just like that, Lorca is dead. Empress Philippa intends to go down with her ship, because once she has been shown as weak, others will attack her and eventually someone will succeeed. However, Michael is unwilling to let another Philippa Georgiou die and so impulsively grabs the Empress, as she is beamed back to the Discovery and the Charon explodes around them. Of course, the Empress is not the Philippa Georgiou Michael knew and admired and bringing a murderous dictator who thinks Saru is a particularly tasty morsel back into the regular universe will surely bite her in the arse eventually. Though the Empress’ survival means that we get more Michelle Yeoh and that’s a good thing in any universe.

So is Lorca really dead for good? It certainly seems that way, though of course he could also be hanging out with Culber and Mirror Stamets in the magic mushroom network. Jason Isaacs also insists that Lorca is dead for good, though considering that Isaacs and pretty much every other Discovery cast member has been lying through their teeth for months now (and Jason Isaacs actually apologises for being forced to lie to so many people in the very same interview). Coincidentally, could entertainment journalists maybe stop asking spoilerish questions in interviews? It’s clear that they won’t get an answer anyway (unless an actor accidentally lets a spoiler slip, which has happened a couple of times) and it puts actors and others into the unpleasant position that they have to first lie to people and then later apologise. Though frankly, I cannot recall any show where the interviews with cast and crew sounded so desperate and where so many people flat out lied about pretty much everything.

What is more, after all the build-up, Lorca’s death is very anti-climactic. After all, we just spent eleven episodes following a man we thought was captain of the Discovery, a man who was a manipulative arsehole for most of the time, occasionally tipping over into full-blown murderous psychopath. However, the Lorca we’ve spent eleven episodes watching was not evil all of the time. He was nice to various crewmembers on occasion, he did rescue Ash Tyler at considerable risk to himself, he genuinely tried to save the glowy blue aliens of Pahvo and that mining colony early in the series. Whatever his motives, he occasionally behaved like a proper Starfleet captain. Having him turn into a one-note ranting villain after the big reveal was certainly fun to watch, but it was also a let-down, because Lorca was an interesting character and deserved better than that.

Lorca’s obsession was Michael was also not very well explained. A lot of people say they never even detected romantic or sexual interest in Michael. I certainly did detect Lorca’s interest, though it seemed purely sexual to me and indeed, I have termed it “rapist vibes” because when Lorca was first introduced and called Michael, still a universally despised prisoner at that time, into his office, I genuinely thought for a moment that he would rape her. So yes, Lorca certainly had an unhealthy interest in Michael. I suspect Landry detected this, too, and that may have been the reason why she treated Michael so awfully until the tardigrade did us all a favour and killed her.

But was Lorca’s obsession with Michael purely sexual in nature or did he just need her for his grand plan to take back the mirror universe or did he actually love her on some level? This never really becomes clear. Lorca’s repeated attempts to pull Michael onto his side, his clear reluctance to kill her and the fact that she was the person he sought out when he was dying suggest that he did have genuine feelings for her. But if Lorca was truly in love with Mirror Michael and projected those feelings onto regular Michael or – even more interestingly – if Mirror Michael really was just a means to an end for him, but he fell for regular Michael, the previous ten episodes never remotely hint at any of this. What is more, Lorca’s romantic interactions with Admiral Cornwell actually made them look like a couple that enjoyed each other’s company – at least, until Lorca freaked out and pulled a gun on her and then set her up to walk into a trap. Meanwhile, Lorca’s interactions with Michael never seems to go beyond prurient obsession. Lorca watched the stars with Admiral Cornwell (of course, he’s just playacting, but he’s still convincing enough that he should know how to be an attentive lover), but he never does the same with Michael.

The big reveal that the Lorca we have been watching all along was actually from the mirror universe should have given us more insight into his character. Instead, it raised even more questions and contradictions and offered zero insight. And before we could get any sort of handle on who Gabriel Lorca really is, he is unceremoniously killed off. After eleven episodes, I still have no idea who Gabriel Lorca actually was and what he truly wanted beyond making the Terran Empire great again and Michael Burnham in his bed.

And coincidentally, it’s a bit strange that Lorca and Tyler, the only two eligible straight men in the entire main cast (Stamets and Culber are gay, Tilly, Landry and Admiral Cornwell are all straight women and Saru’s sexuality is a complete mystery) both happen to fall for Michael and that they both turn out to be imposters and traitors. Indeed, one of my main criticisms of the “Ash Tyler is Voq” plot is that it’s way too similar to the Lorca plot and not executed nearly as well. It’s also a waste of a good character. They should really have skipped the Ash/Voq plot altogether and focussed on Lorca instead. Hell, maybe they should have skipped the whole Klingon war plot and focussed on the mirror universe plotline instead. Because the Klingon war and the mirror universe plotlines feel way too similar to each other, since both involve an infiltrator posing as someone he’s not and both make some political point about how diversity and multiculturalism are better than isolationism, xenophobia and racism. Which is actually an important point to make, especially in these times, but maybe not twice in the same show, stated in an almost identical way.

Talking of Ash/Voq, he’s never even mentioned in this episode and I didn’t even notice it until afterwards, because so many things happened. Though the bloody Klingon plot will rear its ugly head again for the last two episodes of the season, since once the Discovery makes it back to the regular universe, they realise that nine months have passed and that the Klingons have won the war in the meantime (which must irk L’Rell and Voq to no end, because obviously no one missed them – they just went on to win the war without them), while the Federation has been destroyed.

Now we know that this state of affairs cannot last, if only because we know that in approximately ten years of time, the Federation will be fully functional and show no sign of having ever been brought to the brink of destruction by the Klingon Empire. So I strongly suspect that the season will end with a big fat reset button in the form of travelling back in time to either stop the Klingons from winning or stop the war altogether. Unless the Discovery crew realises that they have ended up in the wrong universe yet again and continues to go universe hopping. But while Star Trek Discovery – Universe-hopping Outlaws would probably be a fun show with a lot of potential, I don’t really see that happening. Bryan Fuller would probably have ended with killing off everybody (and plenty of characters have been killed off already), since he planned on only spending one season with these characters anyway. But Discovery has already been renewed for a second season, so a big fat reset button is the easiest and probably the only way to salvage the unholy mess that this show has become and undo some of the really stupid decisions made by the showrunners. And whatever emerges after that big fat reset button has been pushed – the Discovery under the command of either Saru or Michael or maybe even Philippa Georgiou or some version of Gabriel Lorca, provided the producers cough up enough money to tempt them back, with either Saru, Michael, Tilly or maybe even Ash as first officer – may well turn out to be a good show eventually. After all, Star Trek is infamous for ropey first seasons. But if the entire first season is thrown away with “Forget this stuff. It never happened, cause we changed history”, that’s a colossal waste and probably not good for the show in the long run. Because it essentially means that the entire first season can be skipped. Besides, a show should never write itself into such a corner that the big fat reset button is the only way out. Because so far, it has never worked for any show.

As an individual episode, this one was certainly exciting and a lot of fun, easily one of the best episodes in the series so far. However, viewed in context, it still seems like one huge missed opportunity. A lot like the whole show, in fact.

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Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for January 2018

It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some December books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have epic fantasy, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, historical fantasy, sword and sorcery, paranormal mystery, paranormal romance, science fiction romance, space opera, military science fiction, dystopian fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, post-apocalyptic romance, horror, Steampunk, weird western, reluctant witches, space vampires, dragons, djinns, crime-solving ghosts, aliens, rogue AIs, murderous androids, dead women revived, reincarnation, zombie-fighting sheriffs, imperiled hostages, remorseful executioners, Lovecraftian monsters, Frankenstein’s Bride, sentient office equipment and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

The Legion and the Lioness by Robert D. Armstrong:

They said I would never finish flight school. Never rank at the top of my class. Never fly with the top aces. Never return from combat against the Kelton androids. Never survive emergency surgery.

Here I am.

The year is 2151, Earth is gone. A hellscape. I’ve been unfrozen after 72 years of cryosleep on a medical facility on Saturn’s moon, Titan. I have nothing, no home, no friends, no concept of this new world, these Titans.

All that remains is the old conflict that has blackened my veins and memories of the ones I loved still fresh in my heart. Forgotten for decades.

But it seems war hasn’t forgotten me, no, even in my slumber. My name is Captain Victoria Ann Belic, I was a wife and an ace fighter pilot, and have been revived for one reason–to die again.

Zombie Wild West: Death Walks In by Eric Baker:

“Is this the end? The apocalypse?”

The dead are coming back to life, and there’s going to be a showdown in the sleepy town of Dire.

Sheriff Eli Roberts has had more hardship in his life than one man should ever have. Now he’s started over: a new town, a new life, and as of this morning, new problems. A stranger has walked into town and fallen dead in the middle of the main street. Once again the wild west has earned its name.

As if zombies in town weren’t enough, the Sheriff also has to deal with an ornery Doctor, a saloon girl, and a corrupt Mayor. To make it even worse, they’ll have to work together if they want to make it through the night.

Sawyer by Theresa Beachman:

Surviving the invasion was only the beginning.

Ben Sawyer is a man of morals, driven by conflict and haunted by a dark past, where doing the right thing came at high personal cost.

Following an attack on her lab, he helps weapons engineer Julia Simmons across the alien infested landscape of London to the safety of the underground Command Base. Safe for the moment, Sawyer falls hard for her brilliant mind and dangerous curves.

Struggling to come to terms with Earth’s devastation, completing her newest weapon gives Julia hope and purpose. But, her decision leaves her no time for a relationship. She makes Sawyer promise they will not fall in love, because there’s no time for love in the apocalypse, right?

Still fighting his own demons and believing himself beyond redemption, Sawyer agrees to Julia’s terms–comfort without emotional entanglement.

But events escalate and an unexpected alien mutation threatens the very heart of the previously impenetrable base. Even if they can survive the dangers closing in on them, Julia and Sawyer may not survive each other’s dark secrets.

The question then becomes, who will be the first to admit to love?

Life Under the Noose by James Bee:

Fifteen years ago, Rivers was stolen from his village, under the orders of a King. Forced to serve, Rivers’ life was safe as long as his village stayed loyal. Only now it seems that they have broken faith with the King, and the noose around his neck grows tight. His life is forfeit, unless he travels back to his home, and delivers the punishment himself. Now Rivers is faced with an impossible choice. If the life he has carved out for himself is to survive, he must destroy his old world. How far will he go to save his own life? How far can one man be pushed before he breaks?

Life Under the Noose is a fast paced, character driven novel for readers who love gritty action, and high stakes.

Vengeance by Lisa Blackwood and S.M. Schmitz:

When rogue AIs steal everything that matters most, the only thing left is vengeance.

As the flagship of the Spire Empire, Vengeance is a legendary AI whose broken heart has proven his greatest battle yet. But his new telepathic link, a little girl named Hayley, finally teaches him to love again—until rogue AIs attack her planet and level her home in a storm of fire and destruction. Vengeance is left with only one hope in his potentially immortal existence: the chance to avenge his innocent link.

Twenty years later, a young engineer joins his crew, and he’s inextricably drawn to her. But the closer he tries to get to her, the harder she pushes him away. Olivia Hawthorne risks everything—her friendship with her telepathic sisters and even her life—to assume a new identity so she can serve aboard Vengeance. After suffering at the hands of rogue AIs, she should be wary of trusting one again, even her old friend. And yet, she can’t seem to stay away from him. But when rogues raid Spire colonies, Vengeance and Liv must learn to overcome the fears shackling them to the past. Because if they want to survive, they’ll have to seek vengeance together.

[image error] Beyond Night by Eric S. Brown and Steven L. Shrewsbury:

An Epic Fantasy tale of action, adventure, heroism, horror and sorcery…

Beyond Night is a Dark Fantasy Horror novel that pulls back the veil of nearly two thousand years of jaded history. Come trod in the bloody footprints left by monsters, soldiers and wizards and behold what lies hidden Beyond Night itself.

It’s Bigfoot War mixed with Lovecraftian horror on the edge of the Roman Empire.

How could Rome lose a Legion? What could’ve happened to blot out the existence of over five thousand men not only from history but the Earth itself?

As the Legion moves north to engage the forces of Pictdom, a dark horror emerges from the bowels of the Earth. Thought to be random attacks by hulking monsters, Decurion August soon learns a dire truth, that these bloody events are directed by opposing the wizards of the Picts. While one side assembles all tribes in a confederated army to battle the Legion, the other pulls these Greyman beasts from the depths of the Earth.

August fights not only these creatures and workers of magicks, but internal passions in the Legion itself.

Can he discover a way to survive the enormous bloodletting about to take place that will only serve to satisfy the wizards of Pictdom?

[image error] Origins by Lindsay Buroker:

Are you still human if your father was a dragon?

Even though Captain Trip always knew he was a little odd, he’s still shocked by the revelation that the elder gold dragon, Agarrenon Shivar, sired him. It’s time, however, to accept reality and learn to use his power, even if it alienates him from his magic-fearing friends—and the woman he’s come to care about. With enemy dragons threatening to kill or enslave everyone in his homeland, he has no choice.

But even if he becomes a great sorcerer, it won’t be enough to fight off all the dragons threatening Iskandia, so Trip suggests a mission to General Zirkander. He wants to lead a team, with the scholarly Lieutenant Ravenwood’s help, to locate his sire. Agarrenon Shivar, once respected and feared by his own kind, may be the perfect ally for Iskandia—if Trip can talk him into siding with humanity.

Just one problem: the ancient dragon hasn’t been seen for thousands of years, and Trip has no idea how his long-dead mother found him.

Banished by Cynthia Joyce Clay:

n this third book of The Saga of the Dragon Born, Tristabé-airta, banished from her father’s kingdom of Allsongs, must find a mentor so that she can advance in her training in magic. But no one wants to teach a miscreant, especially one who pulled from the ocean ten waterspouts and destroyed a village with them. On the road alone and prey to griffons, ruffians, and a frightening god who lusts for her, Tristabé-airta must find a way to improve her control over her magic.

And Allsongs? Allsongs must prepare for a truly terrible winter, having banished the one person with the magical ability to right the weather–Tristabé-airta. The poets have always said Tristabé-airta is Allsongs’s best defense, so having her driven her out, the new heirs of Allsongs must protect Allsongs from enemy kings and their own dragon natures on their own. Despite the king’s decree, Tristabé-airta’s milk sister Em keeps in touch with Tristabé-airta and gives her what help her magic can provide.

[image error] Copper Cove by Robert Dahlen:

Copper Cove, city of marvels powered by magic and steam, is abuzz over the coming of the new rail line. Crafter Tabitha Miles would love to be on the first trip of the Velessan Express, but there’s work to be done. Staying awake past midnight to make ends meet, difficult clients, runaway automatons, guild enforcers, all just another typical day for her.

Tabitha’s latest commission seems like just another job at first but then she meets newspaper reporter Sophie Haverford and falls into a web of conspiracy and murder. Can Tabitha unravel the mystery, prevent a disaster, and win Sophie’s heart in time for tea?

Rain Dance by D.N. Erikson:

Eden Hunter has a little secret that could get her killed. Again.

Paradise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Reaper Eden Hunter would know: she spends her days working for a local vampire warlord, harvesting the souls of the recently departed. But even bad situations can get worse. And when a body washes up on shore near Eden’s secluded beachfront villa, the former con artist finds herself under investigation by the FBI.

But Eden’s not concerned about being charged with murder. She’s got a bigger secret she needs to keep quiet. It’s why she’s living miles from anyone else, even on an island that appears on no map. If that secret gets out, the fate awaiting her is far worse than life in prison. Too bad the FBI won’t stop digging until it might be too late…

Rain Dance is the first book in the all-new Sunshine & Scythes urban fantasy series starring (semi) reformed con artist turned Reaper (and occasional FBI consultant) Eden Hunter. Each novel can be enjoyed on its own without reading the others, but there is an ongoing series arc.

Their Last Hope by Sarah Ettrich:

AI specialist Liz Price is determined to see sentient androids in her lifetime, but then she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer. Hoping that her dream will be realized in the future, she arranges to be cryogenically frozen upon her death.

When Liz is revived years later, she expects to be cured. But sentient androids are taking humans and killing them for some unknown reason. They control the medical system, and they don’t treat serious illnesses.

A resistance group wants Liz to turn the androids back into mindless machines. They tell her that’s the only way to stop the androids, and the only way she’ll be cured.

Liz wants to live, so she agrees to work with the resistance. She secretly hopes she can reason with the androids, but then she finds out why they’re taking humans.

McEdifice Returns by Timothy T. Cat and Straw Puppy with a little help by Camestros Felapton:

Veteran space marine Chiseled McEdifice wanted a peaceful life after decades of fighting evil but a cowardly attack sets him off on a bicycle ride of revenge and into an adventure across space and time.

From the pen of Timothy the Talking Cat and his surprisingly loud imaginary friend Straw Puppy, comes a space adventure like no other (except ones a bit like it). Featuring a chapter full of the word ‘I’, a dancing photocopier and guest appearances galore.

The City of Ashes by Robert I. Katz:

Douglas survived the siege.

But will he survive the tournament?

The contest takes place every five years. The best and brightest fight for riches and glory. But the hidden battle isn’t with fists or weapons, it’s a game of words and diplomacy. Behind the scenes deals are being struck. Sides are being chosen. And betrayal is in the air.

Does this mean war?

Can Douglas uncover the truth?

And if he wins, can he survive long enough to enjoy his victory?

As the game unfolds, the Grand Tournament is just the opening gambit. What comes next will blow you away.

The Empire’s Orphans by Robin Kristoff:

In the space of three days, Rogan loses his royal privilege, his country, and his mother. Now knowing that his father, the King of Kanrine, orchestrated his mother’s execution, Rogan is left stranded in his mother’s homeland. Sickened by the idea of returning home, Rogan lowers himself to washing and sweeping for a local healer to survive. He’s now a drudge, a mongrel, a nobody with airs. His one friend is Bryna, the poverty-stricken daughter of the city’s former baron, who has her own reasons for skirting the notice of the city’s occupying soldiers.

Before Rogan can decide his next move, the mysterious death of a soldier pulls him and Bryna into a web of politics, murder, and magic. The two of them must race to separate truth from lies as the authorities’ investigations quickly turn personal…and deadly.

Told from the alternating perspectives of a conqueror’s son and a conquered lord’s daughter, THE EMPIRE’S ORPHANS follows two twelve-year-olds in a country simmering with national, racial, and class.

[image error] Witchin’ USA by Amanda M. Lee:

Hadley Hunter has lived a normal life, in a normal suburb, with a normal job and a normal father. All that changes when a grandmother she didn’t even know existed dies and leaves her a fabulous lighthouse on Moonstone Bay Island.

Hadley, ready for an adventure, decides to check things out and finds herself plunged into a world she never envisioned.

From the naked woman swimming in the ocean outside her back door, to the hot sheriff who seems to be hiding a secret, Hadley is intrigued from the start. That’s before magical things start happening – including to Hadley – and a body washes up on the beach.

It seems Moonstone Bay has a killer on the loose … and he may be stalking Hadley, although no one can figure out why.

Things are about to spiral for Moonstone Bay’s newest reluctant – and baffled – witch. She has to learn about the past, investigate the present and hold on to her future for dear life. Along the way she will meet a bevy of new friends who have a few particular abilities … and a lot of really odd quirks.

Set sail for adventure, because once you visit Moonstone Bay, you’ll never be the same again.

Three Wishes by Lisa Manifold:

To find out what might have been, she has to give up control over what will be.

After a long night of eating too much ice cream and lamenting her less than wise choices, Tibby Holloway wakes up to find a freelancing djinn sitting on her bed. He makes her the offer of a lifetime: three wishes – three chances to go back and change her life.

She can choose a different career, find the man she loved and lost – in short, she can go back and do everything right this time.

But there’s a catch.

Once she’s gone back three times, once she’s created three new—and hopefully better—realities, the djinn will decide where she ends up.

Maybe it would be better not to even know … but that’s a chance Tibby will have to take if she wants to have her THREE WISHES.

[image error] Gone with the Ghost by Erin McCarthy:

Bailey Burke has had a rough six months—it’s not easy thinking your romantic overtures toward your best friend caused him to kill himself. Except that’s exactly what happened. Ryan is very much dead, having shot himself with his own police-issued gun. Guilt and grief shouldn’t cause hallucinations though, but six months after Ryan went into the ground, Bailey is freaking out and swearing his ghost is standing in her kitchen. Which he is…

Ryan claims he didn’t commit suicide, but was murdered, and he needs Bailey to help him find his killer so he can earn his ticket out of purgatory. Ryan’s counting on a stairway to heaven, as opposed to wings, since that might be a little unmanly for a cop, even a dead one.

An expert in home design, with her own staging business, Bailey can tell you where to place a couch to improve flow and comfort, but solving a crime? Not her area of expertise. But with help from Ryan’s former partner, Marner, she is unraveling the mystery of what happened to Ryan that day… and unwittingly putting herself in grave danger.

Bride by Kyle Alexander Romines:

The year is 1795. Frankenstein’s monster has given his creator an ultimatum: Victor must build the creature a mate, or watch as the monster destroys everything and everyone he has ever loved.

You know their story.

You don’t know hers.

She is born into darkness, her destiny entwined with an unspeakable evil. Her sole companion is her creator, the inscrutable Victor Frankenstein, gatekeeper to a life she has never experienced. As her understanding of humanity takes shape, she must contend with the horrific nature of her intended mate and conflicting feelings for her creator.

She wants more from life than to be the bride of Frankenstein’s monster, but will she seek freedom, vengeance, or something else entirely?

Smoke City by Keith Rosson

Marvin Deitz has some serious problems. His mob-connected landlord is strong-arming him out of his storefront. His therapist has concerns about his stability. He’s compelled to volunteer at the local Children’s Hospital even though it breaks his heart every week.

Oh, and he’s also the guilt-ridden reincarnation of Geoffroy Thérage, the French executioner who lit Joan of Arc’s pyre in 1431. He’s just seen a woman on a Los Angeles talk show claiming to be Joan, and absolution seems closer than it’s ever been . . . but how will he find her?

When Marvin heads to Los Angeles to locate the woman who may or may not be Joan, he’s picked up hitchhiking by Mike Vale, a self-destructive alcoholic painter traveling to his ex-wife’s funeral. As they move through a California landscape populated with “smokes” (ghostly apparitions that’ve inexplicably begun appearing throughout the southwestern US), each seeks absolution in his own way.

In Smoke City, Keith Rosson continues to blur genre and literary fiction in a way that is in turns surprising, heartfelt, brutal, relentlessly inventive, and entirely his own.

Lessons Learned by Alice Sabo:

While a wildfire threatens High Meadow, an uninvited guest sows seeds of dissent.

The president arrives at High Meadow with his entourage of bureaucrats and faux-military. Tillie and Angus don’t have time for any distractions as a massive wildfire bears down on their settlement. It will take more than hard work and good intentions to get them through this catastrophe.

Martin is leery about sending all of his men to aid those in the path of the fire thereby leaving their borders unprotected. They are most vulnerable in their commitment to help others.

Wisp and Nick work the fire lines seeking out people fleeing the raging flames. Only Wisp can find those lost in the heavy smoke, risking his life to bring them to safety.

Behind their backs, certain people are questioning every decision. At a time when they most need to work together, the outsiders are creating divisiveness.

Ghosts of the Sea Moon by A.F. Stewart:

In the Outer Islands, gods and magic rule the ocean.

Under the command of Captain Rafe Morrow, the crew of the Celestial Jewel ferry souls to the After World and defend the seas from monsters. Rafe has dedicated his life to protecting the lost, but the tides have shifted and times have changed.

His sister, the Goddess of the Moon, is on a rampage and her creatures are terrorizing the islands. The survival of the living and dead hinge on the courage and cunning of a beleaguered captain and his motley crew of men and ghosts.

What he doesn’t know is that her threat is part of a larger game. That an ancient, black-winged malevolence is using them all as pawns…

Come set sail with ghosts, gods and sea monsters.

ONSET: Stay of Execution by Glynn Stewart:

The Vampire War is over.

The United States is reeling.

The Masquerade is fragmenting.

The Apocalypse is here…

The long and bloody war with the vampires in the United States has finally ended, thanks to the efforts of the vampire Arbiter and ONSET Commander David White—and a nuclear explosion on American soil.

The final battle proves harder to conceal than hoped, however, and a series of high profile incidents end any chance of hiding the supernatural. Suddenly the world is faced with the fact that it is both more wonderful and more terrible than humanity ever realized.

But as the US Government struggles to adapt to this new reality, old enemies have set into motion plans that could render humanity’s struggles irrelevant. There are those beyond the Seal who were once Gods…and they want their planet back!

Fire Fight by Chris Ward:

A gripping new space opera saga from acclaimed author Chris Ward …

On the fire planet of Abalon 3, an evil warlord threatens to unleash a wave of destruction in order to take control of the planet’s valuable source of trioxyglobin, a dangerous but valuable liquid used for starship fuel. The only person capable of stopping him is Lianetta Jansen, a disgraced former Galactic Military Policewoman now turned smuggler, who is haunted by a terrible tragedy in her past. Along with her ragtag, wisecracking crew—the one-armed pilot Caladan, and the malfunctioning droid, Harlan5—Lia must confront her own demons, while trying to stop another.

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Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for January 2018

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some December books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, small town mysteries, culinary mysteries, paranormal mysteries, hardboiled mysteries, historical mysteries, police procedurals, legal thrillers, crime thrillers, psychological thrillers, men’s adventure, private eyes, missing persons, prosecutors, reluctant witches, domestic violence, murdered grandmothers, the pit of crawling death and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

[image error] A Frosty Mug of Murder by Constance Barker:

Who Killed the Black Widow?

The Grumpy Chicken Irish Pub is in full blast mode when proprietor Ginger O’Mallory discovers someone has offed the town’s Black Widow before the woman can take out another husband. Secrets swirl and the hooch flows in this brand new series centering around an Irish Pub with a crazy clucker name. And what is with all the spooky goings on with a ghost chicken attached? Find out in this hilarious romp filled with colorful and wisecracking characters.

 

The Crawling Death by Cora Buhlert:

1966. Freelance troubleshooter Todd Donovan is hired to locate Dr. Pat Turner, a biologist who has gone missing in the South American jungle. It seems like an easy job at first, but then Todd finds himself staring into the barrel of a gun.

Captured and taken to the jungle compound of the drug lord Durango, Todd finally meets up with Dr. Turner, who turns out to be not just a beautiful woman, but also Durango’s prisoner.

Durango is not the sort of man to leave potential witnesses alive. And so Todd and Dr. Pat Turner are soon facing a painful end in Durango’s pit of crawling death…

This is a short adventure story of approx. 5500 words or 20 pages in the style of the men’s adventure pulps of the 1960s.

The Mystery of Ruby’s Sugar by Rose Donovan:

Christmas, 1934.

The snow lies heavy around Pauncefort Hall. Dress designers Ruby Dove and Fina Aubrey-Havelock leave behind their Oxford exams to rescue Lady Charlotte’s wardrobe. But what Lady Charlotte doesn’t know is that Ruby is on a mission—a mission to avenge her family and bring down an empire.

As the weather worsens, Ruby and Fina are drawn into the intrigues of Lady Charlotte’s other guests, who include a princess, a furiously left-wing don, a West End starlet—and, it seems, a murderer. After the two resident cads are poisoned, Ruby and Fina must find the culprit and still carry out their secret plans—all before the law arrives. But Pauncefort Hall can remain snowbound for only so long.

The Mystery of Ruby’s Sugar is the first book in the Ruby Dove historical cozy mystery series.

Bleeding Levee Blues by Nick Dorsey:

Tom Connelly left the New Orleans Police Department after the madness of Hurricane Katrina, and his life has gone downhill ever since. Shunned by his brothers in blue, he broke down and gave in to drink. He lost his friends. He lost his wife. And now his son barely knows his name.

But a figure from his past has asked Tom to help a wealthy politician find his missing daughter. If Tom keeps this quiet, the politician promises Tom the one thing he needs most: redemption. A name cleared from past controversy. A new life moving forward.

The search for the young woman leads Tom into the dark corners of the decaying New Orleans landscape and beyond, right into the heart of a deadly human trafficking organization and to the other side of the world. Now Tom isn’t just worried about redeeming himself, he’s hoping he can get out of this alive.

For Better or Worse by Donna Huston Murray:

Finally back to her spunky self after the loss of her husband, men have once again become an issue for amateur sleuth Ginger Barnes—men who mistreat their wives, men accused of murder, and men who ask her out.

While working on a DIY project at her newlywed daughter’s house, a bag of bricks is thrown from the neighboring third-story window. Next, pops that sound like muffled gunshots have Gin racing for her phone. Eric, who lives in the house with his grandmother, claims she’s obsessed with mystery novels. Yet after the septuagenarian falls down a flight of stairs, she’s so frantic to keep Eric away that Gin must intervene. Was the fall actually attempted murder?In her husband’s eyes, Cissie Voight can’t do anything right. Gin occasionally helps the frazzled young mother, and when she needs a dresser carried upstairs, Gin brings Eric along. Bad move! The electricity between the two new acquaintances sparks a chilling premonition. This time Gin’s good intentions will produce grave consequences—for everyone involved.

Deep Zero by V.S. Kemanis:

It’s one a.m. Do you know where your teenagers are? Prosecutor Dana Hargrove makes it a point to know. But one night, in the dead of winter, she should have known more.

In February 2009, Dana is the newly-elected district attorney of a suburban county north of Manhattan, where she lives with her husband, attorney Evan Goodhue, and their two teenage children. The Great Recession has seen a rise in substance abuse and domestic violence. It’s also the era of burgeoning social media, an intoxicating lure for wayward and disaffected teens who find new methods of victimization: a game to some, with no thought of the consequences.

During an arctic cold snap, the body of a high school student is discovered, lodged in the ice floes of the Hudson River. People are crying for justice, but there doesn’t seem to be a law that fits. Days later, in one hellish night, Dana’s children are sucked into a criminal investigation against several of their classmates, making her a convenient target for community outrage.

In Deep Zero, the fourth standalone legal mystery featuring the dynamic prosecutor, Dana walks the tightrope like never before in her tricky balance between professional ethics and family loyalties.

[image error] Witchin’ USA by Amanda M. Lee:

Hadley Hunter has lived a normal life, in a normal suburb, with a normal job and a normal father. All that changes when a grandmother she didn’t even know existed dies and leaves her a fabulous lighthouse on Moonstone Bay Island.

Hadley, ready for an adventure, decides to check things out and finds herself plunged into a world she never envisioned.

From the naked woman swimming in the ocean outside her back door, to the hot sheriff who seems to be hiding a secret, Hadley is intrigued from the start. That’s before magical things start happening – including to Hadley – and a body washes up on the beach.

It seems Moonstone Bay has a killer on the loose … and he may be stalking Hadley, although no one can figure out why.

Things are about to spiral for Moonstone Bay’s newest reluctant – and baffled – witch. She has to learn about the past, investigate the present and hold on to her future for dear life. Along the way she will meet a bevy of new friends who have a few particular abilities … and a lot of really odd quirks.

Set sail for adventure, because once you visit Moonstone Bay, you’ll never be the same again.

Murder at Home by Faith Martin:

Meet DI HILLARY GREENE, a policewoman struggling to save her career and catch criminals.

Flo Jenkins is found murdered in her armchair, a paperknife sticking out of her chest. The old woman was well liked and nothing seems to have been stolen from her home. And it was common knowledge that she only had weeks to live.

Why kill a dying woman? This is going to be one of the toughest cases yet for Hillary to solve.

Hillary also has to deal with a new colleague who has a terrible temper and a rocky past.

With no forensics, no leads, and only a drug-addict nephew as a suspect, will this be Hillary’s first failure to solve a murder case?

[image error] Gone with the Ghost by Erin McCarthy:

Bailey Burke has had a rough six months—it’s not easy thinking your romantic overtures toward your best friend caused him to kill himself. Except that’s exactly what happened. Ryan is very much dead, having shot himself with his own police-issued gun. Guilt and grief shouldn’t cause hallucinations though, but six months after Ryan went into the ground, Bailey is freaking out and swearing his ghost is standing in her kitchen. Which he is…

Ryan claims he didn’t commit suicide, but was murdered, and he needs Bailey to help him find his killer so he can earn his ticket out of purgatory. Ryan’s counting on a stairway to heaven, as opposed to wings, since that might be a little unmanly for a cop, even a dead one.

An expert in home design, with her own staging business, Bailey can tell you where to place a couch to improve flow and comfort, but solving a crime? Not her area of expertise. But with help from Ryan’s former partner, Marner, she is unraveling the mystery of what happened to Ryan that day… and unwittingly putting herself in grave danger.

Chocolate Cake with a Side of Murder by Meredith Potts:

Wedding season has come to Treasure Cove. But a shocking murder threatens to turn the entire town on its head.

Even worse, amateur sleuth Sabrina Daley and her detective fiancé are unable to uncover a single suspect.

Will Sabrina be able to track down the killer before they get away, or will this case go cold?

 

The Accused by Rachel Sinclair

Harper is back…and this time it’s personal.

Harper must defend Damien, who has been arrested for the murder of his birth father, Josh Roland. Harper knows that Damien didn’t do it. He couldn’t do it. Yet his past comes to haunt him, as Harper finds out things about Damien that she never knew.

The victim, Josh Roland, was, for many years, a bastard. He sexually harassed most of his female employees and was a serial rapist. He was also involved with many shady and crooked financial deals that broke the many contractors who had the misfortune of dealing with him. In short, there were many, many people who wanted this man dead. So why was Damien made the prime target of the investigation? The answer to this question stuns Harper and causes her to question everything about what she thought she knew about her law partner.

In the meantime, her tween daughters are giving her fits – even Abby has been acting out lately. They’re 13, at the most awkward age imaginable, and Harper is at the end of her rope with them. Throw in some romantic troubles with her longtime beau, Axel, and you have one seriously frazzled lawyer. She keeps it together, Harper-style, which means that her life is perpetually a mess, but she always fights her way out.

With the twists and turns that you’ve come to expect in a Harper Ross/Damien Harrington legal thriller, The Accused is not to be missed!

Who Killed Granny? by Stephanie Villegas:

When Barbara Smythe finds her grandmother unconscious and sprawled out on the sofa, she suspects foul play. Worried the attacker will come after her next, Barbara rushes around Los Angeles in a desperate attempt to find and warn her twin sister of the peril they face. With the killer hot on her trail, she must race against the clock to discover who killed Granny and bring them to justice.

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A New Release and a New Series – Introducing Two-Fisted Todd

Yes, this is another new release announcement and also the announcement of a new series. But first, let’s travel back in time.

About twelve years ago, I sold several short stories to a magazine that billed itself as a successor to the men’s adventure magazines of the 1960s. Most of those stories were historicals featuring more or less scantily clad damsels in distress, while one was a take on the spicy pulps of the 1930s featuring The Silencer. All but one of those stories have been republished in e-book form since then.

At the time, I didn’t know much about the actual men’s adventure mags of the 1950s and 1960s beyond having seen a few cover scans on the internet. The editor of the mag in question helpfully sent me some scans of the interiors of actual men’s adventure mags. What is more, I also came across this art book which collects hundreds of covers of vintage men’s adventure magazines and also offers an overview about the genre, it’s development, prominent themes and subjects and what sort of content might be found inside. So I promptly bought the book.

The art book also included some statements by artists, models and writers who had worked on these magazines. And one of the writers said that quite often, the covers were painted before there was even a single word of content. And afterwards, a writer would be commissioned to write a story to match the cover. And considering some of the really lurid illustrations on those covers – rugged men being attacked by all sorts of likely and unlikely wildlife, while buxom maidens were being tortured and menaced by evil Nazis, evil Communists, evil biker gangs and evil beatniks (the last one doesn’t quite fit) – coming up with a story to match must have been quite a challenge.

Now I have never been able to resist a writing challenge, so I decided to set myself the same challenge as those men’s adventure magazine writers of old, namely to write a story to match the cover of one of those magazines. So I opened the art book at random, picked one of the covers shown and decided to write a story based on it.

Of course, a men’s adventure tale also needed a suitably manly and rugged hero and so I came up with “Two-Fisted” Todd Donovan, a freelance troubleshooter who travels around the globe to solve other people’s problems, provided the price is right. That was a vague enough description to allow for pretty much any kind of adventure from dealing with lethal wildlife via rescuing young women from dastardly villains to tangling with biker gangs and those really, really dangerous beatniks. And of course, it also had series potential.

So now I had my hero and an image to serve as inspiration, so I started writing. The story stalled out at about three-quarters through. So I set it aside. Then life and work got in the way and the magazine changed direction to become a sexy horror mag, depriving Two-Fisted Todd of his intended market. Eventually, self-publishing became a thing, making previously unviable stories suddenly viable again. And through it all, Todd was biding his time in some tropical paradise, a cool drink in his hand, waiting for another job.

Eventually, I started doing the July short story challenges and one of the things I used for inspiration was the art book of men’s adventure magazine covers, because both the lurid covers and ridiculous headlines made for excellent inspiration. And so several of the stories in Bug-Eyed Monsters and the Women Who Love Them as well as the story “Mock Duck” in Operation: Rubber Ducky were inspired by either headlines or illustrations in vintage men’s adventure mags that I found in that book.

Because the art book was such a gold mine of inspiration, I used it again for the 2017 July short story challenge. Only that this time, I didn’t even open it. I looked at the cover – a lurid illustration of a man and a woman tied up with scorpions crawling all over them – and thought, “Actually, that’s a great image. Why don’t I write a story for that one?”

Of course, I still needed a plot – beyond two people getting tied up and menaced by scorpions – and a hero to go with it. And this is where Todd Donovan suddenly emerged from the depths of my subconscious, cleared his throat and said, “That looks like a job for me.”

And since one of my rules for the July short story challenge is “Go along with whatever pops up, no matter how weird” I sent Todd on a quest to locate a missing scientist (who of course turns out to be a very attractive woman who also isn’t willing to take any macho crap neither from Todd nor the villain) only to find trouble in the form of a murderous druglord and his pit full of scorpions. I also decided to keep the story a period piece set in the mid 1960s.

With the July challenge stories, I normally try to keep research to a minimum. However, this story required some research beyond googling what coca plants actually look like. For starters, a pit full of deadly scorpions required a sufficiently lethal species of scorpion that made sense in the context and setting, since lethal scorpions that live in African or Asian deserts are not really suitable for a story that is set in a Latin American jungle. Finally, I did find a suitable species of scorpion, namely Tityus serrulatus, the Brazilian yellow scorpion, which even looks a little bit like the scorpions on the cover I used as inspiration. And since I had a pit full of lethal scorpions, I also needed to research what happens and what to do when someone gets stung.

That’s one of the benefits of writing. You learn all sorts of obscure facts when researching stories, which is why it baffles me when certain authors, usually of the literary persuasion, insist that they never do research, such as this dude who portrayed cellphones and e-mail as common in a novel set in the early 1990s and also relocated a town from Serbia to Croatia, which is kind of a massive faux pas, especially when the Balkan wars are one of the subjects of the novel.

Te next challenge was finding the right kind of cover for the story. Now the striking cover art of vintage men’s adventure magazines is largely impossible to recreate in the modern era without access to custom illustration. The look of men’s adventure paperbacks such as The Executioner or The Destroyer is also difficult to recreate in the modern era.

In the end, I combined influences from vintage paperbacks and German pulp magazines and found a stock photo of a young lady lying in the grass in clothes that fit both the description in the story and that also looked suitably vintage (too modern clothing and make-up is a curse when browsing stock photos). Of course, there were no scorpions, so I had to photoshop some in. Next came the typography, inspired by looking at the kind of fonts used on actual vintage magazines and paperbacks of the era, and finally some photoshopped grit for that beat up paperback look.

I think the result is pretty good, at least unless I can somehow resurrect Norm Eastman or Rafael DeSoto and persuade them to make covers for me.

Finally, do you remember that first Two-Fisted Todd story, the one I started and never finished? Well, in the wake of editing, proofing and publishing, I dug up that story again as well and found that what I’d written way back when still held up pretty well. What is more, I finished the story. It’s currently going through editing, so there will be at least one more Two-Fisted Todd adventure in the very near future. And then, who knows? After all, I have a big book full of artwork to serve as a potential inspiration for more adventures for Todd Donovan, freelance troubleshooter.

And for those of you who are not into retro pulp stuff, I also have more In Love and War stories coming up very soon (again, currently in editing) as well as at least one more Helen Shepherd Mystery as well as Murder in the Family 2 and After the End 2: More Stories of Life After the Apocalypse.

But for now, buckle up and follow Two-Fisted Todd Donovan into the jungle, as he faces…

The Crawling Death

[image error]1966. Freelance troubleshooter Todd Donovan is hired to locate Dr. Pat Turner, a biologist who has gone missing in the South American jungle. It seems like an easy job at first, but then Todd finds himself staring into the barrel of a gun.

Captured and taken to the jungle compound of the drug lord Durango, Todd finally meets up with Dr. Turner, who turns out to be not just a beautiful woman, but also Durango’s prisoner.

Durango is not the sort of man to leave potential witnesses alive. And so Todd and Dr. Pat Turner are soon facing a painful end in Durango’s pit of crawling death…

This is a short adventure story of approx. 5500 words or 20 pages in the style of the men’s adventure pulps of the 1960s.

More information.

Length: 5500 words

List price: 0.99 USD, EUR or GBP

Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Google Play, Scribd, Smashwords, Inktera, Playster, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, Casa del Libro, e-Sentral, 24symbols and XinXii.

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Cora guestblogs elsewhere and remembers Ursula K. Le Guin

First of all, my pals at the great podcast The Skiffy and Fanty Show are holding a “Month of Joy” event to celebrate the launch of their new website and they invited plenty of folks they interviewed over the years, including me, to share what gives them joy.

When I got the invitation e-mail, I was massively stressed out and didn’t feel particularly joyful. So I wondered what I could possibly write about, especially since very little gave me joy at that time. However, I found that no matter how stressed I was, I inevitably felt calmer when I sat down to make myself something to eat. So I decided to write about cooking.

The resulting post can be seen here. And coincidentally, I finally managed to recreate the elusive Schillerlocken salad mentioned in that post and you can see the result here. But I don’t just talk about cooking, but also a bit about writing. What is more, I share a genuine family recipe and holiday classic, namely my grandma’s recipe for herring salad. I wondered for a moment whether to share that particular recipe – it is a family legacy, after all – but then I thought why not. My Mom and I and possibly my cousin are the only people still making that particular recipe, so why not spread the joy of the best recipe for herring salad ever further?

So head over to the Skiffy and Fanty website, check out my post and maybe try the recipe. And while you’re there, read some of the other “Month of Joy” posts as well such as this one about translating Italian science fiction by Rachel Cordasco.

In other news, this was a sad week for the science fiction and fantasy community, because Ursula K. Le Guin, genre matriarch and grande old dame of science fiction and fantasy, left us at the age of 88. Over at the Speculative Fiction Showcase, I have linked to a number of lovely tributes from many of the big and small names in our genre in the weekly link round-up.

Those posts and tributes say pretty much everything there is to say about Ursula K. Le Guin and also show how important she was for our genre. So this isn’t going to be a long tribute, just a short rememberance.

When I fired up the Internet on Tuesday and saw that Ursula K. Le Guin had died, I was stunned, almost petrified. It shouldn’t be shocking, if someone dies at the age of 88, but she still seemed so active, still writing, still blogging, still publishing (her last essay collection, fittingly entitled No Time To Spare, came out barely a month before her death) that it seemed as if she would be here forever.

As with many other writers, readers and fans of science fiction and fantasy, Ursula K. Le Guin and her work have meant very much to me. However, when I saw someone asking others on Twitter, which was the first Ursula K. Le Guin book they read, I initially drew a blank. Which is odd, because for most of the other great writers of the genre, I can usually tell you which work of theirs I found first. But for Ursula K. Le Guin I honestly wasn’t sure.

Unlike many others, I never read A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequels as a teenager. When I grew up, science fiction and fantasy in general were scarce in supply in my school library and the village newsagent cum tobacco store cum stationery store cum bookstore. And as a young reader, you are very much dependent on the books that are available to you, particularly in the pre-Internet era. And in the 1980s, that meant “realistic” books that reflected the lives and problems of young people (though hardly any of those books ever reflected mine), not fantasy and science fiction. And what fantasy and science fiction there was, was usually be German or European authors. Books by American authors were rare, probably because of the vicious Anti-Americanism at the time (from both the right and the left) that meant anything American was automatically dismissed as trash. So I never read the Earthsea books as a kid, just as I never read Narnia or the Prydain Chronicles or A Wrinkle in Time or The Dark is Rising or the Oz books or Doctor Suess or plenty of other cultural touchstones for people from the English speaking world.

And when I finally discovered written science fiction at the age of fifteen, I found Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Anne McCaffrey and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Poul Anderson and Robert A. Heinlein and C.J. Cherryh and many others, but I still did not find Ursula K. Le Guin. I knew that she existed, but for some reason – probably a lack of availability – I did not read anything by her until much later. Once I did, I read The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven and The Dispossessed and enjoyed them all. I also finally read A Wizard of Earthsea and saw that I would have loved it, had I found it at the right time in my life. But most of all, I enjoyed her essays and her criticism. While I was working on my MA thesis, I thoroughly overdosed on science fiction criticism and could stomach neither science fiction criticism nor science fiction itself for a year or so. However, I still read any Ursula K. Le Guin essay or review I could find. Because unlike the preposterous blatherings of more or less preposterous men that I endured for my MA thesis, her work was always insightful and not preposterous at all.

So which was the first Ursula K. Le Guin work I read? Well, it turns out that there were two of her works that I read in my teens after all. One was “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, which I found in an anthology somewhere. But though it made an impact – well, is there anybody on whom that story doesn’t make an impact? – I did not recall the name of the author (it didn’t help that my teen self occasionally used what few bookstores carrying English language fiction there was as libraries, because I could not possibly afford to buy all the books that interested me) until I found it referenced in one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s essays much later. However, there is another work by Ursula K. Le Guin I encountered at around the same time, probably earlier, and that is The Word for World Is Forest. I suspect the reason I sought it out was because I saw it listed somewhere as an influence on the Endor scenes in Return of the Jedi. My teen self had made it her mission to track down each and everything that was supposed to have influenced the Star Wars trilogy. This quest led me to some strange places and to plenty of things where I could not see any connection at all, but it also introduced me to the films of Akira Kurosawa and the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin.

So the first work by Ursula K Le Guin that I read was The Word for World Is Forest. I read it, because someone somewhere claimed it had influenced Return of the Jedi. I have no idea if it really did, though I can certainly see the parallels, but I’m still grateful to whatever critic drew that comparison, because they introduced me to one of the true greats of our genre.

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Star Trek Discovery – Now with even more Shocking Twists (TM) and a Side Order of Fried Rubberhead

One of the many reasons I dislike Star Trek Discovery (for others, see here) is perhaps not entirely fair, since this is something entirely outside the control of anybody involved with the show. Because Star Trek Discovery premiered on the day of the disastrous German general elections of 2017 and my Twitter feed that night was half furious and terrified Germans talking about the elections and half Americans chatting about Star Trek Discovery, which means that I was not exactly positively inclined towards the show before I had even seen it. Though the show itself managed to surpass my worst expectations.

Ever since then, Star Trek Discovery has been something of a bad luck charm for me, since bad things tended to happen, whenever it aired, e.g. we were struck by a family crisis on the day of the last episode before the winter break aired. So when the Social-Democratic Party announced that they would hold their special party convention to take a vote on whether they could be bothered to govern on a day when Star Trek Discovery aired, I feared the worst. Because Star Trek Discovery is not just a bad show, it brings bad luck and the SPD is too wrapped up in their Germanness to notice, since they probably don’t even know what Star Trek Discovery is. Maybe someone should have pointed out that bad things tend to happen whenever a new episode of Tatort airs, since that also runs on a Sunday and is exactly the sort of German made programming these people will watch.

Alas, the SPD voted (narrowly) in favour of taking responsibility and actually governing rather than throwing yet another temper tantrum (though there are plenty of backbenchers indulging in temper tantrums of their own), so Star Trek Discovery might be shedding its status as a bad luck charm. Unfortunately, that does not make it a better show. Indeed, it’s as much an unholy mess as it ever was. Again, I’m not the only one who feels that way. Here is Katharine Trendacosta at io9 metaphorically hurling the show against the nearest wall.

A few episodes ago, I felt like Ms. Trendacosta, just furious at this pile of crap pretending to be a Star Trek show. But this week, my reaction is basically a version of the eight (or ten) deadly words: “I don’t give a fuck what happens to these people.”

Because I honestly no longer do. The few characters I actually cared about are either evil, dead, badly damaged or whatever once made me care about them is gone. And the characters still standing are pretty much the ones I didn’t care about in the first place. Star Trek Discovery prioritizes plot over character (and they actually had several interesting characters), only that their plots are neither original nor interesting and their shocking twists (TM) are telegraphed from a mile off. However, I largely follow serialised media like comics, TV shows, superhero movies, because I care about the characters. You can get me to follow a story purely for a cleverly constructed plot, but even then I tend to drop out, when there is just one stupid twist after another, unless I have become attached to the characters. And most of the others had better twists than Star Trek Discovery.

What is more, one thing that was constant across Star Trek in all its incarnations was that Star Trek was always character driven. You sat even through dreadful episodes (and every Star Trek had its share of those), because you liked those people and wanted to hang out with them and explore the universe. Star Trek Discovery, however, never gives you a cast of characters you just want to hang out with. It came close a few times just before the winter break, e.g. in the time-loop episode, but it always fell back again into its bad habits of just piling on shocking twists (TM) and emotional drama for the sake of it.

Star Trek Discovery isn’t Star Trek, it’s Dynasty in space, just like Game of Thrones is Dynasty with sword fights and dragons. Which can be fun for a while, but eventually gets tiring when the shocking twists (TM) are all there is.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

Last episode ended with the shocking twist (TM) that the faceless emperor of the mirror universe actually does have a face and it is that of Philippa Georgiou who seems to have raided the wardrobe of Ming the Merciless. Is there any reason why the emperor of the mirror universe has to be Philippa Georgiou of all people beyond the fact that this will shovel even more emotional pain onto poor Michael Burnham? Of course, not, but at least Michelle Yeoh seems to be having fun strutting around her command ship in preposterous outfits.

Meanwhile, Michael Burnham is still posing as the captain of the mirror Shenzhou. However, the Empress is not pleased, because Michael failed to exterminate the rebels she was told to exterminate. She also demands to see Michael, so Michael beams over to the command vessel together with Lorca to present him as a gift to the Empress. She also slips Lorca some painkillers, since he will presumably get tortured some more. One wonders why she didn’t do this before, considering that Lorca spent most of the past two episodes getting tortured. By the way, it’s quite telling that Lorca, who is still nominally the captain of the Discovery, spent five of twelve episodes so far (and Lorca wasn’t even in the first two episodes, so make that five of ten episodes, i.e. half the show) getting either tortured or killed over and over again. Now I can’t stand Lorca – and this episode vindicates my dislike for him – but torturing the character for half the episodes he’s actually in is still excessive even by modern grimdark quality TV standards. But it’s also very indicative of what sort of show Discovery is that it seems to find sadistic joy in torturing one of its main characters (and the other main characters don’t fare any better).

Empress Philippa the Merciless accepts the gift of Lorca and has a gift of her own for Michael. She gets to pick a member of Saru’s species. Since Michael has met mirror Saru as a slave aboard the Discovery, she naturally assumes that the Empress wants to give her another slave and picks one at random. However, when the Empress asks Michael to have dinner with her, Michael realises that she did not pick a new slave after all, but her dinner. Because the main course is… roasted Saru!

Yes, this really happened. Star Trek Discovery really had a cannibalism scene featuring a sentient alien. Okay, so Saru isn’t particularly likeable and I’m quite harsh on his character for much of the time (because he’s written as an unpleasant, passive aggressive and jealous prick), but that doesn’t mean that I want or need to see our heroine eat him or rather someone very much like him. Okay, so there is something darkly funny about Empress Philippa the Merciless picking up the roasted Rubberhead’s threat ganglia (apparently a particular delicacy) with her chopsticks and popping them into Michael’s mouth, while Michael tries very hard not to throw up onto Empress Philippa’s impressive golden cloak. And yes, I may have made some jokes along the lines of, “Well, if Saru ever behaves like a jerk again, then Michael has a good way to make him stop.” But still, this is a cannibalism scene. In Star Trek! Worse, it’s not even the first cannibalism scene in Star Trek Discovery – after all, Voq, L’Rell and the rest of the Klingons revealed that they had eaten the dead body of the Philippa Georgiou from the regular universe in a previous episode, though thankfully we were not forced to watch it.

The two entirely unnecessary cannibalism scenes, featuring lifeforms (Klingons and mirror universe humans respectively) who have never been shown in indulge in eating sentient beings before*, are an excellent example of how Star Trek Discovery is trying to be shocking just for the sake of being shocking. And we get more of that in this very episode. Cause with the reunion of Michael and mirror Philippa Georgiou, the show also heads full tilt into soap opera territory.

For you see, Empress Philippa the Merciless was also mirror Michael’s adoptive mother. It seems Michael is an orphan in every universe and unlucky in her choice of parent figures in every universe. Mirror Michael, however, was doubly unlucky in her choice of parent figure, because her foster father was none other than Gabriel Lorca. Except that Lorca – who is a sleazy arsehole in every universe – did not stop there. Instead, he seduced Mirror Michael. At this point, I could almost hear the writers room shouting, “Incest! We need some incest. After all, Game of Thrones also has incest and that’s hugely successful.” Okay, so actually it’s pseudo-incest, since Michael and Lorca are not related by blood, but that doesn’t make it any less icky.

It also turns out that Michael is unlucky in her choice of partner in every universe. Regular Michael had a relationship with Ash Tyler who turned out to be a traitor, murderer and also a surgically altered Klingon named Voq. Meanwhile, mirror Michael had a relationship with Lorca, who was not just her foster father and an all-around arsehole, but also a traitor, since he staged a coup against Empress Philippa. Worse, he persuaded mirror Michael to join him. And some of the things mirror Lorca told mirror Michael, as recounted by Empress Philippa, sound eerily like some of the things regular Michael has been told by the Lorca she knows. Hmm, that was a very big clue… or was it?

Though Michael hasn’t much chance to ruminate on the implications, because Empress Philippa the Merciless hurls all of that into Michael’s face and is about to execute her. Whereupon Michael does the first sensible thing she has done since the series began – she tells the Empress that she had nothing whatsoever to do with the coup against her, since she’s not even from the same universe. Michael also shows her Captain Georgiou’s insignia, which she got back from Klingon-dude-who-is-not-Voq before the winter break. Amazingly, the Empress believes her – remember, Discovery takes place about ten years before “Mirror, Mirror”, though after the Enterprise episode that featured the mirror universe. Though the Terran Empire does know about the USS Defiant, which will get caught in “The Tholian Web” and travel back in time to the mirror universe. Via the Defiant‘s records, the Empress also knows about the Federation and Starfleet, though she thinks very little of either (well, after having watched Discovery, my opinion of the Federation is not exactly high either, though for different reasons) and gives a little speech about how freedom and cooperation with people not like oneself is dangerous and destructive, that is worthy of every rightwing wannabe dictator. Indeed, if you swapped out the terms “Federation” and “aliens” for “European Union” and “refugees”, you could probably hear a speech very much like Empress Philippa’s at every convention of every far right party in Europe, though rarely delivered with as much style.

However, while Empress Philippa the Merciless may have no use for the Federation, she is fascinated by the concept of parallel universes, because that means just so much more to conquer. However, the Empress has a tiny problem. The crew of the Defiant was dead by the time they reached the mirror universe (actually, they were already dead in “The Tholian Web”) and so no one was left to tell the Empress just how to reach parallel universes. But luckily, she now has Michael who should be able to give her the relevant info. So Empress Philippa offers Michael a deal. If Michael gives her the tech specs for the magic mushroom drive of the Discovery, the Empress will let Michael and presumably Lorca (since Michael insists that the Lorca currently being tortured is not the one the Empress is after either) go. After some hesitation, Michael makes the second sensible decision since the series began and accepts.

Some people complain that Michael chose to hand top-secret Starfleet technology to a ruthless dictator, but I still think it was the best decision she could make given the circumstances. Besides, I have found Michael’s continued loyalty to Starfleet and the Federation frustrating and outright baffling, considering how badly they screwed her over. Cause Michael doesn’t owe any loyalty to the Federation and Starfleet after what they did to her and I for one found it refreshing to see that she’s finally started looking out for number one.

Another one who is an expert at looking out for number one is Gabriel Lorca. Of course, he’s busy getting tortured some more, but then an Imperial officer shows up who seems to have a particularly beef with mirror Lorca, because of something unsavoury mirror Lorca did to his sister. And now, the Imperial officer is eager to get Lorca to say the name of the sister. Which Lorca theoretically should not be able to do, cause he’s not even from the same universe and has never met this guy and his sister before. And so Lorca stays stoically silent, while the officer kills one of mirror Lorca’s followers by injecting him with something that causes him to explode. Which thoroughly messes up the cellblock, but still does not persuade Lorca to talk. So Lorca gets tortured some more, until he collapses, pretending to be near death. Whereupon the officer, who’s really not the sharpest knife in the mirror drawer, promptly storms into Lorca’s cell, because he doesn’t want to let Lorca die without having said the name of his sister at least once. Of course, Lorca has only been feigning and so he kills the officer and – as a final twist of the knife – whispered the sister’s name into the man’s ear. “She was nice”, he says, “But I found someone better.”

“But how…” a gasping chorus from the audience declaims, “…can he possibly know her name? Unless…?”

Okay, to cut a long story short, the Gabriel Lorca we have been watching these past ten episodes is from the mirror universe. Which is a shocking twist (TM) that absolutely nobody saw coming, just like the equally shocking twist (TM) last week that Ash Tyler was really a Klingon named Voq.

As shocking twists (TM) go, the Lorca twist has been set up somewhat better than the Tyler twist. After all, Lorca never behaved like any Starfleet captain we have ever seen and is a horrible person all around. Plus, his (well, regular Lorca’s) lover Admiral Cornwell noticed scars on his body that he did not have before. Finally, the fact that Lorca and mirror Michael were lovers also explains why Lorca keeps oozing sleaze all over regular Michael. Hell, I even got rapist vibes from him. Honestly, whatever they do, I hope that Michael/Lorca doesn’t become a thing, because that would be just ugh and not just because of the pseudo-incest (Does anybody ship them?). If they want to redeem Lorca, pair him off with Admiral Cornwell, since she is at least of a similar age. And the fact that Lorca was shown having sex with an age appropriate partner rather than with someone young enough to be his daughter was one of the very few things I liked about that character. So of course, Discovery had to ruin that, too. By this point, I’m beginning to suspect that they intentionally ruin the few things about Discovery that actually worked. Coincidentally, the officer whom Lorca killed happened to be black (Discovery is really not a good show for people of colour, since they keep getting killed off left, right and centre), which suggests that his sister was black as well. So does Lorca (I’m not going to call him mirror Lorca, because he is the only Lorca we’ve seen) have a thing about black women?

Of course, the Lorca twist would have worked much better, if the Federation and Starfleet shown in Discovery had been even remotely like the Federation and Starfleet we’ve seen in previous incarnations of Star Trek. But considering that the Federation seems to be a horrible dystopia now that thrives on slave labour and hands out life sentences for fairly minor offenses, the fact that a Starfleet captain was a horrible person didn’t seem all that unusual. Not to mention that we have seen horrible or flat out insane Starfleet captains before, they just weren’t the stars of the respective shows. Finally, the fact that Lorca is from the mirror universe and no one noticed that anything was amiss for months, even after Lorca murdered his crew and blew up his ship (though to be fair, we don’t know if mirror Lorca was the one who did that), once again proves that Starfleet is not just dystopian now, but also bloody incompetent. Remember, it took Spock about five minutes to figure out what was up, when faced with some denizens of the mirror universe who looked like crewmates. However, no one in Starfleet noticed anything off about Lorca at all with the possible exception of Admiral Cornwell, who is supposed to be a highly skilled psychologist and Lorca’s lover. And Admiral Cornwell never gets around to alerting anybody regarding Lorca. So yes, more proof that this Starfleet is completely incompetent, something it has never been before either, at least not on this scale.

Another thing that makes the Lorca twist work somewhat better than the Tyler twist is that the audience (ignoring those who figured it out long ago) and Michael find out the truth about Lorca at almost the same time (unlike with Tyler, where the audience found out one and a half episodes before Michael did), though in different ways. Because while planning to hook up Empress Philippa with the tech specs for the magic mushroom drive, Michael accidentally discovers that the Empress is extremely sensitive to light. And doesn’t that remind us of someone? When Michael asks the Empress about this, Philippa the Merciless replies that her extreme sensitivity to light is due to a genetic difference between humans in the regular and the mirror universe. Just how the Empress can know this, considering all they know about the regular universe is what they learned from a wrecked starship, is never explained. Nor is it ever explained why this crucial genetic difference between regular and mirror universe humans has never been mentioned before. Okay, so the mirror universe was pretty gloomy in the respective Deep Space Nine episodes (I’ve never seen the Enterprise mirror universe episodes), but I put that down merely to the “low lighting = drama” convention of the 1990s and beyond. And the mirror Enterprise in “Mirror, Mirror” was just as brightly lit as 1960s TV in general. Still, this aspect is just a minor irritation on the “playing fast and loose with Star Trek canon” scale.

So Star Trek Discovery has now served up two huge, if not exactly surprising twists (Lorca and Tyler), in the space of three episodes, plus a couple not quite so huge twists (Culber’s death, Stamets’ coma and near death, the identity of the Emperor, Captain Killy, “Look whom we’re having for dinner”, etc…). It’s enough twists to give any viewer whiplash and in fact, they keep coming so hard and so fast that the impact barely registers anymore. Worse, most of those twists don’t actually serve the narrative, they’re just for the sake of being twisty and shocking. Putting Stamets in a coma makes narrative sense, if only to give the Discovery a reason to stay in the mirror universe, but there was no real reason to kill off Culber, absolutely no reason to eat Saru and also no real reason for the Emperor to be revealed as Philippa Georgiou.

The Lorca twist actually does make some sense – and if they had dialled down the other twists, people would probably be a lot more positive now. Though the show never really gave us a reason to care about Lorca. He was a deeply unpleasant person most of the time, and while the show finally gave us a reason for this – he’s horrible, because he’s from the mirror universe – I still don’t give a flying fuck about what happens to Lorca, because I never got invested in his character. Lorca might not even be all that bad a person by mirror universe standards – after, all, Empress Philippa the Merciless is clearly an awful person and so Lorca who tried to overthrow her might actually be a good guy of sorts – but the show never gave us a real reason to care about him. Besides, this is the second time Discovery has pulled the stunt of giving us a captain and then yanking them away, first by killing off Philippa Georgiou (and early publicity pretty much focussed on her as the captain character) and then by revealing Lorca to be a universe hopping fraud who seduced his foster daughter. Add to that the premature deaths of Dr. Culber and the horrible woman security chief who became tardigrade fodder as well as the fate of Michael and the Tyler reveal and the Discovery showrunners have pretty much trained their audience never to get invested in a character again, because they will only get killed or turn evil anyway. And if your audience isn’t invested in the characters, then shocking twists and space action are the only things that keeps them watching. And you no longer need to watch Star Trek to get your dose of TV space opera goodness, since plenty of other shows fill that particular void, e.g. The Expanse, Dark Matter, Killjoys, The Orville, the occasional episode of Doctor Who, the occasional episode of Supergirl or Legends of Tomorrow, at least one Black Mirror episode, etc…

Unlike Lorca, I actually cared about Ash Tyler, because he was one of the very few genuinely likable characters aboard the Discovery. And unlike the Lorca twist, the Tyler twist serves no real narrative purpose except pouring even more emotional drama onto Michael. Tyler is basically a fridging victim, turned evil just to cause the protagonist anxiety. And indeed, there are signs in this episode that the showrunners are aware that they royally fucked up with regards to Ash Tyler. Because Tyler still oscillates between his Ash and Voq personas, screams all the time and appears to be in great pain. Saru, at a complete loss regarding what to do with him, finally consults L’Rell. L’Rell reveals that there was a real Ash Tyler once and that they implanted his personality and memories into the surgically altered Voq (so the sympathetic Ash Tyler we met was at least a real person, though stuck in the wrong body), but that something went terribly wrong with the process, cause apparently these Klingons are almost as incompetent as Starfleet. However, beyond that L’Rell refuses to help, until Saru simply dumps the screaming Tyler/Voq into her cell, probably because Saru has decided he is L’Rell’s problem now. Whereupon L’Rell cradles Tyler/Voq, puts her hands onto his body (I sincerely hope Voq was in control at that point, knowing how Ash feels about L’Rell touching him) and Tyler/Voq indeed calms down, whereas L’Rell lets out a Klingon mourning wail. So is Tyler gone for good now? Is Voq gone for good now? Has L’Rell somehow managed to integrate the two personalities? We don’t know, though the most common guess is that she exorcised Voq from Tyler and sort of mercy-killed him, hence the mourning wail.

By the way, am I the only one who finds L’Rell’s harness cum prisoner uniform extremely disturbing? Okay, so L’Rell is a horrible person, but those restraints are still pretty extreme, especially considering she is locked up in a cell. Beides, Michael was forced to wear a stereotypical prison outfit in a garish colour that is apparently so identified with prisoners in the US these days that even futuristic space prisons have garish day-glo uniforms in US films and TV shows (also see the prison scenes in Guardians of the Galaxy), because apparently Americans cannot imagine a prisoner dressed any differently, even though the garish overall is a pretty recent development that came up in the past thirty years or so. And coincidentally, in the prison novella I’m writing for the In Love and War series, the prison uniforms are based on the ones worn in this 1930s chain gang movie.

Now I would be very glad to have Ash Tyler back, since I actually liked him and don’t give a fuck about Voq. But if they’re going to put Ash back together again after two and a half episodes, what exactly was the purpose of the whole “Tyler is Voq” exercise in the first place? The Klingons weren’t even willing to listen to Voq in Klingon form, so they sure as hell won’t listen to him in human form. And where will the character go after this? Can he ever redeem himself? Considering the ridiculously harsh treatment of Michael, who did nothing except a single nerve pinch, what will Starfleet do to Ash Tyler who actually was a Klingon spy and who actually did kill somebody? Okay, one could argue that Ash was not himself and therefore not responsible for his actions, but frankly Michael wasn’t exactly emotionally stable either when she nerve-pinched Captain Georgiou. Okay, so Captain Jean-Luc Picard was never blamed for anything he did as Locutus (and the Borg wiped out half of Starfleet), but that was a different time and a different Star Trek. So in short, the Discovery showrunners ruined one of their few good characters and one of two romantic relationships that worked for the sake of yet another cheap twist.

As for the other romantic relationship that the Discovery showrunners ruined for the sake of a cheap twist, last time we saw Paul Stamets, he was in a coma and near death, while his mind went walkabout in the magic mushroom forest, where he met his mirror universe counterpart. Apparently, mirror Stamets has been working on a magic mushroom drive as well (which begets the question why exactly Empress Philippa the Merciless is so eager to get her hands on the tech specs for the Discovery‘s magic mushroom drive). But something went wrong and mirror Stamets got trapped in the mushroom spore network that links the various universes together. When mirror Stamets happened upon the regular Stamets, he tried to get his attention, hence the lingering reflection and Stamets’ gaffe in addressing Tilly as Captain. And now mirror Stamets has regular Stamets’ attention, he drops a bombshell. For apparently, mirror Stamets’ experiments caused the magic mushroom spores to wither and die, threatening the entire spore network and also coincidentally, the Discovery‘s way back to the regular universe.

The glowy psychedelic magic mushroom forest quickly gives way to the familiar Discovery corridors with extra dramatic lighting, probably to keep the show on budget. And within those Discovery corridors Stamets finds no other than Hugh Culber, his recently killed life partner. Apparently, Culber is some sort of ghost trapped between planes of existence now (So ghosts and the afterlife are a thing now in Star Trek? The departures from established Star Trek lore are so frequent by now that I’m no longer bothered, I merely roll my eyes). But in spite of the eye-rolling “meet the ghost of the recently departed” gimmick that I’d be happy never to see again in any TV show ever, the reunion between Culber and Stamets is still very sweet. Basically, Stamets just wants to stay inside the magic mushroom network with Culber forever, but Culber wants him to go back and wake up. We learn that Stamets, being rather brusque and not overly emotionally expressive, is worried that Culber didn’t know he loved him (Don’t worry, Paul. He knew) and that he enjoyed the quiet domestic bliss of brushing teeth and talking about their day together, before they go to bed. And so Stamets and ghost Culber share their nightly routine once more and Stamets even puts on Culber’s favourite aria (which Stamets hates). They kiss and Stamets wakes up, only to find that whatever infected mirror Stamets’ magic mushroom drive has infected the Discovery‘s, too, so they still can’t leave the mirror universe.

Now the Stamets and Culber scenes were a bright spot in an otherwise grim episode. But considering that the production team assured us two weeks ago that we should trust them and that they know killing off gay characters is a harmful stereotype and that we haven’t seen the last of Culber yet, having Culber return as a magic mushroom ghost only to assure Stamets and everybody else that yes, he really is dead, doesn’t really make things any better. Okay, so Stamets got to say good-bye to Culber, but Culber is still dead and for no good reason, either.

Regarding the production team and their repeated “Please trust us, we know what we’re doing” statements, I’m almost as fed up with them as Katharine Trendacosta is. Because frankly, by this point, I don’t trust the Discovery showrunners any further than I can throw them. I don’t blame the actors, not even when they were forced to lie about the show, because what else should they do? But I definitely blame the showrunners for the unholy mess that is Star Trek Discovery. Particularly, I blame Bryan Fuller, Star Trek Discovery‘s creator and initial showrunner (before he left/was made to leave), since he has a history of leaving/getting fired from shows he’s working on (he left/got fired from American Gods since and it happened a few times before, too), while shows that Fuller does not leave (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies, Wonderfall) tend not to last long. And besides, Fuller was the one who said, way back when Discovery was first announced, that Star Trek Discovery would not be boring old Star Trek and that it would be darker and fully serialized, which was a huge big red flag right there. Cause it seems to me that Star Trek Discovery combines everything that is bad about “the golden age of television” (and regular readers know how I feel about that), the over-serialisation, whiplash inducing plots, being shocking for the sake of being shocking, the senseless character deaths and the relentless darkness with none of the good aspects. Not to mention that Star Trek doesn’t mesh with what passes for “quality” TV these days at all.

Apparently, Bryan Fuller also wanted to tell a different story with a different cast every season, much like those American Whatever shows. CBS nixed that, since they clearly don’t want the hassle of dealing with a new cast and new sets every season, but Discovery‘s alarming tendency to treat its characters as disposable probably stems from Fuller’s original plan. But if Fuller’s plan was such a mess, why didn’t CBS nix it earlier, before the show went into production? And why did the people who succeeded Fuller not try to turn around the mess he created earlier, since Fuller was only credited as writer for the first three episodes? Or maybe the hugely inconsistent show we’re seeing is the result of Fuller’s successors desperately trying to turn the ship around?

At this point, we can only speculate just how the hell Star Trek Discovery could go so wrong? The question is: Can they still turn the ship around and give us a Star Trek show worthy the name? Everything is possible, of course, but at this point I don’t see how they want to turn the show around with only three episodes left. We can’t even blame Bryan Fuller for the mirror universe episodes with their many senseless twists and deaths, since he was long gone by that point.

I will continue to watch until the end of the season, if only because it’s just three more episodes. But I can’t see myself coming back for season 2, unless things drastically improve, and I suspect many others won’t come back either.

*Okay, so we have never seen Saru’s species before, but I’m still pretty sure that Kirk or Picard, whether from the mirror or the regular universe, aren’t secretly feasting on roast Rubberhead.

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Star Trek Discovery – The Anti Star Trek in the Mirror Universe

Yes, it’s the weekly ranting and rambling blog post about Star Trek Discovery. Though at this point, I’m only still doing this, because I started it and want to do the entire first season (Previous editions may be found here). Because frankly, I’m sick of this show. It’s just one awful and depressing thing happening after another in a failed attempt to be deep and relevant “quality” television. I’m no longer even angry at the travesty that is Star Trek Discovery. At this point, my main feelings about the show are basically, “When will this torture be finally over?”

I’m clearly not the only one who feels like this, because several of the people to whose episode by episode reviews I used to link over at the Speculative Fiction Showcase have stopped doing them by now, either because their subscription to the streaming service which is the only way to see Discovery in the US ran out or because they just got sick of the whole thing and stopped watching. By now, the episode by episode reviewers left are mostly the big pop culture sites like Tor.com, io9, Den of Geek or The AV Club, where someone presumably gets paid for watching Star Trek Discovery and writing about it. But the for the love reviewers at smaller sites and personal blogs are largely gone. I can’t even blame them, because Star Trek Discovery is just a depressing mess with occasional glimpses of the much better show it could have been.

Because – as Camestros Felapton points out in his review of the latest episode – Star Trek Discovery just isn’t Star Trek and will never be Star Trek. It’s not even not Star Trek in the way the J.J. Abrams movies are not Star Trek – since those movies are basically generic space action movies coated with a thin veneer of Star Trek. But Discovery doesn’t even have that. It almost seems as if the Discovery showrunners, whoever they are this week (I seem to have lost track, since there are so many producers and executive producers and they also change frequently), go out of their way to make a show that is the polar opposite of Star Trek. Which, as I said last week, is something you can do and that several books and TV shows have done rather well. But if you want to do the opposite of Star Trek, then don’t call it Star Trek.

Spoilers behind the cut!

So the Discovery is still stuck in the mirror universe and there is no sign of them escaping either, so I guess we’ll get at least one more episode of “Star Trek Discovery – At least, we’re not as bad as these mirror universe people”. Michael Burnham, Ash Tyler and Gabriel Lorca are still stuck aboard the mirror Shenzhou. Lorca spends most of the episode getting tortured, which is not nearly as upsetting as it should be, because Lorca is such an unpleasant person that I frankly don’t care what happens to him. Michael poses as the captain of the mirror Shenzhou and in that role she has to preside over executions, which trouble her deeply. On the plus side, she also gets a cool uniform, some sexy lingerie and Saru as a personal slave. The latter should probably be upsetting as well, though I basically viewed it as a character who has been a jerk most of the season (though regular universe Saru seems to have improved in recent episodes) gets his comeuppance. In fact, I was surprised that Michael lied to Saru, when he asked her if she’d met any of his species. Because if I were Michael and Saru had treated me like he treated her for much of the season, I would have rubbed it in his face.

Luckily, Michael isn’t alone aboard the mirror Shenzhou. Lorca isn’t much of a help and basically tells her to just play along and do whatever evil things are demanded of her. However, Michael finds some comfort in Ash, who should know a thing or two about subterfuge, pretending to be someone you’re not and losing yourself in your role. Though Ash seems to be back in human mode for now and even tells Michael that she is his tether and that he will be hers. It’s a sweet moment and Sonequa Martin-Green and Shazad Latif have so much chemistry with each other, which makes me even more angry that the showrunners decided to destroy this lovely relationship (both lovely relationships they had in the show, for that matter) for the sake of a cheap twist that everybody and their sister saw coming from a mile off.

Things come to a head when Michael is ordered to bomb a rebel base. Michael clearly does not want to do this, so she asks Lorca for advice who basically tells her to just go along with it and get the intel they need. Michael, however, comes up with an excellent reason not to bomb the rebel base. For it turns out that in the mirror universe, Klingons – though xenophobic in the regular universe – can cooperate with other species, namely Vulcans, Andorians and Tellurites, just fine to overthrow the xenophobic Terran Empire. Michael now wants to find out just why the mirror Klingons are so much less xenophobic than their counterparts (apparently, “It’s the mirror universe and things are different here” doesn’t suffice as an answer), so Michael and Ash beam down to talk to the rebels, feeding them some bunk about how they are willing to betray their species (well, for Ash it’s true) and want peace. Inexplicably, the rebels buy this whole line and immediately take Michael and Ash to meet their leader, who is none other than – yes, you guessed it – mirror Voq. And since mirror Voq isn’t quite so willing to believe Michael that she is willing to turn against her superiors and let the rebels escape, he calls in the rebels’ spiritual leader and prophet to confirm that Michael is telling the truth. And this prophet turns out to be none other than – yes, you guessed it again – mirror Sarek wearing the patented mirror universe goatee.

Michael is understandably shocked to come face to face with Voq and particularly with her foster father. Sarek mindmelds with Michael and sees the truth about her origin. He proclaims that he sees a universe full of possibilities (“Sorry, Sarek, but you accidentally tuned in to the original series or Next Generation, not Discovery“), praises his own parenting skills (“Uhm, Sarek, I have no idea what universe that was, since you’re a crappy Dad in the regular Star Trek universe“) and declares that Michael is full of bottomless compassion. Well, compared to Lorca and the rest of the Discovery crew she may well be (at least, Michael feels bad about killing people, unlike Lorca), but Michael doesn’t strike me as particularly compassionate otherwise (but then Sarek is Vulcan and probably has different standards). As for how the hell mirror Spock could become first officer aboard the mirror Enterprise (as seen in the classic Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror”), when he is not just a half-Vulcan in the xenophobic Terran empire, but also the son of a prominent resistance leader I have no idea. But then, it’s not as if Discovery is even trying to fit into greater Star Trek continuity by this point.

Voq, when asked how he manages to cooperate with non-Klingons without breaking out in hives and whatever happened to “Make the Klingon Empire great again” anyway, responds that he is guided by the light of Kahless and that having a common enemy united them. Hearing his mirror self go so completely against the “Make the Klingon Empire great again” doctrine that the Klingon head honcho instilled in him causes Ash to suffer another outbreak of Voq. He snaps and promptly attacks his mirror self, yelling “Remain Klingon or die”. This behaviour completely blows the mission and nearly gets Michael and Ash killed, if not for mirror Sarek’s intervention.

Like much in this episode, Michael and Ash’s sidequest to the rebel base makes no real sense and actually endangers them, because it raises questions among the already suspicious crew of the mirror Shenzhou. And regardless of what Michael believes, talking to non-xenophobic Klingons in a parallel universe will not actually help them find a way to negotiate with the Klingons in the regular universe (and wasn’t Michael supposed to hate Klingons?) any more than Sarek’s experience with Michael and Ash from a somewhat less evil universe will help the rebels negotiate with the xenophobic humans of the Terran Empire. So if the sidequest to te rebel base makes no sense in the context of the episode, then why is it there at all? The answer is because the plot required it. Ash needed to come face to face with his Klingon mirror self in order to finally go full Voq and Michael needed to come face to face with mirror Sarek to pile on even more emotional drama. The whole thing is stupid and manipulative and doesn’t even make sense in the context of the plot.

After Ash has thoroughly pissed off his mirror self, Michael and Ash beam back to the mirror Shenzhou, where an understandably furious Michael orders Ash to her quarters and demands just what the fuck he was thinking. Ash replies that he was just following Lorca’s orders – even though Lorca obviously did not order Michael and Ash to provoke random mirror universe denizens and get themselves killed. And then Ash breaks down completely and remembers that he is Voq in a lengthy and entirely unnecessary flashback sequence, since everybody had already figured this out ages ago. Ash/Voq promptly confesses the truth to Michael – way to maintain your cover, Voq – and the two of them have a frank and mature discussion about what to do now and how they can end the war.

Just kidding, because Star Trek Discovery would never let its characters do something that’s actually constructive and does not involve the maximum amount of emotional drama. And so after his confession, Ash/Voq promptly attacks Michael and tries to kill her, because she killed his mentor. Yeah, Voq, and you killed and ate her mentor, so I guess you’re even. Michael’s and Ash/Voq’s fight is interrupted, when mirror Saru barges in (luckily, he didn’t mistake the noises from Michael’s cabin for foreplay – and considering what we know of Klingon sex, it might well have been foreplay) and takes out Ash/Voq. Whereupon Michael sentences Ash/Voq to death in pure mirror universe fashion and insists on beaming him out into space (the preferred mirror universe manner of execution, as we saw earlier) personally. Okay, so Michael has every reason to be really, really pissed at Ash/Voq, but somehow this doesn’t fit in with the “bottomless compassion” Sarek claims to have detected earlier (and for that matter, why doesn’t she try to save the redshirt prisoners who were executed earlier with a similar manoeuvre?). For a second or so, you hope that Michael has changed the transporter programming to beam Ash/Voq aboard the Discovery or somewhere else. But nope, Ash/Voq actually lands in the vacuum of space for a few seconds, before he is beamed back aboard the Discovery by Saru (whom Michael apparently contacted offscreen). Saru, always an arsehole, promptly informs Ash that even though Ash/Voq is a traitor, the Discovery is still a Starfleet vessel and that Ash/Voq will be kept alive until he can be put on trial for his crimes (even though they don’t know Ash/Voq killed the Doctor) and punished. I guess they’re running low on prison slave labour over in the Federation. Coincidentally, even though Ash/Voq is the clear villain in this scene, I still found myself disliking Saru more, because his smugness just grates on me.

Michael, completely distraught, goes to see Lorca once more. And Lorca takes time out of his busy schedule of getting tortured to tell Michael basically the same thing as before. They must remain undercover to gather intelligence on the Starfleet ship USS Defiant, which will go missing approximately ten years after the time of Discovery in the original series episode “The Tholian Web”. I have to confess I had to look up what the reason for the undercover mission was supposed to be, because I honestly didn’t remember. Nor does it really matter, because the sole reason for sending Michael, Ash and Lorca undercover is the same reason for that stupid sidequest to the rebel base, because it’s an excuse to pile yet more emotional pain on Michael, pile physical pain on Lorca and trigger another outbreak of Voqness in Ash. Star Trek Discovery has an almost sadistic joy in causing its characters (all of its characters with the possible exception of Tilly) physical and emotional pain, as Standback points out here. And the sheer amount of pain inflicted on the characters is also a large part of what makes Star Trek Discovery so very unpleasant to watch.

Michael tells Lorca about Ash and confesses that she doesn’t know how to hold on to who she is without him (well, maybe then you shouldn’t have first spaced him and then sent him back to Saru, Michael). Whereupon Lorca tells her that what happened to Ash doesn’t matter, because she still has him to rely on. Now if Lorca were a normal Starfleet captain, even one who’s not overly emotionally supportive like early Picard, this would be a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to say in such a situation. However, Lorca is not a normal Starfleet captain. And indeed the way he says that line is so dripping with sleaze that it literally sent a shudder down my spine. And indeed I yelled at the screen in that moment, “Oh for fuck’s sake, Michael, why don’t you just space him? And for that matter, why don’t you just stay in the mirror universe? At least, here you get to be captain and maybe you can find a way to make a change. Or maybe you could join the rebels or run away and become a space pirate?”

These are not things the audience should ever think when watching a Star Trek episode. We should not want to see a member of the crew, let alone the captain get spaced. We should not think for even a moment that the mirror universe is not so much worse than the regular one and the life of a certain character is better, so why not stay there? That I even had these thoughts at all shows how far Discovery has strayed from what Star Trek used to be.

However, the episode is not quite done with piling emotional drama onto Michael yet, because all of a sudden another ship of the Terran Empire appears and bombs the rebel base that Michael so far managed not to bomb. And it’s not any ship of the Terran Empire either, but the flagship of the so-called faceless Emperor. Who turns out not to be so faceless after all, when the ship hails that mirror Shenzhou. On the contrary, the faceless Emperor wears a very familiar face, namely that of Philippa Georgiou, Michael’s dead mentor, in full Ming the Merciless get-up. As with the “Ash is Voq” revelation, this twist surprised exactly nobody, because you could see it coming from the mile off. Philippa Georgiou is nowhere in sight in the mirror universe, nor do we learn what happened to her (like “Mirror, Mirror” revealed what became of Christopher Pike). And of course, the Emperor had to be revealed as someone who will cause Michael the maximum amount of emotional anguish. And with Sarek out of the picture (literally, because Georgiou just blew him to bits), Georgiou was the only logical choice. Of course, withholding the identity of the Emperor made no sense in the context of the story. And the Emperor obviously isn’t faceless, since she projects herself as a hologram in full Ming the Merciless regalia onto the bridge of the Shenzhou. Once again, the reveal is merely played for cheap shock value, for the umpteenth time this episode. Though at least Michelle Yeoh looks like she’s having fun, hamming it up in that outrageous outfit.

With all the awful things happening to Michael this episode, it’s easy to forget the other Discovery crewmember who is having a really horrible day, namely Paul Stamets. When we last saw Stamets, he was in a coma following that disastrous last jump into the mirror universe and only woke up for occasional violent outbursts and doom laden ramblings. Worse, Stamets also just lost his life partner, when Ash/Voq snapped Dr. Culber’s neck, while a helpless Stamets was lying in bed in the background. Since Starfleet apparently does not believe in CCTV cameras, Culber’s death is only discovered when a crewmember stumbles upon Stamets cradling his partner’s dead body. Since Stamets is not himself and prone to violent outbursts and there is no other suspect in sight, since Ash is on the mirror Shenzhou with Michael and Lorca, everybody assumes that Stamets had another outburst and accidentally killed his partner. Tilly alone is sceptical and tries to cure Stamets via the same method they cured the tardigrade, when it succumbed to too many jumps via the magic mushroom drive, namely by exposing Stamets to magic mushroom spores. It’s not even that bad a plan. Unfortunately, the treatment seems to kill poor Stamets or at least kill his body (but then something similar happened to the Tardigrade and it got better). Meanwhile, inside Stamets’ mind we see him venturing into the magic mushroom network that looks like a psychedelic forrest, where he meets his own mirror universe counterpart. Now parts of the original series may well have been written under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs – it was the 1960s, after all – but the original series never went as far as showing us the drug-induced psychedelic visions of its characters.

Oddly enough, those people who still reviews the series episode by episode seem to have liked this episode quite a bit, which baffles me, because I flat out hated pretty much everything about it from the sloppy plotting via the cheap twists and forced emotional drama to the fact that it pretty much killed off any sympathy or interest I ever had in any of the characters. But then, it seems to me that the people who actually seem to like Discovery prefer darker stories, since they usually also proclaim their undying love for Deep Space Nine, which was my least favourite Star Trek show until Discovery came along.

Now I could forgive the predictable twists, the sloppy plotting and the many discrepancies with established Star Trek continuity, because I mainly watch Star Trek (and pretty much every other TV show) for the characters. And at this point, Star Trek Discovery has done everything in its power to make me dislike every single character still left alive. Philippa Georgiou, killed off only to return first as a hologram and then as Empress Philippa the Merciless. Lorca and Saru – never liked them. Lorca is sleazy and behaves like a villain, while Saru is unbearably smug and condescending and basically just one huge missed opportunity. Ash Tyler never existed and is in fact Voq, the Klingon, whom I never gave the slightest fuck about. And in fact, I can’t even tell the various Klingons apart, except that L’Rell is the female one. I also strongly predict that Ash/Voq won’t survive this season. Dr. Culber is dead. Stamets is a character I disliked a lot at first, but then slowly came around to liking him, when his relationship with the Doctor was revealed and Stamets injected himself with the tardigrade DNA and got a personality transplant in the bargain. Besides, at around the same time, Anthony Rapp, who plays Stamets, spoke up about having been sexually assaulted by Kevin Spacey as a 14-year-old, so my sympathy for Anthony Rapp, the sexual assault survivor, influenced my feelings about the character he is playing. So that leaves Tilly as the sole likable character still left standing. And yes, I would watch the adventures of Captain Tilly and the Discovery‘s bridge crew, once they developed actual personalities.

As for Michael, I know that I defend her a lot, but I don’t actually like her character all that much. Her guilt complex and her stoic determination to suffer and suffer some more really grate on me. And in fact, I often find myself yelling at the screen, “Wake up, Michael. Fight back! Do something! The fucking Federation is not your friend.” Yes, I know that suffering a lot is important for a redemption arc, but I still don’t think Michael needs redemption from anything. And besides – as I pointed out here – all of the pain and suffering piled on Michael is part of why I hate redemption arcs. In fact, with its focus on enduring pain and suffering and winning by endurance, Star Trek Discovery reminds me of some very unsavoury, late Nazi era sort of propaganda films which placed an extreme focus on suffering, pain and endurance (because by that point in WWII, it was obvious that the Third Reich was not going to win, so they had to deploy movies about noble suffering and endurance to keep the population in check). I don’t think that anybody involved with Star Trek Discovery ever had the misfortune of watching movies like Immensee, Opfergang or Kolberg, since few people except for film students and historians have seen those. Nonetheless, Star Trek Discovery sometimes feels like Veit Harlan‘s take on Star Trek* with more people of colour. And this is not a compliment.

Besides, I liked the relationship between Michael and Ash a whole lot, even though I felt it was rushed, so I hate to see it broken up just for the sake of cheap emotional drama and yet more suffering. Because Michael and Ash were good for each other. Just as Stamets and Culber were good for each other. And of course, the Discovery showrunners had to break up that relationship, too, in the cruellest way possible. Because we obviously can’t have a happy couple on Star Trek Discovery.

Coincidentally, I also realise that the older I get, the less tolerance I have for drama for the sake of drama and for anything grimdark at all (and in fact, my taste for grimdark largely evaporated by my late 20s). Besides, if I wanted to watch a dark and depressing SFF show, I’d watch The Handmaid’s Tale, which is a lot better made, more topical and more prestigious than Star Trek Discovery. Not to mention that The Handmaid’s Tale also manages to be more hopeful, because we know from the book that Offred/June or at least her story gets out and that Gilead falls. And yes, if even the fucking Handmaid’s Tale manages to be more hopeful than Star Trek Discovery, you have a problem.

What is more, my tolerance for emotional drama and contrived “We can’t be together because of reasons” plots has pretty much dropped to zero by now. Because let’s face it, those reasons usually aren’t the unsurmountable obstacles they are made to look like. And she’s a Vulcan-raised Starfleet mutineer with a life sentence on her head and he’s a Klingon spy surgically altered to look human and besides they killed each other’s mentors and their respective governments are at war is a better reason than most. Nonetheless, it’s not an unsurmountable obstacle and in fact I really hoped that Ash and Michael would talk to each other, instead of immediately jumping at each other’s throats. And that maybe they’d just decide to run away together and become space pirates or something and the Federation and the Klingon Empire be damned.

But of course, that was never going to happen, if only because characters in science fiction franchises and indeed everywhere else are never allowed to run away from the plot (indeed, The Last Jedi goes out of its way to stop several characters from running away from the plot), no matter how much sense that would make. And indeed, I explicitly wrote the In Love and War series (which will have new installments coming out very soon – nearly done with the editing), because after the third or fourth time of running into a science fiction plot featuring a couple that couldn’t be together because of reasons, I got very sick of the whole thing and wished they’d all just run away to become space pirates or mercenaries or open a restaurant on a far away planet or something. But then I realised that these characters would never run away from the plot, never mind that I usually cared a lot less about whatever crisis threatened the galaxy this week than I cared about the characters and their relationship. And so I thought, “Why don’t I write a story where the central couple actually does run away together to become space pirates or mercenaries or something?” And yes, Mikhail and Anjali both get to suffer a lot of physical and emotional pain, but at least they will be in a better place at the end of it all and not just find some hollow redemption, whatever that might be, either.

*Coincidentally, I now wonder what Veit Harlan’s Star Trek Discovery would have looked like. We’d probably have had Kristina Söderbaum (Harlan’s wife whom he cast as the suffering heroine in every single one of his movies) as Michael, Heinrich George as Lorca (now that I’d love to see), Ferdinand Marian as Ash and Franz Scharfheitlin as Saru. No idea who’d play Stamets, Culber, Tilly and Georgiou.

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