Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 83

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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Star Trek Discovery – Through the Looking Glass and into even more Grimdarkness

The post title sums it up really. Star Trek Discovery is back and it’s as grimdark and depressing and un-Trek-like as ever in spite of liberally borrowing from Star Trek‘s most popular tropes.

If you’ve been following my Star Trek Discovery posts, you may remember that by the last couple of episode before the winter break, it seemed as if the show was improving. Well, it didn’t. Even worse, Star Trek Discovery seems hell-bent on destroying even the very few things about the show that actually worked.

As you may recall, when we last left Starfleet’s worst ship, crew and captain, they had just won a decisive victory in the war against the Klingons (well, they’ve had decisive victories before, considering that the tide of that particular war seems to turn every single episode), managed to destroy the Ship of the Dead, render the Klingon cloaking device useless, rescue Admiral Cornwell and take a high-ranking Klingon officer prisoner. So far, so good. Unfortunately, they also managed to fry the brain of their navigator and resident magic mushroom expert Paul Stamets, who promised to do “just one more jump” (a clearer case of famous last words were never uttered), one last jump which managed to land the Discovery somewhere else. Where exactly – past, future, gamma quadrant, delta quadrant, mirror universe, other parallel universe? – was not clear.

The answer to the mystery where the Discovery has landed after its last jump is one that is so utterly unpredictable that absolutely nobody could have seen it coming.

Warning! Spoilers behind the cut!

Just kidding, the production team went for the most predictable destination they could come up with, cause it turns out that the Discovery has jumped into – surprise! – the mirror universe. Yes, I’m sure absolutely no one saw that coming, especially since the various incarnations of Star Trek have been regularly visiting the mirror universe since 1967, i.e. 51 years ago. Now the reason for the popularity of the mirror universe in the past 51 years of Star Trek is that the episode which introduced the mirror universe, Mirror, Mirror, is a damned good episode, which holds up well even today, as Camestros Felapton noted on his recent rewatch. However, frequent repetitions do not necessarily make a good thing better. And so later reiterations of Star Trek visited the mirror universe again and again. Deep Space 9 had several episodes set there and Enterprise also visited the mirror universe in a two-part episode. I have very little memory of these episodes, since I had stopped watching both shows regularly by that point.

What makes the original “Mirror, Mirror” work so well is also the contrast between the utopian with a few flaws Federation and the dystopian Terran Empire. Therefore, the decision to have the darkest 1990s/2000s Star Trek series such as Deep Space Nine and late series Enterprise take a detour into the mirror universe is somewhat baffling, because the contrast just won’t be so great. Perhaps they were trying to prove that even though the characters of Deep Space Nine and to a lesser degree Enterprise did plenty of questionable things, they at least weren’t as bad as that.

And now Star Trek Discovery makes a detour into the mirror universe, set chronologically before Kirk’s famous trip there, but after Enterprise‘s. And since the Federation of Star Trek Discovery already is a dystopia which hands out life sentences for fairly minor misdemeanours and apparently builds its post-scarcity society on slave labour by prisoners, there really isn’t that much of a contrast between the Federation as portrayed in Discovery and the Terran Empire, except that the Terran Empire is xenophobic (which does not really match the Terran Empire we’ve seen in “Mirror, Mirror”, where Spock could rise to first officer) and that it has cooler uniforms. And so the shock of the Discovery crew upon finding out what their mirror universe counterparts have been up to (“Oh no, how could we be such evil people in this universe? And how can the Terran Empire be so much like the Federation, but so evil?”) rings hollow, because honestly, have these people ever looked at their own universe? They already live in a dark place, so the fact that the mirror universe is a degree darker doesn’t change all that much. Indeed, Camestros Felapton puts it best in his review, when he says that Star Trek Discovery has finally found a universe that suits it. Besides, all characters of whose fate we learn are actually better off in the mirror universe than in the regular universe with the sole exception of Lorca (and Connor, but then Connor dies in both universes, but at least got to become captain in the mirror universe). And I’m not all that bothered by bad things happening to Lorca, because he has been an awful person for much of the season. Though maybe that means his mirror universe counterpart is good. And indeed, there are suspicions that the Lorca we have been watching for the past seven episodes is actually from the mirror universe and somehow ended up in ours, which explains why he is so erratic and an awful person even by the admittedly low standards of the dystopian Federation. Given how very bad the Discovery production team are at surprises and shocking twists that actually shock or surprise anybody, I wouldn’t even be surprised if that theory turned out to be true.

Indeed, part of me was hoping that it would be revealed that the Discovery originated in yet another parallel universe (we know there is an infinite number of them from the Next Generation episode “Parallels”) and that they would have landed in the familiar quasi-utopian Star Trek universe instead. Cause that would at least have been interesting and less predictable and it also would have fixed a whole lot of issues with Star Trek Discovery in one swoop.

The crew figures out what’s up pretty quickly and after some initial shock decide to blend in by pretending to be their mirror universe counterparts. They also find some further help in records retrieved from the destroyed rebel ships the Discovery finds itself surrounded by. Turns out that mirror Lorca was some kind of rebel who tried to kill the Emperor, did kill mirror Burnham and vanished (three guesses where he vanished to). Mirror Burnham was the captain of the mirror Shenzhou before her untimely death, while mirror Tilly did become captain of the mirror Discovery and is so infamous for her cruelty to the point that she is nicknamed “Killy”. Burnham, Lorca and Tyler (because where Michael Burnham goes, Ash Tyler goes) are sent on a mission pretending to be their evil counterparts to infiltrate the mirror Shenzhou, where Lorca is promptly stuck into a torture chamber (well, he is a wanted traitor and fugitive in this universe), which seems to bother absolutely nobody, whether Burnham, Tyler or the audience, probably because Lorca is just plain unpleasant. Though Lorca sure gets tortured and killed a lot. Three out of ten episodes so far contain extensive scenes of Lorca getting tortured or killed. Meanwhile, Burnham gets into a fight with the mirror Shenzhou‘s current captain Connor (previously a redshirt aboard the Discovery) and has to kill him, because that is the mirror universe way.

Meanwhile, the mirror Discovery under the command of Captain Killy is in the universe where Discovery originated (and I’m still not convinced that this really is the Star Trek universe we know) and is probably about to single-handedly take over the dystopian Federation and win the war with the Klingons. It’s probably not telling that I would not care at all, if this were the case, because I find I don’t give a damn about either Discovery‘s Federation or the Klingons.

The bits about the Discovery and her crew impersonating their somewhat more evil miror universe selves are actually a whole lot of fun, from the Flash Gordon-esque uniforms (but then the mirror universe has always had a certain Flash Gordon look about it) via Lorca using Jason Isaac’s native Scottish accent, while pretending to be the Discovery‘s chief engineer (Lorca getting tortured also never gets old, sorry) to Captain Killy hamming it up. And if this had been all the episode was about, then it would have been a good one, even if not exactly original.

But this is Star Trek Discovery and so of course, they can’t just have a simple excursion into the mirror universe. Because this is modern quality TV (TM), dark and gritty (TM), where everything can happen, shocking twists abound and everyone can die (and not just their mirror universe counterparts either like poor Connor whom I have to confess I had already forgotten). And of course, Discovery had to prove that they, too, can be Game of Thrones and so they had to have a shocking twist (which shocked absolutely no one, cause people have been speculating about this for months now) and a shocking main character death (which actually was shocking and still managed to adhere to some of the oldest and most hated tropes in the book).

I am talking of course about the “Ash Tyler is really the Klingon Voq, surgically altered to look human” theory which – I am sad to report – is not a theory anymore, since the show pretty much confirmed it. I can’t even begin to say how much I hate this development, even if it wasn’t exactly surprising, since plenty of people called it months ago. For starters, Ash Tyler is one of the most likable characters in Star Trek Discovery next to Tilly and Dr. Culber. Most of the other characters, including even Tilly, took some time to grow on me (and some never did – I still can’t stand either Lorca or Saru), but Ash was likable pretty much from the start. Plus, Ash was the only person who treated Michael like a human being right from the start (everybody else, including even Tilly, behaved like jerks to her early on) and the budding romance between Ash and Michael has been one of the very few things I actually liked about Star Trek Discovery.

But Ash Tyler, the ace pilot, good guy and conscientious officer, torture and rape survivor, never existed. He is just a fake persona created to hide Voq, one unlikable Klingon among a whole bunch of them. Oh yes, and his memories of torture and abuse are either false or falsely interpreted and the sex Ash had with L’Rell was totally consensual, since Voq and L’Rell were lovers. And of course, Ash’s PTSD, which left him literally paralysed the last time we saw him, is not real either, but the result of faulty Klingon conditioning.

In my last post on Star Trek Discovery before the winter break, I actually praised the way the show handled the subjects of PTSD and male rape, as did Laura Hudson at The Verge and Emily Asher-Perrin at Tor.com. The whole “Ash is Voq” development, however, not just undermines the entire character of Ash Tyler as presented so far, it is also a slap into the face of abuse and rape survivors everywhere. Because let’s face it, while our entertainment media has gotten better at portraying PTSD, it still doesn’t do all that great at portraying survivors of sexual violence, particularly male survivors. And Star Trek Discovery basically just dismissed a character’s traumatic experiences of torture and sexual violence as “Oops, it was all in your head. None of that every happened, at least not the way you remember it, and it was all totally consensual, the Klingon conditioning just got some wires crossed.”

As for how Ash/Voq learns all this, even though she gave him the mother of all PTSD flashbacks last episode, Ash still goes to see L’Rell in the brig and even lets her out of her cell for short periods of times. For some reason, no one notices this or finds it even remotely strange, but then Starfleet is apparently so bloody incompetent by now that they’re not even guarding the brig anymore (and coincidentally, the brig aboard the Shenzhou wasn’t guarded either, as far as I recall). L’Rell tries to trigger Ash’s memories that he is really Voq with a Klingon phrase, but because the conditioning is faulty, it doesn’t really work and Tyler is now partly Ash and partly Voq. Indeed, someone referred to him as “Klingon/Klingoff”, which is highly appropriate.

Coincidentally, it’s not just Starfleet that’s bloody incompetent in Star Trek Discovery, the Klingons are just as incompetent from getting stuck in their Ship of Dead without food or energy to completely botching the transformation and conditioning of Ash/Voq. Indeed, considering how bloody incompetent the two powers vying for dominance in the galaxy are, it’s a miracle that the Romulans or the Cardassians or the Borg or even the Ferengi haven’t already conquered them all.

L’Rell’s attempts to trigger Voq’s memories leave Ash (I’ll continue to refer to him as Ash) with disturbing flashbacks, memories that aren’t his own and occasional attacks of full blown Klingoness. So he does what humans (and presumably Klingons) normally do when they are experiencing health or psychological problems, namely he goes to see a doctor.

Doctor Culber hasn’t had an easy time at all. For starters, his life partner Paul Stamets is in a coma following that last disastrous universe-barrier breaking jump he did and still hasn’t come to except to occsionally mumble prophecies of dire doom and have one violent outburst. What is more, Lorca has assigned some other member of the Discovery‘s medical staff (Are there even other doctors aboard the Discovery? Cause Culber is the only one we’ve ever seen) to care for the comatose Stamets to avoid potential conflicts of interest. Which would be a sound decision, if I even remotely trusted Lorca to make it for the right reasons (which I don’t). Nonetheless, Doctor Culber is understandably upset.

When Ash comes to him, complaining of mysterious symptoms, flashbacks and the like, Doctor Culber runs a battery of tests and scans (one wonders why they haven’t done this before, e.g. after Ash escaped from Klingon captivity) and finds something strange that shouldn’t be there. Whereupon Voq’s personality emerges from Ash and snaps Doctor Culber’s neck.

Yes, that really happened. Star Trek Discovery just had one half of the only gay couple in Star Trek history killed by a previously sympathetic character in front of his life partner (though we hope poor Stamets was at least unconscious and didn’t have to watch) for cheap shock value. Worse, they have also killed off the third main character of colour in the span of ten episodes (five, if you include the two Klingon head honchos Michael killed, since both were played by actors of colour). That leaves Michael and Ash as the only characters of colour in the main cast still standing and I’m pretty sure that Ash wont survive the end of the season either. Hell, it’s very possible that Michael won’t survive the end of the season, but instead has to nobly sacrifice her life to redeem herself for whatever sins the writers seem to think she has committed.

Honestly, for a show that explicitly bills itself as progressive and diverse, Star Trek Discovery‘s track record on race, gender and sexual orientation is appalling. Captain Philippa Georgiou, who was billed as one of the main characters in the publicity materials, is killed off after only two episodes and briefly reappears from beyond the grave as a hologram. The Discovery‘s first security chief, played by an actress of Asian origin, dies of terminal stupidity after two episodes, unmourned because she was a horrible character. Doctor Culber, a gay man of colour, was killed off after ten episodes all in all (and he didn’t even appear until episode four or five). His life partner Paul Stamets, another gay man, is in a coma with severe brain damage. Michael Burnham, a woman of colour, is imprisoned and abused at every turn for things white men get away with all the time (including in Star Trek Discovery) and blamed for everything bad that ever happened in the entire Federation. Ash Tyler, a man of colour, is revealed to be a Klingon sleeper agent and also a murderer. And coincidentally, Ash Tyler is portrayed by Shazad Latif, a British actor of Pakistani origin. So Star Trek Discovery had the lone Muslim actor (not sure if Shazad Latif really is Muslim, but statistically it’s very likely, considering Pakistan is 96% Muslim) portray the sleeper agent and infiltrator who betrays his friends and colleagues to destroy the Federation and the production team obviously sees nothing whatsoever wrong with that. Honestly, it’s as if the Star Trek Discovery producers are trying to check off a whole bingo card of offensiveness here, considering their flat out appalling track record in the treatment of people of colour, LGBT people, Muslims as well as rape and abuse survivors.

At least, the Discovery showrunners seem to be aware how offensive killing off a gay main character (one of only two in the history of Star Trek) is, since they did some preemptive damage control by pointing out that yes, they know killing off LGBT characters is a trope and that it’s offensive, and would we please, please trust them. It’s the same thing we’ve been hearing over and over again from the cast and crew ever since Star Trek Discovery started. “Please, trust us. We know what we’re doing, honestly. We’re Star Trek fans, just like you, and trust us, what we are making is proper Star Trek. Just please be patient.” Indeed, here is another interview of that sort, in which two of the showrunners promise that the rest of season 1 will involve “a lot of fun for Star Trek fans” and that season 2 will be more Star Trek-like.

There is just one problem with all of those promises. By this point, pretty much no one trusts the showrunners anymore that they really know what they’re doing and that they have even an inkling of what Star Trek is supposed to be like. And indeed I feel sorry for the poor actors who are asked to defend the hot mess that is Star Trek Discovery over and over again, especially since it’s pretty obvious that most, if not all of them know what a mess the show is. Take a look at this interview with Shazad Latif and Jason Isaacs, where it’s pretty obvious what Shazad Latif thinks of the part he’s playing and literally says that he doesn’t have any control over the show and what happens to his character. And coincidentally, even though the showrunners seem to be aware that killing off a gay character is offensive, particularly in a franchise with as bad a track record on LGBT issues as Star Trek, they seem to be totally unaware that killing off only characters of colour and letting the lone Muslim in the cast play the evil sleeper agent is just as offensive, since I have heard zero apologies about that.

Besides, showrunners, writers and creators should not have to tell their audience over and over again to trust them, because if they actually did their job right, the audience would trust them without requiring constant reassurance. And indeed, constant reminders by the people in charge of a beloved franchise to please, please trust them are always an indicator that something is seriously wrong. Just remember the whole “Steve Rogers is and has always been a Hydra agent” storyline that Marvel Comics came up with last year in its infinite wisdom. Fans were up in arms – and for very good reasons, too – and the writers were constantly asking their fans to please trust them and have patience. But even with a brand that has an established reputation like Star Trek or Marvel Comics, patience and trust eventually run out, especially when it’s clear that the people in charge have no real clue what they’re doing. By this point, Star Trek Discovery has pretty much exhausted mine and everybody else’s patience. Indeed, the comments under one of the many “please, please trust us” article I linked above were very telling. “Oh, so it’s going to be fun for Star Trek fans”, someone commented, “So what are they going to do? Kill Kirk? Kill Spock? Blow up the Enterprise?” Because by this point, much of the audience expects that if there is a new way to piss on what Star Trek used to be, the Discovery showrunners will find it.

Coincidentally, the many random Star Trek Easter eggs such as the reference to the USS Defiant from the original series episode “The Tholian Web”, revealed to have ended up in the mirror universe in an Enterprise episode I did not watch, are another symptom that the production team constantly has to remind us that yes, this is Star Trek we’re watching. Because if Discovery actually felt like Star Trek, we wouldn’t need constant Easter eggs to remind us.

At the start of the winter break, I was cautiously optimistic that Star Trek Discovery might be salvagable, since the show was actually getting better, the annoying Klingon war plotline seemed to have been wrapped up and the jump to somewhere else was a chance to give the show a fresh start. But with this episode, Star Trek Discovery pretty much destroyed what little was good about the show – mainly the relationships between Stamets and Culber and Michael and Ash – in one swoop, plus killed off one of the few likable characters and made another of the few likable characters a pretty much irredeemable villain. Really well done, Star Trek Discovery showrunners. You just managed to destroy one of the very few things about your show that actually worked.

We are currently in the unprecedented situation that we have two takes on Star Trek (three, if you include the Black Mirror one shot “USS Callister”) airing at the same time. And of these three, the official version, Star Trek Discovery, manages to do the worst job. For while “USS Callister” is not Star Trek (nor is it trying to be), it does use the visual language of classic Star Trek to make a point about toxic masculinity and nerd entitlement and one about the rights of digital persons that is worthwhile in its own right. And I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing more of the adventures of the USS Callister under the command of Captain Nanette Cole.

The Orville, meanwhile, is Next Generation era Star Trek with the serial numbers filed off and some sophomoric humor added (though less than you’d think, given showrunner Seth MacFarlane’s other output). Indeed, it’s easy to imagine that while Star Trek: The Next Generation followed the adventures of the Starfleet flagship, crewed by the best Starfleet has to offer, The Orville follows the adventures of a lesser Starfleet ship crewed by well meaning, but somewhat less competent people. The Orville is not Star Trek, but it works as Star Trek, a lot better than Discovery does. And indeed I wonder what we’d have gotten if Seth MacFarlane rather than Bryan Fuller, Alex Kurtzman and whoever else had been given the mandate to make a new official Star Trek show.

Meanwhile, the official Star Trek show, Star Trek Discovery manages to be the least Star Trek-like of the three. Coincidentally, it’s also the hottest mess. For while it’s pretty clear what Black Mirror in general and “USS Callister” in particular as well as The Orville are trying to do with the basic Star Trek idea, I have no real clue what Star Trek Discovery is trying to do and I suspect the production team has no idea either. Yes, they keep talking about redemption arcs and wanting to show us what the Federation is like at war and how the Federation journeys from darkness into the light and apparently, there’s also a point about xenophobia, isolationism and Trump somewhere in there as well. Most of these points are not exactly new and have been done by other versions of Star Trek, usually better. Besides, very little of what the production team assures us the show is about actually shows up on screen. Ten episodes in, I have no idea what Star Trek Discovery is trying to do and what sort of show it wants to be beyond dark and gritty and a bit like Game of Thrones with shocking twists and lots of characters deaths.

There’s just one problem: If I want to watch Game of Thrones, I will. If I want dark and gritty and twisty and shocking, there are plenty of good SFF shows and mainstream shows I can watch, most of them better than Discovery. But what I expect from something labeled Star Trek is very different from what I expect from Game of Thrones or Outlander or Westworld or The Expanse or The Handmaid’s Tale or Hard Sun or [insert prestigious SFF show here]. A franchise like Star Trek evokes certain expectations, expectations that Discovery not just consistently fails to meet, but that it also goes out of its way to violate. Indeed, it seems to me as if the producers are trying very hard to make a show that’s the opposite of Star Trek. This is of course something you can do and indeed plenty of fine science fiction shows have tried to make “the opposite of Star Trek” with varying success. But if you want to make the opposite of Star Trek, then maybe don’t call it Star Trek.

Can Star Trek Discovery be salvaged? Well, never say never, but at this point I think very little next to a total reset can save this show. They had their chance to hit a reset button of sorts with the excursion into a different universe, but in typical Discovery fashion, they blew it.

In fact, by this point, I’m so angry with the show that I’m not even sure if I’m going to continue watching. If I do, it will only be because now I started with these dissections/reviews/recaps, I want to continue to the bitter end. And it is only five more episodes

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“USS Callister” and the Successful Mutiny Against Toxic Masculinity

A few days ago, I wrote a lengthy post about the treatment of mavericks and mutineers in recent science fiction, using the characters of Michael Burnham in Star Trek Discovery and Poe Dameron in The Last Jedi as examples (there’s also a detour into West German postwar cinema among other things, because I’m weird that way).

The main point was that both Michael Burnham and Poe Dameron, though normally loyal officers and typical hero material for their respective franchises, get into conflict with their respective superiors and find themselves pushed to the point of mutiny. In the past, both characters would have been proven right and their attempts at mutiny would have been forgiven, especially since we have seen plenty of characters do the same things Michael and Poe did in their respective franchises. However, both Michael and Poe are unlucky. Not only do their respective mutinies fail, both characters also pay dearly for what they did. Michael is tragically proven right and yet punished out of proportion for what she actually did and also considers herself wrongly responsible for the deaths of a whole lot of people, including her captain and a Starfleet admiral. Meanwhile, Poe Dameron is proven tragically wrong to such an extent that it’s obvious the plot is rigged against him, especially since a quick conversation could have cleared up Poe’s misunderstandings. Poe is also punished, though in proportion to the actual crime, and actually is indirectly responsible for the deaths of a whole lot of people, including a highly decorated Resistance vice admiral.

Star Trek Discovery uses its mutiny and punishment plot to initiate a redemption arc for a character who doesn’t really need one and also furthers its creepy focus on victory through pain and suffering. The Last Jedi uses its mutiny and punishment plot to make a point about individualism, toxic masculinity and the wisdom of older women. All of these are worthy points, The Last Jedi just doesn’t make them very well.

Viewed in isolation, I would have considered what happened to Michael Burnham and Poe Dameron merely bad plotting and an attempt to make a point that doesn’t work. However, two stories about heroic characters turning mutineer and failing miserably and getting punished appearing in two of science fiction’s biggest franchises, franchises which normally celebrate maverick heroes and heroines at that, so shortly after another seemed like a troubling pattern, particularly considering that there are plenty of voices already calling for more conformity, lest we ‘force’ the poor beleaguered regular people to vote for extremist parties, because everybody’s individualism is so very in their face.

Shortly after I wrote that post, however, I came across another filmic science fiction tale about a mutiny in space, a tale that’s part of a small franchise, but mimics one of science fiction’s biggest franchises. And this time around, the mutiny is successful.

I’m talking about “USS Callister”, an episode of the latest season of the British science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. There will be spoilers under the cut, so read on at your own peril:

Now Black Mirror is a series I was aware of, but never watched until last year, largely because I harbour an intense dislike for Black Mirror creator/showrunner Charlie Brooker stemming from his time as a TV critic for The Guardian approximately ten years ago. And as a TV critic, Brooker not only regularly praised shows I disliked and slammed those I liked, he was also a jerk about it. He was also influential, because a lot of people parrotted his opinions. So when Charlie Brooker switched from criticism to screenwriting, I decided to ignore his output. For starters, we obviously had very different tastes, so it was highly unlikely I’d enjoy any program he made. And secondly, there is plenty of good programming made by people I don’t find unpleasant, more than I have time to watch, so I can safely skip over programming made by unpleasant people.

So I never watched Black Mirror nor anything else Brooker did until last year, when the Black Mirror episode “San Junipero” was nominated for a Hugo Award in the best dramatic presentation short form category. Since I was a Hugo voter, I sought it out and watched it and actually liked it a whole lot. Indeed, “San Junipero” was the first time I faced the “good work made by bad people” conundrum. In short, my personal Hugo voting policy is: “good work made by good people” will be ranked accordingly above “no award” (in normal years, these will be the majority of the finalists), “bad work by good people” (i.e. things I don’t like, but with whose creators I have no issues) will be ranked below “no award” and “bad work by bad people” (puppy leaders and a very few others I have personal beef with and will not vote for) I will leave off the ballot entirely. In theory, there should also be “good work by bad people”, but in practice I had never come across an example during the puppy heyday of 2015/16, simply because if I have issues with a person, their work normally isn’t to my taste either.

But then I watched “San Junipero” and here was a very good piece of television made by a person I really did not like. And mind you, I’m not calling Charlie Brooker a bad person or equating him with the puppies, he’s simply someone who’s rubbed me the wrong way in the past. I would have similar issues if e.g. a good episode of The Orville wound up on the Hugo shortlist, because I dislike Seth MacFarlane. In the end, I put “San Junipero” in the top spot in the best dramatic presentation short form category (though it lost out to The Expanse in the final voting), because the Hugos should be about the work (which was very good) and not the creator. And besides, film and television are team efforts anyway and a whole lot of people beyond Charlie Brooker were involved in “San Junipero”.

But though I’d enjoyed one episode, I still did not watch the rest of Black Mirror, if only because I have a huge backlog of shows I like a lot more and still haven’t found time to watch. However, when I saw the promos for season 4 (because of the link round-ups at the Speculative Fiction Showcase, I see a lot of trailers for and reviews of shows I don’t watch) and saw that there would be a Star Trek parody episode, I was intrigued, especially considering there currently are two other takes on Star Trek on the air, one official version, Star Trek Discovery, which is of highly variable quality to put it mildly, and one unofficial version, The Orville, which seems to be doing a better job of being Trek-like than the official show. So it would be interesting to see what a third take on Star Trek would add to the mix.

In the end, it turns out that “USS Callister”, the “Star Trek” episode of Black Mirror is only superficially about Star Trek. This shouldn’t really come as a huge surprise, since Black Mirror normally focusses on “five minutes into the future” tech dystopias and not far future space opera. And indeed, my initial reaction to the “USS Callister” scenes in the general season 4 trailer was, “Huh. Now that doesn’t look like Black Mirror at all.”

And indeed it quickly turns out that the scenes in the trailer of a day-glo 1960ish Star Trek type space adventure are just an immersive virtual reality game created by a programmer named Robert Daley, where he can forget his sad everyday existence and instead live in the world of his favourite TV show, a Star Trek clone called “Space Fleet”, as the heroic captain leading an adoring crew to explore the unknown. At first glance, this seems to be harmless enough, though it is notable that the crew of the USS Callister look very much like his co-workers. Things take a turn towards the seriously creepy when Daley steals the coffee cup of a new employee, swabs it for DNA and pushes a sample into a device attached to his computer.

The employee in question, Nanette Cole, suddenly finds herself aboard the USS Callister as part of the crew. Turns out that Daley has been recreating self-aware and sentient copies of his co-workers inside the game from the DNA samples he steals. Of course, DNA doesn’t work that way, but then the episode is less interested in scientific accuracy and more in making a point about toxic masculinity and (male) nerd entitlement. Inside the game, Daley is not just captain but god, warping reality like a particularly toxic Gary Stu. People who annoy him, whether in or outside the game, are turned into monsters, have their faces erased or are killed off in gruesome ways. In one case, Daley even throws the kid of his business partner out of the airlock.

Daley is a monster, but he is a monster we are familiar with. Because we’ve met this dude. We’ve met him dozens of times, both online and off. On occasion, we’ve even been this dude. He’s the Star Trek fan who cries that the franchise as now fallen to the social justice warriors, because the lead of Discovery is a woman of colour. He’s the Star Wars fan who first claimed the prequels murdered his childhood and now insists that Disney personally hates him and all real fans (TM) because Star Wars now features women and people of colour and because it turned out the Jedi were not such a great thing after all and that Luke was definitely bloody useless as a Jedi. He’s the Doctor Who fan who freaked out at references to modern pop culture in the show and who completely freaked out when the Doctor started kissing people and had a heart attack when the Doctor regenerated into a woman. He’s the Ghostbusters fan who cannot get his mind around an all-female reboot. He’s the Lovecraft fan who can’t handle the fact that people are discussing Lovecraft’s racism. He’s the Marvel Comics fan who’s furious that Thor is a woman now and Captain America a black man, that Ms. Marvel is a muslim teenager and that Captain Marvel has short hair and no longer wears revealing costumes. And heavens beware if there is a hint of romance or sex in his science fiction entertainment. And indeed, Daley makes very sure that there will be no filthy sex invading his personal space adventure and recreates his puppet crew sans genitals, though he does insist on melodramatic kisses from the female crewmembers. Robert Daley is what happens when such a person is given the power not just over his favourite media property, but over people as well. Though he sure as hell doesn’t see his crew of enslaved co-worker replicas as human, which is his downfall in the end.

Because when Daley is not logged into the game, his crew is more or less left stranded with nothing to do and no way to escape, because Daley’s private little playground is walled off from the MMORPG of which it is a part. And so, led by Nanette, Daley’s crew begins to plot against him. Nanette hacks into the game and sends her real life counterpart a message. When that does not work, she blackmails herself with private photos to sabotage real life Daley, while virtual Nanette seduces virtual Daley (well, as much as possible, considering they don’t have genitalia) to get him to let down his guard. In the end, Daley is trapped alone in his virtual world, unable to exit the game, while his physical self lies dying or dead in his apartment and won’t be found anytime soon because of a long holiday weekend. Meanwhile, the USS Callister and her crew blast off through a wormhole into the greater world of the space-themed MMORPG Infinity. The ship and crew morph into something more modern looking and get their genitals back as well. They do encounter another entitled male player, apparently voiced by one of the stars of Breaking Bad (which I didn’t get, because I never watched that show), suggesting that there are many Daleys out there. But he is no threat and so Nanette settles down into the captain’s chair, while the USS Callister takes off for further adventures.

Like “San Junipero”, “USS Callister” is a great little self-contained story. Once more, the visuals are excellent. Where “San Junipero” pitch-perfectly recreated a seaside town straight from a 1980s teen movie, “USS Callister” contrasts the very 1960ish visuals of the Space Fleet scenes, the real world tech company scenes and finally, the Infinity scenes with their more modern space opera look. This is done really, really well, down to displaying the early parts of the episode in 4:3 aspect ratio. In many ways, the USS Callister with its afros, beehives, mid-riff baring, but navel hiding (navels were apparently so shocking in the 1960s that costumes such as Barbara Eden’s in I Dream of Jeannie were specifically designed to hide them and coincidentally, the original Star Trek was one of the first shows to show female navels on TV) mini-skirted uniforms and go-go boots looks even more 1960ish than the original Star Trek, which is quite a feat, considering how more 1960ish than the real 1960s Star Trek often looked. This became particularly apparent, when a German TV station reran original Star Trek episodes right after Mad Men, which was set in the very period the original Star Trek was made. And Star Trek‘s 1960s view of the 22nd century looked a lot more 1960ish than the 21st century painstaking recreation of the 1960s of Mad Men. While the colourful Space Fleet scenes evoke the peak 1960s looks of original Star Trek, the Infinity scenes at the end evoke the darker and more lensflare heavy look of contemporary science fiction from the new Battlestar Galactica via J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movies to Star Trek Discovery.

Like all of Black Mirror (at least based on what I know of the series), the theme of “USS Callister” is technology and its consequences, usually negative. However, “USS Callister” has another theme and that is the toxic aspects of nerd and fan culture and the viciousness of nerd rage, a theme that is a lot more timely now thanky to Gamergate, the Sad and Rabid Puppies, the recent swatting death of an innocent man due to a quarrel in Call of Duty and other expressions of toxic fan culture than it would have been a few years ago. Daley’s social awkwardness paired with his creepy obsessiveness and seething rage, his Mary Sue fantasies, his insistence on his childhood dreamworld remaining intact and unchanged, his hostility to sexuality invading his fantasy world resonate, because we know this guy, because we’ve met him. Occasionally, we even have a little bit of Daley in ourselves. And coincidentally, talking about the hostility of certain SFF fans to sexuality, here is Black Mirror showrunner and writer Charlie Brooker in his TV critic days tearing into the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood because it contains more sex, swearing and violence than Brooker wanted to see in something derived from Doctor Who. We can easily imagine Robert Daley writing the same about a modern and grittier Space Fleet reboot. So yes, there is a little bit of Daley in many of us. “USS Callister” shows what happens when he is left to run unchecked.

But what I found particularly interesting about this episode is that after two failed mutinies in space with awful consequences for all involved in our two biggest science fiction franchises, we now have a successful mutiny in space (well, sort of) in a world modelled after one of the two big space opera franchises. And all within a few months of each other. It’s also interesting that “USS Callister” and its mutiny against toxic masculinity and nerd entitlement make the very point I suspect The Last Jedi wanted to make with Poe Dameron’s failed mutiny against Vice Admiral Holdo. Only that unlike The Last Jedi, “USS Callister” actually pulls it off. Nanette Cole also ends up where Michael Burnham should end up, after getting rid of a villainous captain (though Daley is much worse than Lorca, since Lorca at least has some redeeming features), namely in the captain’s chair.

We all know examples of very similar works coming out within weeks or months of each other, too close together for one to have influenced the other, due to some kind of zeitgeist serendipity. Whether it’s the original Star Trek and Raumpatrouille Orion coming out within two weeks of each other, the year of the two Robin Hood movies, the year of the two “asteroid hits Earth” movie or the year of the two volcano disaster movies. And in 2017, we had not just three very different takes on Star Trek coming out within a few months of each other, but we also had three stories of mutinies in space appearing within a few months of each other, two of which have a point to make about toxic masculinity. And all three show women in positions of command as well.

What, if anything, does this signify? I don’t know. But maybe, it’s time for me to reevaluate Charlie Brooker and his work, because the two Black Mirror episodes I’ve seen were both very good TV.

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Culinary Archaeology: The Quest for Schillerlocken Salad

As I mentioned in my Christmas post, I decided to forego the traditional herring salad for Christmas 2017, because it is a lot of work and with my Mom largely out of commission, I was stuck doing the holiday cooking/food preparation all on my own.

So I looked for something nice to serve for dinner on Christmas instead and suddenly remembered Schillerlocken salad, another fishy salad which my Mom occasionally made for festive occasions in the 1980s. I’d always liked this salad, plus it contains fewer ingredients than herring salad, so I thought, “Maybe I’ll make Schillerlocken salad instead.”

However, my quest to make Schillerlocken salad was doubly thwarted. For starters, my Mom had lost the recipe – at any rate, I couldn’t find it in the messy collection of magazine clippings stuffed into a notebook that my Mom uses as a recipe collection. My Mom also had no real memory of the salad (“Yeah, maybe I made something like that. I don’t really remember and it was a long time ago. No, I don’t know where the recipe is.”) and while the internet yielded a few recipes for Schillerlocken salad, none of them were even remotely close to what I remembered. So I had to recreate the ingredient list from memory.

The second obstacle I encountered in my quest to make Schillerlocken salad was more serious, because it turned out that the key ingredient, a type of smoked fish named Schillerlocke (named so, because it curls up like Friedrich Schiller’s ponytail, when smoked), had become nigh impossible to get, because the fish species in question, a type of shark called spiny dogfish, has become endangered due to overfishing, at least in the North Sea. Apparently, so I later learned on Twitter, spiny dogfish is still plentiful in North American coastal water to the point that Maine fishermen often discard it as bycatch, which seems like a collossal waste.

Still, you can’t make Schillerlocken salad without Schillerlocken and so I resigned myself to placing it on the list of foods I used to like a lot, but will probably never get to eat again, because it derives from an endangered species. Lady Curzon soup, a particular type of turtle soup, is another example. There are substitute recipes for Lady Curzon soup around (which I should really try some day, just to see if it still tastes as good as I remember) and you can still get turtle soup in Louisiana, made from non-endangered snapping turtles. But I haven’t even seen Lady Curzon soup on a menu in more than thirty years, let alone had it.

However, a few days ago, my abandoned quest for Schillerlocken salad took an unexpected turn, when I came across the elusive Schillerlocken after all, in the display of a Bremerhaven fish vendor. “Are those real Schillerlocken?” I asked the salesperson, who answered in the affirmative.

Now the fish vendor is a reputable company with its own smokehouse and restaurant, renowned for its high quality and sustainably fished products, so the Schillerlocken were not the result of dodgy pirate fishing ignoring fishing restrictions (in which case I wouldn’t have bought them). They or rather the spiky dogfish was likely imported from North America, where it’s not endangered. So I bought two Schillerlocken and got to have Schillerlocken salad after all.

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Two Schillerlocken, fresh from the fishmonger

Of course, I still didn’t have the recipe, but I managed to cobble together a pretty good approximation of the ingredient list from memory, consisting of Schillerlocken, red bell pepper, tomatoes, spring onions, pickled celeriac, pickled cucumbers and pickled pearl onions in a sauce consisting of olive oil, red wine vinegar, ketchup, Dijon mustard, salt, pepper and a mix of dried herbs I like adding to salads.

I’m not sure how closely I managed to hit my Mom’s original recipe from the 1980s, but the result was delicious. I’ll definitely make it again, though only for special occasions. For starters, because the Schillerlocken are really pricey. They also apparently have a fairly high mercury content, so it’s not healthy to eat them too often, especially since I also still have two mercury containing tooth fillings from way back when.

Apparently, there is a Schillerlocken substitute called Goldlocken now, made from tilapia, so I may try making the salad with those to see if the taste and consistency are the same.

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And here is the Schillerlocken salad. The matchstick shaped bits are pickled celeriac.

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