#tilly and book and stamets and culber and adira and gray on the big screen!!!!!

[coredrill]

also i’ve come to terms with things (<- a lie) and am willing to make a trade. since disco’s ending after s5, i’ll admit that star trek 4 is essentially a corpse i’ve been carrying around weekend-at-bernie’s style for 7 years if the next trek movie we get is michael burnham & disco-focused like 5 or 10 years down the line. like A DISCOVERY MOVIE COULD YOU IMAGINE!!!!!!

[discotreque]

Disco 3.04: Forget Me Not

The way Doug Jones delivered “Previously, on Star Trek: Discovery” this week—audibly out of makeup, almost entirely out of character, and over the super-intense footage from 3.02 of Disco plummeting helplessly to a shattered ruin of a planet—in such a brisk, cheerful little chirp had me laughing so hard I was wheezing. I could see his little mannerisms and everything 😂

I slept like a brick last night, so I’m a little too disoriented for much of a preamble. Let’s get right into it. Spoilers ahoy:

REPAIR ROBOTS!!!

Prop watch: the “salt-shaker” medical scanner Culber uses during his opening voiceover is by far the most elaborate we’ve ever seen on Star Trek. Try to fit that into the top of your tricorder. (I guess it’s connected to an iPad now...)

Adira has amnesia too? Literally a mystery wrapped in a mystery, lol.

Stop calling it a squid! It’s an ankylosaur! (ˈaŋkɪləsɔː)

Michael asks Adira on the bridge if the planet Trill looks familiar. Not to be a planet-racist, but don’t all Class M planets kind of look alike from orbit? I’m not sure I could reliably recognize that much of Earth, especially under so much beautifully rendered CGI cloud cover.

I’m going to be praising Doug Jones a lot this season—he’s not just playing Saru as captain, he’s playing Captain Saru in an interesting and distinctive way. He’s not the babysitting big brother anymore—now he’s their dad, and he’s still visibly getting used to the role. It’s played so sweet and subtle and I’m really loving it, and the way the show as a whole is leaning into the “family” vibe this season.

The holographic version of a red-yarn-string conspiracy board that Michael is using when she talks to Culber is one of those acceptable sci-fi breaks from reality for me. It looks super cool and futuristic, but imagine actually working like that for a few hours. Your arms would get exhausted. My neck hurts just watching her crane around. And the eyestrain of focusing on glowing shit, in mid-air, at various distances, with no backdrop whatsoever? Fuck off completely with that. But it’s simple and tactile, so the audience immediately understands the general idea of what she’s doing, and it’s literally see-through, so we can simultaneously know how she feels about it. And if you’re not a total weirdo like me, you won’t be thinking about any of this, except maybe “oh, neat!” when Culber first walks in—it just helps establish Michael’s state of mind at the beginning of the scene.

OKAY SO TWO EXTREMELY IMPORTANT THINGS ABOUT MICHAEL’S QUARTERS. First, she decorated!!! 😭😭😭 Last season they made a point of (repeatedly!) contrasting her uhhhh “minimalist” living space with Tilly’s more personalized and homey side of the room, and now they explicitly note that Michael either brought her 32nd-century knick-knacks over from Book’s ship or replicated a bunch of new ones for Disco, and frankly either scenario makes my heart want to scream into a pillow.

THE SECOND THING IS THAT SHE’S STILL LIVING WITH TILLY??? ARE YOU ACTUALLY KIDDING ME WITH THIS SAPPHIC SHIT. I WAS READY TO BID MY SAD FAREWELLS TO MYLVIA AND HOP ON THE BURNBOOK TRAIN AND YOU DO T H I S??? YOU’RE PLAYING WITH MY HEART, MICHELLE.

I thought it was unfair that people were criticizing the last episode for not like, fully developing every single one of the plot points it was obviously setting up to play out over the rest of the season—but fair or not, I was genuinely surprised when they came back to Michael’s insecurities around leadership, so I guess this show is still working on winning me over too.

“Post-traumatic growth... can inspire us to evolve, to live our lives in a different way.” Well, fuck 😭😭😭😭😭

This is going to sound like either rank sarcasm or damnation by the faintest of praise, but it’s actually a genuine and heartfelt compliment: I did not expect this show to ever even approach the emotional depths of the recent She-Ra reboot on Netflix, let alone include a conversation that directly evoked one of the most powerful moments of that entire series for me. “You know what I love about you most? You’re a responsibility hoarder” has the exact same energy as “You’re worth more than what you can give to other people,” and it sucker-punched me right in the goddamned heart. Let 2020 be the year all our overly self-sacrificing heroines learn to let themselves accept the same love and support they give so freely.

AND THEN SHE JUST LAUNCHES INTO BIG-SISTER MODE WITH ADIRA??? Put me in a photon torpedo and shoot me into space while Scotty plays Amazing Grace on the bagpipes because I am D-E-A-D dead. (Also any time SMG lets her accent out a little bit I just fucking swoon, and apparently that accent is an integral component of her big-sis persona, so 😍😍😍😍😍)

I have been waiting my entire life for a Star Trek character who stuns first and asks questions later.

No. No WAY. THIS is how the Disco computer becomes Zora??? Basically the same way Data created Moriarty, except with a boost from the sphere data, and driven by Saru wanting to heal the crew’s emotional trauma? Holy SHIT.

I’m not sure I realized how many gaps existed in Trill lore until now. We knew a lot about Dax’s specific experiences, but I never had a good sense for how “typical” Dax actually was, and I feel like I learned more about Trill in general in this episode than I did over seven seasons of DS9, which is cool.

Listen, Saru, if you want to have family dinners with the crew, sometimes they’re going to turn out like family dinners.

The closed captions when Michael was arriving in the Trill dreamscape or whatever said (ambient warbling), which is also one of my favourite genres of music.

“I know you’re afraid, but you have to let them connect with you.” OKAY, STOP, JUST STOP.

I guess it wouldn’t be Discovery if every other character didn’t have a grotesquely tragic backstory, but Adira and Gray’s managed to cram about half a dozen of my favourite romantic tropes into a few fleeting moments of screen time before crashing into my heart—much like an asteroid crashing into the side of a generation ship that really should have solved the “random asteroid collision” problem at, like, the blueprints stage—so this one hurt even more than usual.

(Looking forward to blocking all the cis people with ~scorching hot takes~ about Adira and Gray this week. If you’re not trans, then your feelings and opinions about this are literally meaningless to me.)

One of Tal’s previous hosts is seen in a circa-2399 Starfleet uniform, which unfortunately doesn’t fit him any better than it fit anyone on Picard. We also get a (presumably fairly contemporary) admiral’s uniform on Senna, but there’s a lady on the far left with a different style of uniform but the same “post-canon” oval-backed delta concept for the combadge, and I wanted to see more of that one.

AWWWWW, STAMETS ACTUALLY DID STOP BEING A JERK, GOOD FOR HIM <3 (And if I’ve learned anything from science fiction, it’s that dark matter can do literally whatever the writers want, so this seems like a promising road of inquiry!)

Is Gray going to live in Adira’s head like a non-toxic version of Six and Baltar on Battlestar Galactica? Because I am into it.

...and that’s four in a row that ended with a goddamned tsunami of feelings. It’s still finding its feet, but this new version of the show—this slower, softer, sweeter version of Discovery, and the things it’s even attempting—you could say it gives me hope.

Next week: we finally get to see Starfleet in the 32nd century, who are as friendly as everyone else has been so far, and I’m going to have to figure out who’s playing the admiral who talks to Michael in the trailer, because he’s such a “Hey, It’s That Guy!” I got whiplash.