1x09 Into the Forest I Go

[7.8/10] Years and years of television-watching have trained me to wait for the twist. Every time things are going well, whenever there is plan that’s being put into action, anytime the path from here to the ending seems a little too straightforward for your favorite characters, longtime Trek fans, and TV fans generally, are trained to anticipate that game-changing reveal that makes you rethink what you just saw and sets up the new path to come, especially in premieres and finales.

So I spent most of “Into the Forest I Go” bracing for what that watershed moment would be. Would it be the reveal that some crewmember is a traitor? Would the Klingons have developed a weapon that the Discovery hadn’t anticipated. Would some intervening third party jump in and change the binary balance of this conflict?

The answer was, more or less, no to all of that. Instead, “Into the Forest I Go” is a remarkably clear, if conventional, mid-season finale for the first, encouraging batch of Star Trek Discovery episodes. It lays out a problem -- the Klingon Ship of the Dead is coming to destroy Pavoh, and the crew of the Discovery needs to work together to (a.) buck Starfleet Command (b.) find a way to defeat the Klingon cloaking technology, and (c.) defeat the Klingon Ship before it destroys the Pavohns.

That results in a three-fold plan of attack after some number-crunching and problem-solving. Burnham and Ash will beam over to the Klingon ship and secretly plant some probes to transmit the data necessary to break the cloak. Lorca, Saru, and the bridge crew will engage and evade the ship in the meantime. And once the probes are planted, Stamets will subject himself to 138 gruelling micro-jumps, while supervised by Dr. Culber and Tilly, so that they can collect the necessary data and finish the cloak-breaking algorithm.

Sure, there’s some unexpected turns as this plan is put into action. While aboard the ship of the dead, Ash and Burnham find a living but injured Admiral Cornwall. In the same room, Ash sees his Klingon torturer, L’Rell, and goes into shock, leaving Burnham on her own. And Burnham herself has to stall Kol, the snarling Klingon baddie, long enough for the probes to do their work. None of this is easy or (all that) predictable, beyond the general sense that something has to go wrong on these sorts of pseudo-heist missions.

And yet the episode wrings a good amount of tension and drama out it. Particularly for Stamets, the editing and cinematography do a nice job of conveying the hardship he’s going through to make all of this work. Lorca’s cold determination to win this war by any means necessary, and the uncharted territory of significant character deaths make it believable that he could push Stamets to the limit in this effort. Even if the destination seems clear, the show does a good job of keeping the audience biting their nails as every step of the plan needs to come to fruition.

But it’s also a surprisingly tidy ending for this arc. There are several echoes of the series premiere, particularly when Burnham fights Kol. Kol’s scoffs at the universal translator, calling it another way that the Federation is seeking to steal the unique Klingon identity. She ends the season as she began it, getting into a physical conflict on the bridge of the Ship of the Dead. And she gets a measure of closure and redemption, recovering Capt. Georgiou's badge/dogtag, and having her efforts be integral to ending the war that she helped begin. “Into the Forest I Go” isn’t shy about wrapping everything up pretty neatly, both in terms of plot and theme.

And yet as exciting and tension-filled as this multi-faceted mission was, the most compelling part of it, as it often is in Star Trek, comes down to the personal issues explored in the shadow of the intergalactic politics and war. Amid the blockbuster storytelling at the heart of the episode is a harsh but empathetic exploration of abuse that cannot help but disquiet the viewer in light of the real world horrors it reflects.

After his PTSD episode in the face of his tormentor, Ash confides to Burnham about what happened to him as a Klingon prisoner. There are flashes of the torture he suffered, and he explains to her how he survived, by playing on and giving into the affections of L’Rell. He’s haunted by pain, both physical and psychological, that he experienced, wracked with guilt over his feeling of complicitness in his own abuse by seeking out those affections to survive, and struggling to reconcile all those open wounds and unresolved shame about how and why he survived and insecurity that he is partly responsible for what happened to him and It’s a complex topic that Discovery doesn’t flinch at. (Save for the DS9 episode with Kira’s mom, it’s also the only time I can think of where Star Trek really delved into this area.) The actor who plays Ash gives a hell of a performance, and his reaction and the imagery at play is piercing and poignant.

But the way Ash gets out of that spiral, if only briefly, is by thinking of Burnham. The two have found common ground here, each having troubling events in their past they wish they could wash away and move on from, but that instead haunt them every day. Burnham learns that Ash is not the bastion of unflappability that he seemed, and that he struggles with his pain just as much as she does. And yet, in one another, they find comfort, and that helps them to go on, to find joy in what comes next, even if the steps forward aren’t necessarily easy.

So a heart-pumping adventure ends with a weary but warm reflection on the journey to reach it. That is very Star Trek, even if it feels strangely appended to the big action that precedes it rather than a natural extension.

The twist, such as it is, is mainly a tease for the back half of the season rather than some unexpected development. It seems to involve Lorca messing with Stamets’s trajectory on his “one last jump” to keep the key to the spore drive in play. It takes the Discovery to a strange new place that no one can identify, with the promise of parallel universes and alternate dimensions. And it taints a bit of that warm moment between Burnham and Ash with suggestions that the Klingons have gotten to Ash, to Discovery, or both in the process.

But that’s all a matter for January, when Discovery returns. For now, the show still seems to want us to root for, or at least sympathize with Lorca, without revealing the true depths of his damaged psyche. It wants us to think that Burnham’s moral debt has been repaid, and that the Klingon war is on its way to ending so that Starfleet can go back to its peaceful mission of exploration. It wants to consider this chapter closed even as it teases the next.

I’ll admit, I don’t know what to make of that. I expected something thornier, something twistier, as Discovery brought its fall half-season to a close. But it still delivers a satisfying conclusion, even if, at times, it feels a little too straightforward.