1x05 Choose Your Pain

In possibly my favourite entry so far, we get a far more traditional "episodic" story. A situation develops at the start, complications occur and things are happily resolved by the end (although, Harry Mudd may disagree with that assessment). Although, that final shot was a doozy!

Everything felt like it was working better here than it has previously. The Klingons have been the most difficult thing so far as they slow down the episodes so much, but here we get them speaking English and behaving a lot more like the classic Klingons that Star Trek presented us with for so many years. These guys want to fight and hurt other people, and no religious nonsense is going to get in the way.

This gave us a much more detailed look at a couple of characters. Captain Lorca reveals more and more what kind of person he is. He wants to help people, but he also recognises the sacrifices that may need to be made to do that. It's easy to disagree with his perspective when we hear about the results, and the news that he destroyed his own ship and crew is a lot to take. He's also extremely intelligent and perceptive, and he has no qualms about people paying the price for what they've done. Rainn Wilson's portrayal of Harry Mudd isn't too far removed from the Original Series character, but he also managed to put his own spin on it. Maybe it was just due to the quite horrible situation he was trapped in, but this Mudd was more serious while being no less selfish. Still, I don't know if I agree with Lorca leaving him there.

More compelling to me was the different side we see of Saru. It felt like his desire to be an effective captain (going as far as researching the traits of Starfleet legends) began to override his more natural decision making. The debate over the use of the Tardigrade was exactly the Star Trek storytelling we've been waiting for, but at the same time the context here made it kind of one-sided. Placing Saru on the side of using the creature made him seem unsympathetic and cold, and it's only when we realise that he has to make these choices because he believes that saving his captain is the highest goal that we can begin to see why he's doing that.

There was also scientific joy as Stamets uses himself with the jump drive. This is one part of the show that I wasn't quite clicking with, but the more detailed explanations here have made things clearer. As it stands, it seems to me that this method of travel isn't sustainable given the high cost on the user (is Stamets going to be willing to do that again?) and I'm really interested in where it's going to go. I was also pleasantly surprised to hear the first use of the word "fuck" in all of Star Trek. Tilly continues to be a delight.

Very disappointed to see the online homophobes and bigots crawling out of their holes all over the place.

[8.4/10] Captain Kirk was a bad leader. There I said it. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great leader for T.V. land, one who swashbuckles and puts himself in danger and inevitably saves the day. But he’s often a jerk (as a malfunctioning ship once put it), pig-headed, and impulsive, and depends on confidence and a good left hook to see him through. But Star Trek was always fascinated with leadership, what it took and what it meant, from Kirk to Picard to Sisko to Janeway and to Archer. And at its finest, it would have other characters, or other forces, that challenged what it meant to be one of those foolhardy leaders out on the galactic frontier.

So Discovery continues in that proud tradition, seeing fit to filter those perpetual questions -- who do you listen to, who do you sacrifice, what choices do you make -- through three souls on Discovery each trying to figure out how to lead.

The first of those is Lorca who, as Kirk so often did, finds himself captured by the enemy and uses his guile and some fisticuffs to make his way out of captivity. It’s the most direct and revealing a character story we’ve gotten for Captain Lorca so far, and it’s interesting to see him separated from his ship and his crew in a way that exposes his philosophy and his losses in this war.

It also exposes him to a pair of survivors, one of whom is another Starfleet officer, who’s survived in a Klingon prison for the seven months since the Battle at the Binary Star after one of his would-be torturers “took a liking” to him, and the other is none other than Harcourt Fenton Mudd. Mudd verges just a hair into fanservice territory, but I loved the casting of Rainn Wilson as Roger C. Carmel’s successor when I heard the news, and the promise of that choice blossoms on the screen. Wilson knows how to be just outsized enough to capture Mudd’s more theatrical qualities, but grounds it in enough humanity to make the character work in the more down to earth (so to speak) confines of Discovery.

Mudd also offers an interesting perspective on the major theme of the series thus far -- the impact of war on all corners. Star Trek is so rarely concerned with civilians in anything more than an academic or abstract sense, and so using Mudd, an odious trader living outside the law, as the voice of the little guy, finds the gray area and consequences of this conflict. Mudd, for all his characteristically traitorous qualities, makes a decent point, that war or at least pushback is an inevitable consequence of all this boundary-pushing exploration, and the difficulties of that filter down to the regular folks still just trying to make a buck.

That understandably, doesn’t play too well with Lorca, whom Mudd knows by reputation. Mudd reveals that Lorca blew up his own ship, making himself the only survivor, when the Klingons had him outgunned and outmatched. Lorca declares that it was to spare his crew the indignity and hardship of being tortured and put on display in Qo’NoS. It’s also how he received his eye condition, something he uses to remind himself of what he lost that fateful day.

Saru is having a fateful day of his own, as Lorca’s absence means that he’s not only the acting Captain of the Discovery, but responsible for finding and saving Lorca’s life. That causes him to second-guess his own leadership abilities, and try his best to emulate the list of Starfleet’s most decorated commanders (a list on which Captain Archer and Captain Pike get shoutouts). For Saru, someone cautious and untested, leadership doesn’t necessarily come easily, and it’s interesting to see him struggling with the responsibility he’s clearly anxious about.

That causes him to take an ‘at all costs” approach to finding his captain. Despite Michael Burnham’s warnings about the deteriorating condition of the tardigrade (and Burnham mostly takes a backseat in this episode), despite cautions from the ship’s doctor about the same, and worries from Lt. Stamets to the same effect, Saru is resolute. He demands that they not wait, that they pursue Lorca, and that if they have to “crack [the tardigrade] open” then so be it. There is a certain determination, a certain amount of that impulsive pigheaded quality that Kirk had that Saru lacks that he’s trying to make up for.

In his own way, Lt. Stamets is making decisions that are just as hard. He too hears Burnham’s warnings, her psychically-perceived distress from the tardigrade and wants to find a way to roll with the spore drive that doesn’t hurt a potentially living thing. So he does what all mad scientists do when ethics and need intersect -- he tests it on himself.

It’s the best we’ve really gotten to know Stamets so far this season, and it’s a treat. For as prickly as he can be, the self-sacrificing way in which he puts himself into the tardigrade chamber to make the spore drive run reveals an empathy and humaneness in him. His euphoric, punchy laugh when he’s awoken and told his gutsy move worked (with Saru’s shifty, unsure eyes) is a treat. And it’s heartwarming and endearing when the ship’s doctor whom he’s been jousting with throughout the episode like they’re an old married couple turns out to be because they are an old married couple.

I try not to dwell on these things because I’d rather we try to normalize them than treat them as something unusual, but it’s nice to see a franchise that’s always been so devoted to advancing the causes of diversity, tolerance and understanding put its first openly gay couple front and center. The scene with the pair brushing their teeth feels real and humane, and it’s nice to see that sort of vibe delivered through two men who love one another.

But there is a downside to love, whether it’s romantic, filial, or courtly -- it becomes a something that adds risk and, per the episode’s title, the possibility of pain, to everything you do, because the choices you make could take you away from what you love or what you love away from you. The title “Choose Your Pain” doesn’t just refer to the demented trust exercise the Klingons make their prisoners play to prevent bonding, it speaks to the choices and the pain that all the major characters are dealing with in this episode.

For Lorca, the choice was a hard one -- let your crew be captured, tortured, and paraded around the enemy capitol, or take them out yourself in one fell swoop. And his ocular condition, something that apparently he could fix if he wanted according to his admiral friend, is something he hangs onto, with the pain there to remind him who suffered under his command.

For Stamets, it was a different sort of choice, one where he chose to take on the pain himself rather than inflict it on another. Burnham campaigns, pushes protocols, in the name of treating the tardigrade humanely, and Stamets faces those risks, that hurt, himself, rather than letting it suffer on their behalf any longer.

And then there’s Saru, who had no choice, but is revealed to be grappling with his own sort of pain. He copes with the loss of Captain Georgiou, but laments that Burnham had what he never had -- the chance to learn under her, to become better under her, to turn into a leader under her. Burnham understands his pain (having made no less harrowing a choice herself to kick off the series) and tries to ease Saru’s by passing the posthumous gift she received from Georgiou onto him.

Burnham’s pain, the pain that emerged from her own bold choice to take command the way Kirk might have, is arguably the most profound. But it’s made her more aware of the same in others’, more keen to give Saru the telescope that will give him back a piece of what he lost, more apt to try to free a tortured creature to avoid its further suffering. And maybe, in that, she’s learning and poised to become a leader greater than Georgiou, or Lorca, or even James Tiberius Kirk himself.