1x06 Lethe

[8.1/10] There is a line of demarcation between the difficulties a person experiences, their shames and fears, and what about those insecurities and regrets they share with the world, particularly for people in positions of authority. That’s particularly true for Capt. Lorca and Sarek, who find themselves confronted with those close to them -- a lover in the case of the former and a daughter in the case of the latter -- and yet cannot bring themselves to reveal what they’re going through, the personal pain they’re experiencing, until forced to by the very people they seek most to keep it from.

“Lethe” dramatizes these personal blocks and reveals in different ways. For Lorca and Admiral Cornwall, it’s a personal encounter that devolves from professional concern into romantic rekindling. For Michael Burnham, it’s something much more Trek-y, involving taking a shuttlecraft into a radiation-filled nebula and using a nigh-magical mind meld enhancement beam to find her surrogate father. Burnham is still infused with Sarek’s katra after he used it to revive her as a child, and now she’s out to return the favor when she received a psychic blast indicating he’s in danger.

That quest forces her to confront her own insecurities over her relationship with her father. Her efforts to mind meld with Sarek from afar lead her to one moment from their shared past -- the moment when they learned that Burnham would not be accepted into the Vulcan Expeditionary Force. Burnham reads the situation as her adoptive father spending his last moments on his greatest regret -- her. She interprets this scene as him fixating on the ways she failed him, the ways she was not good enough to achieve all that he wanted for her, something that’s lingered with her ever since she first felt the sting of that failure.

But buoyed by the support of Tilly and the recently-made-security-chief and former Klingon POW Ash, Burnham gathers the strength to confront Sarek about what he’s hiding from her, why he’s so set on rebuffing her from his mind. It’s there that she learns the truth. She didn’t fail, or at least not exactly. The Vulcan leadership gave Sarek a choice for whom it would accept into its leadership and good grace: Burnham or Spock, and we know whom ended up picking.

The shame, the thing he cannot escape, is not Burnham’s failure; it’s his own. He failed Burnham, and put in a Sophie’s Choice type situation, managed to lose on both fronts, with Burnham missing out on the dream he instilled in her to join the Vulcan Expeditionary Force, and Spock going against his wishes and joining Starfleet rather than the Vulcan Science Academy. The reasons for Burnham’s rejection are a lie he carried with him from that moment, pushing the failure, and the ensuing sense of loss and worthlessness, from himself onto her.

Lorca is likewise keeping up a facade in order to avoid owning up to his own failures and limitations. When Admiral Cornwall comes to check on him personally, to question his decisions of bringing Starfleet’s first ever mutineer on as a member of his crew and making a 7-month Klingon POW his chief of security, he puts up the image of cool collectedness. He claims to have his reasons, to be fighting this war the best way he knows how, and maintains that his decision-making, his risk-taking, is sound even if it seems unorthodox to the stuffed shirts in Starfleet Command.

But then they sleep together, and after a tender moment, a gentle touch of specific-contoured scars on his back by Cornwall, Lorca has an episode. He wraps his hand around his companion’s neck and brandishes a phaser in her face before he’s able to calm down. It’s then that Cornwall has confirmation that Lorca is not well. He admits that he lied on his psyche evals, that he’s had trouble since the battle that affected his eyes and cost him his crew, that he’s struggle and needs help.

But that’s the hard thing for people keeping important parts of themselves and parts of what they’re going through hidden from the people who care about them -- you never know if they’re telling the truth, if they’re letting you in, or if you’re just one more layer into them denying the real depths of the problem

But it’s understandable, even if the consequences are harsh, when what’s being hidden are personal failings, ways in which people feel like they don’t measure up to the standards they’ve set for themselves. Lorca wants to be a wartime chief, someone who can avenge his crew and create a safe place in the galaxy for his countrymen. That means hanging on to the Discovery, his best hope and best chance to do so, even if it means ignoring all the signs that he’s not well.

For Sarek, it comes in the form of all his efforts to overcome the prejudice of his species. The episode opens with a “logic extremist” who calmly self-immolates to protest Sarek’s involvement with humans or Klingons (you know, by trying to kill him). The crux of Burnham’s story in the episode comes when it’s revealed that the Vulcan leadership would only allow humanity to be a part of the Vulcan community “by titration,” gradually, and that they saw Sarek’s work of integrating Vulcans with their human allies as a parlor trick, a wild experiment, that should be cordoned off from Vulcan purity. It speaks to the recurring themes of this series thus far, one involving the mixing of cultures and the friction points therein.

But while it’s Lorca and Sarek who have these truths revealed, neither grows or changes from it. Lorca is saved by the plot-teasing Klingon trap that Cornwall, who’s filling in for an ailing Sarek, gets caught up in. (As a side note, if you ever find yourself in a T.V. show or movie, never tell someone that you’re going to deal with something big “as soon as you get back,” because it guarantees you aint comin’ back.) And Sarek, despite being rescued and revealed by his now-accomplished ward, remains taciturn and reserved, and more like the version of the character from The Original Series and its descendents.

But Burnham does. It’s signposted a little too hard, but she overcomes the blocks carelessly put in front of her by Sarek, and realizes that she can find her own worth, her own value, apart from his approval, even if it leads her to value the approval of the similarly-flawed Lorca, who offers her an official post on the Discovery. And she realizes, that as she tells Tilly, there is more than one path to success, more than one way to get what you want, and the fact that she had a setback on hers, a couple of major ones in fact, does not mean that she is doomed or fated to fail.

It’s easy to hide our damage, the things that bother us or make us feel like failures or less than. We want to project an image: to our coworkers, to our bosses, and even to our family members. But when we confront those parts of ourselves, share them and work through them, we can not only come out the other end realizing that the help we need is there, but also that the failures that keep us up at night are not really our own, and there’s still a galaxy of possibilities ahead of us.

Maybe I felt a bit let down by this one just due to how much I enjoyed last weeks, or maybe because it didn't follow up on that awesome moment of Stamets in the mirror that ended the previous one. Either way, I didn't get quite as much into this one.

But it's a shame, because there are many parts of this episode that worked by themselves, it just failed to grab me when they were all put together. I think it's clear that a real strength of the show is how unpredictable it all continues to be. The focus is taken away somewhat from Burnham and we get to spend half the episode with Captain Lorca, who continues to become more and more complicated. He's also becoming more and more sympathetic. There's a moment of what appears to be genuine fear when he realises the admiral will take away his command, and despite her apparent disbelief on whether or not he's being real it definitely came across that way to me.

It's a shame that the plot went in the direction of them sleeping together which felt a bit tired, but it did allow for that scene to play out nicely in the aftermath. At any rate, the ending with the Klingon double-cross made her look very naive.

Michael's story was quite interesting, too, if maybe a bit sloppy. It's a common misconception that Vulcans are an emotionless species, as various Trek shows and films have shown us time and time again that they are fiercely violent, racist and have a superiority complex. The emotions are merely suppressed and (hopefully) not acted upon, but they're all there. The relationship between Michael and Sarek is pretty fascinating while somehow feeling a little bit ridiculous. Anyway, it was great to get some more insight into the failings that Sarek felt around this time, especially in regards to Spock.

I also loved Amanda Grayson as portrayed by Mia Kirshnir, who bears an amazing resemblance to original actress Jane Wyatt. A little part of me feels it's a shame that Winona Ryder didn't come back, but I guess that was never going to happen.

The newly arrived Lt. Ash Tyler is a weird one. I think it's clear that the story is going somewhere with him (and if you explore online discussions be careful, because it's also clear that a lot of people have worked this out already), but at this point he doesn't really seem to fit. He's too good at everything and has integrated himself too readily, taking the forefront a bit too often. The guy has just spent 7 months in a Klingon prison (allegedly) so I'd think he'd need some serious rehabilitation.

Other random observations: I love that Stamets appears to have become in a constant state of agreeable bliss since using the spore drive (REALLY need to get back into this story line) and Tilly again just makes me smile.