The Trill were first introduced to the Star Trek franchise in the Next Generation episode “The Host.” In that episode, Beverly Crusher falls in love with a Trill ambassador named Odan, only to struggle when Odan is killed, and the symbiont is temporarily passed over to Riker until a new host can arrive. To be honest, while I remember the existence of the episode, I have a hard time remembering much about the quality of it—I’d also somehow forgotten the Riker section entirely (a section which helps lend at least some plausibility to “Forget Me Not”’s main storyline). I doubt it was a classic, but the grade I gave it back when I reviewed it was a B+, which doesn’t sound too bad. But that’s not the point. The point is, one of the key points of the episode is that while the Federation knows about the Trill, Beverly has no idea about the symbiont until a crisis forces her to operate on her lover. It’s not a species that everyone is familiar with, and while Deep Space Nine would fill in a lot of the gaps, it’s still supposed to be something of a mystery.
“Forget Me Not” hinges on Adira’s relationship with her symbiont, a Trill named Tal. Adira knows that Tal was part of the Starfleet admiral who sent out the message Discovery has been chasing down, but she’s unable to access those memories in order to tell Discovery where they need to go next. As far as plot motivators go, this is perfectly reasonable. It has a certain video game-y quality to it—go here for the next quest that will help you move further along in the main questline—but Adira is an interesting character, and it’s not unreasonable for her to want to get some answers. What gets to me is how everyone on Discovery seems to know about the Trill. This isn’t a thing that came up on the original series, but everyone chats about it like it’s no big thing. Sure, Saru is briefly worried when a scan of Adira’s body reveals that the symbiont is covering her heart, but in general, the characters on the show respond to her condition the way the writers clearly expect the audience to respond to it. We’re Trek fans, so clearly we already know what’s going on, so why bother getting bogged down in the weeds?
This is one of the problems with doing a prequel, and while Discovery solved a lot of my issues with its premise by jumping forward 932 years, it can’t quite seem to shed itself of its lazy world-building habits. I’m not even sure why they decided to reuse the Trill at all. It’s almost a millennium into the future, for god’s sake. Make up a new weird symbiotic alien race. As is, I kept trying to remember if anything we saw here contradicted information from earlier series, and then getting annoyed because that’s not the point, but not really being able to help myself. Really, though, the issue isn’t about maintaining continuity. It’s about using familiar Trek concepts without bothering to ground them or make them feel distinctive to the show. It’s about saying “Hey, remember this,” and then assuming that will be enough shorthand that they don’t have to bother creating the illusion of a coherent universe.
“Forget Me Not” has two storylines, both of which work just fine in the wireframe. In the first, Adira and Michael beam down to the Trill homeworld; Adira learns that she’s viewed by most of the Trill leaders as an abomination (symbionts aren’t supposed to join with humans); after a quick fight, she and Michael are led to the special magic caves were the symbionts swim in Playboy grotto pools, where Adira can go swimming and get in touch with her past lives. Meanwhile, on Discovery, Dr. Hugh tells Stamets that everyone on board is struggling psychologically, and Saru tries to ease tensions, first with a super awkward dinner, and then with a fun movie night.
This is, as mentioned, fine. They even find time to throw in a sad/sweet story explaining why Adira is struggling with her symbiont: her lover, Gray, was a Trill, and she was chose to take on his symbiont after an accident left him near death, in order to prevent the symbiont from dying. I appreciate that Saru showed everyone a Buster Keaton movie (Sherlock Jr, which absolutely rules), and the plot moves forward like clockwork, ending the episode with a star chart leading to the location of the Federation’s current headquarters.
It’s just the execution that kind of sucks. Well, “sucks” is too much, and honestly, I can see the appeal here—it’s all very warm and friendly, and it’s legitimately very cool to see a Trek series without a straight white male in a leading, or indeed any, major role. That feels new and interesting, and I’m relieved that the show didn’t immediately find a replacement for Pike (I liked Pike, but he so quickly slotted into the space Lorca left behind that it felt like no one behind the scenes was terrified of not having a square-jawed Kirk-type around to shout orders); Saru makes a good captain, and at its best, Discovery has an energy and perspective that feels unique for a Trek show.
But. There’s a reluctance to really engage with anything more complicated than “these are the bad guys, these are the good guys, let’s hug.” The writing is frustratingly lazy in its complete lack of trust in the audience, racing to happy conclusions without bothering to really explore the problems that led to them. For instance: Saru goes to Engineering and asks Stamets to come up with a way to use the spore drive that doesn’t require direct human (or otherwise) intervention. Tilly suggests they try something with dark matter, and Stamets immediately jumps down her throat. Because, of course, it’s Stamets and he’s super defensive, but it seems more complicated than that. Later, at Saru’s awkward dinner, things get even more heated. And then five minutes later, Stamets is apologizing and they’re hugging it out and everything is fine.
I promise you, I don’t hate hugs. I am, in general, very much pro-hug. And there’s arguably some value in showing interpersonal conflicts flare up and then burn out without needing to make everything intensely dramatic. But I don’t really know why Stamets decided to apologize, just like I don’t really know why he was defensive to begin with. I can speculate, and I’m sure it has something to do with the tension the whole crew is experiencing, but everything on the show is so centered on making sure we understand everyone loves each other and it’s all fine that any sort of rapprochement feels as meaningless as it is inevitable.
Or hell, take Adira’s time on the Trill planet. At first, it looks like there will be some drama here. Most of the Trill high council freaks out when they learn Adira is human, and while the conflict is overly simplistic, it’s at least an indication that these are different people with different intentions and views of the world. But then Adira goes into the mystic pool, and Michael dives in to save her—which, by the way, is pretty odd considering the pools are supposed to be sacred and Michael is surrounded by half a dozen Trill. It’s pretty forced that Michael is even there in the first place, given that Adira was supposed to make the trip with Dr. Hugh; Hugh sent Michael down because he decided Adira needed emotional support, and somehow Michael was best equipped to provide that, because god knows, we can’t have a major storyline move forward without Michael being there to fix everything.
That’s not what I’m driving at—Michael’s involvement is more or less assumed at this point, and it’s not like the original Trek ever gave a compelling argument for why Kirk had to be a part of every mission. What’s frustrating here is that once Michael forces Adira to confront her past, we get a simplistic, and saccharine, love story, one without any real twists and turns beyond “they were really into one another and they were very nice, and then one of them died.” (There’s a feint towards making Adira jealous of Gray’s newfound Trill abilities, but it’s immediately resolved in the same flashback where it’s introduced.) Once Adira is able to accept this admittedly sad but dramatically inert piece of her backstory, she gets access to the symbionts; and all of a sudden all the Trill who considered her an abomination are now firmly on her side.
This is all weightless. We get no sense of Trill culture beyond the vague mysticism Trek has decided indicates “peaceful culture,” and no sense of Adira having to learn or develop in any way beyond accepting that sad memories are sad. If the scenes between Adira and Gray were moving to you, I don’t want to mock that reaction or try and take it away (I couldn’t), but I do think we can ask for a bit more than a Hallmark commercial. Like the way the show hand waves bringing in the Trill in the first place, this is writing that wants so much to get to the resolution that it can’t bear to let anything complicated or difficult or thoughtful sit on its own. Everything is shortcuts and simplification. It’s not always ineffective; the crew is growing on me, and the hangout vibe that the secondary story in this episode leans into is charming and good. But it’s entirely possible to have likable characters and conflict without sacrificing the impact of either, and that’s something Discovery continues to struggle with.
Stray observations
- So, as speculated last week, it turns out that both the non-binary and the transgender characters promoted before the season premiered are Trill. Ian Alexander plays Gray, Adira’s love interest; Gray is identified as male without being explicitly transgender. I’m not sure that having both Adira (who is still identified as “she” on the show) and Gray be Trill is as progressive as we were lead to believe, but it’s probably not my place to make that call.
- We finally get our long awaited Detmer freak out, as she lashes out at Stamets (of all people) during Saru’s dinner. It’s nifty, creepy little moment, but we still know so little about Detmer that I’ll be massively disappointed if this all there is to all those hints the show has been setting up.
- “The symbionts are a gift to everyone, not just the Trill.” -Adira. I’m not really sure what this means? A simple “I’m going to stick with Discovery for a bit, just ‘cause” would’ve been fine.
- Any show that uses Buster Keaton and Sherlock, Jr. as an expression of pure joy can’t be all bad. (This almost makes up for that horrible line about Elon Musk a couple seasons back.)
180 Comments
Speaking of needing to look stuff up, I had to look up what Playboy Grotto caves meant. This particular set up has been part of the lore for decades. If you’re going into this with no intent to respect the material at all, why bother reviewing it? And the show very readily and explicitly laid out why tensions were high, why everybody snapped, and why everyone made up. You spend a lot of this being defensive about your own opinions in what you’re reviewing. Seems to me like your time and energy would be better put to use doing something you actually seem to enjoy.
lmao yeah reviews should be positive. why criticize things?
No, I absolutely agree it should be open to criticism. I thought the second episode was pure trash. But I think there should be an actual want to enjoy the show. There appears to be none here and never has much.
There appears to be two schools of thought re: Discovery hate. One is the girls n’ gays route, where the absence of a square jawed white guy at the helm is too much to handle. The other is that it’s not a shot for shot remake of TNG, and they want to crawl back up into that womb again without being challenged by new stuff.Sure, DISCO has its issues, but compared with some of the dreck that got farted out in S1 and S2 of TNG and DS9 it’s practically Oscar material.
DS9 season two was way better than Discovery.
In totality, sure, which is what happens when the format is different and you’ve got 26 episodes to play with. Discovery has never had any absolute stinkers though, like Second Sight and Melora, which were basically Hallmark melodramas in space.
No stinkers on Discovery? Did you see Season 1? Or Season 2?
As was TNG season 1, which I think gets far too much shit.
Even if it’s objectively true that some seasons of DS9 or TNG were more enjoyable than new Discovery (and I will say, there was a seeming ease with which those shows drew you in and captivated you with their week-to-week episodes), I think it’s important to remember that if you made that exact same show again today it would not be nearly as enjoyable. Because it already exists and we’ve already seen it. More of the same, passed off as something new (e.g., Enterprise), would be disappointing. There is a challenge that all new TV faces to push the envelope towards something that feels new, fresh and exciting. Or you can be NCIS, and be soothingly familiar and predictable for people over the age of 70. One thing you have to give Discovery credit for is that it’s ambitious. It’s trying to push the envelope, beyond where previous Trek series went, and in some respects trying to keep pace with AAA prestige dramas. It does not have a 100% success rate, but to expect that it would is unrealistic.
And there is exactly one school of thought for hardcore Discovery fans: anyone who dislikes or criticizes the show is doing so in bad faith. It’s basically impossible for them to imagine someone disliking or criticizing the show on its own lack of merit. Detractors of the show, according to the hardcore fans, are saying more about themselves with their criticisms than the show itself. Which is most definitely not always the case.
Hey, I’m not a hardcore Discovery fan. I’m just delighted that there is Star Trek live on television for the first time in over a decade, and I’m willing to give it a chance rather than crap all over it for not being what was in my head, or season 8 of TNG.
Which is fine, but like many Discovery fans you seem almost offended by the fact some people think the show has serious problems beyond not being Berman era Trek.
“but compared with some of the dreck that got farted out in S1 and S2 of TNG …” Yeah, you tell em!“… and DS9”
Ok, them’s fighting words!
Come on, man! I love DS9, my wife and I went to con last year dressed as Dax and Bashir. We chatted with Alexander Siddig and Terry Farrell while dressed as them, like normal people do.But honestly? Was every episode of Discovery worse than Melora? Than Move Along Home? Than If Wishes Were Horses!?
Emissary? Duet? The Nagus? Progress? Dramatis Personae?Like most Trek series, DS9’s first season was its worst. But there were still great episodes there. I would be hard pressed to name any TNG season 1 episodes I could sit through without cringing or fast-forwarding.
“Heart of Glory” and “Conspiracy” are the highlights of ST:TNG Season 1, hornacek, and they’re among the top 50% of the series (“Conspiracy” might even be a Top 10 best episode). OTOH, there was an awful lot of dross there, too….
I agree that HoG and Conspiracy are among the better episodes of season 1 TNG, but that’s like what Affleck says in Argo: “Out of all the bad ideas, this is the least bad”. They’re both good in comparison to the rest of season 1, but still not great episodes.Heart of Glory is notable only for re-introducing Klingons (besides Worf) into TNG. Plus these Klingons are over the top stereotypical Klingons, with a lot of what’s introduced here contradicted in later (better) Klingon episodes. The only notable thing introduced here is that you look into a Klingon’s eyes and yell when they die.Conspiracy was a rare instance of TNG doing a serialized story (even though the idea of a conspiracy had only been mentioned in 1 previous episode). But then they wrap everything up in 1 episode – this should have been at the least a 2-parter – so how big of a conspiracy could it have been? Plus they set up a “this isn’t over” thing at the end, and the show never follows up on it. Very disappointing.
Zack’s Trek fan credentials are genuine. He’s bona fide.
Criticism is good and fine, but Zack’s criticism isn’t made in good faith. Case in point: the first two paragraphs completely ignore that Discovery explained why they know about the Trill last episode. And then, the whole AND NOW EVERYBODY IS FINE! sorta ignores the fact that Saru and Culber literally say they’re not fine.Also not pointing out Discovery is now probably sentient is. uh. kind of a big thing to miss.
No one actually enjoys this show. Someone has to get the short straw for the ST:D review.
Patently false. The show has been renewed for another fourth, very, very expensive season and the writers were paid to flesh out even more seasons beyond that.
THIS^^^^. and if they HAD come up with a new joined species this week, no doubt the author would have said “Why not just use the Trill?”
Disco’s new motto: “Damned if we do, Damned if we don’t”
Saru should change the commemoration plaque motto to say that.
In the final moments of last week’s episode, Saru metions to Burnham that Trills are a joined race, which causes her to comment that she heard of the race, but knew nothing about the ‘joined’ part. That tracks with Trills never having revealed that part of themselves in pre-DS9 Trek. We can assume that in the spaces between then and this week that this information confirmed with Adria and shared with senior staff.
I was just thinking this. When they first discovered Adira had a Trill symbiont it sounded like a new thing to them but because we knew of the Trill it may have seen like the Discovery knew about his all along to some. It sounded more like Saru just found out and relayed the info. Most of the Trill do not have symbionts so the Federation likely encountered those and if any did have symbionts, the humanoids enjoined who were going to die usually got back to Trill to transfer the host so this conjoining was likely not too well known even if the Trill themselves were a known species. Only an accident where the symbiont survives but the host dies is where anyone would find out. It’s not like it was a secret but it wasn’t like word got out about this when the Federation first knew about Trill.
I think what you described is what happened in the TNG episode that introduced them. Beverly fell in love with the Trill guy but didn’t know about symbiotes until he was injured and she had to put it into Riker temporarily.
Plus, if the Trill are a fairly small species and joined Trill are a tiny fraction of that species, it could just be that it’s not well known that some of them are joined. Not because it’s a secret, but because it’s an obscure bit of trivia to most people in the Galaxy.We know there were joined Trill in and around the Federation before the events of TOS because Emony Dax knocked boots with McCoy when he was a med student. Given the use of transporters and just plain old doctors visits, it seems improbable to me that the Federation didn’t know about the symbionts if joined Trill were just wandering about in public like that.
Yeah, I’m less worried about the continuity of it all and more about how paint by numbers it was. Like if someone gave you ten minutes to come up with a tragic backstory behind her joining that Adira was repressing, how close would it have been to this? It feels like a first draft effort.
The formless purple-gray void where she met her hosts also brought back bad memories of Season One Klingons. Just because you can do fancier makeup and effects tricks now doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea, especially when it comes at the expense of character. The episodes aren’t exactly analogous, but I still remember the DS9 episode where Dax met all of her former hosts in the bodies of her crewmates. Just different pairs of actors in a room, but it was really effective at exploring the facets of the Dax symbiote in funny, creepy, and interesting ways. A circle of randos in a formless void over a fairly cliched tragic love story doesn’t really sing in the same way. I like the season overall more than Zach, but this was kind of a miss for me.
I like the circle of randos because it reminded me of Avatar the Last Airbender when Aang communes with previous Avatars and they all have a special bond.
They also mention that they consulted the Sphere Data about the Trill to fill in the gaps, which is a neat way to skirt the canon issues of not knowing anything about them.
Yeah, they learned about the symbionts last week – the information was in the sphere data. They talked about it and everything.
Saru also mentions that he learned it from the sphere data. So this is new to everyone on Discovery. BTW, even if it wasn’t widely known in TNG starfleet, it wasn’t a secret – Sisko served with Curzon for years and presumably knew. Also, most Trill don’t have symbionts, then and especially now.I know I’m being pedantic, but Zack spends a chunk of the review griping about continuity, when this really isn’t an error.
I was going to say something similar that at least it was nice to nod to the fact that it seems like Aidra told Saru about this, and they had no prior knowledge of the Trill being a joined species.
That said, it’s not like Star Trek hasn’t always played fast and loose with continuity. This past week I’ve been mainlining Star Trek (it was a good way to distract myself from *waves arm around*) and just happened to catch the Trill episode a few days ago. The Trill on TNG was vastly different from the Trill on DS9, in both appearance and with the logic and biology of the symbiote. In TNG the transporter would kill them, there was no talk of “joining”, the humanoid host was explicitly nothing more than a vessel for the symbiote, less attractive forehead ridges, weirder looking symbiote, etc. Not to mention that by the time DS9 comes around, Sisko clearly has decades old foreknowledge of the nature of the Trill, which makes Crusher and the Enterprise’s complete ignorance of the whole “joined species” thing a little weird. That’s just how Star Trek rolls, so you’ve kinda just got to go with it.
I really didn’t mind this episode in the broad strokes. I get what they were trying to get at on Discovery, that everyone is extremely messed up and just barely holding themselves together, and the whole explosion at dinner and cathartic release of a Buster Keaton movie was the beginning of the process of dealing with it, not the end.
Likewise, (and thematically related) Aidra needing to process the traumatic memory of watching the love of her life die in her arms before she could accept the memories of the symbiote (and for the symbiote to accept her) was a solid idea and mostly well executed. They could’ve gotten a lot more mileage out of it, though. I mean, that memory she was experiencing (and blocking) was from both sides. Aidra watching Gray die in her arms, and Gray dying in Aidra’s arms are both in her head. That’s fucked up. No wonder she had a mental block. (I was also wondering why there were only, like, six hosts who showed up. There should’ve been dozens, and it would’ve been super cool if one of them were wearing a TNG era uniform.)
It felt like both stories were rushed, somehow, with some unnecessary filler. The logic of the whole “SACRILEGE!!” bit on Trill didn’t really hang together very well and wasn’t necessary (especially since it was awfully quick to be resolved). They could’ve used that time for the meat of the episode, which was about dealing with trauma, not “fundamentalism and xenophobia are bad and counterproductive.” I also agree that Discovery doesn’t ALWAYS need to be “The Michael Burnham Show”. We probably needed more time with Aidra before this particular revelation, but it should’ve been her journey, not Michael saving the day. Again.
As a straight white man firmly in his 50’s, I don’t feel like I have a lot to say about how non-binary folks should be portrayed. But, that being said, making the non-binary folks Trills seems like a cop-out. I thought it to myself as I was watching the show, and I’m heartened to see that someone else noticed it as well.I feel like the non-binary or LGBTQI+ folks (and I feel like I’m missing a letter there, or added an extra? Please forgive me) will be saying “Yeah, thanks for trying, but try harder.”
I hear you. Using the Trill like this would have been more clever in the TNG/DS9/Voyager era but not necessarily today.
It’s interesting, because I feel like the Trill were utilized in the 90s to tell LGBTQI+ stories. The TNG episode actually hasn’t aged well because Beverly is absolutely disgusted when her lover is put into a female host and it plays has homophobic by today’s standards. DS9 played with gender constantly with Curzon/Jadzia Dax being so closely related and they had that tepid lesbian romance with her. I applaud them for trying……but it does seem like it’s an unnecessary plot device for today’s world in which we now have the words for non-CISgendered people and fluid sexuality. I feel like if Dax were written today, they’d write her as gender nonconforming and pansexual, which would align with a several hundred year old being who’s switched bodies several times.
I don’t remember Beverly being “disgusted”. She definitely struggled with the gender flip, but she made an effort to look past it, and just couldn’t. I don’t think that’s “homophobic”, she’s just a heterosexual character. It was a relationship built on physical attraction from the get-go, and she’s not attracted to women.
It played as homophobic in 1992
Have to respectfully disagree on that. She even made what was to me a fairly poetic and moving statement about her “limitation” in the closing scene.
….but the non-binary character isn’t a Trill, they’re human.
But they can be referred to by the non-binary they pronoun because they literally have multiple consciousnesses inside them.
1 ) I didn’t say they weren’t non-binary, I said they weren’t trill. They aren’t. They’re human. 2) The actor who plays Adira says that Adira was NB before they were joined. They were always binary, they’re not NB because they’re joined.
“making the non-binary folks Trills seems like a cop-out.”Adira isn’t a Trill. She’s a human with a symbiont in her, but having the symbiont doesn’t make her a Trill. Everyone on the Trill homeworld is a Trill, whether they have a symbiont or not.
The Trill have always been fairly poorly sketched out in the lore. The first Trill we encounter in TNG had face ridges and nobody knew about the symbionts, then in DS9 they don’t have ridges and joined Trill have been on Earth since at least TOS days. Whether the Trill symbionts are known about or not in TOS is unclear, because it’s hard to imagine that Trill like Curzon and Emony could interact with Starfleet so much without the symbiont being discovered. As a result it seems like the TNG Trill appearance is the aberration, not the DS9 or DISCO ones.
Yeah, I was just about to say that they pretty much walked back a lot of “The Host” as soon as DS9 aired. Also the Trill of “The Host” were, if I remember correctly, kinda creepy and offputting.
Yeah, they seemed like dicks. I can only imagine that they are some kind of Trill sub-species or a relative of the main Trill species. It would also explain why nobody seemed to know what they were. The Federation knew about the Trill we know, but didn’t know that these other Trill had symbionts too.
There is still of course the major error in that EVERY SINGLE TRILL IS A VIABLE HOST. In DS9 we discover the dirty little secret that Trill have been hiding from their own population. Anyone who is Trill can carry one and there just aren’t enough to go around. So the whole selection process is a sham. Hence Dax having a host who was a murderer.
Yeah, I think Zack is a little harsh on Discovery in this regard. Sure, it’s not always perfectly plotted, but this DS9 story basically unraveled the entirety of Trill society by accident in an afternoon and nobody ever mentioned it again. It’s as if somebody showed up on Earth one day and said oh, by the way, I can prove none of your gods exist. Here you go. Ok then, bye.Do they not think that the Trill would have worked that out by themselves over the centuries without a random human doctor just discovering it one day?
Oh there are Trill who know that way more hosts are viable then the Trill government lets on. In DS9 its first covered in Invasive Procedures where a Trill who we think is crazy tried to steal the Symbiote from Dax. In Equilibrium they confirm thanks to Jerome Belar Dax’s secret Host who nearly kills Jadzia is when Sisko, Jadzia and Bashier find out the big secret. They do a bit of detective work do some basic math and the whole thing is laid bare. Sisko blackmails the Trill Commission into helping save Jadzia’s life by threatening to blow up Trill Society if they let her die. That leads later to a random Trill on a Federation Starship getting the Dax symbiote after Dukat kills Jadzia. So obviously the Federation knows. Then with Host in the Next Generation which many things about the Trill were changed for DS9 and now Discovery indicates that yeah other races can be viable hosts for them…. My problem is there is a zero chance that enough viable Trill were killed in the Burn for them to have a we don’t have enough hosts problem. Its far more likely the burn killed off too many symbiotes for there to be enough for even the tiny amount of the Trill they publically claim can be hosts. A human viable host would be extremely bad for the Trill Government.
The “big secret” that they find out in Equilibrium is that half of all Trill are suitable for joining, not “EVERY SINGLE TRILL” like you said earlier.
I think the reveal was that almost half the Trill could host, not the tiny percentage they were claiming. But that is just semantics.
You are correct I rewatched the Episode again last night. Still for the Trill to have a not enough hosts crisis most of their population would have had to die in the Burn….
It’s not every Trill, The Dudicus, it’s about 50% of them — given there are so few Symbiots the selection process makes perfect sense, even if why they’re lying about it doesn’t.I mean, I walk fast, but I’m not about to be sent to The Olympics as a Speedwalking Competitor, and if I tried out for the selection process I’m almost certain I wouldn’t make it past the early qualifying rounds.
Amusingly the quasi-canon of the books uses the Augment Virus to answer why those Trill look different (the same reason different era Klingons have ridges or not)
Ugh. That was fun and silly enough to explain a dumb thing once. Let’s not keep running with it!
Dax originally had the ridges. Then Paramount execs saw the gorgeous woman they hired in the makeup, and demanded they be removed
Will Discovery ever become fun? With all the tears being shed, I think we have enough water to host a pair of whales in the cargo hold. I care about the characters and enjoy the overall premise, but the series is far too heavy on the sentiment. I long to see a Ferengi, or watch some Klingons get crazy with a barrel of blood wind. We don’t need a cartoon for classic Trek shenanigans. Star Trek…used…to…be…fun
Blood wind, we’ve all been there – washing down a curry with a bowl of broken glass. Good times.
both the non-binary and the transgender characters promoted before the season premiered are Trill
Which seem strangely like adhering to ST’s fake out tradition, given their first “lesbian” couple (as well as Crusher’s potential lesbian coupling that she refused) were Trill as well, so they could claim that they’re not REALLY gay.
Which is weird, because Disco obviously doesn’t have problems introducing LGBTQ characters, so why do they have to be all Trill?
Yeah, it seems like a weird attempt at creating some sort of connection to previous firsts in Star Trek, than something written organically.
If they hadn’t made a bit of a thing out of the two actors being on the show, it would have simply been nice to have a trans and an nb-person there without calling attention to it.As it was I enjoyed it because it was sweet and the two of them had a lovely, vulnerable presence.
But I’ll be interested to read some things about this from trans or non-binary perspectives.
What a terrible SJW dumpster fire of an episode. Apparently there is not one single straight white competent male member of Starfleet left. Michelle and her Mary Sue powers once again save the day by helping Adria, which made no sense as she had no idea how it worked when all the Trill just stayed outside the pool. And who are the kidding trying to fit that lesbian
and gay dude into normal gender roles of “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”.
Stop forcing the SJW crap were it does not belong. If a character is gay
fine, that should not be their defining quality. LGBBQ relationships are like hot dogs. I know they exist, but I do not want to see how they are made.
And stop Mary Sueing all charters beyond there limitations. Georgiou can
now take direct phaser fire without a scratch and Michelle knows everything about everything. I
know this is hard for the writers to believe, but Michelle and Georgiou
do not have all the answers. This show is lucky there is absolutely
nothing on becasue of the pandemic or otherwise it would have been
cancelled.
AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA
I don’t see this at all. What, are they supposed to make a big deal that Grey is a trans man? He’s a man, that’s enough.
Well but they are making a bigger deal out of it than it would have to be. Making both the trans and the non binary character Trill, the species they already used twice to sneak in LGBTQ content, instead of any other species in which gender isn’t that much at the core of their whole plot in the show, it becomes – or at least has the potential to become – some weird Trill gender thing instead of something that is normal among humans and other less complicated species.
Adira is not a Trill. She is a human with a symbiont. Having a symbiont does not make you a Trill.
The pronouns for Adira are going to get addressed. There’s an interview with Blu Del Barrio on scyfywire where they say that aspect will evolve along with the character. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/star-treks-new-non-binary-star-blu-del-barrio-talks-their-debut
Exactly, plus the actor requested that they wait until theyd come out to their family.
The ship story line was really about mental health. I don’t think these conflicts have been resolved with hugs but it was more of a truce and the crew figuring out that everyone is under a lot of stress and anxiety and having a better understanding of each others issues. I still think the conflicts are there and they’ll flare up again. The ship really needs a counselor(which starfleet did not seem to have in Discovery’s initial era). Maybe one of Tal’s hosts had a psychiatry degree.
It’s also I think a good thing for Discovery to slow down a bit and actually spend some time with its crew/characters. There’s no great, urgent, overarching mystery to be solved this season, more a series of breadcrumbs really, so the show would be wise to settle down and give some space to the bridge crew to grow into people.
For example, this would have been an EXCELLENT episode for Hugh to go down to Trill, and be the one to help Adira to work through her trauma.But nope! It’s gotta be Michael, front and center!
Very true. A perfect chance to put the spotlight on an ensemble character.
Hugh explained that it would be better for Adira to go to the surface with someone she had some connection to, which would be Michael. Hugh barely knows her beyond any medical exams. He wouldn’t be able to connect emotionally with her like Michael did.
She’s known Michael for 2 minutes at that point. She’d known Hugh just as long, and his history of trauma, and reconnecting with his past and lover was much more thematically tied to her story than Michael.
But Adira had connected more with Michael emotionally in that time. Hugh was just a doctor to Adira.
It was also a good opportunity to really establish Dr. Culber as the ship’s chief medical officer and a senior member of the crew. Strange as that is to say three seasons in, with all of the crazy shit that happened to his character in the first two seasons the show never really got to explore that aspect of the character.
Is Culber the Chief Medical Officer? I he’s one of the doctors, but for some reason I thought they’d established him as a subordinate one….
I guess I just assumed. He’s certainly going to be the one getting the most screen time going forward.
Another thing I’m unclear on is exactly what the situation was with following Burnham into the wormhole. We know all of the senior staff agreed to come along, but what about the rank and file? It sure seems like a full complement aboard but what are the odds that everybody on board would have agreed to leave everything they’ve ever known behind?
Uh – because it was either that, or Control devours their existence…?If not that? I got nothing.
The immediate threat of Control had been neutralized, when Mirror Georgiou microwaved him in the spore chamber. Sending the Sphere (and thus Discovery) to the future was about nipping the longer term threat of Control — either restored from a backup, reconstituted from another copy floating around Federation communication networks, or redeveloped from scratch — from getting access to the Sphere.
There was definitely time for anybody who didn’t want to go to the future to at least beam over to Enterprise.
A very subordinate one- ‘Doctor’ Culber apparently doesn’t know the difference between a human and Klingon.
I think he’s still subordinate. The opening line of the episode is, “Medical officer’s log, supplemental…” No ‘Chief’ in front of it.
I always assumed Dr. Pollard was the CMO and Culber worked for her but I don’t think that was ever established either.
I remember in a S1 or S2 episode he refers to “the CMO”, as someone he needs to meet with so definitely not him. I believe it is the African American woman we often see in sick bay, but I am not 100% on that. She suffers from the same tangential/superficial existence that the bridge crew also shares.
I have always assumed it’s her too. But she’s such a background character I don’t know why they didn’t just make it him. I was confused by his presence at the dinner too because Saru said it was for bridge crew, so shouldn’t it have been the CMO there? I know he’s married to Stamets so he could have just been a +1, but would you have a +1 at a meal specifically for the bridge crew? It just seemed like another bit of sloppy writing.
I was listening to a Discovery podcast last night and am now even more unsure. The hosts pointed out that Dr. Pollard (as is apparently her name) has two pips while Dr. Culbert has three. I haven’t yet rewatched myself to see if this was true or not, or checked previous seasons to see if Culber has more pips than before.
Culber*
Oh! I’ll try to remember to look out for that!
Forget Hugh – why was Georgiou at that dinner? Can’t imagine Saru inviting her. Was she someone’s plus-one?
That never occurred to me but good point. She doesn’t even have an official role on there does she!?
Starfleet’s Gadfly?Ambassador for the Mirrorverse?Because if they didn’t, they couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t reset the Replicators to season all dishes with arsenic…?
They did.
What gets to me is how everyone on Discovery seems to know about the Trill. This isn’t a thing that came up on the original series, but everyone chats about it like it’s no big thing. We learned in DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations” that Dax fucked Bones when he was in medical school.
Did she?
And as a she or a he…?Asking for a friend.
Man, discussin’ in this version Trek involves a lot of dissin’ and cussin’…
Only if all the huggy BS ends up being the first thing that falls apart in the wasteland of the future apocalypse. Huggy to the face, stabby to the back. This seemed to be what Michael’s druid boyfriend was about from the beginning, but quickly he became huggable.
I’m curious why having the non-binary and transgender characters having the symbiont (as you mention several times, Adira isn’t Trill) is less progressive? If the show were saying that the symbiont somehow altered their sexuality into non-binary and transgender, THAT would be messed up, but from what I can tell that’s not the case. If anything, it seems like a reminder to people who rail against current ST for being PC that they’ve had these type of stories for decades now.
If the show were saying that the symbiont somehow altered their sexuality into non-binary and transgender, THAT would be messed up,People keep mentioning that it was a choice of the actor to be referred to as she in these early eps, and that it will change later on. And that that’s all related to things that are outside of the show.And we’ll see how it plays out, but that could actually end up looking a bit like what you’re describing:character in Star Trek universe is introduced as a she, and spends a few episodes as a she.character connects with previous hosts from an alien brain, and decides that they prefer to be non-binary.And depending on how things go, that would undercut the message that in the future non-binary people are just out there being non-binary just like everyone else.
(even if it was all accidental, and it was requested by the actor)
Yeah, we’ll have to see how things go: while they could absolutely handle this badly, if they are going with the pronouns the actor chose, then you can hardly find fault with them.I guess one option would be to have Adira discover their identity as the show progresses, yet tie it back to the past through flashbacks to show that it wasn’t something formed by anything to do with the symbiont. This episode showed that she actually didn’t have access to all of her own previous memories, so it would be easy to do this.Alternatively, they could have it be revealed later as having been the case throughout the time they’ve been on the show, and when someone asks why they didn’t tell them before, Adira could say that once they found out the people of Discovery were from the past, they weren’t sure how they would respond, as though society in that time may have no bigotry towards nonbinary people, they weren’t sure how people from 800 years ago would respond. Which would seem like a legitimate concern: how easily can most people now differentiate between the cultures of the years 1000 and 1200?
…and honestly, I can see the appeal here…Well, that’s something.
Tilly suggests they try something with dark matter, and Stamets immediately jumps down her throat. As someone who works with expensive, complex industrial machinery, I can identify with Stamets when someone, who knows nothing about any of the equipment, suggests I try something or have unrealistic expectations of output in an impossible time frame. I just get frustrated and want to lash out and often just throws my whole day off when you have everything planned and scheduled to run like clockwork.It feels like everytime I leave the room, there’s that feeling over me that we could be heading into battle at any moment.Honestly, just tossing dark matter into anything sounds like a bad idea, let alone into Disovery’s spore drive.
So in short: FUCK Tilly
Stamets is a bit of a douchebag. And dark matter is fucking awesome.
someone, who knows nothing about any of the equipment Except she’s a gifted engineer who’s been working with the equipment and has been doing independent research on it.Sounds like you’ve got the same problem Stamets has: It’s mine, dammit, and I’m the only person who gets to understand or work with it!
“The symbionts are a gift to everyone, not just the Trill.” -Adira. I’m not really sure what this means? A simple “I’m going to stick with Discovery for a bit, just ‘cause” would’ve been fine.I think it’s just her acknowledging they need hosts for the symbiotes and she’s going to be a sort of ambassador to get volunteers to be hosts.
If the scenes between Adira and Gray were moving to you, I don’t want to mock that reaction or try and take it away (I couldn’t), but I do think we can ask for a bit more than a Hallmark commercial.I legit teared up at Adira and Gray “reuniting” at the end, which is something I rarely do. Maybe it’s just the election week getting to me, or maybe it’s that, as a gay person, I quite liked seeing queer characters get a qualified happy ending. That stuff never moved me as much when I was a kid and it was B’Ellana and Tom or Riker and Troi or (insert your favorite hetero Trek couple here). I dunno, I found it just sappy enough. Overall, the mix of familiar Trek tropes with new ideas and twists made this my favorite of the four episodes so far this season. It told a self-contained story as part of the overall arc. It didn’t dive deeply into Trill culture, but it also didn’t need to. This was a story about Adira, not the minutiae of an alien culture. The episode also acknowledged the sheer mental stress of the Discovery crew’s new circumstances—something I wish we’d seen more of on other shows with similar situations (like Voyager). Hell, it even had the Discovery flying away, Enterprise-D style, before the credits rolled. This is what I want out of Star Trek in 2020. P.S. For more of the Disco computer’s new “personality”, check out the Short Trek “Calypso” that premiered pre-season 2.
P.S. For more of the Disco computer’s new “personality”, check out the Short Trek “Calypso” that premiered pre-season 2.THANK YOU. I’m glad at least one other person didn’t just let that entirely breeze past them. I was actually really glad to see that they are making an effort to explain how that came to pass on Discovery. (Also, I did confirm that it definitely is supposed to be the same AI. Same voice actor provided the voice in both the Short Trek and in this episode.)
I was extremely impressed with the acting, particularly the actor who plays Adira—the emotion of those scenes came through so clearly in their face. It’s a character who was initially drawn as somewhat annoying, but there is a real spark of charisma in the performance.
The alien-race as malibu beachhouse was my least favorite thing about the end of Picard, and I wasn’t a big fan of it here either.DS9 had the whole thread about how the Trill power structure had lied to everyone and had claimed that only very few Trill were suitable for joining, even though in reality it was actually fairly common.I realize that Trill is just sidequest #4 on the way to the explodey final boss, but it might have been nice to see the 800-years-later effects of that on Trill society. What we got was actually a little more bland than DS9’s version.
Didn’t they decide to keep it hidden at the end of DS9 to prevent the symbionts becoming a commodity?I mean, it’s dumb, because you’d think the Trill would work out the truth eventually. But that’s really DS9’s fault by having them stumble across such an earth shattering secret by accident one day.
It’s been 800~ish years since DS9, and like everywhere else Trill has had a century of relative isolation. It would have been nice if the writers had shown that something had changed.I dunno, maybe what we were shown was supposed to imply that they’re extra-aggressive or extra-paranoid now?But mostly it was just people in multi-colored robes with fricken’ spears again. (I really didn’t like the Picard finale, which is undoubtedly coloring my thoughts on this episode)
I thought this was the best episode so far. The Trill stuff worked really well. I like Adira. They’re expanding more on the lore with the Trill. They didn’t get too overly dramatic. It’s a good standalone episode.
The thing I’m liking most about this season is that each episode has had a really strong A plot that also furthered the ongoing arc of the season:
3×01: Burnham got her feet under her in the future.
3×02: Discovery got its feet under it in the future.
3×03: Discovery learns what’s happened to Earth in the last millennium, and in the process picks up Adira who holds the key to finding Starfleet.
3×04: Adira learns how to integrate with the Tal symbiont’s previous hosts, providing the coordinates to (what’s left of?) Starfleet.
It’s not like a Netflix show where the individual episodes don’t have any distinct identity or purpose, but at the same time it all feels like it’s building toward something.
Thank you for putting this clearer than I could.
I always thought Disco did very well in striking a nice balance between episodic and serial storytelling. Even S1 where Mudd pops in, it didn’t seem random with nothing tying into the main season plot
I’m glad they added a Trill and didn’t just make a new Trill-lite version of race. It saves us from saying “Hey, I remember the Trill why didn’t they use a Trill”.Don’t know why the Trills didn’t get in the pool instead of making Michael do it. Guess they wanted the main characters to have that bonding moment. Also, the future doesn’t have structural integrity field technology in the future? Or I guess it wasn’t good enough to stop the rock, but good enough to keep the air in? Why didn’t they transport Gray to sickbay immediately? *shrug* It was pretty good overall though.
once Michael forces Adira to confront her past, we get a simplistic, and
saccharine, love story, one without any real twists and turns beyond
“they were really into one another and they were very nice, and then one
of them died.”
Kind of like Lt. Frank Drebbin explaining what happened to his late lover — “It’s the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy,
boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girls dies in a tragic blimp
accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day.”
Good year?
No, it was the worst.
So, as speculated last week, it turns out that both the non-binary and the transgender characters promoted before the season premiered are Trill. Ian Alexander plays Gray, Adira’s love interest; Gray is identified as male without being explicitly transgender. I’m not sure that having both Adira (who is still identified as “she” on the show) and Gray be Trill is as progressive as we were lead to believe, but it’s probably not my place to make that call.Um Adira is a human joined with a symbiont, not a Trill. Gray is Trill.
And it appears that Gray was kinda non binary before being joined, and they and Adira were already a couple so, while I agree it´s kind of a cop-out, it still is quite a queer pairing.I think they overhyped this unnecessarily for promotional reasons, but it’s a step forward for Trek nonetheless
The use of the word “Trill” is complicated, and because of the TNG episode with the bumpy-Trill there were always suggestions that in-universe it was kindof just a generic word for joined beings.I think Zack is correct enough here, in that while Adira isn’t a spotty-Trill, both Gary and Adira are definitely Trill characters.I don’t know that it’s worth questioning the progressiveness of it? But both the trans and non-binary actors are playing the race that’s already known for body and gender swapping.
Trill is a planet native to the Trill species who speak the Trill language. Adira is a human carrying a Trill symbiont. I would normally not get this nit-picky except for the fact that Adira being human and NOT Trill is one of the major plot points to this season lol.
You’re getting picky about the wrong thing, because Zack isn’t saying what you think he’s saying.Zack is not saying this:I’m not sure that having both Adira (who is still identified as “she” on the show) and Gray be the spotty humanoid species which is native to the planet Trill is as progressive as we were lead to believe… What Zack is saying is:I’m not sure that having both Adira (who is still identified as “she” on the show) and Gray be hosts for a symbiotic worm which is known for gender and body swapping is as progressive as we were lead to believe…Spottiness has nothing to do with the point he’s trying to make here.Adira is a trill character, with a footnote that they are the first recorded successful, longterm joining between a terran and a trill symbiont. But nothing Zack is saying is an error.
Everyone who lives on the Trill planet is a Trill, whether they have a symbiont or not. Therefore, just having a symbiont in you does not make one a Trill. As much as The Host episode of TNG got retconned by DS9, Riker did not stop being a human and become a Trill when he was implanted with the symbiont. Adira is not a Trill. She is a human with a symbiont.
So we’ve got:Trill is a planet native to the Trill species who speak the Trill language. Everyone who lives on the Trill planet is a Trill, whether they have a symbiont or not.Both of those definitions are much more wrong than the shorthand that Zack used when describing a Trill character as a Trill.As this episode repeatedly said, a human has never before been successfully joined with a Trill symbiont (from Trill). So even in-universe there is no word for Adira Tal’s character.Zack probably could have written this to quiet the whining: I’m not sure that having both Adira Tal and Gray Tal be Trill is as progressive as we were lead to believe, but it’s probably not my place to make that call….although it’s already completely clear from the context, and was central to the point he was making.
It doesn’t matter if Adira has a symbiont or not – they’re still human.The fact is that Zach (and a lot of commenters) are saying that Adira is Trill, when the show has explicitly told us that they are human.
You do realize that Zack is not saying that she’s not human, right? Go ahead and read it again, and then again just to make extra sure. There is no claim that she’s not human. He says that she is a trill, but that is not at all the same as saying that she’s not human.So:Your personal definition of a Trill was entirely full of holes.You argue that Zack said something that you inferred he said, even though he didn’t say it.The show does not care about this at all. In episode 5 it treats Adira as a Trill. The Admiral says “You’re Senna Tal, per the scans.” After that it doesn’t spend another 10 minutes arguing that she’s a human, or label her a “chimeric abomination,” or “one of those ‘Trillumans’ we always theorized about.” Adira Tal is being treated just like any other Trill character would be treated.
You do realize that multiple times Zack says she is a Trill, don’t you? He said, and I quote:“So, as speculated last week, it turns out that both the non-binary and the transgender characters promoted before the season premiered are Trill.” “I’m not sure that having both Adira (who is still identified as “she” on the show) and Gray be Trill”
Zack either isn’t paying attention and thinks that Adira is a Trill and not a human, or he doesn’t care. Either way he’s wrong. Adira is a human. Just because they have a symbiont doesn’t make them a Trill. They are a human with a symbiont.As far as “He says that she is a trill, but that is not at all the same as saying that she’s not human.” that makes no sense. This is like saying just because someone is a Klingon doesn’t mean that they’re not also human. Trill, like humans, are a species. You cannot be both. I’m not sure you understand what “Trill” means.
Thank you! Very much this!
So then, Adira is Human, Tal is a Trill (being a creature native to the planet Trill). So what would you call Adira Tal? Niether Human nor Trill seem to be appropriate terms.
I’m glad that someone finally sees that Kurtz-Trek’s idea of canon is to reference something fairly random about Trek then get it wrong, misuse it, or just ignore it.
Cat Scan down thread or up thread (fucking Kinja, who knows) does a nice job explaining the Trill thing.If you want to get upset for no apparent reason about ‘canon’ and all that, in TOS Balance of Terror nobody knows that Romulans are Vulcans who left Vulcan a long time ago. Then, suddenly everyone knows it in other episodes and series and seem to have always. I think generally people have to stop freaking out about their beloved canon like it is some sort of holy book or something.
Based on this review and many of the comments, 21st Century Star Trek fans would absolutely loathe Star Trek TOS and claim that it “isn’t Star Trek.” I can imagine what a current review of “Space Seed” would be like, with a Mexican playing a Sikh, a Black woman getting slapped, a White woman getting gaslit by an abusive minority… #cancelstartrek
What a terrible SJW dumpster fire of an episode. Apparently there is not one single straight white competent male member of Starfleet left. Michelle and her Mary Sue powers once again save the day by helping Adria, which made no sense as she had no idea how it worked when all the Trill just stayed outside the pool. And who are the kidding trying to fit that lesbian and gay dude into normal gender roles of “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”. Stop forcing the SJW crap were it does not belong. If a character is gay fine, that should not be their defining quality. LGBBQ relationships are like hot dogs. I know they exist, but I do not want to see how they are made. And stop Mary Sueing all charters beyond there limitations. Georgiou can now take direct phaser fire without a scratch and Michelle knows everything about everything. I know this is hard for the writers to believe, but Michelle and Georgiou do not have all the answers. This show is lucky there is absolutely nothing on becasue of the pandemic or otherwise it would have been cancelled.
I don’t always agree with you, but I have to concede…this could have been a stronger episode with the addition of maybe another 30 minutes worth of screen time, during which these narratives could have been more thoroughly fleshed out. And I very much wonder what happened with Detmer and her haiku.
It’s weird, because by cutting all of these civilizations off from one anothet Discovery is accidentally telling a story that’s perfect for our current world of quarantines and shutdowns.But this one didn’t work for me, because it really felt like all of this stuff – federation ship in orbit, human-trill joining – should have been a much bigger deal to the characters. But instead, it’s a few speeches about what an abomination Adira is, and then they just forget all about it and let that one guy sneak Adira into the grotto.
I get Movie Night, but I was 100% hoping for Soul Train style Dance Party.
Is Georgiou … necessary? Is she there to always present the possibility of a power struggle or mutiny? To be the wise, cranky cynic who sometimes helps them realize the less altruistic and idealistic way is the answer in a pinch? What is it?
It’s weird, because she’s going to stab them in the back at some point. And there will be swelling music and so many speeches about betrayal and love and federation idealsBut she’s actually space-Hitler, much moreso than someone like Dukat ever was. And so when the heel-turn happens the crew are going to look like idiots.
… although actually, Detmer’s redrum freakout this episode already makes them look like idiots.
Totally true. How does the crew not know this?
They do.
Hey, they’ve already trusted Evil Captain Lorca!Why shouldn’t they trust Evil Phillipa Gregoriou?
Not going to be this season. She is on set for season 4
How many of the crew actually know who she really is/was? Saru and Michael do (and Pike, I believe). But I thought most did not, and that the “it turns out Captain Georgiou was alive all this time” cover story was accepted by most. Of course, Detmer and others who served with Real Captain Georgiou would find her new personality bizarre, but they didn’t all see the Empress, and I thought her true identity was hush-hush.
To my shock, that’s not where they went, insect overlord — it seemed like an inevitable climax to her character arc, but the show (as it too often does) jinked off into a facepalm! of a plot twist involving CSI’s Captain Brass as The Guardian of Forever, and that showed us Gregoriou’s experiences in our Universe had turned her into a Real Boy! Starfleet Officer, because on top of everything else Michael Burnham is apparently The Blue Fairy.This show, man — this fucking show….
I haven’t bothered to think too hard about Georgiou because I love Michelle Yeoh giving snark so much. But the show does need to remind us she’s a villain. I thought they were going some sort of Gaius Baltar/Dr. Smith from Lost in Space route with her, and maybe they still will.
Yeah, but I don’t need Henry Golding’s mom on Star Trek: D.
A frustration I had last season was that they shoehorned in L’Rell and Ash Tyler into the plot, in a way that felt very forced and unnecessary. The actors who play those characters are very cool and wonderful people (Mary Chieffo especially, she genuinely could not be more awesome) and I think there was some sentimentality that motivated keeping them around—which is well and good, but the writing struggled to make them feel useful or necessary.I do wonder if there’s a bit of that happening again with Georgiou. It does feel a bit different to me, though, because from scene to scene she’s such a delightful presence, and her snarky personality generates a fun contrast with the earnestness of the crew. From a character motivation perspective, deep examination is best avoided—I think we’re meant to believe that she has a maternal connection to Burnham, and is concerned first and foremost with protecting her. And she has so little anchoring her down in our universe, what did she have to lose by going to the future? I think she’s explicitly said “I like it here”.
The other day I watched Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon for essentially the first time (I might have seen when I was very young), and wow is she good in that. She’s an incredibly talented actress, she plays well off the rest of the cast, she adds levity and/or tension; even if it is shoehorning, I think it’s the good kind.
This may have been said at the time but it feels like Mirror Georgiou might have been better off dying at the end of S1 to offer some closure to Michael’s arc in that season. Since then it just seems like Georgiou is here just for the sake of it than because she’s really needed all that much.
No, she isn’t. But it’s Michelle Yeoh. She looks she is having fun. After 30 odd years of watching her movies, I am fine with her popping up to make a smart ass comment. And beating someone to death.
Yeah, that’s true. I love her as an actress.
It’s now 11/22/2020 and I’m eating this comment of course. Please ignore it!
😂 why whatever could you mean??
I mean, she was awesome this season and the story around her and her departure was awesome. I’m eating my words.
Goddamn spoilers. Fuck.
I enjoyed the Trill part of this episode. I don’t really care about how consistent it is with another episode broadcast 30 years previously. Heck, I’m a Doctor Who fan, so if I got bent out of shape over inconsistencies in my sci-fi franchises, I’d be in serious trouble.
This episode isn’t consistent with the Trill episode of TNG, but all of the Dax stuff on DS9 isn’t either. When they created DS9 they decided they wanted a Trill character, but they wanted to change some of the species’ rules (the symbiont totally taking over the host, transporters would kill them, etc).So if you’re going to compare Trill in this episode with previous incarnations of them, you really should be doing it with DS9, which gets a lot right. Isoboramine is mentioned, the caves looks the same, the guardians who tend the caves, the white robes you wear when you enter the pool to communicate with your past hosts – it’s all there.
(There’s a feint towards making Adira jealous of Gray’s newfound Trill abilities, but it’s immediately resolved in the same flashback where it’s introduced.) I read that as Adira questioning if her boyfriend was the same person. I mean, it would freak me out if the person I fell in love with was suddenly playing a cello or fluent in a language but all the while telling me, “I’m the same person you fell in love with.”
The show isn’t really good with romances, and that’s a problem. It’s already a little cheesy when it deals with crew mates that don’t even date, when they had a romantic layer on top of it, it’s hard to stomach. The Adira/Gray romance felt way too Hallmark to be believable, and the Gray character suffered because of it.
“I don’t want to mock that reaction or try and take it away (I couldn’t)“
Odd thing to say. A bad critic, or a good but very mean critic like John Simon, can indeed take away the reaction somebody has had to a piece of art, by souring it and forever pairing it with their “through a glass darkly” observations. To do so does basic violence on the memory, and as we are always remembering the last time we remembered things it is indeed changing the memory and taking it away. There is a commenter on the Mandalorian board who comes back every week to complain about everything in the show, find everybody who says anything good at all, and try to harangue them until their enjoyment is destroyed. There was your little brother who made farting sounds during your favorite Whitney Houston song until you couldn’t hear it without remembering the farting sounds. There is that place you used to go with your ex. Taking away good memories happens all the time. They are tarnished, soured, poisoned, destroyed.
I sincerely pity anyone whose enjoyment of the episode was diminished by Saru/Burnham having some familiarity with Trill symbionts, even though it was a surprise to Crusher in a mediocre episode of TNG 30 years ago. I am a huge TNG nerd, but DS9 occupies the field for me when it comes to Trill backstory. And seeing the symbiont caves in which we’ve seen Jadzia Dax previously, and seeing the mechanic play out where she can talk to her former hosts, for me, felt perfectly congruent with the canon, and served a purpose in adding some connective tissue to previous iterations of Trek. I get how it might seem “lazy”, but a big part of the appeal of Trek is “Trek as a Place”—the links between series, and continuity of canon, make it feel more “real”, and also more familiar to what we remember fondly from previous series. I think it would be a fair critique, “why make the callbacks at all if you’re not going to adhere to the canon they established?”—but it just didn’t clash for me in the same way. It’s been a couple years since I re-watched the TNG episode introducing the Trill, but I’ve more recently re-watched DS9, in which no one in Starfleet seems all that unfamiliar with joined hosts. Sisko had a long friendship with Curzon Dax, Jadzia’s previous host, and Curzon was a Starfleet ambassador. If there was a retcon with the Federation knowing about joined Trill, it’s a sin committed by Rick Berman and company in the early 90s, not a choice by Discovery.
The show has many characters we know nothing about. Detmer and Owosekun have been sitting there for three years. Give us something on them.Instead, we get new characters. Who get a great deal of background and character development right away.Also, where is Jett Reno? Not invited for dinner? She’s the second or third highest ranking officer on the ship. She doesn’t get to eat or watch the movie?
“… and it’s legitimately very cool to see a Trek series without a straight white male in a leading, or indeed any, major role.”
What a messed up way to look at the world.
I don’t agree. Star Trek is about diversity, celebrating our differences, and above all progress. What better way to show our progress than to be a platform for showcasing the talents of people who have generally been denied major/main roles in American media?
But the author of this review isn’t celebrating diversity. They’re happy about someone being excluded on the basis of their race and gender.
Not excluded, just not highlighted. Are producers excluding POC when they make movies/TV with straight white males? Not necessarily, but it’s still a conscious casting choice. Straight white males have been default main characters for so long, it can look like exclusion when they’re not involved. But it’s not. It’s as much a casting choice as making Kirk and Picard straight white men.I guess I’d have to ask, where do you stand on the concept of white privilege?
“I guess I’d have to ask, where do you stand on the concept of white privilege?”
The only privilege in this world that truly matters is money. Those that have it do what they want. Those without it are stuck beneath them.
And given that the United States from its founding has been organized to give white people all of the money…
Only some White Men — though they sell the rest of us the Big Lie that they meant all of us, and not just “White” and “Male” either.
Steinbeck was right, we really do see ourselves not as an oppressed proletariat, but millions of Temporarily-Embarrassed Millionaires….
There’s still a straight white man in the main cast, but it’s Doug Jones and he’s under makeup playing an alien. Don’t shit your pants.
Now I’m laughing about that, Phil Not Phil…!
::cries in Doug Jones::
Uh oh. Oh God. Not here. Don’t tell me there’s an incel in this fandom?? (And I don’t mean the adorkable kind)Furk outta here with that shi-.
This was a beautiful episode.
A couple of things that were wrong: Adira is not a Trill. She’s a human that’s hosting a Trill symbiont. They said that no human has been recorded to have successfully hosted a Trill. Riker was a temporary host, whose episode may have been kept secret or lost in the history of 800 years earlier.Also, just in the previous episode, Burnham had explicitly stated that she had seen Trill, but didn’t know they were a joined species. This is consistent with McCoy knowing Emony Dax around the same time, or perhaps a bit earlier than DSC seasons one and two. This is even after she spends a year as a courier at the exchanges. If anything, they were more careful than they needed to be, since it was Sara who briefed Burnham on the Trill after he learned it from the people of the United Earth Defense Force. Both People of Earth nor Forget Me Not put in the work on the Trill lore, with the Caves of Mak’Ala that were nearly identical to their appearance in DS9’s Equilibrium.I’m a cishet male, so like you, I’d have to defer to the whether or not the representation is satisfactory to that community. But, Blu Del Barrio did say that Del Barrio chose the pronouns the character will use, at least at this stage in Adira’s story. So, for now, I’ll trust that the actor will guide the character’s journey on that front.As far as the episode itself, it reminded me of Rene Echevarria’s sensitive character pieces, with a bit of Joe Menosky’s surrealism. It really got me tearing up in the multiple times I’ve seen it in the past few days. It’s up there with The Visitor near the top of all Trek episodes. I loved how the themes of the A and B plots tied together quite well, how Culber guided both plots, the ties to the Short Treks episode Calypso.And Sherlock, Jr. is one of my favorite Keaton films.
“This was frustratingly lazy and lacks faith in the audience. B!”
“So, as speculated last week, it turns out that both the non-binary and the transgender characters promoted before the season premiered are Trill”Adira is not a Trill. They are a human with a symbiont in them. This was clearly stated last week and multiple times in this episode.Just having a symbiont implanted in you does not make you a Trill. All of the un-joined people on the Trill planet are Trill.
This review spends a lot of time comparing the depictions of Trill in this episode with their depictions in … the 1 TNG host they appeared in, and not the 7 seasons of DS9. Seriously? Especially since so much of the Trill homeworld and society was explored in DS9 (isoboromine, the caves, the white pools, the guardians, the white robes you wear when entering the pools to communicate with previous hosts). For a reviewer who reviewed every DS9 episode, it seems very strange that all discussion of Trill referenced 1 TNG episode.No mention of the Discovery computer absorbing the sphere data and starting to become the sentient computer we saw in the Short Trek episode set in the far future? It wasn’t key to the episode’s plot but it’s sure to be more and more important as the ship becomes more sentient.Unlike a lot of Trek (except for DS9), this episode took the time to show the effect of a major trauma (time travelling 900 years into the future, leaving everything/one they know behind) would have on a crew. But this review felt like they couldn’t care less about this. Personally I feltAs others have pointed out, pre-TNG people knowing who the Trill were and that they were a joined species is not a flaw. The previous episode clearly told us that Saru learned this from the sphere data and told Michael.Also, as many others have pointed out, Adira is not a Trill – she is a human. Just having a symbiont in you does not make one a Trill. In the TNG episode Riker did not stop being a human and become a Trill when he had the symbiont put in him. Everyone who lives on the Trill homeworld is a Trill, and most of them don’t have symbionts.The fact that the review got these 2 things wrong make me wonder if the reviewer is playing much attention to the show. These are not subtle or hidden facts – they are very clearly told to the viewers.
Why is everyone constantly crying in this show? It happens so often it’s become unintentionally hilarious.
“Make up a new weird symbiotic alien race. As is, I kept trying to remember if anything we saw here contradicted information from earlier series”Would you prefer the Goa’uld.Anyway, repeat to yourself: “It’s just a show, I should really just relax”