At a trim 38 minutes, “Vaulting Ambition” is the shortest live-action hour of Star Trek ever made. Considering the content, I didn’t mind. With this episode, Discovery slips back into its old tics, the tics that have held it back all along: grimness and narrative murkiness. What’s funny is how tonally similar this episode feels to earlier efforts like “Context is For Kings” and “Choose Your Pain,” except those were set in “our” universe and this episode is set in the Mirror Universe, a realm that usually offers a darker contrast to “our” universe. Perhaps the show is trying to make a broader point about the fallibility of “our” universe, but I think that’s giving it too much credit. The show is what it is, and the similarity of the two universes says a lot about its tonal baseline.
Let’s Get to the Point… Another Twist
We’ve known all along that there’s been something off about Lorca. In “Lethe,” his old lover Admiral Cornwell barely recognized him. In “Despite Yourself,” he randomly banged his head against the wall. Now we have an explanation; Lorca was from the Mirror Universe all along. Was I surprised? Yes. Was I disappointed? Yes. However, the episode plays the reveal of this secret well. Mirror Georgieu gradually leads Burnham to the realization that mirror Terrans are sensitive to light, a trait which Lorca has displayed all along. And in a parallel scene, Lorca is presented with a comrade from the Mirror Universe, who his guard threatens to kill unless Lorca says the name of the guard’s sister, who he apparently raped and killed. At first, we the audience think that Lorca doesn’t know the sister’s name, so the tension comes from our knowledge that the poor comrade is doomed. But when Lorca reveals his true colors, killing the captor (who has already killed the comrade), our expectations are subverted. It’s a nice way to pull the rug from under us. But my problem isn’t so much with the execution as with the implications of this twist.
Before, it was possible to read Lorca as a damaged man with a traumatic past. We assumed that the destruction of his ship and crew left a deep imprint on his psyche, making him increasingly guarded and paranoid. Though Lorca was sometimes a frustrating enigma, I assumed that an insightful answer to this puzzle was coming. Now we know Lorca was… just evil. Because he’s from the Mirror Universe. That is disappointing. By definition, the least interesting explanation for a character’s bad behavior is “they’re evil.” This twist hand-waves away all of Lorca’s potential complexity and turns him into a two-dimensional villain. Also, the shock factor is seriously hurt by coming on the heels of the Tyler/Voq reveal in last week’s “The Wolf Inside,” which landed with more gravity and had more interesting implications for the character in question. Discovery is revealing itself as a series about flash and spectacle, where big twists substitute for character insight.
It’s a Spore World After All
Last week, I assumed that mirror Stamets had contacted our Stamets through the spore network for a nefarious purpose. It turns out not to be nefarious (necessarily). He just wants to escape, after being trapped in the spore network due to an experiment gone awry. This storyline works decently, but like most of Discovery’s storytelling, it takes a confusing turn. Stamets encounters Culber in the spore network, who informs him that he’s dead, and the two have a final conversation. All this wants to be very emotional, and the actors try their best, but I simply couldn’t get past the basic question: what the hell is Culber in this scene? He can’t be a figment of Stamets’ imagination, since he conveys new information about the spore network (it’s afflicted by some kind of disease and its demise may lead to the “annihilation of everything, everywhere,” whatever that means). The only real explanation is that this is Culber’s “soul.” So the spore network is like a dreamcatcher for souls? We’ve dealt with katras before in the Star Trek universe, but this is a step too far. I simply couldn’t feel for Stamets or Culber because the encounter between the two didn’t feel real.
Other stuff happens in “Vaulting Ambition,” but the Lorca revelation and Stamets/Culber scene are the centerpieces. Both are interesting, but problematic, like the series at large. Discovery is generally watchable from week to week, with high production values, good acting, and the occasional good moment. But its endgame is not at all clear. If the conclusion to this season soars, like the half-season ender “Into the Forest I Go,” it may redeem a season full of confusing tonal shifts and tangents. If it lands with a thud, thus will land the season.
Miscellaneous Notes:
- There are two other story threads going on here, which I file in the Other Stuff category. One is the Burmham / Georgieu interplay, which I found uninteresting. There’s always been something missing in this relationship, going back to the first two episodes, which never really let us feel these characters’ respect and admiration for each other. In the Mirror Universe, the dynamic is supposedly more extreme, with Georgieu functioning as a surrogate mother for Burnham. But there’s nothing to latch on to here, nothing to care about.
- Also, L’Rell is able to soothe Tyler/Voq using some kind of sci-fi thingy. We still have no idea what L’Rell’s plan or motives are, which also makes it impossible to care.
- Both Stamets exit the spore network, but the episode implies that their identities are switched. Yet more characters that aren’t what they seem.
- Burnham and Mirror Georgieu eat Kelpian for dinner. Gross.
Previous episode: “The Wolf Inside”
Next episode: “What’s Past is Prologue”