Perpetual Infinity

DVD, Discovery S2 (Perpetual Infinity)

Another 'Discovery' episode, another forty-odd minutes of bad 'Star Trek,' shot through with some good Spock (though even he has the terrible line "I like science," to be 'cute' and make the audience titter. Ugh!), and very little else. Oh, wait, there's the small matter of the origin of the Borg. Okay, so maybe I'm being presumptuous, and I really hope the writers aren't, because things are seemingly pointing to the creation of the Borg and if that is the case it will be one more thing this series has ruined in Trek - I had the impression of Borg involvement early on, first from rumours, then when the altered probe from the future attacked Pike and Tyler's shuttlecraft in that episode (you know the one, I can't remember what it was called, they all blend together), and it had been sent back from the future augmented and alive with AI, or guidance, that wanted organics dead. Then we get Starfleet computing power turned into AI through the influence of the data from the sphere. I think… Where did Control come from, I forget? It was Starfleet, but was it AI? Anyway, now we see Leland get assimilated, right down to the creepy black veins that come from nanoprobes, and it even appeared to show us a stream of these devices entering his bloodstream in the best Seven of Nine manner. And there's the whole future time where everything's been destroyed (except of course for a handy Class-M planet so that Dr. Gabrielle Burnham, Michael's Mother, can survive!), so are we really doing the Borg's origin and saying it was Starfleet's fault? I really, really hope not!

I was half expecting Alice Krige to show up as some crewmember ripe for being sucked into the future, things were going so much in that direction ('Enterprise' planned to do a Borg origin if it had continued, so it's not a new idea). Oh no, don't tell me Dr. Burnham becomes the Borg Queen. I say again: ugh! The potential messing up of one of Trek's most legendary 'races' was actually the only point of interest in this whole emotive mess of an episode. Once again we're supposed to care for a character so much that we're devastated when she's taken away, this time pulled from her daughter in the most 'dramatic' fashion, but though they valiantly cram in as many as possible mission logs and scenes with her conversing with various people, not to mention recordings of when she, her husband and young Mike, were last together (and a dream flashback for the newly-awakened-from-death Burnham), it's still a stranger who goes shooting into the red void at the end of the episode. How did that even happen? She wasn't in the suit, no one else was affected, so what is it that has so changed her genetic makeup that she's snapped back along with the time tech she travelled in? This 'Metroid'-like time suit makes less and less sense - I thought Leland told us in the previous episode it was invented by the Burnhams (sure, when can we trust anything he says, I know), but how could this couple, no matter how clever they are, be able to do something like that on their own? I keep expecting to hear that it's actually something that dropped out of the future (where are the Temporal Operatives like Captain Braxton of the USS Relativity?), but here we see it in their home-cum-lab when the Klingons show up to 'kill' them.

Not quite getting what was about to happen I actually thought for a moment it was a Romulan ship that was descending on that planet or moon, or whatever it was where they were carrying out their experiments, but of course it was the Klingons. It's just because it looked so 'raptor's wing'-ish and shows that if you have that extensive knowledge and sympathy with Trek lore of old it's actually a stumbling block to you now! Granted, the Klingons always used Birds of Prey, and would go on to have a tech sharing phase with the Romulans, but it was like something out of 'Nemesis' (probably designed by John Eaves who also did the ship designs in that film). 'How interesting,' I thought. 'How are they going to bring the Romulans into this?' Obviously they weren't, so at least that's one bit of canonical correctness they've kept to, though I don't suppose they'll be able to keep away from anything if the series runs long enough. It's so strange to be in a position to be hoping a Trek series doesn't go on too long when I used to want them to run and run! But almost nothing about this series makes me warm to it and I don't even feel disappointed any more: I just expect it to be silly and wrong. Take Burnham, or more specifically, the actress that plays her - it seems like she bursts into tears every episode and it's all so forced and unnatural. Sure, it's easy to argue that these are momentous occasions for her, she's meeting the Mother she'd thought dead for twenty years, but she's always so unprofessional and un-Starfleet in her actions and far from the heroes we're used to seeing.

Even the fake Control version of her as a hologram, where she talks flatly, like a Vulcan (now we know why the Vulcan Admiral Patar seemed so accurate - she was really just a computer simulation, so they can't even do a real Vulcan right!), was better than the normal flesh and blood Burnham. That's a problem when it's your series' lead. She's so… I don't know if the word irrational is right. Maybe she's so lacking in control, her feminine side on display so much, not reining in her emotions. I'm not even talking about when she's blubbing in front of the Mother that's become so jaded by her endless sojourn as a time traveller that she's unwilling to connect with her only daughter. That's understandable that she'd lose control, although not admirable or desirable in a Starfleet officer. No, it's things like when she wakes in Sickbay and they tell her about her Mother and she's desperate to jump up and go and speak to her. And when Pike is requested to meet her and not Burnham, they have to have a counsel in Pike's massive Quarters where she tries to make a case from every angle except a daughter's right, that she should go down too. It's important to note that they are on a time limit, with the containment field holding the suit and Dr. Burnham in place, set to only last so long! Pike indulges a bit of discussion, which I'd normally champion, but ultimately decides to deny her wishes. It's all rather silly, why not just go down, why wait until the Doctor is ready to talk, and accede to her wishes about who she'll see?

Although the whole idea of Dr. Burnham filming herself is odd, I can buy it because she is a scientist ("I like science!"), and this is all part of the process, and I liked that we see what happened to her when the Klingons attacked and so on, only through these devices (even though flying robots are incredibly overused in this series - you pretty much never saw them on other Treks, one reason the advancement of CGI isn't necessarily a good thing because it encourages the makers to break the rules or alter what is common or possible to a degree that alienates those familiar with Trek's style and approach). It was also intelligent in the way that when she travels into the future that first time she isn't on the same planet/moon/whatever that she started because the orbits would have changed so she would be in space, the kind of accuracy we're not used to seeing on 'DSC'! I immediately had questions of how she survived in this future if there was nothing left, so it was inevitable that a convenient Class-M world had to be there to explain where she went, ate, slept, etc. That tale of survival would have been more interesting than what actually happens in the episode. But as well as they did some things, the important stuff was simply stupid. Once again, if this is a suit made by the Burnhams, how does it have practically infinite data storage? Where did they get the time crystal, what even is it? There are so many questions about this tech, it's all frustratingly vague, just like the modern film series - it's all glossed over, which is a big reason it has come to feel like fantasy rather than science fiction.

The season is tied together by Dr. Burnham as she was responsible for sending the sphere to Discovery (and Terralysium is also mentioned), but I am a bit confused about all that. The sphere was the last remnant of an ancient civilisation, wasn't it? It wanted its knowledge to live on, and that knowledge is what Control used to become AI? Or it was already AI and needed that data to become all-powerful? I don't know, maybe I'm slow, but it's not easy to follow the complications because they don't present them in a clear way. It all boils down to Dr. Burnham being there at various points in time to… ensure Spock and Burnham get to the point where they destroy the sphere knowledge? So why send the sphere to them in the first place? And can the suit see into time, too, rather than just travel there, because she claims to have seen various moments from her daughter's life, and we know there was no Red Angel hovering over the scene. Unless it also has a cloaking device, which would be even more ridiculous. They gloss over the details and just generalise, filling up the space with the usual melodramatic outpourings of emotion, so far removed from the general attitude of restraint shown in Trek previously as to make it bizarre! They even do the cliches like the hands meeting on glass (or forcefield in this case), and again, hands reaching out before Mum Burnham gets sucked away in time, just too late. Again, it feels very like modern 'Dr. Who,' with the same lack of depth and reliance on surface-level shininess and unfettered emotion.

That's not all, they even radically retcon our most famous character: Spock is said to be dyslexic! So they want to make this era seem far more futuristic than it ever was shown to be before, and yet when it comes to medical conditions they slap it right bang into our time! As if dyslexia wouldn't have been cured long before then! There's also another example of a wheelchair skimming through the Discovery corridors, which has been seen before. 1) Why wouldn't it be a hover-chair considering how much antigrav hoverbots we see, and 2) any disablement or physical problem would be fixed. Unless, and I may have made this point before, the person in question is an Elaysian or some other low-gravity alien that can't stand in normal Earth gravity. The reality is it's all about showing diversity, the same reason we have people like Detmer who apparently can't get an artificial eye to look like her organic one, and has to live with a metal plate on her face (without the excuse of being Borg like Seven had!). It's about drawing in people by showing them an example of themselves, I suppose you could say the same about La Forge in 'TNG,' except that really was a different era with specific context and he was shown to actually have greater range of vision than normal eyes would have given him. But really, Spock dyslexic? Then we have Saru referring to firewalls as if that would be a term still used in the 23rd Century. They really have no idea how to craft a future world where everything is similar enough to be identifiable, yet also clearly advanced, something that even 'TOS' achieved on a regular basis.

There are always going to be anachronisms and things that are put in for the time they're made, but I don't trust these writers' judgement and it continues to be something that is constantly taking me out of the world, so much so that it breaks and fragments a poorly constructed iteration of that world and fills me with dismay how much they get it wrong! And then there's Michelle Yeoh. At least she isn't hissing and contorting like some silly 'Flash Gordon' villain, but when I think about it that is about the right analogy. It is just that with added glitz: we're reminded of the only reason she gets roles is to show off her considerable martial arts skills when Control/Leland, who has assimilated his body to use as a host, beams down and starts pew-pew-pewing away with the usual pop-gun Phasers as if he's Commander Data - how was he endowed with super speed, agility and reactions? Those are some nanoprobes! The one good moment of that whole scene is actually seeing one of their once-a-season uses of an actual Phaser beam when he shoots the time crystal, but even that is spoiled by the fact that this beam is somehow firing through a forcefield that is so strong it takes all Discovery's resources to power it, and so powerful it can prevent the suit and its passenger from being pulled into the future! So how can this beam go right through like it isn't even there? There's no consistency to the technology any more, they don't care if it makes sense, it's whatever the story needs, and a story without boundaries to rein it in just goes off its rocker.

As is the norm for the series there are so many problems you have to turn your brain off to keep going through the episode: Tyler takes a huge bug with him when Leland orders him to spy on Discovery, and activates it during a briefing. Initially I thought it was a listening device, but later realised it's to download the sphere data to the Section 31 ship - you notice how barebones they are in their approach to building this world in that such important things as a recurring ship don't even have a name! Bryce refers to it as 'the Section 31 ship,' which could get confusing since we've already seen they have other identical ships! Is it such a top secret vessel that it won't even say its name: 'oh here comes that mysterious big black ship with the crew that wear big black badges, I wonder who they could be?' Why wouldn't Discovery's own internal sensors detect and flag up that Tyler had activated a bug, anyway? When we're talking 'Flash Gordon' levels of ineptitude, it's not just in scenes degenerating into a one-on-one high-kicking fight scene, it's also in the ridiculous dialogue that precedes Georgiou and Leland's confrontation.

Back on The Section 31 Ship he convinces her to do what Tyler wouldn't and beam down with a bug to intercept the data (is the data stream from Discovery to the suit? So why do they need a bug anyway, can't they take it out of space since they have The Section 31 Ship hanging there!?), and he does it by appealing to Georgiou's base instincts and ego of being 'the most powerful woman in the galaxy.' But she's not, she's orphaned from her Mirror Universe and has had to be an underling for S31 as something fun to do, she's not the Emperor (or even Empress), and it shows how shallow the character is that she'd be influenced by him saying how much more powerful Dr. Burnham is thanks to her time suit. Genuinely, it wouldn't have been out of place in a 'Captain Proton' Holodeck adventure, that's the level of cartoon Trek has lowered itself to, and it is continually distressing. In fact there are more coherent episodes of 'The Animated Series'! I struggle to come up with anything that stops me giving this the lowest rating on my five star chart, but Dr. Burnham's veiled reference to Pike's future injuries, a future 'he won't like,' was fun, and I appreciated the poetic justice of Control's logic when deciding to use Leland's body, turning S31's own immoral ways against them because he's the ideal host due to holding multiple points of view in his head and not succumbing to guilt as the ends justify the means, so that was all good. Where this series differs from Trek is that that kind of stuff is where the real drama lies, not in 'Flash Gordon' hokey dialogue and silly laughs (Tilly's only contribution), or contrived fight scenes, but in the ideas. But they seem to have no idea.

**