Aw yeah, now this is what I am talking about. This is Star Trek at its finest. This episode has a lot of what I have been wishing for in the past, a focus on one of the side-characters (ie character development) and better pacing. This time it doesn't feel like they're trying to cram in three stories in one episode, but this one is all about Saru.
While it still is an episode that feels like it deserved a bit more time and setup, I am not going to complain. I was fully invested and intrigued in what was happening on screen and I enjoyed pretty much every second of it.
Discovery is still trying to catch Spock in the hopes he can give some insight to the odd signals they have been following, when they receive another one. This one is from the planet Kaminar, the homeplanet of Saru which he swore he would never return to. What with what happened two episodes ago however, Saru is more than eager to go down there to liberate his people from the Ba'ul, the species that has been essentially preying on the Kelpiens for centuries.
Let me just interject myself here and say that I consider the Short Trek episode that preludes Saru coming to the Federation almost essential watching before this episode. It explains how Saru ended up on the Discovery and I am lucky I found out about them and watched them before this episode. I find it odd that they would make such important information something of a side-story that is easily missed (although they are probably betting on that no Star Trek fan would miss out on these short-stories) but I guess they didn't manage to bring into a regular episode somewhere.
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| Kelpiens farming kelp. |
Either way, Captain Pike and Burnham agree that the urgency of finding out what the signals are all about means they can set aside both the Prime Directive and Pike's legitimate worry that Saru will fudge everything up so that he can get revenge on the Ba'ul. They agree that the odds that the signals would come from Saru's homeworld by pure random chance are infinitely small, so probably whatever is sending the signals wants Saru to be involved somehow. So Saru and Burnham go down to Saru's old village to see if they can find some more information about the "Red Angel" that has been seen accompanying the signals.
There are some good scenes with Saru before then however, that help to further make clear the changes that he has gone through. The first one is a scene he has when he tries to comfort Hugh Culber (the fact that he is back on the ship is briefly dealt with in this episode). Hugh tells Saru that he doesn't really feel like himself anymore and Saru says "in feeling less like you were, you're becoming more like you were supposed to be". This quote is clearly more to illustrate what is happening to Saru and to set the stage for what is to come in the episode, it's great.
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| He's angrier now. |
The second scene is just after when Saru almost has an altercation with Pike on the bridge, when Pike says he doesn't think Saru should go down to Kaminar. This entire scene perfectly shows that Saru has changed from the gentle, conflict-avoiding person he used to be into someone who is about to punch Pike in the face if he has to. Of course Doug Jones who plays Saru really sells it too.
Down on the planet Saru meets his sister Siranna who, after a very emotional reunion, tells them that they have seen something. Before they can talk much more about it though, they're found by the Ba'ul and have to get back to the ship. The Ba'ul immediately demands that Saru returns to them or they will destroy his home village. Pike refuses but Saru teleports himself over. And this is where things get really interesting.
I'm going to interject myself again here. I had already made a guess about what the nature of the Kelpien transformation and relationship with the Ba'ul would be. It looks like that guess was correct, but I wouldn't say that was a difficult guess to make. About a third into this episode I made another guess, inspired by the Isaac Asimov novel "The Gods Themselves". Without going too much into that book (read it though and spoiler alert here if you haven't), in it we find out that the "stronger" species that is taking care of the "weaker" species is actually the "weaker" species in its next form. I had an idea that maybe that could be the case here as well, where the Kelpiens essentially evolve into the Ba'ul and this has to be hold secret for some reason. It doesn't look like that guess was correct, but it's a pretty cool idea right?
In the Ba'ul complex, it's a bit unclear exactly where Saru is, he also meets his sister Siranna. We get to see a Ba'ul for the first time, which/who basically looks like if an oil slick turned into a human. They definitely don't come off as a very nice species. Meanwhile, as Saru is having a conversation with the Ba'ul, Burnham and Tilly are scanning through the records of the big sphere from the previous episode to see if there is any information on the nature of Kaminar. It turns out there is. A couple of millennia ago, it seems like the Kelpiens were the ones killing off the Ba'ul, until the Ba'ul introduced the culling method of the Kelpiens they have kept up until present day. It seems that when the Kelpiens go through the Vaharai unkilled, they turn into something vicious that the Ba'ul don't want to keep around. We get a glimpse of this when Saru shoots some sort of spikes from his head towards the Ba'ul.
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| Saw someone posted this on Twitter, and that is pretty much what the Ba'ul look like. |
This is where the episode goes into "suspend your disbelief a lot here people because things are going to get rocky on the realism". The Ba'ul leave Saru (shackled to the wall) and Sarinna to be killed off by some drones. Saru of course breaks his shackles and destroys the drones, and manages to reassemble the drones into a communication device to contact the Discovery. But why don't the Ba'ul notice that their drones just got splattered and that Saru is talking to the Discovery? They do nothing to stop him anyway.
On the ship, Pike agrees to use the signal from the sphere that put Saru into Vaharai to put every Kelpien on Kaminar into Vaharai, to help them rise against the Ba'ul. Firstly, talk about breaking the Prime Directive! Secondly, Pike has literally no idea what this will do to the Kelpiens. Sure, Saru survived it but Pike is using technology he doesn't understand on a species he knows almost nothing about. It might just as well just kill all of them.
What instead happens is that the Ba'ul decides to use their technology to kill off every Kelpien on Kaminar before the Vaharai is done. Also something that Pike should've seen coming. While Pike tries to prevent this from happening, what does save the Kelpiens is the mysterious "Red Angel" that destroys all of the murder-pylons that the Ba'ul has set out in every Kelpien village. So now every Kelpien has gone into stage 2 and... we're not entirely sure what will happen from that.
The Ba'ul hint that the Kelpien turn into monstrous, preying beings when they're in their stage 2 but Saru thinks the Kelpien can go above that behaviour. It'll definitely be interesting to see if that is the case, since Saru himself said that Kelpiens who undergo the Vaharai and don't get culled go mad. Maybe this is what he meant without knowing it?
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| A very disturbing scene if nothing else. |
Also, considering how much evil-Philippa was eating Kelpiens back in the mirror-Universe, she could possibly know a whole lot about them. Clearly she also disturbed the great balance that the Ba'ul were so keen to preserve, although maybe they were ok with is since she also killed them. I hope they acknowledge this fact at some point.
I enjoyed this episode so much. I mentioned that I feel like they could've done more with the build-up, but what they have done is definitely enough for me to feel invested enough in Saru and his people to care. The whole concept is just so cool, and while it feels surprising, it's surprising in the right way. It doesn't feel like an impossible plotline, but like this is where the character of Saru was going all along. It feels like what they were trying to do with Kes (which I also mentioned in my previous post) but they've actually done it much better here.
We still have to find out what the "Red Angel" is and what motivations it has for sending the signals and meddling in planet affairs to begin with. We also have to find out what connection Spock has to it. So far it all feels very disjointed and it is difficult to see the bigger picture. But that only means that it could be all the more satisfying and impressive if they manage to bring together all the threads to a satisfying whole. If they manage that, this season could be absolutely spectacular and possibly one of the best within Star Trek.
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