"Star Trek: Discovery" Review: "The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry"

Despite the publication date, I wrote this before watching “Choose Your Pain.” Check out my reviews for "The Vulcan Hello"/"Battle at the Binary Stars" and "Context Is for Kings." Spoilers follow (duh).

Now this is the Trek that I remember.

Coincidentally (or not), this is also the best "Discovery" episode yet.

We have a title that would fit right in with the Original Series. We have noticeably fewer lens flares. We have some familiar themes. And finally, despite the show's darker veneer, we have some of that famous Trek idealism starting to shine through.

That isn't necessarily evident from the start. Michael is tasked with figuring out how to weaponize the creature from "Context Is for Kings," with security chief Landry assigned to help her out, or keep her in line, or something. We continue here to have some implausible, or at least muddled, plotting. Last episode, Lorca took pains to bring the creature aboard in secret — he immediately reveals his secret, to a brand-new crew member with no commission and with whom he has no history? (Because he doesn't trust the actual members of his crew?) And he picks a quantum physicist to do this sort of biological research? Or is it engineering? Or what exactly? How does one weaponize a living organism? And how does one then use said weapon in a space battle? (Fire the tardigrade like a torpedo?)

Anyway, if we suspend our disbelief, or accept the wave of the hand the episode gives to a couple of those questions, we at least get a parallel to the conscription of the spore drive and its crew. That leads, though, to Landry's spectacularly stupid death scene. She opens the force field to let out the tardigrade, fires her phaser at it and is mauled. Boy, is she mauled. And what, exactly, was she supposed to be thinking when she initiated this encounter?

It's clear we're not supposed to think too much about it, just accept this totally unexpected death of what had seemed to be a major character. (Look! We're like "Game of Thrones" now! Any character can go at any moment! Not just the red shirts!) I'll grant that there are narrative reasons to prove that characters are expendable — I spent at least a few minutes thinking there was going to be the old Trek reversal, with Landry somehow revived or replaced with an alternate Landry or ... something — but this feels more like a waste of a character than anything pragmatic because Landry's death doesn't really serve anything in the plot or in the development of our (actual) major characters. It barely seems to register for Michael or Lorca. And to argue that it serves the episode's themes is to disregard how cavalierly the scene unfolded, for the characters and those of us in the real world. Even Tasha Yar got a better sendoff. (Did I really just say that?)

We also get a grotesque moment with the Klingons, albeit one not pictured: Voq and L'Rell discuss eating Georgiou's remains. The detail might be explained away because they have been stranded for six months and are starving, but they seem to acknowledge a satisfaction in the act, and that makes this moment seem grisly for the sake of being grisly. ("Look out edgy we are now! Not your daddy's Trek!") And the effect there is that it makes the Klingons seem totally alien, or orc-like, which the creators should maybe be trying to avoid given the redesigned Klingons' physical similarities to orcs.
There's a narrative reason, too, to avoid similarities with orcs: They're typically portrayed as mindless savages, obstacles to be mowed down by our heroes, and they are the subjects of troubling racial commentaries, both of which will be problems if the writers want us to continue to have sympathy for Klingons (at least at the individual level). That's just self-evident: The less relatable they are as characters, the less likely we'll be engaged in this separate narrative through-line. And even if we want to set up Voq and L'Rell as outsiders among their people, if the show's eventual goal is reconciliation among the Klingons, it doesn't serve that purpose to have all the members of the race save two appear to be two-dimensional, faceless monsters.

Back on the Discovery, Lorca pushes Stamets into engaging the spore drive, which is a little easier to wrap your mind around here, where you can see it in action, than it was in "Context" and sets up a parallel with the Klingons' cloaking technology — both sides have a ship that can materialize out of thin air.

Given the apparent carnage at the colony, and the colony's apparent (if somewhat inexplicable) lack of defenses, you have to wonder how the facility isn't totally decimated. But if we skip over that point, as I did in the moment, the moment where Lorca plays the audio of the colonists' cries for help to motivate Stamets is stirring and truly human, making clear the stakes. And it's a sign that whatever their differences in disposition or motivation at the surface, Lorca and Stamets and all of our characters agree on the gravity of their mission, and the value of life.

About that! Michael has spent this whole time learning about the tardigrade and figures out it can help with the spore drive; it even has its own harness-and-computer setup, taken from the Glenn. (I guess that hints at its origins and its connection with the Glenn, or the Glenn's accident, although it's still not clear whether we'll be getting more answers there.) Yet even as the tardigrade does its thing and the mission is successful and everyone is celebrating and Michael is a hero, we see that the tardigrade is under duress and presumably even in pain. And Michael sees that, too.

This is classic Trek: learning to respect and appreciate life in all its forms, a theme that shows up in literally dozens of episodes across the various series. The clearest analogue here, though, is certainly "The Devil in the Dark," a TOS episode about a Pizza the Hutt-looking monster that has been killing miners but turns out to be sentient and peaceful, acting only to protect its offspring. (It's also remarkably forgiving, coming to an agreement to work with the miners/genocidal maniacs.) The message here, as ever in diversity-loving Trek: One life is no more valuable than any other.

We get another classic Trek trope when Michael brings herself to watch the message left for her by Georgiou, whose hologram, assuming that Michael is a captain by now, tells her: "Take good care. But most importantly, take good care of those in your care." Putting others ahead of yourself is so second nature to Trek that it's difficult to immediately conjure a character who doesn't. (Even Quark occasionally acts selflessly.) And some Trek cultures take that to extreme lengths — say, the Vulcans with "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."

Michael, having been raised on Vulcan, is surely familiar with that logic. In this case, though, our two Trek tropes appear to be somewhat in conflict. The tardigrade's life is valuable, but not more valuable than the lives of thousands of colonists under attack. Using the tardigrade to steer the spore drive may amount to torture, but it might also end a war. Will Michael be able to bear that kind of calculus? Can she bear to pick up that butcher's knife and sacrifice that lamb?

These sorts of conflicts, about morality, about sacrifice, have consistently been at the heart of Trek, and not every character has come to the same conclusion. We haven't seen enough yet of Michael to know how she'll manage that decision, or how she'll justify it to herself. But the fact that it's weighing on her is our best sign yet that this series has some brains to go with the beauty.