CBS

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CBS

Last night's episode of Star Trek: Discovery was in some ways the true beginning of the series. We finally boarded the USS Discovery and met some of our series regulars, including the cynical Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs), sunny Cadet Tilly (Mary Wiseman), and tough-as-nails security chief Landry (Rekha Sharma). We also found out what the Star Trek universe looks like when we leave the comfy world of the Enterprise and plunge headlong into war.

Spoilers ahead for ST: Discovery episode "Context is for Kings."

At one point in the episode, Lorca loses his patience with Burnham's obsession with ethics and barks, "This is a ship of war!" At that moment, the series signaled its complete break with Star Trek series of the past. I couldn't help but hear an echo of Guinan's line from the TNG episode "Yesterday's Enterprise," when the ship has accidentally slipped into the wrong timeline and become a warship. Only Guinan can sense the change, and she tells Picard, "This isn't a ship of war; it's a ship of peace." By the end of the episode, we've returned to the "right" timeline where children roam the Enterprise, and the ship continues its mission of science and diplomacy.

On Discovery, however, this mission has been corrupted by war with the Klingons. Science officer Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) complains bitterly to Burnham about the military coopting his research into a mysterious fungal structure that underlies the universe. And he's not just complaining about long work hours. We find out that the Federation pushed Stamets' research partner so hard that his experiment on another ship got out of control and killed the entire crew, leaving their bodies twisted up like molecules. This is like something out of Firefly or The Expanse, not good old Star Trek.

The creepiest part? In a franchise where our captains and crew have always been undeniably good, we suddenly can't trust authority anymore. Lorca gloats to Burnham about how the weaponized "mycelial network" will let them teleport over vast distances, blipping halfway across the sector for black ops. Sure, we've seen corrupt captains and even admirals on Star Trek before, but they were always at the margins. They were the people "our" captains would fight against and defeat. Now our captain is one of them.

Down the rabbit hole

All the scientific work on Discovery has become top secret, and tests of their technology are called "black alerts." During one black alert, Burnham watches as the surfaces in her sleeping quarters extrude floating blobs of liquid, then return to solidity again. The very fabric of reality is warping in this version of Trek. Perhaps that's why we hear Burnham reciting passages from Alice in Wonderland to calm herself down when she's being chased by what looks like a giant tardigrade in a Jeffries tube. As she explains to her roommate Tilly, the book helped her understand how to cope in a world gone mad.

Make no mistake: Discovery is about a world gone mad. Lorca wants Burnham on his ship because he knows she shoots first and asks questions later. He tells her that, in a time of war, he wants a crew that knows there is no such thing as a "universal" ethical code; instead "context is for kings." In other words, rules must be suspended at certain times, in certain places.

This goes against one of the fundamental tropes of Star Trek, which is that ideals like the Prime Directive should be upheld at all costs (even though characters often violate it). But we're in a kind of historical gray area with Discovery, because the Prime Directive may not exist yet. Different episodes have suggested various origins for the show's universal law. In TOS, Kirk mentions that the Prime Directive is 13 years old, while Picard once said it was created in response to a war with the Klingons. So it seems that Discovery exists in a liminal zone, when the Federation was not yet as law-abiding as it later became.

Where’s the utopia?

Discovery gives us a version of Star Fleet that we've rarely seen; it offers no examples of just organizations or good authority figures. Instead, we have people trying to retain a sense of morality in a world where their leaders are lying, war is destroying the fabric of reality, and science is a tool of destruction. People like Saru and Tilly are trying to do the right thing, but it's not even clear what the "right" thing is.

Burnham decides to stay with Discovery because Lorca promises she can help "stop the war." He doesn't mean they're going to dismantle the entire institution of war, the way the Federation has during the TNG era. Nope. Lorca just wants to crush the Klingons. And ultimately Burnham doesn't really have a choice about whether to join him or not. Lorca's already stolen a giant monster from another ship and is doing black ops with cosmic fungus. He could probably just kill her if she says no.

Star Trek fans have been taken aback by how much Discovery has left Star Trek's utopian roots behind. This is a franchise that was famous for its optimistic vision of the future. It's worth asking why the show has abandoned its sunny outlook at a time in history when arguably we need hope the most. As Lorca would say, context is king. Perhaps during troubled times in history, we need a character like Burnham to show us what it means to strive for moral progress, despite personal and political disaster.

Maybe, in the context of 2017, a happy vision of tomorrow would feel like a lie. In that case, Discovery is offering us hope through its characters rather than its political world. After all, one of the puzzling features of Star Trek has always been how we got from our messed up, war-torn present to a future with no war, no money, no racism, and healthcare for all. Discovery is about that in-between place where yesterday becomes tomorrow. It's about how people must act now, in an imperfect but ethical way, to get us the Federation we hope for.

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