Let’s start out with the mid-season finale, with probably Discovery’s greatest victory: destroying the Ship of the Dead; turning the Klingon cloaking devices obsolete; rescuing Admiral Cornwell; killing vicious Kol.

What merits brought this victory about? What is it that the ship’s crew does, that the production crew applauds?

S1E09 gives us two heroes: Stamets, making his 133 jumps, and Burnham, facing off with Kol on her lonesome.

I’ve written previously about how Burnham’s part in this episode is kiiiiinda dubious. Even though the episode centers on her, even though she gives a speech about how she has to be the one sent on this mission, what she’s actually doing is buying time. The reason the episode does center Burnham is less because she’s needed for the plot, and more because she’s needed for the narrative: what Burnham is doing in this scene is hating the Klingons, and hating proud, mocking Kol in particular. Storywise, putting Burnham in the spotlight shifts us from a mission of tactical necessity, to a mission of personal vengeance — taking down the ship that killed her captain; taking down the man holding her captain’s badge.

Now, I don’t object to making the fight personal. That’s good drama. But I am a little dismayed at how little there is to Burnham’s part here beyond her personal animosity. If we’re looking for “what do the good guys have that makes them win?”, then Burnham heading Into The Forest doesn’t give us a whole lot to work with here beyond vengeance. Does she win because she’s stealthy? Because she makes good mission plans? Because awesome fighting prowess? None of those seem to be the point of this scene, and none of them carries much emotional weight.

But Stamets. Well. Stamets’s role is very, very clear.

The 133-jump-triangulation plan gives Stamets a unique opportunity:

He can buy victory, and make his payment in physical pain.

The idea of risking danger for a worthy cause is fundamental to any adventure. So is the idea of heroism as the willingness to suffer for the greater good. But I would like you to notice this: researchers, navigators, or mycologists will very rarely be offered the tradeoff of greater job effectiveness in exchange for their own personal, physical suffering. Nor xenoanthropologists, for that matter. These aren’t physical occupations; to create a physical threat, the writing needs to work for it; to engineer a situation where that’s actually a choice.

What’s interesting is that Discovery’s writing is working for those situations really, really hard.

In “Lethe,” to find Sarek, the crew whips up a machine that converts Burnham’s pain into Sarek’s location:

“I can’t allow him to push me out again. But fighting him is gonna put a massive strain on me.”

“Then how do I know if I should pull you out?” ”Don’t.”

In “Magic To Make The Sanest Man Go Mad,” after a whole episode of racing desperately to stop Mudd in his 30-minute time loop, we don’t even see how they do wind up stopping him — the last time, they just suddenly do. What we do get to see as Burnham’s moment of heroism is: Burnham killing herself, in what we’re assured is an absolutely excruciating fashion:

“Of the 823 ways there are to die in space, this is rumored to be the most painful.”

I just want to emphasize that point a moment: If you’re on board with the idea that fictional victories are a story about how victory can be achieved, then the way “Magic To Make…” puts its weight on how Burnham secures one more iteration and not on what they actually do so that last iteration goes well is very significant. It’s a statement that the pivot isn’t the discoveries they’ve made about Mudd’s attack vector, or that they’re managing to pass on information ten seconds quicker this time because Trust and Friendship, or any one of a hundred other options. The pivot is Burnham’s self-sacrifice. The pivot is Burnham enduring pain.