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Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x09 - "Into the Forest I Go"

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Which is exactly why it would be dumb of the writers to do the predictable thing and make him villainous. Much better to have the twist be he's actually heroic in the end.

Not that I'm saying they won't be dumb, but why give the audience exactly what is expected?

Either suggestion sounds predictable and cheesy,

much better IMO to have him simply be mad, or going mad, not villainous, nothing so intentional but reacting to madness, or ptsd, or what have you. A desperate man simply too afraid to go back.
 
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However, after rewatching the scene, I do need to walk back my "murder" comment somewhat (in regards to this, not to L'Rell). At the point she switches, aims, and fires, we the audience have seen that T'Kuvma has already impaled Georgiou in a manner that suggests a mortal wound, but Burnham can't yet know for sure whether it is too late to save her or not, from where she's standing. Saru doesn't tell her he's lost the captain's life sign until just after she fires. In her mind, she was doing what she thought was necessary to save Georgiou, in the moment. She was just a split second too late. I'm sure that the utter futility of the act, and thus the entire preceding exercise, does add significant weight to her guilt and self-reproach, though. The whole debacle was still a huge fuckup on her part, which she'd strive not to repeat. And I'm sure she does at least question her own motives. Or should, if she doesn't.

-MMoM:D
In her mind? How do you know? If she wanted to she could've stunned him. You don't set to kill if you don't mean to.

I must be heartless because I sort of don't give a shit about Michael's painful past of ghosts and disappointments. When you're on the job you do it and you take responsibility for what you choose to do. If you can't operate that way or take the consequences if you do act out, then find another vocation. Starfleet is not one big therapy session for the damaged. Though with Lorca, Michael, Tyler and Saru .. maybe it is.
 
The best episode of Discovery yet!!

PTSD, Lorca doing the right thing, great pacing, suspenseful....everything well done.

I think Lorca is Section 31 btw.
 
If they just spore jumped into the Mirror Universe it opens up a lot of possibilities for a great episode that serves as an immediate prequel to "Mirror, Mirror(TOS)." Remember, from the Mirror Universe's perspective - at least to high-ranking officials with access to Imperial Terran intelligence files dating back a hundred years - that side already knows ours exists. The U.S.S. Defiant from TOS becomes Empress Sato's weapon and flagship as she seizes power over the Empire and Imperial engineers spend the next century back engineering 23rd century Federation technology. If the Discovery pops into that universe a decade before Kirk and his officers' transporter malfunction there's no logical reason it couldn't jibe with both the TOS episode and ENT.

I say go for it. They're probably going for it anyways.
 
He'll just have something he wants to achieve, probably tied to his history as they keep bringing that up. Methinks it may be saving his old crew, …
You know, I think that's actually the best theory yet for what Lorca's plan might end up being (if there is one). His idea might be to jump to an alternate universe, where the Buran is still intact, and somehow save the crew. “Infinite permutations” and all that jazz. It's certainly more interesting a theory than the persistent Section 31/Mirror Universe/Klingon agent theories.

Observation: It's interesting how the rapidly-escalating circumstances of Burnham's heat-of-the-moment shooting of T'Kuvma, and this discussion of it, have somewhat mirrored a great number of recent and past police shootings, and the discourse surrounding them in the United States of late. I suspect that may be quite an intentional parallel, rather than an entirely accidental or coincidental one, and that obvious prospect only just now occurred to me. I love Star Trek.
An interesting observation! On an unrelated note, am I the only one who though Kol's “Lock her up!” towards Burnham wasn't accidental?
 
You know, I think that's actually the best theory yet for what Lorca's plan might end up being (if there is one). His idea might be to jump to an alternate universe, where the Buran is still intact, and somehow save the crew. “Infinite permutations” and all that jazz. It's certainly more interesting a theory than the persistent Section 31/Mirror Universe/Klingon agent theories.


An interesting observation! On an unrelated note, am I the only one who though Kol's “Lock her up!” towards Burnham wasn't accidental?

Intriguing...let’s take it one step further. What if he literally has to go back, because the only reason he survived is because he saved himself. What if he is literally living a loop, over and over to save his crew. What if Burnham is becoming key to this, because the loop he actually needs to fix is preventing the war. It’s possible each and every member of Discos crew, without knowing it, is actually working on a loop that brings their own lives back into balance...Stamets could be in a lab. Maybe he’s meant to be. But Lorca needs him, and has put him in the place he is in...if the loop is fixed, then Stamets goes back to his lab, no more mutation, but no more spore drive to end the loop either....Tilly, maybe she’s meant to be on the command track but some decision somewhere needs redoing, maybe some of them are even dead in some other permutation. This even includes Saru...maybe he died on the Shenzou.
Maybe Lorca is Star Treks version of Gene Hunt, and everything, all the symbolism about people being true to their nature or exceeding their presumed nature in some way, is about those choices, and Lorca, with his fortune cookie symbolism, is trying to change all their fortunes, over and over again, permutation after permutation, just like his Nemesis, Mudd, an episode or two back.
Maybe with its black alerts, the true ship of the dead, whose destruction ultimately will save the day, is the Discovery.
And that’s why it’s captain cannot look into the light, and why the Klingons are Torchbearers, lighting the way.

None of this likely to be true.
But it’s an interesting thought.
 
The Beacon of Kahless vs. The beacon of the pahvans.

13 more ships should be arriving to destroy Pahvan any day now.
 
In her mind? How do you know? If she wanted to she could've stunned him. You don't set to kill if you don't mean to.

I must be heartless because I sort of don't give a shit about Michael's painful past of ghosts and disappointments. When you're on the job you do it and you take responsibility for what you choose to do. If you can't operate that way or take the consequences if you do act out, then find another vocation. Starfleet is not one big therapy session for the damaged. Though with Lorca, Michael, Tyler and Saru .. maybe it is.
Look, I get it. You don't like that these characters all have very serious flaws and have made very serious misjudgements that have had very serious consequences, and are nonetheless (well, a little bit less, in Burnham's case) still accepted in Starfleet and portrayed as protagonists—though not, I would argue, "heroes" in the simplistic "good guys versus bad guys" sense. You're coming in loud and clear on that point.

But what we were originally talking about in context of "Into The Forest I Go" is Burnham doing exactly as you suggest she should have done in "Battle At The Binary Stars"—i.e. stunning L'Rell instead of killing her. By your own arguments, shouldn't you be citing that as an improvement, a development of character that corrects what you had such a problem with in the first place? I'm not grasping what your actual complaint about that is.
 
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Why would you think that emotionally ill people can't still use logic? Of course she was using logic. But she was mis-using it, her judgment being clouded by emotion. The fact that she ignored the also-quite-logical counterpoints that Sarek and Georgiou and Anderson and Saru voiced indicates she had already made up her mind and would not listen to reason, whether she was conscious of this or not.
Burnham hadn't made up her mind until after speaking with Sarek. She didn't "ignore" Georogiou's counterpoints, she knew they wouldn't work and concluded that her plan was the only one that might save the ship. She was not proven wrong. Sarek gave no counterpoints. He simply cautioned her that the Vulcans' method of handling the Klingons might not yield the same results for humans.
She was almost burtsing at the seams when she talked about "targeting their neck and cutting off their head." She tried to do the sort of thing we might think Spock would have done, but she couldn't pull it off because she wasn't in a balanced state of mind, and this distorted her reasoning.
She was adamant about her position. "Bursting at the seams", is your interpretation of her state of mind. But keep in mind that Burnham is a human raised on Vulcan and is not actually Vulcan. Thus she is always going to display more emotion than a Vulcan might.
It's based on being familiar with and able to recognize obvious and well-documented patterns of passive-aggresssive behavior in real life. But even if we choose to be gullible and ignore the obvious subtext, the fact remains that any and all onus for whatever consequences befall Stamets and the rest of them belongs on Lorca, as the captain. The decision to offer may have been Stamets' but the decision to accept was his, and his alone.-MMoM:D
So, if it's never proven that Lorca manipulated Stamets, will it then follow that you really have no ability to recognize passive aggressive behavior in real life? Again, my point is not that Lorca didn't manipulate Stamets, only that there is no on screen objective evidence of that.

As to whose responsibility it will be if something bad happens to any of the crew or the ship; one thing is for sure, if we find out that Lorca did actually intentionally interrupt the spore jump and that turns out to be the cause of them ending up in the East Japipi quadrant, then Lorca deserves the blame for whatever happens there. That close up we got of Lorca's controls was no accident.
 
But what we were originally talking about in context of "Into The Forest I Go" is Burnham doing exactly as you suggest she should have done in "Battle At The Binary Stars"—i.e. stunning L'Rell instead of killing her. By your own arguments, shouldn't you be citing that as an improvement, a correction of what you had such a problem with in the first place? I'm not grasping what your actual complaint about that is.
Someone said it wasn't Starfleet operations to shoot to kill regards L'Rell. I just responded that Burnham has proven she is more than willing to shoot to kill. As for whether she did the right thing leaving two of L'Rell's victims alone with her is actually more stupidity from Michael. Hey, I'm heading off now to fight a big arsed Klingon, you three try and play nice now, okay?
 
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