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Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x12 - "Vaulting Ambition"

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Something people seem to be overlooking.

Why did Burnham bring an object along on an undercover mission that would immediately identify her as not being who she claimed?
1. If an imperial Captain is being searched, the game's already up.
2. She may need to prove exactly what she used it to prove. A backup plan, if you will. She seemed pretty prepared when that came up.
 
^I can't see them writing Isaacs out of the show, he is the straw that stirs the drink, so to speak. Prime Lorca has to be around somewhere; either that or he makes some redemption pact with Burnham to come back to prime and stay Captain. I would be shocked if they took him out of the show, it would seriously hurt the appeal and audience. He isn't a secondary character they can kill off for shock value.
 
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My Sunday (1/21):

- Wife wakes up pissed at me and we fight all day
- Jaguars lose to Patriots and I can't fucking stand the Patriots (but I do respect the hell out of them)
- US government can't get its shit together, shuts down, but I'm one of the ones that is ordered to come to work and not get paid until/if this is resolved
- Dr. Culber seems to be totally dead :-(
- and Captain Lorca is from the damned parallel universe. WTF?

I know, I know, the signs were there and some of you tried to tell me. But I was a Lorca believer, you know? A Lorca apologist, #TeamLorca. I wanted him to be a good guy, but rough around the edges - bucking the stereotypical trend. He reminded me so much of myself. And then, BAMN! He's a straight up sociopathic villain. Well, shit.

I wanted Dr. Culber to still be alive even if they brought him back by some kind of magic. IDC. Can't we have a happy couple on Discovery?

Not really happy with the episode, but still a solid 7 out of 10.
 
Even if prime Lorca is still about somewhere, that won't be the same character, and that's a shame.
I am annoyed they went the Mirror Lorca route, I was hoping Trek would give us a character who was flawed, ambiguous and a bit of an anti hero without needing a supernatural 'explanation' for it.

Other than that though, I thought this episode was great. Very well presented and gripping, with some great character bits with Stamets and Culber, and Yeoh is fantastic as the Emperor. An almost totally different characters but with enough the same to ground the connection between her and Burnham.

I liked the unflinching brutality of the MU this week; this wasn't coy, campy evil with gold sashes and ambiguous sexuality played for laughs. This was a universe of real horrors, which you could believe would generate amoral monsters.

So the spore drive doesn't exist in the MU, and it appears Mirror!Stamets messing about with the tech may have created a disease or similar which is wiping out the network - sowing the seeds of writing out the drive from the show, I assume. It raises the question of whether that was, speaking fatalistically, inevitable - if the network spans all parallel universes, in one there was bound to be a Stamets who made that mistake.

One question that remains though is that we seem to have parallel stories going on between Lorca and Stamets. Mirror!Lorca wanted to go back to the MU, Mirror!Stamets was trying to contact Stamets from the other side; which was responsible for Discovery ending up here? Both? Did Mirror!Lorca know of the technology on his side so sought it out on our side and dragged it out of a lab and into service?
 
I’m curious to see what Mirror Stamets does with Discovery and Prime Stamets does in the Mirror Universe. Why did they end up in the wrong bodies? Was that Mirror Stamets’ end goal? Did he know Mirror Lorca too?

The Mirror Universe in this incarnation seems to be physically different, with a different kind of light. It reminds me of the upside down dimension from Stranger Things. Mirror Georgiou also makes it clear that the split between the universes happened millennia ago, not recently. How do the same people with such similar backstories keep being born in each dimension? Maybe the two dimensions are physically tied together and feed off one another, need one another to exist.

What does honor mean to a woman who kills subordinates like other women kill flies? I hope they don’t set Mirror Georgiou up as someone to be trusted. Mirror Lorca, on the other hand, is the only Lorca we know and he has a few more shades of gray than the writers will probably allow him. Which one will Burnham choose?
 
I'll be honest and say I'm disappointing that they have Lorca being from the MU because I think he was a character more in the actual TOS mold - but that's what happens when you let the guys who worked on ST:VOY (which was crap front to back) do their interpretation of the TOS era.

(...)

Kinda wish the actual writers WERE actual fans of the TOS era. But after this, no they don't come across as such for me. Not a deal breaker though as their 23rd century universe has some interesting aspects, but their ST:VOY roots are plain to see.

I just want to correct something said here. Yes, Bryan Fuller worked on Voyager and co-created Discovery. However, his last story credit was episode 3, Choose Your Pain and he hasn't been involved since. The only other person on Discovery who had worked on Voyager is Joe Menosky. He had been credited as a Co-Executive Producer up until episode 6 or 7. After that, his name hasn't been in the credits anymore.

Further to the Menosky news, there seems to have been some replacements made to the producers and writers halfway through the season. Aron Eli Coleite and Jesse Alexander, the writers of episodes 4 and 7 are no longer in the credits. Neither is Kemp Powers, the writer of episode 5. Added to the credits is Jordan Nardino, the writer of tonight's episode. There might be more changes but those are the ones I noticed.

The inevitable tell-all book about the first season of Discovery will be a must-read.
 
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Who fired on the Rebel Headquarters? And why was his or her ship invisible?

Apparently, it wasn't the Palace after all - it takes a (short and slow) warp trip in a shuttle to get from Rebel City to the Palace. Of course, with the Palace being mobile, it's not all that strange that it would currently be located a short hop from Rebel Central. But it would be odd for it to first fly in to do the bombardment, invisible, then fly back out and decloak, and then receive Burnham and Lorca.

I'm getting a TOS vibe from all of this: no Cooper on screen and an invisible assailant because it's cheaper than showing an actual ship! Except it probably isn't, at this day and age. But invisibility for the sake of convenience makes for odd plot development, in a show where the enemy being invisible is a central theme for the first half of a season.

Timo Saloniemi
 
No, but Lorca is a main character they can kill off for shock value.
Yeah, but Isaac's Lorca was without question the most compelling character in the show so far.

In polls here he was overwhelmingly voted as the best actor / character.

If they remove him from the show, do they think that people will pay to watch SMG's wooden Burnham?

If they take Discovery into a TNG-style monolithic group-think utopian fantasy, at least for me it will lose all appeal.
 
No, but Lorca is a main character they can kill off for shock value.

Or even leave alive in the MU for shock value if they wish, and still write him out of the show for good.

Yeah Burnham says "Why cant we see them?!"
The emperor implies that it was her who fired though. Perhaps they were long range weapons of some description.

Which would be fun also in the sense that she would then probably have fired them already back when she gave Burnham the command, anticipating that she would balk, and perhaps even hoping to catch her in the blast. :devil:

Timo Saloniemi
 
It was Michael's only way out of an execution. Why is that difficult to understand?
Oh, I completely understand why Burnham would do that when she is seconds away from being killed.

What I don't understand at all is why a few posters here would think that Lorca being deceptive is morally worse than the mass-murdering Emperor who tortures and kills multitudes and eats Kelpians.
 
...I'm getting fond flashbacks of John M. Ford's Final Reflection where the Klingons muse that they might need to remove the Whitefang from the diplomatic menu since the UFP considers them a sentient species.

Their name for Kelpiens?

They didn't switch bodies, they just both woke up.

There's no reason why PU Stamets' body couldn't travel to MU or vice versa. A Stamets (or a tardigrade) has the power to make stuff go places. That includes any Stametses and their clothing, too; being surrounded by a starship is not a requirement, but more of a hindrance.

Whether "our" Stamets ended up aboard ISS Charon in the right uniform, or aboard USS Discovery in the wrong one, is currently utterly unknown. Doesn't seem there would be much surprise involved in the man in PU uniform finding himself in an eeeeeevil room, though. But Stamets isn't the sort of guy to worry about such things, regardless of which Stamets we're talking about.

Timo Saloniemi
 
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