It confuses the issue a bit that half a season passes between the escape and the witnessed debilitation. Is that "a little"? Or enough for the illness to work its course? We can't easily make assumptions about the progress of the ailment - but OTOH we have no reason to think it would not worsen monotonically. Spock never gets better, after all: he only descends deeper and deeper into his madness as far as we can tell. First he's rational enough to commit himself to custody; then rational enough to illegally fight his way out; then rational enough to hide in his parents' basement, muttering to himself; then barely rational enough not to eat his own feet. And then he gets cured. Timo Saloniemi
Except Michael, Tyler and Pike instantly recognize the black badge as Section 31 in season 2. If that was their job, then they totally dropped the ball by when Michael wandered into the spore chamber and checked things out. Why weren't they guarding it then?
Lorca wanted Burnham to wander in there. Telling the guards to look the other way would be suspicious, though. So it's better to just assume he had already given Burnham enough privileges to get her inside the guarded sections of the ship, and the guards still stood between the secret bits and any randomly visiting lunatic killers or unprivileged scientists. S31 would only need to be there until the Spore Drive panned out and all those other 299 experiments on how to win the war could be discontinued or moved elsewhere, of course... Beyond that point, everybody would be authorized and in the know, there only being about 135 people left aboard and all. Timo Saloniemi
Yeah, it didn't make any sense. The technology and spores are right there in an unguarded engineering bay, yet the spore "plants" are guarded for some reason, with rather laughable security.
Lots of people who have mental illnesses go through good periods where they are rational and understand their condition and then relapse into a state where they don't, and there are different triggers for different people depending on the illness, the person, the environment they live in etc.
Even if we consider that, if the Black Badges in season 1 were indeed there to guard the Spore Drive, why did they completely disappear after Context is for Kings? Since Disco was then using the Spore Drive as a tactical asset against the Klingons, there would be a greater necessity for specialized security officers to guard it instead of telling them to pack up and see ya in your story arc next year.
So, the black badges in season 1 were there as the personal security force for the head of Starfleet intelligence, who was there as VIP to tour the ship and check out the Spore drive. When Burnham first boarded Discovery, he/she was in that room on his inspection tour. That's why we saw the black badges only in that episode.
That's just it - why are the guards there originally? Because Starfleet does not trust its own in wartime, and probably rightly so, as Lorca's crew is one of intellectual screwballs, weirdos who study mushrooms or worse. The ship is running experiments to win the war, and the Spore Drive one is not a leading candidate when Lorca kidnaps Burnham. The folks two decks over studying the viability of Purple Matter or Cosmic String Knots might be making better progress, but they mustn't know about each other - for the same reason Stamets and Straal were split, but also for the better reason that if Purple Matter bombs are to be deployed, these mushroom charlatans cannot be allowed to spread the tale. But then Spore Drive pans out, and suddenly the ship has no need for personnel who would not know what these black alerts are all about. Indeed, the giant vessel only sports a hundred-plus folks from then on. There is no need for internal security from that point on: S31 is not needed for fighting back Klingon boarding parties, as every starship by default has a perfectly regular security force for that very purpose. That this overall would be a S31 project, no doubt recommended by Control at that, is hardly in doubt in retrospect (and no, don't confuse this with "writer intent" or other such irrelevancies!). Heck, Lorca no doubt sits where he does because he sleeps with the S31 heir apparent: Spore Drive (among others being studied aboard the Crossfields) is likely to have been rather directly overseen by Cornwell, which is how this Mirror Man was able to land on his feet and start plotting a course back home. But S31 would not have a hands-on approach to the project as such, and Lorca would want those hands off, and would get what he wants because, well, Cornwell. Hence all these easygoing science weirdos being so surprised when S31 does get its hands firmly on stuff relating to their line of work again... As for VIP guards, the one VIP I could see lounging behind that door is Cornwell. Given her overall omnipresence and duplicity, she's the one superior officer who would not get too curious about Lorca's elaborate plot to kidnap Burnham, and might actually be deeply involved in it. But given her behavior in her introductory episode, she'd have to be even more duplicitous than otherwise seems (i.e. a better actor even vis-á-vis the man who abuses the relationship with her)... I gather Lorca just pulled the wool over her eyes thick enough to keep her off the ship until "Choose Your Pain". Timo Saloniemi
When the four Admirals get killed by Control, Cornwell is quoted as next in line to command that organization. And since she's dead, Leland. And since he's dead, Tyler. So yes. Cornwell is one of the extremely few anointed, the next in line being lowly Commanders. Not counting all those other S31 bosses no doubt also killed by Control (it must have killed three dozen ship commanders of Leland's approximate rank to gain control of those vessels, and is likely to have scored more than four kills aboard the prison satellite, too). But none of that changes the fact that Cornwell was supposed to inherit S31. Which goes well with everything we know about her, and better still with everything we don't know. She's always there when shady things are afoot, often by unknown means. She is also the one to promote DS9 S31 style activities such as genocidal tactics for winning wars... Timo Saloniemi
...And to be fair, she was only discussing planeticide, not genocide - Klingons don't all live on the Homeworld. Calling the nuking of a city "genocide" is both semantically and technically incorrect. Offing a planet in Trek is analogous to nuking out a city, not to offing a planet, and no doubt even the most benign of cultures consider it a more or less standard maneuver in any war. Klingons did this a lot in Burnham's War, erasing the populations of worlds. It's just that striking at a homeworld with full lethal force is an obvious no-no, as evidenced by the fact that it never happens. Why this would be is not explicated - is it the implicit orders-of-magintude greater body count compared to even the biggest known colonies, or some sort of innate sanctity of homeworlds? But not even Klingons or Feds, the two most arrogant slaughterers of the quadrant, appear to go for it. You need a bona fide madman for some reason. Timo Saloniemi
Yeah, no. That's nonsense. If my country had a large minority of French people, and I commit acts to kill them all, I do not have to then go to France and kill every French person there, too, in order to have committed genocide. From here: The crime of "genocide" defined in international law (http://preventgenocide.org/genocide/officialtext.htm) And further: Also interesting, according to the modern day definition and law, Starfleet command, Cornwell, Sarek, and Georgiou could already be put to trial since they conspired and attempted to commit genocide, which is already criminal. And they'd have gone through with it, too, if Burnham, Tilly, and Tyler hadn't remembered that the Nuremberg defense isn't in the spirit of Starfleet or the Federation.
And that is a bunch of nonsense. Nobody has ever gone to jail for conspiring and attempting and successfully completing citicide. Hitting a city does not seriously endanger a species or a group, not even at this day and age of urbanization. A dead letter is a dead letter. Killing one guy does not mean an attempt to remove malekind from the surface of Earth; upping the numbers, killing a billion people of a specific skin color is not genocide any more than killing a billion people regardless of skin color. Only "mass murder" is apt here. And people titled Admiral get medals for that. Timo Saloniemi
Well, cute that you disagree with an actual used definition of what constitutes genocide in favor of your minimization. And also, no, in a civilized society like the Federation is supposed to be, an Admiral would not get a medal for destroying "a city", or to remove your minimizing attempt at rebranding what the Federation was about to do, destroying thousands of cities filled with in all likelihood billions of civilians. Because: So, no to the medal. But hey, they probably could get a bitchin' nickname like the "Butcher of Q'onoS" .
Well, the point there is that the entire real world out there does. The "actual" definition is never "used". That is, 1) it is never used in the real world on folks on your own side, as those cannot err (hence Sarek and Cornwell would never get prosecuted). Only tin-plate dictators of pushover nations may be thus prosecuted, and that's not the case here. 2) it is never used in the world of Star Trek, where planeticide is an explicitly accepted and supported practice from the very get-go. Why, Kirk would be court-martialed if he didn't do it! (Heck, he even has authority at his starship captain level to decide whether or not.) Yet it's a Starfleet General Order to do exactly that. Pondering whether or not to proceed is not conspiracy to commit crime - it's a strategic decision, is all. But Starfleet doesn't believe in war crimes. Only backward aliens do. Timo Saloniemi