Star Trek Discovery S5E3: Jinaal

Last week we established the framework for the rest of the season: Discovery’s crew have to find literal pieces of a puzzle that will lead them to unfathomably powerful technology left behind by ancient aliens. It’s a clunky setup, but it makes for a good excuse to visit a new planet each week and embark on a new adventure, so there are worse ways to structure a season.

Except this week’s planet isn’t new. It’s Trill, which Discovery visited last year. It’s home to aliens (also called Trill) who have a symbiotic relationship with long-lived hosts that inhabit their otherwise-humanlike bodies. Trill live a normal lifespan; the symbiotes are passed on from host to host and live for centuries, accumulating the memories of each host.

Last week’s clue led to a Trill who lived 800 years ago, but whose symbiote is still alive and embedded in an elderly woman. Playing a little bit fast and loose with the established Trill rules, the old woman does a Trill mind-meld with Dr. Culver, and the 800-year-old host Jinaal lives again, in Culver’s body.

Jinaal was part of a team of scientists that investigated the ancient aliens back when Captain Picard discovered them. One of them was killed by whatever this ancient technology is, and the rest vowed to keep it secret for fear of it falling into the wrong hands, especially when the Dominion War broke out shortly afterwards, and there were no shortage of wrong hands for it to fall into. 

So Jinall/Culver isn’t ready to hand over this week’s clue. He’s looking for a “worthy seeker,” much like the knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and sends Burnham and Book up against a potentially deadly test — he hid the clue in a canyon where alien monsters go to hunt. It’s pretty transparent excuse to work in an action scene, but it’s also a pretty great action scene, as the monsters are half-Predator, half-demogorgon and spit flaming spikes, and this being Star Trek, Burnham and Book have to try and find a way to resolve things peacefully.

In other words, it’s all the kind of fun stuff Disco does well. And it gets resolved with enough time for the episode to carry three other subplots, with varying degrees of success. Last week, we complained that the character beats got short shrift behind the plot and the action, but this week we get full storylines with three pairings:

The weakest of the three is Adira reuniting with their boyfriend, Gray. He’s a Trill who decided to stay behind on his home planet late last season. They’ve been apart for months, and it’s gotten awkward between them. It’s nice to see Ian Alexander again as Gray, as he has a flair for giving the character a slightly otherworldly air, but the relationship stuff is very pat, and the big what-it-all-means speech they give Gray at the end of the episode is a little much.

Next up is Saru and T’rina, who are planning wedding announcements as he starts his new job as an ambassador. Her slimy assistant warns off Saru, saying some Vulcans won’t appreciate their President marrying an outsider, that gets into Saru’s head, they have a big talk. It all works well, mostly because despite both characters being stilted and overly formal, the two actors still manage to convey tremendous affection between the two. As always, Doug Jones and the CGI team make Saru’s craggy alien face remarkably expressive.

The best of the three side plots involves Rayner, the grumpy recently-demoted Captain who Burnham tapped to be her first officer last week. She tells him to get to know the crew, he steadfastly refuses to get close to anyone, and Tilly takes it upon herself to get him to make an effort. Earlier in Disco’s run, it would have been an exercise in Tilly being awkward and overeager and annoying Rayner, which would have been hilarious or cringe, depending on how you feel about Tilly. Except that’s not how it goes. Rayner’s the comic foil, as he’s hilariously abrupt with the crew, and Tilly’s the straight character, frustrated with him, but patient enough to get through to him. It shows admirable growth in both the character and the writing of her. Regardless of the type of show or the storyline, a final season always works well if the audience can look back and see how far these characters have come.

Stray tachyons:

• We’ve seen Trill before on TNG and DS9, and established rules about how the symbiosis thing works, but Disco has pretty resolutely handwaved that away. In the TNG episode where the Trill are introduced, we establish that a human can’t host a symbiote for more than a few days without dying, but then Adira hosts Gray’s symbiote and they’re just fine. Then Gray appears as a hallucination only Adira can see, which isn’t how that ever worked. Then Stamets is able to transfer Gray’s consciousness from Adira’s head to a robot body… through the power of love? They don’t really even try to explain it, and a show about fake science needs to at least pretend to care about the fake science. This episode doesn’t care either, but earlier episodes have not-cared harder, so that’s something I guess.

• Yay! Jett Reno is back! Last season Tig Notaro was used sparingly, as she’s immunocompromised and had to be extra-careful on set. We’re hoping they work out a way to give her more screen time this year without risking her health, because we could watch an entire hour of her just tossing sarcastic asides at poor Stamets.

• Wilson Cruz does a great job of inhabiting a completely different character when the symbiote takes over Culver’s body, and while I understand that that’s what actors do, I’m still impressed when someone does it well.

• Todd Stashwick’s pissy Captain Shaw was the highlight of the last season of Picard, and it’s entirely to Discovery’s credit that they don’t simply repeat what worked before with Rayner. He’s an entirely different flavor of grumpy bastard.