Weekend Trek “The Butcher’s Knife Cares Not For The Lamb’s Cry”

So, two points before I go any further.  First, the episode title here is rather poetic, reminding me some of the more flowery episode titles from the original series.

Second, this episode has aged weirdly since it has a passing mention of Elon Musk as one of humanity’s great innovators, so I suspect this episode came out before Elon’s politics became more public knowledge and he became a lot more divisive as a public figure.

Well, if I thought Lorca’s secret lab with the giant unkillable thing in it might be a season-long plotline, nope!  Lorca takes Burnham there to work, saying that the creature, eventually dubbed “Ripper” by Lorca’s security chief, ripped apart a dozen Klingons, so Burnham needs to find a way to weaponize the creature.  Said security chief will be there to keep Burnham on task.

Now, here would be where I refer to the security chief by name, but she gets herself killed when she decides to tranquilize Ripper and gets ripped apart for her efforts.  This comes out after Burnham notes the creature resembles certain Earth-based microscopic life forms.  I kinda noticed that myself, and I had assumed the creature was a microbe that had been grown to extra-large size thanks to whatever the spore drive does, something that goes along with the way the Glenn‘s crew was physically warped to bizarre shapes.

However, that apparently is not the case, and if this show is starting to look like it isn’t really a Trek show, this episode is there to say it is well aware that this is something of an odd fit for Star Trek.  Lorca is interested in producing weapons to defeat the Klingons, leading battle drills on the bridge, and not for a bad reason as the episode also has a ticking clock scenario where a Federation mining colony is under Klingon attack, it’s bad, and the Discovery with its spore drive is the only ship that can get there in time if the Discovery crew can get the spore drive to work.

But, at the same time, Lorca complains about the way much of his crew signed up for exploration.  Stamets complains about that directly.  The security chief, she’s more in the same mindset as Lorca, and that is essentially what gets her killed.  Burnham, she’s there for the science and the exploration.  She’s the one that figures out Ripper is actually harmless if you keep him in the dark and don’t attack him.  He feeds on the spores the spore drive uses, and his brain works as some kind of supercomputer for navigation.  Granted, it might have been nice if Burnham figured that out without testing Ripper’s hostility by asking Saru to just step into the room without telling him why.  Saru, he deserves better than that as the one guy there who might be decent to her if she starts to treat him with more respect, something that is probably a downside from Burnham’s Vulcan upbringing while still being human.

Besides, Tilly doesn’t strike me as a soldier-type, and yet she’s here too.

If there’s any doubt that this is still the show where a ship explores strange, new worlds while seeking out new life and new civilizations, there’s Burnham’s ending scene where she gets an inheritance from Captain Georgiou: the woman’s telescope, to remind her to look for things, you know, instead of blowing them up.  That will come in handy because, even though using Ripper got the Discovery to the mining colony just in time to save the colony from the Klingons, it appears to have done something to hurt Ripper in the process.  Ripper maybe can’t do that sort of thing too often.  Lorca may or may not listen to that.

Though there is a Klingon subplot where Voq, the albino, goes to the wreck of the Shenzhou for parts to repair his own damaged ship only for another Klingon captain to take it for the cloaking device, stranding Voq alone on the Shenzhou.  Except, a female Klingon, L’Rell, says she can help him because she comes from the devious House that does sneaky things.  I’d say more…but I don’t much care about these Klingons.  It takes too long for them to say anything.