WiC Watches—Star Trek: Discovery season 2
Episode 201: “Brother”
The season 2 premiere picks up right where season 1 left off, as the Discovery is receiving a distress call from the U.S.S. Enterprise while en route to the planet Vulcan to pick up its new captain. Knowing that her adoptive brother, Spock, is on the Enterprise, Michael Burnham is worried and anxious since they haven’t talked in a long while.
When they reach the ship, they find out the Enterprise has been severely damaged during a five-year mission to investigate seven mysterious red signals, meaning it missed the entire war with the Klingons. It’s clear that whatever these red orbs/signals are, the Federation wants them investigated quietly.
Anyway, Pike and two members of his crew beam aboard the Discovery, but Spock isn’t with them. When Burnham asks about her brother, Pike tells her to keep her expectations in check. Later, he reveals that Spock isn’t even on board the Enterprise. He’s taken extended leave and no one seems to know where he is.
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Pike quickly settles in and tells the crew that he is under orders from Starfleet Command to commandeer the Discovery to continue the Enterprise’s very important mission to investigate the seven signals. It’s at this point we get our first taste of how good season 2 is going to be. Pike and Burnham have instant chemistry; their back-and-forth crackles. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Mount and Martin-Green had been acting together on the show for many years.
Pike gives the order to hit warp speed and head for the first of the seven signals, and as I wonder to myself (out loud) why they aren’t using the spore drive, lead science officer Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) gives me my answer. He’s watching a video of his recently deceased boyfriend, Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz). Stamets is grieving and has decided to leave the Discovery when it reaches Vulcan, meaning the spore drive is offline, for the immediate future.
But don’t worry: according to SyFy Wire, Cruz has been promoted to series regular for season 2, so Culber should be coming back…although it may be an alternate universe version. Or maybe we just see new home videos of him every episode, although I doubt it.
Okay, back to the show, and to what I consider the best scene in any of the many Star Trek shows and half the films out there today: Once the Discovery reaches the source of the first signal, it comes out of warp in the middle of an asteroid field, but Burnham does some long-range scans and finds out there is a crashed Federation medical frigate on the surface of the largest asteroid.
Because of the interference, a rescue crew consisting of Burnham, Pike and two of Pike’s officers — a female officer wearing a red shirt, so you know she’s f*cked, and a male officer wearing a blue shirt, so he’s going to okay — have to take high-speed landing pods from Discovery to the surface of the asteroid while avoiding smaller pieces of giant space rock.
The scene seems like it was cut straight out of a big-budget J.J. Abrams Star Wars or Star Trek film. It’s an intense, heart-pounding chase that comes at a high cost, as the blue shirt guy gets smashed. A win for red shirts everywhere!
On the surface, the team finds the remains of the medical frigate, as well as an engineer named Jet Reno (comedian Tig Notaro) who has rigged up a triage unit where she’s kept several members of the ship alive for several months using her engineering skills and because she “can read” a medical book. Jet Reno might just be my favorite new character.
Pike, red shirt, and Burnham are able to rig up a way for the Discovery to beam the patients and everyone else aboard, but at the last minute something goes wrong and Burnham jumps off the platform. She gets left behind.
She quickly sends a communication to Discovery so the ship can get a lock on her location and begins running away from the crash site as fast as she can, as the asteroid it’s on is about to be sucked into a pulsar. But as she makes her way clear, a beam falls on her and she passes out. When she awakes, she has a vision of a red angelic-like figure before Pike beams back down to rescue her.
Finally, at the end of the episode, Burnham boards the Enterprise to investigate Spock’s living quarters, and realizes he’d been having nightmares of the seven signals, calling them red angels, and that he took leave to go search for them, alone.
“Brother” surpassed my expectations for the sophomore season premiere of a streaming service show. The chemistry between the actors was better than ever, the action was intense and exciting, and you could tell CBS threw some money at it. Let’s hope this keeps up.