This week on Star Trek: Discovery, Booker received a distress call from his homeworld, Kwejian, which was facing retribution from the Emerald Chain’s leader, Osyraa, for the rescue of her turncoat, the Andorian Ryn. Discovery is sent to observe, but can they really stand passively by when her dreadnought begins bombarding the sanctuary world?
“The Sanctuary”
Written by Kenneth Lin & Brandon A. Schultz
Directed by Jonathan Frakes
1. Booker’s Backstory
We finally learn where Booker comes from: he’s effectively a runaway, who became sickened by his people selling their trance worms to the Chain. We learn the Kwejian are among many pre-warp civilizations being exploited by the Chain, but Booker — or Tareckx, which we learn was his birthname — turned tail instead of fighting back, and that’s something his brother-in-arms Kyheem (Ache Hernandez) struggles to forgive him for. While the blood brothers eventually making peace was sweet, it wasn’t all that emotionally engaging: it felt like a scene between their initial, testy reunion, and their reconciliation was missing, and Kyheem’s adorable son Leto should’ve been introduced earlier. The storyline was ultimately interesting as a tour of Kwejian’s surface, but didn’t plumb any of its depths.
2. Osyraa’s Disposition
This marks the first appearance of Osyraa (Janet Kidder), so it’s a bit soon to say if she’ll rank up there with Khan, the Borg Queen and Dukat in the pantheon of great Trek villains, but what I like about her is how calm she is: she dispatches her nephew Tolor for his failures quite nonchalantly, and never raises her voice when speaking to Saru or Kyheem. It would’ve been easy — especially with her green skin — to make her the cackling Wicked Witch of the Final Frontier, but she’s clearly a self-assured ruler of a power to rival the current Federation. However, we learn from Ryn that she knows the Chain is living on borrowed time, as their dilithium supplies are running out, and it’ll be interesting to see how long she can maintain her cool composure.
3. Plausible Deniability Denied
Saru knows he can’t sit back and watch Osyraa smoke out Booker, but he can’t risk the Chain responding with open war on the Federation, so he comes up with the idea of having Detmer commandeer Booker’s ship, and using it to disable her warship. It’s a lot of fun seeing Detmer simply let rip on an enemy target, and Ryn as her nervous co-pilot (the sight of him being startled when Booker’s cat Grudge jumps onto his lap was especially endearing), but did anyone really think this would work? I’m surprised Osyraa didn’t aim a cannon at Discovery during the attack: don’t get me wrong, it was the right thing to do, but you gotta wonder how Admiral Vance is going to react to Saru’s own maverick streak.
4. This is Getting Claustrophobic
Georgiou undergoes a medical examination by Culber and Pollard, using a nifty device that analyzes her body by deconstructing her atoms — it’s essentially the transporter, repurposed for sickbay. It’s a funny storyline — Georgiou the unstoppable force, Culber the immovable object — until Philippa freaks out, the physically taxing process presumably bringing out the repressed trauma of San’s death. She thinks the best way to shake it off is to charge into action and retrieve Burnham from Kwejian’s surface, but Culber points out she became almost catatonic on her last adventure, and offers to talk to her about it somewhere quieter. We don’t see that conversation though: another casualty of the editing room, perhaps?
5. Adira Comes Out
One storyline that does get enough breathing room in this episode is Adira’s coming out: they finally disclose they’re non-binary to Stamets, after he compliments “her” work to Saru and Tilly. They admit they haven’t told anyone other than Gray before, and Stamets only replies, “okay.” Later, after Adira has fallen asleep at their desk, Culber checks in with his husband in engineering, and like proud parents, the couple comment on what an excellent member of the team they’ve been. They keep referring to Adira as they and them, a lovely way to normalize them for viewers unfamiliar with non-binary people — it’s just delightful.
Continued belowBonus Thoughts:
– On that note, Booker insisting Kyheem refer to him by his new name feels like a veiled reference to deadnaming, which is particularly topical after Elliot Page came out this week. He promises Kyheem to tell the story of how he got his name another time, which I look forward to.
– The sea locust infestation on Kwejian also feels quite topical, given climate change has rendered real locusts an absolute menace in Asia and East Africa this year.
– We learned the mysterious music Burnham heard on the seed ship, and which Gray played, comes from a distress signal originating in the nebula where the Burn started — I wonder how long it’ll be before we go there.
– More fun stuff: Linus’s annual shedding, and Saru’s search for a catchphrase (the crew genuinely did not know what to think of him saying “execute”).
This wasn’t the best episode, but it did a lot of necessary table setting for the coming weeks — “carry on,” as Saru is going to say from now on, and see you next on “Terra Firma.”
