7.1.2 The Excluded Middle

Battle At The Binary Stars

Ladies, gentlemen, and those beside, between or beyond. Please take your seats for tonight's presentation - the total deconstruction of Commander Michael Burnham.

Ballistic Ballet

First: preliminaries and stage-setting. "Battle At The Binary Stars" is an unusually slim episode. At just 38 minutes, I'm not aware of a briefer live action Trek episode not actually preceded by the word "short".

This doesn't seem unreasonable. "The Vulcan Hello" cranked us to the top of the roller coaster, and now this is the dive. You want that to be fast. Accordingly, much of this episode is taken up with the various phases of the titular battle. This is then interspersed with short vignettes to allow the viewer time to breathe, and to give greater context to Michael, as our main character, and to Georgiou and T'Kuvma, as the two opposing leaders whose approaches she's caught between.

It's a common enough strategy, but it's certainly very competently done here. "...Binary Stars" makes the most of over a decade of progress on what TV SFX can do - never has Trek made the senseless loss of life look so pretty. It feels kinetic and frantic, too. I've never been in a space battle, and neither have you, but to me at least this feels "right". Maybe that's just another way of saying it's a capable staging of what we've seen before, that I've been trained by forty plus years of media consumption to consider this as being how space battles are done "correctly". If so, all I can say is that I'm comfortable with that. Especially since Starfleet's tactics here - work out which ship most needs help and come to its rescue - feels very on-brand for the Federation. The extent to which the Kurtzman era boils down to "do what everyone else is doing, but a bit more Trek" is going to be a recurring theme in this stage of the blog, but in this case I don't see much of a problem. I continue to wish the Klingon fleet had a more coherent design aesthetic - the Sarcophagus Ship looks vaguely in line with previous designs, but the rest of the fleet is a mishmash of chunky tasers, fighting fingernails, and angry metal moths (a brilliant idea in any other context, obviously). I've complained about this already, though, and while I think it's odd to choose a familiar antagonist, make their entire deal about the need to remain who they always were, and then render them completely unrecognisable, ultimately these are aesthetic preferences that doesn't get us anywhere.

Stellar Cartography

Let's focus on something more interesting, then: the ways the episode develops T'Kuvma, Georgiou, and Burnham.

As always, IDFC takes titles and names very seriously. There are three main characters around which the narrative is formed here. Each of them clashes with the other two over the course of the episode (admittedly rather briefly when it comes to T'Kuvma and Burnham). Given this triangular structure, what can we take from the decision to set the battle in a binary star system?

Speaking broadly, our two opposing leaders (Admiral Whitesplain arriving just long enough to be smugly condescending and then get a Cleaveship to the face) represent alternative approaches to reconciling the importance of one's cultural heritage with the fact time only flows in one direction. T'Kuvma embodies the drive to remain what one has always been, resisting the pull of external forces, however those forces and their sources are conceived. Georgiou, in contrast, is convinced an endless process of change is needed, so as to move ever-closer to unreachable ideal - note that she tells Michael that Sarek chose her to mentor his foster daughter because she had come from a life of loss, and still made the decision to choose hope.

Neither approach are quite as simple as that summary suggests, I realise. T'Kuvma clearly desires change, or he wouldn't need his war. It's just that the change he seeks is revanchist, a return to what he believes constitutes the "right" way to be Klingon, and so to him, it somehow doesn't count. On the opposite side of the system, Georgiou's insistence that any amount of change is justified so long as one is heading in the right direction conveniently ignores her belief that there's only one proper starting point for that journey, which must be arrived at before any progress to that glorious endpoint can be of value. Still. there's a broad truth in summarising T'Kuvma's position as the need to keep faith with the past, and Georgiou's as the past needing to be left behind so we can move toward the future.

These are the twin poles of the episode. The binary stars Michael finds herself stuck between. And the thing about binary star systems is that it can be tough to end up in a stable orbit within them. The gravitational fields pull in too many directions. Is it any wonder, then, that Michael seems to be breaking apart?

Violence As Vaccine

Let's consider our two gravity wells in isolation first, though, before we explore their interaction. Continuing the theme of baseline competence, "...Binary Stars" does a good job of fleshing out T'Kuvma's nature in very little time. Much of this comes from just two short scenes, in fact, the conversation with the representatives of the Klingon Great Council, and the brief flashback to his youth which takes place within that exchange.

Between them, these moments fill out the other half of the picture we glimpsed in "The Vulcan Hello". We talked last time about why T'Kuvma's position on the Federation's quiet assimilations is justifiable, but what we didn't really get into is why he sees that as a problem for the Klingon Empire specifically. Why is he so convinced that a strategy of quiet, insidious assimilation-through-amity is something the Klingons need to fear?

Turns out, this concern is a corollary to a more foundational fear - that his own people have in large part abandoned what it means to be Klingon. The inciting incident here takes place while he was still a child, when he discovered a gang of older children kicking about in his father's downed spaceship as though it were a playground, rather than a graveyard. His loud outrage at this, and the beating he receives in response, demonstrates T'Kuvma has no fear to tell those more powerful that him when they've crossed the line. It also shows us where that line is.

Both of these come into play when he addresses the High Council representatives. I don't think for a moment it's an accident that T'Kuvma arrives late, or that he starts off by berating those gathered for focussing on the inconvenience of the meeting, rather than their duty to the Empire. As with those boys on the downed ship, T'Kuvma doesn't give an inch when he's sure he's right, no matter who he's up against. But it's the other side of this which is more interesting - T'Kuvma fears that Starfleet will spread its sickness to the Empire only because the Empire has allowed itself to become so weak. The Federation threatens to redefine the Klingons because the Klingons know longer know how to truly define themselves. A war against the Federation not only weakens their direct ability to "infect" the Empire, it reminds Klingon society as to what it means to be healthy. This awareness of what it means to be a "real" Klingon is fundamental to his worldview - the only quality that matters. When one of the representatives sneers at the "outcasts and vermin" T'Kuvma has gathered about him, T'Kuvma retorts that all one requires to join his house is a commitment to the doctrine that the Klingons must remain Klingon.

We'll leave aside all the problems inherent with the idea that there's any such thing as one right way to be a person, and that whomever is in charge is the ultimate arbiter of whether that right way is being followed in any given case. We come to bury T'Kuvma, not to judge him. What matters is that his appeal to act in accordance with what it pleases him to believe constitutes the old ways is completely successful. He dazzles the representatives with a show of military prowess (never mind the fact he only manages that through a combination of outnumbering the UFP Fleet and the Pyrrhic victory of ramming the Fed's biggest ship with his own biggest ship [1]). Whatever happens from now, his point is made. He has won his war to start a war. The representatives prove this as they take up his battle cry: "REMAIN KLINGON!".

Captain Jerk

This is an impressive amount of work to get through in just nine lines of dialogue. But we can go further. The scene on T'Kuvma's bridge also demonstrates the pointlessness of the crew of the Shenzou fretting over who started the war, or at least failed to stop it from starting. This will become Michael's show, but right now it isn't hers, or Philippa's. It's T'Kuvma's. Thinking there was One Weird Trick the Feds could have tried to avoid the war is just one more way to assume no-one outside the Federation has any agency - that they're just NPCs whose dialogue tree you need to explore until they agree to join the party.

We switch our attention here to the second star, and Georgiou's treatment of Michael. Firstly, to acknowledge the obvious, by the time she gets to yell at her former first officer, the captain is very far from her best. Her ship is in ruins, probably dozens of people she was responsible for are dead, the entire Federation is perhaps in its greatest peril since the end of the Romulan War, and her closest friend aboard the Shenzou assaulted her so they could seize the ship and betray everything she stands for. Expecting her to excel at interpersonal relationships at this point is armchair quarterbacking (counsellor chair captaining?) of a kind we should all be able to rise above.

All that said, when someone talks about trying to deprogram someone, because the culture they were raised in differs from the one they're entering and that this is somehow considered a problem [2], I'd say that while the word "arrogant" certainly applies, it wouldn't be the first adjective I'd reach for. It's one thing to recognise problematic aspects within another culture (though if and how one talks about same depends hugely on context in general, and power differentials in particular). There's a strange new world's worth of difference between that and taking it upon yourself to correct those aspects in someone raised within that culture.

And yes, caveats apply there too - if some dickhead white Brit blunders into almost any other culture, slapping the imperialism out of him is doing the Prophets' work. That isn't what's happening here, though. Michael isn't a contemporary oppressor, or even a historical one. She's simply a human raised in a society many humans have previously struggled to deal with, Yes, she's too literal-minded to process Georgiou's niceties when she arrives on the Shenzou, requiring Sarek's help to navigate the situation. This isn't evidence of any kind of problem, though - new jobs and new people can take getting used to. Generally, that's only an issue if you're determined to make it an issue. That might be less true in the specific case of a military structure (which makes accidental boss-sassing more hazardous than it might be elsewhere), but even then, it's far from clear it's specifically Michael's cultural context which needs taking into account. I've spoken at length about why I hate the concept of the Vulcan's "logical" approach, and why, but when I see Michael's first moments aboard ship, I don't see some "view from nowhere" prat insisting only the dispassion of the privileged can be considered rational. The coding here is of a young neurodiverse black woman at her first day in a new job in a new culture, who's brought her foster father to help smooth the transition process.

I don't want to risk overplaying the theory of Burnham being neurodiverse. Unlike my ideas about Spock's chronic depression, I don't have the necessary lived experience to theorise without straying from my lane. In any case, I'm not sure it matters in this particular instance where Burnham's difficulty in talking to Georgiou comes from. The problem is Georgiou's assumption that a) this is a problem to resolve, and b) the resolution requiring Michael from her cultural context. It's not at all hard to read this as an insistence that some cultures are much more equal than others. She blames her own "arrogance" in thinking she could release Burnham from her Vulcan "shell", but the real arrogance here comes in the assumption that her only mistake in all this was to not be able to stop Michael's mistakes.

For all her strength, and kindness, and will to help others, Georgiou's entire approach to her ward over the last eight years proves T'Kuvma's point. The words that drive him are "remain Klingon". The words that drive Georgiou are "become human".

Post Hoc, Ergo Procter Hoc

All that said, I'll accept Michael's upbringing has much to do with at least the specifics of the communication glitches that occur when she first arrives, just as they did with her poor approach to persuading Georgiou to fire first last episode. It's far less clear that this is true of her abortive mutiny. Michael herself notes she has no idea if the problem lay in a failure of logic, or a suppression of emotion. She can't tell if she's learned too much from her captain, or not enough.

Burnham's confusion isn't shared by the broader narrative, judging from several clues scattered through the episode. Firstly, there's the shade cast on Georgiou - we've noted some of this above, but we could also note how quickly her firm stance on the inviolability of Starfleet principles breaks down into booby-trapping the enemy's dead [3] to avoid having to pilot a bomb herself.

We also have the scene in the depressurised brig, where Burnham receives a pep-talk from her Vulcan foster father, and uses her aptitude with logic to argue Shenzou's computer into a position where it is compelled to save her life [4]. Others have noted that this "out-logic the computer" beat is a classic Trek move. And yes, this is a venerable tradition stretching all the way back to "Return Of The Archons". There's a fairly important difference in this particular iteration of the trope, though. Burnham isn't presenting paradoxes or demanding infinite computations to stymie a system. She's constructing an ethical argument from logical principles in order to achieve a humanitarian result.

For my replicator rations, this is the best case the franchise has ever made that the Vulcan approach might work in the way we're told it does. The intellect put to the service of kindness - this is what Vulcans are "supposed" to do. In contrast, as the episode reaches its climax, we're reminded of what can go wrong when we give in to emotion. Burnham blows the plan wide open by blowing a hole through T'Kumva's chest. In doing so, she guarantees an interstellar war. The shell Georgiou spent so long chipping at has finally fully cracked, and the result is disastrous.

Or so Michael believes, anyway. As with my essay on "The Vulcan Hello", we need to distinguish between what makes sense narratively, and what makes sense as making sense inside Michael's head. Again as with last time, there's little reason to believe the two should coincide. Burnham is presumably still suffering the after-effects of radiation poisoning and having killed somebody, and on top of that we've got the fact she's betrayed her captain/mentor, obliterated her career, and been criticised for "wasting resources" by her foster father. On top of that, she's convinced herself she's responsible for hundreds of deaths, and the crippling or destruction of three Starfleet vessels. Her upbringing means she's not just blaming herself for everything that's happened, she's shamed by experiencing that blame. Stuck between two starts, she's being rent apart. Plus there's the whole explosive decompression thing (note that this is a journey through the vacuum of space from Sarek's position to Georgiou's). She needs immediate hospital treatment and only vaguely less immediate Navy-strength therapy.

All of which makes it impossible to see what should be obvious to us. Essentially nothing that takes place ahead of the assault on T'Kuvma's bridge is affected by her actions at all. Her mutiny isn't something the Klingons are even aware of. There's no suggestion during the actual battle that Michael's presence would have made any appreciable change to the death of the Shenzhou (I think you could argue Connor might have survived, but I'm not inclined to lay that at Michael's feet).

Most importantly, the desperate mission to capture T'Kuvma from his ruined vessel is functionally identical to how things would have shaken out had Michael followed orders. It was always going to be Georgiou and Burnham on that mission, just as it was when they saved the Crepusculans at the start of the series. Nor is there any evidence of tension between them during the mission itself. Seriously, show someone the scene in the transporter room and then T'Kuvma's bridge, then ask them what relationship exists between Burnham and Georgiou. Nothing here nods back to the fact one officer had imprisoned the other hours earlier.

The entirety of the case that Michael bears any responsibility for the war lies in the fact she might have averted it had she taken T'Kumva hostage. As it happens, this seems extremely unlikely. The Klingons just handily beat a dozen Starfleet vessels in Federation territory. They've just learned they have access to cloaking tech. Immediately after they left to spread word of their great victory, Starfleet commits the war crime of booby-trapping a Klingon warrior's corpse (they have NO HONOUR!) in order to cripple a ship they could not beat in honest combat. Why would the Klingons set all aside if Starfleet dishonoured T'Kuvma by taking him alive? Michael tries to argue they'd be inclined to sue for peace to get him back, but she also argues capturing him would make him a symbol of failure, which directly contradicts the first claim.

We'll come back to this next episode, when the era of Michael Burnham: Galactic Pariah kicks off. For now, it suffices to say that Burnham's internal conflict did not cause the war with the Klingons. I'm not even sure it caused her split-second decision to set her phaser to kill before she shoots T'Kuvma. Does this really represent the final collapse of Michael's Vulcan reserve?. She's horrified and enraged to see perhaps her oldest friend gutted, so she shoots the guy that did it. In that specific context, could we truly call this surprising or unusual behaviour from someone trained in the philosophy of Sarek?

Had Tuvok had seen Janeway slaughtered by a Kazon Ogla, and immediately cut him down in response, how hard would anyone feel compelled to look for an explanation for his actions, beyond there just being some things too upsetting for even a Vulcan to shrug off?

The tragedy here isn't that the gravitational forces tear Burnham apart here result in war. It's that she's torn apart on the same day a war starts, in such a way that it makes it impossible for her to not blame the latter on the former (it's also very convenient for everyone else to do the same, as we'll see). In part, we might argue that this is in itself part of the general Federation tendency to think of themselves as the only real actors involved in interstellar drama here. Really, though, I think this is just more the deep-seated need to believe what you do can make a difference, even in the face of events that are completely beyond your control. Call it the bargaining stage of grief over the death of four starships and a fragile peace.

This is where the roller-coaster slows to a stop. The carriage has bottomed out, and so has Michael Burham. She's learned the limits of her logic when no-one accepts the need for a "Vulcan hello", and concludes her emotional responses also lead to disaster, when she kills T'Kuvma in a fit of rage. She loses her best friend, her captain, her ship and her freedom in the same day, a day in which she's also told she's too Vulcan by one surrogate parent, and not Vulcan enough by the other. Oh, and the people who killed her family are coming back to wipe out her entire society, so that's a thing. All of which, her brain tells her (and her brain must be logical, or she is nothing) is entirely her own fault.

It's one of the most comprehensive crushings of a main character as Trek has ever attempted. What else even comes close? "Chain Of Command", maybe? "Hard Times"? Even there, both episodes ended in a position where the show could pretend the status quo was effectively restored. This is something else - a character put in a no-win situation, whose flaws and insecurities lead to her losing in the most spectacularly damaging way possible.

As a starting point to build upward, there's no shortage of potential or material here. Perhaps, with Michael at her lowest ebb, we can begin the process of putting her back together?

[1] This isn't really the place for this, but why does ramming always do so much damage in Trek? I assume the Cleaveship held USS Europa with tractor beams so that it wasn't simply shunted aside, but why are the energy shields that can withstand hits from the most powerful energy weapons and explosive ordnance available three hundred years hence always flummoxed by just hitting them with sufficient kinetic energy?

[2] Georgiou's attitude calls to mind once again the old line from Lady Azetbur (herself Klingon, of course), as mentioned last time: "The Federation is nothing more than a Homo Sapiens-only club".

[3] Arguably a violation of International Humanitarian Law, by the way, depending on how the device is triggered. Either way, it's an act which risks enraging the Klingons to the point where no amount of targ-trading over the release of T'Kuvma would be likely to bring the war to an end.

[4] We might interpret that scene as metaphor. Georgiou complains about the Vulcans having erected a shell around Burnham, but in the brig, a shell is all that's keeping her alive, and its her own ability to think her way out of her shell as safely as possible that proves the best approach.

Ordering

1. Past Prologue 

2. Yesteryear 3. Battle At The Binary Stars

4. Parallax 

5. Fight Or Flight

6. Charlie X 

7. The Naked Now