7.1.3 Only You Can Save Mankind
- Ric Crossman
- 1 hour ago
- 11 min read
Context Is For Kings
A second try at the second try.
"Because He Was A Fun Guy"
The standard approach for considering this season as touched upon in my essays on "The Vulcan Hello" and "Battle At The Binary Stars", is that those opening episodes are best considered separately from the year's broader arc. It's not quite as simple as saying those episodes mark a total disjunction from what follows - Bryan Fuller gets the same story credit here as he did for "...Binary Stars". This is though where we truly begin the extended story that takes us beyond Fuller's overall plans, becoming something that I remember as being pointlessly dark and morally uninteresting. We can't know that's different to what Fuller had intended to head towards, but we can - appropriately enough - maintain hope.
But as Trek so often teaches us, no plan survives contact with the people you were sure were your enemy. In truth, I found myself appreciating "Context Is For Kings" far more than I did when it was first released. Partially that's just the benefit of knowing where all this ultimately ends up, and having had almost a decade to shake of the uncanny valley sense of wrongness that the show initially instilled in me. But it's also just that I'm a better critic than I was in 2017.
There were three things that originally turned me off about this episode. The first was my preference, often stated, that Trek treat the scary place as an occasional destination, not as home base. The second was seeing this episode as a course correction to the opening two episodes that hadn't really paid attention to what had actually happened in them. The last, and certainly not the least, was the way the first captain of colour ever to appear in Trek opening credits had been set aside, so that we could get ourselves Whitelad McHonky IV.
I'm not sure I'd completely retract any of those criticisms (particularly the third), but they certainly need a hefty amount of qualification and revision. In retrospect, "Context..." is a veritable Matryoshka doll of nested fake-outs - a story-long bluff that then proves to be a double-bluff in the final seconds, only for the bluffs to triple then quadruple over the rest of the season.
An argument that this is simply too many turnabouts likely wouldn't be difficult to patch together, but as an opening to the mystery of the Discovery, it doesn't lack for bravery. Or cleverness, really, given the episode's structure mirrors that of the broader season. What we have here is fractal fiction; the same shape repeated on multiple scales.
"Context..." initially goes all in on presenting Lorca as a villain, or at least someone standing above Lake Villain, preparing to plunge in after diving from the Cliffs Of Asshole. The idea his battle injuries require him to skulk in the shadows is almost physically painful in its lack of subtlety [1]. It has less restraint even than the fortune cookie metaphor – Lorca, in the context of both our protagonist and the woman whose place he’s taking in the narrative, is a mystery cracker.
Meanwhile, Stamets rages against him as a "warmonger", and Tilly, the character we're introduced to as a nervous babber/oversharer, clams up in terror the instant Michael asks what's going on aboard Discovery. Scary black badges and scowling security brutes abound. The man himself says he's been granted license to prosecute the war in whatever way he sees fit, a directive you only give when you don't actually want to be briefed on what "seeing fit" actually looks like [2].
Then there's the astromycology angle, and the attendant possibility Lorca's gameplan involves spreading astromycosis. It's not at all hard to see how Burnham comes to the conclusion Lorca is working on biological weapons. Something killed the crew of the Glenn, after all, and in an unspeakably gruesome and surely agonising way [3], and yet Stamets doesn't seem surprised by what he's finding until Klingon bodies start to show up. There's even some kind of gigantic homocidal killbeast loping about, which in the context of naughty science plots almost always means someone has either deliberately created or accidentally unleashed an existentially terrifying ladmuncher through their towering arrogance.
Every brushstroke here is painting Lorca as something even worse than a mad scientist, a mad project manager, one who the entirely sane scientists don't have the option of saying no to. But then comes the twist; this isn't about weaponry at all, it's about travel. The dark, bloodstained chaos of the Glenn is replaced by a glorious whirlwind jaunt across the wonders of known space, a small but powerful act of discovery aboard Discovery. Lorca, as he tells Michael, doesn't want to outfight the Klingons, he wants to outmaneouvre them, and in doing so perfect a technology that will do more for Starfleet's mission of exploration than any other breakthrough to date.
Yes, it's clearly a calculated sales pitch. Lorca is telling Burnham what he thinks she needs to hear to stay on the ship. And yet, he's not actually lying about what the spore drive does. Something will obviously have to go wrong with the idea at some point, given it's never used or even spoken about again in Trek, but the sudden shift in heading is still effective. The goal isn't to kill the enemy, it's to find a way to travel beyond them.
ScapeGOAT
It’s with all that said that I want to talk about the other way “Context…” originally irritated me – the seemingly universally-held idea that Michael is personally responsible for the Klingon War. Eight years ago, this felt like a contemptuously careless retcon. As I’ve already explored at some length now, war was inevitable. This is the great tragedy of Burnham’s mutiny – she threw everything away on the mistaken assumption her actions could make any difference. In fact, she made that mistake twice, first when trying to seize control of the Shenzou, and again when considering the plausible results of capturing T’Kuvma alive.
Even without so quixotically close a reading of the opening episodes, though, there’s no reason to believe the Burnham Betrayal is responsible for starting the war. And yet, this appears to be conventional wisdom across the Federation, as expressed by Michael's co-cons at the top of the episode. Somehow, it has become canon that the casualties at the Battle of the Binary Stars, and perhaps beyond, can be laid entirely at her feet.
Back in 2017, I assumed this was tawdry retooling; an aggravating edit aimed at making Michael's path to redemption less awkwardly complex. On reflection, though, it's at least arguable all that's happening here is the addition of more weight to the tragedy. The answer to why people would think Michael's treachery brought about the war, despite that clearly not being true, is that someone has put an awful lot of effort into telling people it was true.
But who could that be? The obvious culprit is Starfleet themselves. The highest echelons of the Federation must have been thanking their lucky binary stars that fate handed them someone they could pretend lit the fuse marked "WAR". That way, they could conveniently bury the inconvenient truth that their intelligence gathering efforts had wholly failed to uncover the development of a Klingon cloaking device, or the whereabouts of the gargantuan warship that boasted same, or the intentions of the charismatic zealot who installed the former into the latter to murder every Fed he could find.
I know I've spent a lot of time arguing how ridiculous it is to believe anything Michael did after donning her suit in "The Vulcan Hello" could have altered the fact that war was coming. That doesn't imply no-one had the chance to avert disaster, and finding a way to distract from that obvious fact is clearly and massively in Starfleet's interest. I'd even go so far as to suggest this is why Burnham has been given a convict jumpsuit that approximates command gold, rather than the grey sported by Stone, Cold, and Psycho [4]. It's a golden scarlet letter; a way to label the person society should blame, to stop anyone thinking too hard about why society is so keen on blaming individuals in the first place.
All of which I missed on my first pass. My only defense is that what the episode is very subtle in what it's saying. By which I mean that almost every character seems to be saying the same thing, without that thing actually being what we're supposed to believe.
In addition to Burnham's fellow prisoners, there are four people who pass comment on her past: Lorca, Tilly, Saru, and Michael herself. Tilly doesn't really go into details beyond calling Michael "the mutineer", but both Lorca and Michael herself seem convinced she bears responsibility for the war. But so what? Even by the end of this episode, the twist of Lorca's aims being less sinister than supposed has been complicated by his capture of the Glenn's bitebastard - he might not be building biological weapons, but that hardly makes him fully trustworthy. Micheal, meanwhile, clearly does believe the war is her fault, but we've covered already why her insistence on shouldering that blame is a true tragedy, rather than a true telling.
Really, the closest we have to a reliable commentator on what happened aboard the Shenzou is Saru (and Dehtner, but without context her astonished glare in the mess hall is hard to parse). And he doesn't bring up the war at all. It's clear he blames Michael for the Captain's death, either because she couldn't keep Georgiou alive during the raid on the sarcophagus ship, or because not staging the mutiny would have butterflied away the raid entirely. Neither of those seem particularly plausible from my perspective, actually, but it's not hard to see why he might think them plausible. In any case, what matters here is that what he very much doesn't do is take Burnham to task over the war itself. Our only primary source that lives outside of Michael's head, a person who explicitly takes her to task over his opinion on her failings, doesn't so much as mention the war.
This unlocks a much more interesting view of the episode than the one I originally settled on. "Context..." isn't a rewriting of the previous two episodes, it's entirely consistent with both Michael's inability to accept the galaxy might revolve at precisely the same speed with or without her at (what she sees as) the centre of it, and with the broader tendency in Trek to suggest Starfleet Command frequently fails to live up to the standards it insists upon in those below them.
Which, of course, brings us back to Starfleet's golden-uniformed golden boy; the man who they hope will win them the war. Captain Gabriel Lorca. It makes far more sense, both narratively and thematically, to assume Lorca knows he's lying when he tells Michael she helped start this war. He's manipulating her into helping him by playing on what he's quickly figured out is her biggest vulnerability - the belief that she can singlehandedly alter the course of galactic history. Great Man Theory expressed as self-loathing.
Fortune cookies, like every method of fortune telling, work by letting us pretend we're looking at a calendar, when we're really staring into a mirror splattered with inkblots. The future becomes a blank canvas across which we paint our present, over and over. Lorca knows this very well. He asks Michael what her future is going to be, but what he's really doing is exploiting her present. Her need to believe that she caused this mess herself, so that she can believe she can fix this mess herself. Lorca pulls a classic con - using his mark by letting her think she's using him.
"Wars Not Make One Great"
We have of course looked, more than once, at the toxicity of Great Man Theory - the idea that humanity's story boils down to a series of Big Decisions made by a comparatively miniscule number of people (almost invariably white men) who have acquired - deliberately or accidentally, temporarily or permanently, through gift or theft - the quality of Greatness, which allows them to change the course of civilisation. This has always been baked into Trek, particularly in its original iteration, indeed I've talked before about how starship captains can be likened to the rulers of city-states. There's a very real sense in which the success or otherwise of Trek's Third Age comes down to the extent to which it can finally recognise the theory for the lie it is. Lower Decks is built from the ground up a a rejection of the idea, Strange New Worlds has a complicated relationship with it, and Picard embraces it completely to a frankly disturbing extent.
Discovery, like Strange New Worlds, interrogates the idea without fully rejecting it. I think much of why I found the early seasons of this show frustrating lies in that failure to reject being the more prominent of the two approaches. On rewatching "Context...", though, it strikes me how Lorca not only embraces the idea of Great Men - the episode title itself references Lorca's pronouncement about how rules are for the little people - but weaponises the way Michael's guilt over the war is a dark reflection of the same theory. Ultimately, believing you singlehandedly caused an interstellar war is just as self-aggrandising as thinking you can singlehandedly win that war, it's just nowhere near as pleasant. What we're given here is hope that redemption for Michael will come not through individual heroism, but in recognising individual heroism isn't actually what gets the job done.
Sylvia's Adventures In Glumberland
I want to end this essay by talking about Ensign Sylvia Tilly for a little while. Tilly really doesn't appear to belong on the Discovery. Frankly, she seems far more out of her element on the ship than does Michael, who, let's not forget, has been picked up precisely because Lorca believes she does fit in. Yes, "Context..." plays with Burnham being in a situation she can't understand or easily navigate, but it isn't her who is lost in Wonderland, it's Tilly. A bright, friendly Ensign, fresh out off the academy at basically the precise same time everything goes to hell, and now trapped on a ship where she gets stuffed into shuttle trips to monster-filled funhouse abattoirs. It's a much darker alternative world than Carroll offered, but it's still unmistakable where in this episode the allusion is strongest.
The reference also suggests the episode knows the territory it treads should be seen as an aberration. Starfleet is supposed to be about wonder, and even Lorca (professes that he) knows it. There's supposed to be something better ahead. The spore drive is one acknowledgement of that fact. Tilly is another. She might be tempted to buy into Lorca's approach, as we see with her lie about assigned consoles, but ultimately the stronger urge is to try and be a friend to someone giving no outside sign of needing friendliness. Tilly isn't just a sparkler lit within one of the darkest Trek episodes IDFC has covered to date, she's a reminder of the alternative to that darkness that Trek at its best represents. A quick wink to the audience to let us know we're supposed to be feeling lost and confused, and that eventually, like Alice, we will find our way back home.
So it's good news, overall. "Context..." isn't at all the aggravating soft reboot I'd seen it as all those years ago. That realisation brings with it hope that I'll find myself enjoying this season overall more the second time through than the first. There is though a worry here. Almost this entire essay has focussed on the ways this story can form part of a broader story that is both clever, and Trek. None of that actually means that story itself is going to resolve the way it could, or should. I had to fake a total absence of knowledge about episodes 3 to 10 of Picard Season 1 so I could pretend the potential of its second episode was worth writing an essay about. I'll admit to some concern I've accidentally pulled the same trick in earnest here.
"Context Is For Kings" isn't a story which loses sight of where we're supposed to be. That doesn't in itself mean we're going back there anytime soon.
[1] Although it also gives the show its own look, beyond that brought on inevitably by twelve years of technological progress.
[2] There's also just the weight of the franchise to consider, given The Original Series only ever offered us three kinds of Starfleet Captain - retired, dickhead, and Kirk.
[3] The design work for those bodies is undeniably sick, in both senses of the word. An unspeakable charnel house of Starfleet officers twisted and knotted like blood-soaked balloon animals.
[4] Yes, really.
Ordering
1. A Man Alone
4. Context Is For Kings