7.1.4 Mirror Moves

The Butcher's Knife Cares Not For The Lamb's Cry

I think I think too much about mirrors.

They’re just so weird, though. It’s so ludicrous that we use them to look at ourselves. Because we’re not looking at ourselves. Ce n'est pas un moi, certainement. But more than that, mirrors invert precisely as much as they faithfully produce. An entire axis is reversed, the horizontal dimension rendered the most perfect lie. This is why people so often dislike photos of themselves. It’s like hearing our voice on tape – the actual truth doesn’t match with what we’ve always experienced ourselves, and we don’t like that at all.

“The Butcher’s Knife Cares Not For The Lamb’s Cry” kicks off with Michael using a holographic projection as a mirror in which to consider her new, unranked Starfleet uniform. Given the technology is clearly recording her image and rendering it in real time, there’s no obvious reason the image should behave as though it were created by a layer of reflective metal behind a thin pane of glass And yet that’s precisely what is happening. Michael is choosing (consciously or not) to see herself differently to how everybody else will see her.

In an episode so filled with thematic reflections (and which, as we’ll see, is both infiltrated by and partially set in the Mirror Universe), this is something worth bearing in mind. What we think people are seeing, and what they actually see, aren’t necessarily going to match up.

Guess Who's Coming With Dinner

We’ll start where essentially everything here started; the binary star system which saw Georgiou, T’Kuvma and thousands of others on both sides killed. We learn here that Voq and L’Rell, along with the other survivors aboard T'Kuvma's shattered sarcophagus ship, have been stranded in the debris field during Michael’s trial, imprisonment, and eventual conditional release. They’ve been floating, and starving, for a full six months. The justification for this is that the rest of the Klingon Empire have been very happy to just leave them alone while they stomp all over the outmatched Federation, and Voq himself has been unable to scavenge the parts they need to leave the system.

Except we learn that this isn’t quite true. They could find the parts they need, the problem is that would mean raiding the USS Shenzhou, the very ship whose crew felled their beloved T’Kuvma. For half a Terran year, Voq and L’Rell have been arguing over whether that fact renders the derelict Starfleet vessel profane ground. Would salvaging its technology to integrate with their own be a blasphemy against T’Kuvma’s memory, and his insistence Klingons remain themselves above all?

Before we get into the implications of all this, let’s take a moment to note that Mary Chieffo and Shazad Latif are simply killing it here. They’re being asked to act in a fictional language that nevertheless needs to be gotten just right, while under layers of latex, and to sell by turns frustration, exhaustion, betrayal and conciliation. By Gre’thor, Chieffo even has to act out faking a betrayal. I feel like I missed just how phenomenally these two actors are navigating all this the first time around, as I struggled with the colossal strangeness of combining perfect fealty to past Klingon lore, alongside wholly unrecognisable visuals. Let me take the opportunity to say, belatedly: respect.

At first blush, it might seem to us – or at least, it did to me – that this argument is a fairly silly way to justify T’Kuvma’s followers sitting out half a year of the war. I can believe the Klingon Great Houses were perfectly happy to leave them languishing, of course. It’s always much easier to have a religious figurehead to rally around when they’re dead, and it’s even more helpful when there’s no-one around who actually knew them, and who might take exception to how you’re interpreting their will. That’s unless you have control over them, of course. This is almost certainly part of what motivates Kol here – by bribing T’Kuvma’s people to abandon his own choice for successor, he gains not just extra warriors, but Klingons with a direct personal connection to T’Kuvma who he handily has a ready source of kompromat for.

But why has the argument being going on so long that Kol’s long-delayed return is an issue in the first place? Why has Voq stuck to his disruptors so long, only to change his mind now? For a long time, I had this down as just poor writing to paper over the sudden realisation there needed to be a reason for no-one noticing Voq’s disappearance. That assumption lasted until I realised you could easily rewrite the episode to suggest the sarcophagus ship had no way to acquire dilithium full stop, as opposed to no way Voq deemed acceptable. Almost nothing would change about the episode, except that we’d lose the trip to the Shenzhou (Kol would need some other way to distract Voq and L’Rell while he ran his takeover, but that wouldn’t be hard to come up with), and we’d lose the argument between Voq and L’Rell itself.

And both of those elements are essential to the episode. In particular, the fight between T’Kuvma’s lieutenants is the opportunity “…Lamb’s Cry” needs to drop the question which echoes through not just this installment, but the first season as a whole: "What good is purity if it only leads to death?"

Alien Environments

This is not an unfamiliar rhetorical question to Trek fans. Deep Space Nine made it a key theme of much of its run, with “In The Pale Moonlight” being perhaps the ur-example. Enterprise considered similar issues in its latter seasons, as well. If we move from the question of purity as defined by Starfleet, and into broader concepts of religious faith and moral conviction, we can point to TNGs “Ethics” and Voyager’s’ “Jetrel” and “Nothing Human”, among others.

There are several interesting decisions “…Lamb’s Cry” makes in returning to this ongoing conversation. The episode is broadly divided into three pairings, and the disagreements between them. Voq and L’Rell argue over religion. Stamets and Lorca butt heads over the tensions in Starfleet’s dual role as a research institution and self-defence force. Burham and Landry are set up to have a similar clash, on a more immediate, tactical level.

This is already a perfectly sensible structure, allowing reflections and contrasts within and between each pairing, even as the larger comparison between Federation and Klingon Empire is progressed. On top of this, there’s a lot of interesting details and wrinkles.

First off, let’s note that of the three pairs of characters, it’s effortlessly the two Klingons who come off best. Stamets is arrogant, Lorca manipulative, and Burnham is both. Landry just wants to shoot the world. Back on the sarcophagus ship, though, while L’Rell is perfectly happy pointing out what she sees as Voq’s inconsistencies, she still clearly respects the manner in which he strives to honour T’Kuvma’s teachings, while Voq himself ultimately accepts that L’Rell has been right all along. Somehow, these are the characters who come across as most sympathetic, despite the fact they ate Georgiou.

Not that it necessarily makes much sense to linger on that, any more than it does trying to figure out who in this particular fight has it right with regard to religious convictions we know next to nothing about. I think there’s a broader point being gestured at here about the dangers of trying to base a religion around what you think a single person would have thought about any given situation, particularly after their death, but ultimately their treatment of Georgiou’s body, and the wreckage of the Shenzhou, work better as reflections of Federation standards of respect and (secular) sanctity.

Consider Voq and L’Rell’s raid on the Shenzhou. The direction, design and editing here are all absolutely beautiful. Note we’re introduced to the frozen, airless bridge as Voq, from our perspective, hangs upside down, reminding us both that the Klingons are the Federations opposite in this particular war, and that Voq is somewhere that is, to him, entirely alien. Note also how he finds a hologram of Georgiou and Burnham, which we see through from behind. We’re seeing a reflection of their faces – the second time for Burnham this episode – at the exact same time we see Voq’s total disinterest in what he’s seeing. When he dismisses the picture as of no value, it makes perfect from his perspective. For us, though, it’s another reminder of what it means to say Voq mirrors our Starfleet protagonist – those spaces closest to us are those that are furthest from the Klngons.

I don’t think for a moment it’s a coincidence that this scene happens roughly halfway through the episode, at the start of the third of four acts, and just two minutes from the actual centrepoint, time-wise. Voq’s sneering dismissal of the broken bridge operates as a reflection point for both Burnham receiving Georgiou’s will on one side, and her screwing up the courage necessary to watch it on the other.

After a little light tension over whether the two interlopers trying to untangle the dilithium without blowing themselves to bits (another reminder that they’re wholly out of their element), they return to the ship to find that Kol has seized control [1]. The resulting exchange seems like a clear win for L’Rell’s flexibility, insofar as she manages to save Voq’s life by feigning betrayal. Ultimately, though, the episode doesn’t fully come down on either side. Did Voq’s crew turn against him because they were sick of starving to death because he valued his interpretation of T’Kuvma’s teachings over their own lives? Or did they do it because after all their sacrifices, Voq finally allowed himself to be swayed from his convictions? Where did Voq’s self-image depart from how others saw him? Where did his efforts to reflect T’Kumva’s teaching start to reflect badly on him?

A Grant Don't Come For Free

Let’s move to Starfleet’s side of the lines. Here, questions of religious conviction are replaced by the insistence nothing matters more than the advancement of science. This is, of course, just one more mirror, particularly if we presuppose the Federation’s veneration of science reaches the level of philosophical belief. Such has been argued within Trek, more than once - as Kira Nerys once put it “some might say pure science, taught without a spiritual context, is a philosophy.”. The extent to which this is true for any given Starfleet officer is an interesting one, but not one the episode itself really digs into. Instead, it dives into the difference between believing it is important to perform science well, and believing your performance of science is actually up to snuff. Or, to put it in terms resonant for this particular essay: does your self-conception of yourself as a scientist match up with what others are seeing?

The first point to make here is that both our champions of science - Burnham and Stamets – come across as fairly unsympathetic. It's clear that Burnham is uncomfortable with the effects a spore jump appears to have on Ripper (more on this later), but she's also perfectly happy to lie to a colleague she knows she's already hurt multiple times, if that helps her confirm a hypothesis more quickly. Stamets, meanwhile, relentlessly pushes for Discovery to return to her original mission as a science vessel, but only because he's a vainglorious prick obsessed with his own legacy (note how the only particularly sympathetic moment he has here is his joke about wanting to chat with his fungus, and even that is just playing his self-obsession for laughs). We talked last time about how good Lorca clearly is at figuring out how to persuade people they want the same things he does, and he's clearly worked out he'll get farther playing to Stamets' ego than the fact the entire Federation is in a war for its very existence. It seems clear he’s right, too, which is very far from being to Stamet’s credit.

There’s a lot to say about Stamets’ no good, terribly bad attitude here. In terms of the ongoing question of who Lorca is and what he wants (which I spent quite a few words on last time), their conversations here muddy Stamets’ description of his captain as a “warmonger”. To what extent is Stamets just pissed off that he’s not being allowed to do exactly what he wants, when he wants to, purely because of the surely entirely irrelevant fact that there happens to be a war on? There’s also the question raised as to whether Stamets is simply assuming Lorca wants to fight wars for the same reason Stamets wants to engage in research – for the glory.

Again, there are echoes here of the kind of question Enterprise and (especially) Deep Space Nine mulled over – how can Starfleet balance its desire to push outward the borders of understanding while not letting the borders of the Federation collapse? As has happened before, the unique structure of this blog means we’ve come to this question at a much later point chronologically than it was first asked. I don’t see that as a problem though, in no small part because Stamets’ narcissism is going to help underscore my approach to this, which is to try to disentangle the process of science from the ego of scientists.

We should start with the realisation that engaging in science and waging war are not mutually exclusive. This is already obvious in the limit case - we know how to split the atom because the US wanted to do it in such a way that they could kills hundreds of thousands of people whose government they disliked. But the Manhattan Project isn't an exception to the rule. In Britain, what turned mathematical research from an eccentric hobby into something one could make a career into was the ruling class realising that maths can help you kill people, like, much more effectively. If you want to know how to calculate the trajectory for a shell so it blows up the people you’re thoroughly sick of not being blown up, you need someone to have worked out the trigonometry for you. There was no money in maths, except blood money.

And science goes where the cash is. It has to, really, unless it proposes to do without. That isn’t a justification; merely an acknowledgement. Science isn’t impossible without funding, but it’s orders of magnitude harder. Even if all you need is a blackboard and a cafetiere, you still need some way of making ends meet while you’re frowning at your equations. This has always been the dirty little secret - a secret fully known but almost always fully denied - of how the actual business of science gets done. This is as true as it always was. We’re no longer quite so tied into the state’s desire for efficient murder, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves – we do what we do because the people with the money want us to do it. Nor can we claim to be completely free of the business of grasping for bloodstained bills. It was just last year, for instance, that Leonardo UK visited my campus to sniff around for STEM academics to work alongside, at roughly the same time they were in the news over their arms exports to Israel.

None of this is to say we should swallow our tongues about either the nature of scale of the problem. My point is precisely the opposite, in fact: the reality of the compromises we must make to get our science on must be highlighted at every opportunity. Where Stamets goes wrong, as do so many of my colleagues, is to pretend they can escape the reality of their compromises and complicities, by pretending they’ve achieved everything in their career to date by sheer singular force of will. It’s one thing to object to the latest way in which the money is intruding on your research. It might even be a new line is being crossed, qualitatively different to the compromises you've felt compelled to make up until now. But only an idiot, or a narcissist, mistakes the point where a problem becomes too great for them to ignore for the point where that problem began.

The Non-collusion Delusion

The obvious response to me laying out how things are is to point out Trek is supposed to show us how things could be. Starfleet, as I’m sure Stamets would argue, is supposed to be better than the historical (or contemporary) violent scrabble for funding; the bloodbath to win the chance to smear blood on one’s hands. Discovery suggests tha this is indeed true, at least to some extent. Yes, there are clearly still choices being made by someone over what research will be supported. This is unquestionably reasonable in the abstract, though, surely? So long as resources are finite, not everyone can have everything. Certainly, the process by which someone is given a starship and crew in order to facilitate their research has to be a little more involved than just asking for one. It’s entirely possible the selection process is flawed, but that obviously isn't where Stamets' beef lies. His issues is with the small print, which so far as can be determined, reads "In the event we're attacked and fighting for our right to exist, we may not ignore the fact your research could be used to save countless innocent lives". It's hard to imagine there can be many deals with the Devil which are so light touch, or so humanitarian in their sub-clauses,

Some of this we might be inclined to put down to Stamets being, wholly understandably, nervous about the possibility Lorca will keep pushing until the entire crew get turned inside out. He’s seen first hand how badly that ends, after all. Seeing himself, his partner, and his entire research team explode like sentient popcorn is very much something he must be desperate to avoid. Even here, though, he has an option - he could simply resign.

Consider this for a moment. An alien race is hellbent on destroying the Federation, potentially slaughtering billions along the way, and Stamets is the only remaining scientist who understands a machine that could potentially bring about victory. And yet Lorca is clear the guy can leave any time he wants. He just can't take the stuff Starfleet built for him, and which dozens of other Starfleet personnel have helped him set up.

What’s important here isn’t that Lorca is completely in the right on this. For the record, though, he absolutely is – they’re much, much less likely to be able to save innocent lives if they have to try to figure out the spore drive themselves, but that’s still what they’re going to do, because they’re Starfleet officers and people are relying on them. What really matters here though is that Lorca would still be right even during peacetime. Stamets is not, in fact, entitled to the labour and property of others, simply because that labour and property wouldn’t exist without him.

This attitude is a reflection of arsehole scientists who insist they bear no responsibility for where their money has come from, or why that money was paid: arsehole scientists who insist they bear no responsibility to the people who’ve turned those ideas into something useful. Even in space, science is not performed in a vacuum. Just on the most immediate level, the spore drive only becomes truly useful thanks to the work of Dr Staal on the USS Glenn. But there were also the people working on each ship to get the spore drive to work, and the people who helped design the Crossfield-class to allow the research to take place, and the people who then built those ships, and, and, and. Few, if any, of them would have been doing any of that because they owed Stamets a favour, and they all deserve better than to learn their work will never achieve the goal hoped for because Stamets doesn’t like a change in management. Paul appears to take great offence at the idea his intellect isn’t being more fully appreciated, but what’s actually happening is Starfleet is recognising genius is 99% perspiration, much of which comes from the pores of other people. Far too often, we talk about the shoulders of giants while ignoring the shoulders of whomever is lugging the equipment to the lab today. Accordingly, Starfleet insists the work of everyone involved in the project be appreciated, not just the ideas guy.

If you want to hold up science as some kind of noble pursuit, you need to recognise both the compromises necessary to get your work done, and the people necessary to get your work done. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how good or subtle or revolutionary your ideas are. You’re a shitty scientist. Lorca seems to grasp this pretty well. We talked last time about how he appears to have a talent for reading what people want, and adjusting his pitches accordingly. While arguing with Stamets in sickbay, he barely even bothers to note the human/humanoid cost of Stamets taking his puffballs and going home. Instead, he points out Stamets remaining on Discovery is his fastest route to the glory he’s convinced is his by right. This may even explain why Lorca reaches for Musk as an example: Stamets is precisely the kind of preening, solipsistic arsehole to buy Musk's self-made genius bullshit schtick. [2]

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Petting Zoo

We’ll finish things off for this episode by returning to Burnham. As noted above, the route we’re taking with Michael and Landry’s study of the alien creature seems fairly clear – they’ll clash about how best to learn how “Ripper” can tear open bulkheads and shrug off phaser blasts, they’ll appear to fail (as with the mutiny against Voq, and the Discovery almost falling into a star), only to eventually succeed together, even if they don’t end up being friends.

The fact these parallels seem obvious makes the sudden death of Landry surprisingly affecting. I say “surprisingly”, given that ultimately it’s just a particularly cynical iteration of the redshirt death trope, with the loss of our second Asian woman in just four

episodes.

Landry’s untimely demise does at least have some interesting consequences. It gives us another example of how Lorca operates – he immediately uses her death to further motivate Michael, and thereby give him what he wants. But the loss of Landry also leaves Michael alone in her quest to puzzle out the tardigrade, raising the question of who her true dance partner is going to be this episode.

It briefly appears that this is to be Saru, but of course that goes south almost immediately. I already nodded at Michael’s decision to use Saru’s autonomic responses – about which he seems at least a little self-conscious – to aid her research, without permission. Here, we’re back in similar territory to that we explored while talking about Stamets. Michael easily could have secured Saru’s cooperation honestly. She could even more easily not rubbed salt into the wound by faking an apology for the very kind of behaviour she is engaged in with that fakery. Even if she doesn’t believe she needs to apologise, or that apologies have no value in general, it would be logical to keep Saru onside, should he have more to contribute to her work in future. Burham insists that her actions were “necessary”, but this isn’t remotely true. In part, I think she’s engaging in a Vulcan trait we’ve discussed before – prioritising the expression of contempt for emotion above considering how recognising the emotionality of others might yield better results. I also think this is just another instance of being a dickhead scientist – the research needed X to happen, therefore you’re the problem if you’re not happy about how X was secured. "I could heat these beakers faster by burning this bridge."

I think there’s another element in play here too, though, which is just that Michael is falling into a familiar pattern with Saru; having the old fight because the new one is too much to bear. Once she’s confirmed to her satisfaction that Ripper isn’t automatically a threat, she starts thinking about what else it might be, and that’s where things get interesting. It turns out, Michael’s opposite number in considering how best to study the tardigrade is the tardigrade itself.

Others have pointed out the ways in which Michael can see herself reflected in the tardigrade. Dismissed as an “animal” by Landry, treated as nothing but a means to an end by Lorca, considered monstrous for a “single incident from [their] past”. This is all quite true, and fits very well with our broader concerns here.

There’s something else here too, though. The rest of this episode has gone all in terms of the need to make sacrifices for survival. Voq must tread profane ground to offer salvation to his crew. Stamets must set aside his preferences for his research goals and methods. As we've seen, though, the focus isn't so much on how much a character must sacrifice, but what they see as being a sacrifice, and what that implies about them.

Somewhere, in a small, dark room in the depths of the Discovery, Burnham is thinking about whether it would be so great a sacrifice to set aside her Vulcan upbringing, and embrace empathy. As a result, a much more interesting moral dilemma than what you'd be willing to give up appears: what if the nigh-magical technology you’ve created to allow your ship to go anywhere instantly – to save anyone instantly – can only work via the discomfort, perhaps even torture, of a single creature. What are you prepared to demand of someone, or even something, else?

It’s here, at long last, that we see the reflection we’ve been searching for: that of Trek itself. On one hand, the survival of billions, even trillions of people. On the other, the apparent unhappiness of a single animal. The moral calculus would seem to be obvious on that, but Michael, delightfully, in the true spirit of the franchise, isn’t persuaded just yet. We all knew watching the show that the spore drive had no future, given its absence from every other Trek show, and the possibility it might have been shelved because it made a giant invertebrate sad is a quite delightful one. If the episode's title is meant to cast the tardigrade as the lamb, then even if it is Lorca himself we're meant to think the butcher, it is Michael who is staring at her own reflection in the knife-blade.

And ultimately, there are aspects of Michael she sees reflected in the tardigrade, but there are far more ways in which the creature is wholly unfamiliar. It's that distance between them that makes Michae['s empathy so meaningful, just as it's the sheer insanity of setting up an argument that one animal's suffering could outweigh the survival of at least four sentient species that makes is so valuable someone tries to make that case. At the end of the day, Trek is about how we extend our empathy fairly and fully. It's about how we need to ask ourselves not which of our own principles we will abandon to survive, but how much pain we have the right to insist others endure for the sake of that survival.

It's about making sure we can look at ourselves in the mirror.

[1] The Kol subplot frustrates me a little. I can just about see why it took a while for someone to come scavenging for the cloaking tech. That's just standard Klingon arrogance (and possibly some feeling about cloaking being dishonourable). His obsequiousness upon arrival is obviously a ploy to make getting the tech easier - an attack on the sarcophagus ship would risk damaging the device, or even Voq destroying it. What I don't get is why Voq didn't ask for dilithium from Kol's ship to repair his own vessel, and/or food for his crew. Or, if he did, on what basis did Kol refuse while maintaining his facade?

[2] According to Memory Alpha, the Elon Musk reference in this episode that initially struck so many as risible, and later was argued to potentially have been a subtle clue to Lorca's status, was just something Isaac threw in, hoping he'd get a new Tesla out of it. I'd say this is a questionable read both of the nature of Trek, and the desirability of owning a Tesla, but I can't argue Isaac wasn't reading Musk just as well as Lorca was reading Stamets. [3] Battlelines are also reflections, of course, at least roughly. Assuming your military intelligence/recon methods are up to snuff, you tend to have at least some idea of where your enemy is building up their forces, resulting in you doing the same opposite. I wonder whether this is why chess – the western world’s go-to metaphor for military conflict – has reflectional rather than rotational symmetry. You don’t start with the equivalent game state to your opponent; you start with a reflection of it.  

Ordering

1. The Last Outpost 

2. The Naked Time 

3. The Butcher's Knife Cares Not For The Lamb's Cry

4. Babel 

5. Phage 

6. Unexpected

7. The Lorelei Signal