This week’s Star Trek: Discovery is a tough one for me. All art is subjective, and all reviews of that art are subjective to at least some degree, but “Whistlespeak” takes things an additional step further by being about a very subjective subject, one that happens to be something I don’t really connect with: the social experience of religion and spirituality.
This is hardly the first time Star Trek has tackled the subject, but I didn’t have to write reviews of those episodes! I feel like I’m walking into a Catholic church and complaining about the vintage of the communion wine. It might be true — but it’s also not the point.
After several days of subjecting the vial found in “Mirrors” to every scientific test imaginable, the Discovery crew is no closer to figuring out what it could possibly indicate; all tests show that it contains nothing but pure, distilled water. Just when they’ve exhausted all options, Captain Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) gets a “call” from Kovich (David Cronenberg), who’s able to provide her with a bit more information: the names and planets of origin of all five of the clue-giving scientists.
(She finds one of his infinity room keys in her pocket; I guess he just beams those onto people?)
Adding to the pile of eccentricity and mystery, Kovich gives this information to Burnham handwritten, on a yellow legal pad. Genuine, of course; none of this replicated nonsense. Why? Because he loves the feel of paper. I like that Kovich is a mystery — and I don’t think I want to know so much about him that he ceases to be one — but I do hope we get a little something more before the series is up. Without that, as time goes on I’m afraid he’ll be reduced to “That time David Cronenberg was on Star Trek for some reason” instead of remembered as a full character.
With Kovich’s intel, Burnham and the team are able to pinpoint planet Halem’no as the location of the next clue. It’s an arid, storm-tossed place where, 800 years ago, the Denobulan scientist on Kovich’s list surreptitiously built five huge rain generators. Disguised as naturally occurring towering rock formations, only one of them remains in operation, and the planet’s entire population lives in its vicinity.
Before Burnham and Tilly (Mary Wiseman) beam down to find the clue, Burnham spends some time listening in on the Halem’nites. They have a typical phonetic language used for everyday communication, but they also have something called whistlespeak — which sounds much more like multi-tonal birdsong than human whistling — and is used for communication across great distances.
Burnham gets very excited about this, not just from a linguistic and anthropological perspective, but also from a metaphorical one; the idea of people coming together from across the vastness of space or across cultural divides is understandably thrilling to her.
Unfortunately, beyond Burnham and Tilly hearing a bit of it once they beam down to the surface, no one actually uses whistlespeak to communicate in the episode! Even when the emotional power of song becomes integral to the episode’s climax, the tune is merely hummed. Communicating across distances — whether across interpersonal divides, divides of time and space, or across the cypher of clue and solution — has been a primary theme of this season of Discovery. I don’t know that I see how the introduction of the linguistic phenomenon of whistlespeak really helps that though, given that it goes virtually unused and, other than Burnham’s explanation of it to Tilly, unmentioned.
Burnham and Tilly join up with a band of pilgrims known as ‘compeers’ — an ancient word meaning ‘companions’ — who are on their way to the rain generator, known to them as the High Summit… and the home of a temple to their gods. One of the pilgrims is sick from dust inhalation, and is cured by the local leader, Ohvahz (Alfredo Narciso), through some sort of sonic healing ritual using musical bowls.
Talk about a missed opportunity for some of that whistlespeak, right?
Burnham learns afterwards that access to the temple inside the tower is restricted to those people who have completed the Journey of the Mother Compeer, a ritual that proves worthiness to the gods and entices them to bring rain. Burnham asks to perform this ritual, and the next morning she, Tilly, and a host of other pilgrims including Ohvahz’s child Ravah (June Laporte) are lined up and ready to prove themselves.
Multiple people, including the dust-sick woman, urge Burnham to reconsider her enthusiasm for running the Journey and entering the temple. Ohvahz also tries to convince Ravah not to run, but they insist, seeing it as an opportunity to prove themselves. It’s a little ominous, but Burnham’s got to get that clue so, off she goes.
Maybe I’ve just seen Altered States too many times but when I saw that running the Journey started by ingesting a tab of mystery substance I thought the trip was going to turn out to be a psychedelic one. I’m a little disappointed to have to report that nope, it’s just a footrace. More of a leisurely jog really, but one that’s done while very, very thirsty.
Participants drop out along the route, tempted by the bowls of water placed here and there, and Burnham eventually drops out too — deliberately, tempted by something else. Noticing that some moss in a particular area is yellow instead of green, she surmises that the color change is being caused by hypothetical radiation leakage from a hypothetical broken console.
As far as hunches go it’s paper thin, but it does turn out to be correct.
While Tilly continues to run the race to access the tower the traditional way, Burnham contacts Discovery to get a walk-through on how to repair the console. Adira (Blu del Barrio) stumbles their way through for a while before telling Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie) that they think someone else ought to take over. “Yes,” I said to myself while watching, “Good thinking Adira, you’re right, they probably should get an expert on 800-year-old Denobulan technology.”
But actually the problem is just that Adira is feeling too flustered and awkward to want to continue, so Rayner declines their request. And why is Adira feeling flustered and awkward? Because Tilly isn’t the awkward one anymore, and Discovery apparently requires that one of them always be fumbling and bumbling their way through a mission at any given time.
Adira and Burnham are successful, and rewiring just that one console is all it takes to repair the rain generator. Tilly, for her part, has made it almost to the finish line alongside Ravah. They’ve each been given a bowl of water to carry across the line as one last temptation, but also one last challenge… as it’s kind of hard to run and not spill water. Ravah trips, their water spilling, and they’re out.
Instead of finishing the race on her own, Tilly returns to Ravah and pours some of her water into Ravah’s bowl. They cross together in a moment that surely was not intended to invoke the ending of perennial elementary school reading list title and book-that-traumatized-me-in-front-of-my-entire-4th-grade-class Stone Fox, but did.
It’s a nice moment seeing them persevere together (and one with fewer sudden dog deaths than Stone Fox, so I appreciate that), but one’s that’s immediately tempered by the fact that their reward for winning is ritual sacrifice. Oops.
Burnham can’t beam into the “temple”, Tilly and Ravah can’t beam out (or leave any other way), and the rain generator is well on its way to causing the “sacrifice” conditions — which turns out to be a vacuum forming inside the chamber where Tilly and Ravah are trapped during rain generation.
Prime Directive be damned, Burnham beams into the nearby chamber where Ohvahz remains, not wanting his child to die alone. He is understandably freaked when she materializes beside him, and it takes a while to convince him that she’s real and that her explanation, which sounds like something straight out of Ancient Aliens on The History Channel, is legitimate.
Even with that done, there’s still the issue of Ohvahz’s fervent belief that the gods and the very rain itself require the sacrifice. Burnham finally gets through to him by humming a tune she hears Ravah humming to Tilly over an open comm line, and he opens the chamber. Everyone is saved and it rains, hooray.
Star Trek does love its “ritual sacrifices that power ancient machinery” storylines, and over the decades they’ve changed just how “set straight” the alien of the week is in the end, but I’m not sure they’ve ever had one that’s quite as gentle as this one. Burnham explains the rain generators and their origin to Ohvahz, which leads to him asking some understandable questions about the nature and reality of his gods, which Burnham deftly deflects.
He then — and this is where my bewilderment sets in — casually and almost sadly wonders aloud if they really have to stop the sacrifices, because doing so would be a lot of work. I understand Ohvahz’s concern about the social upheaval of this change (not to mention that they never really needed to have happened in the first place, can you imagine when that gets out?) — but yes, guy, you definitely have to stop sacrificing people.
Oh, and this whole time? The next clue was actually in one of the other rain generators. Welp!
OBSERVATION LOUNGE
- Saru (Doug Jones) is once again absent from this week’s episode — and will be out of sight for at least two more weeks (we’ve seen up through episode 508). On social media this week, Doug Jones shared that his temporary exit from the season was a result of his commitments to the Disney sequel Hocus Pocus 2.
- The clue registered a lifesign in “Mirrors” despite being nothing but inert water, artificially generated by one of the planet’s rain generators. Pretty lucky that Zora (Annabelle Wallis) knew about this charity project, huh?
- Tricorder contact lenses? One please!
- he console Burnham repairs is only the second instance of Denobulan computer interfaces seen in the franchise; the circle-based interface is in line with the control room of the Denobulan ship seen in “Cold Station 12.”
- Burnham showing Ohvahz his planet from orbit after breaking the Prime Directive and being mistaken for a god is reminiscent of a very similar moment between Picard and Nuria in The Next Generation’s “Who Watches the Watchers”.
- The five scientists who worked to hide the Progenitor technology are Dr. Vellek of Romulas, Jinaal Bix (a Trill), Carmen Cho (a Terran), Marina Derex from Betazed, and Hitoroshi Kreel (this week’s charitable Denobulan).
While Burnham and Tilly are down on the surface, Culber (Wilson Cruz) has been continuing to interrogate his new feelings and experiences. We see him consulting his abuela — or at least an experimental holographic AI of her created from his brain waves, as a “grief alleviation therapeutic” — seeking advice on her spirituality in life… and also a recipe.
She declines to give him spiritual advice, suggesting that he’s jumped the gun a little by not ruling out physical causes for his symptoms, and also the recipe because it turns out she wasn’t actually that great a cook and was secretly replicating his favorite meal behind his back.
(How a program made from Culber’s own memories could know a secret she’d kept from him, I don’t know. Either AI in the 32nd century is psychic or it still has the pesky 21st century habit of making up whatever it thinks will satisfy a prompt, accurate or not.)
Also, come on now — I thought Star Trek had already clearly stated its position on how creepy and invasive holographic representations of real people are almost certain to be. Just this morning I saw an ad for an AI that claims to let you speak with exes or deceased loved ones, accompanied by the comment “Absolutely the fuck not.” I do not disagree, and neither, I suspect, does Leah Brahms. Or Kira Nerys, or Deanna Troi, or Chakotay, or…
Reluctant for the help — but also energized by the possibility that this might all just be physiological — Culber opens up to Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and asks for his help and support with a full neurological workup. When no anomalies are found, Culber seems almost disappointed, which Stamets picks up on. Even though it’s a small scene, this moment with Stamets is the one thing in the episode’s exploration of religion and spirituality that I connected with and really appreciated.
Stamets is not a religious or spiritual person, something that Culber is concerned will color his reaction to Culber’s “awakening.” But instead, he’s fine with it, even if he’s not invested on a personal level. His is a “You’re healthy and you’re happy, so I’m happy” philosophy, which seems to me to be the most respectful possible way to approach this type of issue, one that allows both parties to hold and live by their own respective beliefs.
It’s interesting, then, that Culber closes the episode quietly disappointed with this. And Book (David Ajala), who’s had a hard time keeping his own perspective this season, is right on when he gently calls Culber out: “It’s an odd quirk, really, this human tendency to consider something less meaningful if it’s just for yourself.” Stamets doesn’t need to share in this with Culber, he just needs to be there for him, and he is.
Next week: the Breen are back!
Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 continues on Paramount+ May 9 with “Erigah,” followed the next day on SkyShowtime in other regions.