Star Trek: Discovery 5-06: Whistlespeak (Quick Review)

Episode:

61

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Writer:

Kenneth Lin & Brandon A. Schultz

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Director:

Chris Byrne

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Air Date:

02-May-2024

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching Whistlespeak, which probably isn't about an expedition to the peak of Mount Whistles, but I've been wrong before. I was way off with my assumptions about the last episode, Mirrors.

Discovery used to have 13-15 episodes each season, but they slashed that to a miniscule 10 episodes for its final year, which means that I'm already past the halfway point. That's kind of crazy, as it feels like the season's only just started. Either the episodes so far have been well-paced and engaging, or barely anything's happened yet. Or both.

Alright, there will be SPOILERS below, for this and for earlier stories from series like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Strange New Worlds. But mostly this.

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RECAP

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The Discovery crew are absolutely stumped by their latest clue as it's just a vial of distilled water. Fortunately, Dr Kovich provides them with a list of the scientists who left the clues and with this they're able to track the next puzzle piece to an ancient weather control system on Halem'no, a planet almost entirely covered by dust storms.

Burnham and Tilly disguise themselves to chat with the primitive Halem'nites and discover that only the chosen devout are allowed to enter the camouflaged weather tower. They join the others going on a race to prove their worthiness, unaware that they have to eat something that will make them desperate to drink. Burnham drops out along the way to follow a trail of irradiated moss, leaving Tilly to finish the test of endurance. She and a young Halem'nite, Ravah, help each other to become the only ones to complete the race and their reward is to be locked in the ancient tower to suffocate as sacrifices!

Burnham finds a damaged control panel and is able to fix the weather modification system, with some tech support from a nervous Adira back on Discovery. When she realises that Tilly is going to die she decides to break the Prime Directive and tell Ravah's father Ohvahz that aliens built the towers, not gods who require sacrifices, so that he'll let them both out of the sealed chamber. Fortunately Tilly's figured out where the clue is and Discovery leaves to go after Moll and L'ak... for some reason.


REVIEW

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Seriously though, why are they sending the ship with the puzzle pieces on it to catch Moll and L'ak, the two people in the universe most likely to steal them, figure out the remaining clues, and then use the technology to destroy the Federation? There are four episodes left and only one scientist remaining on the sheet of paper Burnham was given, so those two are about to become a big complication. I just hope no one on the crew runs off to join them this time (I'm looking at you Book).

Also, how the hell did Moll and L'ak figure out this clue in the bad timeline? All they had to work with was a vial of distilled water! It's entirely unsolvable without the extra information that Kovich was able to dig up.

Incidentally, I thought Burnham did a great job of keeping her team's morale up and suggesting new avenues for them to explore while they were hitting nothing but dead ends. Then she carried on doing a good job during the rest of the story too. Burnham has been a captain for a while now, but this episode puts her through some classic Star Trek situations that give her a real opportunity to shine as a leader and a problem solver in her own way.

She even gets to do the Captain Kirk thing of going undercover on an alien world and gathering information, for the first time since... I dunno, New Eden in season 2? Even better, it's a proper away mission with Tilly, and I've been waiting even longer for that.

Look, it's Burnham and her best friend on an alien planet together doing Star Trek stuff! I'm fine with Discovery being cancelled now, the series has already given me everything I ever wanted.

They didn't do anything particularly amazing together, Burnham passed out and Tilly won a race, but I'm enjoying the season's format of Burnham teaming up with another character (usually Book) every episode. Was it actually plausible that Tilly beat all those aliens and won the endurance race? I actually think it is, as she's got less dust in her lungs, she's had actual Starfleet training, and she's got different biology.

No really, humans and Halem'nites are very different species, they just happen to look exactly the same for budget reasons. Uh, I mean because a Progenitor race seeded humanoid life in the galaxy.

Either way, I got a very '90's Trek vibe from them. I felt like Burnham and Tilly had beamed into an episode of Next Gen or Voyager. Or Stargate SG-1 I suppose, with all those trees around. I mean the episode was 100% Discovery in its tone and messages, but it had more of that original Trek flavour to it.

I could sense that was something off about the whole situation though. The episode definitely tries to misdirect the audience away from looking for another shoe to drop, with its whimsical music, ultra-friendly aliens, and endurance challenge twist, but even on Discovery planets aren't this twee.

Surprise, it was all leading to someone having to make a horrible sacrifice to keep the machine going, like in the Strange New Worlds episode Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach. Though here the episode isn't about individuals overlooking terrible things to sustain their own comfort and it's not judging anyone. This time the theme is about good people making huge mistakes due to their beliefs and their ignorance.

Tilly nearly died because she didn't know what she was signing up for when she entered the race. The Halem'nites have been sacrificing people for years because they somehow came to believe that it was necessary. Even the Denobulans that saved the planet messed up by being unable to foresee the consequences of disguising their weather control system as an ancient temple with torches that stay lit without oxygen.

There's a lesson to be learned here and the characters outright tell us what it is at the end: using the Progenitors' technology could lead to horrible consequences that they're too ignorant to predict.

You can't throw a stone in the Trek universe without it hitting a planet full of primitive people that look exactly like humans and are living sub-optimal lives due to an issue with ancient alien technology they don't understand. Sometimes there's an evil computer that needs feeding, sometimes there's an asteroid defence obelisk on the blink, sometimes their planet is secretly a generation ship on a collision course, and so on.

Though this time it's different, as we actually know the alien race that built the weather control system all those centuries ago. In fact, the Discovery crew are 100 years older than the towers! This doesn't change anything about the episode, it just changes our perspective a little when our buddies the Denobulans are cast in the role traditionally filled by a legendary space empire lost to time like the Iconians, Tkon, Preservers or Progenitors.

Anyway, finding one of these planets usually leads to a Starfleet crew coming into conflict with their #1 commandment, the Prime Directive. Thou shalt not interfere with other cultures or reveal to them the existence of alien life.

It's incredibly rare for Discovery to take on the Prime Directive and I was impressed with how the writers handled it. The rules say that the characters have to dress up and play along instead of just beaming down in front of people with an engineering crew and fixing everything, and this is good because that means we got to have a story. I have my issues with the Prime Directive sometimes, but not when it's forcing the characters to have fun and hang out with people.

But Burnham breaks the Prime Directive immediately when lives are at stake, and she uses the same justification that Kirk always liked to use: this is not a thriving growing civilisation. In fact, four other communities have already died and these guys will be next unless they're taught the purpose of the Denobulan weather technology and what is (and isn't) necessary to maintain it. Episodes like Next Gen's Homeward and Voyager's Time and Again would argue that Burnham's duty is to let them all die... and this is where I have issues with the Prime Directive. Fortunately those kinds of episodes are the exception, and Starfleet usually goes out of its way to preserve life instead of letting entire races die because they didn't progress far enough in their tech tree.

In Who Watches the Watchers, Picard's concern was that witnessing alien technology might cause the Mintakans to regress back to superstition. Here Burnham has the opposite concern, as she doesn't want to mess with the religion these guys already have any more than she absolutely has to. Especially as there's a risk that it could lead to violence (the Halem'nites seem super nice though, so I found that hard to buy).

So in the end this turned out to be one of those Star Trek episodes about religion and spirituality, which is a subject the franchise hasn't always had the best of luck with (see Voyager's Sacred Ground).

It comes at the subject from two different directions, with Burnham assuring a religious man that even though he has new information that contradicts his beliefs, it doesn't mean that everything he believes is wrong, and Book assuring the fairly un-religious Culber that it's fine to find spirituality after a Trill possesses your body, even if something you have to explore on your own.

My thoughts on the Culber plot are... it's cool that he's hanging out with Book and bringing him some food to try. That's all I've got. Culber spends the episode unsure of what he's going through and he knows that his partner doesn't get it, so it's not all that weird that I don't get it either. Everyone's happy for him, so I guess I'm happy for him too.

I just hope that next time the series comes back to this thread, the writers decide to be less vague. Maybe Culber could decide to become a Trill host or something, I dunno.

At least Culber's plot was better handled than Adira's thread. They're still struggling with a lack of confidence after accidentally letting the time bug onto the ship a few episodes ago. Fortunately, Rayner tells them that they can get the job done and then they get the job done. And that's it.

Then there was Saru... who was absent again for the third episode in a row. No Owo or Detmer either.

We did get a bit more about Tilly having issues with her students back at the academy, though I'm not sure if her plot led to any resolution. She does a fantastic job of encouraging Ravah and gets them where they want to be, only to find that she's enabled them to sacrifice themselves for a holy cause. I mean, there's a metaphor in there if you squint; maybe Tilly needed to realise that the reason so many of her students are quitting is because Starfleet is crazy dangerous and she's actually helped them understand that it isn't right for them. Or maybe not.

Book's problem had the best solution, as it's revealed at the end that he just went off and played retro games all episode! Next time though he should see if he can find anything better to play than Asteroids on the Virtual Boy.


RATING

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I'm going to compare Whistlespeak to another episode of Discovery that deals with the Prime Directive, religion, ancient technology, and an apocalyptic threat: season 2's New Eden. Both episodes are about faith and science, but only one of them features Christopher Pike and has Discovery swinging around a rock to save a planet from an asteroids, so I'm leaning towards that being the better story. Also, its title actually has some relevance to the plot! There's very little whistlespeaking in Whistlespeak.

But New Eden is one of Discovery's highest rated episodes so it's okay if Whistlespeak couldn't quite make it to its level. What we got here is a gentle blend of late Discovery and classic Trek that doesn't try to be anything exciting or exceptional. In fact, it's kind of slow and thoughtful, and I can appreciate that sometimes. I feel like I should give it a middling 6 out of 10, but sadly I have to deduct two points for the two times someone said the word 'connect'.

Though on the other hand, there was no Saru and T'Rina subplot. In that case I guess I have to give it...

7/10

Honestly, it's a contender for my favourite episode this season. I just like bland old school Star Trek I guess.

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NEXT TIME

Next on Star Trek: Discovery, it's a story called Erigah, which is also the sound I make whenever I see episode titles like that. I think it's the word for the Breen bounty on L'ak's head, so I'm sure I'll be seeing a lot of Discovery's favourite puzzle-solving space rogues.

But next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the second part of Star Wars: The Last Jedi!