The best parts of this episode are far and away the bits that hint at what sort of creatures the 10-C might be and show us our faves exploring what was once seemingly their homeworld. Apparently, thanks to the crushing pressure that would have existed on this planet’s surface, the 10-C evolved to live among its gas layers, floating with bendy, cartilage-like bodies and somehow building reinforced structures to serve as nurseries for their young below. The few glimpses we get of them—or from them, really, as the fear-based memories imparted to the crew on the planet’s surface seem to show their final moments before death—are deeply alien, creepy almost Kaiju-esque creatures that don’t look anything like the Star Trek aliens we’re accustomed to seeing.
And I don’t know about you all, but this is the sort of Star Trek I love, the hands-on, mission-based exploration stuff that reminds us all why we thought it’d be cool to go to the stars in the first place. Aliens are (and should be!) really weird! It’s truly the height of hubris for us, as humans, to assume that other intelligent life in the galaxy—both our own and in the ones beyond it—would look or think like us, or generally exist in a way that’s easy for us to understand. I want Star Trek to show us more stuff exactly like this, is what I’m saying.
Since the Discovery crew now has an artificially imposed external deadline before billions of people will be killed, we can only spend so long exploring the ruins of the 10-C’s space nursery, but it’s all fascinating to contemplate. From the hydrocarbons that seem to nonverbally communicate group memory and emotion to the general coolness of the structure they somehow managed to build in a hostile environment to protect their young, it’s enough to make me wish we’d spent some more time on this kind of storytelling than some of the political arguments from earlier in Season 4.
(Sidebar: Does anyone else feel like we learned more about Detmer in this episode than we have during the previous three seasons put together?)
After communing with vaguely sentient dust particles, Michael is predictably gung-ho and optimistic about the Federation’s ability to convince the 10-C to stop killing billions of other species with its mining death machine, and I suspect she is likely correct, but I love Discovery for at least giving equal weight to the idea that she is not. For at least floating the idea that these creatures might know exactly what they are doing, and just not give a crap about it at the end of the day.
We all want to believe not just in the innate goodness of a mission like Discovery’s—exploring new civilizations, finding new worlds—but also in the idea that all manner of things will be well along the way. That the new species we meet will be friendly; that we’ll be able to find a way to make our good intentions understood; that some things are universal enough to make for common ground between every life form, no matter their individual experiences.
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