Star Trek: Discovery — ‘Su’Kal’ [3x11] ★★★☆☆
By: Dan Owen
Tags: Culture, Television, Star Trek, TV, Review

Really? This is the explanation to what The Burn is? It wasn’t predictable, thankfully, but neither does it make much sense. With only three episodes left this season, Star Trek: Discovery desperately tried to pull its plot-strands together with “Su-Kal” — an overstuffed hour that struggled to provide a coherent and plausible explanation for anything.

The USS Discovery detects a life sign from the abandoned Kelpien ship in the nebula they’ve calculated was the source of The Burn — the disastrous event that disabled all warp-capable starships powered by dilithium¹.

1. I thought Romulan ships used miniature black holes for power, not dilithium? Whatevs.

Saru (Doug Jones) suddenly lets everyone know the Kelpien captain who send the century-old distress call, Dr Issa, was pregnant at the time — as the blotches on her forehead weren’t a sign of radiation poisoning. So they theorise that perhaps her child may have survived whatever calamity befell the ship.

Investigating, Saru, Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), and Dr Culber (Wilson Cruz) beam down to a planet inside the Verubin Nebula, comprised almost entirely of rare dilithium. Strangely, after appearing on said planet, they find they now have the appearance of different species — Burnham looks like a Trill, Culber is Bajoran, and Saru now appears human (a delightful way for the excellent Doug Jones to appear without his make-up).

Cutting a long story short, it transpires that the Kelpien captain’s then-unborn son, Su’Kal (Bill Irwin), has since grown up alone on the planet. But before she passed away, his mother created an advanced simulation filled with computer holograms, each designed to teach him and keep him safe. The reason this advanced “holodeck” has disguised the true appearance of Burnham, Saru, and Culber is so Su’Kal isn’t scared by encountering a species he’s unfamiliar with².

2. But it doesn’t make any sense that Su’Kal would be scared by Saru — a fellow Kelpien! — so the logic of that wrinkle is missing on me! Maybe they just really wanted to give Doug Jones a break from the make-up chair?

There’s actually a solid Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in this idea, as it’s a sci-fi take on the Plato’s Cave allegory, with Su’Kal having lived inside a simulation that’s altered his perception of what reality is. This would have made for an interesting story touching on themes familiar from The Truman Show (1998) and The Matrix (1999), but the episode was weighed down by its need to connect to season 3’s Burn mystery — so Su’Kal is also presented as the source of that galaxy-wide disaster.

It’s something about the Kelpien’s prolonged exposure to subspace radiation in utero, and being near so much dilithium, turned him into a “bomb” that detonated — thus causing the Burn? It makes no sense, so I can only hope the remaining few episodes provide details to help this settle better in my head. Discovery doesn’t have a good track record with explaining its mysteries, however, so I’m unconvinced things will make sense.

While this was a middling episode, the cliffhanger it ended on was decent. Tilly (Mary Wiseman) was given command of the Discovery by Saru, getting to fulfil her childhood dream of sitting on the Captain’s chair, but then immediately faced the prospect of villainous Osyraa (Janet Kidder) seizing the ship for its valuable spore-drive.

The arc of Tilly becoming First Officer, despite being a low-ranking Ensign with no command experience, has stretched credibility for me this season. I don’t mind Tilly’s arc, in theory, but she needed to achieve her dream in a plausible way over many more seasons. And frustrating when even Osyraa (who I don’t remember even knowing who Tilly is) starts to ridicule her inexperience over the comms, with Tilly fighting back with tenuous claims Osyraa’s “projecting” her own inadequacies onto her. Then it only got worse when, perhaps inevitably, Tilly does lose the USS Discovery to Osyraa and her crew… who throw her off the Captain’s chair and put a mind-controlling gizmo onto Stamets (Anthony Rapp) so he’ll be compliant with executing the spore-jumps.

As cliffhangers go, it wasn’t bad — even if Osyraa hasn’t registered as a truly threatening villain this year. And like all multi-part stories, one hopes the next instalment fixes some of the issues that arose in part one. So maybe I’ll look back more kindly on why Su’Kal triggered The Burn, but it smacks of the show not really knowing the answer to their own mystery and then settling on something difficult to swallow because it’s small-scale enough for the characters to engage with.

Cast & Crew

writer: Anne Cofell Saunders.

director: Norma Bailey.

guest starring: David Ajala, Oded Fehr, Ian Alexander, Bill Irwin, Janet Kidder & Tig Notaro.