Star Trek: Discovery — ‘Forget Me Not’ [3x4] ★★★★☆
By: Dan Owen
Tags: Television, Star Trek, Culture, Review, TV

Trill are a fascinating species, but Star Trek: Deep Space Nine rarely touched on Jadzia’s personal relationship with her symbiote Dax. I don’t recall the show exploring any of the storytelling possibilities about sharing one’s mind with the memories of numerous past hosts. Perhaps that’s because Jadzia was a pureblooded Trill, so to her there was nothing strange about her own nature. Or the writers just didn’t see much of interest there, unlike today. So now I can better understand Star Trek: Discovery’s decision to make Adira (Blu de Barrio) a human “aberration” who’s been joined with a Trill “squid”. It allows for us to explore this unusual species better, by having a character learn about the Trill from an outsider perspective that’s still as one could hope for.

“Forget Me Not” was probably the most “Star Trek” of episodes Discovery’s made, but I seem to be saying that most weeks this season! Maybe this won’t appeal to newer audiences who’ve become accustomed to a lot of explosions and action (especially now it’s being released alongside the VFX-fest of The Mandalorian on Disney+), but I appreciated seeing an episode with a firm emphasis on character that wanted to show us new things about a species the franchise has previously glossed over.

Hoping to restore Adira’s missing memories from her symbiote, the USS Discovery jumped to the Trill homeworld and she beamed down with Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) to meet with the people there. But while Trill looks like a beautiful paradise full of reasonable folk, they’re a little aghast at the idea of a symbiote bonding with a human because it’s never happened before. (A bit of an interracial analogy perhaps?) They’re rudely told to leave immediately, although a man called Guardian Xi (Andreas Apergis) takes pity on Adira’s unusual situation and decides to help her — partly because he thinks bonding symbiotes with non-Trill is the only way for their dying species to survive after many of them were wiped out.

This ultimately leads Adira to a “magical cave” filled with water pools fizzing with electricity: the ancestral home of the slug-like symbiotes. Adira’s told to submerge herself in the water to fully commune with “Tal” inside her, but when the procedure gets a little dicey because of her human biology Burnham dives in to help guide her. And then we’re treated to a quite beautiful visualisation of what being a Trill is like, at least when using these pools, with Adira and Burnham appearing in a dark void with colourful tendrils that attach to Adira’s body and send her to a “mindscape” where she can interact with her previous hosts. Her memories also return there, revealing she was once dating a Trill man called Gray (Ian Alexander) who had been recently joined to a symbiote — Tal — only to suffer lethal injuries that made Adira risk her own life to have the healthy symbiote transplanted into her. It was partly a way to ensure the symbiote and its many lifetimes of valuable memories didn’t die, but also means she can be close to her dead lover — in the sense she’s now bonded to all of Gray’s memories.

While there’s nothing particularly new about what this story was doing, it was a highly effective way to dig into a fascinating alien concept. I barely gave Jadzia Dax a second thought on DS9 — in terms of what she was, not who she was — so it’s great the writers have realised how interesting the Trill are. And the fact they’ve cast a non-binary actor (Blu de Barrio) and transgender actor (The OA’s Ian Alexander) adds a further layer to things. It makes the Trill act as a conduit for gender-identity issues that are a hot topic right now in society, so it’s a masterstroke to weave that into Star Trek. I know Discovery catches some flack from people, but this is exactly how Trek should be modernised and comment on humanity today.

The fact there was a solid B-story also made “Forget Me Not” feel like a truer hour of Star Trek, with Captain Saru (Doug Jones) trying to help the crew with their mental health after Dr Culber (Wilson Cruz) brings the matter to his attention. It was a nice idea for the mind-bending experience of being thrown 930 years into the future to be handled properly, as previous Trek series never really explored what big events like this would do to ordinary people’s heads. The crew are now in a topsy-turvy universe where everyone they’ve ever known died centuries ago, so they’re lost interlopers with nothing to anchor them to where they find themselves. This was primarily communicated by Detmer (Emily Coutts) admitting she has a problem to Dr Culber, so it seems we can ignore theories that something more unusual was happening with her because of her recent moodiness. Tilly (Mary Wiseman) and Stamets (Anthony Rapp) also butted heads a little in Engineering over a disagreement with the spore drive, which wasn’t quite as demonstrative of this particular stress.

Anyway, Saru decided to have a dinner with the Bridge crew as a way to bring them closer together and rekindle that missing “connection” to their families. It ended in squabbling and walkouts, to the amusement of Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), but he eventually found the perfect way to give everyone a way to unwind and relax — playing holograms of old Buster Keaton movies in a shuttle bay. I forget Discovery doesn’t have Holodecks as that Next Generation tech? Although it’s hard to believe people would find centuries-old Keaton films as hilarious as everyone seemed to here. But maybe they couldn’t get the rights to some 1990s Adam Sandler classics, right? Hmm.

One interesting wrinkle is that the ship’s computer has suddenly upgraded itself, becoming more “human” in temperament and responses. Saru theorises that the alien Sphere they downloaded into the ship’s memory last season has decided they need some assistance, so it’s augmented their system. Do they now have tech on par with this century, or does the ship have a more advanced propulsion system and computer now?

The idea of the USS Discovery itself having a “symbiote” also mirrored the A-story in a subtle but clever way, and as a fan it was cool that Discovery’s slicker A.I now makes sense of the excellent Short Trek episode “Calypso” — which foreshadowed season 2 and showed us an abandoned Discovery with a more advanced computer in the future. It looks like the writers are going to somehow take us to that point, so it’ll be interesting to see how the two stories match up.

Overall, I really enjoyed “Forget Me Not” It isn’t the most rewatchable of episodes and the B-story was a little shaky at times, but everything on Trill was entertaining and involving. I just enjoyed seeing the writers take something we know, or thought we knew, and making it seem a lot richer than ever before. DS9 did that with the Bajorans (and arguably the Cardassians), so it’s wonderful to see Discovery doing the same.

Cast & Crew

writers: Alan McElroy, Chris Silvestri & Anthony Maranville.

director: Hanelle M. Culpepper.

guest starring: Ian Alexander, Karen Robinson, Andrew Shaver, Kenneth Welsh & Andreas Apergis.