1x12 Vaulting Ambition

[7.5/10] What do you do when you lose someone you love? And how do you respond when you can get a piece of them back, an echo of them, that’s close but not quite the person you once cared for?

These are weighty questions that Discovery couches in its usual sci-fi thought experiment splendor. Throughout “Vaulting Ambition”, the show presents stories of its characters reconnecting in ways with people they thought they lost, in ways that are ephemeral and incomplete, and toying with how they react to those sorts of ghosts and shadows resurfacing.

The most obvious of these is Stamets who, as teased last week, meets his Mirror Universe alter ego somewhere along the spore network. Mirror Stamets is encouraging his prime counterpart to figure a way to get both of them out of this other space and back to where they belong. But somewhere along the way, our Stamets sees his partner Hugh wandering the halls, and finally catches him, only to learn that, as we know, Dr. Culber is dead.

This is the type of storyline I normally love. It’s impressionistic, full of impossible geometry and bits of Stamets shifting from one part of the ship to another in ways that shouldn’t work. It has the broader, almost spiritual threat of the spore network disintegrating. And it’s centered on the importance of the relationship between two people who unabashedly love on another and are coping with their grief and separation in that high concept way that you can only pull off in a genre like science fiction.

But it left me cold. A big part of it, I regret to say, were the performances involved. Anthony Rapp joins William Shatner in the long line of Star Trek actors who had to act opposite “themselves” with results that were uneven at best. The scenes between Stamets and Culber felt less like a sad embrace between two characters on Discovery and more like one between Mark and Angel in Rent. That is to say, there was a lot of theater-style acting in their scenes, and while that’s long been an acceptable approach to Trek (see also: Patrick Stewart’s classically trained tack), it clashes with the more naturalistic tone of this series in a way that prevents much of the emotional material from landing.

The clearest contrast is in the scenes between Saru, L’Rell, and Tyler/Voq. These scenes have everything working against them. The actors are either in prosthetics or speaking in Klingon, neither of which lend themselves easily to emoting. And yet the measured but incisive tone in Saru’s voice; the shocked eyes of L’Rell when a dying Tyler is transported into her cell; the vacillations between Klingon anger and human pitableness in Tyler himself as he’s torn between the two parts of himself, make the build to and end of that story much more affecting and tragic than the easier-to-root-for relationship between Stamets and Culber.

But both stories end up in the same place, with both Stamets and L’Rell having to let go of someone they love, however hard that may be. For Stamets, it means waking from his coma and leaving the dreamscape where he can still make up for lost time with the man he loves. For L’Rell it (seemingly) means ridding Tyler’s mind of the last traces of Voq, effectively killing the man that she loves, in order to save him further pain and misery. These are hard decisions, but they evince a willingness to let go for some sense of greater good.

That’s something that Lorca couldn’t manage, and in a way, his decision set in motion everything about this series. While Burnham and Mirror Georgiou also have trouble confronting the image of someone they’ve lost, someone who both is and isn’t the person they once knew, only Lorca refused to accept that there’s a difference and tried, with all his might, to hold on to whatever he could find.

That’s the reveal of “Vaulting Ambition.” The shocking twist isn’t just that the Lorca we thought we knew is actually from the Mirror Universe (revealed via the explanation of his eyesight condition, which is a clever reason for why everything’s darker in the Mirror Universe), it’s that he groomed or became attached to or maybe even loved the Mirror Universe version of Burnham, to the point where he somehow found his way into the Prime Universe, brought her to him, and laid the groundwork to bring things back to where he wanted them to be, to restore what he felt he had lost.

It’s a clever reveal, one that lines up with the questionable behavior we’ve seen from Lorca (something more than a few fans of the show had suggested as a hint toward his true origins) but also gives him an interesting motivation. His efforts to work the spore drive weren’t just to defeat the Klingons, but to potentially give him a way to get back home. His encouragement of Burnham wasn’t just a recognition of her talents and her sense for doing what she felt she had to do, it was an effort to reclaim the person he loved, or some version of her, by any means he could.

It’s a bold place to take this show in its first season, one that recasts much of what we thought we knew and puts it in a different light. Rather than drawing out some palace intrigue with Burnham and Empress Georgiou, or saving the Lorca reveal for the last moment, or having Burnham uncover an escape through interphasic space like the U.S.S. Defiant business seemed to suggest, Discovery puts its card on the table, with no more hidden identities, no more secret origins, and its lost souls put to rest.

Everyone makes some kind of peace here. Stamets leaves behind his chance to be with his dead husband to protect the fabric of the universe. L’Rell excises the last vestiges of Voq, freeing his soul in some sense, rather than keeping him trapped and in pain. Even Burnham and Empress Georgiou reach some sort of equilibrium, each a little wounded, a little in shock, to be face to face with someone who looks at them with the eyes of someone they loved, someone whose parting carried tons of emotional baggage.

Everyone except Lorca. Maybe he had other motivations for coming to our universe and going back to his own. Maybe he just wanted a safe retreat from Empress Georgiou until he could muster the resources and allies to overthrow her. Whatever his larger goals, he could not let go of the Burnham he knew. He put the universe itself at risk, cost thousands of lives, to find her, and is now the walking embodiment of the cost of that inability to let the dead rest.