2x08 If Memory Serves

[6.1/10] When we saw the NCC 1701 pop-up at the end of Discovery’s first season, I was excited but concerned. There would, inevitably, be a momentary thrill to seeing the crew of the famed Enterprise interact with the crew of the Discovery. And, in fact, Anson Mount’s Captain Pike has been a shot in the arm for Discovery’s second season, filling in the space that Lorca occupied on the show without feeling like a mere replacement.

But it portended the problem that all prequels and sequels seem to run aground on at some point – trying to harken back to what came before in a way that feels hollow and even a bit cheap. “If Memory Serves” is as much a sequel to “The Menagerie” or “The Cage”, as much an installment trying to become a conduit for the audience’s preexisting feelings about the character of Spock, as it is telling its own new, unique, and definitive story for this chapter of Star Trek history.

Don’t get me wrong, Discovery does try to advance its own projects here. It uses the near deus ex machina of the Talosians’ abilities to not only create stakes for what’s at risk with the red angel situation, to explain what happened to Spock, and to pull the curtain back on the familial estrangement and strife between Burnham and Spock that’s been shoved into a mystery box all season.

Some of it isn’t bad! The hinted idea that the Red Angel has witnessed events that would destroy all life in Federation space, and is now traveling to the past to try to avert that fate, is an appropriately stakes-heavy and sci-fi wacky premise for Star Trek. The fact that it has made Spock unstuck in time and straining to get his mental bearings using either logic or emotion is an interesting character beat. And even the idea of Spock being bitter at a sibling because at the same time his mother stopped feeding his human side, that new sibling received her warmth and love is an emotionally compelling one.

But so much of how Discovery tries to get there is on the backs of preestablished parts of the franchise it has only barest, most contorted connections to. I am not a continuity hound, and I can 100% forgive the awkwardness of a “previously on” segment that plainly features different actors, a different aesthetic, and a different tone right before we dive into Discovery’s five-decades-later follow-up. But too much of what “If Memory Serves” does depends on trying to channel the weight and meaning of past events, and too often it falls woefully short.

I will start with the most basic and most unavoidable crack in the armor here – this does not feel like Spock. It’s one thing to reimagine Pike the one-episode wonder. But Spock is arguably the definitive character in all of Star Trek. Trying to harness so much of the character’s complicated family history, past encounters with the Talosians, and general personality and psyche without nailing that connection between the performer on our screen’s now and Leonard Nimoy in 1966 makes the whole thing feel hollow.

Discovery is going for a big lift here. It wants to position its main character as key to who Spock became. It wants to posit a deeply-felt personal history between them. It wants to do that to legitimize its take on Spock and to heighten the importance of Burnham. And it’s just too much. I don’t mind that Burnham is Spock’s adopted sister. (Lord knows it wasn’t the first time Star Trek pulled a long lost sibling out of the ether). Still, Discovery wants to retcon 50 years of arguably the most developed and examined character in the franchise to anchor it around our current hero du jour.

You would have to absolutely nail the characters both old and new, and fold things into the continuity seamlessly to pull that off, and that is an ask Discovery has yet to prove itself capable of, especially not here. There’s some wiggle room from the fact that this is a mentally disturbed, younger, and a little looser Spock than the one who shared Kirk’s five year mission. And yet this Spock can’t help but feeling like a pale, not-quite-right approximation of his predecessor (and, I guess, successor?). And the involvement of the Talosians comes off like convenient fan service, there to coast on the good will and impact of events past rather than building on them,

The reveal of Burnham trying to be cruel to be kind to her little brother, to protect him, and it spurring Spock to abandon his human side, is particularly unsatisfying. Again, it feels like too much of a retcon, but that’s not the only flaw. It’s hard to swallow because it tries to play the significance of a relationship that we’ve only heard talked about, and never really witnessed or even mentioned elsewhere. It too seems too cute in classic Spock references, right down to “half-breed” being used as an unforgivable insult. And it falls victim to the problem that hobbles even less-ambitious Discovery episodes – the ponderous, unnatural, stilted conversations that everyone has about everything.

As I’ve mentioned before, the severity, the soap opera-level melodrama, the declarative and exposition-heavy lines uttered by nearly everyone just sink the show’s projects before they even get out of dock. The ostensibly bad blood and heavy history-laden conversations between Burnham and Spock lack the shorthand or relatability to make them land. The stage-y, Lifetime channel-esque conversations between Stamets and Culbert utterly wreck a legitimately interesting plot and character study. And the idiocy of a Battlestar Galactica-esque “let them fight to work this out” scenario is heightened by emotionally expository shouts from Culbert and Tyler as they lock horns. There are a lot of problems in “If Memory Serves” that come from broad story choices that puts the show in a difficult spot, but some of the biggest weaknesses here come from the same kind of heavy-handed writing and wooden dialogue that would wound any episode of any show regardless of subject matter.

Oddly enough, the only part of this episode that manages to surpass all of this is the meeting between Pike and Vena, because it builds on, rather than backfills, the continuity, and because the two performers at the center of it manage to sell the weight of the reunion. The reveal that the Talosians have given Vena a substitute Pike after “The Cage” to keep her happy is the right kind of humane but tragic. These moments are brief enough that they don’t try to do too much or overstay their welcome. The interactions between Vena and Pike are reluctant but soulful, with the performers creating that emotional shorthand that’s missing between Burnham and Spock. And there is added weight, tragedy, and hope to these knowing not only where these characters have been and where they’re headed.

If only “If Memory Serves” could accomplish the same elsewhere. There was always going to be trouble trying to set a show made in 2019 ten years prior to the events of a show made in 1966, but most of it I can forgive. It’s a little odd that the Talosians and the tech look different, or that we have new actors in familiar roles, or that there are long lost siblings we never heard of. But kept on the edges of the core of Star Trek -- its most major characters, events, and stories -- Discovery had the space to carve out its own identity and chart its own path, getting a boost from its proximity to the familiar without getting sucked into it.

That safe distance ended here. Now we are deep into revisiting one of the most iconic stories in Trek history. Now are delving deep into the psychology and history of arguably the franchise’s most definitive characters. Now we are inserting these awkwardly-fitting characters and narratives into what’s already been established, and maybe even sacrosanct to Star Trek with hardly even a fig leaf or handwave to justify it. I can appreciate Discovery as its own thing, carrying on a tradition without needing to adhere strictly to the continuity of what’s already known to the audience. But I can’t appreciate when it injects itself into the heart of those familiar places, tries to invoke that same emotional ballast and good will from what’s come before, and ends up exposing how far away it is from those things in the process.