re:Discovery Splendid Chaps Productions

The moment we’ve all be waiting for is here! Brother is the first episode of Discovery season two, and the re:Discovery crew is here to guide you through it. In a thrilling season opener, we meet Captain Pike and some of the Enterprise crew – but not Spock as expected, which looms large. There are seven mysterious red lights blinking simultaneously 30,000 light years apart. An Enterprise officer meets a grisly end mid-mansplain. We talk Discovery’s aliens, non-humans and augmented humans. Science officer McKenzie nerds out about non-baryonic matter. And we collectively scream over the latest addition to the Discovery crew: Tig Notaro as the swaggering, sassy Jet Reno!











Connect with us and let us know your thoughts via Twitter, Facebook or our website. A transcript of this episode is available.















Show Notes:







* “Be Right Back” is an episode of Black Mirror, where a woman has a virtualisation of her dead husband’s personality (gathered from his online presence) placed into an android body.* The Barzan are a humanoid alien race on Star Trek that require a respirator to feed them the toxic (to humans) gasses found on their homeworld.* The history of Airiam – Discovery’s augmented human bridge officer.* Alex Kurtzman takes over from Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harberts as showrunner on Discovery.* New Star Trek show announced staring Michelle Yeoh – featuring Section 31.* New Picard show* Lower Decks – the new Star Trek animated series.

Season two continues as it began with more high adventure, as the Discovery fires up the spore drive and follows a new red burst 50,000 light years across the universe into the Beta Quadrant, where they find an impossible colony! As Pike, Burnham and Owosekun go down to the surface to investigate, Tilly ignores OH&S to help out Stamets and unearths her own spooky business. The mysteries multiply, the crew’s trust in each other grows, General Order One gets debated, and the #DetmerDrift is born. Plus there’s tension between science and religion, big questions about faith, and we want Pike to be our Dad (or Daddy?) more than ever.











Connect with us and let us know your thoughts via Twitter, Facebook or our website. A transcript of this episode is available here.















Show Notes







* Touched by an Angel is a TV series about two guardian angels.* There are reports that Chinese labs are using CRISPR gene-editing technology on humans.* A “deus ex machina” is an unsatisfying surprise solution to a problem.* Rumspringa is a rite of passage for Mennonite and Amish teenagers.* The “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” is a character archetype seen primarily in films from the 2000s.* Lt Reginald Barclay is a recurring character introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation.* Here’s a link to our “Space Dads” Twitter poll.

“Point of Light” picks up many threads from season one, as well as progressing the Tilly’s ghost, Red Angel and Spock plotlines. We reconnect with L’Rell and TyVoq’s man bun on Qo’noS, where holding onto the seat of power is proving difficult; Amanda seeks Michael and Pike’s help in decrypting Spock’s stolen medical files; and a new assassin is in town – Section 31 is real, and is recruiting! Team re:Discovery discuss overarching theories, question Sarek’s parenting, ask where (and who) is Sybok, and much much more.













Connect with us and let us know your thoughts via Twitter, Facebook or our website. A transcript of this episode is available here.















* The Squire of Gothos is an alien being with god-like powers, and the title of the episode in which he appears, encountered by the Enterprise during the first season of Star Trek.* Q is another alien being with god-like powers, and a reoccurring character throughout the run of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He also appears in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager.* Sybok is Spock’s older half-brother, appearing as a major character in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, but never mentioned before or since.* The idea that humans’ innate faculty for language is genetic is the theory of universal grammar, credited to Noam Chomsky.

Set your face to ugly cry – in this week’s episode “An Obol for Charon”, Discovery’s most elegant soul, Saru, faces a fatal illness – the vahar’ai; the ship is held in place by a sentient orb which causes havoc to its systems; and Tilly is consumed by the fungal entity “May”. Team re:Discovery discuss the central theme of polarisation between action and surrender, whether we exist if there is no one to remember us, the “soft butch showdown” between Stamets and Reno, if shirtless Saru met our expectations and much much more. So grab a hanky and press play!













Connect with us and let us know your thoughts via Twitter, Facebook or our website. A transcript of this episode is available.















* Wikipedia has a limited description of soft butch; this term, mostly used by the queer community, can describe anyone masculine presenting with a touch of femme.* Majel Barrett-Roddenberry also played Nurse/Doctor Christine Chapel and a whole host of characters in Star Trek: The Animated Series, including a young Amanda Grayson (Spock and Michael’s mother). Her run as the voice of the Federation’s computers actually lasted past Star Trek: Voyager through to Star Trek: Nemesis, as well as JJ Abrams’ first Star Trek film, which premiered the year after she died.* Captain Christopher Pike’s appearances in original series episodes The Cage and The Menagerie were the only pre-Discovery insight into the pre-Kirk history of the Enterprise.

In this week’s episode “Saints of Imperfection” the Discovery crew launch a mission to rescue Tilly from the mycelial network and pursue Spock’s shuttle craft. This episode is heavy with entities existing where they shouldn’t – Phillipa Georgiou on Spock’s shuttle, Pike’s old friend Leland running Section 31, and in the season’s first (expected) whoa moment, the highly problematic return of Hugh. Team re:Discovery discuss the history of the theoretical tachyon particle, body diversity in the crew, the queer significance of Discovery and the technology of transporters. Like everything in this episode, it doesn’t work how you think it does!













Connect with us and let us know your thoughts via Twitter, Facebook or our website. A transcript of this episode is available.















* TV Tropes covers “Bury Your Gays” in detail; basically it’s when LGBT characters are killed off in a way that makes them feel more expendable than the non-queer cast. The TV Tropes entry for Discovery notes that the producers – and Wilson Cruz! – talked about the trope immediately after Culber’s death went to air, promising this wasn’t like that. Time will tell.* Spock’s death and resurrection traverses the films Star Trek II – The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III – The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home. They’re all great!* Mycelium Running is a book written by real mycologist Paul Stamets, and was a huge influence on Discovery’s spore technology. You can read more about it in this article, published soon after season one, which has a few guesses about the future of the show…* Psychotropic drug enthusiast and artist Alex Gray makes art that encapsulates the feeling and experience of being on mushrooms. See some his art works here.* The CIA has a long, documented history of murdering political leaders, killing civilians, interfering with foreign elections and performing highly unethical and illegal drug experiments on vulnerable and unknowing civilians.* As well as Spock Must Die!, James Blish also wrote novelisations of several Star Trek episodes. This article by Colin Milburn goes into more detail about tachyons, Blish’s 1954 short story “Beep” and Gerald Feinberg’s writing on the subject.* RENT is a rock musical loosely based on the opera La Boheme surrounding the AIDS epidemic in New York in the 1990s. It debuted in 1996.

This week’s episode “The Sounds of Thunder” returns Saru to his homeworld Kaminar. The Red Angel has directed Discovery there – but why? We finally meet the Ba’ul – the mysterious oppressors of the Kelpiens – and ponder what level of action is ethical to stop genocide (you know, just regular Star Trek stuff). Team re:Discovery return to “that episode” to discuss the huge amount of listener feedback we received, and cheekily deliver our audit of #startreknudebutts. Thanks for listening!













Connect with us and let us know your thoughts via Twitter, Facebook or our website. A transcript of this episode is available.















* Netflix (or at least Australian Netflix) lists this episode as “The Sound of Thunder”, but everywhere else has “Sounds”, plural. We’re running with the majority on this one, but we might have used both titles in our discussion.* “Skin of Evil” is the first season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Enterprise security chief Tasha Yar is killed – halfway through! – by Armus, a creature manifesting as a thick, black oily liquid which could move and change into a vaguely humanoid shape.* Odo, chief of security on the starbase Deep Space 9 in…er…Star Trek: Deep Space 9, is a shapechanger who normally appears humanoid, but must revert back to his natural liquid form every 18 hours or so to rest. For most of the series, he does this in a special bucket.* “Soylent Green” is a bland but nutrient-rich foodstuff made by the Soylent Corporation, supposedly from plankton, in the dystopian future of 2022 depicted in the 1977 film Soylent Green. As revealed in the film it’s made from…well, not plankton. (The film is loosely based on Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!)* Traditional Betazoid wedding ceremonies – as we are informed by Ambassador Lwaxana Troi – are performed in the nude.* In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy dies and is magically resurrected by her friends, but struggles to adjust to being alive again. (We’re being deliberately vague on the details; while we’ll no doubt bring it up again, it’s a great storyline and we don’t want to spoil it too much if you haven’t seen it.)* In the long-running British sci-fi sit-com Red Dwarf, David Lister is the sole surviving human being, lost three million years in the future aboard the massive mining ship Red Dwarf. The series two episode “Thanks For the Memory” revealed Lister had his appendix out many years earlier, but in the series six episode Legion, he has his appendix taken out again! Lister’s weird life offers several fixes for this continuity error; the standard fan explanation is that in the series four episode “DNA”, when he is transformed and then restored to his original self by a DNA altering machine, the machine remade his body complete with a new appendix.* Watch out for our round up of Star Trek‘s nude butts in a separate post soon. (We’ll add a link to these notes when it’s ready!)