Star Trek Discovery episode 12 review: ‘Vaulting Ambition’

Twist-filled episode helps the series find its groove

One of the most common criticisms of ‘peak TV’ is that shows tend to bloat beyond what’s necessary – due mainly to the disciplines imposed by a broadcast schedule being removed in the era of streaming.

It’s not fair to single out any individual programmes (except bloody Stranger Things), but there’s been a recent counter-trend against this as creators realise not everybody wants to see moving wallpaper. Mindhunter featured an episode barely half an hour long, and now Star Trek Discover has delivered an episode with a blissful runtime of only 36 sweet minutes.

It’s also a return to form after the wheel spinning of last week. The show’s commitment to this evil parallel universe was evident once it became clear the production had shelled out on more than a few fancy uniforms for its band of alt-timeline space fascists, but next week will be our fourth episode there – far more than anybody could have expected, and it’s a gamble that’s payed off.

It may be a tad early to use the evil twin motif to deconstruct an ensemble that’s barely been established beyond Burnham, Lorca and Saru, but STD seems more interested in offering a critique on how the perky values of equality and harmony of the Federation, and the Terran Empire of the Mirror Universe has become an unexpectedly significant counterpart. We may be warlike and gritty in ‘our world,’ but here’s how much worse it could be without the hope of the Federation, the show seems to say.

Let’s kick off with the end-of-episode revelation that the morally grey Captain Lorca is in fact a fugitive from the mirror universe, lending a new weight to all his mysterious speeches about destiny, aversion to light and willingness to kick more ass than your average Federation peacenik while adding some thematic meat on the bone

This may stretch credibility, and edge the show dangerously into the territory where the narrative just becomes a twist delivery system, but it certainly feels fresh, even for Trek. That is, of course, provided there hasn’t been a wave of stories in recent years about evil doppelgangers assuming someone’s identity in a parallel universe and successfully prosecuting a war in their stead that I’ve missed. Where STD and its crew goes from here is anybody’s guess, but any parallels in this half of the season between palace intrigue at the human empire and the Klingon politicking in its first half are doubtless entirely intentional.

This twist only comes in the final moments, though, and the episode has plenty else going on, despite the truncated runtime. We check in on Tyler/Voq, who’s now being treated by L’Rell and still relatively a mystery, but the Stamets and Burnahm plotlines more than make up for the note of box-ticking.

Stamets is still in a spore-universe that looks a lot like the planet in Avatar, working together with his similarly-marooned Mirror self. The technobabble is off the charts here – seriously, if you could follow it, get your mum to notify the Nobel committee – but what matters is that Stamets is presented with a shade of Culber, his partner who was killed by Tyler in a moment of Klingon-ing out.

There’s no fannying about, no sugar-coating it: Culber tells Stamets he is dead, and we get a tenderly observed recreation of Stamets’s happiest moment with him. Cannily, it’s when they’re just brushing their teeth, listening to music one of them hates and one loved.

There are legitimate criticisms here of the wisdom of STD making a fuss over introducing a same-sex couple only to kill one half of it in the first season, and they really land after watching these scenes. Anthony Rapp and Wildon Cruz do beautiful work here, in scenes shorn of gobbledegook that really sing: Cruz will be a loss to the show.

Speaking of losses to the show, Michelle Yeoh’s back! Her scenes as the galactic emperor, complete with Studio 54-esque throneroom and a cape Liberace would find a little loud, can get on the nose somewhat. Oh, you don’t say, Real-world Yeoh had a maternal bond with Burnham? If you missed it at the back, Yeoh’s Emperor Georgiou spells it out with the subtlety of a UKIP poster on immigration – luckily, Yeoh is a class act, and she gets away with it.

Still, if the dialogue is pretty blunt, the narrative works a blinder, with Burnham effectively undercover and at first doing her best to avoid being rumbled. Then, faced with no other option, she reveals her real originals to the emperor – which leads to Yeoh’s Georgiou executing her entire council of advisors to keep the secret, and the offer of a trade for the information that will return the Discovery to our world, but only in return for the spore drive tech, which could accelerate Georgiou’s genocidal rampage around the galaxy.

This is the kind of dilemma Trek has always excelled at — you can hear Picard’s monologue all the way from 1992 — and sets up an intriguing episode next week.

More importantly, STD seems to have got its two big twists out of its system, clearing the decks for a more character-driven endgame to the season. It usually takes Trek shows a while to find their feet — STD has definitely found its groove now.