midshipmank:

The entire time Michael was giving her speech about not allowing fear to make them give up their principles, I was thinking about how the Discovery writers, way back before Disco started airing, talked about how they wanted to write a Star Trek show that was about current issues (as all Star Trek, and all scifi, generally is). I was thinking about the significance of them having a Black woman not only as the protagonist, but also as the heart of Federation idealism and compassion. And I was thinking about how they made really excellent use of the Mirrorverse: instead of villainizing an alien species by making them the embodiment of hateful, fearful, reactionary ideology (therefore making such ideology seem inhuman), the enemy came from within. It was us, if things had gone slightly differently in Earth’s history. The tension between how different the Prime universe really is from the Mirrorverse was always at play. It was really well done, especially since they set it up with the false premise of a good/evil dichotomy between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. We’re ready to believe the enemy is out there, nonhuman, with a culture we don’t know much about, etc, etc—a really straight, flat allegory. But then they turned that on its head, and the real enemy was revealed to be someone we thought we trusted, someone we thought we knew, and then it even became ourselves…. It was just really well done. As someone who’s academic focus is literally science fiction and (identity) politics, I am so pleased with how this season of Discovery went. It was excellent.

I have only one complaint: when the fuck is Hugh Culber coming back.