The A plot is probably the least interesting thing about “Whistlespeak,” and it’s still a really good episode.

It’s so funny. Just as I’m getting used to Discovery, coming into an understanding of what Discovery is and genuinely accepting it on its own merit, they go and change up the formula. This season continues to be the anti-Discovery season.

This is episode 6. In Star Trek there are several tent poles, if you will. Some people might call them tropes or cliches. I like to think of them as things you can expect, signposts that tell you you’re watching Star Trek. The bottle episode. The time travel episode. Last week was both. And then there’s the will they, won’t they violate the Prime Directive with an alien species episode, and that’s this week.

They’re having trouble with that little vial of liquid we saw last week. So Burnham transports, and she has that transport redirected to Kovich. Kovich explains things to her using a really fun 20th century legal pad, which I thought was so clever. I’m not sure how that survives in the future, but hey, whatever. He writes a list, because he happens to have found the names of the scientists, and having the names of the scientists really helps figure things out.

One of those scientists turns out to be a Denobulan who specialized in building weather towers. Towers that help planets who need it by creating weather of a specific type in the atmosphere. All very technical, but it helps them realize where their next clue might end up being. They track down a planet with a pre-warp society, which means the Prime Directive comes into play.

I’m not going to go step by step here, because there are really two things happening. There’s the overall plot Discovery is on, searching for the Progenitor technology and all that stuff. Then there’s a B plot, and the B plot has to do with Dr. Culber. Ever since his experience on Trill, when Jinaal went into him, that entire encounter has begun to open something in him in terms of a spiritual awakening. He’s trying his best with it, and that honestly is the much more interesting storyline.

There’s a bit of an echo between the two, and that’s the best of what Star Trek does. Actually, it’s what the best writing does. You parallel the circumstances happening in one plot to another, and the stories complement one another. So while Dr. Culber is dealing with his own spiritual awakening, Burnham and Tilly have to go down to this planet and deal with stuff.

A Planet That Worships the Tower

The one thing they don’t know they’re going to have to deal with is that this is a highly religious society. There were five of these weather towers on the planet. The other four have gone down, and this one is about to fail too. When it does, the planet will become relatively uninhabitable, or at the very least the people will have to change significantly to even remotely try to survive.

All that being said, they worship the gods, and they see the plateau this thing is built on as the tower of the gods. So there’s this whole spiritual through line, and I really love it. Burnham and Tilly meet a young lady who is a devout member of the society.

The episode gets its name from the way this community speaks over long distances. They don’t have radio. They don’t have anything like that. So they whistle, and in the whistling there’s a language. The universal translator learns how to speak it so the crew can better understand the communications that are happening.

A Literal Foot Race

They meet a group headed to the summit, and they have to figure out how to get inside the thing, because only the spiritual leaders are allowed in. Unless you complete what’s called the challenge, or the race.

It’s really funny, because I’m sitting here thinking, what kind of writers room sat there and said to themselves, we have to figure out a way for these people to compete for this? And they come up with this whole thing. The race is a contrivance. I mean, it totally is a contrivance. If you were to take all of the Prime Directive type episodes and line them up, and I’m totally sure my homeboy over at Best Trek Worst Trek is going to do that someday, this is probably the least creative way to do it. It’s always a challenge. It’s a fight, it’s a political thing. This is literally a foot race. I’m not kidding. They have water stations and everything.

Which is ultimately part of the plot. Burnham, on this little race, notices something the closer they get to the summit. “Look at the moss on the trees. Most of it’s blue, but some of it’s yellow.” If this thing is broken, there’s a chance it’s leaking radiation of some sort, and radiation would be causing mutations.

So she takes herself out by drinking water at one of those little checkpoints. This is a spiritual outing. It’s a test to see if you’re worthy to go in and talk to the gods to help bring the rains. Because of how their legends are built, you have to take what honestly looks like a square piece of white gum, and it makes you thirsty. You have to complete this thing dying of thirst, because that’s how this all started. The gods were appeased by the sacrifice, they brought the rains, all that nonsense. So Burnham’s like, I’m out, I’m out, I’m out, and Tilly has to continue, because the clue is inside the temple and they’ve got to fix this thing to keep everything from breaking down.

When Burnham goes and checks it out, it’s a relatively simple fix.

There’s a C plot where Adira and Rayner are up on the ship, and Rayner is sort of helping Adira find themselves, giving them self confidence and whatnot. It’s fine. It’s incidental. It’s as inconsequential as it sounds, me wasting the time to tell it to you.

Tilly, the Bowl, and the Sacrifice

The devout girl they found decides to take the race. Her father’s trying to tell her not to do it, and she does it anyway. This mirrors the situation Tilly’s got going on at the Academy, where one of her students is debating whether to leave the Academy to go off and do something Tilly doesn’t agree with. So she wants to be as supportive as she can be for this young lady. It’s a balance of saying, well, if I can’t help my student, let me at least help you. Oh, Tilly.

When they get to the temple, they have to complete the last part with water. The girl spills hers. Tilly gives her some of her own, because the rules say you can’t complete with an empty bowl. So they both go in.

As usually happens with these things, and I probably could have predicted it, they’re going to be a sacrifice. Oh yeah. You get trapped inside the temple, the air gets rushed out of it, and you suffocate, all to appease the gods. That whole piece felt contrived too. I get the sacrifice thing, but at the same time, it’s whatever.

“Are There No Gods?”

This is where the A plot begins to make sense in terms of mirroring the B plot.

At the very end of this whole thing they realize Tilly’s going to die, and Burnham’s like, I don’t care about the Prime Directive, I’m not going to risk a really good person because of this nonsense. She gets the warning: “You beam in now, you’ll be revealing yourself to a pre-warp civilization. You’re going to have to answer for the Prime Directive violation.” And her answer: “The Halem’nites can’t maintain this technology. They’re going to get wiped out sooner or later either way. We have to do this.”

She transports into the control room where the girl’s father is, because he’s the head of this temple. So she’s got to sit there and have a conversation with him while they free the girls. And the dude’s like, I don’t know what to do. What does this all mean? Are there no gods?

Burnham has to have a really great conversation. I don’t normally bring these things up, because it doesn’t really have anything to do with what’s happening in a review. I myself am a spiritual person, a person of faith, so this really rang for me and touched me. Especially in a Star Trek society, one that has more or less probably forgone some level of spiritualism for more of a mental awakening, to have her explain this to this guy.

He asks, does that mean there’s no God? And she tells him all it means is that now you know whatever you believe includes us. We’re people like you. There are other things in the universe, and one of those things could very well be your gods and the things you believe in. So don’t lose your faith because what you believed isn’t exactly the way you believed it. There is still what you believe. “Nothing we have shown you means gods don’t exist or that the journey of the Mother Compeer didn’t happen.”

I believe there’s a very powerful lesson there. Star Trek always shines when it expresses ideas that big, and that was probably the one saving grace on the A plot side of the episode.

They do the thing, by the way. They find markings that mirror the markings on the little vial, pointing to one of the other towers that are broken. That one’s easy to get into because nobody lives there. They get there, they find the next clue, it goes to someplace else, and they’re going to figure it out. I’m sure they’ll let us know next episode.

Dr. Culber Is the Episode

I saved the B plot for last because to me it’s the far more interesting part of the episode.

Culber is dealing with what this all means. He has a counseling tool he uses, a version of his grandmother, and he goes to talk to her. She tells him she can’t really help him with things of faith. He’s like, but you always talk about faith. And she says yeah, but I raised you to be a scientist. I raised you to think first. So how do you address the spirit when you haven’t really looked at the body yet?

So he does some scans, with Stamets helping him, which is great because they get to work together. At the end of it they come to terms with the fact that he’s perfectly fine. And Stamets tells him: “The scans would have picked up anything with health implications. So in lieu of that, I say, why don’t you just enjoy it?”

Enjoy it.

How many times do we sit there and attack other people for their belief system? I’m leaving enforced beliefs out of this, that kind of nonsense. Don’t make fun of your friend who has a spiritual belief, or who believes in the man in the sky. Sit there and take joy in the fact that they believe something, and always think about what it is that you believe.

Those are really important, big ideas. The Culber storyline was the saving grace of this episode. I genuinely feel that way.

The Verdict

Star Trek: Discovery Episode 6, “Whistlespeak,” is a 7 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

Here’s my problem. I’ve just recently come to my own awakening, an understanding of what Discovery is, or was supposed to be, and it’s helped me see it and really enjoy it from a very different perspective than I started with. I very much was a Discovery hater. Absolutely.

I’d come around to seeing this series as chapters in a story. This season, the final season, seems to want to hearken back to classic Star Trek as strongly as possible, and we’re getting awfully episodic chapters. Season 4 was so much better at this than season 5 is right now. Each of these feels like a standalone adventure, and why would you have standalone adventures in a book? I get the reasoning behind it, I guess. But I feel like they’re not staying in their lane, if that makes sense.

When the commentary on spiritualism is done right, when it’s respectful and respected, I think we genuinely can coexist in a way that Star Trek has always been there for. There’s an episode of Babylon 5 that did something similar. Sinclair, the commander on that show, got a chance to walk through and introduce them one at a time: this is an atheist, this is this, this is that. He goes through all the various sci-fi religions and mainstream religions that exist. I thought that was such a neat way to handle that particular piece of material.

I can’t wait for the next episode.

Did you find some of the same connections I did? Did you really like the A plot over the B plot? I’d totally love to hear what you think about how the episode handled faith. Tell me in the comments on the video above. My Star Trek: Discovery playlist on the channel has everything from this season.