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As Star Trek: Discovery charts a new future for Starfleet, Tilly and Adira’s latest mission thematically echoes one of Spock’s biggest crises.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Discovery Season 4, Episode 4, “All Is Possible,” streaming now on Paramount+.
Ever since its debut, Star Trek: Discovery has featured plenty of nods to the the wider Star Trek franchise, even with the series initially taking place approximately a decade before the start of Star Trek: The Original Series. This tendency to connect to Star Trek lore has only increased since the characters have been transported over 900 years into the future, now able to incorporate elements from series like Star Trek: Picard. And as the crew embarks on a mission to inspire the next generation of Starfleet cadets, the USS Discovery’s latest mission channels a crisis of leadership endured by Spock in an early episode from the TOS era, “The Galileo Seven.”
On a routine training mission with the first class of Starfleet Academy cadets in centuries, Sylvia Tilly and Adira Tal crash their shuttlecraft on a hostile planet, cut off from contact with Starfleet for support. With the cadets still highly distrustful of each other due to societal tensions between their respective civilizations, Tilly and Adira have their hands full in getting the impressionable trainees in line, even if only to survive the experience. And with the planet’s surface incredibly deadly — with freezing temperatures, electrical storms and native beasts attacking the crashed shuttle — Tilly and Adira’s ordeal echoes Spock enduring a harrowing shuttle crash.
In “The Galileo Seven,” Spock leads a small team to analyze a cosmic anomaly appearing near the Enterprise only for it to affect the shuttlecraft’s system and cause it to crash on a nearby planet. With the anomaly preventing the crashed team from contacting the Enterprise, Spock faces criticisms over his leadership decisions as they are targeted by the planet’s hulking beasts and casualties begin to mount. And while Spock’s more detached, calculating leadership certainly ruffles some feathers, he manages to get himself and his surviving colleagues rescued by the Enterprise just in the nick of time.
For Tilly, the de facto commander of the cadet team, her crisis of leadership isn’t necessarily one of the cadets not believing in her command style, but that the divisions between them are too deep and fractious to prevent them from falling in line under her orders, even when their mutual interests are aligned. By having her cadets not only recognize the necessity to work together but confront their cultural differences head-on, Tilly essentially outlines the mission statement of Starfleet and the Federation, with different civilizations overcoming their differences to work together towards the common good. This is underscored with Tilly nearly sacrificing herself to save the cadets while they move to a location to contact a nearby Starfleet vessel, with the entire group saved at the last moment.
The entire ordeal not only seals the Federation’s hopes that alien civilizations can indeed work together again after the cataclysmic incident known as the Burn, but also helped open Tilly’s eyes in that she may be better suited for a more instructional position than one as an active duty member of a starship. It was only through Tilly and Adira’s example that the shuttle crash was not an even more tragic accident, and while Tilly proceeded far differently than Spock, this approach proved perhaps even more acceptable in saving the day.
Developed for television by Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman, Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 releases new episodes Thursdays on Paramount+.
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