The Morning After is a recurring column in which our intrepid commentator, Lars Pearson, wakes up, makes the coffee and looks at recent geekery in the harsh light of day. Sometimes by wrapping himself in a Jon Snow-like pelt and declaring, “We attack at dawn!”

 [Spoilers for the recent Star Trek: Discovery finale follow. You have been warned.]

Now that we’ve reached the end of Discovery Season 2, we can – beyond all considerations of the storytelling, the casting, the production values, the drama of it and so much more – look at the most vitally important and finger-scorching question of all.

Namely, did it address how Spock could have an adopted sister, Michael Burnham, who’s never been mentioned in any other Star Trek series?

Such was the angst and contempt from certain segments of Trek fandom on this issue, the Discovery showrunners had telegraphed in advance that yes, Season 2 would address it head-on. And so we learned that to preserve the security of the Federation, Spock proposes that everyone involved must cover up Discovery‘s fate by never, ever mentioning the ship or its crew again, on pain of treason. (If you understood precisely why it wasn’t enough to stick to the lie that everyone died horribly, you’re a better person than I am.)

Here’s the thing… while it’s nice of the showrunners to be so accommodating, let’s not pretend it was ever necessary in the first place.

The “reasoning” behind Fandom’s complaint with Burnham – if you can call it that – has always been that if something isn’t mentioned or seen, then it doesn’t exist. Peter David, as it happens, ran face-first into this same issue while writing the beefy Star Trek novel Vendetta (1991), when he added a sub-plot about a female Borg. (This, years before Seven of Nine was a glint in anyone’s eye.) Gene Roddenberry’s assistant – Richard Arnold – protested, insisting that since we’d only seen male Borg on screen, obviously they were only blokes. David, understandably baffled, responded that just because we hadn’t seen any female Borg, it didn’t follow that none existed. (By the way, you actually can see a female Borg in TNG: “Q Who?”, if you squint a bit, but let’s move on.)

David fast realized that by that same logic, Captain Kirk in his whole life had eaten nothing more than a chicken salad sandwich, a slice of pizza and a cup of coffee – but he didn’t even get the coffee, as Tribbles drank it. But Arnold dug in his heels, and the brouhaha resulted in Vendetta sporting a confusingly vague disclaimer it was apocryphal. I challenge anyone to read that bit of text cold and think it means, “We’re decanonizing this because there’s a womanly Borg about the place.” The readership pretty much ignored it.

And yet, The Rationale of Arnold lives on, in the horror many Trekkers have displayed at the addition of Burnham to Sarek’s family. Their kneejerk question keeps being: “How can Spock have a sister that he’s never mentioned?”

Well, let’s game this out. Is there any moment in the whole of on-screen Classic Trek, movies included, when Spock might credibly have done this? After all, “By the way, I have an adopted sister” is hardly something one is likely to air as one is (for instance) mind-melding with an emo space pizza, dealing with a godlike fop with a Napoleon complex, or hunting down a murderous alien intent on suckering out your salt, your precious salt, through your face.

It’s also the case that we never learn that much on screen about the Classic Enterprise crew. How many siblings does Uhura have? Dunno. Sulu? Pick a number. All right, Chekov is provably an only child, as TOS: “Day of the Dove” relies upon it. Scotty has a sister and a nephew per Star Trek II, but is she his only sibling? No matter how much you sift through this sawdust, the characters’ back stories remain open slates.

Classic Trek is not even, as it happens, a world in which the characters know much about each other. Exhibit A remains, now and forever, “Journey to Babel”. In this, Kirk, Spock and McCoy welcome Ambassador Sarek and his wife Amanda on board the Enterprise. Kirk suggests that Spock might like to beam down to Vulcan to see his parents, prompting a pregnant pause and Spock’s admission that, “The ambassador and his wife are my parents.” Dun-dun-dunnnnnnnn… go to the opening theme.

Stop for a moment to ponder that. Kirk does not know that his first officer is the son of one of Vulcan’s highest-ranking public servants. Never mind that this is surely common knowledge, never mind that even the utopian Federation has not eliminated gossip (Jadzia Dax springs to mind, although it’s charming when she does it), but surely, surely, Starfleet would have briefed Kirk on that point, and cited it in Spock’s personnel file. Nor is “Son of the Vulcan ambassador to the Federation” the sort of thing one buries in a footnote. Perhaps Kirk fantasizes so much about Orion slave girls, he never reads his paperwork.

There’s also, of course, the out-of-nowhere appearance of Spock’s half-brother Sybok in Star Trek V, which entails Kirk insisting to Spock, “I happen to know for a fact that you don’t have a brother.” We can read this as either A) Kirk has damn good reason to think Spock has no brother (which in no way rules out a sister), or B) Kirk is so oblivious about Spock’s family, he doesn’t know about his half-brother, who is the son of a Vulcan princess. Either way, it doesn’t tip the scales toward the “How can Kirk not know about Burnham?” faction, does it? (I tried re-watching Star Trek V recently, and good Lord… it made me endorse the fan-theory that the whole film is a delusion on Kirk’s part, per the Nexus in Generations.)

But thanks to Discovery season 2 – which for the record, I very much enjoyed – we now have a solution, albeit an awkward one. It makes total sense that Spock, Captain Pike et al perpetrate the fiction that Discovery blew up. But then they go that extra step, and are ordered to “never speak of Discovery or its spore drive or its crew ever again.” Okkkaaaayyyyy… yes, that would explain why older Spock never brings up the topic. He was never obliged to do so in the first place, but ass covered.

Why, though, does this preclude anyone else from ever talking about it? Burnham was notorious as Starfleet’s only mutineer, and Federation news services surely publicized the reinstatement of her rank. (There’s no sense in Discovery season 2 that anywhere she goes, Starfleet personnel might arrest her on the spot.) She’ll remain a topic of conversation for years if not decades.

It was always possible, of course, that Spock had mentioned Burnham any number of times off-screen to Kirk or McCoy, over the Romulan ale (or whatever passes for a soulful heart to heart with a Vulcan). Establishing that he’d keep his mouth shut about Burnham, however, doesn’t fully square that circle. Those same conversations would occur, at some point, with other people initiating them. (I mean, his best friends include Leonard McCoy, who is hardly a paragon of tact.)

Seriously… imagine a world where Edward Snowden is publicly pardoned and returns to work for CIA, and suddenly it’s announced that he’s died in the line of duty. His siblings are ordered to never speak his name – apparently under the rationale that if they don’t bring it up their infamous relation, nobody they know will either. That’s a foolproof solution. Foolproof.

But hey, problem solved right? A stated but hugely flawed explanation is always, it would seem, preferable to a simple and benign one that goes unstated.

Now perhaps fandom can pressure CBS into explaining why, in The Wrath of Khan, Scotty takes his nephew’s soon-to-be corpse to the bridge, rather than somewhere more helpful like sickbay.

 

In a different lifetime, Lars Pearson was a department head at Wizard: The Guide to Comics. With Lance Parkin, he just won an Independent Publisher Book Award for Ahistory: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe.