SNW 4.02 The Griffin Incident
I'm not a fan of horror, but I can appreciate when it's effectively done, which I think this episode was. And I liked that in the midst of all the horror each of the three protagonists got told something that they needed to hear but weren't necessarily ready to yet. Spock got Your human characteristics are a strength, not a failing (and shown, viscerally - pun intended - what happens to people who try to cut out vital parts of themselves, i.e., Una's Illyrian biology and Pike's explorer/commander identity). Kirk got You can't save everybody all of the time (and most especially you can't save family, whether it's David or Sam). And La'an got You're not Khan, you're not a monster, and you are one of us (meaning Starfleet, but also, less positively, possibly the dead).
How they deal with what they hear is interesting, though. Kirk, at this point, is a decent person but only just starting to become particularly self-reflective in the wake of the scavenger vessel from last season and parenthood in this, and pretty soon he's also bleeding out from a gut wound. It's not that he doesn't hear what he's told, but he's got a lot on his plate, so it kind of gets brushed aside - in the middle of dying, our decent guy is still trying to save La'an more than himself - or at best filed for later on.
Spock's already been on a journey of self-discovery, so he's in a reasonable place to start dealing with what he's told; once he's finally able to stop reacting and start acting, he resolves Trek's decades-old and frankly increasingly tedious ruminations on being half-this vs half-that with none of it adding up to a whole person by choosing not to cut out either his humanity or his Vulcanness, but to engage in a cultural practice that we know, thanks to Amanda and Michael, is (all snobbery aside) perfectly accessible to both species - namely logic - instead. Breaking out of that trap is what allows him to break out of the Griffin's trap and see what's really there.
La'an is the one whose journey of self-discovery re. her Augmented ancestry* has been increasingly forced on her, and who is profoundly unwilling to embark on it because she's afraid of what she might find, and so she doesn't hear what she's told. Instead, she hears what she fears, and what she fears begins to take her over to the point where she (temporarily) becomes it, like Rose Harper did before her. I'm so interested in where her story is going to go through the rest of this season - and I guess that if we really had to have That Episode last season, at least this is a good thing salvaged from it.
*And I wonder, just how recessive are those Augmented genes anyway, in a woman who can drink multiple Klingons under the table without getting so much as a hangover and has done so multiple times?
