While Star Trek: Discovery‘s spore drive and Mycelial network are universally praised as great sci-fi concepts, many fans are arguing that canon demands it be written out of the show and the sooner the better. If the spore drive was not available to Captain Kirk (and especially Captain Janeway) then it needs to be flushed down the memory hole before the prequel series gets too close to the eras we’ve already seen. No argument there. However, the spore drive must not, and I wager will not, be mothballed until the series is concluded. The unique way Discovery explores the Final Frontier is essential to the show.
Any Star Trek series has several main ingredients: dynamic characters; moral allegories; sci-fi whiz-bang. One essential element is the exploration of space, summed up by the tagline “the Final Frontier.” This evokes both an environment and an action. From a storytelling perspective, it is a combination of the setting and the plot of each episode. The means by which Star Trek crews explore space is more than just the backdrop for the episodes–it greatly effects the types of stories that can be told in the series. And each series does its exploring in a unique way. Let’s call this the Exploration Premise. Of all the Trek ingredients, this is the one that the franchises’ show runners keep reinventing with each series. Discovery‘s spore drive is only the latest example.
The Exploration Premise was the same for The Original Series and Next Generation: the Enterprise uses its warp drive to hop from one star system to the next, sometimes in an unexplored region of space but usually relatively close to home. Each week they visit a gaseous anomaly or dying star or asteroid belt or strange new world. On both of these shows, the exploration happens in a completely random direction with no thread connecting one mission to the next. Oh sure, in-universe, the Enterprise’s mission orders probably adhere to some Starfleet strategic imperative blueprint, but this is never mentioned on screen, and I’ve never even thought about such a document until I wrote this sentence. This simple premise allows for the type of episodic stories those shows excel at telling.
Deep Space Nine was the first spinoff to differentiate itself by changing it’s relationship to the Final Frontier. It kept the character templates, allegories and gadgets, but instead of warping into a random corner of the galaxy each week, it decided to spend the entire series exploring only one star system (Bajor) and it’s nearest neighbor (Cardasia). It further developed its own style of exploration with the use of the wormhole’s link to the distant side of the galaxy. This twin premise allowed for serialized stories that were more issues-driven and character-based, while the Gamma Quadrant depicted a more intense and sometimes terrifying sense of the unknown than TNG could in the familiar Alpha Quadrant.
Voyager went a step further and stranded the entire show across the distant Delta Quadrant. This allowed for stories about the danger and adventure of being alone in unexplored space without any hope of Starfleet support or resources. While the episodes were similar to TNG in that the Voyager explored different planets and nebulae, etc. each week, the viewer knew the direction of all these stories was pointed the same way: toward home.
Conversely, Enterprise‘s Exploration Premise was pointed in the opposite direction: branching out and away from Earth. Except since it was a prequel, the show depicted what it was like exploring nebulae and strange worlds for the first time. Tellingly for the purpose of this essay, even this premise was not deemed different or interesting enough compared to the previous shows. So the element of time travel was added to its version of exploration, in the form of the Temporal Cold War. The NX-01 could not travel through time, but other ships in the series could, and so did the characters, many times over.
When the time came for a 5th spinoff series, the Discovery show runners were going to have to come up with yet another new premise for exploring space and telling stories in the process–“a new way to fly.” In keeping with the fact that Discovery tends to Go For It! in all things, it equipped its ship with a spore drive than enables a Final Frontier trifecta: instantaneous travel to any point in the universe, travel to parallel universes, and time travel. Now that we’ve seen the first season, it is hard to imagine this show or any new Trek show plodding from one sector to the next at warp 5 or warp 8 or even warp 13. Watching the DISCO spin like a top and pop out of existence makes us realize what Trek’s producers intuited back in 1992: the TOS/TNG Exploration Premise had gone stale, and no new Trek–no matter what time period it is set in–should be locked into the same narrative framework that ran out of steam with the end of TNG’s run.
Beyond storytelling, there is another reason why the spore drive is an essential upgrade to the Exploration Premise. The act of spore jumping, and the limitless possibilities of this type of travel, opens the viewer’s mind to a sense of wonder and unknown possibility each week. Fifty and thirty years ago, TOS and TNG were able to do this simply by warping into planetary orbit each episode. But that kind of space travel came to feel routine in the same way Americans who were awestruck by the Apollo missions became bored by the space shuttle launches. In both cases, we needed a higher dosage of wonder.
TNG all but admitted this in its final episode, with the “All Good Things” Q Speech:
“Is that all this meant to you? Just another spatial anomaly, just another day at the office. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons, and for one brief moment you did. For that one fraction of a second you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you–not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.”
Star Trek cannot merely tell us we are witnessing this unfold on our TVs, it has to show us with a mix of physical settings and plot events, hence the importance of continually revising the Exploration Premise. “All Good Things” accomplished this with a temporal anomaly that evolved backwards through time and linked Picard to three different phases of his life. DS9 took us inside a wormhole inhabited by beings who exist outside of linear time. Discovery shows us by taking us into the Mycelial Network, which is depicted like we are traveling along synapses of the Universe’s brain.
Since we are told and shown how this network connects all points in space and links all life, the show’s writers will not have any trouble making us believe we are experiencing Q’s “unknown possibilities of existence” on a regular basis. This is why, even though the spore drive cannot continue to operate during the other Trek time periods, it will and must continue to operate for the rest if Discovery‘s run. The Mycelial spores are this show’s most important characters.
