Thoughts on the big Crewman Daniels reveal

With a special preview of an article by Gerry Canavan

Yesterday I was in the same room as a Star Trek actor for the first time—namely, David Cronenberg. The context was a Q&A session about his fascinating new film The Shroud at Chicago’s iconic Music Box Theater (where it will continue to play through next week). Though his run as the mysterious Dr. Kovics on Discovery did not come up, I found him to be as funny and charismatic and compelling in person as he was on screen. I have a lot of critiques of how Discovery handled its leap to the 32nd century, but introducing Kovics into the Star Trek universe almost makes it worth it. Surely he was the best character in that distant future milieu—in part because he was so enigmatic. For me, his defining moment was when he announced that he could not join the mission to save Earth and Vulcan from full-scale planetary destruction was that he had more important priorities to attend to. What could that possibly mean?!

When the producers were given the chance to film a final “coda” to Discovery season 5, to make up for the unexpected cancellation of the series, they decided to puncture the mystery around Kovics. In a very odd scene, they have him declare to Michael Burnham that he had lived many lives and had at one time been known as Crewman Daniels—the Temporal Agent tasked with making sure Captain Archer fulfilled his world-historical destiny. I found the final season of Discovery to be tedious and pointless overall, but that one line made me glad that I had secured permission to briefly address it in Late Star Trek. One of my guiding theses is that 21st century Trek is absolutely obsessed with somehow settling accounts with the hated prequel series Enterprise—and now the founding series of Star Trek’s streaming era was using some of its precious few last minutes to establish some kind of connection with its predecessor’s most confusing and widely-panned plot arc.

In the limited space I had available, I could only note the following: “In what will likely be the latest date shown in on-screen canon for the foreseeable future, the circle of Star Trek history is at last closed—a clear vindication of my thesis that the many varied installments of late Star Trek are united by the tribute they pay to Enterprise” (164). (I also note that I made an embarrassing error, inflating Daniels’ rank to that of Lieutenant rather than Crewman throughout the book.) Earlier this week, Gerry Canavan—the co-editor of the Mass Markets series in which my book appears—shared with me his own reflection on the Kovics-Daniels reveal, which is part of a chapter of his to be published in the forthcoming edited volume The Third Age of Trek. With his permission, I quote him at length:

Two odd notes from the end of Discovery’s fourth season might give us some pause. First, there is the revelation that the fan-favorite character Dr. Kovich (a mysterious Starfleet operative with whom Burnham frequently has encounters, who seems to outrank both the head of Starfleet and even the president of the Federation despite having no clear title or source of authority, a stunning performance from director David Cronenberg) is in fact an aged Crewman Daniels from Enterprise. While a fascinating bit of fan service, this raises tremendous questions about just what Daniels was trying to accomplish in his work, and why preserving a timeline that leads to the collapse of the Federation and the cessation of all the peace and stability it represents was so urgent (to say nothing of the question to what sorts of ethical principles, civilian oversight, or even other decisionmakers Daniels/Kovich is meant to be accountable). Kovich/Daniels’ collection of trinkets and souvenirs, and his apparent interactions not just with the Enterprise and Discovery crews but with every major crew across Star Trek history, might even suggest we have been fundamentally confused about what sort of franchise Star Trek is. It is, in the end, a series about how a single individual, Kovich/Daniels, controls all things past and present, self-willing himself into existence and then ruthlessly preserving the conditions for his own emergence to the exclusion of all other considerations.

Gerry clarified to me that the second “odd note” is of course the virtually incomprehensible attempt to make a connection with the fan-favorite Short Treks installment “Calypso.” In both cases, the writers seemed to be in such a rush to establish lore that they didn’t think through the implications—surely their intention wasn’t to turn Kovich/Daniels into the monstrous self-aggrandizing puppet-master of the galaxy, just as they presumably didn’t mean for fans to pity poor Zora’s endless torture of solitary confinement while she waits for Craft to show up.

The question that arises for me is why. Why would they spend these last few minutes on obscure franchise lore? I would suggest that the motivations are basically the same as those behind Enterprise’s equally ill-conceived gesture of presenting its finale as a holodeck program viewed by Riker and Troi: to avoid being written out of the timeline. As I point out in the book, “These Are the Voyages…” namedrops the NX-01’s first mission and the Xindi attack—both events that were caused by future-based participants in the Temporal Cold War. If Riker and Troi know about such events in season 7 of TNG, that means that those “changes” were baked into the familiar Prime Timeline rather than providing a pretext to shunt Enterprise into an alternate reality.

In the case of Discovery, leaving “Calypso” as a “dangling chad” (as producer Michelle Paradise once put it in an interview in which she reveals that they originally planned to spend an entire season on the “Calypso” problem!) would be problematic because it suggests the existence of an alternate timeline where our heroes’ journey to the future went very differently. And more seriously, even leaving “Calypso” aside, any future production would have the opportunity to preempt The Burn, effectively writing the final three seasons of Discovery out of the Prime Timeline. By verifying that Temporal Agent Daniels fully endorses the existing timeline, then, I believe they were trying to preempt any such temporal shenanigans and guarantee their place in Star Trek history—ironically by using the very same lever fans had so often deployed to write Captain Archer and friends out of Star Trek history, namely the Temporal Cold War.

In other words, Discovery died as it lived: by picking a fight over its place in Star Trek canon. What began as the boldest—and in my mind, most successful—attempt to reinvent Star Trek in the context of contemporary TV, ended with the very worst kind of franchise writing, prioritizing IP management over plot, character, meaningful themes, or even basic coherence.

But what do you think?