024: DIS: The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry

Transcript
Welcome, everyone! Thanks for joining me today. It’s been awhile since we’ve had a Discovery episode, and we really get into the stuff in this one! Season 1, episode 4, The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry. 
 
<<Transporter>>
 
Michael Burnham is an official member of the Discovery crew, uniform and all. Tilly comes into their quarters with a package; it includes the last will and testament of Captain Georgiou. She starts to open it, realizes she just can’t do it, and tucks it away. 
 
On her way to the bridge, she runs into Saru. Saru is wearing the position of first officer well. He doesn’t agree with Lorca bringing her onto the crew, but will work to make the best of the decision. He very much still sees her as a threat, though, and we see this in his threat ganglia – little, kind of hangy things that pop out of the back of his head when he senses a threat. She tries to assure him she is no threat, but “my ganglia remain unconvinced.” 
 
Saru, again, is gentle with Burnham but firm in his messaging. He does not support Burnham being on board at all. If you make some assumptions here, though, this is perfect. First, he leverages his relationship with her to be brutally honest. He’s not playing nice; but he’s also not being mean. It’s actually a great example of telling someone you don’t have any respect for them, but in a respectful manner. 
 
Second, and here’s where the assumption comes in, while he doesn’t want her here, he will work to make it all work. I am assuming that he and Lorca discussed this and that Saru expressed his concerns about it. Lorca may have heard and he might not have, but, when Saru left that meeting, it was clear that Burnham was joining the crew. Even though he didn’t agree, Saru supports the decision and is going to help make is a success. 
 
I hope something like this has happened to you before. If it has, that means you have diversity of thought on your team and people are willing to express their disagreements. In the end, though, a leadership team has to be unified in their direction. So you’re in a meeting and the lead person has an idea or a new mandate or something that needs to be enforced with staff. You don’t agree with it. Assuming that leader has created a safe space for people to express differing ideas, you do so. The team discusses it and, at the end of the discussion, the consensus is to do what the lead initially proposed. 
 
You don’t like it, but you’re a member of a functional leadership team. Once you leave that discussion, you own that idea like it is yours. You work hard to make it successful. That’s what a functional and successful leadership team looks like. 
 
They reach the bridge, and it’s pandemonium! Red alert, they’re in a firefight with 2 Klingon birds of prey. Things are looking pretty bad, and just when it looks like they’re about to be destroyed, the simulation ends. “We’re all dead.” 
 
Lorca lays into them. “Very nice. Very polite.” He demands perfection from the crew and explains what a powerful weapon Discovery will be because of its spore drive. But he also points out that they will be on their own; they can get there first, but that means they’ll have no backup. Landry tries to move things along, but Lorca gets one last dig in, “We’ll do better; it’d be hard to do worse.” 
 
Hey, nothing more motivating than being told you’re terrible, right? Here’s the thing, though. He’s not wrong. The tactical situations Discovery will find itself in are exactly as he described them! They’ll jump right over the Klingon homeworld – alone. Yeah, backup might be on the way, but it could take hours or even days for them to arrive! How often, in the original series or TNG did we hear, “We’re the only ship in the area, backup is days away?” 
 
But do you think there are more effective ways to motivate the crew? I sure do! Point number one: this is neither a military ship nor a military crew. With the exception of Landry, we’ve been told this is a scientific vessel with a crew of scientists. I mean, would Tilly be on a warship at this point in her career?? 
 
Point being, you have to match your motivation to the situation and the people. Maybe, if he had a crew of military personnel that were trained and drilled for these scenarios, this would be an effective way to light a fire under them. But they’re not. I imagine for some on the crew, they’ve never been in combat before – and these drills are great for progressing through that – but to be put in a situation you neither trained nor signed up for and then get mocked and berated for not doing well is just poor leadership. Tell me – how would you motivate this crew? What techniques and strategies would you use? 
 
Me? Well, there isn’t time to coddle them, not time to sit with each person and have a good conversation, with empathy, about your expectations. As we’ll see shortly, they get called into action at the snap of someone’s fingers! So, me, I’d go into full coach mode. Herb Brooks coach mode!
 
Herb Brooks coached the 1980 US Men’s Hockey Team to victory against the dominant Soviet team. The Miracle on Ice. He painted the picture that, yeah, the Soviet team is great, and would likely beat the US team most any time. But not this time. He showed them that victory was possible and it was possible because of the contributions of each member of the team. 
 
You can hear the whole speech in the 2004 film, Miracle. It’s a great movie, I recommend it. But what he does here is the approach I would take. Explain what success looks like, and then paint that picture for them. Set the expectation for success and what that looks like and then motivate and inspire the team to reach and achieve that. I’d provide the tools much the same way Lorca does: drills, exercises, scenarios. But give feedback in a constructive way. I think it’s ok to drop the heavy stuff on them, “We’re all dead,” but then tell them how to do better. But telling them they’re terrible and then walking away…that doesn’t help anything. 
 
He storms off with Burnham. He discusses her strengths again, “said the xenoanthropologist.” This was a gorgeous scene of them walking down a dark corridor together that lit up as they walked. In contrast to the areas of Discovery we saw earlier, bustling with activity, this part of the ship is desolate. And we’re about to see why. 
 
When the last episode ended, we saw that Lorca had kept the horror creature from the Glenn in some cage surrounded by dangerous weapons. Lorca brings Burnham here. He shares that “I study war” and that he hones his craft in this room. He takes her to the cage door, and the creature launches itself towards them but hits the force field. So far he’s learned it “has a natural aversion to light.” 
 
She questions why he would have kept this on his ship. He says that it showed its use on the Glenn, it’s all but impervious. He then orders her to study, and weaponize it. 
 
Shifting gears, we’re back on the Klingon Sarcophagus ship. Things are not going well for them. The Battle at the Binary Stars was 6 months ago and they’re still crippled; they need a dilithium processing unit to start their engines back up and to join the war effort. Instead, they’re sitting, dead in the water, and are almost out of food. In fact, turns out they ate the remains of Captain Georgiou. How pleasant…. 
 
Voq and L’Rell are planning how to proceed. She encourages him to raid the abandoned Shenzou; it has a dilithium processing unit. Voq sees this as sacrilege. This is the ship responsible for the death of T’Kuvma. L’Rell makes compelling arguments that, eventually lead Voq to agree to scavenge the Federation vessel. 
 
Landry walks in on Burnham; Lorca’s assigned her to team up with her to help solve the problem of this monster. “How do you know it’s a monster?” Doubling down on it, Landry names it Ripper. Burnham explains it appears to be closely related to a Tardigrade, a docile creature that can withstand most any environment. She continues to speculate about what it is and how it came to be on the Glenn, but Landry is all about the mission, weaponizing this thing. Burnham just doesn’t see it and says it’s biology suggests it isn’t violent and would only attack in self defense. Great line from Burnham: “You judge thing based on it’s appearance and one incident…” 
 
So, she was looking at Landry when she said that, but she was talking to me. And you. And just about everyone that can hear. In a real way, this is a precursor to the TOS episode The Devil in the Dark, which we talked about a few episodes ago. That episode took place some time in 2267, and this episode takes place November 2256. So 11 years prior to Kirk’s revelation, Burnham is trying to convince Landry of the same. Put simply, when you seek to understand a thing, instead of just reacting to what it looks like, you can accomplish great things. The Devil in the Dark gave us a great example of that, and, spoiler alert, this episode will too. 
 
Landry responds by laying down her version of reality. Lorca doesn’t care about what the thing is, he’s interested in what it can do and how it can give Discovery an edge. And she says if he needs a thing, they’ll give that thing. Period. 
 
In his ready room, Lorca is contacted by Admiral Cornwell. A critical dilithium mining colony, Corvan 2, is under attack by the Klingons. The closest Federation ship is 84 hours away, and the colony has less than 6 hours to survive. He assures the Admiral that they are ready to use the spore drive and that he has no doubts they’ll be ready. “You have no doubts.”
 
I love Stamets! He just tells it how it is. He explains that while they grabbed a lot of gear from the Glenn, they still don’t know how to use it. Discovery, on its own, doesn’t have the computing power to maintain a long jump safely. 
 
Look, I know I use a lot of drops from Dune, but please tell me this is not the exact same way the Guild Navigators came to be? Computers can’t calculate a safe jump path for ships and highliners, so they pump people full of drugs to give them the prescience to see the right path. Here, they need to find a way to basically do the exact same thing. Hey, imitation is the purest form of flattery, right? Or, at least something like that. 
 
Following his model for super great motivation, despite everything Stamets just explained, Lorca says they need to do it now, so figure it out. “You listen to me…”
 
Back on the sarcophagus ship, Kol, the Klingon from House Kor that belittled Voq, beams aboard to swear his fealty to Voq and the tenets of T’Kuvma. He wants the cloaking technology that this ship has. Voq explains the dire straits they are in, but shows he is a man of faith and is true to his beliefs. He says, “What belongs to House T’Kuvma belongs to House Kor.” Kor calls T’Kuvma his messiah and gives the rallying cry, Remain Klingon! 
 
Stamets is ready to run a test of his new approach to the spore drive. They’re headed to Corvan 2, weapons primed and shields up. Lorca calls for Black alert, and Burnham watches Ripper start to freak out. Lorca orders the jump, “Go!” and they emerge in the gravity well of a star! They are plunging to their destruction. This show is beautiful! Such an incredible shot of the ship over the star. 
 
Stamets gets knocked out in the confusion, his faced slammed against a console, and the crew successfully backs away from the star and warps away. A near miss. 
 
Landry and Burnham are discussing the behavior Burnham saw from Ripper when they did the jump. 
 
Side note, I think a lot of people have just said this creature is a tardigrade, but, so far, Burnham has just said it has a lot in common with one. So, I’m going to call by it’s proper name, Ripper. 
 
Anyway, Burnham says the use of the spore drive caused a measurable reaction in the creature’s brain. Landry couldn’t care less. She says they aren’t going to let Lorca down.
 
Stamets is being treated by Dr. Hugh Culber. Lorca storms in. Stamets stands up to him and Lorca calls him on it. “Then get off. Leave the ship.” And then he shifts gears and asks if he wants to be remembered as a failed fungus expert, or in the same sentence as “The wright brothers, Cochrane…”. Stamets storms off back to Engineering to get to work.
 
Lorca then makes a power play. He plays the latest distress call, “kids crying” on a shipwide channel. You can see the guilt mount on Stamet’s shoulders as he gets back to work. 
 
Also motivated, Landry grabs a massive rifle, releases a sedative into the cage and releases Ripper. He attacks, and lives up to his namesake just ripping Landry apart. Burnham puts the lights on to maximum causing it to retreat into the darkness of its cage, puts the force field back up, and calls for emergency transport to sickbay for her and Landry. 
 
Culber gives the nod that all TV doctors learn to indicate the patient is dead. Lorca is furious and tells Burnham to get back to it. 
 
We see the shell of the Shenzou, floating in space. Voq, in a sweet looking spacesuit, is scavenging around. He finds some personnel files, but most everything of value is gone. L’Rell, though, has found the dilithium processor. She explains some of it has fused together and they must be careful, one misstep and they’ll die horribly. Voq gets right to it. L’Rell explains she operates best as the power behind the power. She helped T’Kuvma and is committed to helping Voq because T’Kuvma believed in him. They retrieve the unit, and head back to their ship. 
 
I want to mark this moment because of the tactics used by L’Rell here. So often, when someone says leader, people see a publicly visible person: the manager or executive leading the meeting or addressing shareholders; the politician giving a speech; or a military leader rallying the troops. But leadership has a lot of different looks. In the command codes section, coming up, we’ll look at what L’Rell accomplishes by being a leadership influencer. 
 
Back on Discovery, Burnham has pulled Saru into the weapons lab. She apologizes to him for her behavior and they notice his threat ganglia aren’t responding to her anymore. During the discussion, Ripper gently roars and points out that his threat ganglia didn’t respond to that either. She feels this supports her theory that it only attacks out of self defense and isn’t an aggressive creature. 
 
Saru, though, is furious with her. She manipulated him and apologized under false pretense to test her theory. “You will fit in perfectly.” 
 
She doesn’t seem phased by that, though. She gets some spores from Tilly who is eager to help Burnham; it’s her way of helping the people on Corvan 2. Burnham drops the force field and releases the spores into the cage. As she guessed, Ripper doesn’t attack, in fact, it devours the spores! It was starving! It’s mere inches away from Burnham and is not attacking her! 
 
She and Tilly put together some pictures and do an analysis on the Engineering section. Her hypothesis is that Ripper, ok, the Tardigrade, she called it the tardigrade, can handle the calculations to navigate the mycelial network. She presents it to Stamets and he agrees to test it out. They beam it into the fungus garden and confirm there is a symbiotic relationship between them. They’re going to test the jump with Ripper as navigator! 
 
Voq and L’Rell return to their ship to find the crew feasting on food that Kol brought to them. You know, total side note. I paused here to take some notes, and, wow. The Klingon makeup is so well done! I know people have feelings about the look of the Klingons, but regardless of that, what a great job. Even Voq’s eyelashes look like they belong on an alien.
 
Kol mocks Voq and the loyalty of his crew. Says it just took some food for them to shift their loyalties. After a tense and threatening back and forth, even L’Rell turns her back on Voq and accepts Kol’s food. He orders Voq’s execution, but L’Rell says she has a better idea. Leave him on the Shenzou, that unholy ground, to die, slowly and alone. 
 
Quick cut to Discovery and Black Alert. They beam Ripper into the spore reaction cube which activates the tech from the Glenn; it inserts itself into the tardigrade. Stamets is blown away by the data readily available from Ripper. Lorca orders the jump…and they emerge right over the mining colony on Corvan 2. You see, learning more about the tardigrade paid off; it’s much more than just a monster or a weapon!
 
Lorca flexes his military experience. He has the ship just sit there and take fire from the birds of prey. He has another jump prepped as the enemies close in. Saru is freaking out and Lorca waits longer…he orders the jump, leaving some depth charge kind of things, that destroy the attacking birds of prey! The colony is saved; and no one knows who or how they were saved. The spore drive remains a secret. 
 
Two self-satisfied smiles here. One from Lorca; he knows he just pulled something off that people will talk about for a long time. And Stamets…kind of for the same reason. 
 
Burnham, though, being the pragmatist that rains on everyone’s parade, isn’t celebrating. In fact, she sees the real damage they caused. Ripper is in pain. Serious pain. She contemplates that as we join Voq on the Shenzou, where he has been left to die. 
 
He is dejected. He is angry. He destroys the personnel records he found, specifically, when it’s displaying Michael Burnham. Slight spoiler – remember that little point. At his lowest point, he is staring into the holographic eyes of Michael Burnham. 
 
As he watches T’Kuvma’s ship, his ship, warp away, he knows his faith is being tested. He says, “My faith tells me this is not the end!” He repeats this L’Rell beams in behind him. He attacks her but she’s able to beg him off. She says she only has a moment, but she has a plan that will unite the houses, as T’Kuvma preached. But it will require great sacrifice from Voq. She tells him to go to the House of Mokai and they will prepare him. He asks what he must sacrifice. She says, “Everything.” 
 
Burnham is tending to Ripper. He’s hurt; he’s miserable. She offers him some spores “I brought you the good stuff,” and apologizes to him. 
 
Back in her quarters, Tilly celebrates her success, “seems like you’re going to have another reputation.” She encourages Michael to open Georgiou’s will and then leaves the room. Michael decides to open it, and we’re greeted with a hologram of Georgiou delivering a message, “I imagine you have your own command now…” I suppose she didn’t have a chance to update this during the Battle at the Binary Stars.
 
She delivers a beautiful message to Burnham, and there are takeaways here for us too. “The best way to know yourself is to know others,” and, “keep your eyes and heart open, always,” and, “take good care of those in your care.” She leaves Michael with her telescope, which has been in her family for centuries that she can follow her cause, exploring and investigating. 
 
<<Red Alert>>
 
This is where season 1 discovery really gets its legs under it. We’ve established the Discovery crew, and the ship; Burnham is finding her place; and the Klingon threat is taking on the more galactic feel it was meant to have. I feel like the prior episodes were all the necessary buildup to get to here. 
 
So, what do we have? A wildly dysfunctional crew with a aggressive tyrant as the captain; a ship with the near supernatural ability to suddenly appear anywhere in the blink of an eye; Michael Burnham stepping into her role as a tortured prodigy that seeks to understand, despite her reactionary approach in the opening episodes; and a Klingon threat that appears to now have centralized leadership, and cloaking technology. 
 
I love it.
 
I am really enjoying the character of Lorca. On one hand, he’s really just the arch-villain that happens to be your superior officer. But he has these flashes of brilliance. In the last Discovery episode we watched, I praised his ability to enroll Michael in his vision for the ship. In this episode, it’s brief, and it’s couched in threat, but when he tries to get Stamets out of Sickbay, for just a second, he actually tries to build him up and inspire him – comparing him to the Wright Brothers, Zephram Cochrane and Elon Musk. 
 
Fun story on the Elon Musk mention. Apparently, he dropped that in, ad-lib, hoping Musk would give him a free Tesla! 
 
Now, of course, before he compared him to such greats, he told him to get off the ship, and afterwards he played the horrific distress call from the colony to drive his point home, but, still, he had a moment!
 
Unfortunately, this episode kind of suffered from one of my complaints about Discovery. If you weren’t directly involved in Burnham’s story, you did not get much screen time. But that’s what we can come to expect as the series continues. They do have some excellent character development later on, but it takes some time to get there.
 
And, they killed Landry!! Seriously?? I mean, she’s an awful person and, in my opinion, the perfect example of what a Starfleet officer shouldn’t be, but, she was also kind of great. I was super disappointed she went so quickly. 
 
We got to meet Admiral Cornwell; and incredible character in Star Trek. I’m excited to see more of what she offers as the series continues. 
 
It will be interesting to see how things progress with Ripper. You know, when TNG first came out, they planned on having dolphins and whales as crew members. Turns out that, especially in 1987, that would have been super expensive, so they dropped the concept, but maybe having Ripper as the spore drive navigator will be their chance to do something like that. Maybe. 
 
<<Command Codes>>
 
They say the absence of a thing can often be just as instructive as the thing itself. And we absolutely had examples of that with Lorca in this episode. He was aggressive, insulting, dictatorial and, well, just plain mean. But the sad thing is, it worked. He berated his bridge crew, personally insulted Stamets, weaponized a distress call, and they were still successful. 
 
In the short term.
 
We’re 4 episodes into Discovery and they just had their first, big win. But was it Lorca’s leadership, or the skill of the team that brought them that victory? I would honestly say the team succeed in spite of Lorca’s leadership. 
 
Burnham’s assignment was to weaponize Ripper. That cost Landry her life. Ignoring the mandate, which is a pattern with her, Burnham learned more about the tardigrade and its capabilities. Then, she was able to convince Stamets that its capabilities were related to the spore drive and could be their solution. Had all of that not happened, the ship would failed and the mining colony would have been lost. 
 
The execution of his strategy at the colony was chaotic and dangerous. I mean, he had been taking the time to drill the crew; you think he could have told them he planned on using the ship’s defensive systems to lure the enemy ships into range so they could jump out and blast them out of the sky? Yeah! I think he could have! In fact, that would have all but eliminated the chaos and panic among the bridge crew. For all they knew, he was sacrificing the ship for something! 
 
It is absolutely a good thing to try new approaches. But if you keep your entire team in the dark about it, at best you will limit the benefits and, at worst, serious could damage could happen. 
 
I mean, imagine if Burnham was on the bridge! We know she doesn’t really care about following orders. Shields are down to 20% and the ship can handle 2, maybe 3 more shots; she’s going to warp out of there! Then they’ve lost the colony and Klingons know they have some magic ship that can appear in the sky. 
 
Terrible, terrible stuff from Lorca here. 
 
Now, imagine that your job is to support him, and be sure his orders are carried out the way he wants them to be. Enter the Executive Officer; Saru. Here’s the officer that wanted to run as soon as they found an unknown object at the Binary Stars. The one that says his species is specifically bred as prey. And he has to support Lorca?? Yikes! 
 
But he does. 
 
We talked about it early in this episode. When Lorca said Burnham was joining the crew, even though he didn’t like it, he’s going to help make it happen. 
 
I wanted to talk about this in more detail. And, more specific to your situations and experience. When you put a group of humans together on a team and put one of them in charge, it creates some…interesting dynamics. We talk about the positive ones quite a bit, right? Diversity of thought and experience can bring fresh and innovative ideas. Having a group of people to run ideas by helps ensure we focus our time on the ideas that most benefit everyone. And so on and so on.
 
What we don’t always talk about is the process, the path to those fresh and innovative ideas. I think the people that used to make those motivational posters, you know, the cat in the tree saying, “Hang in there!” those people would want you to think that you put a diverse group of people in a room and suddenly rainbows and lollipops are streaming through the air! Ideas are pitched, built upon and implemented! It’s all so magical!
 
But, it isn’t. I mean, sometimes, it gets ugly. Not always, for sure, but I want to illustrate that spectrum between rainbows and lollipops, all the way to chairs getting thrown and tables being flipped, and everything in between. 
 
Ideally, you walk into a meeting to discuss implementing a new mandate or something like that. You share your ideas, others share theirs, and you all work together to filter through the thoughts and bring it all together into a plan of action everyone contributed to and feels good about. And I honestly believe that can happen most of the time. 
 
But there are times when your ideas aren’t welcome. When the boss, or maybe even their boss, or HR (it’s always HR, by the way) has a “my way or the highway” approach to it and that’s the end of it.
 
Regardless of which end of the spectrum you experience in the meeting, there are two rules that simply cannot be broken if you want to be an effective leader. One – voice your opinion. Fight for it if you can. Be compelling and work to bring others to support your opinion. But do that behind closed doors. That is for the meeting. It’s not for the floor and it’s not for all of the team. Which brings us to: Two – when you walk out of that meeting whatever idea was the final decision, you own that as if it were your own. You don’t complain to colleagues or staff that it was bad decision; you don’t tell people that are upset about it that you don’t agree with it. You own it, and then you go back to One. Behind closed doors, you voice your opinion. And maybe now, you have real-life examples of the negative impacts you can bring forward. But, One always leads to Two, and Two to One. Remember that.
 
Now that’s not the end. If it’s a truly bad decision and it’s causing harm of some kind, you escalate it. I mean it when I say fight for your opinion. But also be reasonable about it. Just because you disagree with a thing doesn’t mean it’s a bad decision. 
 
Quick story. In the early 2000’s, we had to lay off some people. It was awful. We were in a union environment and the rules processes for this were clearly spelled out in the collective bargaining agreement. Now, I was new to managing an organized workforce and didn’t understand how a CBA worked. When we got the news from HR – see, it’s always HR – that we had to do some lay offs, they identified the people that were impacted, per collective bargaining. Well, I disagreed. One of those people was super talented; like, we were lucky they chose to join our team kind of talented. But, because they lacked seniority, they had to go. 
 
I put together reports, cost benefit analyses and wrote incredible talking points to make my case that we should keep this person and put one of our lowest performers in their place. I was shot down. Not because I had a bad idea, but because the rules for this were clear. I not only owned the decision when all was said and done, but I was also one of the people that delivered the news to those affected. And at no point did I tell them that I disagreed with them being laid off. I was sympathetic. I listened. But I didn’t try to make myself feel better by telling the one person that I fought to keep them on board. 
 
Now, if it was a different situation, like a non-union environment, and I was given the list of people being affected, I could ask more questions, fight for my opinions. I could even escalate to HR, because I’ve been unfair to HR this whole episode, if, for example, my boss said they wanted to lay a person off because of a protected class or something like that. 
 
So there is situationality to this, for sure. But generally speaking, Rule One: Voice your opinion behind closed doors. Rule Two: Own the decision as your own when the meeting is done. 
 
Can we talk about L’Rell a little bit more? The power behind the power. What I appreciated in her was the demonstration that you don’t need a title and you don’t even need the spotlight to be a leader. She supported both T’Kuvma and Voq in their holy visions. She provided counsel that helped them both. But she’s also in a position to advocate for her ideas, and other’s ideas as well. Through influence, she can shape policy, she can shape a response. 
 
When you have developed expertise in an area, and you have the respect of others, influencing others can almost seem natural. Your opinions are taken seriously and people tend to pay attention to what you have to say. 
 
But you can work to build your influence regardless of your expertise level, experience, position or title. It takes time, but it is possible, You must first build trust with and around your team. Do this through consistency and being reliable. Be an excellent listener, and take action based on what you hear. And develop relationships with the people you work with. The activity of doing these things will help to build your influence. Jayson Demers (@JAYSONDEMERS) wrote an article for Inc.com that focuses on this. Check out the link in the show notes. (https://www.inc.com/jayson-demers/7-ways-to-build-influence-in-the-workplace.html) 
 
Finally, Georgiou is amazing! Could you imagine working with or for someone like her? I would feel invincible knowing she was supporting me! In a short message, she opens Burnham’s heart so she can see who she really is, “You are curious, an explorer.” Then she points her in a direction to build success for herself, “Take good care of those in your care.” And then she forges a personal connection that goes beyond words, “I am as proud of you as if you were my daughter.” 
 
So good. It is such a shame that we got so little of her. Pound for pound, minute for minute, the greatest Star Trek captain to date. Unfortunately we only got her for a very short time. Rest in Peace, Phillipa Georgiou. You will be missed. 
 
<<Hailing Frequencies>>
 
The Starfleet Leadership Academy is supported by listeners, just like you. Click the link in the show notes to support the ongoing production of this podcast. 
 
There is very little I enjoy more than hearing from you. What takeaways did you have from this episode? What did I miss? We’re on Twitter: @ SFLA podcast and you can follow me @jefftakin Jeff, t as in Tardigrade, a k i n. And, I’d like to ask a favor. If you have enjoyed the Starfleet Leadership Academy, please tell a friend or colleague about it.
 
Now let’s see what we’re going to watch next time…. 
 
Oh yeah! Season 5, episode 25 of Deep Space 9, In the Cards. A super fun episode that not only brings baseball cards into the Star Trek canon, but also features Jeffrey Combs as Weyoun! This one hits a lot of high points for me and I hope it will do the same for you. I’m also excited to see what lessons we can pull from this episode. 
 
Until then, Ex Astris Scientia!
 
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