Michelle Yeoh

            On Tuesday it felt less like I had cold that I’d woken up with the day before and more like I had food poisoning again.

            I had to work for six hours starting at midday and so I took a very early siesta for an hour and ate a very quick and very early lunch before leaving.

            I worked for Kieran Brent for two classes in a row. It was one long pose and the time went fairly quickly for the first class. I memorized Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem “Dog” while I was posing. During my breaks I worked on getting caught up on my journal. For the second class I did a similar sitting pose but with the opposite twist to my upper body and I found it very uncomfortable. I was exhausted by the time the class ended. I’ll be doing the same thing next Tuesday.

            I had a small chicken leg, a potato and some gravy for dinner and watched an episode of Star Trek Discovery.

            Spoiler alert!

            This story continues from the end of the last episode when Tilly was taken by May via an organic transporter in the form of a cocoon, into the mycelial network. May tells her she needs her help to stop a monster that is destroying her world.

            The Discovery catches up with Spock’s shuttle, disables it and transports the one life sign aboard but it turns out to be Philippa Georgiou, who is really the dark version of Philippa who was the empress that Burnham saved from the alternate universe. Philippa is now a member of Section 31, which a black ops branch of the Federation. Their mission is to track down Spock.

            Stamets figures that since their spore drive jumps go through the mycelial network they can do a partial jump and stop Discovery halfway inside of the network. The problem is that the mycelia will eat through the hull of the ship if it spends more than an hour in that position. Stamets and Burnham find Tilly but Tilly says she’s promised to help May. The monster that May is talking about turns out to be Stamets’s late husband Dr. Culber, who was murdered by Ash Tyler in the first season. Somehow, because Stamets already had altered his body by injecting himself with mycelial spores, Culber’s life force had entered into the mycelial network and reassembled there in another body. The problem was that he was inadvertently destroying the mycelial network just by being there. They try to take Culber back the way they came but the barrier between regular space and the network was impassable for his body as it began to dissolve as soon as he tried to go through. Tilly figured though that the cocoon in the science lab could again be used as a transporter and to bring Culber back, so that’s what they did.

            Philippa Georgiou is played by Michelle Yeoh, who started out as a ballet dancer and then began making martial arts films in the 80s in Hong Kong. She is not a martial artist but she uses her dance training and on set instruction to simulate fighting skills. She starred in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”.