6 Ups & 5 Downs From Star Trek: Discovery 5.6 — Whistlespeak

In this, the written version of the Ups & Downs, we're going to do something a little different when it comes to Cetacean Observations. Seán will have the fine-eyed and exhaustive list of easter eggs and lore, but here, that might be too much for the poor whales to handle! We will pick a couple — or maybe even just one — that stand out and go into detail. In general, did the Trek track or not?

On the whole, Whistlespeak wasn't replete with references. The first that did stand out is the nub on which the rest of the episode rested: Denobulan Hitoroshi Kreel and some 24th century water towers that still used silver iodide (a chemical compound used in real-life today for 'cloud seeding')! The walls of part of tower three were also "solid tritanium," a material widely deployed in Starfleet starship construction as far back as the NX-01.

There were nods to several technologies — the replicator (for grandmother's mofongo), the "holodeck simulator" (where Book can always tell the ship is fake), and of course, to all those TRI-corders. A favourite, however, was the isolinear chips — a 24th century staple — used in the control panel for the weather tower. Adira's "Okay, Captain. I need you to bypass the auxiliary power circuits" was also a reference unto itself. '[Re-route] auxiliary power' might as well be the Starfleet motto! Adira's subsequent translation — "Yank it out, Captain" — was not only hilarious, it was Star Trekcondensed into one line. What officer/engineer worth their salt hasn't taken a page out of Seven of Nine's book at some point and tried a "radical dislocation"!