Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Paul Stamets

In amongst the myriad, made-up complexities of (near-)instantaneous travel through the mycelial network and its place in canon, there was one point of confusion over Stamets' job title aboard the Discovery. Was he, or was he not, the Chief Engineer? Short answer: No. Long answer: Also no.

A degree of confusion was valid, nonetheless. Star Trek has pretty much always had chief engineers, or chief(s) of operations, so it wasn't a stretch to think that Stamets was head of engineering. Moreover, in the season one episode Choose Your Pain, when the then lieutenant jg Owosekun pulled up Stamets' life sign readings on her console on the bridge, underneath his name could be read "CHIEF ENGINEER". That might feel like confirmation enough, but it was, apparently, just a production error. To paraphrase Anthony Rapp in an interview with TrekMovie back in 2017, Stamets was a science officer, not Scotty or O'Brien.

That didn't stop him from playing around with one of Montgomery's famous adages. As Stamets said to Michael Burnham in Context Is for Kings, "At the quantum level, there is no difference between biology and physics. […] Physics and biology. No. Physics as biology". The physics of biology, or biophysics, is hardly a new discipline, along with the more recent field of quantum biology; however, physics and biology are not one and the same thing. Plus, by that logic, everything at the 'quantum level' is everything else at the 'quantum level'. When it comes to even the remotest possibility of a spore drive, I'm afraid changing the laws of biology won't help change the laws of physics.