There’s been some controversy regarding the new show “Star Trek: Discovery.” The new main ship in the series, the “USS Discovery,” has a unique warp drive that runs on an experimental drive in the Trek universe that’s called the Displacement Activated Spore Hub (DASH) drive.

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The DASH drive works by tapping into space plants called mycelia. In the show, the crew discovered a space fungus whose root system had spread “throughout subspace” and the DASH drive worked by tapping into this drive and more or less becoming a brain wave that travels through it.

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So is it fact or fiction? There is mycelia here on earth, and surprisingly they do work similarly in reality. Like in the show, mycelia refers to a network that fungi make with plants. The main function of mycelium  is to decomposing organic compounds, but research also points to this network being used for plants to communicate with one another.

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It’s worth noting that the mycelium is part of one organism. The actual mushroom is a fraction of the size of one fungus. This network isn’t very large in comparison to the mycelium in “Star Trek: Discovery,” where a network reaches not only other planets, but “throughout subspace.”

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“Star Trek: Discovery” also features an organism called a Tardigrade that exists on Earth, but this time it’s even further from the truth. On the show, the crew has to fight a tardigrade that could tap into the Mycelium network, much like the DASH drive does. Unfortunately, though, the show’s tardigrade is based on many liberties that the show took when making it.

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Tardigrades on earth are micro-animals, and they are tolerant of harsh environmental conditions. It’s been theorized that they may even be able to survive in space, but while it hasn’t been tested yet, scientists thought that the tardigrade could incorporate parts of foreign DNA into its own DNA, using a process called Horizontal Gene Transferring. The paper that was published about this was highly controversial at the time, and a second paper was published by the same scientists that wrote it, stating that their first findings were false.

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Why does that matter? It’s because in the show, the “giant space tardigrade” is hardly even remotely like the ones on earth. The tardigrade on the show is about the size of a grizzly bear and appears on the ship after absorbing DNA from the mycelia network into its own DNA, giving it the power to appear anywhere on the fungal network that it wants.

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So, all of the research shows that the writing team on “Star Trek: Discovery” didn’t do their homework. Real life mycelium and tardigrades aren’t as large as they are on the show, and a plant that stretches between planets is extremely unlikely. The show’s most egregious burst though, is why any of this matters.

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It all boils down to suspension of disbelief. At the core of this show, it’s creativity for creativity’s sake. “Star Trek” was among the first franchises that explored interdimensional travel, they pioneered the sci-fi genre, and now they’re trying something new on that front. Their science is blatantly wrong, but matter can’t move faster than light, and that claim has been ignored for the entirety of the show’s 50 year run.