Review

Before discussing the story itself, the elephant in the room needs to be acknowledged right at the start: this is the third Star Trek prequel in a row and like the others it introduces a litany of continuity problems, perhaps more than ever before. That aspect of the premise is quite problematic, but this review will dwell on that as little as possible, focusing instead on reviewing this series primarily on its own merits, rather than on how it impacts and possibly diminishes the rest of Star Trek's canon. For more on that, see this article.

It is also notable that this is the first Star Trek series to be filmed in a 2:1 aspect ratio. This is an unfortunate choice, as it leaves black bars on the top and bottom of 16:9 screens which are the most common screens this series will be viewed on. This aspect ratio was reportedly chosen to make Discovery "feel more cinematic," which is a strange reason. Game of Thrones is 16:9 and definitely feels adequately cinematic. Wasting 11% of the screen is not how you make something "feel cinematic." Producing good content is.

With that out of the way, The Vulcan Hello is without a doubt the strongest Star Trek pilot so far from a story perspective. This touching and compelling story weaving Burnham's traumatic and quirky childhood with Klingon nationalism is some of the richest drama portrayed yet on Star Trek. This terrific shift in tone for Star Trek is captured brilliantly by the significant departure in the style of the opening theme as compared to previous Star Trek series. This new opening theme is stylized more like a James Bond film than it is like previous Star Treks, and that's a good thing, as this is a different kind of Star Trek; one which grapples directly with the dark side of exploration: sometimes fantastic new discoveries lead to fantastic new terrors. Generations ago, the invention of warp drive led to the discovery of the Klingon Empire and the commencement of a cold war that lasted a century.

This contrast is best captured when Burnham explores the Klingon beacon. She has no idea what it is, nor does she understand the danger it represents, but is nevertheless awestruck by the beauty of its architecture. Her sense of wonder at her discovery is palpable and infectious. And her precocious recognition of its threat due to her personal history with the Klingon Empire, a rare experience during this time period, is a powerful piece of foreshadowing of the danger the Klingons pose to the Federation of this time period. Her explanation of "The Vulcan Hello" also neatly foreshadows how the Federation eventually makes peace with the Klingons: "Violence brought respect. Respect brought peace." That quite accurately summarizes Federation-Klingon relations in the 24th century as depicted on TNG and DS9.

The portrayal of Klingon tribalism and nationalist unification was a particular highlight also. The decision to show lengthy scenes entirely from the Klingon point of view in their native language subtitled was a fantastic way to elicit empathy for them rather than depicting them merely as the violent, savage, one-dimensional antagonists they sometimes seemed like in some past Star Trek productions. Framing their xenophobia as an issue of "self-preservation" and seeing diversity as a threat to their cultural identity evokes powerful comparisons to real life nationalist movements all over the world, both historic and modern. This is a natural fit for Klingon canon and can even be seen rippling across the Empire as late as DS9: Tacking Into the Wind when Ezri Dax confides in Worf that she views the Klingon Empire as dying, and deservedly so; a judgment made in reference to a culture she saw as too attached to tradition for its own good. Worf was uncomfortable with that assessment, but seemed to agree.

Another interesting piece of texture this episode adds to the canon is its potential to clear up some ambiguity surrounding the history of the cloaking device. In TOS: Balance of Terror, Kirk and Spock had a conversation that explicitly stated that cloaking technology is "theoretically possible," and heavily implied that it had never been observed. Star Trek: Enterprise complicated this by depicting both Suliban and Romulan ships with cloaking devices, but it was conceivable given the tone of the show that Archer and crew didn't do a great job spreading knowledge of what they encountered far and wide across human (and later Federation) society. This episode seemingly further complicates this problem by showing T'Kuvma with a cloaking device a decade too early. One way to rationalize this however is so long as it is just T'Kuvma's ship that has a cloaking device and knowledge of this technology is limited to a handful of Starfleet officers, it is conceivable that like on Enterprise, broad public knowledge of this technology does not become mainstream until TOS.

Moreover, T'Kuvma possessing cloaking technology has the potential to deepen the quirky relationship between the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Empire that was established in TOS: The Enterprise Incident. That episode established that the Klingons and Romulans had a brief military alliance, which perhaps stretches back into this era as well. If that is so, it raises some interesting questions, such as did T'Kuvma get his cloaking device from the Romulans, who were already shown to possess an early prototype in Enterprise? If so, it's rather ironic that T'Kuvma, who fears corrupting the purity of Klingon identity by mingling with outsiders, would forge this alliance with the Romulans. We'll see.

Star Trek: Discovery's pilot is not without its flaws, though. For starters, the ship Discovery is nowhere to be found. Given that this is a serialized drama, it seems obvious that the story will get to it eventually, but it seems equally obvious that if you're going to name your show "Discovery," you should find a way to work the ship into the pilot somewhere, at least as a framing device to match the show title. Another rough edge was Burnham's spacewalk. It was pretty contrived to force her out there in a spacesuit. Not having a shuttle "maneuverable enough to navigate the ring" seemed like a pretty weak excuse for that. Similarly, drawing the Starfleet logo in the desert as a plan B rescue plan was pretty campy, as was Saru's hair literally standing on end when he got scared, and frankly the whole concept of an alien species whose magic superpower is to "sense the coming of death" is the lamest thing since Wesley Crusher's sweaters.

We could have also done without Ensign Danby Connor's annoying airline pilot announcement joke, a piece of filler dialog that is so overused in space opera by this point that it's a genuine cliche; one that was never funny to begin with. Likewise the lens flare is an unwelcome aesthetic continued from the Kelvinverse films and while the subtitled Klingon scenes are mostly awesome, the subtitles fly by a bit too fast sometimes.

All things considered though, despite prequel fatigue among most Star Trek fans, this is a strong prequel. It doesn't quite have Rogue One levels of polish, especially with regards to careful treatment of continuity (visual and otherwise), but it comes close and delivers an exceptionally strong story so far.

Review

Star Trek: DiscoveryShenzhou kicks into high gear in this thrilling followup to the pilot's cliffhanger at the end of the first episode. It's nice to see lasting, painful consequences result from Burnham opening pandora's box with the Klingons. Georgiou is tragically killed, T'Kuvma is martyred, and Burnham is in prison for starting a war! Having the main character's life permanently upended in this way sets the stage for a kind of drama never before seen on Star Trek, a welcome change of pace.

This skillfully-written episode makes good use of foreshadowing and parallelism. Burnham's character is shaped by a traumatic attack by the Klingons which killed her parents, leaving her a ward of Sarek. While not depicted in as much detail, it turns out a parallel story played out for T'Kuvma as well, as he apparently lost his parents at a young age too and likewise engaged in a process of self-discovery after "discovering" his father's ship and vowing to restore honor to his house.

Their similar childhoods ironically make them particularly hostile to each other: Burnham fears the Klingons as much as T'Kuvma fears the Federation. Burnham is afraid that the Klingons could take something or someone else dear to her and T'Kuvma sees the Federation as an existential threat to Klingon identity.

Indeed, both of them suffer exactly that which they fear most. T'Kuvma succeeds in provoking a war with the Federation, but in addition to costing him his life, we know from other Star Trek productions that the war doesn't end well for the Klingons. Likewise Burnham watches Georgiou die at T'Kuvma's hands. Then in her moment of grief with her self-esteem at perhaps an all time low, she declares, "We are at war and I am the enemy," shortly before being stripped of rank and sentenced to prison. All this was nicely foreshadowed in the previous episode when Georgiou said to Burnham, "I trust you with my life, but it doesn't change the fact that you're lost." Georgiou's trust was misplaced and Burnham is even more lost now than she may have been before.

Another interesting piece of perhaps unintentional foreshadowing from the previous episode is when Georgiou asked Burnham in the desert how long the storm would take to come crashing down on them. She estimated one hour, 17 minutes, and 22 seconds, or roughly 77 minutes. If you think of the coming of a storm as a metaphor for the battle with the Klingons, the grimmest part of the battle for our heroes is roughly 77 minutes into the screen time of the Star Trek: DiscoveryShenzhou series so far.

While this episode is terrific overall, there are some flaws to take note of. Aside from the copious continuity problems introduced here and noted above, Sarek's mind meld across a thousand light years of space due to some kind of subspace katra bond strains suspension of disbelief pretty hard. And what was with that ridiculously dark room the court martial was conducted in? Shadowy figures convicting our hero isn't dramatic, it's dumb. Do judges in the real world turn off all the lights for dramatic effect when sentencing criminals? No. So turn on some frigging lights!

Those are small nitpicks for the most part though and by and large this was a fantastic piece of drama. Putting Burnham in such a dark place (the figurative part anyway...) is an incredibly compelling way to set up a gripping story about how she grapples with both her personal losses and her responsibility to Federation society for having started the war with the Klingons. It seems clear that Star Trek: DiscoveryShenzhou is not at all interested in repeating Star Trek: Enterprise's mistake of failing to depict the single most important event in the historical canon of the era that it is depicting. Enterprise failed to depict the Earth-Romulan war even with four seasons. But this series started the war with the Klingons in episode two. And that's awesome.

Review

The Discovery finally makes its debut in this episode in a remarkably shady fashion. The apparently highly corrupt Captain Lorca orchestrated a prisoner shuttle emergency to capture Burnham and manipulate her into joining his crew. Did he end up killing that shuttle pilot that came loose from the tether in the process? It's best not to dwell on such minutia... the episode certainly doesn't. What's important is Captain RansomLorca of the Federation starship EquinoxDiscovery has found a way to travel through space really really fast by experimenting on the protomolecule from The Expansesome mysterious alien stuff we've never seen before.

We have seen this basic story outline many times though. The Expanse's protomolecule notwithstanding, we've seen instantaneous travel technology on Star Trek many times. Beyond Voy: Equinox, there are a handful of other examples, but the one this episode most closely resembles is the Iconian gateways featured on TNG: Contagion and DS9: To the Death. The presentation of rotating landscapes is so similar to those portrayals in fact, it's legitimate to wonder if Iconian technology was in fact based on the same stuff that Lorca has discovered. We'll see.

What is clear though is this research project is definitely not going anywhere. Since this is a prequel, we know that nothing based on this technology ever gets developed and mainstreamed by anybody, so it's all going to go horribly wrong at some point, making it kind of hard to care about this research project at all.

In addition to that though, the coarse, sneering cynicism oozed by just about every character except for Saru also makes it difficult to sympathize with any of the people engaged in this research. It's hard to imagine why Saru, a person of clearly upstanding and incorruptible moral character, would choose to work in this den of snakes. It's sort of fuzzily implied that Saru understands the necessity of the shady secret research they're engaging in, but so far the narrative just isn't selling it. The title of the episode "Context Is for Kings" hints at what they were going for though. That and several other emotional beats in the episode are evocative of this moving exchange from BSG: Pegasus:

Adama: "Wait for all the facts. Context matters." Tigh: "Context? That woman shot an officer right in front of the crew." Adama: "We shot down an entire civilian transport with over a thousand people on board. Says so right there." Tigh: "That was completely different. And we don't know there were people on that ship." Adama: "Which is why I hope the admiral reads the complete log and understands the context."

It seems this episode is going for a similar vibe: that Lorca's actions, morally questionable as they may be, are justifiable to some degree given the context they're operating from. But that's hard to see at this moment. From what we've seen so far, Captain Ransom of the Equinox was easier to sympathize with than the borderline megalomaniacal Captain Lorca. Ransom had real, desperate reasons to act with such cruelty. Lorca seems more like a mad scientist gone batty with power.

Perhaps the worst parts of the episode though were the obligatory space monster horror scenes. Anything that resembles Ent: Impulse is definitely not going to win a lot of points. Between that and the murky character writing, this episode is a pretty significant step down in quality from the pilot. Notably though, Captain Lorca's character has some potential. The comparisons to Captain Ransom from Voyager have the potential to be quite flattering: Ransom was awesome. With a bit more careful writing, Lorca could develop into a very interesting character. They've also got some potential to connect him to Section 31 in some interesting ways here too, which could help with containing some of the continuity problems that are starting to pile up.

Review

In the next installment of Captain Ransom'sLorca's quest to capture creatures to power his experimental propulsion drive, the mad scientist captain astonishingly forgets what the creature was for and becomes inexplicably obsessed with its murky potential to be turned into a weapon somehow, despite its obvious and much more useful connection to the parallel spore propulsion experiments that were being conducted on the Glenn. It wasn't just Lorca who missed the obvious though. Literally everyone seems oblivious to this connection for half the episode for seemingly no reason. Burnham eventually figures it out, but not before Landry gets herself killed in the most embarrassingly stupid and unnecessary way imaginable in a reckless beyond words attempt to harvest its body parts to turn into weapons of some kind. If she had succeeded in killing the creature, she would've permanently destroyed its potential to be exploited for propulsion in exchange for weapons of questionable value at best.

Meanwhile Lorca and Stamets get into perhaps one of the pettiest arguments ever seen on Star Trek when Stamets whines again that he's a scientist, not a soldier, after which Lorca rhetorically invites Stamets to leave the ship. Stamets, evidently a bit dense, takes the rhetorical suggestion literally and threatens to "take everything" with him, after which Lorca has to literally remind him that the ship and all its contents are the property of Starfleet, so he can't really take his ball and go home. Ultimately, the only thing that convinced Stamets to go back to his job was Lorca passive aggressively broadcasting the death and carnage going on at Corvan II over the entire ship's intercom, in a seeming act of public humiliation directed at Stamets. Basically Stamets threw a temper tantrum and Lorca gave him a spanking in front of his schoolmates. But the narrative portrays it as though it ought to be compelling interpersonal conflict. Like super deep stuff, man!

Indeed, the episode is laced with similar false profundity everywhere. Some of it is in the small details, like Lorca casually name dropping Elon Musk alongside the Wright brothers and Zefram Cochrane, as though Musk's accomplishments, impressive as they may be, are even remotely comparable to inventing airplanes or inventing warp drive. They aren't. Other cringeworthy dialog included casually mentioning that Corvan II produces 40% of the Federation's dilithium, while also mentioning that there are no ships in range to protect it. These two facts are trotted out for dramatic effect, but all it really does is beg the question as to why the Federation would leave such a valuable asset so poorly defended to begin with. A related issue has to do with why the Discovery left Corvan II so quickly afterward. You'd think they'd stick around to provide relief to the colonists, but of course that wouldn't be anywhere near as cool as a dramatic exit, now would it? Likewise the uniform synthesizer scene put some seriously overwrought visual effects on display for seemingly no reason other than to go for a wow factor that falls flat.

The biggest offender in terms of false profundity though was the writing surrounding Burnham. Two scenes stick out like a sore thumb. First, the scene when she manipulates Saru into borrowing his threat ganglia as a means to see if the tardigrade was dangerous. Setting aside how overwhelmingly cringeworthy the entire concept of threat ganglia is to begin with, manipulating him into coming down there and then offending him with trickery was unnecessary. She could've just asked to borrow his threat ganglia. But, see, then it wouldn't be laced with unnecessary melodrama! Likewise, the second big Burnham scene that reeks of false profundity is Georgiou's letter to Burnham in her will. While it's always nice to see more of Georgiou, one of Star Trek: Discovery's few likable characters so far, hamming up the irony that Burnham became the opposite of what Georgiou imagined in her letter added no value to the story. All of that was made quite clear in the Battle at the Binary Stars. Repeating it all in a video will is just, well... repetitive. And closing the episode on a redundant scene wasn't a strong choice, especially when they could've depicted her struggling with the morality of inflicting pain on the tardigrade to save lives instead.

Also, they really need to slow down those Klingon subtitles.

Review

This episode does much to recover from the missteps of the previous two. Opening with Burnham struggling with the morality of exploiting the tardigrade to gain a tactical advantage over the Klingons taps into the stuff that made Voy: Equinox so good. It took longer to get here than it should have, but it's still good stuff nonetheless. Ultimately, this is a fairly uplifting episode compared to the others so far. Burnham gets to free the creature, Lorca gets to atone for past sins to some degree, and Stamets gets to be a genuine hero. And when the science nerds are geeking out over their research, the story nearly breaks the fourth wall when Tilly exclaims her excitement with Star Trek's very first "fuck," as though the characters themselves are glad the writers finally let them do some real science and tapped into the spirit of Star Trek in a real way for the first time since the opening moments of the pilot.

There are only shades of it though. Turns out Starfleet is hunting for more tardigrades and doesn't seem all that interested in wrestling with the ethics. Even Saru refuses to hear out Burnham about the harm they were doing to the creature; a surprising development for a character who thus far has seemed beyond reproach at all times. He later comes around and pleads with Burnham to "go save its life," which was a nice piece of character development, but the payoff was a bit lackluster as the immediate consequence was for Burnham to recklessly dump it into space without the slightest clue as to whether she would be saving the creature or inadvertently executing it.

While it's certainly true that real life tardigrades are pretty hardy and it's reasonable to assume a macroscopic one that lives in space can probably survive a vacuum, just because an animal has tolerance for extreme conditions doesn't mean that such extreme conditions are in fact its ideal habitat. They never figured out how the tardigrade got aboard the Glenn to begin with and never got any hard information about what exactly the tardigrade's natural habitat actually was. So when Burnham saved its life, the whole thing amounted to a lucky guess based on a hunch. Happy endings are nice, but happy endings that just as easily could've been hubris aren't quite what the spirit of Star Trek is all about. Except of course when Janeway flies head first into a binary pulsar. But at the time in Voy: Scientific Method she was pumped up on drugs by bad guys to keep her dopamine levels high specifically to make her act erratically. Plus she hadn't slept in four days and had been in constant pain the whole time. Janeway's recklessness was an act of desperation. Burnham's was just reckless.

There were other, smaller deficiencies in the story as well. Saru's anger and/or jealousy directed towards Burnham regarding her closeness to Georgiou wasn't at all compelling. And we're treated to Stamets getting into yet another petty argument with someone. This time it was Burnham over whose idea it was to use a living creature as a navigational tool. It was also distinctly odd that we never got any real details about what exactly Tyler went through with that Klingon female captain. Luckily these weak storytelling beats were far less numerous and distracting this time than in the past two episodes.

Perhaps the most notable piece of storytelling in this episode is the breadth of character development we get for Lorca. It turns out Lorca was such a valued officer that after losing his previous ship with all hands that he was swiftly given another command and given free rein to fight the war however he saw fit, to such an extent that he frequently goes on unsanctioned missions that are only just now being reined in. The reason for his light sensitivity is revealed here too. Interestingly Lorca lied to the admiral about why he doesn't get his eyes fixed, citing a supposed distrust of doctors. He later reveals to Tyler during their escape on the Klingon space peacockraider that he doesn't want to fix his eyes because the pain helps him remember what he did to his previous crew.

The backstory of the Buran sets up Lorca as a tragic character in ways very reminiscent to Burnham. Both of them inadvertently caused the deaths of people they care about, but in many ways Lorca appears to be struggling with his version of this far more, despite being arguably less culpable. Besides his generally unhealthy obsession with the study of war and his masochistic desire to not fix his eyes, it was also particularly disturbing to see him throw Stuart, Harry Mudd's innocent pet against the wall, nearly killing it, for no other reason than to upset Mudd. This kind of completely unnecessary casual cruelty and indifference towards life are indicators of Lorca's poor mental health. As was Lorca's prior eagerness to capture and experiment upon the tardigrade. Likewise, while perhaps an intentional homage to Kirk's actions in TOS: I, Mudd, it was pretty horrifying to see Lorca leave Mudd in the hands of the Klingons; striking him even on his way out. Earlier Mudd tried to remind him that there are billions of civilians at risk on the ground while Starfleet makes war in the skies above them. Ultimately, Lorca's first duty is to protect civilians like Mudd, but he seemed all too willing to forget that simply because Mudd was selfish and obnoxious, as though that should deprive him of his human rights as a Federation citizen.

The surprising star of the show this episode though was Stamets. After a weak start at the beginning, Stamets enlists fully in Burnham's quest to unlock the full potential of the spore drive without causing further harm to the tardigrade. Then he bravely risks his own life to save both the tardigrade and his ship when he pilots the ship out of danger by taking the tardigrade's place as the spore drive's navigator. Shortly thereafter, Stamets also gets the distinction of depicting the first gay romantic relationship in a Star Trek TV series in the episode's closing scenes. Seeing Stamets and Culber in private together was a nice piece of character development that would've been nice to have gotten earlier. It makes them both suddenly feel far more relatable. We could've done without that sinister hangover effect from piloting the spore drive cliffhanger though. It felt forced and wasn't really needed. It would've been far more touching to end on Culber begging Stamets not to put himself in danger like that again, leaving the threat of lasting side effects from piloting the spore drive to be more of an implied threat rather than hamming it up like they did with that cliffhanger.

Review

A straightforward, but touching story. The attack on Sarek and his rescue is dramatically compelling, the deeper window into Burnham's backstory with Sarek is intriguing, and the insight into Sarek's conduct as a father not just of Burnham but of Spock also is fascinating. It's nice to see that Vulcans aren't exactly a totally unified society after the events of Enterprise. It always made sense that the nativism the Romulans exploited would've originated as a homegrown phenomenon that the Romulans merely fanned the flames of, rather than something they conjured up from whole cloth. A demagogue can't succeed without some demand for demagoguery. Even a hundred years after the demagogic (for a Vulcan) leader and secret Romulan collaborator V'Las was removed from power in disgrace, those nativist feelings are still simmering on Vulcan. There is still a group which sees humans as inferior, and even views the Federation as a failed experiment. This sentiment apparently extended far enough to deny Burnham a job in the Vulcan Expeditionary Group based entirely and explicitly on race rather than merit. This resentment of outsiders was so intense that it was the reason for the bombing of the Vulcan Learning Center. Burnham was the target of the terrorist attack; the extremists were trying to assassinate her.

Meanwhile, the nature of Lorca's psych issues becomes a bit clearer here in a quite creepy way. Cornwell stages a much needed intervention on Lorca, whose erratic behavior should rightly be a cause of concern for Starfleet. After psychoanalyzing him, she concludes that his behavior is pathological and manipulative. During a particularly chilling scene, she admits that she can't tell whether or not Lorca is being emotionally honest with her or just pretending to feel the things she expects him to feel. And in one of the most chilling scenes yet aired, Lorca jumps at the chance to manipulate Cornwell into taking Sarek's place for the meeting with the Klingons, almost as though he knew she would be captured. Did he know somehow? Or was he just trying to get her off the ship temporarily while he figured out what to do? Or worse yet, did he tip off the Klingons somehow? All to keep Cornwell off his back? These are disturbing things to ponder. Regardless, he is certainly taking advantage of her absence, given that he is now all too willing to drag his feet rescuing her by uncharacteristically (as Saru explicitly makes note of) going through proper (slow) channels to get a rescue mission authorized. Clearly Lorca is in no hurry to see Cornwell again, a person that is supposed to be his friend. Like Harry Mudd, Cornwell is left at the mercy of the Klingons because Lorca is apparently a sociopath. Given all that, Burnham's line, "I'm grateful to serve under a captain like you." was a pretty nice piece of irony.

While this episode is overall quite good, there are a few wrinkles in the story. Despite Cornwell's concerns about him, Ash Tyler seems to be coping far too well with his ex-POW status. Aside from his overwhelmingly contrived interruption of Burnham's attempt to reach Sarek seemingly for no other reason than to dispense seasoned veteran advice about how people going through near death experiences dwell on what they wish they would've done differently, Tyler was a picture of good character and perfect conduct, which is not something one generally expects from someone who just spent the better part of a year being tortured. Perhaps the most annoying feature of the episode though was seeing them using the spore drive with impunity now, seemingly without additional costs. At least no costs other than Stamets acting weird again and being oddly cheerful in a creepy way. It's like the annoying cliffhanger from the last episode never happened. This episode doesn't deal with the consequences of having Stamets pilot the spore drive at all, which is a pretty big dramatic oversight. Although Cornwell's remark that Starfleet knows about Stamets' illegal eugenics work is delightfully ominous. As we know from other Star Trek shows, augments are rarely treated well.

Also of note, it is pretty neat to see Kol dolling out cloaking technology in exchange for loyalty oaths. Using new technology as leverage to dominate the other great houses feels very authentically Klingon and it adds a nice piece of texture to Klingon history.

Review

This episode is an awkward attempt to rehash previous entertaining standalone time travel episodes like TNG: Cause and Effect or Voy: Relativity sandwiched in the middle of an otherwise totally serialized story. Let's do a time loop episode while Admiral Cornwell is a prisoner of the Klingons! Ugh. That said, for the most part this is a skillfully done rehash. And even more notably, Burnham's personal log at the start of the episode makes some things explicit that were left too vague in previous episodes. The most significant is the revelation that Stamets is indeed capable of piloting the spore drive sustainably now. Likewise, many on the crew have noted the changes in Stamets' personality, but largely don't think much of it or find it all that concerning. Ditto with many on the crew noting Tyler being surprisingly well adjusted for someone who spent seven months being tortured. It's important to have dialog making note of these things, lest the audience think the narrative intends to portray such things as unremarkable. Better late than never for the story to get around to that. It's still pretty annoying that they're not dealing with the whole evil-Stamets-in-the-mirror cliffhanger though.

The real star of the show this episode is Mudd. He was hilariously entertaining in nearly every scene he was in, which is a bit of a surreal thing to take in given that most of his scenes in past episodes (including his previous appearance in this series) were mostly cringeworthy. And while it is pretty annoying to have a largely filler episode right after the cliffhanger with Cornwell captured by the Klingons, one kind of weird silver lining about the otherwise awkward timing of this episode is that Lorca faces real consequences for abandoning Mudd despite not seeming to face any for abandoning Cornwell in a similar fashion. The way the narrative is structured this doesn't seem like an intentional irony, as nothing in the plot draws any attention to the parallelism whatsoever, but it was nevertheless fairly satisfying to see anyway. As was seeing Lorca die repeatedly.

The sheer force of Mudd's hysterical personality can't carry us through weak plot logic, however, and there was quite a bit of that here. For starters, Mudd's time loop device was quite an overwrought piece of technology. He reportedly acquired it prior to his imprisonment, as he had used it to rob a Betazoid bank. He then somehow reacquired it after somehow escaping the Klingons. He then somehow located an endangered space whale, somehow buried his ship inside it, and somehow positioned the space whale in the path of the Discovery. And as if all that weren't difficult enough to swallow, the time loop device itself was apparently a stable, reliable piece of technology and Mudd just so happened to be the first person to get ahold of it by virtue of encountering "a four dimensional race" who "perfected the technology" supposedly on Mudd's behalf. Seriously?

Another pretty weak moment was when Burnham confronted Mudd about her value as a hostage in an attempt to get him to loop time one more time. As she's discussing it all with him, she stands in front of a table full of those purple death balls easily within reach. Mudd then turns his back to Burnham, giving her ample opportunity to snatch one and assassinate him with it. Instead she waits until Mudd is much closer to the table and then much more riskily snatches them up while Mudd is watching and promptly kills herself instead of him. It's a powerful scene, and especially amusing given that Mudd kills himself out of frustration to reset the time loop immediately afterward, but there was no reason Burnham couldn't have just cut to the chase and taken Mudd out to accomplish the same goal, just as Stamets did in a previous loop. The scene perhaps would've been less entertaining that way, but it would've made a lot more sense.

In addition to those flaws, the second half of the episode is just generally a lot less charming than the first half. Instead of focusing on gradual, hilarious refinements to the time loop as TNG: Cause and Effect did, the story begins to lazily cut over most of Stamets explaining things to people over and over, better each time, and instead shows the crew magically becoming more informed with each time loop. By the time they reach the last time loop, Stamets has somehow found a way to organize a conspiracy against Mudd that involves several crew members acting in a coordinated fashion. It's hard to imagine how Stamets could've crammed all that prep of so many people into a five or so minute elevator pitch so effectively. It seems the writers couldn't imagine such a scene either, choosing instead to cut over it rather than try to write it.

On balance though this odd, mostly filler episode still succeeds in being more fun than it is flawed. And as a result is one of the stronger stories so far.

Review

This episode had a promising start. In addition to the cool space battle, we finally see Stamets is suffering from some concerning consequences of piloting the spore drive again, L'Rell is conclusively revealed to have been the same Klingon female captain who held Tyler, Mudd, and Lorca captive (the scar matches the injury she suffered during Lorca's and Tyler's escape), and L'Rell engages in some kind of plot to overthrow Kol. But none of these plots get a chance to sufficiently develop. The Stamets stuff is swept under the rug quickly and the L'Rell plot dangles several loose threads in the most annoying possible fashion. For instance, is Cornwell really dead? It looked like L'Rell intended to deceive Kol and revive her after staging the fight where she killed her. But if so, then did she succeed in deceiving Kol about Cornwell being dead? And if that was her intent, then she sure took her time reviving Cornwell, what with that lengthy scene mourning her dead comrades and then seemingly getting her cover blown by Kol anyway. Instead of coming off as a dramatic cliffhanger as the narrative seemingly intended, it just comes off as annoyingly vague.

Meanwhile, on Pahvo, AKA Disney's Pocahontas planet of perfect balance and absolute harmony, every tree, rock, and blade of grass vibrates with its own specific tone. Together these combine to form a kind of music. Nobody on the landing party could quite tell what song it was, but obviously it was Colors of the Wind. After all, according to Saru everywhere you go you can feel the symbiosis between nature and the living spirit. Groovy, man! Perhaps every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name! Perhaps if Saru meditates hard enough, he'll be able to paint with all the colors of the wind!

Even setting aside awkward aesthetic similarities to one of Disney's less savory films, just about every detail of the away team plot is cringeworthy from start to finish. For starters, as soon as they discover the swirly alien spirits, Saru immediately abandons the mission of directly examining the giant transmitter thing to study the alien life form despite the fact that they're on a ticking clock. Even if they were making good time as they said, you'd think they'd want to stay focused on their primary mission of investigating this technology for the war effort rather than exhibit this "oh look, a squirrel!" degree of distractibility. Compounding this irrational decision-making process, Saru immediately insists that his risky behavior couldn't possibly bear any risk because—and he proclaims this with total certainty—if the aliens meant them any harm, then his threat ganglia would surely sense it. The overwhelming stupidity of the concept of threat ganglia notwithstanding, everyone seeming to just tacitly accept the notion that threat ganglia are straight up infallible adds yet another layer of cringe.

Saru isn't the only one smoking the peace pipe though. Burnham prattles off a range of reckless, dumb lines insisting on following first contact protocol rather than use the transmitter tech, even after Saru is compromised. Tyler has to argue with her to try to talk her down from all that. Ultimately he seems to fail to convince her and resorts to simply ordering her to do her job and complete their mission to use the alien tech to build a cloaking device unmasker. And even Tyler doesn't seem immune to the planet's numbing effects on rational thinking when he idiotically equivocates when reciting the famous Vulcan idiom "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," reversing it to "so are the needs of the few or the one." He basically says to Burnham let's not complete our mission and let lots more people die so we can have our forbidden love. What uninspired melodrama.

Then when Saru goes to stop Burnham, Burnham looks up, sees Saru coming, and instead of pulling out her phaser to stun Saru, she turns her back to him, continues to fiddle with the computer, and ultimately allows Saru to disarm her and destroy her work. Only after that does she realize hey it might be a good idea to grab that phaser and stun Saru after all. A bit slow on the uptake there, huh? In any event, all is well. The aliens then conveniently transport Tyler to Burnham, conveniently fix the broken computer, and Discovery then conveniently arrives instantly to pick them up. Behold, everything moving at the speed of plot!

But the cringe doesn't end there. The annoying Pahvo plot isn't done making the characters act like morons. Because it turns out Saru wasn't under some kind of alien coercive influence at all. Burnham gives him that out when she says "you weren't yourself," but Saru will have none of that. "But I was!" he insists, determined to destroy all credibility he has as a character. "My whole life I've never known a moment without fear!" You see, the narrative expects us to find it believable that Saru would try to trap his comrades on that planet forever on a whim and forget all about the war and his responsibilities to the Federation simply because he's learned the bliss of painting the colors of the wind. But then perhaps that is par for the course for an episode which pretentiously names itself Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum (a latin adage which translates to "if you want peace, prepare for war") with only the loosest attempts in the plot to justify the false profundity of such a title. What a mess.

Review

A fantastic story from start to finish with only minor things to quibble with. The most important thing this episode needed to clarify was just what was going on with L'Rell and Cornwell in the last episode and we thankfully got that clarification. Well, mostly. Was Cornwell really dead? Nope. Did L'Rell intend to deceive Kol and revive her after staging the fight where she killed her? Probably. Did she succeed in deceiving Kol about Cornwell being dead? Unclear. Also unclear is how exactly she managed to revive Cornwell. The most interesting revelation in this episode though was that Tyler was repressing the trauma he experienced from L'Rell's prior torture and that she continues to have some sort of hold over him. At the end of the episode, she says to him, "Do not worry, I will never let them hurt you. Soon..." which strongly implies that she has some kind of plan for him.

Given the conspicuous absence of Voq since L'Rell informed him he would have to sacrifice "everything" in order to go on and then the sudden appearance of Tyler directly afterward who also just so happens to seem to have some deep connection to L'Rell, either there is some kind of connection between Voq and Tyler, or the narrative is deliberately misleading us. We should hope for the former. Even so, unfortunately the exact nature of this connection if it exists is still being withheld both from the audience as well as the characters, a weak narrative choice.

While we can't know the precise nature of any such connection yet, a reasonable guess would be that Voq was surgically altered to look human and brainwashed into thinking he is Tyler. Tyler is thus just Voq acting as a sleeper agent, waiting to be activated by L'Rell. But if that is the case, Discovery would have done well to learn from how Battlestar Galactica did this. In BSG's pilot, we learned that Boomer was a sleeper agent at the start of the series. This information was withheld from the characters, not from the viewers. That narrative approach would've made the drama in Discovery much more satisfying. Instead, Discovery's approach of hiding this from both the audience and the characters too is just a recipe for cheap surprises down the road rather than great storytelling with true replay value.

Regardless of what ends up happening there, another weak beat in the story was L'Rell's insane luck. Whatever her plan really was aboard the ship of the dead in the previous episode, it failed miserably. Kol saw through her deception and she was imprisoned, presumably with no hope of escape. Sure was handy that Discovery showed up to blow up the ship and then rescued her by accident without at all planning to! If L'Rell really does turn out to be some mastermind sleeper agent puppeteer, she will also simultaneously only survive long enough to activate her sleeper agent due to incredibly dumb luck. There is no way she could've possibly planned to end up aboard the Discovery in this manner. And if all this was planned, subsequent episodes are sure gonna have to do a lot of work to fill in the gaps. Either way that's weak storytelling.

But all that said, this was otherwise a spectacular episode. Discovery battling the ship of the dead was cool. The military tactics leveraging the spore drive were clever and exciting to watch. And Burnham's duel with Kol was even cooler than the space battle! Overall a very satisfying episode that seems to have gotten the story back on track for the most part. The jump-to-the-middle-of-nowhere cliffhanger was a bit anticlimactic after such an otherwise strong episode though.

Review

Dr. Culber, may he rest in peace, asked Lorca perhaps the episode's most important question: "Do you even want [Stamets] to get better? Or did you want all this to happen?" That seems like much more than merely the emotional conspiracy theory of a grieving lover given that the closing moments of the previous episode depicted Lorca pulling out a computer, going into the "encrypted" section, accessing navigational control, and engaging in some kind of spore jump coordinates manual override shortly before the Discovery ended up jumping to the wrong place. It seems likely Lorca wanted his ship to jump into the unknown to avoid having to return to starbase 46 and face Admiral Cornwell. It's perhaps also possible Lorca might even originate from the mirror universe and wanted to return home. After all, mirror Lorca was stated to have still been at large after his failed coup against the Emperor. What if he traveled to the prime universe and replaced the original Lorca? He even said "let's go home" shortly after inputting the override. If that is the case though, it would be odd for Lorca to almost blow his cover by trying to personally answer the hail from the I.S.S. Cooper rather than asking Burnham to look up who their alter egos were before speaking to anyone from the mirror universe.

By and large, this episode is charming enough to be quite effective in spite of being almost totally irrelevant to the show's otherwise total serialization of the war with the Klingons. Numerous small details stand out as highly amusing, ranging from the hilarious Captain Tilly (now we know why Stamets called Tilly captain in Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum!) to the fleshing out of the backstories of various characters' mirror universe counterparts. It's fun to imagine Lorca staging an uprising against the Emperor and being put down by Burnham. It would be even better if the next episode establishes the Emperor as being a descendent of Hoshi Sato. Likewise, this episode teases us with the intriguing possibility of the Discovery itself having switched places with its mirror universe counterpart; a remarkably frightening possibility that would parallel the events of TOS: Mirror, Mirror quite well. One remarkably annoying detail about this distraction from the Klingon war though is it doesn't make a lot of sense why the crew of the Discovery didn't transmit the Klingon cloak breaking algorithm they've been working on long before they jumped. Why hoard the data from their superiors?

The only real advancement in the Klingon war story we get in this episode is Tyler's continued creepy behavior. In addition to killing Dr. Culber, he is depicted reciting a Klingon prayer with L'Rell after she activates his hidden programming. Something appears to go wrong though, as she exclaims in an exacerbated fashion that the prayer should've caused him to remember his "other name." The hypothesis that Tyler is Voq seems even more likely now, but it remains a frustratingly weak narrative choice to keep withholding this revelation from the audience for the reasons stated in the review of the previous episode.

Another detail that should give us pause in this episode is the decision to make characters from the prime universe aware of events which will befall the U.S.S. Defiant a decade or so in their future during TOS: The Tholian Web and later Ent: In A Mirror, Darkly. Assuming the crew of the Discovery makes it back to their universe, which seems like a safe bet, they will return with knowledge of the demise of the Defiant and its subsumption into the mirror universe before those events take place in TOS: The Tholian Web. It's hard to imagine why they wouldn't mention this to Starfleet so they could warn the Defiant and prevent it from being lost. There are some possible reasons: for instance, someone could invoke some prototypical version of the temporal prime directive as a reason to keep silent on it. Or perhaps Lorca and his crew will be concerned if they prevent the Defiant from being subsumed into the mirror universe, it will alter their own history by preventing them from being able to use the knowledge they gain from it to return to the prime universe. But regardless, the decision to work the events of Ent: In A Mirror, Darkly into the plot of this episode means they will have to very carefully button this up later to avoid a serious plot hole, which given this show's sloppy approach to continuity so far seems like wishful thinking.

Indeed, while it is usually best to confine criticism of the show's broader approach to continuity to separate, dedicated analyses rather than repeatedly rehash such criticisms in every individual episode review, this episode offers us a remarkable new irony on that front. Ent: In A Mirror, Darkly was perhaps the best prototype for what a modernized show set in the 23rd century should look like. That episode of Enterprise showed us how to update the production quality of TOS to look much better without violating established visual continuity. More recently, Rogue One showed us how it could be done just as effectively in the Star Wars universe. But Discovery has taken a much lazier approach. They cherrypicked the plot out of Ent: In A Mirror, Darkly, and deliberately discarded the episode's central feature: an admirably rigorous respect for visual continuity. It would be like if Rogue One had completely redesigned the storm troopers or Darth Vader "because it isn't the 70s anymore." Because of this, instead of getting something as carefully crafted and stunningly impressive as Ent: In A Mirror, Darkly or Rogue One, each episode of Discovery is an exercise in seeing which piece of established canon they'll lazily throw away next, which is incredibly sad and was entirely unnecessary. Doing almost anything else would've been better than this.

But that broader criticism of one of Discovery's central premises should not play a role in how we should judge this specific episode. And when you look at this episode on its own merits, there is a lot to love. In fact, oddly, some aspects of continuity in this episode are quite additive like Ent: In A Mirror, Darkly or Rogue One rather than destructive like Discovery too often usually is. A particular highlight of this episode in that regard is its potential healing some especially stilted dialog from TOS: Mirror, Mirror in which Kirk jumps to conclusions way too quickly about how they must've been transported into a mirror universe. Perhaps by then Kirk will have read about the Discovery's encounter with the mirror universe, so it won't be such an amazingly wild guess. Plugging a plot hole with prequel plotting is partly what made Rogue One such a fine film: it finally gave us a good answer as to why the Death Star had such an obvious flaw. Perhaps Discovery will give us an answer as to why Kirk could jump to conclusions so quickly about the concept of a mirror universe in TOS: Mirror, Mirror? It's nice that not all of Discovery's contributions to continuity are so overwhelmingly problematic. Let's hope they button up that Defiant stuff correctly.

Review

The long overdue final confirmation of Tyler being Voq finally happened. As expected, this episode milked that drama for all it was worth and then some, opening the episode with Burnham and Tyler deepening their relationship more than ever before in an ironic, though heavy-handed fashion and then closing the episode with the ultimate betrayal. Storytelling that relies on surprise twists of this sort is incredibly cheap. It doesn't age well with multiple viewings and as such is poor justification for an otherwise remarkably slow-paced plot. As mentioned before, a better model for such a twist would have been what Battlestar Galactica did with Boomer being revealed to be a Cylon in the pilot. In BSG, the audience was clued-in to this but the characters weren't. Instead of teasing an annoying mystery, instead the drama explicitly emphasized the ever-present threat of a sleeper agent in their midst. Cluing in the audience from the beginning about what L'Rell and Voq were planning would've been a similarly much more compelling drama.

In addition to making the individual episodes more fun to watch though, cluing in the audience early would've also provided Discovery with an opportunity to lend some credibility to what by all appearances now seems like an asininely idiotic plan on L'Rell's part. Her and Voq's infiltration of Discovery is at best recklessly lucky and at worst a bumbling failure. The narrative has given us no reason to assume either of them had much of a coherent plan at all, and if it turns out they did plan all this somehow, it's going to require a lot of explanation for how they could have possibly known that it would all work out. Given that, Tyler/Voq's chest thumping in his final confrontation with Burnham about the brilliance of his plan to infiltrate Discovery and learn its secrets came across largely as lame and overwrought. There's also a loose end surrounding what mirror Saru's precise motivations were in saving Burnham. It feels like there's more to that than what we've been shown so far, but it was left annoyingly vague.

What worked much better however was the acting and directing surrounding Tyler's transformation into Voq. In fact, one of the highlights of the episode is the earlier part of that scene which begins with Tyler confusedly pleading with her to recall that Captain Lorca had encouraged them to embrace doing things that were out of their nature to survive. In that moment Tyler was in active denial about who he was. Then Burnham triggered memories of his torture again, causing Tyler to excuse his behavior as an after effect of PTSD. Then, after a bit more prodding from Burnham, Tyler was finally forced to remember exactly who and what he was. And his affection for Burnham instantly vanished. The whole transformation scene—save for the aspects at the end that were overwrought—was fascinating to watch. Shazad Latif's acting in that scene was fantastic and the smart intercutting of clips from previous episodes of T'Kuvma, Voq, and L'Rell was highly effective.

This is a particularly strong episode for Burnham as well. Yet another heavy-handed irony of the episode, though one that is much more effective, was getting to see Burnham strut her stuff as captain of the Shenzhou, something she's always wanted, only to be betrayed at the end of the episode by mirror Georgiou: an ironic reversal of Burnham betraying prime Georgiou in order to take temporary command of the Shenzhou in the pilot. The closing scene revealing mirror Georgiou to be the Emperor was highly amusing and might lend credence to the hypothesis outlined in the previous review that Empress Georgiou could be a descendant of Empress Hoshi Sato. Granted, this hypothesis is a bit ethnically confused given that Sato was a Japanese character and Georgiou is a Malaysian Chinese character, but the ethnic portrayal was already a bit confused given that Sato was portrayed by a Korean-American, so who knows?

Speaking of mirror characters, this episode was a surprisingly effective use of mirror Voq, and Burnham's fascination with him was delightfully in the spirit of Star Trek. Her insistence on figuring out precisely how a Klingon could learn to compromise and embrace diversity was admirably high-minded and effectively foreshadows all sorts of things that occur later in Star Trek's chronology, from Kirk's begrudging peace with Kor, to his active collaboration with Kang to fight off a common enemy, to the Klingons joining forces with the Federation to fight the Dominion on DS9. Burnham learned in this episode that Klingons are naturally predisposed to gain respect for those they share a common enemy with, which was a nice touch.

It was also highly amusing to see mirror Sarek—complete with an obligatory evil Vulcan goatee—take in Burnham's life in the prime universe via a mind meld, nicely paralleling mirror Spock's mind meld with McCoy in TOS: Mirror, Mirror. Although this raises a number of questions the episode didn't bother with. For instance, did mirror Burnham have a relationship with mirror Sarek just as prime Burnham and prime Sarek did? It doesn't appear so, but the episode doesn't address this. And what was mirror Sarek's relationship to mirror Spock? It seems odd that mirror Sarek would fight in the rebellion while mirror Spock serves on the I.S.S. Enterprise. However, perhaps like prime Spock and prime Sarek, mirror Spock and mirror Sarek don't quite get along. Overall this is a fine episode. It could've been better had the story not dragged out the Tyler/Voq reveal so long and especially if L'Rell's and Voq's infiltration plan made a bit more sense, but this episode is largely effective in spite of that.

Review

Despite being a historically short episode and jam-packed full of exposition and revelations, this episode still comes across as remarkably slow-paced, perhaps because nearly every plot development is executed remarkably clumsily. Not just the big developments, but even small things too. For example, in the scene depicting mirror Georgiou and Burnham eating Kelpien, it's tough to tell whether or not they were eating mirror Saru or just some random Kelpien. It sure looked like Saru, but if it was him, how did he get aboard the I.S.S. Charon? And what the blazes was that artificial sun thing at the center of that ship anyway? These details were supposed to be small but compelling emotional beats in the story, but just ended up being distracting. As was the repeated use of horror movie aesthetics in Stamets' and Tyler's scenes.

Speaking of Tyler, it's still pretty hard to know what to make of this plot thread, as L'Rell's actions continue to not make much sense. The exposition in this episode seems to fully confirm the likely hypothesis from previous reviews that Voq was surgically altered to look human and the personality of Tyler was grafted onto him. L'Rell once again insists that this was all part of some grand plan and Saru even agrees referring to her actions as "devious designs." But as mentioned before, it was anything but. Again, it seems L'Rell and Voq are only in this position due to bumbling, dumb luck. And with their covers fully blown now, it's hard to see how they'll gain any advantage from this mission whatsoever.

One perhaps remote possibility for how L'Rell could come out on top is that L'Rell was feigning weakness to Saru and used the surgery supposedly meant to save Tyler to once again repress Voq's emerging personality beneath the Tyler imprint. That way she could bring Voq back to the surface later at a time that is more useful. And in order to convince Discovery's crew that Voq was truly gone, she publicly mourned Voq's death with the signature Klingon howl after the surgery not because Voq is truly dead, but as a ruse to make the Discovery crew think she did as they asked. The fact that it's hard to tell if the narrative expects us to believe that far-fetched hypothesis or believe the perhaps worse conclusion that L'Rell just shrugged, did the surgery, effectively killed Voq in the process, and gave up on her mission on a whim shows how terribly conceived a plot thread this is. No matter which way it pans out, it's still stupid.

Perhaps the most cringeworthy plot thread in this episode though is Stamets' conspicuously unexplained conversation with his dead(!) boyfriend Culber, strongly hinting at some supernatural afterlife stuff. At best, this will be resolved by some technobabble about how Culber's consciousness was somehow preserved in the mycelial network inadvertently by Stamets. At worst, this is Starbuck's ending from Battlestar Galactica all over again. Dead person shows up for tearful goodbye, the whole thing is supernatural, and we're just expected to buy it without an explanation because apparently stuff making scientific sense in science fiction stories is an unimportant detail... Let's hope the show establishes that it's the former in a future episode, not the latter.

What works a bit better with Stamets in this episode is the revelation that the spore drive does damage to the mycelial network, at least insofar as how mirror Stamets was using it. This goes a long way towards explaining why the spore drive eventually becomes an abandoned technology later in Star Trek's chronology, though obviously there is still some work to do here to button it up completely.

The most intriguing though perhaps also the most problematic new development in this episode is Lorca being revealed to have always in fact been mirror Lorca. There were several hints dropped that this could be the case in previous episodes, which previous reviews have alluded to. On the surface, this would seem to explain the numerous instances of shady behavior we've seen from Lorca since the beginning. But unfortunately, there are also several Lorca scenes that are difficult to explain now in retrospect. For instance, there seems to be little point to Lorca failing to remember Ava's name during his torture by Ava's brother. The scene heavily implies that Lorca wouldn't remember Ava's name because only mirror Lorca would know such a detail. Thus we were supposed to conclude Lorca must not be mirror Lorca. When it turns out Lorca was just pretending to not remember and he is in fact mirror Lorca, the narrative expects us to see it as a clever twist. But like many others in this show, it isn't a clever twist. It's a cheap twist. Deliberately misdirecting the audience isn't clever, it's lazy.

This same narrative flaw can be seen with the revelation that mirror Terrans are more light-sensitive than humans from the prime universe. This was explained before as Lorca having suffered from an injury and refusing to get it fixed out of a misplaced sense of guilt. Now it's explained simply as an innate feature of mirror Terrans. While again the narrative clearly acts as though this is clever misdirection, it's more like just lying to the audience. It likewise strains credibility to accept that this quirk of mirror Terran physiology would go unnoticed in all the other mirror universe episodes in the other Star Trek series.

Another scene that's difficult to explain given that Lorca was always mirror Lorca is when in Despite Yourself he almost blew his cover by trying to personally answer the hail from the I.S.S. Cooper. Had Burnham not fortuitously stopped him from answering the hail, his cover would've been blown. If Lorca was always mirror Lorca, wouldn't it have been prudent to simply ask Burnham to look up who their alter egos were before speaking to anyone from the mirror universe? There is simply no way he could've known Burnham would conveniently stop him from answering the hail just in the nick of time so as to make Lorca look conveniently ignorant about the mirror universe. Knowing what we know now, that is an incredibly contrived scene.

Even going as far back as The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry, Lorca's irrational obsession with turning the tardigrade into weapons is even more incoherent now than it already was then back when we were supposed to believe he was prime Lorca instead of mirror Lorca. In the context of prime Lorca seeking to waste the tardigrade's potential for building a functional spore drive in exchange for the uncertain possibility of making weapons, the tradeoff was already dumb. Taken in the context of mirror Lorca only seeming to care about getting back to the mirror universe, that idiotic emphasis on turning the tardigrade into weapons somehow is even dumber than it already seemed.

All things considered, the steam is definitely running out on all of Discovery's plot threads. While there are some moments of intrigue and amusement here, this episode and all the plot arcs in general feel aimless and poorly planned.

Review

Discovery's foray into the mirror universe concludes here at long last. It had begun to overstay its welcome. This ending for mirror Lorca answers most of the important questions about precisely how he got to the prime universe. It seems he switched places with prime Lorca almost two years before this episode, as it was stated that his soldiers endured 1 year and 212 days of torture. This would seem to confirm that not only was Lorca on this show always mirror Lorca, but it is quite likely that mirror Lorca commanded the prime Buran for quite some time before it was destroyed in the Klingon war and he was given command of the Discovery. Also the precise mechanics of how mirror Lorca got to the prime universe would seem to imply that it is also quite likely prime Lorca died in the process, as he would've been beamed to the I.S.S. Buran shortly before it was destroyed with all hands. As such, barring some technobabbly resurrection, there is a good chance we may never see either version of Lorca ever again.

Unfortunately the end of Lorca's story isn't terribly satisfying. From the beginning he was a character that was difficult to square in any universe. In his earlier episodes when we were led to believe he was an ordinary Starfleet captain, the narrative escalated from mere misdirection to outright lying to the audience on a number of occasions, as detailed in previous reviews. There is no coherent explanation for why Lorca didn't remember Ava's name in Vaulting Ambition other than to lie to the audience. There is no coherent explanation for why Lorca almost blew his cover in Despite Yourself other than to lie to the audience. There is no coherent explanation for why Lorca would develop an irrational obsession with turning the tardigrade into weapons in The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry other than to lie to the audience. These are not examples of clever misdirection. They're just cheap lies to the audience to get some cheap surprises down the road.

For it to be clever misdirection, those actions would have to make sense in the context of Lorca having always been mirror Lorca. But they don't. If you rewatch all episodes of Discovery so far with the knowledge that Lorca was always mirror Lorca, you'll see that Lorca's behaviors and actions don't always make sense in the context of him being mirror Lorca in the same way that the actions of Head Six on Battlestar Galactica don't always make sense in the context of her having always been an "angel from god" instead of a chip in Baltar's head. In both cases, this eleventh hour revelation undermines the character and much of their prior actions all for the sake of cheap shock value at the expense of the story's credibility.

A better version of the Lorca story arc would've imitated how early BSG handled Boomer in the same manner that L'Rell's and Voq's sleeper agent story should have as described in previous reviews. If it was known to the audience from the beginning that Lorca was a mirror universe refugee trying to find a way home and that Tyler was Voq posing as a sleeper agent, the narrative would've had to construct a more intelligent story that makes the characters' actions make actual sense in the context of their true identities. Such an approach would've avoided all that sloppiness, would've significantly enhanced the replay value of the series, and would've been a lot more entertaining to watch in general. But who needs timeless stories with true replay value when you can throw cheap twists at the audience every week instead that fall apart if you think about them for more than five minutes?

A much more significant problem this episode creates though is the now conspicuously unresolved problem of the Discovery crew possessing foreknowledge of the Defiant's fate in TOS: The Tholian Web before it happens. This is especially compounded by bringing mirror Georgiou to the prime universe. While there is still certainly time for a future episode to button this up, It's hard to imagine why they wouldn't mention this to Starfleet so they could warn the Defiant and prevent it from being lost. Here's hoping for some kind of debate over a prototypical version of the temporal prime directive?

Some smaller lingering issues are resolved here though. For starters it's nice to see that someone found the giant distracting artificial sun thing at the center of the Charon notable enough to explain what the hell it was. Also at long last it was nice to see that Saru's threat ganglia are not in fact infallible as was repeatedly hinted at before. It's nice to see that Saru's silly danger noodles superpower won't necessarily be attenuated beyond a reasonable person's suspension of disbelief like previous Star Trek shows have done with similar characters at times. We also finally have a pretty solid answer now as to why the spore drive doesn't remain in use after Discovery: the mycelium fuel it uses is a scarce resource that can be easily exhausted in unsustainable ways by bad actors. Given that, it seems likely that someone somewhere will disrupt the fragile mycelial network to render it permanently unnavigable, if it hasn't been already in the process of getting Discovery home.

That said, could they possibly have made the danger posed by exploitation of the mycelial network more overwrought? Yes, we get it, it's a global warming metaphor. But throwing around a bunch of hyperbolic nonsense about how draining the mycelial network of its energy will destroy all life in the universe—no wait—all life in all universes is unnecessarily heavy-handed in the extreme. So basically if any civilization in any universe develops this technology and misuses it, then all life in all universes could end? Uh, sure. This kind of false profundity conjures up bad memories of TOS: The Alternative Factor, which is not a vibe that Discovery (or anything for that matter) needs to be channeling.

It was likewise quite overwrought to have the Klingon Empire conquer the Federation in the cliffhanger. While nothing in canon necessarily precludes this event, it seems a bit hard to believe nobody across hundreds of episodes and films would've mentioned that the Klingons brought the Federation to its knees at some point in the past. Plus such a dramatic reversal of fortunes significantly exacerbates the stupidity of not sending Starfleet a draft copy of that cloak-breaking algorithm they were working on in Into the Forest I Go before making the jump. This entire cliffhanger could've potentially been avoided if somebody had remembered to send an email.

All that said, even with all those narrative and plotting flaws, this is an exciting episode nonetheless. Watching ruthless mirror characters romp around and battle each other is always fun and the ridiculously well-orchestrated phaser fight in the corridor near the start of the episode might be one of Star Trek's best action sequences ever. Hidden forcefields, hidden phaser canons mounted on the wall, and an emergency site-to-site transporter escape plan. Wow! Were it not for the narrative and plotting weaknesses, this episode's sundry of well executed action sequences and thrilling character moments could've easily added up to a perfect score.

Review

This episode indulges in many of Discovery's worst instincts, once again parading around pseudo-depth in all its false profundity as though the audience is supposed to be impressed. The parallel stories of what to do with mirror Georgiou and Voq/Tyler display an array of utterly confused and often contradictory attitudes about how to deal with dangerous people, with this shallow writing masquerading as a showcase of the spirit of Star Trek.

In the case of mirror Georgiou, here we have a person who does not dispute—and in fact takes pride in—her record of genocidal behavior. She has murdered countless innocent people and brags about it. She is clearly a war criminal. While there are certainly compelling arguments to make from a moral relativism standpoint about whether or not it is fair to judge Georgiou's actions based on the standards of another universe's culture, norms, and laws, the most you can truly extract from such an argument is a concession that yes, it may indeed have been incumbent on Admiral Cornwell to devise a way to send Georgiou home as she requested.

Barring that, Georgiou's attitudes—culturally normative as they may be where she comes from—present a clear danger to everyone around her. She should not have been let out of confinement under any circumstances and most especially should not have been given command of a starship, nominally or otherwise. That Sarek and Cornwell could be so easily manipulated into this by Georgiou dramatically undermines the credibility of their characters, especially when it isn't entirely clear why Sarek couldn't just lie to Georgiou by promising her her freedom, extracting the information she was holding back, and then imprison her again. Perhaps Georgiou knew that was a possibility and refused to put all her cards on the table in order to maintain ongoing leverage, but if such a conversation took place, the episode frustratingly cut over it. It further strains credibility to assume that nobody on Discovery's crew would be at all suspicious of Georgiou's true identity having just witnessed Emperor Georgiou in the mirror universe for themselves. Wouldn't at least somebody be a bit bemused by this sudden coincidence?

Saru and Burnham seemed to possess a clearer understanding of the danger using Georgiou in this way puts them all in, but as we know from Vaulting Ambition, Saru's judgment is often faulty as well in regards to conferring undue trust on prisoners, given that he gave L'Rell permission to operate on Tyler. Indeed, Tyler's story somehow manages to be even more frustrating than Georgiou's. It is established by now that Tyler is neither conclusively Voq nor Tyler. But the crew reacts to this ambiguity in the most idiotic way imaginable, ranging from outright denial to hubris.

This absurd tale begins with Tyler declaring, quite correctly, that he belongs in the brig. Saru then idiotically replies that he sees no semblance of Voq in him any longer. Because who needs scientific evidence when you can just do what you feel? Then he lets Tyler roam free about the ship in a deeply misguided act of trust that is at least as reckless as Sarek and Cornwell unleashing Georgiou. How can Saru possibly trust that L'Rell purged Voq from Tyler if even his own doctors repeatedly insist they don't understand the science behind the surgery and can't conclusively state one way or the other whether Tyler is Voq or Tyler?

Most of the crew then adopts Saru's naivete too, quickly forgiving and forgetting despite Tyler still quite possibly presenting a danger to himself and others. Only Stamets and Burnham articulate anything even remotely resembling the proper skepticism about whether or not Voq is truly gone, but the narrative strongly implies that the only reason Stamets and Burnham are skeptical is due to the personal trauma they experienced at Voq/Tyler's hands, not because they doubt that Voq is truly gone. Both Stamets and Burnham admit in their interactions with him that they may at some point accept that Voq is gone. The narrative closes both scenes in such a way as to present Tyler as the victim of a sort of tragic bigotry towards PTSD rather than the potential danger that he actually is.

At best, this narrative choice is another lazy attempt to misdirect the audience in an effort to make another possible cheap twist out of Voq reasserting control over Tyler again more shocking down the road. At worst, the narrative is honestly trying to get us to frown on the idea that anybody should doubt that Voq is truly gone by framing Stamets' and Burnham's skepticism around personal trauma rather than a rational assessment of the evidence. Given the narrative's track record so far, we should be worried that the writers might expect both the audience and the characters to accept the idea that Voq is truly gone based entirely on Tyler's charisma and the unreliable narrator of L'Rell without any hard evidence whatsoever. And we should be worried the narrative will then hold up that misguided blind faith as an example of the spirit of Star Trek. If that is so, then the writers must not have seen much Star Trek. Given those two choices, we should, sadly, hope for another cheap twist instead. It would be the slightly less shallow outcome.

There are a few other tidbits of note as well. While it was amusing to learn that the I.S.S. Discovery was swiftly destroyed after it switched places with the U.S.S. Discovery, the exposition about the Klingon war continues to strain credibility. We now learn that despite various Klingon factions having descended into competition that is tantamount to a civil war, they have still been capable of wiping out one third of the Federation fleet and occupying 20% of Federation space even with their leadership in disarray, all thanks to the cloaking device and seemingly nothing else.

Again, while nothing in canon necessarily precludes this event, it seems a bit hard to believe nobody across hundreds of episodes and films would've mentioned that the Klingons brought the Federation to its knees at some point in the past, including threatening Earth itself. Plus, again as mentioned before, this dramatic reversal of fortunes significantly exacerbates the stupidity of not sending Starfleet a draft copy of that cloak-breaking algorithm they were working on in Into the Forest I Go before making the jump into the mirror universe. Again, it bears repeating that this entire situation could've potentially been avoided if somebody had remembered to send an email.

Speaking of attenuating continuity, this episode frustratingly both solved the Defiant problem and then undermined its own solution in the course of a single episode. Cornwell seemed to put a lid on the possibility that the Federation possessing foreknowledge of the Defiant's fate in TOS: The Tholian Web would be acted upon in any way by immediately classifying all knowledge about the mirror universe. But by the end of the episode she makes mirror Georgiou captain of the Discovery. This seems like a terrible recipe for keeping a lid on knowledge of what befell the Defiant.

Moreover, the entire rationale for classifying this knowledge was just as shallow and poorly thought-out as the rest of the story. The whole idea that if knowledge of the mirror universe became common knowledge that Federation citizens would go rogue and try to gain access to it to be reunited with lost loved ones is absurd on its face, especially given that ten years later when Kirk visits the place, nobody seems worried about that anymore and it's clear from the events of DS9 that Kirk's experience there was, in fact, made public knowledge. This entirely contrived rationale exists solely to plug the plot hole of having referenced the events of Ent: In a Mirror, Darkly, rather than to serve any useful purpose internal to Discovery's own story. This clumsy attempt to plug that plot hole just created others.

Likewise the miraculous ability to grow more spores on demand and keep using the jump drive with impunity would seem to totally undermine the closure we thought we had received in the previous episode explaining why the spore drive had ceased to be a viable technology by the time of TOS. So that solved problem was rendered unsolved once again, similar to the Defiant problem getting solved and then potentially unsolved by the end of the episode.

This episode certainly was a terrible mess by itself, but much more disturbingly it also reflects broader unfortunate trends in Discovery's overall writing style. By now Discovery has developed a deeply concerning habit of engaging in frustratingly shallow writing on nearly every level that was on full display here, but is also present to varying degrees across most of the season. The characters act recklessly, the narrative celebrates their recklessness as though it is a species of virtue, and even seems to have the temerity to act as though this recklessness is somehow in the spirit of Star Trek. The narrative routinely lies to the audience in the pursuit of cheap twists and acts as though we should be impressed. And continuity between series is repeatedly strained unnecessarily seemingly because the writers couldn't be bothered to watch the episodes of past series and understand the intent of the writers who came before them. Bear in mind, none of these criticisms have anything whatsoever to do with Discovery's editorial decision to totally disregard visual canon, which separate and apart from all these criticisms is bad storytelling for entirely different reasons.

What we appear to have here, surely to the everlasting frustration of many Star Trek fans, is a Star Trek series that for the first time in Star Trek's history struggles to be true to the spirit of Star Trek, seemingly because the writers possess only a surface-level understanding of what the spirit of Star Trek even is. What made TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise so iconic was that the writing and narrative themes were largely deep and nuanced. The characters were usually idealistic and full of vision. Their attitudes were focused, coherent, and unambiguously virtuous. While some episodes of the older Star Treks occasionally fell flat or exuded false profundity at times, those episodes were the exception, not the rule. Discovery on the other hand appears to be drawing its inspiration from the pseudo-intellectual writing of an episode like TOS: The Alternative Factor and then serializing it into a long running story with better production quality and acting. It's as if the writers think just by having better acting, cooler sets, and more impressive action scenes that nobody will notice that the story is hot mess of vapid platitudes and plot holes pretending to be deep.

Needless to say, this trend of shallow writing is toxic to a franchise most famous for its prior focus on cerebral stories like TOS: Balance of Terror, TNG: The Measure of a Man, TNG: Tapestry, DS9: Duet, Voy: Death Wish, Voy: Distant Origin, DS9: In The Pale Moonlight, Ent: Vox Sola, and plenty more. Nothing in Discovery so far even remotely compares not just to those classic episodes, but to most of its runners up too. Instead Discovery is delivering a glitzy romp that while mostly fun in the way that much of Star Trek's many past action stories are also fun, is also a stressful exercise in seeing what continuity will be crushed next with each episode all in service of yet another action romp that only pretends to be deep. This story only works if you don't think too hard about it, which is a sad thing to say about Star Trek, a franchise that was once known primarily for its optimism and intellectual rigor. Let's hope Star Trek Discovery rediscovers Star Trek's heritage soon.

Review

This is an extremely disappointing conclusion to a story that opened with a lot of potential in the terrific pilot. The pilot offered the potential for a story that articulated the deeper reasons for the Federation-Klingon cold war we see in TOS. The potential for a story about nationalist tribalism that both resonated with real world events and substantiated the unique quirks of Klingon culture that ripple across the chronologically later stories. The potential for a story that sets up a century-long struggle in vain to "remain Klingon" that ends on a tragic but dramatically compelling whimper when Ezri Dax correctly assesses that the Klingon Empire was dying and deserved to die a century later on DS9. How can one "remain Klingon" when one defines Klingon identity as blood and soil the way T'Kuvma, Voq, and L'Rell did? We always knew their ideology was destined to fade into the mists of history as the Klingon Empire was gradually subsumed into the Federation's inevitable hegemonic melting pot.

This theme isn't new. Non-Federation aliens have felt threatened by the Federation melting pot many times on Star Trek. Recall this quite revealing exchange from DS9: The Way of the Warrior. It begins with Quark, regarding root beer. Quark: "What do you think?" Garak: "It's vile." Quark: "I know. It's so bubbly and cloying and happy." Garak: "Just like the Federation."

As an important piece of context, normally neither Quark nor Garak would bother with experiencing Federation cultural trivia unprompted by others, but the Federation's expansion and its growing appeal to more and more Alpha Quadrant species had begun to make it harder and harder to ignore the Americana (so to speak) of the Federation.

Their conversation continued. Quark: "But you know what's really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you begin to like it." Garak: "It's insidious." Quark: "Just like the Federation."

This is why the Klingons went to war with the Federation. They wanted to "remain Klingon" in the face of the frightening threat of the Federation's expansion due to the growing appeal of the Federation's values. T'Kuvma, Voq, and L'Rell rightly regarded the Federation as insidious. It posed an existential threat to their xenophobic values, which opposed diversity, inclusion, and assimilation.

But by the end of the season, all the potential for a deep meditation on Klingon nationalist tribalism had devolved into a set of motivations and events with layers of incoherence caked upon each other. Even setting aside the fact that the narrative lazily cut over most of the war using the mirror universe diversion, L'Rell's infiltration plan turned out to be ill-conceived and failed miserably. She easily could've died on numerous occasions—most notably when the ship of the dead was destroyed—and kept narrowly escaping death entirely due to dumb luck, rather than any kind of skill or planning. Her reprogramming of Voq turned out to be riddled with bugs and she never achieved her original objective of using him to gather intelligence about Discovery's spore drive.

The way she comes out on top in the end is likewise painfully incoherent on many levels. Burnham decides on the basis of seemingly nothing more than naive hubris that L'Rell could take over the Klingon Empire by brandishing a PADD with a claim that it can blow up the world. L'Rell idiotically agrees that is a workable plan and further agrees to end the war she just a short time ago was so deeply committed to that she was dropping lines like, "This war ends when we crush you." She even took a beating to prove her commitment to Klingon tribalism. But all those deep commitments suddenly vanished as soon as Burnham offered her a half-baked way to take over the empire. It turns out L'Rell was never a committed nationalist. Just power hungry.

She was also, as always, the beneficiary of incredibly dumb luck. It's not clear why the High Council would believe her when she said to them, "Hey guys, I've got this PADD that can blow up the world, so therefore I'm the leader of the Klingon Empire now." It's even less clear why they'd be so willing to just call off the war based on such an unproven threat when they had Earth itself on its knees. Nor is it at all clear why Klingons everywhere would all unanimously agree with this radical reversal instantly without the slightest hesitation. When all the Klingon ships just turn around and go home, the narrative expects us to celebrate it as a victory for peace, but it's hard to not just laugh at the absurd implausibility of the scene instead.

It's also ridiculous for the narrative to imply that everyone thinks L'Rell's hold on power could ever last. The Federation essentially effectuated a regime change in the Klingon Empire. L'Rell even did it holding a Federation PADD. It's hard to imagine that not breeding resentment among at least some Klingon houses, who might already be a bit annoyed that they had to call off the war on the eve of victory. Since the PADD is gene-locked, all they'd have to do to end the threat she poses to their homeworld is assassinate her. Or what if they just destroyed the PADD? Or how about the fact that L'Rell couldn't possibly monitor every Klingon on the planet? They could go spelunking for the bomb and dismantle it. Clearly, neither the characters nor the writers thought any of this through.

L'Rell and the war are just the tip of the iceberg of vacuous writing here though, as there are a litany of other stupid details in this episode. It's hard to accept that Burnham's and Saru's obnoxious behavior on the bridge wouldn't have immediately blown Georgiou's cover. It likewise strains credibility for Saru to be outraged about letting Georgiou out of confinement when he did exactly the same thing with L'Rell in an earlier episode. The height of absurdity here is letting Georgiou go in the end. There is no reason for this other than to make it convenient for the writers to bring her back randomly in the future. A bad story point motivated by lazy writing.

Also Georgiou said Cornwell told her that Tyler's "Klingon id has been neutered" and that he is "benign" and "useless to them." She also says he is somehow tarnished to the Federation. But these statements are contradictory on their face. If he's useless, then he's also harmless. But if he's useful, then clearly there's potential for harm. The latter is clearly shown to be the case by the events of the episode, as he seems to have access to all of Voq's memories. Thus, he seems far from useless, but don't tell Tyler. Because at the end of the episode, he idiotically agrees that he's "no good for either side." The narrative seems to idiotically celebrate this line as though he said something really deep. (He didn't.) Then Tyler undermines the point anyway by going to live on Qo'noS, which for those of you keeping score at home, happens to be picking a side. He might be "no good for either side" (which is wrong), but he's totally picking a side anyway (because it was a stupid line to begin with). Speaking of Qo'noS, it is stated in an earlier episode that no humans have been there in 100 years. And yet no one seemed to care about a whole bunch of humans being there during this episode. In fact, there seemed to be a whole bunch of them there already before the landing party even got there. Go figure.

And then there's Cornwell's absurdly swift caving on her plan to destroy the Klingon homeworld as soon as Burnham calls her up and says, "Hey, genocide is bad." Cornwell's response was basically like, "Golly, yeah, you're right, I didn't think of that!" On that note, it's hard to imagine a good reason why neither Cornwell nor Sarek appear to have been punished for attempting a genocide. And speaking of Federation policy on matters of great significance, it appears the Federation has put the spore drive in mothballs, in an apparent attempt to resolve the continuity issue of why we never see it again. It's good that they're trying to respect continuity, but as usual they did it in a terribly sloppy way. It's stated that Starfleet is working on a "non-human interface" to the spore drive, which implies that there are significant medical consequences for piloting it, but that doesn't actually seem to be the case. We've seen Stamets pilot it several times. Sometimes he had some medical problems, but they were always quickly resolved. It's not actually terribly clear precisely what danger the spore drive poses now or why they can't just keep using it.

It should be noted briefly that there are a handful of small details to praise in this episode. Georgiou enjoying herself on the Klingon homeworld was highly amusing. The depiction of a rich, reasonably diverse society on Qo'noS was nice to see too. We saw minority communities and non-warrior castes of Klingon society, which has been somewhat rare on Star Trek thus far. Also Discovery's jump into the underground caves showing the ship struggling against the planet's gravity was depicted in a much more satisfying way than the similar scene in The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry when Discovery appears to magically hover over Corvan II effortlessly. It's also nice to see that Discovery will soon get a new, presumably permanent captain.

Though that brings us to that neat trick the writers pulled at the end, whipping out that pretty shot of the fully reimagined Enterprise swooping in majestically, as though just begging us to forget about the incredibly unsatisfying episode we just watched because something better lies ahead. The audience pandering isn't even concealed, given that the emphasis of the scene isn't on the supposed emergency that brings Captain Christopher Pike to the Discovery, but instead on the nostalgic glee of seeing the Enterprise again. As for the reimagined Enterprise, we should all have mixed feelings about it. On the bright side, it's a great way for the writers to send a clear message to us about how they regard rebooting visual continuity. Previously it had been a bit more vague. They seemed to be respecting some visual canon, but not all of it, so it wasn't clear where their boundaries were. As such, for those invested in visual canon remaining consistent, watching Discovery has so far been a vaguely stressful exercise in "which canon will they crush this week?" Selectively respecting or rebooting canon is bad storytelling as has been previously discussed, but it would've been even worse if we never got a complete answer as to which visual canon they will and won't respect. With this episode, we've finally gotten a pretty clear answer to that. They'll reboot anything. They'll even reboot the Enterprise. Nothing is sacred. We can accept that now and move on, even if many of us may disagree with it.

What should give us pause about that though is by now it's clear that the writers' blasé regard for visual canon is merely a reflection of their blasé regard for all canon. This season has been riddled with continuity errors both internal to Discovery and external to other Star Trek shows. Their whole approach to canon in general is at best described as strained, and at times has been downright sloppy. So for those of you who are unconcerned with visual canon but are still hoping that the writers will build upon story canon respectfully, at this point the best advice would be to not get your hopes up too much. The track record so far hasn't been great. And unlike the illustrious Enterprise season 4, it seems unlikely that better writers will show up at the end of the show to clean it all up this time. We're witnessing the soft rebooting of all of Star Trek, not the careful stewardship of a timeless epic. Where once the whole of the story was treated with the literary rigor required to carefully interweave a chronology spanning centuries, now Star Trek is just being arbitrarily twisted and morphed with little regard for the finer details like a pulp comic book franchise.

And like a comic book franchise, we have a proportional reduction in internal storytelling depth. This season has repeatedly violated the principle of "show, don't tell" in its writing. Aside from obvious details like cutting over most of the war, there are more subtle violations of this principle as well. In this very episode, we have Burnham telling us how Klingons murdered her parents rather than the narrative showing us. The scene would've been dramatically improved by a flashback, but we didn't get one. The war would've been dramatically improved by showing it to us, but we didn't get that either. And most importantly, the terrific pilot offered us potential for the story to show us how the Federation learned to stop taking "shortcuts on the path to righteousness," to see how the Federation learned how "not break the rules that protect us from our basest instincts," and how to "not allow desperation to destroy moral authority." But we weren't shown any of that. We were told it in a speech the narrative didn't earn.

This season of Star Trek started out by asking a lot of difficult questions about the tension between identity and multiculturalism, and then merely pretended to answer them. It punted the deep questions with shallow platitudes.