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.