Michael Burnham arrives on Talos IV with her brother Spock, hoping the Talosians will use their mental abilities to restore his fractured mind. But the aliens demand a price from her that will come at great personal cost. Meanwhile, Discovery must find a way to track their missing crew member without alerting Section 31.
I wasn't expecting this episode to kick off with a "Previous on" package of clips taken exclusively from Star Trek's original pilot episode, "The Cage." And what a package it was -- besides explaining the key points of that story, you got to see a smiling Spock and a charisma-free Jeffrey Hunter in the role of Pike, smash-cutting directly to Anson Mount. (For what it's worth, I don't think Hunter and Mount look like the same person, though it feels like they could credibly be brothers, or father and son or something.)
The episode was full of callbacks to that original episode. The singing plants, which Georgiou even had a snide comment about. The return of Vina, this time played by Melissa George. New Talosian aliens, veins throbbing in CG instead of by the efforts of a stagehand pumping an air bladder. (And in a non-Star Trek shout-out, everyone has now agreed that the movie Interstellar has decided for us what a black hole looks like.)
There was a lot to like here besides the nostalgia factor. The flashbacks to Michael and Spock's childhoods delivered a nice emotional payoff to what the series has been building up since it began. No, it wasn't entirely "surprising," and it was good that it wasn't. Because they prioritized something honest over something shocking, the revelation of how the emotional rift formed between the siblings delivered on the drama.
The moments between Pike and Vina were also quite strong... though perhaps this depended more on a knowledge of the events of both "The Cage" and the original series two-part episode "The Menagerie." This filled in the middle act of a love story in a melancholy way, while staying true to the lighter payoff it has (if you watch those early episodes). Anson Mount got his most personal material of the series so far, a scene more demanding than "looking captain-ly," and he was great.
But speaking of a love story in its middle act: Stamets and Culber. Man, am I torn about this. On the one hand, I recognize that happiness and contentedness is the enemy of drama. Happily married characters on a TV series are a magnet for writers to tear apart to generate story. However, on the other hand, we've now traded one ugly TV cliche about gay people for another. Because if TV writers aren't killing off their gay characters in metaphorical punishment for their orientation, they're demonstrating how its impossible for them to maintain a healthy and stable relationship like straight people can.
Like I said, I'm torn on this. It's not like there are any stable straight relationships on Star Trek: Discovery the writers are intentionally or unintentionally contrasting with. And I like that they're engaging with the trauma that would surely result from being brought back from the dead (or even, less metaphysically, rescue after a long period of torture). But goddammit, Star Trek writers, do you not understand that having waited 50+ years to give us a recurring gay couple, having fallen behind other television in inclusiveness when your franchise was once a forerunner, you need to do better than serve the same cliches? Especially cliches that carry an undercurrent of anti-LGBT attitudes?
And while I'm on what's not-so-good about Discovery in general, I'm officially sick of the camera work. It was distracting enough when they were one-upping the J.J. Abrams penchant for lens flare. But the constantly moving and rotating cameras need to stop. It's not underscoring emotion in the script particularly well, and it's certainly not organic to the storytelling.
The resolution of this episode threw an intriguing lifeline to viewers who might still be hung up on the continuity between all we're seeing and original Star Trek. Spock made it clear that the interventions of the time-traveling Red Angel led to him save Michael's life as a child. Perhaps this did not take place in the "Prime universe" of past Star Trek series? Maybe to that timeline, and the movies' "Kelvin timeline," we've now added a third Star Trek timeline?
Despite a couple of missteps, I did mostly like this episode. Still, I'll feel a lot better if they'd just wrap up the storyline of Culber's trauma and move on. I give this episode a B+.
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