Seeking answers, the USS Discovery ventures into a subspace rift created by the Dark Matter Anomaly. Meanwhile, Book faces a strange visitor from his past.

The very definition of a safe pair of hands, seeing Jonathan (Number One) Frakes credited as director of an episode immediately sets your mind at rest – you know that the veteran of multiple Star Trek shows and movies will deliver a solid show. In fairness, a bottle show like Stormy Weather doesn’t offer the director all the toys to play with, but such a familiar plot means that he’s probably been here before (as Riker) and knows how to call the shots.

For his seventh Discovery, Frakes is given a script that takes the crew into darkness, the sub-space rift left behind by the DMA. A crime scene ripe for investigation to help identify the source of the anomaly, things start going wrong very quickly. A DOT-23 drone is destroyed, and Book tries to jump but is hit by an energy surge from the Mycelial Network (and sees his dead father). Oh, and Zora is engaged by playing a game with Gray and sings 1930s torch song ‘Stormy Weather’ to Burnham. There’s enough going on to justify the episode’s existence, but ultimately it’s just a little too generic. The cast all get something to do, and we discover a bit more about the DMA, but beyond that, there’s little reason to return to it.

Verdict: With Frakes at the helm we’re safely steered into and out of the gloomy wake of the season’s big bad, but there’s still a bigger and more significant story to tell. 6/10

Nick Joy