Six months after her court martial, Michael Burnham is brought aboard the USS Discovery – to a very mixed welcome…

There’s a lot that feels familiar in this week’s episode, with the good old standby of “a sister ship of our amazing one whose sets we can distress to show things have gone to hell” brought out even before we’ve really spent more than five minutes aboard the Discovery. But there’s also a lot that’s very different from any Trek show we’ve had before – normally a disruptive figure to the crew’s equilibrium is the episode’s guest star, and we know things will be put back to normal once they’ve gone. This time around, Burnham is the central character, and she’s coming onto a ship where there’s discord already – particularly between the captain and astromycologist Lieutenant Stamets over the nature of their mission, for reasons that rapidly become clear.

It was a good call to have some other familiar faces on the Discovery already, and the relationship between Saru and Burnham is going to be one of the highlights of the show, I suspect (and for more on their background together, check out David Mack’s Desperate Hours, set 18 months earlier than this on the Shenzhou). I’m less comfortable with Mary Wiseman’s Sylvia Tilly – not through any fault of the actor, but it does seem odd that such an inexperienced cadet would be sent on such a fraught boarding party. However, like the presence of a certain furry menace in Lorca’s ready room, I’m ready to wait for explanations.

As to Lorca himself, Jason Isaacs seems to be deliberately infusing the character with dark mystery, and the decision to focus the series around Burnham rather than the captain means that we will need to be patient to gain full understanding – more than anything else, his demeanour throughout the episode emphasised the serial nature of this particular brand of Star Trek. I must admit that at the start of the final discussion between him and Burnham, I wondered if we were going to learn that he was weaponizing the augment virus in some way… but it’s entirely possible that he may be up to something worse!

Verdict: The show’s still bedding in, but this has the familiar but different tone that I was hoping for, with some lovely nods to continuity (including the animated series) as well as forging a new direction. 8/10

Paul Simpson

ow