Star Trek: Discovery - 'The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry'

Saru... Well, let's be frank. He puts up with a lot of bullshit.

We begin this episode with a totally unexpected crossover with LEGO Dimensions(1), before cutting to Burnham getting her new uniform, with science division silver panels and no rank insignia. Then Ensign Tilly turns up with a package for Burnham, which turns out to be Captain Georgiou's last will and testament. Burnham shoves it under the bed, despite it beeping continuously like a high-tech howler waiting to go off.

I've been predicting that Captain Georgiou herself would return, in fact or as a clone, and that this would prove to be the reason for leaving her body behind. Turns out... Yeah, the Klingons ate her when the food in the stranded sarcophagus ship began to run out. Voq, the albino, and T'Kuvma's other protege L'Rell have been scavenging parts from the destroyed Klingon ships left behind by the battle, but the only dilithium processor is on the Shenzhou, and Voq is reluctant to pollute the purity of the vessel. L'Rell is a more pragmatic sort, and suggests that there is no purity in death.

Lorca assigns Burnham to the creepy autopsy room to find out what makes the beastie from the Glenn so good at killing up Klingons, although to his disgruntlement she determines that it's actually not all that aggressive. It's a kind of massive tardigrade, basically indestructible, but itself destructive only in a basic, instinctive fashion. It is, however, a demon in self-defence, as Landry - who dubs it 'Ripper' - discovers when she tries to sedate it and cut off a claw for study. Ripper ignores the sedative and mauls Landry to death in the time it takes Burnham to turn on the lights, which Ripper hates. While most of our red shirts have been white boys, that makes two named women of colour under the bus in four episodes to one named white man, a fact which is causing more than a little muttering.

Ripper is kind of adorbs when he's not... ripping.

As Lorca pushes for a working spore drive in order to relieve the beleagured dilithium mines of Corvan II(2), and Stamets struggles to work out what sort of computer could have driven the navigational rig recovered from the Glenn, Burnham realises that Ripper is attuned to the panspermia micelium trails that the spore drive utilises, and indeed likely appeared on the Glenn in search of more spores to consume. The navigational rig is a harness for the tardigrade, which allows the Discovery to make a quantum spore jump into battle, then back out again, apparently squishing the Klingon attack force in its wake or something.

L'Rell's dress is by Skesis at C&A.

Meanwhile, back in the binary system, Voq and L'Rell retrieve the dilithium processor from the Shenzhou with some flirty engineering, only to discover that fair-weather zealot Kol has bought off the remaining crew of the sarcophagus ship with food and intends to rule the Empire once the war with the Federation is done. L'Rell apparently turns on Voq for a turkey leg, but instead engineers his survival and sends him to the matriarchs of her mother's house, where he will learn things he never imagined, but at the cost of everything.

We wrap up with Burnham opening her bequest, which turns out to be Georgiou's badly scorched optical telescope, and a recorded message congratulating her on the command Georgiou was sure she would have earned. It's a sobering and melancholy reminder of just how little Phillipa Georgiou anticipated any of this shit happening. She was a proper Starfleet Captain, and now she's been eaten and the fate of the Federation lies with dodgy bastards like Lorca. Meanwhile, Burnham walks a line between proper and dodgy, willing to shoot first and put Saru in danger to see if his 'threat ganglia' respond to Ripper, but also able to look beyond the obvious and see something more than a killer in Ripper itself.

'Is it Star Trek?' my girlfriend asked after we watched this episode, and I believe that it is, although it is not, to borrow a phrase, your grandaddy's Star Trek(3). This is not to say that it is wholly divorced from its predecessors, but certainly it owes more to the films - Prime and Kelvin timelines - than it does to the immediate legacy of TOS. Mind you, the same could be said of everything post-TNG, when the creators really began to get into evolving universes and arc plots. And what about representation? I think it's made a good fist of it, but casting two non-caucasian in ablative guest star roles would have been a lot less problematic if the surviving bridge crew were a little less pale.

(1) Okay, actually it's a quantum-scale closeup of a replicator in action, but it looks exactly like the opening scene of LEGO Dimensions.
(2) Which I think are the ones that the other prisoners speculated they were being taken to last week.
(3) For generational values which mean that, solely in this instance, I am your grandaddy.