Star Trek: Discovery - 'Context is for Kings'

Discovery.

Some time after her court martial, Michael Burnham is being transferred to what is rumoured to be a dilithium mine(1) when the shuttle is caught in a field of electricity eating micro-organisms. The pilot is lost in space, but the shuttle is rescued by the USS Discovery, an advanced science vessel. The Discovery is under the command of Captain Gabriel Lorca and First Officer Saru, who is understandably perturbed to see Burnham again. In addition we meet the former helmswoman of the Shenzhou - now sporting a cranial implant of some kind - Engineering chief and astromicologist Paul Stamets, security chief Landry and super-perky allergen sufferer Sylvia Tilly, whom I will probably end up either adoring or despising.

Burnham is assigned to work in engineering, working numbers for some weird spore-based technology, and then placed on an away mission to investigate the wreck of the Discovery's sister-ship USS Glenn. What they find is the crew, twisted and torn apart by mysterious torsion forces, and a Klingon boarding party ripped apart by parties briefly unknown, and eventually revealed to be some sort of mutated spore-pig. Cornered by the beast, Burnham risks her own life to distract it and allow the others to reach the shuttle, while she crawls though the Jeffries tubes reciting passages from Alice in Wonderland.

"Please don't murder me in my bed. Please don't murder me in my bed..."

The away team escapes and Lorca offers Burnham a job. He admits to engineering her 'rescue' - the fate of the shuttle pilot is never discussed, by anyone, incidentally - but denies that the Discovery and the Glenn were researching bioweapons. The spore-based technology is, rather, a new form of propulsion, intended to permit near-instant travel by following the panspermia network created by drifting interstellar sores. It's shiny AF, with only a slight side-effect of occasionally turning people inside out, and would let them pop out of nowhere on the Klingons and go boo with impunity.

The shuttle leaves without Burnham, Saru has a prey moment, and Tily asks Burnham to be her mentor on the quiet. Landry delivers the spore pig to Lorca in his unsettling autopsy room.

Discovery continues to impress technically, and presents us with a cracking away mission plot this episode. With the relative gore and violence levels now well-established, the big reveal this time is that the USS Discovery herself is effectively terra incognita, in her totality for Burnham, but in part for pretty much everyone on board, since she is running some 80 war-critical secret projects at any one time and everything is compartmentalised and locked up behind easily-defeated breath locks. Only time will tell what she has up all of her sleeves, or what the spore drive can really do.

"You're very tall."

We still only have a passing understanding of who Michael Burnham is, but that question has been pushed aside by 'what the fuck is going on with Lorca?' Gabriel Lorca is a sinister and slightly magnificent bastard, all about the science and the mind-games and the constant testing. He has he skeleton of a Gorn (not supposed to have been encountered yet) and a single tribble (not supposed to be possible) and keeps secrets with the same unthinking ease that most humans apply to breathing. Also, he's Draco Malfoy, so he's got that working against him.

Creepy Title Quote: "Universal law is for lackeys. Context is for Kings." Apparently Captain Lorca considers himself exempt from the rules which bind lesser souls, and it's hinted that he sees Burnham as a potential protege in this regard, after her actions at the Battle of the Binary Stars.

(1) Apparently we're still before the Starfleet Penal Reforms which will see Tom Paris convicted of treason and sentenced to an extended outward bound course in New Zealand.