Star Trek: Discovery - 'What's Past is Prologue'

"Come at me, bro."

This week on Discovery, shit gets real as Lorca makes his move and Saru leads a last ditch bid to save the universe(1).

Lorca frees his captive supporters from the agony booths, including Mirror-Landry, who has of course not been savaged to death by a tardigrade. Rallying secret supporters aboard the Charon, he captures Mirror-Stamets and turns his work - a nasty set of bioweapons - against the Emperor's supporters. Michael escapes from the Emperor and is able to warn Discovery that Lorca is a Terran, while the Emperor's attempts to subdue the rebellion prove less than successful, allowing Lorca to take the throne room. Having done all he can usefully do to aid Lorca, Mirror-Stamets is summarily executed as part of an episode-long campaign to remind us that Lorca is the bad guy.

"There may come a day when the principals of Star Fleet fail, but it is not thisday!"

Stamets-Prime explains to Saru and Tilly that the Charon's big ball of glowy power is in fact a mycelial reactor, drawing power from the network and, in doing so, killing it. If the damage is not checked, the network will die and take all other life in the multiverse with it, so that would be bad. The reactor is impervious to their weapons, thanks to a containment field, and even their most photonic torpedoes would barely scratch it. Saru declares against the existence of a no-win scenario and plans are drawn: Michael joins forces with the Emperor to retake the throne room and shut down the containment field, while the torpedoes are primed with spores to massively increase their yield. This means using up all of their harvested spores, however, leaving their only hope of getting home a mad attempt to ride the detonation of the reactor.

Aided by Lorca's obsession with destiny, and with making Burnham his Empress, Burnham and Georgiou make it to the throne room, where they are able to take down the guards. Burnham refuses to kill Lorca, because Starfleet, but Georgiou has no such qualms, running him through and dropping him into the mycelial reactor for good measure. The Emperor then offers to hold off Lorca's remaining supporters until Discovery can retrieve Burnham, but at the last moment Burnham opts to grab her, so that they are both beamed to relative safety as the reactor detonates, taking out the Charon and flinging Discovery into the network. An overwhelmed Stamets is once more guided to safety by Dr Culber's voice, leading him to 'the clearing in the forest' and bringing Discovery back to its own universe.

"This is fine."

Unfortunately, they are nine months into their own futures and it looks as if the Klingons have pretty much won the war. It's also entirely possible that the Terran ISS Discovery has been jobbing around for the last nine months, trying to find a tongue for Captain Killy to lick her boots with.

Discovery continues to dangle increasingly vain hopes - this time the potential timey wimey of the mycelial network, vs. the loss of the spore stock - as well as messing with our sense of continuity - no-one in the Mirror, Mirror episode knew anything much about mirror universes or creation-critical mycelial networks, and there was no sense of a Federation recovering from near-total collapse less than nine years later. I guess one of these suggests a solution to the latter, although I am increasingly, if not contentedly, resigned to the loss of Dr Culber. Prove me wrong, Discovery; please.

This episode didn't have Shazad Latif in it at all, which is quite a come down from two of him just a couple of episodes ago, but we have Michelle Yeo back and I am sure that nothing could possibly go wrong with trying to integrate the genocidal ruler of a fascist empire into Star Fleet. This is what I mean about trying to make sure we know Lorca is the bad guy, by the way. While he is obviously an evil, manipulative motherfucker out to seize personal power and cop off with as many women(3) as he could, his cause was against an oppressive regime and who is to say that he was any worse than Georgiou? We were shown a lot of the latter's honour, against Lorca's ruthlessness, specifically to create a false moral divergence between the established and incoming fascist overlords. Notably, Emperor Georgiou didn't eat any Kelpians this episode, but I can't help feeling that Burnham would have done better by everyone to let her go down in a blaze of glory.

(1) Yeah; the damage to the mycelial network constitutes a threat to all life in the multiverse. Way to bury the lede(2).

(2) It is entirely conceivable that I just got distracted last week.

(3) Revealed as our villain, he yet remains unabashedly cis-het and white.