Star Trek: Discovery, Season 1, Episode 3: Context is for Kings
Once more, as someone who is not very familiar with Star Trek, I'm incapable of actually understanding what makes something more Trek-y or not. But the storyline told in this episode is certainly more interesting, I can tell you that. In my review for the premiere two-parter, I likened it to a prologue to a story. It told us of Burnham's backstory, as well as the huge event that'll be part of said backstory. It kick-started the Federation/Klingon war that is going to be the backdrop of this show. And, most importantly, it court-martials our main character Burnham, making her infamous among Starfleet as 'the mutineer'. She has absolutely valid reasons to do so, of course, but mutinying is still a pretty stupid thing to do, and she even notes this herself.
Flash-forward half a year later, and Burnham finds herself, a prisoner, transported onto the starship named Discovery, and here it feels more like the beginning of the show, the real 'chapter one', so to speak. It shows us the real main cast of the titular USS Discovery, of whom we are only familiar with Burnham and Saru from the previous episode. But we also learn of all the strange mysteries that plague the ship, and the ship is a research science vessel... whose purpose is to find a breakthrough to win the war.
And it's interesting to try and figure out who's going to be antagonistic to Burnham among the ship's crew. In a neat twist, it seems like the Klingons aren't going to be adversaries in every episode. Well, they're constantly mentioned, and a couple do get a brief appearance before being killed by the actual enemy of the weak, some disgusting space maggot monster.
And, well, Burnham is committed to serving her sentence, it seems, but still keeps the whole code of Starfleet close to her heart. She gets shunted from a prison shuttle to the USS Discovery, and gets co-opted into helping with engineering projects and shit. She does so without question, doesn't antagonize the blatantly-hostile officers while still taking enough of a stand to not be a pushover, and when seemingly asked to compromise and do unethical stuff, she flat-out refuses. Oh, and also, she's pretty dang smart. Being raised by Vulcans will do that to you.
A fair bit is made about the super-secret mission being done in the bowels of the USS Discovery and her sister ship, USS Glen, and like Burnham, the audience discovers this bit by bit, while also being acclimatized to the ship's crew. Saru is First Officer on the ship, and while he is absolutely tactless and makes it clear that he does not trust Burnham at all after her treachery, he is also not hateful. He assesses Burnham's worth as a soldier very highly, praising her while noting her past misdeed in the same breath. Oh, and he eats blueberries. The interaction between Saru and Burnham is written pretty well. The two respect each other, but there's the unspoken friction caused by Saru's bluntness and Burnham's past treachery.
There is Sylvia Tilly, the excitable, bubbly and babble-mouthed cadet that ends up being stuck as Burnham's hapless roommate. She is absolutely fun, giving an energetic character to the otherwise dour and serious ship. I think her first lines are kind of like "cool I wanted a roommate roommates are like instant best friends like oh wait that is kind of my bed" or something like that. Tilly's motormouth tendencies and her being kind of half-scared of Burnham... before eventually respecting her new roommate at the end of the episode and apologizing for trying to not seem affiliated with her earlier in the episode is earnest and well done. And her earnest trying to be a friend and affirming that she's going to be a captain someday is definitely well done.
There is the enigmatic captain Gabriel Lorca (played by Jason "Lucius Malfoy" Isaacs), who is very, very shifty and kind of a puppet-master. Burnham quickly surmises that Lorca got her onto the ship on purpose and from all the secret projects all over the ship, Burnham initially assumes Lorca is making biological weapons. Lorca demonstrates and shows that they're devising not biological weapons, but simply advanced technology like a fungus-based instant-warp thing that'll help them win the war anyway. And then after Burnham leaves the room, Lorca reveals that he is in possession of a very fucked-up zoo of genetically-engineered organic horrors, and he was responsible not only for the creation of the scary maggot monster that threatened Burnham's team, but also the one to beam it on board the USS Glenn seemingly just to manipulate Burnham onto his side or something. The title of the episode, "universal law is for lackeys, context is for kings", paints him as a captain that's far more willing to bend laws and ethics to get what he wants... something that'll no doubt put him into conflict with Stamets and Burnham in the future... although all the talk about context is probably something that Burnham can sympathize with, considering her situation .
And, yes, it is a fungus-based technology, because the last main character in the show is the astromycologist scientist Stamets, who is the head of engineering. He explains this whole deal about how his branch of science basically combines biology and physics.... somehow. Organic technology, basically. After some antagonistic back-and-forth, we get a very heartfelt rant from Stamets to Burnham about how the war fucked over his plans of research and discovery, and he's just perpetually angry. He should be working with his buddy to make the world better, but now they are separated, assigned to different ships to work 'twice as fast'. Of course, said buddy gets killed and horrifyingly deformed, seemingly because of a freak science experiment gone wrong.
The show goes to full sci-fi horror show when Burnham, Stamets and Tilly and a bunch of other redshirts (who don't wear red) are sent off to look at USS Glenn and try to figure what happened. What seemed like a Klingon raid turns out to be not the case when the Klingons are found to be slaughtered by this horrifying maggot monster. The CGI monster looks pretty good, the body horror we got from the victims are pretty neat, and the action scene and eventual escape is fast-paced enough to be entertaining.
Overall, it's a fair bit better than the premiere, I think, with the cast being pretty fun to follow and the setup and all the mysteries behind the Discovery's mission crew being intriguing enough to keep me hooked for at least a couple more episodes.
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