Star Trek: Discovery, Season 1, Episode 12: Vaulting Ambition
Huh, this episode is actually pretty good! Also, it's highly probable that we're going to ride out this Mirror Universe train until the ending of the first season of Star Trek: Discovery. No promises on whether I'll ever watch the second season, but it seems that the Klingon war's going to be wrapped up there and not here. I'm not sure if we've actually spent enough time with our characters that bringing in the mirror-universe versions of them will have enough impact, but the season manages to work in some neat details -- like the real origin and agenda of Gabriel Lorca -- which I have to admit is actually quite interesting and unexpected.
Without this development, I think, none of the storylines in the Mirror Universe really felt like they're worth it. Burnham's constant attempts at infiltrating the Terran Empire while being constantly shocked at everything thrown her way like Kelpian Sashimi isn't quite interesting enough to be dragged on for multiple episodes, but the introduction of Emperor Georgiou is extremely welcome. The Emperor, despite, y'know, being the Emperor of the mustache-twirling-evil Mirror Universe, actually views her universe's Burnham as her own daughter, and actually knows (and has covered up) the existence of Mirror Universes. The scenes between Burnham and the Emperor are some of the best this Mirrorverse arc has had, from the Emperor thinking that Burnham is her Burnham (who's an actual traitor) to the revelations that they find regarding Gabriel Lorca.
See, Lorca spending practically the entirety of this episode and the previous one stuck in a torture chamber with CGI lightning across his body apparently leads up to a twist that's far better executed than the clumsily-handled Tyler/Voq one, because the Lorca we've been following is actually the Lorca from the Mirror Dimension, and that explains all the mysterious shifty things he's been doing, as well as his slight obsession with keeping both Burnham and Stamets's spore drive on board. It does explain some of Lorca's more throwaway lines of dialogue (which we get flashbacks of here), his more sinister ones with the Tardigrade, as well as, apparently, his sensitivity to sunlight -- a characteristic of the Mirrorverse humans. It's all pretty well-handled here.
Unfortunately, there are two B-plots that aren't quite as interesting here. Stamets spends his time in the mycellium weird dimension, and we're given a proper farewell between Stamets and Culber here. Of course, the Mirror-Universe Stamets is of course, also evil, and has spread some sort of disease through the mycellium network from the Mirror-Discovery to our Discovery. Or something. It's a fair bit of development, and the fact that Stamets's prophetic visions are apparently visions of the Mirrorverse is neat. The Stamets stuff is... neat, but not particularly engaging.
The Saru/Tyler stuff is also a bit less engaging. We're basically dealing with the fallout and it's a lot of exposition and feet-shuffling between Saru and L'Rell, and the latter ends up being convinced to work on Tyler to... separate him from Voq? Turn him completely Voq? Turn him completely Tyler? Combine the two psyches? Something? It's pretty vague, and apparently all L'Rell has to do is to wear some needles on her fingers and stab Tylervoq in the head like once or twice. I'm not a big fan of all the Tylervoq stuff -- pretty tedious, pretty poorly built up and extremely unexciting once the revelation happened last episode. Eh.
Overall, an... okay episode. The B-plots of Discovery tend to be bland or obvious exposition, but for this episode, the A-plot feels pretty good.
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