I have no idea what that means.
Yes, there are spoilers.
We have yet another decent episode this week, and a return of the Klingons. This time the Klingons screen presence wasn't as boring and I am starting to like Voq's second hand L'Rell who gets some character development here.
It all starts out when the Discovery jumps into battle to save some fellow Federation ships, but fails pretty miserably when it turns out that more and more of the Klingon fleet have stealth technology. This makes Lorca angry and he demands a solution right now. As he speaks to different characters on the bridge around him, I realize that we know nothing about them except for their first names. I have never been so uninformed about a bridge crew in Star Trek ever.
Somehow they find an item that can help them on a planet somewhere. I must've missed where this information came from, but my immediate thought was that whatever it is, it can't work very well since they have no nifty anti-cloaking device in the later instalments of Star Trek. Yet again they are introducing something they will need to un-explain by the end of the show, very much like the spore-drive.
Saru, Michael and Tyler (which I swear they pronounce as Taylor) beam down to the planet which is not supposed to have any life forms. Instead it has... singing trees? Well, the trees turn out to be sentient in what can only be described as hilariously Star Trek. Honestly, this was so Star Trekky it made me smile.
Since the trees are somehow sentient Michael decides that they need their ok before they can use the anti-cloaking device, which is basically a huge crystal tree worthy of any JRPG (it is also purplish-blue like the rest of the trees). Meanwhile Saru is not feeling well from all the singing and Michael and Tyler do some more love-bonding but I just can't see those two together. But neither could I any other couple in other Star Trek series (except maybe Worf and Dax) and I know I talked a bit about this in my episode 7 post already.
Saru begins to try to learn to communicate with the sentient cloud-thing the trees emmanate, and has a scene where he tells Michael and Tyler he's barely made any progress learning their vocabulary, n the next sentence he has a long tirade of back-story on the Pahvans (or something like it) as the beings are called (named after the planet). For someone who just said he barely understood them he had already gathered a lot of information.
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| At least they're not Phylosians. |
Back to the Klingons and things are getting very confusing. L'Rell hates the new Klingon leader Kol but offers to interrogate the prisoner because she needs him to accept her into his ranks. What prisoner? Well, Admiral Cornwell of course. Instead of doing that though, she tell Cornwell she wants to defect and they try to sneak to L'Rells ship together. So that's why she wanted to interrogate her! On their way there, Kol sees them and L'Rell kills Cornwell. Or does she? It is not very clear. Either way she returns to Kol and swears fealty to him, he awards her the face paint that they're all wearing and the second after he tells her he knows she is trying to deceive him and arrests her.
Ok, what just happened there? Was it really necessary to go through the whole kneeling and face painting and talking if he knew she was up to no good in the first place? And why let her be alone with their most useful and valuable human prisoner? And where is Voq in all this? Last time we saw him he was stranded on the destroyed ship of Giorgiu with L'Rell, they were talking about getting some sort of revenge and how does all of the stuff that just happened in this episode tie in with that? And how does the face painting work anyway? Do Klingons never shower or do they just re-apply afterwards?
They'd better explain a lot of the things that went down in this episode or it didn't make much sense.
On the Discovery it seems like Stamets is not feeling too well from all the spore-jumping anymore. So he's basically gone from being a really grumpy hater to a cheerful loving everyone kind of dude, back to a grumpy hater again. Tilly is worried and asks him about it. He tells her to sod off, when she doesn't move he just opens up to her, so he changed his mind pretty quickly. Nothing is explained however, he just confirms that the spore jumps are starting to make him confused.
On the planet Saru has been possessed by the tree-spirits while trying to understand them. They're basically all about harmony and peace and really made me think about the Mako lifestream from Final Fantasy VII. Saru becomes a bit creepy and won't let Michael or Tyler leave the planet. Overall Saru gets some character development here. Earlier on in the episode they "casually" mention that Saru's species the Kelpiens can run really fast. Guess if that is going to play a part later in the episode?
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| The Pahvans actually look a lot like this. |
Tyler tricks Saru so that Michael can run off and fiddle with the anti-cloaking device, which is also a transmitter somehow? Saru figures it out because he can sense that Tyler is deceiving him with his "threat-ganglia", I really hate that name by the way. Saru gets really violent, almost tries to kill Tyler and then runs really fast to get to Michael and almost kills her too. My first thought was that all that talk about peace and harmony went away pretty quickly, but this is actually something Michael points out as well and Saru basically blames Michael for forcing his hand.
The tree-spirits interfere in the end when they turn up and Michael beg them to allow them to use the transmitter-anti-cloak-device to stop the war, since that will bring peace and harmony. The tree spirits agree but it turns out they're actually just stupid and have instead sent out an invitation to the Klingon fleet to come join the Discovery by the Pavan homeworld, presumably for negotiations.
And that is where the episode ends, so it's pretty much a two-parter because this episode didn't answer any questions but only raised them. Overall it was a pretty confusing episode that often had me feel like I missed a scene somewhere, but I like the idea of the sentient trees because it's just so silly.
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