#Spore drive on sto series#

For the past couple of episodes we’ve been tracking a shuttle that Spock stole from Starbase 5, where he was under psychological care. This entire season has been building up to the Discovery crew encountering Spock, who holds some knowledge about the season’s big story arc-the mystery of seven red bursts that have appeared across the galaxy, and the appearance of a Red Angel. It artificially inflates (or, more accurately, undermines) the urgency of the ship’s predicament and basically gives the bridge team the scripted equivalent of “busy work.”Īctually, I have two complaints. The story is essentially told from two different perspectives: that of the Tilly rescue mission and that of the bridge crew, who are trying to keep the ship, which is parked in mid-jump, “afloat.” For most of the second half of the episode the scripting seems to be a bit light on the bridge side of the equation, with lots of “Hurry up, we have to get out of here now!” scenes, followed by ten minutes (okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration) of the rescue mission talking and figuring things out. My only real complaint about this episode was the pacing. He will be changed in some way, in his perspective at least, if not in some more fundamental way. Culber will not be the same Culber that we’ve known. But as we know from watching genre shows, no one is ever brought back “from the dead” without there being some kind of consequence. So it isn’t a surprise in any way that Culber would at some point reappear on the show (plus, Cruz has pretty much admitted in interviews that he’d be returning to the show, so there’s that). We’ve had hints that Culber was still alive-or at least active in some way-in the network, as he has appeared to Stamets at random times, and once helped to navigate one of the ship’s spore drive jumps. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz), Stamets’ long-lost partner.

By scanning for a molecular structure that matches the pod, he can track down where Tilly was transported to, and he concocts a plan to use the ship’s spore drive to rescue her.īut the Discovery crew picks up another passenger in the network while rescuing Tilly: Dr. Meanwhile, Science officer Stamets (Anthony Rapp) discovers that the pod that May dragged Tilly into at the end of the last episode works sort of like a transporter. Episode 5, “Saints of Imperfection,” an episode that looks far more like an episode of Stranger Things, deals primarily with her rescue from the mycelial “upside down.” Tilly learns that May needs her to help track down a monster that has been damaging the network. We learn that May is a creature from the network and has crossed over to find a sympathetic person-it selects Tilly-for some undisclosed purpose, absconding with her into the network itself.

#Spore drive on sto series#

Other Trek series have done similar things, usually employing the virtual reality technology of the holodeck to put the crew in un- Trek-like situations. This philosophy was employed to great effect in the series of four Short Treks that acted as prequels to Discovery‘s second season, and it has been developed even further in Season 2, utilizing the magic wonderland of the mycelial network rather than holodeck technology.Īt the end of the fourth episode, Ensign Tilly (Mary Wiseman) is essentially kidnapped by a ghost-like figure she’d been seeing for a couple of episodes, patterned after a Junior High School friend of hers called May Ahearn. From the very beginning, Star Trek: Discovery has shown that it’s not afraid to tackle different and unexpected types of storytelling, stretching the boundaries of what a Trek episode can be.