WHY WE LIKE IT: A powerful representation of PTSD.
WHY WE DON'T: There's reason to doubt the core premise.
REVIEW: A hundred million Federation dead in two years is hard to get over, so a former Klingon general, though he may have defected to the Federation's side, is going to be a sore point on the Enterprise. The ship was in the far reaches and couldn't participate in the war, but some of the show's characters joined the crew after, most famously M'Benga and Chapel and as Boimler hinted, Ortegas. So here comes Rah, a calm, collected, smiling Klingon who went from genocidal general to peacemaker extraordinaire and... honestly, I don't really buy that premise. Yes, he's proven to be keeping secrets and lying about the details of his defection so he could survive in the cold war to come, but that's not what I mean. The "Butcher of J'Gal" was so named by the Klingons - NOT by the Federation whose civilians he massacred, which seems confusing - because he killed, like, three of his own guys to make his escape. That convinced the Federation's diplomatic corps that he would make a great ambassador to make peace between the Klingons and Feds, but... Why would the Klingons respond at all well to a traitor? If he's a "good will ambassador" to make the Federation forgive the Klingons, the fact that he openly trashes Klingon culture goes against that too. Rah's presence doesn't really make sense and is a fabrication to make M'Benga - and to a point, Chapel and Ortegas - confront their feelings about the war, their PTSD, their trauma. And that's where the episode gets good.
The present-day story is intertwined with harrowing flashbacks to M'Benga and Chapel's time on the front lines, working at a desperate M*A*S*H unit (and nice to see Clint Howard in Trek again, this is his biggest role). Star Trek Discovery skipped the war, which means we did too. Seeing it here outs us in mind of the Dominion War in Deep Space Nine and several of its warfront episodes (triage, the effect on soldiers, the terrible sacrifices), and acts as a sort of secret origin for the characters. M'Benga is already using the pattern buffer to store lost cases, and he's being hounded by commandos for more of his Protocol 12 super-soldier drug (as seen in The Broken Circle). A lot happened in those two years. The new information? Well, Chapel only used the drug once, so not as much as earlier suggested (makes sense). And more importantly, M'Benga was once known as the Ghost, a highly-efficient super-assassin who made a reputation for himself in black ops circles for killing Klingon targets. He has since given up on it for ethical and health reasons, but this episode draws him back into it, after Rah orders the slaughter of children and the bodies mount up (including a soldier he patched up and bonded with). The big reveal is that HE was the "Butcher of J'Gal" and killed Rah's men while the general escaped.
Now back to the present. M'Benga isn't just suffering from PTSD, but he's confronted by a man who has taken HIS great shame and turned it into a career booster. And Rah is so pushy with M'Benga, wanting him to go on a good will tour with him, etc. that eventually Josef has to tell him - beg him! - to leave him alone. This is a powerful scene because it works on many levels. On one, M'Benga is a veteran feeling crippling anxiety faced with an old enemy (the genocidal murderer who got away) and doesn't want to interact with him, but he also knows that if push comes to shove, he might go off and commit a violent act. And he does, behind frosted glass, in a moment you can replay several times, but never really confirm happened the way M'Benga and Chapel say it did. The knife is M'Benga's, and Pike is right, Rah was so cool and slick, it's hard to believe he would have gone for it. M'Benga shouts "DON'T!", which makes it sound like Rah did do something, but he might just mean the sort of man-handling we saw in their wrestling bout. It's an over-reaction, probably. But who started the fight? M'Benga's answer is ambiguous. He didn't start the fight, not if the fight was started by the Klingons years ago. He didn't start it with Rah either, that was Rah lying about his actions during the war. And this scuffle? From the dialog, I'd say not either. But Josef is glad he's dead anyway, which is a very DS9 ending indeed. The crucial point is that Rah not only murdered thousands of people, but that he (and the Klingons, the war) turned M'Benga himself - a doctor pledged to do no harm - into a killer, or in his words, a monster. He hates the Klingons, but he hates himself more. There are things he thinks are beyond redemption and cuts Rah off from his, but we know what's really going on. He believes HE can't be redeemed, no matter how many lives he saves. The broken bio-bed metaphor is a little much, but this is how he sees himself. Strong stuff.
SECONDARY WATCHING: The episode evokes another diplomatic dinner with the Klingons, that of Star Trek VI. Worth checking out with this added background, as the episode continues Spock's interest in making peace with this culture and therefore serving as envoy in the film. We might also look at people's reaction to Burnham again in Discovery's first season, seeing as she was deemed responsible for sparking the Klingon War (though I'd argue they could have prevented it had Georgiou listened to her).
LESSON: You can't trust a political animal.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-High: I don't quite buy the premise, but can't argue it leads to powerful scenes and an exploration of war's effect on people. M'Benga's greatest episode.
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