WHY WE LIKE IT: More about the Breen than we ever knew.
WHY WE DON'T: More about the Breen than we ever knew.
REVIEW: So yeah, I'm a little on the fence about revealing so much about the Breen, but that may be my nostalgia for the Berman-era inside joke/mystery race that was a cool aggregate of dozens of mismatched references that then had to make sense together (or not). They've been name-checked a lot this season, so it was inevitable they would appear (Face the Strange told us they were Moll and L'ak's ultimate buyers), but we probably should have seen it coming that L'ak - whose species was undetermined - would be Breen. But he's an atypical member of his race (there's always at least one), a fact that is couched in body dismorphia perhaps. The Breen have a translucent face and a taboo "matte" face, which he is more comfortable with (so it's perhaps ill-considered for Moll - who is in love with him - to force him to show the former). While the flashbacks are meant to show us how they fell in love, it doesn't really. She's a courier doing business with the Breen, and he's a boy from the other side of the tracks who, despite his royal lineage, isn't into his monolithic culture. Once they are found out, L'ak's uncle puts an "Erigah" on him (an unbreakable blood bounty) and they escape. It's good background and our first look at the 30th Century's Breen, but the love affair just IS. We might be so intrigued with the Breen stuff, we don't notice how thin this Romeo & Juliet love story actually is.
In the present-day time frame, the next clue is inside a pocket universe, beyond a sphinctering wormhole, aboard the Mirror Universe Enterprise (I did say this quest would take us on a tour of the Trekverse), and Moll and L'ak are already in there. Burnham and Booker go in, leaving Rayner in charge of Discovery (he tries to pull a Riker on her - and this time, they WALK to the bloody ready room - but she kind of turns the tables on him and makes it that he's skittish about service as acting captain, something others would have been eager to do... I only halfway buy it). The mission is, of course, an excuse to use the Strange New Worlds Enterprise set to save money (confirming there ISN'T a TOS-era "Tellarite Chic" redesign, it was just our eyes failing to adjust to 60s production values), but they make the best of it. We learn what happened to Mirror Spock (nothing good) and that Mirror Saru took up the rebellion. That refugees from the MU found themselves to this pocket universe and escaped and integrated into the Prime Universe. Burnham sees it as a message of hope. Some good action in Sickbay. A bit of a confrontation between Book and Moll. L'ak much more open to negotiate if it means he won't be separated from her love. And a close escape using the ISS Enterprise after everyone's shuttles are lost. Amusingly, Burnham refuses to say "hit it" when sitting in that chair. Again, it's thin in terms of plot, but it's fairly exciting and we do get a better understanding of the antagonists' motivations.
Back on Discovery, Rayner is really working with the C-team. It's obvious the show has actor availability problems this season and characters like Owo, and Detmer are given the task of flying the Enterprise to a museum at the end to sideline them in future episodes... which would have worked better if they'd BEEN in the episode AT ALL. I like the new faces fine, but that's almost all they are - faces - and one wonders why they weren't on the bridge during this important mission. Rayner's quality as captain (or XO) is that he knows how to focus the crew and get working solutions going just by asking the right questions. It's clear he doesn't have a science background, so he depends on others who do. More of a Renaissance man like Kirk and Picard who here manages to receive coded messages from anthropologist Burnham based on his culture's epic poetry. The B-team, meanwhile, is running through some angst protocols. Culber is feeling off since he bonded to a Trill symbiont and makes a speech that just sounds like they needed a recap for "Previously on...", and Adira blames themself for the time bug. All pretty unnecessary. And in the end, Moll and L'ak escape using a Sickbay escape pod, which had conveniently gone undetected and even more conveniently can't immediately be captured despite being centuries out of date.
LESSON: Circumstances shouldn't dictate what you can do or who you can be.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium: Good info on the Breen. Good background on the bad guys. Good action beats and cliffhangers. Just not the tightest script in the lot.
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