Star Trek Discovery S5E4: Face the Strange

Last week we didn’t see our villains, Moll and Lok, until a kicker at the end of the episode that revealed Moll in disguise among the acolytes on Trill. Like so many things on Discovery, it’s a twist that advances the plot… and doesn’t make a lick of goddamn sense. Last we saw the two pirates, they were missing the vital clue that would lead them to Trill, and even if they had a written invitation to go there, Discovery can travel between stars instantaneously; it’d take them days to catch up.

But to my surprise, we get an explanation. They’ve bugged Discovery, in the form of a literal robot bug that roams the ship listening in, and then disappears into the walls. So they’re simply letting Burnham and crew do all the work of finding the Progenitors’ ancient technology, so they can swoop in and take it from themselves.

Meanwhile, Burnham is starting to regret making hardass Rayner her first officer, as he shouts down her crew, and overrides suggestions. She pulls him aside to give him a talking to, but just as he starts to apologize for his behavior, the lights flicker. They get a message from the bridge about an energy surge. They try and beam directly to the bridge, and get beamed back to where they started, except the lights are off and the room is in disarray.

They walk to the bridge the old-fashioned way, only to find rubble and bodies strewn across the floor. The crew aren’t dead, but something happened to the ship in that moment when they were transporting to nowhere. And onscreen, a wormhole, and ahead of the ship, the Red Angel from Season 2. But of course, the Red Angel is Burnham, leading the ship into the future. Burnham and Rayner have gone back in time, to the moment when Discovery jumped forward in time. 

Just as they get their bearings, the lights flicker again, and they’re further back in time. The ship’s back on Earth, still under construction. We established a very firm format for this season, with the crew searching for a new clue every week, so taking a left turn into a Next Generation-style mystery episode is a delightful surprise.

Each time loop takes Burnham and Rayner through a greatest hits of past Discovery episodes, as they try to work out a solution before they’re zapped back to the room where they started and the beginning of a new cycle. They quickly realize Stamets is also aware of what’s happening —the alien DNA that allows him to run the spore drive also makes him immune to time travel shenanigans, which doesn’t make a ton of sense, but is at least well-established from season 1’s time loop episode (“Magic To Make the Sanest Man Go Mad”). 

But before they get to Stamets, they go through a few more loops. One where the ship is under attack, and a chilling one where they jump forward and not back, to a future where the ship is adrift, the crew is dead, and Federation headquarters has been destroyed. It’s what happens if Moll and Lok get the ancient technology — they sell it to the Breen (an old enemy from Deep Space Nine), who use it against our friends and all they hold dear.

But eventually they get to Stamets, and we get some classic Star Trek — smart people working together to solve a seemingly-impossible problem, with some fun ridiculousness like Burnham having a Vulcan kung-fu fight against her past self. It’s the kind of episode Discovery does very well, and not nearly often enough.

Stray tachyons:
• Even amidst the chaos of the time loops and the frantic efforts to save the ship, we get some nice character moments, especially between gruff, closed-off Rayner and tightly-wound Stamets, who hadn’t yet gotten a chance to interact.

• The visits to Discovery’s past gives us the opportunity for a nice cameo from a past cast member. And Sonequa Martin-Green inhabits Past Michael so well it’s hard to believe they’re the same person.

• This is the final season of Discovery, and Paramount has announced that next season of Lower Decks will also be its last. Strange New Worlds was renewed, but it feels like the Paramount+ era of Star Trek is winding down, which is a shame, because between those two series, it really feels like they got the hang of this Star Trek thing.