Star Trek Discovery S5E5: Mirrors

After last week’s fun time-loop episode, we’re back to the season-long treasure hunt. Discovery is on the trail of Moll and L’ak, the pirate duo the crew are racing against to find a powerful ancient technology. The two have disappeared into a wormhole, which is too big for Discovery to fit through. So after Rayner insists on leading the away team and gets shut down, Burnham and Book take a shuttle to confront the pirates.

Inside the wormhole, they fly through a mysterious green cloud that’s blocking their contact with Discovery. They also find Moll and L’ak’s ship, or more accurately, half of it. It’s been destroyed. If the duo survived, they would have taken refuge in an intact ship also in the cloud — the I.S.S. Enterprise, the Mirror Universe version of Captain Kirk’s starship. It’s battle-damaged and must have been in the cloud for hundreds of years, as it’d be contemporary with pre-time-jump Discovery. (Which means the ship is abandoned and we won’t get a look at bearded Evil Spock.)

The episode leans heavily on Book’s unlikely connection to Moll — she’s the daughter of his mentor — but he doesn’t really know her at all, just her father. But as soon as the two confront each other on board the Enterprise, it’s clear that that doesn’t matter much. She has no love lost for her late father, and has no desire to surrender herself.

But Book quickly susses out that she and L’ak are driven by more than money. Under duress, she admits that the Breen have a bounty on her, and that L’ak is one of them. (The Breen were a recurring villain on Deep Space Nine, which made a big deal of the fact that no one had ever seen what was under their metal helmets.) We flash back to Moll meeting L’ak, the black sheep of a powerful family on Breen, and convincing him to join her in conning his people on a business deal, which we assume is what led to the two of them living a life on the run.

Back in the present, the old malfunctioning ship traps Burnham and L’ak together behind a forcefield, which means Book and Moll have to put their differences aside and go to the bridge to try and deactivate it. So we have parallel scenes of the good guys trying to talk the bad guys out of being bad, but neither side of it’s terribly compelling. It’s a consistent problem for Discovery, that when they slow the action down for character moments, they haven’t developed the characters well enough for us to care much about them. Moll and L’ak have tragic backstories, but it’s hard for us to care too much about them. Book cares about Burnham, but they haven’t spent much time together in a non-action scene this season, so their relationship hasn’t really progressed.

Maybe it’s the fact that they’re on the Enterprise set from Strange New Worlds, but it’s hard not to think about how much better that show mixes action and drama, without having to slow down one to make time for the other.

But we do get back into the action, as Stamets and Adira come up with a risky plan to pull Burnham out of the wormhole, and the brief rescue scene is worth the price of admission. But things immediately slow down again, as we get an extended wrap-up in which Burnham pats Rayner on the back and has a vaguely feel-good talk with Book about their relationship.

Every show has a meh episode now and again, and this was one for Discovery. But we’ve only got five episodes left in the series, and it’s a shame to not make the most of what we’ve got left.

Stray tachyons:
• In a bit of continuity with Disco’s earlier Mirror Universe episodes, the I.S.S. Enterprise was at one point captained by Mirror Saru, before he and the crew abandoned ship.

• The show has a lot of fun trashing the Strange New Worlds sets as the foursome brawl their way across the Enterprise.

• Oyo and Detmer — familiar faces on the bridge who generally don’t get much to do — are absent this week, and Burnham mentions sending them off on a solo mission after this one. Are those two actresses being written off the show with a few episodes to go? Unclear.

• Culber has a C story where he’s upset for 30 seconds at the beginning of the episode, and then he spends a minute at the end of the episode pouring out to Tilly that he’s upset by things that happened to him in season one. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, and as character drama goes, it makes the Moll and L’ak stuff look like Succession.