The president acknowledges that, yes, Burnham has luck on her side, but sooner or later that luck is going to run out.

In short, for all Burnham’s many strengths, she’s not the right person to command the new starship Voyager, and its experimental Pathway drive. Her decision to abandon the bridge to head out on a spacewalk, along with her complete inability to grasp standard Star Trek mathematics – that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few – tell Rillak everything she needs to know about the Discovery captain. It’s also Burnham’s chance to take an impromptu crack at the Kobayashi Maru, and it’s safe to say she doesn’t pass with flying colors. Inverted gravity, inoperable doors and an onslaught of frozen methane provide the perfect opportunity for regular Discovery director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s to show off some amazing space action, and he delivers spectacularly with shots of Discovery and the Deep Space station spinning through space in balletic unison. The concept of Murphy’s law – if anything can go wrong, it will – appears to be influencing the cosmic order, as Tilly and Adira beam over to assist.

Given Burnham’s history of insubordination and rule-breaking – not to mention her protests against having a politician standing over her shoulder – this is unlikely to be a straightforward in-and-out rescue.Īnd so it proves when Discovery finds a space station spinning dangerously out of control, under the command of an almost comically inept commander. The mission comes with additional pressure for Burnham, when the president invites herself on board as a not-so-silent observer. Rillak also takes the opportunity to make a sly dig at present-day Earth’s dependency on fossil fuels, and flag the construction of the Archer Spacedock – a fun reference for Star Trek: Enterprise fans. The newly elected President of the Federation, Laira Rillak, is impressed enough to invite them – with the exception of Saru, who’s still helping out as a “great elder” on his homeworld, Kaminar – as guests of honor at the launch of the new Starfleet Academy. For the sake of balance, we also get a glimpse of some of the show’s clunkier tropes – the numerous self-congratulatory glances between shipmates, and the fact it usually takes them seconds to solve a problem that has perplexed others for decades. As the sequence plays out you learn about the post-Burn status of the reborn Federation, get to see most of the freshly-promoted Discovery crew in action (many of them enjoying their new, Trek-standard multicolored uniforms), and a technobabbly solution to a problem with the planet’s magnetic field. It’s effectively a crash course in Discovery, as this race of “butterfly people” – their effervescent wings are a VFX triumph – pursue their visitors with extreme prejudice.

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