An Obol for Charon

** (2 obols out of 5)

Number One! The number one number two Number One! Sort of. I mean, it's just a glorified cameo but there she is. She dropped by to tell Pike that nobody has found Spock yet. Because maniacs like me never stopped screeching about it, Pike orders Enterprise Chief Engineer Louvier to rip out the holographic systems throughout the ship (Were they even the cause of the malfunctions? Or only the malfunctions in my own head?)  

Commander Nhan also appears at a staff meeting, seemingly having transferred over from Enterprise but your guess is as good as mine. Saru maybe has a rhinovirus and Pike has to order him to take rest because capitalism. Saurian Linus’ cold was last week, but this will turn out to have been a coincidence.

There are some welcome antics with a broken translator, leading to an excellent scene with Jett v Stamets: Dawn of Snark. There's an important exchange where Stamets praises humans for having barely saved their own lives by switching over to solar panels, and he likens this Earth catastrophe to the terrible damage dilithium mining is currently wreaking. He hopes his spore drive will be the clean alternative, although it is full of shrieking ghosts.

Speaking of which, a shrieking 100,000 year old semi-organic sphere triggers Saru's Vahar’ai “death process”. He and Michael discern that The Sphere is on its last contact. The Sphere told them everything it knew except its own name which had to have been better than "The Sphere" and then The Sphere exploded.

Michael balks at the insanity of cutting off Saru’s ganglia when he asks her to, (I mean, I don't understand why we aren't taking these health problems to Doctor Pollard?) and it turns out the terrible people who eat Kelpians are lying to the Kelpians. Vahar’ai only makes a Kelpian stronger and braver. And kickier. Some Ba'ul's house is gonna get kicked down!

 

First contact with May begins, she turns out to be a scout for the jahSepp. This nugget is gleaned via the Trepanation of Tilly, for the appalling shock factor, I guess. Certainly it was terrifying for me. Discovery wouldn’t know what to do with itself if these poor folks weren't always in the middle of a high-stakes disaster where the answer is drilling holes in each other's heads.

Now the jahSepp distract Stamets and Jett by blasting them with psilocybin and making off with Tilly. On Discovery, Mushrooms Eat You.