Saints of Imperfection

 ** (2 magic teardrops out of 5)

Because the audience hopes to see Spock on our Spock chase, we chase Spock's shuttle a little more and who should turn up inside it but Emperor Georgiou, now an agent of Section 31?! Pike knows what 31 is. Mike knows what 31 is. We all know what 31 is! More Covert than Covert, my rump.

Pike gets on the hologram with Leland, also an old chum from Section 31, like it's a an ordinary branch of Starfleet Intelligence that Archer or Sisko should've easily known about a century ago and a century from now, no biggie. And also here's a Section 31 liaison in the person of handsome Ash Tyler and this lovely Section 31 gift card redeemable nowhere because we surely don't exist.

Nhan is mentioned to be chief of security, so watch out- because on Discovery that's the Defense Against The Dark Arts post.

Speaking of space magic, Tilly was kidnapped by the Spore People into the Mushroom Kingdom through a cocoon, and her Spore buddy May has to convince the local Spores not to eat her alive in tiny painful bites because their natural approach to new things is eating them. They need her to fight a monster named Culber. A monster the Spores found awhile ago and chose to revive instead of just eating him. The monster has covered himself in poison bark to stop them eating him, which they want to do. Won't Tilly help them?

Culbers are friends, not food! Why did the jahSepp heal him just to start trying to eat him again? No time! 

Pike rides to Tilly's rescue, Stamets bringing the whole ship half in, half out of the mycelial network like a doorstop. Try to avoid getting a hundred people twisted into flesh and blood pretzels like the crew of the Glenn!

Tearful reunion of traumatized Stamets and Culber, which is always good, especially when the prevailing theory is that Stamets' mushroom soup tears transported Culber's energy into the mycelial network "like a lightning rod" where the locals gave him a body that can't leave their dimension.

"I need you to make it make sense," says Captain Pike, a tall order which no one fulfills. But on the bright side we still get Culber back, thanks to more cocoon shenanigans.

Admiral Cornwell pops in to tell us she knows about Section 31, and she condones its terrible, weirdly public, sly, sexy nastiness, so Pike should too, and maybe subscribe to any streaming service that gives us more of it someday.

 

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.