WiC Watches—Star Trek: Discovery season 2
Episode 205: “Saints of Imperfection”
Captain Georgiou and the mysterious Section 31 make an appearance in “Saints of Imperfection” while the crew of the Discovery risks all to save Tilly from the mycelial network. This was an exciting episode of Star Trek: Discovery, filled with emotional moments, heart-pounding action, and the return of some familiar faces.
“Saints of Imperfection” opens with Burnham racing to engineering, where Stamets is studying the mycelial cocoon that May placed Tilly in at the end of the last episode. The cocoon is empty, and Stamets believes Tilly has been transported by an alien posing as May into the mycelial network, a kind of doorway to an alternate dimension the Discovery jumps through whenever it engages its spore drive. Burnham concurs, because obviously that’s what’s happening, and they hatch a plan to bring Tilly home.
Speaking of alternate dimensions, the Discovery is still hot on the trail of Spock’s shuttle. After some nifty maneuvering, they use the tractor beam to bring it on board the loading bay. Captain Pike and Burnham, assisted by a security team, approach the shuttle as its door opens, but instead of Spock inside, it’s Phillipa Georgiou, the former evil Empress of the Terran Empire who crossed dimensions when the Discovery returned home at the end of last season.
You see, Empress Georgiou was recruited by Starfleet to join the black ops division called Section 31 because she looks just like the real Captain Georgiou who died at the start of the Klingon war. (It’s a lot of complications, I know.) The members of Section 31 wear all-black uniforms and rock shiny black Starfleet badges; they even have a ship that can camouflage itself as an asteroid. Damn, these guys are cool. Anyway, Section 31 has also been searching for Spock, and he’d already abandoned his shuttle by the time Georgiou found it.
Pike can tell something is off between Burnham and Georgiou. He asks Burnham for answers, and she asks him to trust her and promises to reveal everything when the time is right.
We also find out that Ash Tyler is now part of Section 31. He boards the Discovery to act as a liaison so Georgiou can get back to her ship and continue the search for Spock. You may remember that Tyler was the Chief of Security for the Discovery before it was revealed he had been scientifically modified with Klingon DNA to infiltrate the Federation. I don’t know why they all of the sudden trust him enough to recruit him for a top secret spy division of Starfleet, but they did, so…good for him?
Back to the reason we’re here: the mission to rescue Tilly. As it turns out, May is actually a tiny parasitic-like alien who can live inside the brains of other beings. She reveals that she brought Tilly to the mycelial network because there’s a “monster” destroying her home that appeared when the Discovery began jumping through space and time using the spore drive. She tells Tilly she needs help killing it; then she’ll return her to her ship.
Meanwhile, Stamets and Burnham figure out they can do a half-jump into the mycelial network and look around for Tilly. The catch is that they only have one hour before the parasites living in the network begin eating through the hull of the ship.
They make the jump, begin their search and finally run into Tilly and May, who convinces them to join her monster hunt. When they reach the source of what May calls the monster, they find Dr. Culber. Seeing his dead boyfriend alive in the mycelial network kind of freaks Stamets out, and he starts thinking back to how Culber came to be there.
If you’re remember, in season 1, Ash Tyler killed Culber when his Klingon DNA kicked in. Apparently, when Tyler broke Culber’s neck, Stamets found his body and held him in his arms as he died. A tear ran down Culber’s face, and Stamets kissed it. After that, he connected to the spore drive and made a jump, and since Culber’s DNA was on Stamets during the jump, he was re-created in the mycelial network and had been living there ever since.
Tilly tells May that Dr. Culber isn’t a monster and they want to take him back with them to the Discovery, but since he was created solely in the mycelial network, he can’t return the normal way. Luckily, the cocoon May used to nab Tilly is still in engineering, and they use to bring Dr. Culber to the other side. Dr. Culber and Stamets are back together again, and they all lived happily ever after…
…except that Georgiou is still searching for Spock, and it’s not clear she’s going to go easy on him when she finds him.
This was yet another fantastic episode of Star Trek: Discovery. The storylines are meshing together nicely. My only concern is that we just finished Episode 205 and we’ve yet to have any interaction with Spock. Hopefully that will change very soon.