Star Trek: Discovery season 1 episode 7 review: Time loops and Schrödinger's snogs in best episode yet

We’re on the home stretch of this first batch of Star Trek: Discovery, with only two more before it takes a break for the new year. This is the seventh episode, and it feels like a show growing in confidence, happy to deliver a more standalone story that’s also far, far more fun than the torture ‘n’ treason-filled run up to this point.

Rainn Wilson comes back with his superbly hammy take on OG Trek conman Harry Mudd, now escaped from the Klingon prison Jason Isaacs’s Captain Lorca left him in a few episodes ago. He’s got himself some time-manipulation technology – let’s not bother thinking about where, life is short – and is using it to repeat the same thirty-minute time loop until he can work out how to take control of the Discovery and sell it to the Klingons. Despite the fact that in various loops we see almost every major character die at least once – two characters die in a way explicitly said to be the most painful in existence, and Lorca dies several times, including at one point being beamed into space - this is a fun, unserious episode. The tone is set by Mudd smuggling himself onto the Discovery inside a giant space whale, which may just be a suggestion that we’re not to take what happens next especially seriously.

The time loop trope has been used in everything from Buffy to The X Files to Edge of Tomorrow to the classic Next Generation episode ‘Cause and Effect,’ so it’s wise for STD’s writers to deploy it, not so much as a tension-builder, but to explore character. We open with Burnham’s personal log where she admits to a sense of routine setting in – a subtle nod to this episode's breaking with STD norms – and also expresses horror at having to go to a below-decks party. It seems a bit unlikely that such a shindig would happen on a key strategic asset during a time of war – unless there’s a lot more beer pong on aircraft carriers in the Eastern Mediterranean than we know – and it’s even more unlikely that people in 2255 will groove to Wyclef Jean (unless more people boogie to Bach these days than I’m aware of), but once again, it doesn’t matter – the point is to get her out of her comfort zone.

She’s beginning to have feelings for Lieutenant Tyler (Lorca’s cellmate from his time in Klingon captivity) and, given her Vulcan upbringing, has no idea how to express them. Another of Trek’s traditions – the stealth teaching emotions to spectrum-dwelling nerds – then pops up as Cadet Tilly teaches Burnham about how to drop signals to Tyler – and the time loop structure helps, as she gets it wrong almost as often as Mudd messes up his plan.

Tilly has an unlikely ally in the shape of Stamets, played by Anthony Rapp, who’s been in the news for darker reasons this week. Far from the humourless scientist with a rigid spine of the earlier episodes, his merging of his genetic material with the tardigrade means he’s now goofier than a schoolboy, and seems to have wandered in from The Big Bang Theory. What happened to his sinisterly de-coupled reflection from a few episodes back? This is clearly building to something – perhaps a cliff-hanger for the end of this half of the season?

Anyway, Stamets also now lives outside the normal time stream (one last time: don’t worry about the details), so he has to gradually convince the rest of the senior crew what Mudd up is up to. This crucial establishment of trust is what brings Burnham and Tyler closer, with her telling him the one secret that she’s never told anyone else in the next loop she’ll believe him: that she’s never been in love.

Tyler’s a man of action, so this means they’re necking in the next time loop, but in a bittersweet touch, it’s one of the timelines that gets destroyed. This is perhaps the first ever Schrödinger's snog – it at once did and didn’t happen. Folks, this is what we watch Star Trek for, no?

After some macabre comedy – a single take combining some of Lorca’s 53 deaths into one shot is hilarious – Mudd is eventually busted by a counter-con on his original con. Told of what the Klingons would pay for Burnham – how much would you pay for someone who killed your Messiah? – he immediately gets in touch, but his communications have been rigged so he’s actually summoning the father of his estranged wife who he rinsed of the dowry.

Given his character emerged in the 60's TV show, it feels kind of appropriate for Mudd to be brought down in what’s essentially a panel from an old Andy Capp strip – and given all the murders he’s committed were in obliterated timelines, they don’t count, right? Legal scholars, do get in touch, but the implication here is that only Mudd and Stamets can remember him killing literally dozens of people, but they’re actually alive now, so… that’s okay right?

I keep saying to not sweat the details of this episode, so let’s not start now – but let’s do consider that in delivering its funniest episode so far, STD also delivered its best. Let’s hope the creators take that lesson on board.