Star Trek: Discovery season 1 episode 4 review: The STD ancronym becomes apt in fungus-centric episode

After a two-part opener that introduced one ship, then a third episode introducing a whole other ship and crew, this can be considered is our first ‘normal’ episode. Free of the need to hold our hands and guide us through its world, STD (hey!) can now show us what it wants to be when it's not busy getting pieces on the board. So, what is it, now the dust is settling?

The answer, happily, is a meld of Trek old and sci-fi new.

After the fireworks of the opening trilogy, here we slow right down as Burnham – now with newly non-straightened hair – gets her teeth into a good old Star Trek moral dilemma. What’s to be done with the monster Lorca beamed aboard at the end of the last episode? Can it be weaponised? Is it even a monster?

Burnham points out that nothing in its biology suggests a predator – it’s essentially a dust mite blown up to the size of a transit van. Tactical officer Landry (Reka Sharma of Battlestar Galactica, a resonance that could only be 100 per cent intentional) doesn’t give a fig, christening what Burnham has identified as a tardigrade ‘Ripper.’

She maintains this level of creativity by boneheadedly coming up with a scheme to control it that’s identical to the one that got a whole shipful of people killed. She finds out her aggressive approach doesn’t work the hard way, getting mauled to death by the tardigrade – the after-effects aren’t pretty. So long, Landry, you had the misfortune to be played by one of the more expensive supporting players.

The urgency driving the attempted weaponisation of the tardigrade comes courtesy of a Klingon siege of a strategic mining outpost. It’s out of the way, so only the Discovery with its capacity for instantaneous travel can get there in time. Problem is, science officer Stamets is struggling to make it work, clashing with Captain Lorca over just how enthusiastically the crew of the Discovery should embrace their transition from explorers to soldiers. Lorca is keen to get some; Stamets, you suspect, would be happier tending his spore garden.

Ah, those spores. This episode contained more talk of mushrooms than a Psytrance Youtube channel.

The idea of interstellar fungus offering a conduit to anywhere in the galaxy is a goofy one, but, to its credit, STD plays it straight. One slight nod or wink and the whole enterprise would be torpedoed – actually, given all this talk of fungus, maybe STD is an apt acronym after all.

Anyway, Burnham eventually works out that the tardigrade is essentially a biological control system for the spores that make instantaneous travel – teleporting, I guess – possible. Far from a potential weapon, it’s an intergalactic GPS that just happens to look like something that would infest your toddler’s hair.

This is in fine Trek tradition – at this point, Picard would have retired to his ready room for some Gilbert and Sullivan, happy with a good day’s work. That said, he would have sputtered into his Earl Grey if he saw how the tardigrade was subsequently treated. Probes are thrust into its body - it’s clearly in pain - with Burnham salving her conscience by bringing it spores to feed on when it’s back in its cage. If you’d bet money on the new incarnation of Star Trek ending up like a high-production PETA campaign, congratulations on your new wealth.

Trek has been in this territory before – Voyager two-parter ‘Equinox’ examined this exact same question. That time, however, the people using living things for fuel were the bad guys. DS9 blurred the moral lines, of course, but only really when Sisko and co. had their backs against the wall. Maybe Battlestar Galactica did for Trek what Austin Powers did for Bond – it’s increasingly clear that the virtue of Picard et al lie a long, long way ahead in this universe.

Meanwhile, a surprising amount of this episode is spent on Klingon politics. In truth, the slow speed the actors say their Klingon lines means these scenes can drag, especially now we’ve lost Chris Obi’s charismatic performance as their would-be messiah T’Kuvma. After his death, his minions have been stranded for six months unable to warp away from the battlefield. They’re running short of food – we’re even told Michelle Yeoh’s corpse was eaten, eesh – and tempers are fraying. T’Kuvma’s deputy Vol has a sweet space suit and an oddly sweet growing bond with L’Rell as they scavenge the wreckage of the Shenzhou for parts. They have no time to take this further, sadly, as Vol is deposed in a vaguely sketched coup, before L’Rell saves his life and sends him on some kind of Klingon vision quest where, hopefully, he’ll learn to speak faster than your grandad ordering a curry.

So, four episodes in, we’re approaching the half-way point of this first consignment of episodes, and it’s clear what STD is. It’s not 1990 anymore (sadly) and Trek has evolved with the times: one of the reasons Enterprise was such a miserable failure is that it felt dated right out of the gate, and Discovery is nothing if not contemporary.

With a brand as weighty as they get, that’s a pretty major achievement – now, however, Discovery needs to do more than justify its own existence. There are hints of places to go in the supporting cast – we got our first sighting of Wilson Cruz’s Dr Culber this week, in a brief performance that nevertheless stood out – and Jason Isaacs is visibly having the time of his life as the disciplinarian, gung-ho Captain Lorca. The foundations are solid and have been shored up; it’s going to be exciting to see where this particular Trek will take us.