Star Trek: Discovery‘s “New Eden”

Pike leads a landing party, Saru supervises the crew doing science, Stamets is ambivalent about reactivating the spore drive, Spock’s in a mental institution, and why are there humans from the 21st century in the Beta Quadrant? My review of Star Trek: Discovery‘s second episode of its sophomore season, “New Eden.”

An excerpt:

Pike, Burnham, and Owosekun go down to investigate, and let me say how much I loved seeing Owosekun get more to do. Oyin Oladejo makes the most of the opportunity, as Owosekun gets to be very useful, turning on the equipment they do eventually find, and also breaking out of a locked room with a mechanical lockpick. I would have liked to have seen her take a bit more of a lead, given that she went on the landing party due to being raised in a Luddite community—just in general, I hope we find out more about that.

Owosekun’s bridgemate also gets another moment in the sun, as Emily Coutts’s Kayla Detmer gets to show off her piloting skills when Discovery has to perform a rescue. New Eden is surrounded by rings that turn out to be lethally radioactive. Tilly comes up with a crazy-ass plan to use the asteroid matter they beamed aboard last week to draw the radiation out, which requires some fancy piloting by Detmer.