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After last week’s filler episode, Star Trek: Discovery redeems itself in a big way this week, but not as one might expect. Yes, there was more development on the source of the signal from the starting point of The Burn, but that was the B-story this week. The A-story is basically in the title of the episode, ‘Terra Firma’, signaling to us that this will be a Georgiou-centric episode (she being Terran, of course). But did we expect to be back in the Mirror Universe? Nope, but it was certainly a welcome and exciting development. The question is … was Georgiou really in her Prime Universe? (She had a great line reminding Saru that to the Terrans, his universe was the mirror and theirs was Prime.)
About The Burn, Adira and Stamets discovered there was a video signal embedded in the audio distress signal they had been trying to decipher, and it was quite surprising to see a Kelpian ship’s captain making the distress call because when Saru left his present for the future, Kelpians were not yet a spacefaring species. The Kelpian ship was investigating what was believed to have been a dilithium repository at what is now believed to be ground zero for the start of The Burn. The captain also seems to have radiation burns on her forehead, but Saru directs Tilly to not relay any of this information to Admiral Vance just yet, not until they have more to go on.
Which is a funny turn of events because not long before that Saru was being very by-the-book with the Admiral on the topic of Georgiou’s illness. Kovich (played by director David Cronenberg) lays it all out for Culber that the metamorphosis Georgiou seems to be experiencing is really a battle within her body of her molecules fighting to go back from whence they came — the Mirror Universe. Kovich cracks open another Trek Easter egg when he explains that this has only happened once before to a Federation soldier named Yor who fought during the Temporal Wars (which, he notes, the Discovery missed during their own travel through time), crossing time and universes which were created by the temporal incursion of a Romulan mining ship. This references the 2009 Star Trek film where Nero travels through time to get revenge on Spock, creating the Kelvin Timeline in the process. Yor’s body could not deal with the trauma crossing time and universes inflicted on him and it started to break apart, just as Georgiou’s is beginning to do now.
Of course, Georgiou is not one to deal with things lying down. Instead of facing a horribly painful death, she’s becoming more an more aggressive (as Kovich suggested she would), at one point attempting to agitate Michael to the point that she would fight and kill Georgiou in the process. But Michael is not playing that game, telling her that would be the coward’s way out. And … that have information provided by the Sphere data in the ship’s computer (now apparently named Zora) that pinpoints a planet where a cure may be found. Presenting the information to Vance, Saru attempts to do what he thinks would be right for a Federation officer and put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the one — since the Emerald Chain is about to launch some ‘training exercises’ and he knows the Federation will need every ship at its disposal — shocking Michael with his cold-hearted gesture. But, surprise, Vance okays the mission to help save Georgiou, telling Saru privately that if he allowed one person on his ship die when they had the chance to save them, his crew would never trust him again. A lesson learned, and perhaps why Saru was not so eager to give Vance the data on the Kelpian ship.
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Discovery jumps to the uninhabited planet and we get a nice reversal of the opening scene of the series, and instead of a desert with Georgiou leading Burnham, they get snow-covered terrain with Michael leading the way. Or at least following her GPS to a location where they find … a door. And a man who calls himself Carl (Paul Guilfoyle), who speaks in riddles and holds tomorrow’s newspaper detailing the horribly painful death of Georgiou. Nothing he says makes much sense to them, and Georgiou has no time for riddles so she says her goodbye to Michael and steps through the portal. On the other side she’s on her version of Discovery complete with the Mirror Universe crew (I love this version of Tilly more than our Prime version). Georgiou comes to realize that not only has she crossed into her universe, she’s also traveled back in time to the day of the christening of the ISS Charon, the mini-sun-powered Terran flagship seen in the climax of Season 1 (and, man, did they have a great visual of Georgiou with her Emperor’s headdress on and the mini-sun perfectly framed in the center of it). She also realizes that this is the day her Michael betrayed her along with Lorca (who did not show up even though his name was said many times, so perhaps in Part 2?), which resulted in Georgiou executing her. But now that she’s armed with this knowledge, and remembering that little chat she had with our Prime Michael about killing being the coward’s way out, Georgiou decided to spare Michael’s life this time, although she came close to lopping off her head, leaving Michael with a small cut of the blade on her neck. Also, Michael didn’t seem to have as many members of the crew on her side as she believed with Tilly and Owosekun assisting Georgiou (and it was great seeing crew members who are now dead in the Prime universe — Commander Landry, a non-robotic Lt. Commander Airiam — alive and well in Georgiou’s Prime universe (not to mention the unenhanced Detmer). But now instead of being dead, this Michael is alive and at Georgiou’s mercy, setting up the second part of the episode.
I’m willing to bet that by the end Georgiou will not return to Discovery knowing that there is a Georgiou spin-off series in the works. It originally seemed that she would stay in the Prime universe to continue her work with Section 31 and Ash, but tossing her 930 years into the future seems to have made that impossible. But now that she may be back in her universe and in the time period of the first season, what the spin-off will look like now is anyone’s guess. She is armed with a lot of Federation and Starfleet knowledge now, but she also isn’t the same person as she was, the person who would easily behead the person closest to her after being betrayed. This new Georgiou has the ability to be more calculating and she knows that crossing universes can be fatal. So will the new show be set exclusively in the Mirror Universe? Will the Discovery crew get to pull double duty on both shows? Well, it’s too early to consider what may be, but this episode has done a great job of making me very excited to see the next episode. Is it Thursday yet?
New episodes of Star Trek: Discovery stream every Thursday on CBS All Access.
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