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Here we are at the penultimate episode of Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery, which also happens to be the 800th entry into the Trek Universe, which includes all TV episodes (live and animated), Short Takes and movies. And to mark the occasion, this episode titled ‘There Is a Tide…’ is directed by Jonathan Frakes!
The episode picks up where we left off last week, and for only the second time since the series started, Doug Jones does not make an appearances as Saru. He, Hugh and Adira are still on the dilithium planet in the nebula while the clock ticks on their mortality. With Osyraa having commandeered Discovery to infiltrate Federation HQ, Book and Michael are able to use a hyper-fast courier tunnel to catch up to the ship, crashing into the docking bay just as the ship passed through the force field. What Admiral Vance doesn’t get is that Discovery being chased by Osyraa’s ship is just a set up, and he reluctantly allows Discovery through the force field to end the attack, realizing after the fact that Osyraa has control of Discovery and he’s potentially just opened up a door for the Federation’s destruction. He does fire up any ship in the hub, weapons hot to fire on Discovery if necessary.
On Discovery, Osyraa has captured the bridge crew and is holding them in the Ready Room. Michael managed to slip away from Book’s ship undetected while Book allows himself to be captured. He joins Tilly and the others, and it’s not long before they are joined by the antennae-less Ryn as well, attempting to form a plan to overtake the guards using … Morse code, while hoping Michael can do her work from the innards of the ship, crawling around the Jeffries tubes. What Tilly didn’t count on was coming face-to-face with the man she left for dead back in the second episode of the season, Zareh. Apparently Osyraa plucked him from certain death by freezing (or not, it’s never really explained how he ends up in service to her), and Tilly learns a hard lesson about not taking out your enemy when you have the chance.
But is Osyraa as bad as she makes herself out to be? Hailing Vance, she offers him an olive branch and a proposal — unite the Federation and the Emerald Chain to help strengthen them both. The Chain gets the benefits of belonging to the Federation and in turn the Federation has a whole new avenue of commerce opened to them. Even Vance’s lie detector AI, which Osyraa finds fascinating, determines that she’s being completely honest about this accord she’s proposing. She even has an agreement all drawn up, and after reading it Vance is quite impressed and on the verge of considering the offer. On two conditions: Osyraa appoints someone else besides herself to be the face of this new union and that she gives herself up to stand trial for her crimes. The first point she’s okay with and has someone in mind. The second point … not so much. Perhaps she’s still a bit grossed out upon learning that the Federation’s food replicators use … human excrement (put much more bluntly by Vance) to reproduce food, so that’s why the apple she’s eating doesn’t quite taste like a real apple (which, surprisingly, she’s actually tasted).
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Who she has in mind to be the union’s representative is a scientist by the name of Aurellio, played by Kenneth Mitchell. If you’re not familiar with Mitchell, he has been with the Discovery family from the beginning playing Klingons Kol, Kol-Sha, Tenavik and the Time Keeper … all members of the same bloodline. Mitchell appeared in Seasons 1 and 2 but was then diagnosed with ALS which robbed him of his mobility but the writers and producers of the show managed to find a way to keep him in the fold with this character who is also confined to a futuristic wheelchair (no wheels, all floaty). And he’s no buried under a ton of Klingon prosthetics. It was a very emotional moment seeing Mitchell on screen again. His character is tasked with learning how Stamets controls the spore drive. He uses opera to bond with Stamets and brings a humanity to the character, which is the complete opposite of Osyraa. Aurellio even explains to Stamets that his devotion to Osyraa stems from his childhood (how old is Osyraa exactly?!) when his medical condition gave him very little time to live, but it was she who found a way to give him a new lease on life. So for Aurellio, there is more to Osyraa than what people see. Paul says that may be so, but perhaps he’s not actually seeing the whole picture, blinded by the kindness she showed him. Aurellio has a difficult time digesting this information.
But he may get his chance to see her true colors. After storming out of Vance’s office, effectively burning the accord after his suggestion that she stand trial as a show of good will, she returns to Discovery to break out of the hub and take the ship to parts unknown so they can figure out how to replicate the spore drive. There are just a couple of problems: Ryn has managed to tap into the system to make it look like there are thousands of people aboard the ship, making it nearly impossible for Zareh to track the bridge crew, who have found a way to escape after overtaking the guards, leaving Ryn and Book to face the new guards trying to get into the Ready Room. Meanwhile Michael has also managed to fend off some of the guards by staring a fire in a Jeffries tube, causing the fire suppression measures to kick in, sucking all the oxygen … and the guards … into space. Michael barely manages to hold on herself, losing her boots in the process.
On the bridge, Osyraa now has Book and Ryn, and after Ryn refuses to undo his trick with the sensors, she blasts him into atoms … while Aurellio watches, finally having his eyes opened to how brutal she really is. He tried to talk her out of committing the murder, but she casually did it anyway, so perhaps he will play a key role in her fate in the season finale. But she has another problem on her hands as well — Michael Burnham. Burnham has made her way to Stamets, who is desperate to jump the ship back to the planet to save Hugh and the others (Michael had no idea Adira was also with them now). But Michael can’t allow that to happen or Osyraa will be able to gain control of the spore drive. Stamets tries valiantly to fight off Michael and get to the controls but she resorts to the good old Vulcan nerve pinch to incapacitate him.
Placing Paul in a cocoon force field, he lets all of his emotions flow (a very powerful moment for Anthony Rapp) as he screams at her for basically sentencing Hugh to death. He rails at her about how the entire crew of Discovery gave up everything to follow her through time so she wouldn’t be alone and this is how she repays him and Hugh? And with that, he phaser which was set to overload goes off, blowing out a window in the room, sucking the cocooned Stamets into the void of the Federation hub (but he’s quickly captured by a tractor beam). Now the ship is rendered basically useless with no way to operate the spore drive … and Osyraa is not happy.
What she doesn’t know is that Michael attempted to send an encrypted signal to her mother to tell her that Discovery is under siege and she may not ever see her again. So will the Vulcans and Romulans show up on the Federation’s doorstep to help fight what will almost certainly be an epic battle with the Emerald Chain? And the bridge crew, while attempting to formulate a plan, are greeted by an unlikely ally — a group of the little repair drones, with the leader using the voice of Zora, the sphere data which has integrated with the ship’s computer (which has also apparently been responsible for blocking some of Osyraa’s efforts to dig deeper into the ship’s logs). Zora, which has already proven helpful to Saru and Georgiou, now offers to help Tilly and the crew retake the ship. What have they got to lose at this point? It will all play out in next week’s season finale.
New episodes of Star Trek: Discovery stream every Thursday on CBS All Access.
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