STAR TREK: DISCOVERY, 2.5 — ‘Saints of Imperfection’
By: Dan Owen
Tags: Television, Culture, Review, TV, Star Trek

STAR TREK: DISCOVERY, 2.5 — ‘Saints of Imperfection’

The crew navigate a dangerous alien realm to save Tilly’s life, and Section 31 is assigned to help track down Spock, to Pike’s dismay. Dan Owen Follow Feb 16, 2019 · 6 min read

The ongoing issues with the mycelial network have felt like a hangover from last season, and one I’d rather have avoided, but “Saints of Imperfection” appears to provide a satisfying conclusion. Or it at least ties up some questions regarding May (Bahia Watson), the humanoid emissary from the mycelial network that attached itself to Tilly (Mary Wiseman) as a spore, and the uncertainty of Dr Hugh Culber’s (Wilson Cruz) fate after having his neck snapped but then appearing to boyfriend Stamets (Anthony Rapp) during one of the USS Discovery’s ‘spore-jumps’. And it did all that in a way that was genuinely exciting and intriguing, chalking up another hit for this much-improved season.

We still haven’t set eyes on Spock and we’re no closer to understanding what the “seven signals” are about, as attempts to find out keep getting interrupted by other matters. This week, while trying to prevent fugitive Spock’s shuttle from entering a nebula, Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and Michael (Sonequa Martin-Green) are surprised to find the occupant is actually Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh). Interestingly, Pike doesn’t know she’s not our Georgiou, but rather a doppelganger from the Mirror Universe, with Michael having to keep the secret and pretend “the war” has changed her since they last met. However, Georgiou is allowed to reveal she’s working for Section 31, under the command of Leland (Alan Van Sprang), whom Pike has a tenuous friendship with because their moral compasses are different. And it doesn’t help that a straight-arrow like Pike isn’t keen on Section 31 generally, because he doesn’t like their lack of accountability given their covert work.

In many ways, “Saints of Imperfection” was built around various characters encountering forces in their lives that either compliment or contrast with them. Michael is back in the orbit of Georgiou, the ‘evil twin’ of her former captain and friend, who had such a positive influence on her life, who is now allowed to pretend she’s one and the same out in public. She’s also reacquainted with Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif), another person she loved with an unconventional identity — being a genetic chimaera of a Starfleet officer and an albino Klingon.

Pike also had difficulty adjusting to the presence of Leland and the controversial Section 31’s operations. And then we had Tilly brought into the mycelial network against her will by May (another ‘twin’ of an old friend), who used the mycelial cocoon in Engineering as an “organic transporter” to rebuild her body in mycelial-land (an impressive CGI vista of bioluminescent grassland). Once there, it became clear the environment is under attack from “a monster” Tilly can perhaps help them slay, which was later revealed to be none other than Dr Culber — who was duplicated into the mycelial network at the moment of his death and has been driven mad because he’s been treated like a cancerous cell by the organisms around him and attacked as a foreign intruder. He’s only survived this long by defending himself with poisonous tree bark. It was a genuine shock to see Culber looking so dishevelled and unhinged, too, given how sharp and well-adjusted his character was last season.