After suffering heavy losses in battle, finding a way to counter the Klingon cloaking technology becomes a priority for Starfleet.

This is the premise of “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellem,” an episode that devotes itself mainly to two very unrelated story arcs.

The first focuses on Starfleet’s efforts to defeat the enemy’s cloaking. To this end, Burnham, Ash, and Saru are sent to a strange forest world called Pahvo, whose unique ecosystem produces a constant harmonic signal that Starfleet believes can be used as a kind of sonar to detect the Klingons.

Their mission is quickly complicated when they discover a race of intelligent energy beings native to Pahvo. Following Starfleet protocol, Saru initiates first contact procedures, but the alien nature of Pahvo soon begins to takes its toll on his mental state.

I know expecting scientific accuracy from Star Trek is a fool’s errand, but I have to say I did find the absolutely outlandish nature of Pahvo and its inhabitants a bit hard to swallow. It’s just pure space magic, and the fact they throw all of this at you in this wall of magitechnobabble right out of the gate doesn’t help matters.

Also, while I’ve wanted to see a Saru-focused episode since… well, since the very first episode of Discovery, it’s a shame it had to take the form of him going space crazy. I think the character deserves better. His scene with Burnham at the very end was nicely done, at least.

As an aside, it occurs to me that Saru’s people could probably benefit a lot from Vulcan philosophy, or at least elements thereof. Like the Vulcans, they seem to have trouble keeping their emotions under control. Wouldn’t it be interesting if Burnham started instructing Saru in Kolinahr?

Meanwhile, the other main thread of “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” abandons the Discovery crew altogether and focuses on the Klingons, especially L’Rell, who seeks to curry the favour of Kol… or so it would seem. This is a very confusing story, and I’m not exactly sure what the writers were trying to achieve.

It seems to put a more sympathetic angle on L’Rell, making her a bit closer to the honourable Klingons we’ve known since the days of The Next Generation, but it’s not really clear if this is genuine or just a part of some elaborate ruse.

If it is genuine, that runs totally contrary to how Discovery has thus far portrayed Klingons in general and L’Rell in particular. I want to see Discovery’s Klingons gain some any nuance, but this is all a bit out of the blue.

The end result is a fairly uneven and overall rather mediocre episode. They had some interesting ideas, but the execution is lacking.

Overall rating: 6.9/10

So far, Discovery has had a fairly different style of story-telling from most of previous Trek, save parts of Enterprise and maybe DS9. That is, this is an arc show. It’s telling a single continuous story over several episodes.

Until now.

“Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” is a throwback to more traditional Trek story-telling. It’s a “bottle show” taking place entirely on the Discovery, and it’s (almost) an entirely self-contained story.

Irate from his abandonment on the Klingon prison ship, Harry Mudd returns to exact vengeance on Captain Lorca and the Discovery, and with the help of some spiffy alien tech, he has all the time in the world to make his plan come to fruition.

Only Lieutenant Stamets, with his mushroom-altered consciousness, has the ability to recognize what Mudd’s doing, and hopefully stop him.

This is an episode that I enjoyed more than it necessarily deserves. It’s campy, it’s silly, it’s predictable, and it’s complete filler with no relevance at all to Discovery‘s ongoing arc. Mudd is a shameless and unnecessary play to TOS nostalgia, but inconsistencies with his portrayal in TOS are likely to incense the same fans he’s meant to target.

This is, in short, an episode that shouldn’t work. And yet it kind of does.

The thing is, this is also the most like old school Star Trek that Discovery has ever felt.

This is exactly the sort of episode that has traditionally made up the bread and butter of Star Trek. And that’s not necessarily a good thing. I’m not really a fan of trivial filler episodes like this, and I’m glad Discovery is going for a more arc-based approach.

But as a one-off thing, there’s something warmly nostalgic about a cheesy, old school bottle episode. I don’t want all — or even most — of Discovery’s episodes to be like this, but I see “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” as kind of a love note to Star Trek’s past, and seen through that lens, there’s something strangely charming about it.

Also, Anthony Rapp continues to be by far the best of this series. Gods Stamets is so much fun.

While there are a lot of things that could be criticized about this episode, there are only a few things about it that strongly bother me.

One is the ending, which makes no sense at all. I don’t know what more I can say without violating my admittedly ill-defined spoiler policy. It’s just dumb.

The other is that while Stamets is the only one who knows what’s going on, somehow this still turns into Burnham saving the day again. I know she’s the main character and all, but does she need to steal the spotlight from everyone else every single time?

Well, at least she does get to be pretty badass.

And it’s a bit strange there’s no reaction at all to the admiral’s abduction from last episode.

Overall rating: 7.3/10 More fun than it has any right to be.