TL;DR – There are reflections a plenty this week, and that is not even contained to a mirror universe.

Disclosure – I paid for the Paramount+ service that viewed this episode.

Star Trek: Discovery Review –

This season, we have had an interesting situation with a pair of antagonists who don’t quite fit the bill as bad guys. Sure, they deal with the shady side of things, but I also think we might forget that the Romulan ship in Red Directive was also legitimate salvage. But you could feel that some backstory was ready to be dropped. Well, today’s episode does just that.

So to set the scene, after flashing through time in Face The Strange, we discovered that Moll (Eve Harlow) and L’ak’s (Elias Toufexis) gambit worked, and they are now ahead of the USS Discovery-A crew. But as luck would have it, they know where they went because there is a wormhole of sorts, but not a nice friendly wormhole like in DS9. No, this one will rip your ship in half without thinking of it, which is what Michael (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Book (David Ajala) discovered as they went in. That was surprising, but even more so was stumbling across the ISS Enterprise. Now, we will be looking at the episode as a whole from here, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead. 

We will get to the two big moments a bit later in the review, but I wanted to take a moment to look at the smaller beats that I think might have hit the hardest this week. Much of this week’s time on the Discovery was about Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie) finding his rhythm on the ship. We end up with a slight shift, but also something keeping in his personality. He gets the most out of the crew but won’t sit there while they waffle. I think the moment they all workshop the problem on the bridge and Rhys (Patrick Kwok-Choon) comes up with the solution might be my favourite from the episode. Also, while everyone would have died if Rayner had gone with Book, he was right to bring it up. It was also nice to see Tilly (Mary Wiseman) and Culber (Wilson Cruz) have a small moment together where she rightly called out that he was thinking in spiritual terms even if he had not realised it himself.  

While I know it helped that they already had the sets for the Enterprise, thanks to Star Trek Strange New Worlds, it was still a nice inclusion to the story. In addition, it served as a nice tie-up of the many Mirror Universe Storylines that Discovery has delved into in episodes like Terra Firma. There is a joy that comes from seeing all that future Sci-Fi posturing in a very retro set, bringing the two sides of the franchise together. The visuals in this episode were also stunning. I think we underestimate just how much work they have done to make the sets and locations feel vast and make that work. For instance, I know they were only working on a small space in the hangar of the Breen Space Station, but they made you feel it.

On the notion of Breen, it is time to talk about Moll and L’ak. Given that the Breen’s whole persona up to this point was their ability to be an enigma with an odd-sounding voice, I think it is the right time to open up some of that history and give them a bit more to work with much like Strange New Worlds did with the Gorn in Hegemony. We then get our second mirror reference with the two different faces of the Breen, which fits into the groundwork we have seen in the past. I do wish they had gone with a shade in the Breen uniforms that hinted at those from the past rather than the black ones, which was a touch generic. However, I am glad they kept the voices.

We also got more mirroring in the fact that Moll & L’ak and Michael & Book’s relationships do have lines of comparison. They are all past couriers, and they all have made mistakes with legacies that still haunt them now. We know about Book’s past, but this week, we got to see the inciting incident that brought Moll & L’ak together, and of course, it was love. While their backstory was interesting to know, I think what was really fascinating was watching how Moll & L’ak worked when they had been separated and had to team up with their enemies. While this was intriguing, their escape at the end, after all the build-up, did feel a touch of lacklustre.

In the end, do we recommend Star Trek: Discovery – Mirrors? Yes, we would. This was another fun stop on this treasure hunt, with a touch more weight given we know how it could go, but not the same pressure as past seasons. We got to delve more into a species than we have before, and got to have a romp in the past.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you seen Star Trek Discovery yet?, let us know what you thought in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day.   

Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Star Trek Discovery
Directed by – Jen McGowan
Written by – Johanna Lee & Carlos Cisco
Based off – Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry
Created by – Bryan Fuller & Alex Kurtzman  
Production/Distribution Companies – CBS Television Studios, Roddenberry Entertainment, Secret Hideout & Paramount+. 
Starring – Sonequa Martin-Green, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman, Wilson Cruz, Blu del Barrio, Callum Keith Rennie & David Ajala with Annabelle Wallis, Eve Harlow &Elias Toufexis and Patrick Kwok-Choon, Orville Cummings, David Benjamin Tomlinson, Victoria Sawal, Christina Dixson, Natalie Liconti, Tony Nappo, Barnaby Carpenter& Leeu