Worth: $13.00
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Cast:
Sonequa Martin-Green, Jason Isaacs, Doug Jones
Intro:
In the rollercoaster of quality that is Discovery, this is one of the fun bits of the ride.
The USS Discovery is trapped in a mirror universe in which a violent Terran Empire subjugates all other civilizations. While Saru (Doug Jones) and Tilly (Mary Wiseman) attempt to cure Lt Stamets (Anthony Rapp) of his spore-afflicted state, Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Tyler (Shazad Latif) masquerade onboard the mirror universe USS Shenzhou to gain the data needed to return home.
All due credit to writer Lisa Randolph: “The Wolf Inside” picks up an awful lot of tiresome and dramatically weak plot threads and weaves them into something that – for a week, at least – manages to be a genuinely entertaining hour of television. The core problems left from the previous episode do remain, but they feel somewhat mitigated. The mirror universe still feels a very worn-out Star Trek trope in which to place a story, but at least it leads to a solid moral dilemma: keep one’s cover by destroying an anti-Empire rebellion, or try to warn the rebels and risk losing any chance the Discovery getting back to its own reality. That feels authentically Trek in nature; to be honest, quite a lot of moments in this episode do.
Of course, Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs) recommends staying undercover and murdering a bunch of aliens, thus re-confirming his status at Star Trek’s worst-ever captain. Isaacs is a fantastic actor, but he really does have to work hard to make Lorca even remotely believable given the way he is written. Much more convincing and enjoyable this week are Saru and Tilly. The latter gets another chance to show intelligence, ambition and drive – she works best when the writing moderates her gushy awkwardness – while Saru seems to act like a proper commanding officer in every scene he’s in. This really is the painful part of Discovery as an ongoing series: the characters are all great, but as a viewer one must roll the dice every week to find out what version of the character they’re going to get.
One long-teased plot development finally hits, likely to nobody’s surprise. It’s a little clumsily revealed and executed, but Randolph does pull it around in the end to a slightly unexpected and satisfying end point. There’s also an end-of-episode cliffhanger that again will likely surprise no one, but has a good chance of entertaining nearly everyone. It’s not the character return we likely wanted, but it’s a return many of us will be happy enough to take.
“The Wolf Inside” ends having ended one somewhat annoying plot thread, but there are still quite a few hanging out there. We’re still stuck in the mirror universe. Stamets is still in weird spore territory. Dr Culber is still in the same state that he was last week. What this episode commendably manages is to pass those problems along, and simply tell a dramatic and mostly enjoyable story around them. In the rollercoaster of quality that is Discovery, this is one of the fun bits of the ride.
