[Faithful Reader]

The best part of this was the scene at the end. I didn't realize how much I needed Michelle Yeoh and Doug Jones on my screen. I know Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan did Waiting for Godot after a few films of the X-men film series, and kind of want this magic to happen as well.

We have a Lieutenant (!) Georgiou essentially doing a first contact situation with Saru. it's a great scene with both actors and they have a fantastic performances on both ends. We get a sense of where each character came from and see that Georgiou grew up on the Shenzhou if not spent a good portion of her career. Saru knows that he'll almost never be able to return and if he does, it's probably because something went horribly wrong.

Another highlight was showing how self taught Saru was. Yeah, he probably needed some sort of formal training, but he learned the interface from an alien piece of technology and taught himself another language. We've seen him be inquisitive on the show, but this really showed how deep this character trait went. Just as last month we had a successful montage, this week, we had Saru doing a lot of work in a very short amount of screen time. It's hard to do this on screen, especially compared to prose, but they really sold it here.

Unfortunately, the rest of it falls. Poorly.

We have hard nosed traditional father figure and demure younger sister. The village just seems boring. We were told by Saru that everything on his homeworld was both predator and prey and here we have a bunch of guys farming seaweed. Not just that, but they are apparently pre-warp and there's some sort of arrangement with the Ba'ul. That is the most logical follow up, but we didn't really learn more about the Kelpians and the things that we did learn are kind of a step back.

Think back to the first visit to homeworlds. The Menagerie. Amok Time. Sins of the Father. Even Family Business is a upper tier episode. This pales in comparison and feels like such a wasted opportunity.