“Forget Me Not” sees Adira connecting with hidden past and mourning a lost love, while aboard ship, the Discovery crew confronts their collective trauma during one of the most awkward dinners in Star Trek history.

At least there’s popcorn.

After learning about the joined nature of the Trill species in last week’s “People of Earth,” the Discovery jumps to the Trill homeworld in the hopes that Adira (Blu del Barrio) will be able to finally connect with their blocked memories — not only of their symbiont, Tal, but of their own former life.

After joining with Tal a year ago, Adira has been unable to recall anything about their past, and Tal, who had formerly been joined with Starfleet admiral Admiral Senna Tal, has been uncommunicative as well. Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Adira take a shuttle down to the surface where they’re met by a small group of Trill diplomats who wear flowy robes and like to hang out in nicely manicured parks where they hand down unilateral judgements on behalf of their entire planet.

What I’m saying is, it all feels very 90s-Trek — in a way that’s simultaneously simplistic and endearing — when the group declares almost immediately, and with only a single dissenter, that the Adira-Tal joining is an abomination.

The initial excitement over meeting a previously-unknown joined pair cools significantly once the group learns that the host is human. Even the severe culling of hosts and symbionts caused by The Burn isn’t enough for them to get over their distaste, especially when they learn that Adira cannot recall the names of Tal’s former hosts.

Michael and Adira make their way back to the shuttle, but are instead ambushed by one of the diplomats and his men, apparently wishing to liberate Tal from the young human. Michael, demonstrating her new and more pragmatic approach to life, swiftly knocks out the attackers and the two humans continue on their way.

Eventually they’re met by the sole dissenter, the earnest Guardian Xi (Andres Apergis), who brings them to the sacred Caves of Mak’ala — last visited by Jadzia Dax in Deep Space Nine’s “Equilibrium” — where unjoined symbionts live in milky, electroconducting pools.

Once they’ve entered the pool, Adira falls into a trance and, with Michael’s help, begins to connect with their own memories — and the memories of Tal’s previous hosts, carried by the symbiont.

Back aboard Discovery, Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) has completed his medical assessment of the crew’s stress levels and come to one conclusion: things are bad.

Some characters, like Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman), have been openly working through the grief of leaving everything and everyone they’ve ever known behind. Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) his immersed himself in his work even more deeply than usual, reverting to the grouchy lone genius he was in the early Season 1 episodes where we first met the character..

Others, like helmsman Keyla Detmer (Emily Coutts), have dissociated to the point of mentally removing themselves from the situation. Detmer is present, but only physically, when it comes to working and socializing with the people around her.

Newly-minted Captain Saru’s (Doug Jones) attempts to provide the crew with rest, relaxation, and healing — and to find his own style as a captain — brings some welcome attention to the emotional strain of recent events. Consulting with the ship’s computer, as the Kelpien first did back in “Choose Your Pain,” Saru considers and dismisses a long list of suggested relaxation techniques and activities.

During this scene, the alien Sphere Data — inhabiting the Discovery computer systems since last season — takes over the normal computer interface temporarily, speaking and laughing in the voice of Zora (Annabelle Wallis), the artificial intelligence who was the sole (virtual) occupant of the long-abandoned starship Discovery in “Calypso.”

Saru doesn’t seem to be overly concerned to his ready room’s computer display or voice interface; personally, I’d be more than a little wary of the ship’s computer starting to demonstrate self-awareness after Control’s takeover of Airiam last season, but this is something we are likely to revisit as Season 3 progresses.

Eventually, Saru settles on two parallel solutions: most of the crew gets the night off, while the series regulars gets… to attend a mandatory work dinner.

If I was any one of the people at that dinner table, I’d have been pissed to learn that the rest of the crew was spending their time doing literally anything else — and as expected, the dinner goes poorly.

Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) kicks off a round of haiku that begins pleasantly enough… but quickly devolves into Tilly and Stamets snipping at each other, and Detmer loudly and compulsively attempting to compose a haiku about Stamets spilled blood. She never really gets past “Stamets’ blood is everywhere” in an increasingly uncomfortable moment.

The only person who appears to be enjoying themselves is Georgiou, who grins her way through the arguments and absconds with the liquor when the dinner inevitably breaks up.

Diving back into the Trill pools, it’s at this point that we finally meet one of the season’s most highly anticipated new characters: young Trill host Gray (Ian Alexander), who is unjoined when he and Adira begin their relationship aboard a generation ship searching for Federation headquarters. Grey is set to become the newest host of the Tal symbiont — taking over for Senna Tal — which makes Adira understandably unsure of how this will change the nature of their relationship.

After the joining is complete, Adira gifts the newly-named Gray Tal with a handmade quilt chronicling his life experiences. It’s a touching moment, and one that feels like the beginning of getting to know these two characters and their love for one another. It turns out, in a way, to be the opposite… as the blue-haired Gray is suddenly killed during an asteroid collision with the ship. (I have a lot more to say about this below!)

In the last moments of Gray’s life, Adira makes the sudden choice to accept the Tal symbiont, as the closest humanoid available. The surgery is performed by robots, and presumably there is no one else around to answer Adira’s questions after the joining.

Finally able to recall and connect with Tal’s former hosts, Adira emerges from the pool as Adira Tal, ritualistically speaking her names to the gathered Trill congregation — and demonstrating that atypical joinings like theirs are not only possible but maybe even desirable given the worrisome state of the host/symbiont population.

After that not-so-great crew meal, Saru’s second try for ship-wide stress relief is a Buster Keaton screening in the shuttle bay, complete with Starfleet-issue popcorn buckets — also last seen in “Calypso” — which goes over much better than the dinner. (By the way, if it seemed unbelievable or forced that a bunch of people would be cracking up at a 350 year old silent comedy, you’ve never seen any of Buster Keaton’s films!)

Regardless, the dinner wasn’t a complete bust. Tilly and Stamets work through their conflicts and work better together afterward, and Detmer reaches out to Culber for the help she’d been trying to pretend she didn’t need.

And in the final moments of the episode, Adira starts playing the cello in their quarters — a skill inherited from one of Tal’s past hosts — and in a twist on the typical Trill presentation, we also see a vision of Gray himself sitting with Adira, guiding their cello bow.

While past Trills like Jadzia and Ezri Dax would often refer to specific past-host memories, or inherit some personality quirks from those former hosts, Discovery looks to present Gray’s memories in the form of an independent and seemingly self-aware entity in — from Adira’s point of view — while still being an integrated part of Adira Tal’s personality.

Given that the presentation of a person’s physical — or outward — self is often a central aspect of the trans experience, the choice to render Gray incorporeal seems significant. To some viewers it may come across as insulting, perhaps liberating to others, and to still others unimportant. Regardless of how it’s received by viewers, I hope Gray’s spectral nature is something the writers discuss and explore in further episodes, particularly with respect to how Gray sees himself.

I also wonder how the other characters are supposed to perceive or interact with him as an independent individual — or if he’ll just be around as a kind of Force ghost (to mix space franchises for a moment) for the rest of Adira’s time on Discovery.

There’s much more to Gray as a character, though, than how his death serves the plot, but I worry that rendering a trans character literally invisible within minutes of his introduction  undermines the representational value of including him in the first place.

While there’s reason to expect he’ll return beyond this episode (though we’ve not yet seen past the first four episodes of the season), it’s hard not to see killing off a character played by the Star Trek franchise’s first explicitly-transgender actor is a pretty serious hurdle for some viewers to get past.

It’s a choice the show itself will need to address and explain — after the character is killed after less than ten minutes of screen time — hopefully in a way much more satisfying than another post-show “Don’t panic!” message from the cast and producers during The Ready Room.

The CBS All Access and Star Trek promotional teams have widely publicized the open inclusion of a trans character played by a trans actor, and Gray’s death feels wildly out of sync with the way the character has been advertised. After the similarly-bewildering decision to kill off Hugh Culber in 2017’s “Despite Yourself,” I find myself more skeptical of than intrigued by whatever the writers are cooking up for Gray and Adira.

That’s unfortunate, because there are aspects of this shared consciousness that are genuinely fascinating. But as much as I want to focus on the good, at this point Gray’s death just leaves a bad taste in my mouth right now.

But moving on — for now — from the questions and concerns I have about this situation, it’ll be interested to explore what happens when a symbiont moves from one member of a couple to another, and what it might look like to connect on such a deep and fundamental level.

We’ve seen several instances of Trill encountering past loves — Jadzia’s reunion with Lenara Kahn in “Rejoined,” and Curzon’s slightly-gross infatuation with then-protégé Jadzia revealed in “Facets” — but we’ve never seen a Trill symbiont move between members of a couple. I look forward to seeing how the connection between Gray and Adira evolves and how it affects their individuality.

Other Observations

• In addition to movie night, the Discovery computer suggests crew morale improvement suggestions including: exercise, medication, limited dairy, yoga, use of a hyperbaric chamber, therapeutic coloring books, and interstellar shopping.
   
• Like Commander Nhan, Doctor Pollard (Raven Dauda) wears a ‘skant’ version of the Discovery uniform.
   
• One of Adira’s memories is a recipe for Bajoran hasparat.
   
• Captain Saru’s ready room features a number of potted plants, including the distinctive red flowers of Kaminar seen in “The Sound of Thunder.”
   
• The Trill neurotransmitter isoboromine — which manages the connection between symbiont and host — gets a mention during the visit to the Caves of Mak’ala.

• “Equilibrium” revealed that there are many more suitable hosts among the Trill population than is generally known — one of the most tightly-kept secrets of Trill society. While the Trill population was diminished by the destruction of The Burn, that secret seems to not have gotten out during the last 850 years (or if it did, it’s been lost to time).
   
• Tal has had six previous hosts before Adira — Kasha, Jovar, Madela, Cara, Senna, and Gray — dating all the way back to the Star Trek: Picard era, as one wears a captain’s uniform from that 2399-set series. (Either those are some long-lived hosts, or Tal spent a lot of time floating around in the Caves of Mak’ala.)
   
• Three of Tal’s past hosts have served in Starfleet. In addition to the host wearing a Picard-era uniform and Senna Tal’s grey Admiral’s uniform, one other host wears a powder-blue uniform with a gold operations-division stripe from some in-between era, complete with “modern” 32nd century combadge with commander rank marks.

Now that the crew is starting to adjust to their new lives in the far future, and Adira Tal’s unlocked memories of the Federation’s collapse are ready for exploration, it seems that the starship Discovery is in a good position to begin picking up the pieces of the United Federation of Planets… to begin solving the big mystery of The Burn.

Star Trek: Discovery returns for the fifth episode of the season, “Die Trying,” on November 12 exclusively on CBS All Access (USA) and CTV Sci Fi Channel (Canada); the episode arrives November 13 on Netflix for all other global regions.