In this week’s new Star Trek: Discovery episode, a lapsed alliance is reformed, frustrated greenhorn cadets find themselves in an even more frustrating crisis, and an original member of the USS Discovery crew takes a first step into a new adventure.

The first captain’s log since Burnham took command catches us up on the latest happenings aboard Discovery, and among the Federation and its allies. Negotiations for Ni’Var to rejoin the Federation are nearly complete as the ship orbits the former Vulcan homeworld — but while the Discovery the crew is enjoying a renewed focus on rest, relaxation, and general wellbeing, the ship’s counselor has a fully-booked calendar.

Book (David Ajala) finds a seat in Dr. Culber’s (Wilson Cruz) office, finally taking Burnham’s advice around his grief over losing Kweijian. At first, the session is a bit stiff and uncomfortable as he resists Culber’s attempt to recreate a Kweijian healing ritual, but once the doctor shares a personal story about his own history experiencing grief and death, Book seems to warm up.

In his attempt to gain Book’s trust, Culber voices something that has always lurked behind Star Trek’s depiction of therapy: the unusual preexisting relationships between therapist and patient. Just as Counselor Troi is good friends, a trusted colleague, and an occasional romantic partner with members of her crewmates aboard the Enterprise, Culber also knows the people who come to see him — well before they sit on his couch.

By sharing something about his own experiences with Book, Culber breaks a general rule of a typical therapy dynamic, but because Culber knows his patient he’s actually leveling the playing field in a way. I would be interested to know what a real life therapist thinks about this, or how mental health professionals in other similarly insular settings handle clients who they may already know.

In the end, though, Culber does seems to break through to Book — while he’s still not excited about the process of therapy, Book is at least willing to continue with it.

Meanwhile, down on Ni’Var, Captains Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Saru (Doug Jones)  have been asked to replace an indisposed Admiral Vance at a summit where President Rillak (Chelah Horsdal) and President T’Rina (Tara Rosling) are about to bring the logical world back into the Federation fold.

The two captains have been told to simply stay quiet and look official from the sidelines, but the pair immediately sense that something else is going on — just as Ni’Var’s reentry to the Federation is about to be finalized, President T’Rina springs a strict last minute requirement on Rillak: Ni’Var must have an exit clause from this arrangement, allowing them to leave the UFP again without any resistance.

This, Rillak argues, would weaken the Federation and be unfair to other member worlds, none of whom have a similar clause. Neither side is willing to budge and when it appears that the negotiations are about to fall apart, Burnham speaks up. Her words don’t solve the larger problem, but she at least creates time for the two sides to cool off enough to request a recess instead of walking away entirely.

During the break, the captains work their relationships with each leader to find out what’s going on behind the scenes. Saru speaks with T’Rina, and learns about the concerns of her supporters, who feel that the Federation will revert to its pre-Burn ways, and once again become too centralized to recognize the unique needs of its individual member worlds.

Rillak on the other hand feels the Federation cannot withstand the weakening that such a clause with Ni’Var would create, explaining her own stance on the matter to Burnham — and after Discovery’s captain sees each leader bound by their position not to offer a compromise, Burnham offers a compromise of her own, allowing both presidents to save face while still keeping the negotiations moving.

Instead of an exit clause for Ni’Var (or any other member world), Burnham proposes an independent oversight council to serve as mediator for any world which has a concern with its relationship with Federation leadership, tasked with regularly monitoring how the Federation addresses the individual needs and concerns of its members.

As the council’s first act, Burham offers to serve herself as a bridge between the two political bodies, given her unique position as a Starfleet officer raised and schooled in Vulcan society.

After the negotiations, Burnham and Rillak talk again and seem much more confident and trusting in one another than they did at the start of the season, a development that I appreciate and honestly didn’t see coming. The change feels organic to their relationship and true to both characters and their varying perspectives and priorities.

In short? I think I might owe Rillak an apology.

Lieutenant Tilly (Mary Wiseman) is also spending time with Dr. Culber this week, and after she expresses her uncertainty in what direction to take her lately-aimless life, he recommends her for a special assignment — leading a training mission for the recently-reopened Starfleet Academy, with an added benefit of taking a break from all the gravitational anomaly business.

Joined by Ensign Tal (Blu del Barrio), Tilly gets assigned to lead a six-hour shuttle survey mission to a desert moon, a team-building exercise sorely needed as the cadets — who grew up in the post-Burn era — have not yet learned to open up to one another and work together.

Before they get to their destination, the shuttle is hit by a gamma ray burst, and they are sent careening toward an icy moon. The pilot is killed in the shuttle’s crash landing, communications are down, and the wildlife is hostile. With only a few days of rations and no way to signal for help, the group can’t stay in the downed shuttlecraft and it’s up to Tilly to get them to nearby high ground. Sounds simple enough, right?

Well, it probably would be… if Tilly weren’t saddled with the most dysfunctional team in the history of stories about dysfunctional teams. This trope is common enough in fiction and has been used several times before in Star Trek, often to good effect, “All is Possible” has admiral intentions but a seriously flawed execution.

For one thing, the attitude of these cadets is strange, even before the drama begins. I get that despite being at the Academy for “a few months,” these three people don’t know each other as individuals or as cultures, and they don’t really want to know each other. Fine.

But what’s up with them refusing to speak to Lieutenant Tilly, their commanding officer? I know that part of the purpose of this storyline is to underscore just how brittle the Federation’s cultural dynamic is — especially after the Burn screwed up everything on the intergalactic-harmony front — but they’re acting like bored teenagers resentful of a chaperone, instead of people who signed up to be students at a multicultural quasi-military academy.

Broken Federation dynamic aside, they do all know how a school works and that adults will ask them questions which they, as officers-in-training, are expected to answer, right? When they do finally introduce themselves to Tilly, we learn that human cadet Sasha (Amanda Arcuri) had never met an alien before she came to the academy, that Tellarite cadet Gorev (Adrian Walters) hates Orions because of the now-defunct Emerald Chain, and that Orion cadet Harral (Seamus Patterson) is quiet and smart in a way that seems smug and superior.

Adding a bit to the friction, Adira is surprised that they’re being asked to participate as another cadet — instead of as Tilly’s assistant — but they fall in line quickly without further issue. The other three, however, continue to squabble as if their lives depended on it.

Gorev in particular, seems so intent on aggressively shooting down every one of Tilly’s commands (and ideas from everyone else in the group) that I immediately grew suspicious of him, thinking he was deliberately trying to sabotage the rescue — or even that this was all part of the training exercise, a plant who there to deliberately create strife. None of this is the case, which actually makes it worse.

He is simply a deeply unlikeable character who takes out his anger — some of which is understandable, given his prior life experiences — on everyone around him, whether they’re the cause of that anger or not. Frankly, I cannot comprehend how this guy is still a student at the Academy. Does he yell at and mock all of his instructors the way he does Tilly, or is he simply incredibly quick to panic in stressful situations?

In his defense, the makeup appliance worn by the actor is so thick that he is essentially unable to emote other than by yelling — especially out on location shoots —  so I suppose that does limit the actor’s performance to a pretty small range.

Regardless of the the tusked cadet’s thinking that absolutely everything is a terrible idea, Tilly does manage to get the team to the top of a distant ridge — the high ground needed to get a signal to a nearby Federation starship — but not without a few detours, as along the way Adira gets trapped in some quickly-expanding ice.

The group has to pull the ensign free by way, essentially, of a game of tug-of-war — and then the team decides to stand around for several long minutes having heart-to-heart discussions while in a hostile environment populated by large hungry creatures. The only way this could have been any more cliche as far as the team-building element is concerned is if they’d had to rescue Adira by doing trust falls.

(Also, if the dangerous creatures are so attracted to Starfleet tech, why was Tilly’s first move to crank up her programmable matter machine?)

The pacing and construction of sequence is my second major problem with this part of the story. The dialogue, the emotional revelations, the purpose of it? That’s all fine. It’s the placement of this drawn-out emotional discussion distracts me from what I should be paying attention to.

Instead of being engrossed in the characters and their growth, I spent the entire scene thinking — once again, as I mentioned two weeks ago — “Guys, how about you do this later?!” Surely the instinct for self preservation is going to be stronger than the need to yell at your buddy, right?

Get to the top of the mountain and then have it out.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter because the ice and the cold and the creatures all decide to politely take a coffee break while Gorev yells at the Harral for being an Orion and Adira explains that actually, his father was a prominent abolitionist who died a political prisoner without living to see the demise of the Syndicate which he’d worked so hard to take down.

(I guess they had time to research all of the cadets’ family histories sometime in the few minutes between being assigned to the mission and the crash?)

With that sorted, the Tellarite looks as sheepish as he can under all that makeup, and all  of his complaints about Tilly’s plan disappear as the crew presses on through the tundra… but once they get to the top of the mountain, Tilly and Adira realize that one of them is going to have to go back down to distract the creatures while the other four stay on the ridgeline and call for help.

Tilly volunteers, and she makes enough of a target for the creature to focus on that Adira manages to get the Armstrong on comms safely, beaming everyone out of danger just in time.

Arriving safely back at the academy, Tilly vouches for the young trio, saying they’ll all make great Starfleet officers. (Let’s just say that she has much more confidence in those cadets than I do.)

On the surface, “All Is Possible” seems to walk similar paths to “The Galileo Seven” and Data’s time captaining the Sutherland in “Redemption II,” while the Tellarite cadet’s attitude — so combative as to be suspicious — reminds me of the imposter Bolian cadet in “Allegiance” who was planted in that group to sew trouble among the captives.

Where this week’s episode fails, and those other examples succeed, is that we’re expected here to simply accept the drama as it comes.

“Galileo Seven” and “Redemption” put characters in positions for us to side with or against them; we’re supposed to dislike (or at least disagree) those stories’ antagonists and side with Spock and Data, making their eventual triumphs our own. “Allegiance” expects us to notice and grow skeptical of the cadet’s unusual and unprofessional behavior, and when we’re proven right, it’s as satisfying for us as it is for Captain Picard.

“All Is Possible,” however, seems to want us to just be passive observers of the situation and its characters — because while the characters might find catharsis among themselves, there simply isn’t any there for the viewer.

Tilly’s journey out of her comfort zone culminates in the opportunity to take on a new position: teaching at the new Starfleet Academy, bringing some of that “old world” Federation hope and teamwork to the newest generation of cadets.

After a touching conversation with Burnham in which we learn that Tilly’s promotion to lieutenant was — unexpectedly for her — a completely hollow achievement, part of a drive to succeed in Starfleet’s command track to impress and show up her mother… who now, centuries gone, isn’t a driving force behind Tilly’s motivations any longer.

After a few emotional moments between the best friends, Tilly says goodbye to the rest of the Discovery crew via a montage of hugs and smiles — no time for similar farewell conversations with Saru or Stamets, it seems, or her just-visited counselor, Dr. Culber — Tilly transfers off of of the ship, watching as the Discovery warps off to new adventure without her.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• “All Is Possible” takes place on Stardate 865661.2.
• David Cronenberg returns for the first time this season as Dr. Kovich, first time his character has been named in dialogue.
• According to Kovich, none of the cadets have gotten to know each other at all during the four months they’ve been at the Academy. How is that possible when there are only like 16 cadets there? This sounds like an Academy problem, honestly!
• 32nd century Starfleet cadets have their own distinctive combadge, with the entire backing ‘oval’ removed and a series of bars extending from the right side.

• Like the departure of Michelle Yeoh last season, the star of this week’s episode gets to spend some quality time in the Canadian winter before leaving the ship.
• The creature that is hunting the survey party is pretty neat looking — kind of like a ten-food-wide hermit crab that was actually an octopus, and had glowing red magma for blood?
• We’ve seen Tilly’s snowglobe collection before, but her “All Is Possible” snowglobe gifted to Adira houses a teeny-tiny Enterprise NX-01 inside — while prop master Mario Moreira revealed on The Ready Room that it was a custom build, it’s very similar to a commercially available Star Trek: Enterprise snowglobe released a few years back.

• Freshly re-incorporated, Gray (Ian Alexander) must do regular Trill meditation to stay grounded in his new body — but not before getting a stylish new look.
• Dr. Culber’s counseling office is a redress of the Discovery ready room set, with a fancy divider placed behind his chair.
• One of the decorations on Culber’s office shelving unit is the medal he was postumously awarded in the Season 1 finale; obviously claimed from Stamets once the good doctor came back to life.

• Burnham pronounces Bajor with an emphasis on the second syllable — “Ba-JOR” — just like Captain Picard in “Emissary.”
• Can we talk about that horrendous Poltergeist II tequila worm situation that Admiral Vance was supposed to have been dealing with? How huge was this thing if they had to wait for it to gestate before “extracting” it? Good job, Discovery, bringing the body horror to an episode that features David Cronenberg as a guest star.
• We learn from T’Rina that disgraced Qowat Milat sister J’Vini has been sentenced to punitive meditation, just like T’Lyn on Lower Decks.
• T’Rina knows how Saru likes his tea — with salt, of course — and Burnham is very quick to notice their whole vibe. Those two have an amazing dynamic together, and I have to say I think I ship ’em. More flirty meditation sessions between Saru and T’Rina, please!

As to the question a great many are asking: is Mary Wiseman beaming out of Star Trek: Discovery for good? Well, despite her departure from the USS Discovery, this won’t be the last we’ll see of Wiseman this season; Paramount+ tells us that we’ll see Tilly again before the season’s end, but when?

Even the actor isn’t spilling the beans on that; in an interview with Forbes today, Wiseman confirmed that she’s not going to be gone forever — and that Tilly’s new assignment was a writing decision.

“What I can tell you is that Tilly will be back later this season…

[The change to Starfleet Academy] just felt like an organic outgrowth of the story, that she was in this sweet place of questioning, both her past and her motivations for the path that she was currently on,” said Wiseman. “That’s kind of what this character needed, some time to grow, on her own, as an adult. So it’s kind of a natural extension of that.”

While Tilly’s future remains a mystery to us, Wiseman’s next real-life move is already public — she’s set to take the starring role in a stage performance in New York City through the end of March 2022.

Discovery Season 4 has completed filming, of course, but how her commitment to that production will impact her availability for a still-yet-unannounced fifth season of the show is unknown; that said, with the grueling 10-month filming schedule on Season 4 behind them, it’s possible everybody in the cast is just getting a nice long vacation before the crew heads back to Toronto.

We’ll just have to wait to see how things shake out — even Wiseman herself told Slashfilm that she’s not allowed to say any more about it.

In the meantime, here’s Mary Wiseman on today’s episode of The Ready Room, where she discusses Tilly’s transition to Starfleet Academy, and more.

Star Trek: Discovery returns December 16 on Paramount+ in the United States, and on CTV Sci Fi Channel and Crave in Canada.   Outside of North America, the series is available on Paramount+ and on Pluto TV in select international locations.