Three major plots — the Progenitor clue, the Breen, and the hunt for Moll and L’ak –come together in “Erigah,” an episode that annoyed me at times… but that also happens to contain ten of the best minutes of Star Trek in years.
 
Moll (Eve Harlow) and L’ak (Elias Toufexis) are beamed from their escape pod directly to Discovery’s locked down sickbay. With extra security courtesy of the returning Commander Nhan (Rachael Ancheril) — a welcome face which we haven’t seen in quite some time — Culber (Wilson Cruz) goes to work trying to treat L’ak’s wound. Meanwhile, Book (David Ajala) is hanging out outside trying to get access to Moll because he’s “spent more time with Moll than nearly anyone!” Buddy, pal, guy, I am begging you. It was like 20 minutes and Moll wasn’t even into it.
 

Discovery makes a quick jump to Federation Headquarters to retrieve an old Breen refrigeration suit to help with L’ak’s treatment, and this is where things hit the fan. A Breen dreadnought is headed their way, demanding that Moll and L’ak be turned over to them. Discovery can jump away and continue to draw this out, or they can stay and force things to finally come to a solution. Let’s go with the latter.

Star Trek is many things. Arguments about whether something qualifies as “real” Star Trek are generally absurd, given that the show has been everything from incredibly horny to deeply profound (and both in pretty equal measure). But there’s one element I think everyone would agree is central to Star Trek: diplomacy.

Diplomacy, though is hard. It’s high risk high reward from within the story — the other guy might not feel like talking — but it’s also risky from a writing perspective, especially as the stakes of the story reach a high point. Quite frankly, the audience also might not feel like talking, and redirecting the dramatic tension from the exciting promise of a firefight to the potential blandness of a negotiating table can be the thing that deflates a story. Not every episode of Star Trek that involves a bunch of people sitting around and talking about border disputes or trade routes are good ones. But a lot of them are. And some of them are really good. I think, other faults aside, “Erigah” belongs on that list.

The Federation’s decision to negotiate with the Breen is borne of two things: first, the Federation will always try diplomacy; and secondly, the Breen are some tough customers. The Federation has a very slim chance of coming out of a direct firefight with a Breen dreadnought and it knows it. Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie) saw this possible future back in “Face the Strange,” and they are not keen to bring it into being.

Still, Rayner pushes — hard — for a direct confrontation. Even for him, he’s brash in his discussion with Burnham, Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr), and T’Rina (Tara Rosling), who is charge of the Federation side in for these negotiations. He’s almost out of control, interrupting and insulting the other participants. The Breen, he is adamant, do not negotiate; genocide is their Prime Directive, and even with only a slim chance of success, Starfleet has to strike first.

This is a bloodthirstiness that Rayner has never shown before, and it’s out of character enough that Burnham surmises that something else is going on here. She’s right. During The Burn, a Breen primarch called Tahal commandeered Kellerun, using up the people and the planet without mercy before moving on. Rayner is the only member of his family to survive the occupation.

The primarchs, one of whom is Tahal and another of whom captains the dreadnought, are all locked in a war of succession for the Imperium’s empty throne. But because none of the contenders are actually the direct blood descendants of the previous emperor, their claims are iffy at best. Whichever of them could get the endorsement of a blood descendant would have a huge boost.

This, Burnham realizes, is where L’ak comes in. Primarch Ruhn isn’t here to pick up a blood bounty, he’s here to pick up a meal ticket. And this is key to the Federation’s strategy.

(A side note, it is very funny to me that Breen society is obsessed with blood – blood bounties and blood descendants – given that anatomically they don’t even have blood.)

When he’d arrived, Ruhn had given the Federation an hour to turn over Moll and L’ak, and when that hour is nearly up T’Rina invites him over to negotiate. He is, understandably, very unimpressed. But then, he’s never met T’Rina and doesn’t know that she’s a stone cold badass. After a throwaway offer of some dilithium, which Ruhn expectedly rejects, T’Rina lays it all out. She knows why he wants L’ak, which is exactly why they’ve agreed to peacefully hand him over to Tahal instead. Oh, and no, you won’t attack us — you wouldn’t risk harming L’ak.

And then T’Rina really brings it home, telling Ruhn she’d be willing to reject Tahal’s offer and hold onto L’ak, keeping him off the board entirely and letting Ruhn duke it out using regular old Breen in-fighting. Unless, that is, he fears he cannot defeat her. Ruhn relents, on the condition that L’ak will not be harmed in Federation custody.

For a scene played between two central characters who hardly emote, one because they’re a Vulcan and the other because they’re wearing a refrigeration helmet, it’s absolutely riveting! The writing is sharp, the logical turns land like punches, Rayner’s personal insights into how ruthless Tahal is cut deep, and Tara Rosling, who has been fantastic as T’Rina from the start, is electric. This is some all-time Star Trek diplomacy; Jean-Luc Picard himself would be proud.

Of course it’s also all a bluff, but Ruhn doesn’t need to know that.

On the clue front, Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and Book are working to identify the object itself — a punch-cut metal “card” — while Tilly (Mary Wiseman) and Adira (Blu del Barrio) are working on the Betazoid phrase written on it: “The Labyrinth of the Mind”. Unfortunately, this week’s sleuthing didn’t work for me; as a concept a galactic puzzle is great stuff, but the execution is starting to feel more and more like last season’s deciphering of Species Ten-C’s language: an extremely difficult setup in theory and a conspicuously easy solution in practice.

Adira and Tilly work — well, “work” — with Zora (Annabelle Wallis) in a scene that is, I’m sorry, laughable. Zora announces that she’s discovered a vital piece of information, that the phrase is the title of a manuscript written by our previously identified Betazoid doctor, Marina Derex, and Tilly and Adira act like this is a huge breakthrough. Zora ran a basic search query, that’s it!

I don’t understand what Zora brings to this, or is it simply that no one can run any “internet” searches without Zora The Consciousness getting involved as the go-between? I know she’s the computer, but is she always the computer? Surely a bored ensign can access deeply personal files in their quarters without having to ask their sentient coworker Zora about them, right?

Anyway, there’s one search result for this phrase, and then when Adira asks Zora if there are any people — just in general — who know anything about handwritten manuscripts and where they might be located there is again, one search result. The fact that it’s Jett Reno of all people is somehow the least bewildering part of this whole thing.

Reno (Tig Notaro) tells Tilly and Adira about a place called the “Eternal Gallery and Archive,” a neutral all-worlds-welcome mobile archive that moves through space from one place to another every 50 years and uses metal catalog cards. We have a winner.

Again, all of this seems like information that would take anyone with halfway decent lookup skills a few minutes to find, which is way too easy for a puzzle of this magnitude and also way too basic for our characters to be this impressed to have solved. It falls flat for me as far as the mystery element is concerned and makes Tilly and Adira seem downright naïve.

Sick of being in sickbay, Moll and L’ak decide it’s time to make a move. L’ak injects himself with a full day’s worth of the compound he’s being given, and when the forcefields come down for Culber to treat his sudden distress, Moll slips out. Culber and Nhan put up a good fight, but Moll gets away, intent on grabbing a shuttle and getting the hell out of there. With the Breen dreadnought just outside it’s honestly not a great plan, but it’s keeping with the desperate seat-of-their-pants way Moll and L’ak operate.

Meanwhile on the card side of the puzzle, Zora is again using the power of super-intelligent AI removing some rows from an Excel spreadsheet at Stamets’ instruction, as he tries to pinpoint where the metal of the card came from. Book shows up to help because he’s antsy and needs to keep busy after his latest round of “I can help!” about Moll has been rebuffed. In a moment of inspiration Stamets realizes that Dr. Derex may have telepathically created a “transitive link” between the manuscript and the card that Book, who is empathic, might be able to read. I uh, didn’t know Betazoids could do that, but sure let’s go with it.

Book “reads” the card and sees images of turbulent red ionic storms and then he’s out. Moll’s escaped and so of course, he needs to be there to connect with her or whatever. He does help, convincing her to return to sickbay to be with L’ak in his final moments, but it’s not really due to any special insight Book has. Seems like anyone could have gotten through to her with “Don’t you want to be with your loved one when they die?” in this situation.

Moll enters sickbay to a small contingent of Breen, including Ruhn and a medic, administering aid to L’ak. It’s not enough, though, and L’ak dies, which is a really bad thing for the diplomatic situation. Ruhn doesn’t care that L’ak did this to himself, it’s the Federation’s fault anyway, and he prepares to leave with the corpse (even in death, L’ak can bring some weight to Ruhn’s claims to the throne).

But, Moll isn’t willing to leave L’ak and offers herself over to Ruhn. She tells him that she can help him find a source of incredible power, but perhaps more important is the fact that she and L’ak were joined in some capacity, married but also more, linked on some kind of genetic level perhaps, in a way that makes her a viable alternate as far as the bloodline descendant thing is concerned.

Book objects (of course Book objects…) and the Federation gets five minutes to decide what to do.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• Rayner references the Romulan saying “Never turn your back on a Breen,” which was introduced in Deep Space Nine’s “By Inferno’s Light.”
• Rayner does another DS9 callback by suggesting the team use “thoron fields and duranium shadows” to bluff the Breen into believing Starfleet Headquarters is more heavily armed than in reality. This technique was first used in “Emissary,” and then suspected to be in use at Deep Space 9 by Martok in “The Way of the Warrior.”
• Tilly mentions that the Breen destroyed a city during their last visit to Federation space; this seems to indicate that the Breen have stayed outside of Federation territory since they attacked San Francisco from orbit in “The Changing Face of Evil” some 800 years prior.
• Except for Linus, it appears that Discovery has an entirely different bridge crew than it started the season with. Maybe this is just Delta Shift (why should 99% of the action on other Star Trek shows only ever take place when the “main guys” are on duty?) but still, it’s a bit jarring.
• Though he does get a name drop, this is the third episode in a row without Saru (since Doug Jones was away for Hocus Pocus 2). Between his absence and the near-complete replacement of the secondary bridge crew, it’s feeling like the series ended early for a lot of actors.
• The Badlands are an area of turbulent plasma storms situated near Bajor and Cardassia, which also served as a home for the Maquis rebellion during the early 2370s. Notably, this area of space is where the USS Voyager got pulled into the Delta Quadrant in “Caretaker.”
• The Breen wear the spiked symbol of their species on their rugged uniforms, another logo first introduced in Deep Space Nine.

After determining that Moll doesn’t have enough knowledge to endanger the search for the Progenitors’ tech, the decision is made. To quote my gal T’Rina, “There is little to be lost by allowing this and much to be lost by keeping her.” The Federation can’t take on the Breen now, just as they couldn’t when this whole thing started. Book continues to be flabbergasted, and I continue to wonder why he thinks he has any sort of say over Moll.

The Breen leave, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief before turning their focus back to the next clue — while Discovery prepares to head for the Badlands.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 continues on Paramount+ May 16 with “Labryinths,” followed the next day on SkyShowtime in other regions.