In addition to being just the starting half of an oddly-unbalanced story, “Terra Firma, Part 1” is a tough episode to review, packing a lot of confusing and unnecessary obfuscation around a story element that — if you weren’t paying really close attention — may drastically change your enjoyment of what just occurred.

Setting up a number of elements which seem primed to exit Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) from the series, this week’s Star Trek: Discovery tale is filled with scenes and symbolism that imply a conclusion to her story, at least until the long-gestating Section 31 series arrives (not-so-coincidentally being led by two members of this episode’s writing team, Bo Yeon Kim and Erika Lippoldt).

But before we get into the big events around the former Terran Emperor, let’s spend a moment on the new developments surrounding The Burn. The revelation that the lost Federation ship broadcasting from the Verubin Nebula is a Kelpien vessel — and not some duplicate of the USS Discovery, as some fans had speculated — allows The Burn investigation to make only marginal progress in the season story arc, taking time away from this episode’s clear Georgiou-centric intentions.

(While I’m not yet convinced that the Discovery won’t have some role to play in being part of what caused The Burn — somehow, somewhen — we don’t seem to be heading down that road yet, as there’s clearly still something about that Kelpien ship yet to be explored.)

That said, it’s a nice touch to see Captain Saru (Doug Jones) experiencing hesitation and making minor missteps as an inexperienced captain. His initial inclination to shut down the idea of a mission to Dannus V is logical — based in the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the one — but Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) approves the mission while offering some important advice about how to earn the loyalty and respect of his crew.

This is a lesson that other captains in Star Trek like Kirk or Janeway did not need to learn, but as Saru continues to come out of his own Kelpien shadow, watching him progress towards that level of revered commanding officer a rewarding journey — but just as the Kelpien connection to The Burn gets started, the episode abruptly says “That’s all for this week!” and puts it all back in the box to shift the spotlight fully to Georgiou’s story.

The Section 31 agent and Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) beam down to a cold, wintery planet in search of a way to stop her medical degradation — caused, we learn from Kovich (David Cronenberg), by her trip across dimensions coupled with her jump into the far future.

Following a path gleaned from Discovery’s ancient Sphere Data, Burnham and Georgiou trek for miles across an arctic tundra — a trip which mirrors the Burnham/Georgiou desert excursion in “The Vulcan Hello,” another sign that this may be the end of the road for this character pairing.

At the end of their hike appears a enigmatic, dapper gentleman calling himself Carl (Paul Guilfoyle of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fame) who spouts vaguely deep-sounding riddles while goading Georgiou to step through a mysterious — there’s that word again — freestanding door in the middle of the snow. The door, he says, is her only way to survive.

I’ll come back to Carl in a minute, because there’s a lot to unpack: and whether you have a sense of his identity or not will go a long way towards understanding what’s going on in this deeply-frustrating episode, which ends with more of a simple act break than a cliffhanger to keep us hooked in for next week’s conclusion.

Georgiou steels herself and walks through the open doorway — only to immediately find herself basically Quantum Leap-ing back into the role of 2350’s-era dictator of the Terran Empire, keeping all of her memories of the past and future and offering her a chance to change her fate.

She’s still got her future Fitbit to monitor her health, but besides that she’s all Terran again, trying to figure out what she’s doing back home and shaking off the temporal confusion to assert herself back in her Emperor role while giving viewers a look at the Mirror Universe from a time before the Discovery crossover in 2018.

Georgiou averts an assassination attempt by Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp), killing him in the process (we saw him alive back in Season 1), and learning from her own recollections of the past — and sparing the life of her Burnham, who was supposedly killed during Lorca’s rebellion.

It’s delicious to dip back into the Mirror Universe after almost three (calendar) years away; seeing the gleaming gold costume design and over-the-top makeup work on the Discovery cast is a surprise likely no one expected ahead of this week’s viewing, and something CBS has done a remarkably good job of keeping under wraps — something that was spoiled for fans back in Season 1.

Hearing the crew talk about the long-gone Gabriel Lorca as current foe, seeing the Mirror counterparts of Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz), still-human Airiam (Hannah Cheesman), and alive-again Ellen Landry (Rekha Sharma), and finally getting to meet the dastardly Terran version of Burnham and the much-feared ‘Captain Killy’ (Mary Wiseman) are all a lot of fun — but ultimately, the episode doesn’t give us any explanation of what’s going on, or why any of it matters.

That is, unless you’ve figured out what’s up with Carl.

Leaving his identity hidden from all but the most eagle-eyed viewers, I think, is probably the biggest storytelling mistake this episode makes… because unless you’re able to get a good look at “tomorrow’s newspaper” advertising Georgiou’s impending demise, you’re going to have a lot of questions.

“Everything you need to know is right here in black and white,” Carl says, leading most to focus on the Georgiou-centric front page story, but it’s what’s on the back pages that tend to be the most revealing about what’s actually happening here. (Check out our full break down of the front and back pages below.)

With a splashy, advertisement for “Good Soup!,” a glimpse at the name of the 21st Street Mission, a half-seen woman’s portrait and a very visible offer to “Let Me Help!” on The Star Dispatch — all elements from Edith Keeler’s work in the 1930s, seen in “The City on the Edge of Forever” — these puzzle pieces seem to immediately unveil a connection between Carl’s magic door and the iconic “doorway back through time” from Star Trek legend: the Guardian of Forever.

If somehow Carl truly is connected to (or a personification of) the Guardian — either the original portal visited by Captain Kirk and company, or perhaps a second Guardian located at this new planet — “Terra Firma, Part 1” is suddenly seen through a very different light, and the stakes become much clearer.

On a brief note, having a personified Guardian — if that’s really what’s happening here — is actually a concept that dates back to Harlan Ellison’s concept for what eventually became the Star Trek episode fans are familiar with; in the 2014 IDW Comics adaptation of Ellison’s original teleplay, the Guardian is not a talking stone donut, but in fact actual entities who call themselves the Guardians of Forever.

If Carl really is connected to the Guardian, then Georgiou has likely in the process of really changing her own history. That makes me so much more invested in the story than the sly “What the hell is going on here?” eyebrow waggling that the episode attempts upon first watch; even the little tap of the wrist band by Georgiou when she arrives in the Mirror Universe, which also may be designed to indicate the reality of the situation, is too coy.

More than once in its run, Star Trek: Discovery has gotten so wrapped up in making things in a puzzle to solve — What’s up with Lorca? What are the Seven Signals? Who’s the Red Angel? What caused The Burn? Who is Carl? — that it often neglects an important part of storytelling: telling the audience why what’s happening is supposed to matter.

This is where I think “Terra Firma, Part 1” really stumbles — for everybody who doesn’t live with a copy of Memory Alpha in their heads like many of you reading this review — because the final scene in which Georgiou spares Burnham matters so much more if it’s really happening.

Burnham’s care for this version of Philippa Georgiou isn’t a one-way thing, and the longer that the Terran has been part of the Prime universe we’ve seen her reciprocation slowly grow. As recently as last week, Georgiou expressed her concern for Michael when Discovery went to Red Alert over Kwejian (even if only the audience saw it), and sparing Mirror Burnham’s life this time around shows that she’s fundamentally changed since joining ‘our’ Discovery‘s crew.

Beneath all the rude bluster, the former Emperor may just no longer be the brutal and genocidal ruler she once was — and that’s an important milestone if this version of the character is on her way to become the lead of her own Star Trek series.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

• Kovich’s discussion with Culber in the opening moments of the episode labels the main Star Trek universe as “the Prime universe.” Aside from a glancing mention in last season’s “Perpetual Infinity,” this has been a term used only outside of storytelling, to delineate the main setting of the franchise from the Kelvin Timeline — the universe of the three Chris Pine-led Trek films — and the Mirror Universe, home of the Terran Empire.
   
• As we covered more in-depth in Monday’s article, Betelgeusian  ‘time soldier’ Yor was a refugee from the Star Trek: Nemesis era of the Kelvin Timeline – the year 2379 of an alternate universe created by a Romulan mining ship – which makes this the first mention of that alternate universe outside of the Chris Pine films.

• There are a lot of references to the Temporal Wars and Temporal Accords this season, and this week we learn that the Accords include ‘iron-clad’ provisions regarding ‘interdimensional displacement restrictions’ which ban against universe-hopping. If our thoughts on the Guardian of Forever (above) are correct, that may serve as a way to bypass the Accords to get Georgiou out of this time – and dimension.
   
• Culber, Stamets, and Airiam are shocking themselves with agonizers in the ISS Discovery’s mess hall – what a fun party game!
   
• The Kelpien scientist mentions the USS Hiraga Gennai, which was named for an 18th century Japanese ‘polymath’ — or Renaissance man — who know much about many subjects. (Quite an interesting fellow.)
   
• Mirror Burnham’s tale of talented artists and her wicked acts against them took her to planet Kepler-174d, a real exoplanet discovered in 2014.
   
• Carl’s newspaper is reminiscent of the Q Continuum’s The New newsmagazine seen in “Death Wish,” as well as that of The Ascended Times from Stargate SG-1, which was read by Daniel Jackson in that series while visiting the Ancents’ ascended plane (SG1: “Threads”).

• The price of a copy of The Star Dispatch newspaper? 15 Quatloos, of course.
   
• Besides Georgiou’s fate, other headlines in Carl’s paper reference the missing USS Jenolan which carried Montgomery Scott to the 24th century (TNG: “Relics”) and the fall of the T’Kon Empire by supernova (TNG: “The Last Outpost”).
   
• The back page of the paper features a column about Worf’s win at the bat’leth competition at Forcas III (TNG: “Parallels”). The honeycomb-shaped crossword puzzle on the back page, complete with two spiral-shaped black areas, could be references to the hexagon-shaped ships which make up a Suliban Helix, where key events occurred during the Temporal Cold War in Star Trek: Enterprise — but both the header and questions appear to be printed in Bajoran script.
   
  (Perhaps the Vulcan script at the bottom says that the Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that time travel is impossible.)

• Like the ‘hand cannons’ used by the Emerald Chain, 32^nd century Starfleet phasers are able to compress into wrist-mounted badges when not in use, thanks to programmable matter tech.
   
• Culber’s red Terran uniform – also worn by other actors typically seen in medical white aboard the ‘prime’ Discovery – was first featured as concept art during a 2018 episode of After Trek. While not used in the first trip to the Mirror Universe, early story concepts included a Culber appearance during that first season tale.
   
• Book’s desire to help Discovery navigate the future – while pulling his weight – gives me a strong Neelix-and-the-Delta-Quadrant vibe. Hopefully Book’s better in the kitchen!
   
• The Kelpien doctor in the century-old hologram is played by Hannah Spear, who also played Saru’s sister Sirannah last season.

Overall, I am really conflicted about this episode. There is a lot that I like, but keeping Carl’s secret in the deep, deep background of the story robs the episode of its stakes, and creates a situation where it feels a lot like the whole back half of the episode set in the Mirror Universe is exquisitely-produced filler material, just biding time until “Terra Firma, Part 2” finally lays all of its cards on the table.

Though its gilded production design looks amazing as always, “Terra Firma, Part 1” is ultimately a jumbled mess of great scenes that piece together to form a story of very little substance. Here’s hoping next week’s “Part 2” sticks the landing in a way that makes Georgiou’s detour to the past worth the trip.