It’s been two years since “Coming Home” brought Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 to a close, and this Season 5 premiere wastes no time getting back to the action. Strap in, the chase is on!
 
“Red Directive,” written by Michelle Paradise and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, opens in medias res with Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) surfing an unknown ship whose warp bubble is threatening to burst (never a good thing), before flashing back four hours to a party celebrating the Federation’s 1000-year anniversary – give or take a few decades. There are elaborate drinks worthy of Guinan herself, references to jumja sticks, and people unhappy about reassignments.
 
The music is barely there, though Saru (Doug Jones) and T’Rina (Tara Rosling) manage to find enough to sedately dance to, everyone’s in uniform, and of course there comes Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) to interrupt the festivities with an urgent mission. It is very much a Star Trek party.
 

The urgent mission, the briefing for which takes place in the “infinity room” — aka “that white void from in The Matrix” — is to recover an item from an 800-year-old Romulan science vessel that was found at the edge of the Beta Quadrant, and to do it fast. The mission has Red Directive priority, which you can tell just from the sound of it is serious business, and Kovich (David Cronenberg) is coming along to supervise.

Unfortunately, Discovery is scooped by two scavengers — the human Mol (Eve Harlow) and her mystery-alien counterpart L’ak (Elias Toufexis). Side note, if L’ak’s voice sounds familiar it’s because you’ve played a videogame before — almost any videogame, with Toufexis’ long resume!

Thinking the ship might already have been stripped, L’ak suggests the pair cut their losses and go find somewhere to make themselves comfortable together for the night, but Mol wants to stay the course and L’ak agrees without hesitation. This is the only glimpse we get into the nature of their partnership; before and after, they’re two people in lock-step and on a mission, and even here when they do disagree, it’s quickly resolved. If there is a romantic relationship between these two, it is not a priority.

Discovery soon arrives and sends a small boarding party of its own over to the Romulan vessel. Burnham, Rhys (Patrick Kwok-Choon), and Owosekun (Oyin Oladejo) poke around a bit, at first finding nothing but an open vault and the desiccated corpse of a Romulan wearing a noticeable Next Gen-era uniform. Not too long after, they also find Mol and L’ak, who trap Rhys and Owosekun in forcefield bubbles, removing them from the action before they even get a chance to really be a part of it.

Burnham catches up with Mol and L’ak and tries to talk them into handing over the artifact, but unsurprisingly this doesn’t work — it also contradicts the “shoot to kill” order Kovich gave the away team, though it’s to be expected that Burnham wouldn’t rush to use violence. The two thieves get away to their ship, Burnham gets blown into space, and the episode catches up to where it started: with Burnham surfing a ship through a warp slipstream while Discovery trails close behind.

Then, suddenly, a third ship arrives! The USS Antares, a sleek, four-nacelled beauty that gives echoes of a 32nd-century Stargazer, swoops in between Discovery and Burnham, tractoring the fleeing mystery ship. Her captain, Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie), refuses to let go, even when it’s clear that the Antares is doing more harm than good with its tractor beam.

This sequence is visually gorgeous — the wide shots of all three ships stacked in a close line with the swirls and eddies of the warp stream flowing around them are beautiful — but the action itself is otherwise static and goes on a little too long. The back-and-forth between the two captains serves to establish Rayner’s character as someone who is stubborn, gruff, and has a different command style than Burnham, but for quite a while nothing’s actually happening.

When Rayner finally does back off the mystery ship escapes, as he said it would, but not before it sends out 20 decoy warp signatures. Thankfully, Book (David Ajala) is able to arrive pretty much immediately — the galaxy remains a very small place on Discovery — and using his years of experience as a courier, pinpoint which of the warp signatures is likely to be the correct one. How does he know? Because there’s a dealer on this particular world, Q’Mau, known to specialize in old things.

Turns out the dealer, Fred (J. Adam Brown), specializes in old things because he himself is an old thing… a Soong-type android in the — well, not the flesh, but the bioplast.

I have to say, Fred threw me for a loop! This is not the first time we’ve seen a Soong-type android in the last few years, after the events of Star Trek: Picard, but it’s the first time in recent memory that I can recall seeing one thoroughly Data-like. Fred has different emotional expressivity than Data, and doesn’t have all the same physical mannerisms, but he doesn’t use contractions — and visually he looks more like Data than any of the other androids from Coppelius.

Long story short, I forgot all about the Romulan lockbox for a hot minute because I was sure that this near-Data was the real mystery. I was wrong, of course, as he is quickly killed by Mol and L’ak, but not before he easily opens the puzzle box and speed-reads through the handwritten notebook found inside.

Burnham, Book, and Rayner find Fred’s body and have it beamed aboard Discovery for analysis and then rush to find Mol and L’ak as they make their escape. This leads to an anti-grav sand runner chase through the desert as our three heroes try to catch up with Mol and L’ak’s ship, which is heading for the nearby mountains instead of back into orbit.

As with the earlier ship surfing scene, the action feels like it should be more exciting than it actually is. Part of this is because it’s a long sequence without a lot that breaks it up visually. But it’s also that there’s simply a lot of dialog, both between Discovery and the landing team and between the members of the landing team themselves as they shout at each other over the noise of their dirt bikes.

There’s an argument between Burnham and Rayner about whether to risk a sand avalanche by firing on the mountain to prevent the ship’s escape, which the Antares eventually does without incident. Then there’s the continuation of a conversation between Burnham and Book that started the moment he beamed aboard, one about who froze out whom and the nature of their relationship — and there’s another argument after the fleeing ship deliberately triggers the avalanche that the Antares avoided. Can Discovery stop the avalanche before it wipes out a city of thousands? Only with help from the Antares which Rayner is reluctant to give.

The move they pull to stop the avalanche — both starships slamming saucer-first into the desert and creating a joint shield bubble — which is exciting, unlike the sand chase that preceded it, is so “Uh, can they actually do that??” but also such a spectacle that you have to just sit back and say “Well, I guess in the 32nd century they can” and leave it at that.

Meanwhile, while all this has been going on, Burnham had put Tilly (Mary Wiseman) on the case to hack into Kovich’s files to find out more about the Romulan ship and its long-dead occupant. The cut back to Tilly is, to put it mildly, abrupt. She’s in a set that’s never been seen — generically Federation, but otherwise totally absent of any context clues — and I spent most of this scene simply trying to figure out where the heck she was:

There’s a guy with Tilly and she’s acting nervous and the cutesy music is obnoxiously childlike for a scene between two grown adults who maybe are flirting with each other. Is this where they work? Is it Starfleet Academy? Maybe it’s a classroom. Oh he’s leaving, okay. Maybe this is Tilly’s office. Oh there’s a bed, in the middle of this huge, bright, round room. Are these her quarters? She’s laying on the bed, I guess these are her quarters. Her very sterile, incredibly impersonal quarters half a quadrant away from the immediately previous scene. Got it. Okay what are we doing here again? We’re hacking something. Can we get Tilly a dimmer switch and some decorations and maybe a window while we wait?

Tilly gets caught, but Vance intercedes because he’s tired of being kept in the dark on this mission too, and the two of them look on as the personal log of our dead Romulan, one Dr. Vellek (Michael Copeman) begins to play. It’s too degraded to make out much, but the phrase “…in the shadow of the twin moons…” is clearly audible. Combining this information with the visual record of the notebook as contained in Fred’s positronic brain, Burnham identifies a location – the V’Leen System. But she still doesn’t know what it is Kovich has them chasing, or why.

Finally, realizing Burnham has the final piece of the puzzle, Kovich relents and lets her – and us – in on the secret, and ho boy what a secret it turns out to be!

Dr. Vellek was a member of the Romulan delegation in TNG’s “The Chase,” the episode that explains why virtually all the aliens in Star Trek look like humans with forehead appliances — a progenitor race seeded the galaxy with genetic material that connects all humanoid life. The new piece for Discovery is that after the events of “The Chase”, Vellek found the location of the progenitors’ technology, which he recorded only in his notebook.

With the star system Burnham identified, Starfleet knows the location too — and now the chase is really on.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• Season 5’s opening credits have some new imagery, including moons in orbit of a planet, a rotating gear, the “infinity room” access device, Mol and L’ak’s ship, and a field of rotating geometric shapes.
• While a new classification of Starfleet mission, the term “Red Directive” is similar to the Omega Directive, overriding normal protocols and taking top priority over all other objectives.
• The drinks served at Starfleet Headquarters, called “Tonic 2161,” feature floating stars which taste like Bajoran jumja sticks.
• Stamets reports that Starfleet’s attempts to replicate the Spore Drive have come to a close as focus shifts to the new Pathway Drive system. This means Discovery will remain the only starship with the special propulsion system.

• Speaking of the Spore Drive, this episode gives us a unique view of a jump, looking out the open cargo bay door while the ship transitions locations. (Close that freaking door, already!)
• Shoutout to the Tholian Republic and Breen Imperium for continuing to be a thorn in the Federation’s side even after all these centuries. That’s some impressive staying power.
• The Romulan science vessel is designed after the original studio model seen in Next Gen’s “The Next Phase.”
• The interior of the Romulan ship is a redress of the Discovery mess hall set.
• L’ak’s face has an interesting shimmering or morphing effect for a few seconds when he first removes his helmet aboard the Romulan ship, almost like it’s changing shape or smoothing itself out. I wonder what that’s all about?
• Thanks to programmable matter, a standard issue Starfleet phaser can extend into a heavy-duty phaser rifle with a twist of the wrist. Cool!

• Vellek wears a passable recreation of the Next Gen-era Romulan military uniform, but where are those crazy shoulder pads?
• Burnham is taking saxophone lessons… every captain should have a hobby!
• Fred’s serial number is AS-0572Y, with “AS” seeming to refer to Altan Soong.
• Like Data in “The Royale,” Fred reads the Romulan book at a lighting-fast pace.
• The puzzle box is identified as a tan zhekran, a type of Romulan object introduced in Star Trek: Picard’s “The Impossible Box.”
• Along with the box, Mol and L’ak also bring Fred a set of Picard-era isolinear coprocessors, Picard-era Romulan communicator — and most valuable of all, a self-sealing stembolt.
• Other props seen in Fred’s lair include and early-season Discovery hand phaser, a Zhat Vash phaser rifle, a Season 1 era Klingon bat’leth, and a Klingon cloaking device like the one from the HMS Bounty.
• Kovich notes that the Progenitors designed “life itself,” which not-coincidentally is the title of Discovery’s Season 5 finale.

So what’s in store for this, Discovery’s final season? Are Mol and L’ak still looking for a buyer, or did they just want Fred for his excellent puzzle-solving skills? The latter, I think. Will Book and Burnham reconcile? Probably! Will Discovery and her allies succeed in saving all life in the galaxy? Surely yes, unless the producers have some very dark plans for the series finale.

It looks like we’re in for a fun ride to find out how it all comes together. “The Chase” provides some huge storytelling opportunities, but as an all-time episode of Star Trek also some pretty big shoes to fill…. but I think Discovery can do it.

(Also, Saru and T’Rina are getting married: cue the heart emojis!)

Our review of the second episode of Star Trek: Discovery Season 5, “Under the Twin Moons,” can be found here — but please keep the discussion below limited to “Red Directive” only!