Star Trek: Discovery: Season 1 – Episode 7 ‘Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad’ REVIEW

As you’ll remember, last week we ended on Cornwell – the chief who’s riding Lorca’s ass in more ways than one – having been kidnapped by the Klingons. So, appropriately, we open this episode on Michael pondering on how she’s come to fit in on Discovery, but that now she’s going to have to face her greatest challenge yet, because Discovery is about to – record scratch – throw a wild party?

If you can come to terms with how they’ve completely buried the lead from last week, it’s nice to see Michael actually display Vulcan-style awkwardness in a way that doesn’t involve flashbacks or visions. And, similarly, it’s nice that Starfleet has managed to hit the happy medium of parties that aren’t stuffy diplomatic receptions or the Mos Eisley cantina.

The soundtrack appears to be a remix of ‘Staying Alive’, which explains those ‘DISCO’ t-shirts that I’d foolishly thought were doing something as pedestrian as abbreviating Discovery. And of course, it actually being a party ship explains the black(light) alerts and their stash of mushrooms. Poor old Michael hates it all so much she prefers to notice the lights flickering ominously, something I’m sure won’t be relevant later on.

After we had Tilly blurting out that Ash is so hot last week, now we have Michael staring longingly at him from the corner as he gives a rousing speech. This is not to knock Ash’s lovely face, but the writers are clearly trying to put their feet down and establish that both halves of the show’s obvious power couple are actually straight, and it’s not working. Tilly has no issue with Michael cutting in on her action, and claims she’s more into musicians than soldiers these days anyway – which, said to Michael, just comes off like a heartwrenching attempt to save face.

Michael and Ash get to talking, maybe something’s going to happen – but then they get called to the bridge, so maybe we’ll never know (but that’s laughably unlikely). They’ve picked something up on the radar, but it turns out to just be a common-or-garden space whale. This kind is endangered, so they beam it aboard to take it off to some kind of space-wildlife sanctuary.

It’s at this point that it all goes wrong, when the whale’s mouth opens and a guy in a silly costume wanders out and starts shooting people. It doesn’t reflect well on Discovery, which is after all functioning as a warship – really, they’re lucky it was a guy in a silly costume rather than four dozen Klingons in bad moods. Then again, Kirk’s Enterprise once found itself in even greater peril when an Irishman got drunk, locked himself in the engine room, and set a course for Cork.

Our space-Jonah whips off his silly helmet and reveals himself to be their old pal Harry Mudd – still as greasy and grandiloquent as ever, but this time bearing a terrible grudge. He wants to steal Discovery’s mushroom drive to sell it to the Klingons, and doesn’t much care how many times he has to kill everyone to do it – at which point Discovery blows up, and we find ourselves back at the party.

Now, people screwing with time is a Trek staple (to say nothing of the ship being blown up), and the captains have traditionally absolutely hated it. Back in Enterprise, the gang got tangled up in the incredibly confusing time cold war, and by the time of The Next Generation, the Federation will have an entire shadowy bureau dedicated to trying to keep chronology from getting too damaged (often with little success) – but right now, they’re having to play it by ear.

Like Marty McFly before him, Mudd has all the time he wants, because he’s got a time machine – and so is going about the heist in quite a leisurely way, getting incrementally closer to figuring out the mushroom drive, but also taking the opportunity for revenge on Lorca, by shooting him in the face over and over like this is an FPS and he’s turned on god mode.

However, Mudd hasn’t reckoned on one thing – Stametz. The mushroom drive is messing with his personality to the extent that when Michael knocked into him earlier, his reaction was to hug her, and say, y’know, we’re all just individuals going through life, man. But the dangerous levels of psilocybin in his blood are also allowing his consciousness to exist outside of time and space – so he alone is able to remember what’s going on.

This too is a Trek staple. Whenever reality’s being messed with somehow, often it will be only one member of the crew who notices, and they must then suffer the indignity of sounding absolutely loopy when they try and explain what’s going on to the rest of the gang. And as you might imagine, these days Stametz is on the border of that at the best of times.

As time cycles round again, Stametz does his best to warn Michael, getting her to tell him a secret so next-cycle-her knows she’s telling the truth – which, tragically, is that she’s never been in love. He wants her to warn Ash as well, a tactic which is running into the teeth of her flounderingly awkward inability to talk to him. Luckily, who better to save the day and also to get her and Ash together than a gay best friend? (I mean Stametz, not Tilly).

Inspired by the story of how Stametz and Culber met (spoiler: stuffiness) Michael and Ash go through the opening stages of any romance over the course of a couple of loops – but, in spite of a slow dance and a first kiss, they still aren’t making a lot of ground against Mudd, who’s taken over all the important computer systems and is now calling himself Captain Mudd and chucking antimatter at people. Their only chance is to get him to set off another time-cycle – so Michael approaches him with the idea that while the Klingons will pay top dollar for Discovery, they’ll pay even topper dollar for the person who killed T’kuvma, that is to say, her.

At about the point Mudd starts hearing a cash register sound and his eyes turn into revolving dollar signs, Michael swallows some of his antimatter. This was established earlier as a particularly painful way to die, begging the question of why she didn’t just shoot herself. Either way though, it works – Mudd immediately beep-boops them back to the party – and now they can spring their plan into action.

While Mudd’s taken over all the major systems, they can still screw with him via the minor systems – which, oddly, include the captain’s chair. So instead of sending their location to the Klingons, what he’s actually done is sent their location to Stella, the girl he ran off on and whose dowry he blew, and also her arms-dealer father.

When they arrive, Stella is instantly willing to take Mudd back – and her father, despite being dressed like a Nazi on a night at the opera, is perfectly happy about this, not even taking a space-shotgun to him. Stella’s father asks if there’s anything he can do for Starfleet, and Lorca demands that they keep Mudd out of trouble, which…really seems like Mudd’s getting off unjustifiably scot-free. I know his whole vibe is that of the lovable rascal, but in this episode we had him blowing up Discovery and murdering Lorca in cold blood many times over.

(Though speaking of his lovable rascal-cred, the tribble that Lorca had on his desk does seem to be missing during Captain Mudd’s tenure. This could very well be the moment that put Mudd on his path to tribble-tastrophe.)

There’s also the fact that they’re still, lest we forget, at war with the Klingons. It seems like a big scary arms dealer – albeit he turned out to be a pussycat where his spoilt daughter’s concerned – might be able to help Starfleet in ways beyond keeping that pesky Mudd off the streets.

Michael and Ash have a mutual debrief later in the turbo-lift, and Ash says it’s a shame they had to miss their first kiss – but even though they’re alone in a lift, he doesn’t go for a repeat performance. He doesn’t say it’s because of how hurt Tilly would be but come on, we’re all thinking it.