Welp, here we go! After two years and however may seasons of OTHER Star Trek shows in between, we return to the ship and show and tech that started this era of Trek production. And it starts with a bang! Here we go with 5x01, "Red Directive".
Spoilers!
- The "Pathway Drive" mentioned last year has officially won as the next generation, dilithium-less FTL drive for Starfleet. They're not decommissioning Discovery, but the spore drive is dead as a fleetwide option.
- The Tholians and Breen are mentioned as antagonistic parties in this era.
- Saru now sports the same dress uniform as Burnham, which was unique last year. Looks like a command officer's model. Admiral Vance has his own that I didn't recall from last year, which is gray like the rank and file uniforms.
- Kovich and Vance invite and brief Burnham in the "infinity room", a blank white space, with a fancy ouroboros-shaped glass invitation. I'm guessing some other dimensional space cut off from the three or more we're used to.
- The 800 year-old Romulan ship is SO 800 years old, its insides look an awful lot like Discovery's, right down to the papered-over "rabbit's tooth" windows!
- The Romulan corpse they discover is wearing a 24th century, pre-Nemesis (and post ENT) uniform. Curious that despite how dessicated the body is, the ship itself has remained spotless for this long.
- 32nd century phaser pistols can extend themselves into rifle mode! Though I question the logic of using a rifle in close quarters like this, despite the addition of a rapid fire that apparently didn't exist in pistol mode. It still DOES possess technology to make the phaser bolts to fly where the sparks are exploding, instead of where the actor is actually pointing the barrel. :P
- At the end of the chase scene (released previously), Moll's ship releases twenty warp decoys, each on a different course. Saru mentions it'll take days to figure out where they went.
- We see Discovery spore in from the inside of the open shuttlebay. After all they went through to finally close that door..!
- The tribble from 4x01 is still tribbling around Discovery! Given what what we see in PRO S2 and PIC S3, I'm wondering if we can assemble a better look at the species' rapid evolution over time, from being a pet and lab dissection in DSC S1.
- It's great that holocomms STILL fritz more here than in DS9.
- Fred is a synthetic of the (Altan) Soong / A500 family.
- Among the loot from the Romulan ship includes "vintage" PADDs and tricorders, the puzzle box, isolinear chips, and an accurate, but deployed, self sealing stembolt. I can only guess they're used for the same reason you use a SSS elsewhere in the 24th century.
- Fred has a thing for ancient weapons. His shop on Q'mau / Tattooine / Arrakis / Space Marrakesh is littered with old props from previous seasons, right down to an early DSC phaser on his desk.
- Fred attempts to buy the gang's lot for three bars of latinum. Is that still lot? Is inflation a thing in this galaxy? The NoJay Consortium sold their info for that much, or tried to.
- Since her upgrade, Discovery no longer uses wires. We'll see how that pans out the next time we see exploded wreckage on the ship.
- At the conclusion of the episode, Discovery dusts off and enters into the Archer spacedock.
