This was not nearly as good as the last few. Not terrible, but it was mostly an episode that moved the pieces around the board and felt largely unmotivated in doing so. We got set-up for later revelations and that was about it. 8/10 for being decent, but nothing special. Might have gone lower, but the Vulcan sets and costume design were exceptional.
This was a bridging episode: how well this episode sits in the season depends entirely on where things go from here.
The Tyler/Pike plot was the weakest in the episode. Tyler's armchair psychoanalysis of Pike felt like it came from out of nowhere, and it was very disappointing that he was given the satisfaction of being right about something Pike didn't display any indication of. Nothing he did seemed particularly
unusual given the circumstances, and Tyler's personality seems to be changing to serve the needs of the plot. To be fair, that's the same role he played last season. I suppose the composite mind is a convenient excuse for it, but it's still hard to track who he is and what he wants. Does he need to be a love interest, despite having no chemistry, so he can play a key role during a betrayal later? Get them together during an erased timeline and then just pretend it's still a thing. Here, he's rejected by the Klingons, picked up by Section 31 despite having no discernible skills (his talent as an infiltrator was literally due to being a sleeper agent, technically a person who is now dead), and then assigned to a ship where he's going to face a lot of opposition and resentment. The only reason to have him on Discovery is his relationship with Burnham, and she's been mostly absent on her own mission since he arrived. His interactions with Pike just seem empty. He's constantly aggressive to Pike for no reason, and it feels like it's only because they want to eventually have him be here to do things like he did this week, that no one else would be allowed to do. He's literally inserting himself into scenes because of S31's authority (which they wisely justified by having Cornwell authorize it), and it feels as forced as it is.
The show continues to look
marvelous this season, and this week adds some amazing shots of Vulcan to the mix. The sets and the costumes are magnificent, even if they do show their budgetary constraints in size, they still manage to look wonderful. Sadly, the Spock plot feels strained, and nothing much happened. After all the searching for Spock, it turns out he's somehow managed to find his way home (wasn't Amanda the one out asking people to help her find him?) and is hiding out there. We get some family drama that didn't interest me much; we don't get anything new from anyone except seeing Amanda act like she doesn't realize she lives on Vulcan surrounded by Vulcans (not a character trait I appreciate), and then after all
that Burnham takes Spock to Section 31 anyway, somehow without any difficulty.
But the worst part is what happens next: she gains nothing by taking him there. The entire side-trip to Section 31 served no purpose in her plot to find or help Spock, or gain access to his knowledge. If you want to write a "useless" diversion like that, it really needs to still serve an unintended purpose (either as an accidental gaining of some ancillary thing, or a new setback to overcome), but it feels very strongly as if the entire purpose of this set of scenes on the S31 ship was to let Burnham be completely snowed by The Emperor into helping her take over command. She practically admits as much to Burnham, and yet there is no argument, no questioning, no negotiation. She tells her that Spock is in danger and instead of interrogating any aspect of the situation she follows the plan given by someone she has avowed to not trust. And now Burnham and Spock are right back where they started, having played a role in someone else's story (so that the spin-off can have The Emperor where it wants her to be). She decoded the answer to the message from Spock without any new information.
And I admit I groaned when the results came up as Talos IV. I can see some potential there, but my first instinct is to feel the heavy hand of pandering across the screen. I don't need to have answers to all the questions I never asked. With luck, they'll give us something about why the death penalty is attached to this place, but I don't have a personal need to see the Talosians (they do look cool in the preview -- not how I would interpret them, but still cool -- though a bit too much like the Engineers from Prometheus, perhaps). Talos IV feels, to me, like the least-interesting solution to Spock's problem; it contributes again to the small-world problem Discovery struggles with rather than being an "oh, of course they can help!" moment which was probably the intent.
Stamets and Tilly have good chemistry together. I like his continued mentoring of her, and telling her to trust herself because he wouldn't ask just anyone to beam him through time. That's a lovely moment. The rest of the sciency-nonsense didn't do anything for me, and the whole time rift seemed to come out of nowhere (literally) in orbit above Kaminar... and then they just leave at Warp. I sure hope that shockwave isn't a problem for the war breaking out on the surface of the planet... None of this subplot served any purpose in this episode. It was a situation that is not unusual for Star Trek, providing a stage for Tyler's interactions with Pike, and (presumably) setting up shenanigans for the future (the probe, and Airiam's possession).
Poor Airiam. I do wonder if her going through all the Sphere's infodump previously and now this magical virus-communicated-by-a-simple-visual will be connected. She's not in for a pleasant time, I suspect. It probably would have been more streamlined if she'd been on the shuttle and infected directly, but that would have made in-universe sense (she could have navigated the rift due to her superior processing ability) and left out the unnecessary Tyler presence, and we can't have that. Missed opportunity to give the character a bit of screen-time there in a way that would have contributed to the story and flowed better.
And with this post, after eleven years of being registered and much longer being a lurker, I should finally be rid of that silly banner at the top of the forum welcoming me to the board and calling me a newbie. 
