the Harry Mudd episode. The best character is definitely Stamets - likeable but also complex and very useful for plots but not in a deus ex machina way.
Tilly is OK but is leaning a bit too much towards a Neelix type of role and I wanted every alien they met to kill him. I guess at least on this show if she does end up that bad there's a chance she might actually be knocked off.
Lorca is cool - they've tried dark captains before but he is a genuine bastard, while not being evil. The way he manipulated Stamets into doing one more jump was cool, then usurped by Stamets' strength of moral integrity and lack of physical integrity.
The Klingons have their drawbacks (why did they decide on a style of make-up that makes acting impossible as well as having them speak a "foreign" language thus making acting that way virtually impossible?) but they are at least genuinely bad - usually Klingons are all bark. The female spy Klingon still manages to have a personality and believable story arc despite everything.
The random aliens are very cool. Ripper, the space whale, the sentient peace-loving forest that's just as misguidedly centrist as you'd expect something that hippyish to be.
Michael Burnham is OK. Don't know why I don't like her that much, though I don't dislike her either. Can't be arsed about the romance.
I know it's only a few episodes in but it'd be nice if the other characters had a bit of a personality.
Tyler is definitely Voq. He had a conversation with Michael about her having trouble with conflicting emotions, and he said he knew that was just being human (which is disparaging from a Klingon POV). Then she introduced herself, and it went like this:
We've met.
- Have we? Let's try it again.
Then in the last episode she says that Tyler "put on a facade." Obviously she doesn't know he's not really the man she met before (because if he was on the ship he was supposed to be on they'd have met before Discovery) but if he is Voq then it's dramatic irony. There are lots of little things like that that will have a double meaning if he really is Tyler.
And he doesn't know either, except very deep down. A sleeper agent. His memories of torture also jibe with memories of being operated on to look human.
As long as he's the only one, I don't mind. I gave up on Westworld when it became clear that pretty much anyone could be a robot - it made the story meaningless.
Lorca definitely had a strong suspicion (at least) that he was sending the Admiral off to be captured. He suggested it as a way to stop her from taking his ship away and he was pissed off when she returned alive.
If they're in an alternative universe now that happens to be the ST:OS canon universe, then that's a clever way of getting away with setting their show essentially in the ST universe but with their own designs and fairly significant changes. Or, given what Stamets said about "so many possibilities", this could be them leaping to that universe just for one episode, to then either return to their own universe or to go on to more. Though hopefully not too many - this isn't Sliders.
He did this on purpose? He'd been studying Stamets' maps, so maybe he'd realised a way to travel to the other/mirror/whatever universe? They are explorers, after all.
