It's great to see 'Star Trek' embracing a metaphoric story reflecting the journey of a very personal transformation and we've seen a lot of that, but it's not exactly subtle anymore and it's entirely possible to saturate a good thing. It's such a shame that neither Gray nor Adira (Blu del Barrio) have been given stronger, better-written parts to play. Then we get to the most contrived portion of this episode, the new relationship between Zora (voiced by Annabelle Wallis) and Gray Tal (Ian Alexander).

Nerd note: It's refreshing that an 'inverse tachyon pulse' wasn't mentioned at any point since Saru did reference the Enterprise breaching a subspace barrier earlier and we assume that was from 'The Next Generation' series finale 'All Good Things' (Season 7, Episodes 25 and 26). So now we have our ticking clock for this episode. A photonic flare fired at the same speed with an identical trajectory as the poor drone indicates that the sub-space bubble that the Discovery is in, is collapsing. The crew goes through a well-conceived plan of action in order to gain answers.

And her decision proves to be the right one when the drone encounters the edge of the rift and begins to disintegrate, screaming as it does so…in an unusually dark moment in 'Star Trek: Discovery' worthy of a Wilhelm scream. Burnham very wisely launches a DOT-23 robot drone to investigate, rather than risk a life. Moreover, all scans are useless as there is quite literally nothing out there no stars, no plasma barrier, no gas clouds, no nothing. Suddenly, instead of a long, bumpy journey through the plasma barrier of the subspace rift, the ride becomes as smooth as glass.

There are many nice, mostly understated touches to this episode that have been lacking in others so far.

Captain nice episode 1