Star Trek: Discovery season 1 episode 11 'The Wolf Inside' review & recap: Easily the worst outing

Hot on the heels of one of its very strongest episodes comes easily Star Trek: Discovery’s worst outing, one that spins its wheels before delivering a highly predictable twist and totally bungling its handling of one of the show’s key plotlines.

We kick off still in the Mirror Universe, but the fun and games of last week are instead replaced by two spaceships capable of travelling faster than the speed of light just kind of hanging about in deep space. Burnham pretends to be her own evil twin while searching for a poorly-sketched Maguffin that should hold information on how the Discovery’s crew can get back to our universe, in a thread the lack of momentum of which is almost comical. For a show about trekking and discovery (do note the words are there in the title), the characters in this episode go nowhere fast, at least until Burnham goes on a bizarre mission to seek to understand how a pan-racial coalition can be maintained, seemingly forgetting that as a Starfleet officer she already works for one.

Anyway, we kick off with Burnham reluctantly sanctioning the execution of some of the Mirror Shenzhou’s crew for ‘malicious thoughts’ about the Terran Emperor – but who could that possibly be? Given pretty much every cast member has been shown in their evil equivalent (even Sarek shows up sporting a goatee, in a nice homage to Spock’s evil twin facial hair from the franchise’s first trip to the mirror universe), so it’s likely someone we’ve seen before. Perhaps one of the more internationally prominent cast members? Maybe one whose presence in the show was heavily promoted before she abruptly died in the pilot, whose character had an intense emotional bond with Burnham?

Who can say? We’ll find out at the end of the episode.

Meanwhile, Tilly and Saru are on the Discovery trying to work out how to save Stamets, who has apparently been blamed for the death of Culber. They theorise that he killed him in confusion, working out that his brain patterns changed state after the 133 jumps meaning his mind is essentially in several dimensions at once.

What follows is basically a re-do of an old episode of House, with our heroes working out that more exposure to the spores is the only way to help Stamets, which happens to be against medical advice. The explanation for this is top-notch techno-babble, even for Star Trek, so all credit to Mary Wiseman and Doug Jones for getting through it, but when the only real takeaway from an episode’s plotline is the verbal dexterity of the actors, you may well have some problems. Still, it’s nice to see Tilly coming into her own – the treatment is her idea – but when it’s far from clear what they’re actually doing, the triumph doesn’t quite register as such.

Burnham, Tyler and Lorca’s adventure aboard the evil version of the Shenzhen isn’t much better: we open with an interesting monologue from Burnham on how she needs to remember the difference between being a fascist and pretending to be a fascist, and that’s about all of interest.

Lorca’s barely in this episode, but there’s just time to set up the idea he may be stalling the team’s return to the Discovery before Burnham is off on a reconnaissance mission to the anti-Terran resistance movement. She needs to convince them that the humans are coming, and in a meeting in one of the conference rooms so favoured by resistance movements throughout history, manages to do so, while delivering some unbelievably on-the-nose questioning about how the resistance has managed to build an alliance across species.

That’s not the real meat of the scene though: it turns out that the leader of the resistance is… Voq, who in Discovery’s universe has been surgically turned into… our pal Tyler!

In fairness, the idea of someone being physically altered into a new species and meeting their ‘original’ in a parallel universe is a solid one, and hardly a hoary old standard. It’s just the show does nothing with it: Tyler, hearing his counterpart speak the language, snaps, and attacks ‘himself.’

He’s quickly subdued, and Voq calms down quickly enough to accept Burnham’s overtures for peace. The whole scene is odd, but honestly – how many people go from awkward negotiations to fighting to peaceful compromise within minutes, all in the same scene? It’s dodgy writing, and just doesn’t work.

The meeting over, the rebels agree to flee so they can fight another day, and Tyler and Burnham return to the evil version of the Shenzhen. We’ve known for a week that Tyler was a secret Klingon (well, smarter viewers have known since well before Christmas), but Burnham is only finding out now, and amid some pretty gnarly flashbacks to the procedure, the Klingon side of Tyler/Voq seems to be winning out.

Once again, an actor does sterling work with a thankless task: Shazad Latif (Clem Fandango of Toast of London, of course) really goes for it with the Klingon language and accent, and just about gets away with it. Of course, it’s hard to remember the albino Klingon Tyler used to be, so it’s really more useful to see him as a totally new character.

Still, his sudden heel turn and ranting about the glories of the Klingon empire feels odd and out-of-nowhere. When he and Burnham fight, is he really about to kill her?

We never find out, because the goons of the evil Shenzhen show up and promptly sentence Tyler/Voq to death for making an attempt on their ‘captain’s’ life. Burnham saves him, however, beaming him into space then straight back to the Discovery, where the episode wraps up with his arrival there with Burnham having sequestered a fancy USB drive on his person with the data the Discovery needs.

So, this all may sound like there were some pretty dramatic developments, but it’s hard to nail down precisely why 'The Wolf Inside' doesn’t work. It’s not plausibility: we’re in SF-land, so all bets are off. The show’s actors are a gifted bunch, and work hard to sell some clunky dialogue. Even the concepts aren’t bad: it’s just their delivery. Everything feels shuffled, jumbled, out of order: characters react to things at odd times, like no living human would.

At times, it can feel like a justification of all clichés of bad SF writing. STD is better than this.

Oh, and by the way, Michelle Yeoh’s Philippa Georgiou, Burnham’s prime-universe mentor, is the emperor, because of course she is.