Full spoilers follow for this episode.
One of Star Trek: Discovery’s greatest moments (to date) comes late in this episode, the second of Season 2, when Anson Mount’s Captain Pike meets with Jacob, a human whose people have lived their entire lives on a planet on the other side of the galaxy, ignorant of Starfleet, the Federation, and even space travel. “Do you have a ship?” Jacob asks Pike, sort of half-flapping his arms like wings. “Do you, uh… fly among the stars?”
Pike grins slightly in response and just says “Yeah,” almost embarrassed at how awesome not just his life is, but life is for just about every citizen of the Federation.
Mount sells the moment, enshrining himself in just two episodes as one of the great Star Trek actors. But also, in that moment Discovery’s Season 2 transformation from dark and brooding war drama to a more traditional Trek story continues, as Pike grapples with the Prime Directive — aka General Order 1 — in “New Eden,” a planet-of-the-week style story that still manages to thread the season’s bigger Red Angel arc into its plot. The result is an episode that crackles with humor and some exciting moments, while also giving Pike and Sonequa Martin-Green’s Burnham some good old-fashioned Trekkian dilemmas to deal with.