"Lethe" wasn't perfect but it was pretty damned good. I'm a writer and I obsess over writing as a result. Crisp dialogue means the world to me and "Lethe" packs a better script than anything that came before it. Simply put, it's snappy. The interactions aboard the Discovery in particular were very strong. Burnham and Tilly are terrific together so please be excited for the inevitable emotional mayhem they get themselves into going forward.
Lorca is emerging as the show's best character though and so much of that is thanks to his actor, not his lines. His lines are good but Jason Isaacs is that much better. I was pleased with his B-Plot's ability to reveal layers in this dude. Whereas prior episodes have either shown him merely through Burnham's eyes or told us about his past through Mudd's mouth, this time we saw the world as he sees it, and it's haunted.
The core of the story, Burnham/Sarek, is where things encounter a bit of turbulence. Not much, mind you. But a bit. I dig the psychedelic nebula the shuttle traverses en route to Sarek's rescue. I dig Tyler fretting over what to do about Burnham when her connection to Sarek strains. I dig a lot of what we see and hear with the idea that Sarek chose Spock over Burnham for a big gig he never even pursued, anyway. I'm a little less enthusiastic about repeatedly having Sonequa Martin-Green and James Frain go at one-another with Vulcan martial arts as Burnham tries to bring the truth out in her surrogate father. Yeah, no, I know, I get it, y'all, it's metaphor, but it's kind of silly, too. Again, I'm a writer; I think I'd be tempted to scribble it down into a script, myself. But it doesn't entirely translate with a believable face when put to film.
We've got a new plot thread emerging in some Vulcan extremists now and as a Star Trek: Enterprise fan I'm hyped. I loved that show's ability to portray a planet Vulcan with a schism and a chip on its shoulder. I'm glad to see that schism still remains to some extent some 90-odd years later because Enterprise was cut down before its time. The Vulcan race at-large seems to be behaving more in the vein of TOS-and-beyond, which is great and it makes sense because Archer and T'Pol helped right the course, but we've still got radicals or fundamentalists or wherever they're going with this and that's going to be an ongoing threat. "The great experiment" is what those dweebs are calling the Federation and they're saying that it failed. Yeah, we'll see. Dweebs.
Now that Cornwell's well and truly fucked, Lorca's suddenly following orders to the letter and not going after her himself. Kol's got a high-tier prisoner and Dennas (the Klingon matriarch with the bedazzling head jewelry) is back after debuting in holographic form in the premiere. All well and good but what's the deal with Stamets? He was two sentences away from warping himself to 1966 with all the psychedelic rhetoric this episode. His mycellial LSD trip seems to have brought back a happier dude indeed. Is he in actuality Mirror!Stamets? Are we ready to get wild with a crew from The Other Side? Only time will tell. Remember: Tyler is Voq or I lose this season's biggest bet.