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Saru’s dying. The ship is collapsing. Tilly’s being blobnapped by a hallucinated fungus named May. But Steph? Steph is not having it. 😠 This week, the drama is high—but the believability is low—as Our Sci Fi World tackles Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, Episode 4: "An Obol for Charon."

📉 From the jump, Steph calls it: Saru’s not going to die, and the episode knows it. So why does it lay the melodrama on thick? She breaks down how stacking three simultaneous crises—Saru’s “terminal” illness, Tilly’s freaky neural invasion, and the ship’s power-failure death spiral—leaves the emotional core untouchable. Jeff agrees: there’s no room to breathe, no narrative trust, and certainly no way to feel it all.

🔍 But the ep isn’t without joy. Enter Jet Reno (🔥 Jet with two T’s), returning like an engineering rockstar with duct tape, sarcasm, and no time for Stamets’ ego. Steph immediately falls in love and crowns Reno the MVP of chaos. She’s unapologetically herself, possibly immortal, and entirely uninsultable. Jeff and Steph dig into her dynamic with Stamets and how their energy instantly clicks into a new version of Trek’s classic “grumpy genius duo.”

🗣️ In the biggest Trek-troversy of the week, Steph learns—on mic—that everyone on Star Trek isn’t actually speaking English. Cue a hilarious conversation about the universal translator, alien earpieces, and whether Pike’s “hillbilly Montana English” is somehow being beamed into fluent Vulcan. (“Wait… are they all just hearing their own language??”)

📚 They also fall face-first into a glorious idiom rabbit hole over the phrase “like it or lump it.” Steph insists it’s a real thing. Jeff has never heard it. They end up Googling etymology and debating what “lump” even means as a verb. (One of them is right. It’s Steph. Again.)

🌌 Amid the chaos, this becomes an unintentional episode about overstuffed storytelling—how too much plot makes everything feel weightless, and how shows like Discovery sometimes sabotage their own emotional arcs by cramming them between high-stakes techno-catastrophes. Saru deserved better.

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Parenting a half-human, half-Vulcan child is never going to be easy. Add a logic-first father, a disappearing son, and a galaxy full of dangerous secrets, and the challenge becomes something else entirely. Point of Light, the third episode of Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, digs into the tension between love and logic, and this episode of Our Sci Fi World rides every beat of that storm.

Jeff and Steph track three emotional storylines across three locations, where power, trust, and family are all under pressure. Amanda Grayson boards Discovery to demand Spock’s medical records and refuses to back down. She knows her son better than Starfleet does and she’s done asking politely. Her scenes with Michael Burnham are the emotional heart of the episode, rich with pain and connection, and Jeff and Steph both lock into the tension. They ask: what makes a good parent when your child isn't just a mystery but a cultural contradiction?

Steph brings her real-world production lens to bear, unpacking how a script like this balances massive tone shifts and why Amanda’s scenes hold so much weight. Jeff breaks down Amanda’s evolution as a character, from background figure to emotional anchor, and makes the case that Discovery is finally honoring her role in Spock’s life. They both agree: Amanda Grayson may be one of the most underappreciated characters in the Trek canon.

Meanwhile, back on Qo’noS, Chancellor L’Rell and Ash Tyler are juggling empire, identity, and an impossible secret. Their child has been hidden away with Klingon monks. Their leadership is under attack. And Mirror Georgiou arrives just in time to complicate everything with a new offer. It’s the start of what will become Section 31, and Michelle Yeoh’s performance is so commanding it nearly resets the tone of the show. Steph talks about what happens on set when a single actor controls the temperature of a scene. Jeff praises the decision to play L’Rell’s grief straight and not cut away.

There’s politics. There’s betrayal. There’s a ceremonial knife pulled out of someone’s armpit. And somehow, through all of it, Discovery keeps its narrative threads just barely connected.

This episode of the podcast delivers on all fronts. There’s theory, there’s laughter, and there are serious questions about Starfleet’s mental health protocols. Jeff explains why logic alone will never raise a functional Vulcan. Steph wonders what happened to Pike’s storyline. And both hosts hold onto the same insight: Star Trek works best when it asks what love looks like under pressure.

If you're watching Discovery for the high-stakes canon-building or just here for a flawless Amanda Grayson monologue, you're in the right place. This is a messy, ambitious, emotionally rich hour of Trek, and this podcast digs all the way in.

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A glowing red signal. A forgotten Earth colony. A captain who jumps on phasers like they’re grenades. In this episode of Our Sci Fi World, Jeff and Steph dive into Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, Episode 2, “New Eden,” and everything it sets in motion.

Discovery’s mission brings them to a distant planet where survivors of World War III live without technology, memory of Earth, or even electricity. While Pike and Burnham navigate the rules of General Order One and a faith-based society, Saru manages command on the bridge, and Tilly nearly blows herself up chasing an asteroid shard with a mysterious energy signature.

Jeff zeroes in on how Discovery uses mystery and misdirection to shape its serialized arc, including what the show gains and risks by withholding Spock. Stamets confesses he saw Hugh inside the mycelial network, and Jeff wonders aloud if this is Trek’s version of Supernatural’s resurrection rules. Steph, meanwhile, focuses on the real-life dynamics underneath the sci-fi, from actor hierarchy to call times and what happens when a "wheels up" time doesn't match the paper trail.

Also in this episode: questions about Vulcan diagnosis protocols, a spirited debate over whether “starship” and “spaceship” are interchangeable, and the birth of what may become a recurring segment—the Glossary Girlies. From faith versus science to union regulations, New Eden sparks the kind of conversation only this show can deliver.

Whether you’re in it for Pike, production, or pre-warp protocol, this one’s for you.