“The Brightest Star”– Episode SF-003– Doug Jones as Saru of the CBS All Access series STAR TREK: SHORT TREKS. Photo Cr: Michael Gibson/CBS © 2018 CBS Interactive. All Rights Reserved.

Years before his time in Starfleet, a young Saru lives on Kaminar with his sister Siranna and their father, Aradar. As we see him go about his routine, he explains through narration that he sees the world a bit differently from his fellow Kelpiens. Where they look at the stars and see death, he sees hope. We also witness a sort of ritual self-sacrifice that the Kelpiens undertake when they reach vahar’ ai, which they believe means that they have been chosen by the Watchful Eye to maintain the Great Balance. This involves the chosen Kelpiens approaching an obelisk in their village and vanishing – whether they’re transported away or merely disintegrated is never stated.

One day, Aradar returns from a sacrifice with an errant fragment of technology belonging to the Ba’ul – the species with which the Kelpiens coexist on Kaminar. He tells Saru to dispose of the fragment, reminding him that they are forbidden to keep it. As they speak, Saru displays an inquisitiveness that clashes with his father’s more traditionalist convictions. That night, instead of disposing of the fragment, Saru begins to experiment with it. Eventually, he is able to send a message, simply to see if there’s anyone out there who can hear it.

Time passes and Saru begins to wonder if he’ll ever get an answer. Until one day he does. It’s a brief message, one that simply reads “hello”. But it’s enough. Saru realizes that the life of a Kelpiens isn’t enough for him, and arranged to meet whoever is on the other side of the communicator. One night, he and Siranna venture far from their village. When she mentions an urge to return to safety, he tells her she should do so, bidding her a fond farewell.

Saru continues on, reaching a clearing where, before long, a Starfleet shuttle lands. The pilot introduces herself as Lieutenant Philippa Georgiou. She tells Saru that Starfleet took a great deal of convincing just to allow her to meet with him. If he leaves Kaminar with her, she says, he will never be able to return. The thought is a sobering one, but after one last look at his village, he declares that he no longer has a place here and boards the shuttle.

When I first saw ‘The Brightest Star’, it was not what I expected.

In and of itself, that’s not a bad thing. But the weird part is that I’m still not entirely sure just what it was that I expected.

I suspect, though, that this… dissonance, for want of a better word, is a result of the thing that made Saru (and the Kelpiens more generally) so interesting in the first season of ‘Discovery’. I’m talking, of course, about their nature as a “prey species” (a phrase often used by Saru himself). It’s an intriguing concept. After all, what does a “prey species” actually look like, especially once it attains sentience and develops the sort of advanced technologies that would bring them into contact with the Federation? Humans, after all, haven’t always been at the top of our food chain. Does that make us a prey species? Maybe, from a certain point of view. But clearly, that wasn’t the idea with the Kelpiens. If it were – if it had just been their ancestors who were hunted – I imagine things would have been far less interesting.

“The Brightest Star”– Episode SF-003– Doug Jones as Saru of the CBS All Access series STAR TREK: SHORT TREKS. Photo Cr: Michael Gibson/CBS © 2018 CBS Interactive. All Rights Reserved.

But between that broad concept and the revelation in ‘Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum’ that Saru lives in a more or less constant state of fear, we were given very little sense of how that predator/prey dynamic actually worked. That in turn, meant that each viewer was left to fill that void with whatever made sense to them, based on as much or as little thought as they cared to put into it. Think of it as splitting the difference between projection and headcanon.

And I suspect that’s the root of my ambivalence, because while it’s not something I invested a ton of thought in (and thus I hesitate to say I had any specific expectations for how it might play out on screen), the picture that developed in my mind over the first season was one of Kelpiens being actively hunted. But what we ultimately got wasn’t the typical ‘National Geographic’ idea of a predator/prey relationship. In fact, what we actually saw was more akin to subjugation through religion and ritual. Which, if I’m being perfectly honest, makes much more sense, no matter how ambivalent my immediate reaction might have been.

Despite my initial ambivalence on that front, there was one thing I immediately loved, and that was the inclusion of Georgiou as the first human (and almost certainly the first non-Kelpien) Saru ever met. And I’m not just saying that because it’s always a thrill when Michelle Yeoh turns up on ‘Discovery’. Her involvement instantly deepens the relationship between the two characters, establishing that she was more than just a captain or even a mentor to him. She represented hope. On top of that, it even adds nuance and depth to his relationship with Michael Burnham as well… (What? We’re talking about ‘Discovery’. You knew it would come back to her eventually.). Specifically, it lends some much needed context to the animosity Saru bears toward Burnham for much of the first season. Sure, no one is terribly fond of Burnham when she arrives on Discovery, but Saru seemed to take her mutiny and the subsequent death of Georgiou particularly hard. Now we know why.

And of course it goes without saying, but Doug Jones is fantastic here. While he’s always been a standout on ‘Discovery’, this is very nearly a one-man show, and he carries it marvelously. His scenes with Aradar and Georgiou, and especially his farewell to Siranna are worthy of particular mention.

‘The Brightest Star’ may not be “essential” in that skipping it likely won’t impede your ability to follow the narrative that unfolds in ‘The Sound of Thunder’. But if you have any interest in Saru as a character, where he came from, what drives him, then you have no reason not to watch this. Hell, if you just like watching Doug Jones act, then ‘The Brightest Star’ is fifteen minutes well spent.

What did you think of ‘The Brightest Star’? As always, let us know in the comments and check back in two weeks for the next ‘Final Frontier Friday’!