“Brother” is the 1st episode of the 2nd season of the TV show “Star Trek: Discovery”, which starts again after “Will You Take My Hand?“.

Note. This article contains spoilers about “Brother”.

The USS Discovery reaches the USS Enterprise, which suffered severe system failures, and commander Saru (Doug Jones) offers his help. Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) gets on board the Discovery and announces that his orders are to take command to investigate a series of powerful cosmic signals. Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) tries to meet Spock.

After a first season of ups and down and subject to much criticism, showrunners Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harberts got fired when production of the second season had already begun, after almost completing the first five episodes. According to what was reported, they got fired not due to creative disagreements, but to the accusations of abuses by the authors and other management problems, including expenses exceeding the budget.

Alex Kurtzman, who contributed to the show’s creation, was appointed in their place and a pause was needed to assess the situation with the authors. After some time the production is resumed until the end of the season, which was extended to 14 episodes instead of the 13 originally scheduled.

Among the promises for the 2nd season was to bring the story of “Star Trek: Discovery” back into the canon of the original series developing it in order to explain what appeared as inconsistencies. In “Brother” Spock appears only in flashbacks that show Michael Burnham joining the Sarek (James Frain) family but his presence hovers throughout much of the episode, where something more about the relationships between them and with Amanda Grayson (Mia Kirshner). Michael Burnham talks about her adoptive family with Saru as well and this offers a connection with one of the mini-episodes – accessible on Netflix in the trailer section! – produced during the break between the two seasons.

I appreciated the introspective part of “Brother” along with the introduction of Captain Christopher Pike, linked to a cosmic mystery that during the episode shows a number of ramifications. The story of the detected signals is somewhat anticipated by a story told by Michael Burnham that begins the season with beautiful images taken by the Cassini space probe during its mission.

The episode also contains a part with a lot of action, but it seemed to me that it was based too much on cliches, so I didn’t find it interesting. Overall, “Brother” lasts about an hour but maybe they could’ve cut the action a little because the introspection and the introduction of the cosmic mystery in my opinion were more than enough but I fear that the showrunners feel obligated to add action to avoid complaints about the slow pace. Despite that, this start of the season seemed encouraging to me so I hope the the story-arc they started is well developed.