You Might Have Missed The Star Trek: Voyager Easter Egg In This Week's Discovery
Warning: This article contains spoilers for the latest episode of "Star Trek: Discovery."
Has anyone else noticed that the final season of "Discovery" has started to feel a little ... monotonous? Almost every episode to this point has followed a similar structure: Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and her crew must outrun Moll (Eve Harlow) and her Breen lover L'ak (Elias Toufexis) to find the next clue to the Progenitors technology in some distant part of the galaxy, pass a series of tests in order to prove themselves worthy of such an important find, and end on a mini cliffhanger of sorts as one of the other officers announces a breakthrough to the location of the next clue. Be sure to tune in next week to see the Discovery crew creep that much closer to the ultimate power in the universe!
Episode 8, fittingly titled "Labyrinths," just revealed a certain method behind that madness, however. As Burnham follows the latest lead pointing towards The Eternal Gallery and Archive, a space museum preserving ancient relics and cultural mainstays from countless civilizations, the story quickly plunges Burnham into a mental maze filled with red herrings, false starts, and seemingly no real way to actually solve this puzzle. In other words, "Discovery" basically incorporates the essence of monotony directly into its plot — and one casually-dropped Easter egg to another "Trek" series that's all about being lost in space goes even further to tie everything into a neat, thematic bow.
You see, The Eternal Gallery and Archive is presently located in a region of space known as the Badlands. Though only Commander Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie) is familiar with this area of intense plasma storms, Trekkies may have recognized this as the same place featured in the series premiere of "Star Trek: Voyager."
Star Trek returns to the Badlands
Once upon a time, centuries before the events of the final season of "Discovery," Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) led her crew of the cutting-edge Starfleet vessel Voyager on a merry chase into the Badlands in search of a particularly dangerous cell of rebel Maquis fighters. The constant plasma storms in this region render this mission incredibly dangerous, which is echoed far in the future when the Discovery must venture into another area of this very same location and hope they make it through in one piece to find their prize. But neither Voyager nor their Maquis target could've ever imagined that they'd enter the Badlands and never make it out again ... or, rather, end up abducted by super-powerful beings from another quadrant of the galaxy altogether and spend the next several years of their lives attempting to make it back to Earth.
What might seem like yet another reference tossed out as chum for the fans actually takes on greater meaning. Nobody on the Discovery can quite relate to the existential horror of being transported thousands of light years off target in the blink of an eye and left to fend for themselves (and all without the convenience of a spore drive, at that). But once Burnham finds herself trapped in a labyrinth with a program that her subconscious interprets to look like Book (David Ajala), longtime "Trek" viewers may have connected the dots for themselves and noted the irony of how one Starfleet captain's endlessly circular journey in "Voyager" now feels like an unexpected mirror of a wildly different captain in "Discovery" — both linked by their own radically different paths into the very same Badlands.
How's that for parallels? New episodes of "Star Trek: Discovery" stream on Paramount+ every Thursday.