Home is no longer where the heart is for Star Trek Discovery.

*SPOILERS*

While “People Of Earth” may start out in typical “Star Trek: Discovery” fashion, with a massive exposition dump in one of Burnham’s trademark interminable personal logs, summarising the series so far and dropping in a few details about what she was up to in the year waiting for Discovery to arrive in the future, it soon course corrects to something which more closely resembles “Star Trek” as we knew it.

Of course, there’s crying – as if there wouldn’t be from Starfleet’s most tearful, emotional officer (seriously, what did she learn during her childhood on Vulcan?) when she’s reunited with her crewmates and the series uses her return as a way to carry out further subtle recalibrations of the characters we know and, well, if not love then recognise. Having been given the chance to breathe and grow last week, they must now readjust to simply existing to interact with or react to Michael Burnham.

Tantalising threads from last week are ignored – there’s nothing further on Detmer’s apparently more-serious-than-she-was-letting-on injury, for example. And, of course, any chance for parallel storytelling seems to be nipped in the bud by this episode (although I wouldn’t put it past Kurtzman & co to already be plotting a limited series spin-off of Michael Burnham: Star Trek Courier). We do get a swift answer to one of the series’ most burning question: who is in command? It’s a very “Star Trek: Discovery” resolution too: Saru is the Captain, but only by the grace and consent of Michael Burnham, so let’s be honest: where does the power really lie still?

In passing, we also get an answer to how a ship of Discovery’s size manages to operate with such a small crew: they have droids to swarm about and carry out repairs. Another creeping Lucasian touch? How long will it be, I wonder, until one of the robots develops an aberrantly endearing ‘personality’ and becomes part of the crew?

Newly minted Captain Saru makes a right pretty speech about the starship Discovery earning its name, but the series seems more intent on becoming “Star Trek: Rediscovery” as it frames the finding and restoration of the United Federation Of Planets as its season arc. Personally, the more compelling mystery is what caused galactic calamity ‘The Burn’ but I have an uneasy feeling the series won’t get round to directly addressing that, using it instead as a MacGuffin which explains why the crew are now having to rebuild a Federation which had endured for over 800 years.

After integrating Book into the cast/ crew, Discovery is brought back down to Earth with more than a few bumps. It turns out the “People Of Earth” – in a none-too-subtle metaphor – have taken a lurch to the populist. Following ‘The Burn’ it seems that humanity adopted an ‘Earth First’ philosophy, seceding from the Federation and creating the United Earth Defence Force to Make Earth Great Again.

Visiting an Earth-like civilisation on an Earth-like planet which is alike but not alike is one of the very first Trek tropes, but this is one of the few occasions where the alien version of Earth is Earth. It surely can’t be a coincidence that in the week before the 2020 US Presidential Election, “Star Trek” offers us an episode where a xenophobic and isolationist regime is offered the choice not to lash out at its enemies and former allies but to reengage with the wider galaxy, embrace diplomacy, empathy and compassion and regain much of what has been lost.

With such an on-brand “Star Trek” story and the assured direction of Jonathan Frakes, “People Of Earth” is a fairly sedate but not sedentary episode of “Star Trek”. There’s still the lingering problem that the writers can’t separate the characters from the audience, therefore events which have huge import for the viewers seem to disproportionately affect the crew, e.g. the crew’s shore leave to the San Francisco where they act like they haven’t seen it for a thousand years when, in the series’ timeline, it’s only been a matter of months since they were providing depositions to Starfleet Command regarding the whole Mirror Lorca affair.

Once again, it feels like Discovery has taken three episodes to set out its stall for the coming season, but season three is still shaping up nicely. Could the usual Trek tradition of Season Three being the point where everything clicks come true once again? Given we know that there are more new characters yet to meet (hopefully no more snarky engineering geniuses though, otherwise nothing’s going to get done while Stamets, Reno, Tilley and Adira Tal squabble).

All eyes, then, on next week’s view to a Trill, when we’ll start to see just how this story starts to unfold.