Paul Stamets is the key to Discovery’s spore drive, but it’s unclear how he’ll be affected by the jumping he did — and the destination he’s taken discovery to — during and after the battle of Pahvo. Image credit: Michael Gibson/CBS.

Star Trek: Discovery’s Unanswered Scientific Questions After Season 1, Episode 9

It’s more than the Spore Drive, it’s about the heart of science fiction.

If you’ve been following Star Trek: Discovery, you knew what we were headed for going into the mid-season finale episode: Into the Forest I Go. There’s a war happening between the Federation and the Klingons, precipitated by T’Kuvma on the Klingon side and the Captain and the mutinous, impulsive first officer of the USS Shenzou. T’Kuvma is dead; Captain Georgiou is dead; first officer Burnham is court martialed and then reassigned to the USS Discovery, which is the Federation’s greatest weapon and warship. Discovery’s secret weapon is the mycelium spore drive, which leverages a magic space network of fungi to instantly “jump” anywhere in the known Universe, and (potentially) even into parallel Universes.

As the war continues, a power-hungry Klingon named Kol rises to fill the power vacuum left by T’Kuvma’s death, while Voq (his protege) disappears and L’Rell, after months as a torture specialist, develops Federation sympathies and has a mysterious connection to her former prisoner, Lieutenant Ash Tyler. Tyler and Burnham join spore-drive inventor Paul Stamets, bumbling Cadet Sylvia Tilley, First Officer Saru, and Captain Gabriel Lorca aboard Discovery, as they try…