204 Blobnapped and Uninsultable. Jet Reno is just fire. (DIS204 An Obol for Charon)

Send us Fan MailSaru’s dying. The ship is collapsing. Tilly’s being blobnapped by a hallucinated fungus named May. But Steph? Steph is not having it. 😠 This week, the drama is high—but the believability is low—as Our Sci Fi World tackles Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, Episode 4: "An Obol for Charon."📉 From the jump, Steph calls it: Saru’s not going to die, and the episode knows it. So why does it lay the melodrama on thick? She breaks down how stacking three simultaneous crises—Saru’s “terminal” illness, Tilly’s freaky neural invasion, and the ship’s power-failure death spiral—leaves the emotional core untouchable. Jeff agrees: there’s no room to breathe, no narrative trust, and certainly no way to feel it all.🔍 But the ep isn’t without joy. Enter Jet Reno (🔥 Jet with two T’s), returning like an engineering rockstar with duct tape, sarcasm, and no time for Stamets’ ego. Steph immediately falls in love and crowns Reno the MVP of chaos. She’s unapologetically herself, possibly immortal, and entirely uninsultable. Jeff and Steph dig into her dynamic with Stamets and how their energy instantly clicks into a new version of Trek’s classic “grumpy genius duo.”🗣️ In the biggest Trek-troversy of the week, Steph learns—on mic—that everyone on Star Trek isn’t actually speaking English. Cue a hilarious conversation about the universal translator, alien earpieces, and whether Pike’s “hillbilly Montana English” is somehow being beamed into fluent Vulcan. (“Wait… are they all just hearing their own language??”)📚 They also fall face-first into a glorious idiom rabbit hole over the phrase “like it or lump it.” Steph insists it’s a real thing. Jeff has never heard it. They end up Googling etymology and debating what “lump” even means as a verb. (One of them is right. It’s Steph. Again.)🌌 Amid the chaos, this becomes an unintentional episode about overstuffed storytelling—how too much plot makes everything feel weightless, and how shows like Discovery sometimes sabotage their own emotional arcs by cramming them between high-stakes techno-catastrophes. Saru deserved better.