This week’s episode “The Sounds of Thunder” returns Saru to his homeworld Kaminar. The Red Angel has directed Discovery there – but why? We finally meet the Ba’ul – the mysterious oppressors of the Kelpiens – and ponder what level of action is ethical to stop genocide (you know, just regular Star Trek stuff). Team re:Discovery return to “that episode” to discuss the huge amount of listener feedback we received, and cheekily deliver our audit of #startreknudebutts. Thanks for listening!

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• Netflix (or at least Australian Netflix) lists this episode as “The Sound of Thunder”, but everywhere else has “Sounds”, plural. We’re running with the majority on this one, but we might have used both titles in our discussion.
• “Skin of Evil” is the first season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Enterprise security chief Tasha Yar is killed – halfway through! – by Armus, a creature manifesting as a thick, black oily liquid which could move and change into a vaguely humanoid shape.
• Odo, chief of security on the starbase Deep Space 9 in…er…Star Trek: Deep Space 9, is a shapechanger who normally appears humanoid, but must revert back to his natural liquid form every 18 hours or so to rest. For most of the series, he does this in a special bucket.
• “Soylent Green” is a bland but nutrient-rich foodstuff made by the Soylent Corporation, supposedly from plankton, in the dystopian future of 2022 depicted in the 1977 film Soylent Green. As revealed in the film it’s made from…well, not plankton. (The film is loosely based on Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!)
• Traditional Betazoid wedding ceremonies – as we are informed by Ambassador Lwaxana Troi – are performed in the nude.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy dies and is magically resurrected by her friends, but struggles to adjust to being alive again. (We’re being deliberately vague on the details; while we’ll no doubt bring it up again, it’s a great storyline and we don’t want to spoil it too much if you haven’t seen it.)
• In the long-running British sci-fi sit-com Red Dwarf, David Lister is the sole surviving human being, lost three million years in the future aboard the massive mining ship Red Dwarf. The series two episode “Thanks For the Memory” revealed Lister had his appendix out many years earlier, but in the series six episode Legion, he has his appendix taken out again! Lister’s weird life offers several fixes for this continuity error; the standard fan explanation is that in the series four episode “DNA”, when he is transformed and then restored to his original self by a DNA altering machine, the machine remade his body complete with a new appendix.
• Watch out for our round up of Star Trek‘s nude butts in a separate post soon. (We’ll add a link to these notes when it’s ready!)