Synopsis: Commander Burnham travels to Vulcan to find Lt. Spock.
This episode can be seen as an illustration of James Hillman’s acorn theory, the idea that just as an acorn has everything inside it to become an oak tree, we all have inner daimons that have all the information we need to become who we were meant to be, if we only pay attention.
In “Light and Shadow” Commander Michael Burnham asks permission to take leave to go to Vulcan in search of her brother, Lt. Spock, while Discovery and her crew remain behind to study tachyon residue. Burnham arrives on Vulcan, and her mother takes her to where Spock is hidden in a sacred crypt. Sarek discovers them there and tells Burnham that she must take Spock to Section 31. However, once there, Philippa Georgiou warns Burnham to take him away from there. She does, and eventually she realizes that the numbers that he has been mumbling to himself are coordinates to a planet. Meanwhile, Captain Christopher Pike and Section 31 Agent Ash Tyler take a shuttle to plant a probe in a temporal anomaly and are caught in it. Lt. Commander Paul Stamets, who has injected himself with tardigrade DNA and can navigate through time, can rescue them, even though it means beaming into a shuttle within a temporal space anomaly. He asks Ensign Sylvia Tilly to do it, and once Stamets gets there the three aboard the shuttle are safely brought back to Discovery.
In this episode, Tilly can be seen as needing to listen to her inner daimons in order to become who she was meant to be, here a highly trained and competent Starfleet officer. In comparison, Georgiou can be seen as an individual who has embraced her inner daimon and is very happy being exactly who she was meant to be, in our universe or the mirror one.
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