- As the U.S.S. Discovery crew attempts to let loose at a party, an unwelcome visitor comes aboard bringing about a problematic and twisted sequence of events.
- Discovery is helping the Federation to start winning crucial battles against the Klingons. Burnham is attracted to Tyler.
While attending a crew party, Burnham and Tyler are called to the bridge to deal with an endangered space creature, a Gormagander, that the Discovery has come across. The Gorgamander feeds on alpha particles from solar winds. It is so consumed by this task, that it ignores procreation, which has led to its state of near extinction. Protocol requires Starfleet to transfer it to a Xenologic facility, so Lorca beams it into the shuttle bay.
When the creature is brought on-board, it is revealed to be carrying a person: Harry Mudd. Harry Mudd attacks the personnel in shuttle bay and even kills a few. He plans to kill Lorca and sell the ship to the Klingons and kill any chance that the Federation has of winning the war. Mudd says that when Lorca left him inside the Klingon prison, he stole any chance of Mudd getting back with his beloved Stella, the only woman he ever loved. Mudd is caught by the officers he decides to blow up the ship instead. The explosion rips the ship apart and cannot be contained. Soon, it reaches the bridge and Lorca is consumed by the fire.
Time line returns to the party earlier, with Burnham and Tyler called to the bridge again. They are intercepted by Stamets, who is aware that they are in a time loop due to his interactions with Ripper's DNA. Stamets is the only one who retains his memory from one iteration to the next.
Over numerous time loops, Stamets works with Burnham and Tyler to find a solution to the problem while Mudd gets further in his plan each time. Each time Mudd plans a different approach to get inside the Discovery ship. The 2nd time he transports into the Engineering section and activates the spore drive and overloads it. Stamets explains to Burnham and Tyler that they have lived through each variation multiple times and there is no scenario which ends well for the Discovery ship. Stamets tells Burnham that Mudd is running the same 30 minutes over and over and his objective seems to be to learn how to run the spore drive system and hand over the ship to the Klingons. Stamets says that Tardigrades can exist in multiple dimensions, and hence he is able to remember the loops due to a side effect of the Tardigrade's DNA
Stamets is worried that eventually Mudd will figure out the piece of equipment he is missing to run the Spore Drive. Stamets is able to convince Burnham and they develop a secret code that Stamets uses to quickly convince Burnham at each iteration. But they need Tyler and Burnham keeps blowing it with him when she tries to get his help at the party. Stamets teaches Burnham how to dance. The next iteration, Burnham asks Tyler to dance with her, and then asks for his cooperation, after winning his trust.
Tyler reveals that Mudd has a time crystal and he once used that to rob a Betazoid bank. He had an infinite number of tries to memorize the security patterns. They eventually convince Mudd that he has won. Mudd kills Tyler and Lorca, and Stamets reveals that he is the missing piece required to run the Spore Drive. Meanwhile Burnham works with Tilly to find that Mudd has hidden his entire ship within the Gormagander, and that has the time crystal and the source of its power. To distract Mudd, Burnham tells him that she killed the Klingon messiah T'Kuvma, and the Klingons will pay a lot more money for her, than for Discovery. Mudd agrees, and then Burnham kills himself to force Mudd to reset the time loop.
In the last iteration, the Discovery team is ready before Mudd boards the vessel. Stamets says that the crew is willing to surrender the ship if Mudd doesn't kill anybody. Mudd agrees and the time loop expires.
Preparing to receive a boarding party of Klingons, Mudd is instead confronted by his "beloved" Stella (Katherine Barrell) and her father, from whom he had stolen her dowry. Turns out Stella wasn't taken from her, Mudd was running away from her. Her father was an arms dealer and had even put out a bounty on Mudd. When Mudd thought he was sending the coordinates to the Klingons, the computer actually sent them to Stella and her father. They take Mudd away.
Stamets reveals to Burnham and Tyler that in one of the time loops they had danced together and kissed.
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