12 Streaming Era Star Trek Episodes We're Adding To 'The Classics'
5. Calypso
Calypso is an outlier on this list as it is one of the Short Treks, a sadly truncated experiment in short-form storytelling in Star Trek. Several episodes were mere gags, while others delivered clues and teases for upcoming arcs. Of them all, Calypso is the closest to a perfect fairy tale that they came.
Aldis Hodge's Craft both discovers and is discovered by the USS Discovery in a distant nebula. While on board, he discovers that the onboard computer is sentient, now calling herself Zora. She has been alone for a long time, abandoned by her crew, waiting.
Over the course of its short runtime, we watch Zora fall in love with Craft as she helps him heal. Holographic projections help them to dance together, though Craft cannot bring himself to feel the same way about her. His eventual departure may be inevitable, yet the journey to get there is both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time.
The ending, while certainly sad, offers hope. Zora asks Craft if, were they together on his homeworld, and if she were human, he would tell her his real name. He counters that, if those conditions were met, she would be the one to give him his real name.
Discovery's coda attempted to tie Calypso into the main plot of the show, though it suffered from its cancellation. So we may never truly know why Zora was all alone for as long as she was, but for even those few minutes, she lived a beautiful life.