Context Is for Kings
The series' writers consider this episode to be the show's equivalent of a pilot, introducing the majority of its main cast, the titular starship Discovery, and the beginning of the season-long story.
Six months after the start of the Federation–Klingon War of 2256, Michael Burnham, having been imprisoned for half a year, is on an unexpected prisoner transfer when an emergency forces her shuttle to be rescued by the USS Discovery.
She overhears Lieutenant Paul Stamets, an astromycologist who is leading the assignment, discuss an upcoming experiment with a colleague serving on another starship; Lorca is soon informed of an incident on the Discovery's sister ship, the USS Glenn, that killed its crew.
Stamets leads a boarding party, including Burnham, to investigate and finds the dead crew hideously twisted and malformed, as well as a group of Klingons who were killed by an unknown creature.
Lorca later asks Burnham to work for him, despite her sentence, explaining that he organized the circumstances that led her to him, as he needs strong-minded people such as her to help him win the war.
The writers were interested in exploring Burnham's upbringing as the foster child of Amanda Grayson and Sarek, exploring how the human Grayson would have wanted to counter some of Burnham's "logical" Vulcan teachings, and similarly would have wanted to expand the views of her son Spock by teaching him that "logic doesn't dictate everything".
This led to the introduction of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as a book that Grayson read to them as children and which Burnham now carries with her as a talisman to "center herself".
[11] Grayson's interest in the works of Lewis Carroll and Spock's awareness of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland were both previously established in the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "Once Upon a Planet".
[12] It was also important to the writers to justify the presence of Cadet Sylvia Tilly, whose optimistic outlook is at odds with the rest of the crew of the Discovery and the tone of the series, by having her prove herself during the character's first away mission.
The monstrous creature introduced on the Glenn was described by Harberts as "vital" to the series, stating that it would be reappearing in future episodes, and that it would serve as a metaphor for Burnham and her character journey in the show.
[8] Additionally, guest star Rekha Sharma was cast as Discovery's security officer Commander Landry at the end of April 2017.
Changes made to the sets for filming in this episode include the adding of "scratched walls, flickering lights, dangling wires, busted doors".
The set was decorated with blood and ten corpses, including an actor in Klingon prosthetics portraying a dead member of that species.
Another Klingon actor was connected to a pulley system with a special harness and pulled out of shot, to simulate being dragged away by the creature, something that was filmed multiple times to get "just right".
The website's critical consensus reads, "'Context Is for Kings' is a successful soft reboot—with its namesake ship and new captain setting the series on a new, more confident course.
Here Star Trek plays with the makings of a mystery [and] nowhere does it excel more than when it devotes itself to pure, thrilling horror as it does during the boarding of the USS Glenn.
Club graded the episode an 'A−', calling the change from the prologue disorienting, but feeling that the different nature of the Discovery and its crew was well established.
Handlen particularly noted the action scene where Burnham quotes from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, finding it "utterly unexpected, and it hooked me good.
