Burnham explores a dead world where emotion-carrying hydrocarbons cause hallucinations, while a hostage crisis unfolds on Discovery.
Burnham leads Saru, Culber and Detmer to a dead planet near the hyperfield that may have been 10-C's original home. They find enormous skeletons of creatures that lived in the planet's gas layers and begin experiencing hallucinations that stir intense emotions.
The team realizes that 10-C communicated emotions through complex hydrocarbon compounds and fled after meteor strikes burned away the gas. That insight offers a way to talk to them. Meanwhile Book and Tarka secretly attach their ship to Discovery and take engineer Jett Reno hostage, and Book persuades Earth's General Ndoye to help them destroy the anomaly. Terri Hughes Burton wrote the episode.