Problems
- Bodies don't freeze when they're spaced.

Factoids
- The title of this episode appears to be a reference to Psalm 23: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil."
- Kenneth Mitchell plays Tenavik in this episode. He previously played Kol and Kol-Sha.
- This episode establishes that Section 31 has a fleet of a bit over 30 ships.
- Reno's wife was killed during the Klingon war.

Remarkable Scenes
- L'Rell and Tyler arguing over who should go down to the surface.
- Pike's vision of the future showing him how he'll end up in the wheelchair in TOS: The Menagerie.
- Reno encouraging Culber to patch it up with Stamets. Reno: "You have a second chance. And it may not last forever. Don't screw it up."
- Spock saving Burnham from Control.
- Pike telling L'Rell and Tyler about their son.

My Review
Another clunker in a season full of clunkers. After spending some time with L'Rell's and Voq's/Tyler's son (so much for those theories that he might grow up to be "the albino" from DS9: Blood Oath), Pike becomes convinced that the vision he saw of ending up confined to a wheelchair is inevitable for no clear reason other than being told that it is inevitable. It's entirely unclear how taking a time crystal and having a conversation with a time monk deprives him of all free will for the rest of his life, but that appears to be what the writers expect us to believe. Gone is Pike's agency to resign from Starfleet, change careers, or simply kill himself before the impending accident. Foreknowledge of it as a possible outcome doesn't render it merely a possible outcome, but somehow a certainty.

Bad takes on the philosophy of free will aside, the whole notion that the Klingons are sitting on rich deposits of natural resources that can be used to build powerful time travel technology that they simply refuse to use because it wouldn't be honorable or something is utterly stupid. Countless Klingons would have no such scruples, yet for some completely asinine reason we're supposed to believe that this power is never exploited across centuries of Star Trek stories. The tendency for this series to grant superpowers in a prequel that history never recorded and not think through the implications of how they would ripple across canon is an endless source of frustration and one of the principal reasons why this whole show ought to be struck from canon with prejudice.

And somehow, overwrought time crystals are not even the stupidest detail of this story. That honor goes to the cliffhanger. They're being chased by a fleet of 30 ships, can't outrun them with warp drive, and need to buy time to figure out how to use the time crystals to defeat Control. So rather than do the overwhelmingly obvious thing of using the spore drive to jump across the galaxy—say—to Terralysium where it would take the enemy 150 years to catch up to them, they just suddenly forget that option for no coherent reason and decide blowing up the ship is all they can do, which is especially incoherent given that they used the spore drive earlier in the episode to travel to Boreth. But hey, at least we finally had a scene with Linus where he wasn't used to make a body humor joke.