My first exposure to Sonja Sohn was the same as most everyone’s: in her phenomenal role as Detective Kima Greggs on the early 2000s HBO show The Wire. Arguably the best cop show in history, it’s not a coincidence that the show has produced some of the most sought-after acting talent of the twenty-first century, from Idris Elba and Aiden Gillen to Lance Reddick and Deirdre Lovejoy to Chad L. Coleman and Seth Gilliam.
There are a lot of things to like about “Perpetual Infinity,” but the thing I like best is Sohn’s amazing performance as Dr. Gabrielle Burnham.
We open with a flashback to Doctari Alpha, which we previously only saw from the POV of little Michael Burnham sitting in a closet listening to her parents get shot and killed by laughing Klingons. This time, we see her parents working on Project Daedalus. Gabrielle Burnham climbs into the experimental suit, hoping to use it to go back in time to keep the attack from happening. She overshoots rather spectacularly, winding up 950 years in the future.
Earth is now a barren wasteland, as are all of the founding planets of the Federation. Gabrielle uses the suit to go back in time to try to fix things. Her rescue of the humans on twenty-first-century Earth during World War III (“New Eden”) was an experiment to see if she could alter history. She was later able to save her daughter by warning Spock.
Spock—who is apparently dyslexic, an interesting factoid that doesn’t actually contradict anything we know about Spock, and which he typically views as a human failing he needed to overcome—is uniquely able to interpret the visions of the “red angel,” as the distortions of the wormhole the suit creates make it hard for her to be perceived when she travels in time. In addition, time travel is like bungee-jumping for her: regardless of where and when she goes, she’s always tethered to the late thirty-second century, and always bounces back there after a bit. The containment field that the gang put together last week is keeping her on Essof IV for the time being but, as Pike so eloquently puts it, that leaves them in a tug-of-war with the universe. Eventually, the universe will win.
No matter what Gabrielle does to alter history, though, Control winds up destroying all life in the galaxy, using the data from the sphere. Like a good scientist, Gabrielle has made logs of all her work, and her daughter gets to watch her mission logs—hundreds of them. Turns out that Gabrielle specifically put Discovery in the sphere’s path in “An Obol for Charon” in the hopes that the Discovery crew could safeguard the data from Control.
But that doesn’t work, either, especially since Control has now taken over Leland. It didn’t kill Leland last week, as I initially thought (though he now has a messed-up left eye), but it does manage to implant its nascent consciousness into the Section 31 captain. It orders Tyler and Georgiou to safeguard the sphere data at all costs.
Which is a problem, as Discovery’s Plan A is to delete the data. Gabrielle urges Pike to do this in her first conversation with the captain—one with an oblique reference to “The Menagerie,” as she tells him that she knows his future and he won’t like it. Saru objects to this plan, likening it to destroying the Library at Alexandria or the Biblioteca Corviniana. (What, he couldn’t mention Memory Alpha?)
However, that doesn’t work, as the data repartitions itself to avoid being removed. Burnham allows as how this makes sense given what the sphere went through to keep that data from being destroyed back in “Obol.” Plan B is to dump the data into the suit and send it back to the thirty-second century where Control can’t get at it, but this plan is sabotaged by Control itself, using Leland to get Georgiou and Tyler to do its dirty work.
Luckily, there’s a lot more to Empress Philippa Georgiou. One of the great things about Discovery is how often it passes the Bechdel Test, and the scene where Georgiou and Gabrielle talk is brilliant. Gabrielle has been a galactic voyeur for a long time, and she knows that Georgiou will die to protect Burnham—and when Georgiou objects that she’s got her confused with her prime universe counterpart, Gabrielle counters that she knows exactly who she’s talking to.
Michelle Yeoh has magnificently played Georgiou this season, trying very hard to be the bad-ass Section 31 officer, but also genuinely concerned for Michael Burnham’s welfare, seen most aggressively last week when she objected to the plan to kill Burnham to lure the Red Angel, and later when she tried to end the experiment and was stopped only by Spock’s phaser.
After talking to Gabrielle, and hearing her use the same phrasing she heard from Leland’s mouth with regards to Control, she recruits Tyler to help her betray Leland, and it’s Tyler who discovers that Control has taken over the captain. Control stabs Tyler, and only doesn’t finish him off because he’s in the opening credits—er, that is, because he discovers that the data transfer Georgiou surreptitiously started on its behalf has been cut off by Georgiou herself.
This leads to a messy fight on Essof IV, as Control-in-Leland’s body tries to restart the data transfer and also kill Gabrielle and destroy the suit. She’s opposed by Nhan and her security force (one of whom dies, a fact that goes unmentioned and unmourned, because of course redshirts aren’t actual people, apparently, grumble mutter) as well as Georgiou, thus giving us more glorious Michelle Yeoh hand-to-hand combat.
Control does succeed in damaging the suit, at least, and soon it becomes clear that they have to let Gabrielle and the suit go back to the thirty-second century. They do so, and then blow up Essof IV as soon as the landing party is beamed out, but Control manages to get back to the Section 31 ship before things go boom.
And Tyler got out in an escape pod. Control got about half the data from the sphere, which is probably still too much, and also now has possession of a 31 captain. Gabrielle is back 950 years in the future with a busted Red Angel suit. Georgiou and the wounded Tyler are now on Discovery, likely fugitives from 31 in the same way Discovery was just a few episodes ago.
The big revelation, though, is that Gabrielle doesn’t know anything about the seven signals. So there are still more questions that need answering…
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What makes the episode is Sohn’s phenomenal guest appearance. We open with the flashback to Doctari Alpha, where she’s both a dedicated scientist and a loving mother. So it’s a bit jarring for her to later refuse to see her daughter, and for her reaction upon Burnham later beaming down anyhow is to bluntly say, “No.” Eventually, though, we learn that it’s not because Gabrielle doesn’t care—the problem is the opposite. She can’t talk to her daughter because that may break her. She’s had to watch Michael die over and over and over again. To actually interact with her grown-up self is too much.
But she does it eventually. Which is good, as prior to this, it was Burnham who was going to break. She can barely handle the notion that her mother’s alive—when she wakes up in sickbay, she assumes that she hallucinated her mother and is rather taken aback when Pike, Spock, and Culber assure her that it really was Mommy dearest—and Gabrielle’s refusal to see her daughter makes it worse. Sonequa Martin-Green shows every bit of shock and anguish in Burnham, and it’s a heartbreaking performance.
Not that the rest of the cast isn’t great. The banter between Georgiou and Tyler presages some fine conversations between Michelle Yeoh and Shazad Latif on the sadly inevitable Section 31 spinoff show. Saru’s plea not to delete the archive is delivered in a brilliantly heartfelt manner by Doug Jones, but so is his determination to carry out the order once the objection is overruled. Anson Mount’s Pike remains the collected center of it all, juggling all the balls in the air and trying to win the day. Tilly and Stamets are mostly reduced to the Trek cliché of the technobabble-spewing engineers, but Mary Wiseman and Anthony Rapp make it work. And Dr. Culber’s pleas to Burnham to see her mother’s side of things are particularly poignant given what he’s gone through, a subtle, understated, but excellent performance from a peculiarly uncredited Wilson Cruz.
And of course we have Ethan Peck, who continues to give us a person I have no trouble believing will be the same character played by Leonard Nimoy in ten years’ time. One of Spock’s defining characteristics is his loyalty to those close to him, from his criminal acts on Pike’s behalf in “The Menagerie” to his support for the dying McCoy in “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” to his attempts to rescue Kirk in “The Tholian Web.” Here we see him play the perfect little brother, supporting and aiding Burnham. I especially like his insistence that the future is not yet written and they can write it themselves, and using a 3D chess game to punctuate his point.
According to the previews, the next signal is going to show up on Boreth, a world we first saw on The Next Generation’s “Rightful Heir,” and which is where L’Rell sent her infant child by Voq in “Point of Light.” So we get more Klingon stuff next week including, one hopes, the triumphant return of the great Mary Chieffo as L’Rell.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is a guest at Planet Comic-Con in Kansas City, Missouri this weekend, alongside fellow Trek word slingers Dayton Ward, Kevin Dilmore, and Thom Zahler, and Trek actors William Shatner, Wallace Shawn, Jennifer Morrison, Lori Petty, and Chris Sarandon. Look for him at Bard’s Tower, Booth 803, where he’ll be selling and signing books, including his most recent releases A Furnace Sealed and Mermaid Precinct.
Spock is not the older brother. According to Memory Alpha’s summary of this episode, Burnham was 10 in 2236, which makes her 4 years older than Spock.
Also, is the in-universe Memory Alpha in service yet? I always got the impression from “Zetar” that it was new, though I guess that’s mainly from the fact that Kirk needed to explain what it was in his opening log entry (which of course was for the audience’s benefit).
I think Krad may mean Spock is acting like an older brother to his distressed sister.
I have no problem with Spock being dyslexic. In fact it makes all kinds of sense that a hybrid of two very different biologies would have a neurological issue or two, and probably other health problems as well.
The direction this season has taken is dramatically problematic, IMHO:
* It’s all a bit abstract. As an adversary, CONTROL has no face (not even a logo), and the macguffin (the secret sauce of software sentience) is similarly invisible.
* It feels like a rehash of the Skynet time war. Trek isn’t always original, but its inspirations aren’t usually so obvious.
I’m still not convinced by the “all sentient life in the galaxy” alleged scale of the threat. Surely Dr. Burnham didn’t visit every inhabited world (she wouldn’t even have coordinates outside the UFP’s ken), there’s no mention of “I listened for radio chatter and warp signatures and heard only silence”, and that’s hardly conclusive because survivors would be hiding.
I’m also not convinced by “CONTROL is genocidal, because reasons.” It’s described as a “threat-assessment” AI, and should be able to deal with nuance. How is “kill everybody” the simplest solution to its own directives? Is its prime directive personal survival, and if so, who writes an AI like that?
Thirdly, “keep its grubby mitts off the Sphere’s archive” isn’t a complete solution — what if CONTROL learns to evolve through some other means?
If part of the plan is “hide the Sphere’s archive in the future”, shouldn’t the other part be “put out an APB for CONTROL so that it doesn’t survive into the T+950 future”?
There’s a distinct lack of lateral thinking. Why has nobody tried to negotiate with CONTROL? Have they asked “why are you doing this, and can we convince you otherwise?” Or maybe written a virus (it’s UFP software; they should be familiar with its architecture). When the Sphere’s archive evades deletion, why not destroy the relevant physical memory banks? When Discovery learns the datastream is being diverted to the Section 31 ship, why not destroy its memory banks, or disable its engines to prevent CONTROL’s escape?
Re: the red signals — I guess the first cluster of seven were just to grab everyone’s attention. The signals at Reno’s asteroid, Terralysium, Kaminar and (next week) Boreth are numbers 8, 9, 10 and 11.
1) CLB best me to the mention that Michael is actually older than Spock.
2) Gabrielle rescuing the WWWIII humans and now they have evolved to have a religion based around her seems morally dodgy. Why can’t she reveal the truth to them?
3) Maybe Gabrielle is lying when she says she doesn’t know anything about the 7 signals or maybe she just hasn’t caused them yet as of this point.
4) It seems like these episodes are alluding more and more to the events depicted in “Calypso” although not quite sure yet how we get to that point. But if somehow Discovery again gets the Sphere data to safeguard, much like they had downloaded it into the Red Angel suit and sent it to the future, perhaps they will do the same with the Discovery by jumping it ahead centuries, the crew abandons ship and returns to their present, and in the meantime the Sphere data merges with the ship computer to evolve into a non-malevolent A.I.
5) I feel like the show runners of Discovery is baiting its audience into creating a “Shut up, Tilly!” meme.
6) I thought it would be “nice” if Tyler actually died – raises the takes that anything could happen on this show and because Tyler doesn’t really do it for me. But gotta keep him alive for the spin-off I suppose!
7) There are 7 signals and we’ve seen 3 already and looks like we’ll get the 4th next episode. But we only have 3 episodes so I wonder if they’ll have to double up on signals in one of the episodes assuming they wrap up the whole arc this season.
So when is CONTROL going to turn Agents 86 and 99 loose on Our Heroes?
Ugh. I meant little brother, really……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, using the edit function to cover his screw ups once again
@wiredog: lol. Yeah, we need KAOS to show up.
Tilly is once again relegated to comic relief. Even Pike and Saru seem annoyed with her. At least she’s not MIA, like the admiral and Eng. Reno. Why aren’t there other engineers running around? Stamets is a space fungus and navigation expert (since he’s piloted the ship), but why does he continue to handle all engineering tasks, other than the fact he’s in the opening credits.
@krad: “the sadly inevitable Section 31 spinoff show…” According to Kurtzman there’s no series order yet and it wouldn’t shoot till after Disc season 3 wraps up. Yeoh will appear in S3.
Bits: Michael is a Junior, named after her father. The actor playing her father is SMG’s husband in real life. I suppose if she’d been named after her mother, we’d be calling her Gabe, following Fuller’s affectation. Although Gabriel would fit with the angel theme.
Things still up in the air: If Momma doesn’t know about the original seven signals, who triggered them? Esp. the one that led Discovery to the Sphere. Dr. B says she put the Sphere in Disc’s path. How exactly she did this is left unasked. These are some decidedly uncurious people. But Disc was already heading there because of the prior signal… time paradox?
Dr. B has seen Michael die a hundred times and will see her die a hundred more. Does she have to go back and repeat her life-saving actions each time she jumps? I’m just finishing up Alastair Reynolds’ Permafrost, which posits time as a sort of crystal lattice that retains it’s form even if changes are made in the past. These changes propagate and reconfigure the crystal matrix, but it retains it’s overall solid shape. The grandfather paradoxes would eventually erase everyone’s memory of the original timeline. This seems to line up with the rubberband to 950 years in the future that can’t be reset.
Why that happened is another mystery. She’d meant to go an hour in the past and ends up 10 centuries hence and 50,000 LY away on Terralysium. She doesn’t question the suit’s power to do this, nor that she was able to later transport an entire church there. Maybe this will finally connect to the Calypso future if the Angel (whoever’s piloting it then) or another unseen entity (Airiam Angel?) transports the Discovery 1000 years, although it doesn’t explain why the crew is missing.
@krad, I think all the security officers died. Only 4 people were beamed back up, followed by immediately the torpedo barrage. Those many security people are all gone.
Does Michael Burnham Sr. have a brother named Uriel? And Gabrielle a sister named Raphaelle?
@8, Redshirt syndrome taken to the max!
Those Borgie elements are making me nervous. Please don’t go there, Discovery…
@10 – I was reminded of the Borg at first too but I think this is more simply evil A.I. that could somehow merge with a living being – kind of like the evil supercomputer that took over the villain’s henchwoman in Superman III – that scene freaked me out as a kid! Lol
@11. Haha, same here! Damn you, Superman III… so many nightmares.
I hope it is a simple evil AI and they’re not inventing some convoluted connection to the Borg. They’ve already got enough on their plate.
(Sorry, second post. Text editor completely bogged down.)
More hidden abilities for the Suit: Besides the magic healing ray from last episode, it can stealth to allow Momma B to stalk follow Michael’s life. She’s aware of all the highlights we know, including M’s graduation from The Vulcan Science Academy.
@philip: Yes, there are echoes of other shows. I’d throw in Battlestar Galactica and The Magicians.
The characters in Magicians are on their 39th or 40th timeline. They all died in previous iterations trying to stop the Big Bad. This is an excellent way to handle meta-continuity. It even allows for the book source material to be incorporated as one of the timelines. According to Dr. B, we already have at least 100 rewritten timelines in the current story. Btw, anyone not watching Magicians, it’s highly recommended. They just did an amazing musical episode about female empowerment.
BSG comes in with the birth of Cylon Control’s sentience. Other reviews and commentators have mentioned that this may turn out to be a Borg origin story. I currently doubt that, since the Borg assimilate, not destroy life. Maybe Control’s mandate will change somehow, if that’s the endpoint. It does say “Struggle is pointless (useless?)” to Leland before it assimilates him. It may try “Resistance is futile” next. Likely a red herring.
But the larger implication may be that Starfleet ships will need to be stripped of higher tech, the way BSG did to avoid detection and infection by the Cylons. BSG reverted to older tech like landlines for communication. This would dovetail with the return of the Enterprise, swooping in to save the day, but stripped of the tech making it susceptible to control’s infiltration (like holograms), which of course lines it up with TOS. And we’ll get to see Number One again.
One thing that usually bothers me when writers use digital transfers in a story is how they equate it with the transfer of a physical thing. They establish that the Sphere data has firewalled itself, preventing deletion. That means that it remains in Disc’s databanks. Another gobbledygook hidden ability of the Angel suit is that it apparently has infinite storage capacity, which… c’mon. But transferring the sphere data to it just generates a copy. Same as LelandControl now has a partial copy of it. Leland convincing Georgiou and Tyler that they need to steal it because Starfleet can’t be trusted with it just makes them look dumb.
This may be fixed if the sphere data ends up elevating Disc’s computer systems to AI status, creating Zora in the 33rd century. But a link may never be established and that short will remain isolated from this story.
@10, I bet they do go there. Nobody can resist throwing the Borg into the mix it seems. Didn’t they crop up on Enterprise?
@14. Indeed they did.
So if we are talking Borg here, what do we think is going to happen in the next few episodes? Is Leland going to be flung back a thousand years and across the galaxy and become the seed from which the Collective grows? Are we okay with the first Borg being named Leland, who sounds like a cast member of Hee Haw? Will Tilly become his Borg Queen?
(Cue the Ernie Anderson voiceover) “All this and more on the next exciting episode of Staaar Trek! Discovery…”
I’m not getting Borg vibes from control at all. More like Ultron or skynet.
Phillip Thorne, you are quite right. The plot that is emerging is bargain basement-level sci-fi garbage, executed with awkward and histrionic dramatics. I find the glowing reviews here to be increasingly suspect, and hope they are not the product of a conflict of interest.
@17/Manuela Verdad: Nonsense. Keith’s been reviewing Star Trek productions here for years and has never minced words when he didn’t like something.
@17/Manuela Verdad: CLB is right. I disagreed with quite a bit of krad’s review of The Next Generation, probably to the point of being one of those obnoxious commenters who irk me so. For this, krad, I apologize for obnoxious 2013 me, and have always appreciated your zeal and honesty in all your reviews.
The episode: I now have to watch every season of The Wire, as Sonja Sohn’s nuanced, heartbreaking perfomance here has made me want more.
I haven’t processed all the time travel and A.I. stuff yet, but the main story is about a devoted scientist, mother, and wife, separated from her family by centuries, trapped in time trying to prevent the distant, apocalyptic future she finds herself being yanked back to against her will. There’s so much to that, I have to set it aside for now and focus on the human story, which Sonja Sohn and Sonequa Martin-Green deliver in beautiful, heartbreaking fashion, helped along by our other friends in the surrounding cast, particularly Culber (who I’m glad to see back in uniform) and Spock.
Dr. Burnham ‘s disillusion, deep sadness, and resilience come through in just one episode, knocked out of the park by Sonja Sohn. I hope we see Gabrielle Burnham again in some way.
I see that they are trying to make a good show, and the sad thing is that they have amazing actors, good directors and a big enough budget for FX, but… I still hate this show.
I keep on watching it for Pike, and Spock, and the Empress, but the storyline is such a mess.
This second season fixed some estetic flaws of the first season just to focus on… time travel?
@10 & @11: I didn’t think it seemed at all Borgie. The Borg have static self-contained implants, but it looked to me like Leland was injected with lots of nano-machines instead.
@21. The Borg also have nano tech used to assimilate, as shown since the movie First Contact. That and Control saying something like “Struggle is pointless,” which sounds a lot like their famous catchphrase, has me wondering if Leland will eventually get around to gluing old computer parts to his face.
@16, I don’t think the storyline involves the Borg here but did Skynet/Ultron ever infect/invade actual flesh and blood people? So maybe those aren’t the best analogies. The Superman III evil supercomputer may still be the most apt comparison!
@17: Wait, what? Are you actually implying KRAD might be some kind of undercover CBS plant operating through a type of payola pay-to-write system where he gets free Star Trek: Enterprise blu-rays and other Trek swag in exchange for his glowing Discovery reviews? It’s all becoming so clear now.
@21: like I mentioned earlier, I don’t (and hope) this has anything to with the Borg, however the Borg inject nano-probes into other beings as a method of turning them into Borg themselves – you see those self-contained implants growing out of them, in addition to mechanical prostheses being psychically attached to them.
@23. True, though this could be an early version of the Borg we’re seeing here. Appearances and motivations could be different.
Enterprise, Discovery and the JJ Abrams movies have all proved they love to use embryonic iconic elements from Star Trek. They’ve repeatedly said they like to explore how _____ will eventually become the thing we know. It’s one of the big prequel gimmicks. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the Borg will be used in that way as well.
I really hope I’m wrong though!
I bet you’re not wrong though. So far Discovery hasn’t made much of an effort at originality.
Again the writers crapped on Culber’s characterization in the service of plot. Last season: didn’t notice his patient is a Klingon. This season: “This signature can only be you. D’oh, it’s your mother!” It’s getting harder to care about the relationship crisis storyline when one of the partners is an idiot about major plot points.
@24: You’re right about the Trek prequels seeding elements of established lore to show how they began but using the Borg would just reek of desperation. So I hope the showrunners used some restraint and leave this A.I. as another variant of Nomad/V’ger/HAL/Skynet/Ultron.
@26: I don’t get why Culber gets so much prominence regarding medical issues when he’s not even the CMO. It would be as if Dr. Selar was always brought to the conference room of the Enterprise-D for senior staff meetings or away missions while Dr. Crusher is left to tinker around sickbay and grow her special moss. Maybe Culber should be promoted already and call it a day.
@27. GHiller: You’re forgetting Cylons as an apt example. (It’s ok that you didn’t read either of my comments above…)
I also referenced Culber’s partner being used in a similar manner. Stamets has very specialized expertise, yet he’s being used as if he’s the chief engineer, just because he has a starring credit. It’s restricting/reducing the show to a workplace drama with a limited staff, slotting crew in places where they really don’t belong.
@28 – Yes, I agree with both your points. I just suffer from some type of syndrome where I get drowsy if I start to scroll too far back in the comments. ;)
@7,funny you were the only one (I think) to mention the reference – every time I hear “Control” I can’t help but think of Don Adams and Edward Platt.
While I agree this episode had some good points, I felt kind of unsatisfied after it. With 3 episodes left , I feel that they are more focused on setting up the spinoff then the Discovery story itself. WIll “Control” continue as the villain in the spinoff??? I hope not.
Surprised only 3 episodes left , I guess I was expecting more – definitely more Spock. He just seems like a Sarek replacement , giving Michael advice.
I am guessing we will see a hint of who the captain will be next season in the finale… not sure if it is known yet by people here….. I am guessing they stumble upon Prime Lorca.
@30 – As I understood it, Prime Lorca is switched places with Mirror Universe Lorca and is still somewhere in the MU if not dead. Of course, it’s always possible he could find his way back “home”.
When Michael’s mother was talking about watching her throughout her life growing up like when she was reading Alice in Wonderland – I couldnt help but find it analogous to losing a parent in real life and believing they are always watching you from up above
Also , only 3 episodes left and we have not seen Rebbeca Romijn except for her one cameo
Well, they sidelined the Enterprise for the Klingon War. Maybe they can find a secret 5-year mission for Pike and Number One between end of season 2 Disc and the time he turns it over to Kirk.
I guess I’m the contrarian here, but I find Sohn all wrong for the part she’s playing. And I was literally cringing at the scenes with Burnham and Burnham. like about a dozen too many references to “baby” I’m surprised they didn’t use “babygirl” or maybe they did and I just blocked it out. The heartfelt eye contact and furrowed brows are just a very cheap hackneyed way to try and generate suspense. Hey, you two, what you do now may be the difference between life in the universe ending or not, so get on with it.
Remember when they had the drinking game on The Bob Newhart Show for every time they said Bob? You could get rip-roaring drunk if you had to do a shot every time the script has Burnham giving the angsty look. Hell, you could get pretty lit if you just did a shot every time she starts crying.
I found this episode boring, it’s like I’m fatigued by the Red Angel storyline, and this episode didn’t have enough of Michael interacting with her mother for me to care about the characters. And that’s what I’ve found interesting this season: the characters. I liked Saru’s and Michael’s interaction, Michael and Spock, Tilly’s antics, Stamets’ grief at losing and recovering Culbert, Culbert trying to deal with his return (even though they only paid very little attention to him seeing a “therapist”), Tyler/Voq trying to figure out who he is, etc.
The season-long plot just lost me midway through, although it might be due to the change in showrunners… I do hope this doesn’t bode ill for season three. And I sure hope Control is completely unrelated to the Borg…
@27 – GHiller: Because he’s in the opening credits. Same as Stamets isn’t supposed to be the actual Chief Engineer, because he’s an astromycologist and did co-invent the spore drive, but is never shown doing anything remotely related to the actual warp engines or overall ship maintenance. It’s something Star Trek has done in the past (see TNG’s lack of a science officer and Data filling in), but this is the worst case.
I’m glad I’m not the only one in the gallery having occasional Get Smart flashbacks. (Mind you, I had another cognitive dissonance moment some way upstream; #7/Sunspear’s reference to “SMG’s husband” confused me immensely before I realized that he wasn’t referring to Sarah Michelle Gellar, who is widely referred to by those initials among followers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)
As to the omission of mention of Memory Alpha: one distinct possibility is that whatever portion of the archive data Discovery manages to hold onto once we’re done with this arc is the seed content for what becomes Memory Alpha by the time we go there in the original series.
All in all, I am enjoying this season despite the Section 31 elements, largely on the strength of the actors’ performances (Ethan Peck is infinitely better as Spock than James Frain has managed to be as Sarek, although some of that is what the writers have given Frain to work with). My chief observations at the moment are these:
1) If the episode count is firm and we have just three more weeks left in the season, we’ve got a lot to wrap up in that time.
2) Besides the matter of Rebecca Romijn as Number One, weren’t we also initially promised more appearances of Harry Mudd this season? If so, I really don’t see how that’s going to be shoehorned into what’s left of the season. (In real-world terms, I wonder if second-season Mudd was a casualty of the change in showrunners….)
I wonder if Control is what the Voyager probe encounters before it is sent back as V’ger. As the Memory Alpha webpage says that “But V’ger had been reprogrammed to such an extent that it had come to think of biological lifeforms as an “infestation“, and destroyed any that it encountered.” Which sounds very much like what Control is attempting to do.
No, V’ger is the Voyager 6 probe.
@37/trigger_mike
In TMP (1979) Voyager 6 encountered an unnamed “machine civilization”, and as soon as the Borg were invented in 1989, fans speculated they were one and the same (IIRC, one of the Kirk novels ghostwritten by the Reeves-Stevens makes that connection). Now that CONTROL is showing some similarities to the Borg, viewers are guessing at a connection.
But both are cases of “small universe syndrome”, in which writers or fan-speculation are insular, revisiting the same cast of characters. Evidently, we have no faith that the writers of DIS can avoid this trap.
The universe is big and can contain many unrelated machine civilizations, there are wellsprings of nanotechnology independent of the Borg (e.g., Denobulans had experimented with it by the 2150s), and genocidal impulses arise spontaneously in disjoint civilizations. Nobody’s ever suggested (?) that the various shapeshifters encountered in TOS and TNG are off-shoots of the Changelings of DS9.
@39/Phillip Thorne: It never made sense to connect V’Ger with the Borg, because the Borg consider cybernetic and organic life equally essential, while V’Ger considered organic life nothing more than a useless infestation. Also, V’Ger is like a million years more advanced than the Borg, with technology and knowledge at the ultimate limit of what’s achievable in this universe. The Borg are horse-and-buggy level compared to V’Ger. It’s utterly nonsensical to link them just because they both involve technology. There are plenty of other cybernetic/AI entities in Trek.
Even the Shatner/Reeves-Stevens novel (The Return) that used the Borg-V’Ger theory had to handwave like crazy to justify the obvious inconsistencies, claiming there are several separate, very different branches of Borg that don’t interact. So why even bother to connect them at all if you’re going to do that????
I don’t recall hearing anyone try to link shapeshifters together, but I once encountered a fan who was utterly convinced that the Q and the Bajoran Prophets/wormhole aliens were one and the same.
Seriously, this series is amazing in having extremely long times of emotional sufferings and looooong good-bye scenes in emergency situations which are there every two minutes. and this is my basic problem with the season: the story either almost stops for very loooong, emotional conversations, which are sometimes super boring, or there’s emergency, everyone’s almost dying and the universe is doomed. the pace changes are too drastic and radical for me. In parallel i’m watching DS9 and i find it much better balanced in general.
Too convoluted for me. But I did like the poetic justice of what happened to Leland.
Maybe it’s the necessary compression of summary but almost all episodes of Discovery sound unbearably convoluted and crowded with incident.
In my best “get off my lawn!” mode, I feel compelled to point out that if you are going to quote one of the best-known quotes from Shakespeare, you should try not to omit a word, particularly a word of more than one syllable, as it makes the rhythm lurch horribly. It also makes you look dumb.
The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite,
That EVER I was born to set it right.
Well, in my comments on previous episodes, I complained about the tendency of modern serialized TV to center every storyline, no matter how cosmic, around the main characters and their immediate families, particularly their parents. That’s still an overused trope in general, but I have to admit, it made for some brilliant drama here. The situation with Gabrielle Burnham and her daughter was wrenching. Michael so wanted to see the mother she’d believed dead for 20 years, but Gabrielle had seen Michael die so many times that she couldn’t bear to see her anymore. They both had deeply understandable reasons for their determination to do incompatible things, yet both their decisions caused the other pain, and it was really moving, and both actresses were magnificent, especially Sonja Sohn.
The evolving, warming relationship between Spock and Michael was well-handled too, despite his misquote of Hamlet. Even the writing on the Section 31 side was pretty good this week, with Leland-Control’s manipulations of Georgiou and Tyler, and their interplay with one another.
Although it did bug me to hear Georgiou explicitly refer to her current timeline as the “Prime universe,” a term that’s only been used out-of-story until now. I had the same problem with them explicitly using the term “Mirror Universe” in dialogue last season. Both are introducing metatextual terms that really shouldn’t be used by characters within the fiction. (Wouldn’t everyone see their own timeline as “prime?” So why would Georgiou use that term for a timeline not her own?)
Oh, speaking of time, this episode finally establishes the date of Burnham becoming an orphan and being adopted by Sarek as 2236, according to Memory Alpha. That puts it a year before the events of “Yesteryear,” which raises the question of where Michael was during that story.
Interesting how Gabrielle tested her ability to alter time by making a change that would have no noticeable effect on Earth history — the church she spirited away (somehow) was seconds away from being vaporized in nuclear fire, so its removal from history would have no measurable consequence, and she deposited it far enough away that it would be many centuries before the Federation came across it (or so she thought). But then, how did she even know she’d changed history? Maybe because Terralysium was uninhabited in the original timeline.
But we still have no explanation for how her invention is so endlessly powerful as to be able to jump anywhere in time and space and take whole buildings with her. This has to be some kind of found/repurposed tech from the future or an advanced alien species. Unless it’s the “time crystal” that gives it all its powers.
Oh, I forgot to add: I love the idea that Spock is dyslexic. Giving one of the most brilliant, perceptive, and precise characters in all of fiction a learning disability is a great way to say that it doesn’t have to hold someone back. Although it would carry more weight, I think, if it had been established in a Trek series geared more for family audiences rather than TV-MA, so that it could inspire young children with learning disabilities the same way Spock inspired me as a lonely, nerdy, intellectually oriented kid who always felt like an outsider.
It won’t be Spock, but perhaps the teen-oriented Trek animated series they just announced for Nickelodeon might have a character like that or Tilly. And the cast of characters will be comprised of teenagers.