Time time time, see what’s become of me
While I look around for my possibility–Paul Simon, “Hazy Shade of Winter”
Doing a prequel is always a dodgy proposition. It’s very easy to do it wrong, and in such a way that the material to which it’s a prequel no longer makes sense. (To give a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel example, Star Wars describes the Force in terms of being a long-dead religion that Darth Vader is pretty much the only person who follows anymore, not something that was a major thing within the adult lifetimes of all the characters, as later established in The Phantom Menace and its two sequels.)
It can be done right, however. AMC’s Better Call Saul is a textbook example, and for the umpteenth time, Star Trek: Discovery’s pulling it off, too.
The latest of the seven signals is over Boreth, a Klingon world first seen in The Next Generation’s “Rightful Heir,” established there as the world on which Kahless promised to return. The planet has a monastery, which was mentioned twice more, on Deep Space Nine’s “The Way of the Warrior” and Discovery’s “Point of Light.”
We return to the world and learn that it has a second purpose beyond the Story of the Promise: it’s also where a dedicated group of Klingons, called the Timekeepers, protect the Klingons’ time crystals.
Now there’s an untold story here, because Leland said two weeks ago in “The Red Angel” that the Federation was worried about the Klingons achieving time travel, because they could easily go back to the Mezozoic and blow up Earth. But we find out this week that they’ve had time travel all along—which raises the question of why they don’t use it to go back to the Mezozoic and blow up Earth. Instead, they’ve hidden the crystals on their most sacred world, and put it in trust to monks who are sacrosanct. Even the High Council has no authority over them. So what happened to cause that?
That, however, is a story for another today. For now, Discovery has been sent here and they happen to need a time crystal. Tyler arranges for them to get safe passage to Boreth thanks to his special relationship with L’Rell. However, there are two problems: the monks won’t just give up a time crystal (in fact, they’re very likely not to) and L’Rell refuses to let Tyler go down there. The Klingon Empire thinks he’s dead, and he needs to stay that way by not setting foot on a Klingon world. Pike volunteers to go instead. After all, all sentient life in the galaxy is at stake.
Pike shows up at the monastery and gets the same disdain that Klingons generally have for anyone who is not a Klingon. The monastery is run by an albino Klingon named Tenavik—whom we eventually learn is L’Rell’s and Tyler’s son all grow’d up. Time passes weirdly around the time crystals, which is how he’s an adult already. (The presence of time crystals on Boreth also makes a nice subtle retcon explaining how the monks would, a hundred years hence, age their clone of Kahless to adulthood in the months leading up to “Rightful Heir.”) Tenavik is played by Kenneth Mitchell, now on his third Klingon, having played Kol throughout the first season and Kol-Sha in “Point of Light.”
When he grabs one of the time crystals, Pike is given a vision of the future and told by Tenavik that, if he takes the crystal away from Boreth, that vision will come to pass no matter what.
And of course the vision he gets is a dramatization of what Commodore Mendez described in “The Menagerie“: during a training exercise on a Class-J starship, a baffle plate ruptured and exposed the cadets and Pike to radiation. He got most of the cadets to safety, but in the process was so badly injured that he was stuck in a convalescent chair, able only to communicate in the most minimal manner.
We’ve already seen Anson Mount play a version of the Jeffrey Hunter Pike, with a certain amount of the Bruce Greenwood Pike thrown in for good measure, but this week we sadly get to see him play the Sean Kenney Pike, as the captain sees himself scarred and badly injured. And 2010s technology is able to portray the injured Pike in a much more devastating manner than 1960s technology could, as we see that the chair-bound Pike is in constant agony. For a long time, the limitations of Pike’s chair—he could only signal “yes” or “no” through beeps—has rightly been viewed as a failure of anticipation by Gene Roddenberry in 1966 of medical advances in the next thirty years, much less the next three hundred. This episode proposes an alternative: that Pike could only say yes or no because he was in such constant agony that that was the best he could do.
And here is why Discovery is a good prequel: once again, they’ve used having Pike as a regular to add texture to the events of “The Menagerie.” In this case, throughout the framing sequence of the first part of the 1966 story, Pike is constantly telling Spock “no” when the latter says he’s taking Pike to Talos IV. By revealing that Pike knew this was his fate, that he accepted it in order to save quadrillions of lives, it adds so much to Pike’s insistent “no.” He doesn’t want Spock to bring him to Talos IV because he already knew years earlier that this would be his fate, and he’s accepted it.
On top of that, Pike gets his Captain Moment, when he overcomes the horror of what he’s seen because the horror of what’ll happen if he doesn’t take the time crystal is far worse. He’s convinced that the signals sent them to Boreth to get a time crystal, and he’s equally convinced that it’s their only hope to do what Gabrielle Burnham has been unable to do: stop Control from wiping out all sentient life. So he antes up, kicks in, grabs the time crystal, and accepts his rather awful fate.
The rest of the episode moves the plot pieces forward, with the added bonus of some fun pairings. Georgiou has gone off to find the Controlled Leland (see what I did there?), and Burnham thinks they should be joining her. Pike and Saru point out that Control wants the Sphere data, which is pretty well stuck in Discovery’s computer, so it’s best to keep Discovery as far from Leland as possible.
However, Tyler learns that a Section 31 ship hasn’t checked in, which never ever happens. So Burnham takes a shuttle to investigate, thus keeping Discovery and its Sphere data away. Burnham is surprised twice by Saru, in command while Pike is playing with time crystals on Boreth. The first is when Saru readily acquiesces to her request to go on this side mission; the second is when Saru orders Spock to accompany her. Burnham doesn’t want the company, but Spock insists, backed up by an order from their superior.
While this part of the story is mostly there to move the plot along, it also provides us with Burnham and Spock straight-up working together without the angst of family. (Having said that, there’s a lovely moment at the top of the episode where Amanda calls to check in on Burnham and see how she’s doing after the awful experiences with her biological mother last week, and Spock walks in on the end of it, giving Amanda a chance to say that she loves them both, which was just a great “awwwwwww” moment.) Brother and sister actually make a dandy team, and both Ethan Peck and Sonequa Martin-Green continue to kill it, especially the former. (“I apologize for being so slow,” he says calmly after calculating the exact current needed to keep the Control nanobots magnetically attached to the deck and then executing that plan with only one hand, as his other wrist was broken, which is just so Spock…)
As an added bonus, we get the return (and the death) of Kamran Gant, the Shenzhou tactical officer who, it turns out, joined Section 31 some time after we last saw him in “The Battle of the Binary Stars.” He seems to be the only survivor of the 31 ship, but it turns out there are no survivors, and Control has animated Gant’s corpse. Control, it seems, has expanded its reach to more of 31, and by the end of the episode, there are dozens of 31 ships surrounding Discovery, presumably all under Control’s, um, control. Burnham makes the only suggestion she can: Discovery needs to be destroyed.
Before we get there, though, we have a bit of personal business. We finally get Tig Notaro back as Commander Reno, and while the bridge crew plays a word game in the mess hall, Stamets is still moping over Culber—who is hanging out in the mess hall with a whole ‘nother set of people.
Reno takes matters into her own hands—literally, as she has a hangnail—and goes to Culber to get it treated and tell him to get his head out of his ass. Reno, it turns out, was married, but her wife died in the Klingon war. Reno reminds Culber that he and Stamets have a second chance that may not come again, and not to screw it up. It’s a nice little scene, the highlight of which is Culber and Reno comparing annoying habits of their respective partners. (“Believe me,” Culber says fervently, “I understand micromanagement.”) I particularly like that Notaro keeps the character’s edge, but the scene also gives her a bit more depth beyond “smartass engineer.”
Next week looks like we’re finally getting the Enterprise/Discovery team-up we’ve been teased for ever since the last shot of “Will You Take My Hand?” last February. Looking forward to it, especially since we’ve only got two episodes left this season…
Keith R.A. DeCandido is at HELIOsphere 2019 this weekend in Tarrytown, New York. He’ll be selling and signing books at the eSpec Books table, and also doing programming, most notably a panel on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on Sunday at 11:30am with fellow Trek word slinger Susan Shwartz, as well as author Laura Antoniou and critic Russell Handelman.
I like that the time crystals actually help support the idea that Kahless will return to that particular spot some day.
“(To give a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel example, Star Wars describes the Force in terms of being a long-dead religion that Darth Vader is pretty much the only person who follows anymore, not something that was a major thing within the adult lifetimes of all the characters, as later established in The Phantom Menace and its two sequels.)”
To be fair, that contradiction is inherent in the original movie, which established that the Force-using Jedi Knights Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader were contemporaries of the father of the 19-year-old Luke Skywalker. I suppose the prequels could’ve established that they and Yoda were among the last adherents of a mostly forgotten faith, but I’m not sure that tracks with the original film’s descriptions of the Jedi during the Clone Wars.
I haven’t seen the episode yet, but I utterly hate the idea of “time crystals.” Time travel shouldn’t be some casual thing that’s familiar and easily obtained — that conflicts with TOS’s portrayal of the discovery of the slingshot effect and the Guardian of Forever as amazing new discoveries, and it cheapens the idea of time travel as a plot device by having the means for it literally just lying around somewhere. Not to mention that it perpetuates the bad habit of modern Trek of replacing science fiction with handwavey fantasy. At least the TNG-era shows tried to make their technobabble sound like actual scientific terminology, even when it was gibberish like “isolytic shock” or “thalaron radiation” — now we’re reduced to lazy stuff like “Red Matter” and “time crystals.”
I like that time travel is such a dangerous weapon that even the Klingons are scared to use it but the humans are all “Leeroooooooooy Jeeeeeeennnkins!”
Also, Anson Mount killed it once again. Seriously, CBS, do a new Enterprise series and take my money!
Also also, what do the new showrunners have against Tilly?
Zodda: I don’t think they have anything against Tilly, but it’s an ensemble show and not everyone has something to do every episode. Which is fine.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@2: They seem to imply *powering* the crystal takes a *lot* of effort and that teching the supernova was what let the Red Angel suit work, so it’s not that easy… which doesn’t quite explain Mudd last season though.
I for one would like to see less Tilly. I think the writers are making her awkwardness more painful to watch. I think she has already reached the “Shut up Wesley” meme level. I would much rather spend more time with the rest of the bridge crew. Avoid the Airiam mistake they made. They need to flesh them out more.
I have to admit, the acting for Anson Mount interacting with his vision and afterwards knocked it out of the park. I would love to watch a show with the further adventures of him as Captain Pike. I am looking forward to meeting him next Friday night at Great Philadelphia Comic Con.
Time crystals are real, although Disc makes them more magical and capable of employing the trope of a baby growing into an adult in a manner of months:
time crystals
@@.-@ It feels like she’s had very little to do since they got her out of the network, but maybe that’s recency bias. I’m just now remembering that she figured prominently in the Airiam episode.
I still want mmor Tilly, though. Shes the perfect counterpoint to a nanobot swarm flowing out of a dude’s vaporized torso.
Love the character moments in this episode, especially the Pike stuff being a real stand out. But I gotta say, from a real-world perspective, that if I were in as much agony as Pike is portrayed in the vision of his future self, I would want to be put out of my misery already! Life is beautiful, yes, but quality of life is also damn important or the hope that your lot in life will improve. So I wonder, in-story, what makes Pike continue to go on post-accident?
Generally liked this one, aside from the usual details that don’t add or haven’t been explained yet. The story was more tightly plotted than usual, which helped build some suspense in the Control part of the story. Having shown the AI as a puddle of nanites, it now seems more unlikely it’ll be connected to the Borg.
The red signals are still a confusing bit to hang this season’s story on. They witness all seven at once in the first episode, presumably recording the locations, yet spend the season waiting for the next one to pop again in sequence. Dr. Burnham said she has no knowledge of the original seven, so I guess this will make sense once the other entity causing them is revealed. It doesn’t explain why they’re waiting around to connect the dots.
Was nice to see Spock and Burnham admit that they were wrong in trying to trap the Angel, thereby screwing up her efforts. Spock, however, is still going on about how Michael is the common element and her going along with it. “Well yes, it is about me and my future hasn’t been written.”
Which is ironic because the exact opposite is true for Pike as his fate is sealed by what he sees of his future in the time crystal. Why the determinism locks in for Pike isn’t explained. It is so because it must be so for this show to remain a prequel.
The mess hall scene reminded me of high school and even college cafeterias, with the nerds segregated from the cool kids.
Very excited to see the Enterprise next episode. Finally more Number One. And it sounds like the story may finally tie into “Calypso.” (haven’t given up on that.) They may evacuate Discovery and transfer the crew over to the other ship, while sending it to the future a thousand years hence waiting for its crew to return. Should be fun seeing our regular crew of misfits operate aboard the Enterprise.
@7/Sunspear: Yes, there is a state of matter called a time crystal, but it’s not a “crystal” in the sense of a big hunk of pretty rock you can hold — it’s a crystal in the sense of an atomic structure with a repeating pattern. In this case, the pattern has a repeating pattern in time as well as space, meaning that it changes from moment to moment in a stable cycle that’s analogous to the spatial repetition of a physical crystal. It’s sort of a metaphor for what one paper calls “an emergent, collective, subharmonic temporal response.” (And yes, that experiment did create the “time crystal” state within a diamond, but the term refers not to the diamond itself, but to the the repeating pattern of spin states in certain impurities within it.) And they certainly don’t involve time travel in any way.
@CLB: So, you’re saying Discovery writers have taken a real concept, like say a mycelial network, and done something absurd with it?
I must confess I do not unterstand the main plot line any longer.
In “Brother”, Pike speaks about the Seven Signals that have just appeared over the past 24 hours […] across more than 30000 lightyears. That’s quite a significant distance, about ⅓ of he diameter of the galaxy. Although little is known, Pike claims they are an imminent threat and that the lives of Federation citizens are in danger (we do not learn who told him this). These Seven Signals™ were even shown on a holographic galactic map, and they were the ones that Spock had foreseen. We visit one signal, perhaps the closest, and meet Jet Reno.
In “New Eden”, Saru informs Pike Another signal has just appeared (the one at Terralysium). This should make eight signals by now, right? But in the following episode (“Point of Light”), Burnham still asks Amanda You know about the seven signals, and at the begin of “An Obol for Charon”, she muses To find any rational explanation for the seven signals continues to escape me.
And it gets worse. That very episode has a new signal (the dying Sphere), in “The Sound of Thunder” a tenth one appears at Kaminar, and this episode “Through the Valley of Shadows” has an eleventh, yet Pike states about it This new signal is the fourth of seven.
So how can that be explained, rationally or not? Did these signals appear multiply in the same location? Can they (because of Fun with Time Travel™) be detected before they happen? Or is there a difference between the original seven and the four afterglowers (which all appear close to Federation space)? And why, for the Goddess of Electromagetism’s sake, are they called “red”, although they were surely detected with superluminal sensors and not optically? They should have rather been called “unconventional alephino emission sources” or whatever made-up particle they emit.
Really, this Seven Signal™ stuff drives the entire season, and we are never told even the basics about them. Maybe it’s my simplemindedness, but I can’t imagine on which observational data and individual knowledge the characters walk through the plot. Why does no one point out that seven plus some more must give a larger number?
I don’t have a problem with reimagining things from the original show because a lot of it NEEDS to be reimagined. There are parts of that series that look like they shot the 60s into space. It doesn’t work anymore.
The Pike in the chair thing makes no sense. We now live in a Star Trek world where they can rebuild him, they can make him stronger and faster, etc. They had a character Airam who was more machine now than man. Part of her brain was replaced with a computer. Why is Pike doing The Butterfly and the Diving Bell in this reimagined universe? Pain? You just block the nerve endings and the brain doesn’t feel pain. We’re almost to the point where we can do that now, surely it will be a simple process in the 23rd century.
If he chooses this because of the time crystal and something like god or fate or whatever expecting him to suffer in this weird way to save the universe, then we have to see why the universe doesn’t go <poof> at the end of the Menagerie when he foregoes his punishment. Or is the time crystal a rules lawyer? “Oh, well your body is still in this machine technically, even though your brain thinks you’re perfectly fine and having awesome sex dreams with Vina so you got me! I didn’t think of that!”
Keith- I’m not sure if you’re disabled or not but if you are not, I really wish you had run this by a disabled person, preferably someone with physical disabilities, because the language you used in parts of this when talking about Pike make me, as a disabled person, extremely uncomfortable and upset. I will admit to not being caught up, as the second half of season one put me off, so I am sure many of my problems here lie with the episode writers and the arc they have chosen for Pike this season, but I wish you had taken more care in your writing and word choices about a disabled character. Thank you.
@13. Luthien: good breakdown of how nonsensical the characters sound when it seems they can’t do basic math. I’d add the extra signal that they cause themselves when they decide to summon the Angel by killing Burnham.
The other piece of illogic is that they are now waiting for the next signal, which they assume is caused by the Angel, even though they just put the Angel suit out of commission and sent Dr. Burnham 950 years in the future with no apparent means to time travel. Aarrrgghh! These writers!
@14. matthew: Yes, the pain management issue is problematic. It makes no sense to leave Pike in permanent agony after his injuries. Seeing his horror is dramatic, but it will only happen cause meta-continuity demands it.
For all the complaining about Discovery “messing up” canon or whatever, the fact that they took Pike’s fate (chair and all) and contextualized it should be commended. I agree with KRAD how this encriches the overall Trek universe.
Someone brought up Pike not taking his own life- wasn’t it mentioned that he was at least a bit religious? That could be an easy explanation for why he accepts the agony of the chair.
Its fun to speculate what happens to the physical ship, of course, and if Calypso does show hints or not. It’s too bad Mount has already been nixed for S3. I wouldn’t mind the ship being sent into future and them having to spend some time on the Enterprise.
@13- could Control have been the one who originally hyped up the threat/meaning of the signals?
@16- they were told that Michael’s mom wasnt behind the red signals.
Meira: My deepest apologies for that. Could you e-mail me at krad at whysper dot net?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@17 M When the talk of going back to the well started, I hoped they would go back to the time period of the original series and just set the series on another Constitution class starship. There were 12 of them and we didn’t see all of them on the original show. Give us the same looking ship but with a new crew and no need to recast. New adventures in a familiar universe. <sigh>
Speaking of pain and medicine and all, I’m curious whether this Star Trek is still set in a universe where they still can’t cure (or prevent) the common cold? I suppose we can imagine a universe in which Jenny McCarthy is elected president and all vaccines are outlawed so that medicine is set back 200 years and we lose a big chunk of our knowledge of pathogens. Maybe they put virologists in camps.
While I’m picking at stray threads the show keeps unraveling, it would appear that Apple still exists in 23rd century because we know that Airiam is running iOS on Apple hardware since they clearly didn’t include an SD card slot so she could expand her memory. And since she was deleting stuff, I take it she didn’t want to pay to upgrade her iCloud storage. And did they make her change her name? I just noticed that’s it’s Air-iam, maybe she’s equipped with Air-play?
@M: The original seven, yes. Pike says, “Seven simultaneous… ” She was involved in the subsequent ones, like the one over Kaminar. The wormholes she opens up have a distinctive red glow. Technically, there’s two such events in the Killing Michael episode, but the second is inside a structure.
It’s still possible, perhaps likely, that a second entity (perhaps Michael herself becoming an Archangel) goes back and paints a roadmap for Discovery to follow. But at this point, the Angel is definitely correlated to the linear, not simultaneous signals they’ve been following.
@20: I nominate your entry for comment of the day! Lol
Yeah, it is a bit strange to hear a term as basic as “time crystal” in Star Trek. In an earlier series, they would’ve dressed it up a little with some sexy sciencey words. Even Doc Brown didn’t go the easy route and call his invention the “time changer;” it was the “flux capacitor.” I mean, if you’re gonna have time travel terminology in your science fiction, why not do it with style?! :)
I certainly hope Discovery rises to the level of Better Call Saul next season. I think one way to go about it would be to focus more on the characters and the community of the ship and ditch the stringing along from episode-to-episode mystery box stuff. Also, not every season’s story needs to involve the fate of the galaxy or the universe. If we care about that small community, we’ll keep tuning in.
So the show has been asking the question whether or not the future is set and right now all signs point to “yes”: Pike’s accident will happen, the red signals are part of a greater plan which must be followed. But also: Control always wins in the end.
So it’s also contradicting itself: why play your role in following the signals if failure is guaranteed? Wouldn’t that imply that defeating Control is ultimately impossible? Burnham used to believe that the future was NOT set, while Pike has continued, from “New Eden” onwards, to believe or at least be open to the existance of a “greater power” — which he’s had confirmed in this episode. There’s no escaping his fate, right? That’s what the Klingon monk said.
But if fate is inescapable, then Control will always win, which would make for a bummer ending to the season. So the future is NOT set, which would imply that Pike’s accident is ALSO not set… Let’s hope they find a satisfying way to end this messy time travel stuff.
Have been enjoying the show this season, even if the stakes (and the tempo) are really high all the time. A little more time to breathe and some added levity would be nice. And a Captain Pike show too! =D
@24/timdeman: There is no reason to assume that every temporal event would happen the same way. That’s not how physics works. The laws of physics are universal, but the way they manifest depends on the specific conditions — for instance, if you let go of a hammer on Earth’s surface, it’ll land on your foot, but if you let go of it in Earth orbit, it’ll just float in place, more or less. Same laws of gravity and motion, different context, so different result.
By the same token, the laws of temporal physics could allow for some temporal paths to be fixed, immutable loops and others to result in different, branching outcomes, depending on the particular conditions of the event. In the case of Pike… I’m just riffing on physics here, again not having seen the episode yet, but quantum physics says that if you go back in time and interact with the past, then you create a quantum correlation between the time you interact with and the future you came from, thereby guaranteeing that the only future that can result from your actions is the same one you came from. So merely the act of time-traveling would lock your future into place, or at least guarantee that the branch of the multiverse you ended up in was the same one you started in. (So pretty much the opposite of most time-travel stories.)
So since the term “time crystal” is ripped off from a quantum-physics thing (that means something totally different), maybe we could pretend that the vision the crystal gave Pike ended up entangling him with his future in a way that guarantees he’ll experience it, whereas different methods of time travel somehow have a looser connection between past and future, a non-unitive probability that allows for more than one possible outcome.
Another, simpler way of putting it is that your future is only multiple-choice until you know the answer. If you know the outcome, then the probabilities resolve and you’re stuck with that path. Maybe having a time traveler come back and tell you what their future is like is a less direct connection to that future than actually seeing it through a time crystal, and so it doesn’t lock it in the same way. Though that wouldn’t explain a case like, say, Jonathan Archer traveling to a devastated future, then coming back to his own time and changing it.
@20/matthewrigdon: “When the talk of going back to the well started, I hoped they would go back to the time period of the original series and just set the series on another Constitution class starship. […] New adventures in a familiar universe.”
That would have been wonderful! I hoped they had chosen the 23rd century specifically to tell a space exploration story, because in that time the galaxy was still largely unexplored. The name “Discovery” also seemed to fit.
Curing the common cold isn’t easy, because the common cold is so harmless. A cure shouldn’t produce adverse effects worse than the original symptoms. That makes it harder to find a cure for a minor illness.
Concerning Pike and his chair, I prefer the idea that was discussed in the “Menagerie” rewatch comment thread a couple of years ago, that he couldn’t communicate because he had aphasia.
“It’s too bad that they couldn’t have made the ships/uniforms/etc look more like TOS”
Response
“It’s a new show. Change is good. We have to change with the times”
VS
“It’s too bad they couldn’t have smartened up the science”
Response
“No! Time crystals/Red Matter/etc are really cool!”
Also, it seems that they don’t know how time travel works just because Burnham’s mother said she hadn’t created the original seven bursts. Sure, the time crystal of the original suit was phasered but that doesn’t mean that she’s never coming back. No body = open door. Heck, this is Star Trek, even death isn’t the career killer that it used to be. Spock had a long, fruitful career after he died.
@23. Spike: “I certainly hope Discovery rises to the level of Better Call Saul next season…”
Speculation is already rife on other sites I dabble in about season 3. Some fantasize about the Disc crew spending some time on the Enterprise. But both Mount and Romijn signed only one-year contracts. That could change, I guess, given the near universal acclaim of Mount’s Pike portrayal.
One interesting rumor I saw was mention of the words “antennae action” being dropped in the writers’ room for S3. So Andorians confirmed for next season! Not that I’m particularly interested in Andorians, unless they come up with some fascinating new lore.
Shorter arcs, similar to the successful structure on Agents of SHIELD, may work better than a season-long one, since they don’t seem able to make interesting Big Bads. They teased Control as proto-Borg. This episode it’s more Terminator-like. And we still don’t know why a system created to defend the Federation would corrupt into a “kill all sentient life” entity. It’s just generic.
What I’d like to see is less of this weird combination of the Federation as a small neighborhood where people keep running into each other easily, while at the same time we have magical jump travel (in the form of fungal spores and fancy suits of armor) that can hopscotch across the galaxy. Give us true exploration, actual strange new worlds and civilizations, please.
@CLB: I’m not a tax expert, but wouldn’t a sub to CBS streaming be a business write-off?
I wouldn’t mind seeing an Andorian as a regular member of the crew.
Man, that ep. was a punch in the gut. Poor Pike. As much as they did this to make the fanboys gasp in delight (or horror), I wish they hadn’t gone this route. He looked much worse off and unhappy than in The Menagerie. And how can now Pike live with what he knows of future Pike? He doesn’t even have the advantage of knowing that one day, Spock will take him to Talos IV.
“He doesn’t want Spock to bring him to Talos IV because he already knew years earlier that this would be his fate, and he’s accepted it.”
Gotta disagree with this, Keith. He accepted his fate back then to “save the universe” or whatever, but there was no hint on life afterwards shown to him on Boreth. Having made that sacrifice – how many years I’m not sure – he’d know what Spock was doing and would probably be all cool with it IF he wasn’t worried that Spock would face the death penalty. It’s about Spock and present day, not his past sacrifice.
Not a real big fan of the time crystals. Time crystals, red matter, all those kind of McGuffins just don’t really do it for me. Plus- I’d think the Klingons would be all over this time travel, not letting the crystals sit unused in a monastery. Unless – taking one guarantees that you get a bad ending (for a Klingon, an honorless death).
Highlights:
-Anson Mount’s performance. God, I wish they’d scrap the dull Picard show and do a Pike show. Or if that makes TNG fans howl too much, dump the S31 show.
-Spock and Burnham interaction. Their take on early Spock is great and the interaction between these two is fun to watch. As a bonus, it was nice to see Amanda again.
“No way, Jose” moments:
-WTF is up with both Spock and Burnham being so DUMB? Oh, lets just mosey on over to a S31 ship with its crew spaced. WARNING, WILL ROBINSON. And then, oh, there’s ONE alive crewmember. DOUBLE RED ALERT!! They both deserved to be assimilated…er..turned into a Control-bot for this utter stupidity.
@28/Sunspear: Taxes are not the issue. Taxes on this wouldn’t be relevant until next April. I don’t have the money to spare right now, not until my novel advance comes (hopefully any day now). I’ll sign up and watch season 2 when I have money; probably I’ll wait until the season ends and binge it.
A couple of randomish thoughts:
1> I have the same issue with the fact that the Klingons have apparently had one of the most powerful potential weapons in existence for quite a while.. Monks, yadda yadda, if the high council really wanted them, they could get them, and even if not prior, after Praxis? Or the Dominion war? (Right now I will accept institutional memory failure in that they maybe are not aware they are still there? but like the Spore Drive, that needs to be retconned (or foreconned) a bit before the show ends. – Same issue I have with the Guardian of Forever, there is no way that the Federation would not have considered using it during the Dominion War)
2> By calling them time crystals, the assumption is they are just rocks. But what if they are actually something different (possibly Sentient or linked to a sentience), and for Pike, they are not showing the future, they are setting his future. That’s the sacrifice, choosing to take the crystal means a locked in future of something horrible created by the crystal? Similar to the idea in Dr. Who of a fixed point, no matter what happens, history will always adjust to get there.
2a> If that is the case, even though it would still possibly happen, showing him the final afternath would have defeated the idea of the devils bargain. (it’s basically a crossroads demon kind of deal)
3> What ever happened to the DTI? We know they existed in Enterprise’s time (or well in the future but accessed Archer’s time – it can be assumed Daniels was DTI) so why are they not involved here. They don’t have to be, but a throwaway line might be nice.
4> The idea of the leader being Tyler and L’Rell’s son aged up is neat. Then (at least so far) they have did nothing with it? Other than the scene at the end, the fact of his parentage had no impact, he could have been any Klingon.
5> Is it me, or this this one hell of a powerful AI? When it comes down to it, its a program, that was originally residing on a system with a lot of capacity. How does a program of that size just get downloaded to multiple ships without sucking out a lot of processing power (and by the same token thats a lot of processing power for a collective of nanobots. Also, and it hasn’t been that long, Control didn’t replicate Leland but kind of infected him, but now can literally create masses of nanobots and animate them, but it needs the sphere data to do what now? If it can really do that and self-replicate and program, it already wins, because with the ability to create motive self-aware shapeshifting units, it should already have more copies out there than you could possibly destroy.
Now don’t get me wrong, it was a great episode, well written, well directed and the cast continues to hit it out of the park. But overall there is definitely some room for plot hole caulking.
Just an idea: Control will escape but learn to appreciate biological species… and turn into the Borg.
@Gerry,
Going to say probably not to that one, because the Borg is a hive mind not a centrally controlled AI. Although I could see some ways to get there (remnant autonomous nodes or something). Also, if I recall correctly, until Q intervened, the Borg had little contact or knowledge of the Federation.
But also, the books came up with what I think is a better origin for the Borg. Now, the books are certainly not TV canon, but I can’t see the writers giving up that lovely backstory yet. This version of Control is actually not dissimilar to the origins of Section 31 in the books….
Discovery travels back in time to stop Control before it’s created. To keep the tech from advancing to that point, they end up causing the atomic war we saw the result of in TNG. Earth’s entry into the interstellar community is delayed until 2063 and everything proceeds from that point, except with a lower tech level, due to the war. Voila, prime universe.
@32/JeffL: The DTI did not exist in Archer’s time, and Daniels is not DTI. He’s from the Federation Temporal Agency, a successor organization hundreds of years later.
In the novels, at least, the DTI is founded in 2270 as a response to Starfleet’s recklessness with early temporal research (in “Assignment: Earth” and “Yesteryear”), which is why the DTI sees Kirk as such a menace. It’s my hope that Discovery doesn’t contradict that by establishing the DTI in the 2250s.
@34: When the Borg became aware of the Federation is bit convoluted. By our chronological first time we see the Borg it is in “Q Who?” so it seem that’s the first time the two powers becaome award of each other. However, in the very same episode, Data alludes to rips in the surface of a planet that are identical to what happened to outposts along the Neutral Zone back in the season one finale, “The Neutral Zone”. Both episodes were written by Maurice Hurley and the original intention was to tease the arrival of the Borg in that season one ender. Therefore, it was indeed the Borg at the Neutral Zone as it is implied by Data’s dialogue in “Q Who?”, then the Borg are already in the Alpha/Beta Quadrants and aware of the Federation. But if that’s the case, I always reasoned that the Borg didn’t take an interest in the Federation until the events of “Q Who?” because the Enterprise was able to escape the Borg cube in the Q flash of light. That had to intrigue the Borg, right?
BUT then in Star Trek: First Contact, the Borg in the 21st century around Earth try to contact their counterparts in the Delta Quadrant but are thwarted. However, Borg corpses that survive the destruction of the Borg sphere from the incident with Picard and friends are reanimated in the Arctic in the 22nd century (“Regeneration” on Star Trek: Enterprise) and are at last successful (or it is presumed they are) in making their Delta Quadrant counterparts aware of the Federation without the Federation knowing these beings are Borg (and for some reason the Enterprise-D doesn’t cross reference in their databanks the similarities of their encounter with Archer and friends’ encounter) two centuries before the Enterprise-D incident, so now Archer’s time frame should be the first time the Borg are aware of the Federation. What’s stranger, on Star Trek: Voyager, it’s portrayed where Seven of Nine’s parents are in search of what they don’t realize are the Borg and this is years before the events of “The Neutral Zone.” So yeah, it’s pretty complicated.
@2 – totally agree the Klingons on having these time crystals cheapens the whole idea as it does make it too accessible. I don’t mind Discovery episodes with time travel as part of the storyline but this was overkill IMO
@6 – Also mentioned in comment section for other episodes how great it would be to see an Enterprise/Pike series. Glad the credits showed us that RR/Num1 will be back. Guess she is too expensive to be a season regular so she gets 2/3 episodes , still better than nothing…. also concur on Tilly, they have overdone her quirkiness, I dont mind her, but they need to tone it down. It was refreshing to see the other crew in the mess hall get a few lines but still not enough. The Saurian is a cool idea but again I think the attempt to use him as a comedic character is a bit to Orville. But I do home he breaks out the brandy
as I believe @13 was alluding to, plot this season definitely seems somewhat discombobulated – thought plot(s) was better s1 though I like having the Pike Enterprise crew in the mix
@24 – good point, the future is set in stone when it fits the plot and the future is based on choices (as I think Spock just basically said last episode) – so which is it???
@30 – yes, they were pretty dumb with respect to Gant, I saw that one coming from a mile away – and another vote for the Pike series
Oh and Twilight Zone just released timed perfectly to try and save ST fans from canceling when Disco ends. I watched the first ep it was pretty bad, 2nd is supposedly better but have not seen it yet
@39. jmsnyc: The Kumail Nanjiani episode was indeed terrible. I almost always like him, but unfortunately, I think he burned thru some good will. It was repetitive, slow, and way too long at 50+ minutes. It’s like they thought the audience was dumb and they had to do heavy repetition to convey an idea we got immediately, before the character did. Needs about 20 mins lopped off. Just ugh.
The second one is an adaptation of the famous Shatner gremlin-on-the-wing episode and the Lithgow remake. Only this one’s 10,000 feet higher and goes for a twist on the expected ending. It was better.
Ironically The Menagerie and Pike in a wheelchair is airing right now on BBC America, right after Search for Spock where I go to see Kirk, Scotty and Checkov do the self destruct in order to evade and kill the majority of Doc Brown’s crew
While watching the Menagerie, just heard the hangnail comment my McCoy that the Reno visit to sickbay was an easter egg too
VOICE [OC]: You’re needed aboard the Enterprise, Doctor. Medical emergency.
MCCOY: Well, what is it? Sickness? Injury? How bad is it?
VOICE [OC]: That’s all we have on it, Doctor. Just needed aboard.
MCCOY: Probably somebody discovered a hangnail. I’ll beam up and let you know, Jim.
@37/GHiller: It’s easy to understand how the Borg could’ve been aware of the Federation but not immediately gone after it, as long as you remember that the Federation is not the center of everyone’s universe. From the Borg perspective, it’s a remote power clear on the opposite end of the galaxy, and presumably they have more immediate threats and targets to deal with closer to home. Given how vast their Delta Quadrant territory is, they must have dozens of Federation-equivalent powers on their immediate borders that they’re already occupied with assimilating. So when they got word of an interesting civilization way off on the far side of the galaxy, they probably put it on their “to be assimilated later” list, but fairly low down, because they had more immediate priorities. It was only when the Enterprise-D managed to get to their territory much sooner than predicted that the Collective decided to investigate the Federation more closely. The reason they only sent two cubes years apart is the same; they had more immediate concerns, especially once the war with Species 8472 began.
So what we saw in the shows and films was just the Borg’s casual, offhand curiosity about the Federation, first as a remote area of interest, then as a minor annoyance. The Star Trek: Destiny novel trilogy by David Mack shows what would happen if the Borg decided to make the Federation their top priority (because Janeway destroying their transwarp hub in “Endgame” catapulted it to the top of the Borg’s threat list) — a devastating invasion by thousands of cubes at once.
@40. Hate to say it but I too was disappointed with the first episode of the new TZ. There was something very dry about it, even with all the edgy “comedy” and profanity. I don’t know, it just didn’t click for me. Felt more like an episode of Tales from the Crypt, but without the corny puns and the, you know, fun.
Re: Klingons and time travel – Somehow I got the impression that the time crystals were at the Boreth monastery because of the dangers of time travel. I’m not sure if that was explicitly stated in the dialogue, but however I got the impression, it implies that the Klingons may have experimented with time travel in the past.
That kind of got me thinking – we really don’t know all that much about Klingon history, even after all the Klingon-centric episodes across the series. DS9 established that they were once conquered by the Hurq, and we have some legends and mythology associated with Kahless, but not much else. Is there even a canonical time period established for Kahless? (I know KRAD has written a passel of books about the Klingons, but I haven’t read any of them, regrettably enough.)
So, what sort of horrific time-travel-adventure-gone-wrong would be enough to convince the Klingons to protect the time crystals at their sacred monastery to avoid future mishaps? Seems like an interesting mystery that might be explored some day. . .
@44/Suspect: “Is there even a canonical time period established for Kahless?”
TNG: “Rightful Heir” pegged it as 1500 years before, i.e. the 9th century CE.
@40,@43 – I guess we should not go off topic but I just watched the 2nd episode of TZ…. and was not impressed – Shatner/Lithgow versions were better – I did not like the twist at the ending. I think this series is missing something, not enough to keep CBS-AA – will cancel, and renew if/when needed
@44. Usual: “what sort of horrific time-travel-adventure-gone-wrong would be enough to convince the Klingons to protect the time crystals …”
Wherever they went, whatever they tried, Kirk was there to stop them… There’s a statue somewhere in the monastery of The Great Demon Kirk.
Here’s a thought: Are the Orbs of the Prophets a form of time crystal? I ask because the scene where Pike saw his future reminded me of an Orb vision.
Was I the only person who saw the start of the scene with Pike in a splangly future wheelchair, out of focus, down a corridor, and thought “Davros!”.
Ok, a silly idea, but not as silly as all that.
@48/Almuric: No, each Orb has a different function. There is an Orb of Time and an Orb of Prophecy and Change, but other Orbs have different attributes, e.g. the Orb of Wisdom and the Orb of Contemplation.
Also, the Orbs seem to be confined energy fields of some kind rather than physical objects (although there were crystalline physical props underlying the visual effect, and “The Storyteller” claimed that a small gem was an Orb fragment).
@44. The Usual Suspect – L’Rell stated that Boreth is where the time crystals came from.
So, does this mean that Harry Mudd’s future is set in stone since he obviously toughed his time crystal? What about Burnham’s mom & dad? Did they touch theirs as well? Are the only people who’s futures are set as the ones who touched the crystals? What about the cadets that Pike saved? Could they avoid their fate of being in the accident while Pike still ends up in the chair?
It’s amusing that the Klingons take time travel so seriously and the Federation does it so often that you’d think that travel agents would be selling trips to the past. Sure, the DTI pay it lip service but as we saw, they’re actually pretty bad at their jobs, totally missing the tribbles and just taking Sisko at his word. Time, and time and time again. Pun intended.
Mudd didn’t use the time crystal to look into his future, but to loop into the past, and he obviously did change his personal timeline each time he used it. So it evidently wasn’t the same application or variety of crystal.
Or, the writers didn’t think it through when they first introduced them and later retconed how they work. It’s not like Pike did anything special with beyond simply holding it in his hand. Perhaps Mudd did see his future and then continues to use the crystal to commit mass murder.
Maybe science fiction of the Star Trek variety needs a “crystal rule.” You get one powerful crystal, dilithium, and that’s it. Because the more you have of them the more it starts to bump up against fantasy, what with Infinity Stones and Chaos Emeralds and the like.
The Klingon dressed like a wizard didn’t help.
Seems the “Runaway” short will tie in to next episode. The name “Xahea” shows up on a viewscreen in a promo pic. That would mean Tilly’s other BFF, besides May, may show up. The Queen’s process of recrystallizing dilithium may come into play with powering up the raw time crystal. They have to do something with it now that Pike made his sacrifice.
This could also bring May back. The three women will combine to shunt the Discovery into the future thru a combination of the time crystal/dilithium/spore drive. And that will finally incorporate all the Short Treks.
Except for Mudd’s. Maybe Control will take over all the Mudd robots. What happened to his time crystal? I forget. Or rather, two time crystals. He supposedly had one in his gauntlet and a larger one on his ship. And why would the monks have allowed him to leave with them?
This however, would require incredible foresight. I’ve been disappointed before, as in last season, when a plot falls short of its potential.
Hi. Very long time lurker, first time poster. Big fan. Been here since the Star Trek rewatch. To the point where Mr. Bennett and LisaMarie are positively familiar to me. Working through the Superhero movie rewatch.
I think that the time crystals are a bit like Pele’s stones at Mt. Kilauea. Only the person who takes the crystal incurs the “Wrath of Fate”, just like how you get bad luck if you take one of the fire goddess’ rocks. Note that Tenavik immediately touches that particular crystal after Pike but doesn’t experience a vision. Like Mr. Bennett said, there could be entanglement going on. The setting of someone’s timeline can only occur once per quanta of crystal. So Pike has paid the price for taking the crystal, but it can be freely used afterwards, because no one else can overwrite that entanglement. Perhaps the reason that it sets is because it’s tied to the planet and it sets after it is broken from the whole of the deposit. Or even that it’s tied to that time and point in space.
Alternatively perhaps it extracts different prices from different people. Gabrielle Burnham seems to be experiencing a particularly brutal fate for her interactions with the Time Crystal even before hers was destroyed. And what happened to the Section 31 Agent that actually stole the crystal (apparently from Boreth) originally? What was his fate?
As for why the Klingons haven’t exploited their easy time traveling apparatus the reason may very well be cultural despite Tyler’s assertion that they would in fact glass Earth in the Mesozoic era. The Klingon people are very spiritual. The fact that they have a monastery on a frozen world because their savior said he’d pop up there again speaks to it. That takes strong faith. Judging by Tenavik and the monk’s treatment of the crystals, even getting a Time Crystal would be like having an orb experience for the Bajorans. There’s also the fact that getting one seems to be right up there with acquiring the Soul Stone in personal brutality for a person.
Keep in mind that despite the centrality of the concepts in their culture, most Klingons are not in fact as honorable or brave as Worf, Martok, and Gorkon even by Klingon standards. Which is why Tenavik honors Pike when he sees his fate and takes the crystal anyway. The crystals may extract too high a cost for most Klingons seeking glory.
Also there’s the fact that the monks know what they’re doing with those crystals. Any invading Klingon force trying to take them by force is going to not be fighting a bunch of monks, but a bunch of monks who can freely manipulate time. So you’re risking Gre’thor by screwing with the monks in the first place and you’re highly likely to lose. Orbital bombardment isn’t an option since you might destroy the crystals.
Or perhaps a particularly wise Klingon had experience with the crystals and outlawed their use and the others have simply respected it. They do have laws. If the wind does not respect a fool, the imagine what disdain time bears for those who disrespect it?
Lastly, the fact that Boreth is basically built on a temporal mine may offer insight into the original Promise of Kahless. Could it be possible that he simply intended to time travel to when he would most be needed by the Klingon people using the crystals? Had he already had a crystal vision? Or perhaps can Klingons who seek him there actually go back in time to see him instead? Didn’t Worf have a vision before he actually met the Clone Kahless?
Sometimes I really hate Time Travel. I wish Stat Trek would leave it to experts like the Doctor.
I think this episode may have cemented Christopher Pike as my favorite Star Trek captain. Certainly, the plot circumstances were a little contrived, but the moment where he realizes the horrible cost of taking the crystal and does so anyway is perfectly acted and directed . The moment where Pike steels himself to take The crystal and recites all the things he believes in is so potent because the show has taken the time to SHOW him acting in all those ways. Particularly telling to me was the awkward “and love” at the end – because we did see Pike clearly in love with Vina – and continuing to be so – just a couple episodes earlier.
Ethan Peck continues to impress as Spock .The moment where he talks about immobilizing the nanobots was excellent .That said, why isn’t Spock wearing a uniform yet? I strong suspect it’s going to be the last scene we are of him before he’s clean-shaven and in the usual blue .
@58. twels: technically, Spock is still on leave, although he’s participating in official Starfleet actions. Maybe now that the Enterprise is back in play, like you say, he’ll go back to the blue uniform. That should be an iconic moment.
Stray thought: truly hope next season has some better stakes. Last season we got not just the potential destruction of the MU but the entire multiverse when the mycelial network was threatened. This season it’s ALL sentient life. Guess that shows a slight restraint. At least machines will be around. But wait, they will be sentient too… Did they think that one thru?
Just stop going to eleventy eleven with stakes. The most extreme stakes don’t equal the best drama. Have some local-level stuff. Or say a threat has the potential to kills unknown millions, just not all of creation every time out.
@59. What, don’t you want to see them saving the universe at every turn? It’s so rarely done, you know.
I heard the comedian Dana Gould say the problem with a lot of modern pop entertainment is that every single moment has to be “an orgy with fireworks.” Haha, yeah, that about sums it up.
Another fabulous performance from Anson Mount. I adore Pike in Discovery. He’s the very best of Starfleet in all the right ways. I’ll be gutted if this season is the last we see of him. He’s really added to the show and I love how they have really made this legendary Captain live up to his historic name.
I watched the TNG episode Offspring last night right after watching Through The Valley Shadows. It’s an episode I love, but I always hated Starfleet’s unsympathetic desire to rip Lal away from Data. I do think Discovery has unintentionally added a new layer to this. Because of the mistakes made with Control, there is a real fear of machines becoming sentient. We’ll need to see how this plays out, of course, but as it stands I’m beginning to understand Starfleet’s perhaps understandable fear of technology becoming too powerful.
Spike @60: *Nothing* ruins an orgy more than fireworks.
So, this episode makes the point that (A) The future is unwritten , and (B) All of this was meant to be.
@61/Boyinabubble: “Because of the mistakes made with Control, there is a real fear of machines becoming sentient.”
Why then did they accept Data into Starfleet? Nobody seemed to be afraid of him. And why did they attempt to replace starship captains with computers in “The Ultimate Computer”?
I liked the episode, because once again, it focused more on the characters, particularly the amazing sequence regarding Pike’s choice, and the interaction between L’Rell and Tyler/Voq. I liked seeing L’Rell’s and Voq’s child again, but I’m not very happy about the whole “Boreth is a motherlode of time crystals and the monks are guarding them” thing. I dunno, it feels lazy.
I wonder if something happens to the time crystals between now and TNG, because Boreth in the 24th century didn’t seem like it had anything to do with all this stuff.
One thing about Boreth that bothered me a bit, was that the architecture of the monastery’s interiors (filmed in the University of Toronto) looked very much like an Earth building, and it distraced me a bit.
Back to Pike, Anson Mount never ceases to be perfect in the role. His is a bravura performance, one of the highlights of season two. I highly recommend watching the latest The Ready Room episode where Mount talks with Naomi Kyle about Pike.
As for the plan to destroy Discovery, my son and I were theorizing that this might end up with Disco in the future, and the sphere data helping it evolve into the artificial intelligence from Short Trek “Calypso”. This would mean we’re getting a Discovery A ship next season, I guess. Oh, one more thing, the preview for the next episode implies the Discovery is going to Xahea, the planet from another Short Trek, “Runaway” (as mentioned before in these comments).
It was also very nice to see Reno again, and tackling a problem in an engineer manner, showing off her people skills too. The mess hall scene was also very cute, adding to that “family” feeling this season has achieved so well. Also, in two seasons, Discovery has increased Star Trek’s canon queer characters by 400%.
@15 – Meira: Please, if it’s not much of a bother, could you tell all of us what’s wrong with Keith’s writing? We’d love to know, so we can avoid that kind of thing in the future, too.
@28 – Sunspear: Shorter arcs within a season like AoS would be a great way to go, taking advantage of the serialization possibilities of the format, but not turning it into a season-long movie.
@29 – Spike: Me either. In fact, we need more aliens as regular, front line characters.
@65: I also wondered about Boreth – specifically why they had to name check a planet we already know if they were going to add the time crystals to it. Why not have Tyler send the kid to another monastery? Surely Boreth isn’t the only one they’ve got.
Also, L’Rell seems a little too chummy with the Federation for my liking. Just last season, she was dead set on a war. Sure, Burnham and later on Georgiou have helped her seize power, but it seems like she was way too willing to let Pike and the Federation know where they had a huge bunch of secret weapons lying around
“I haven’t seen the episode yet, but I utterly hate the idea of ‘time crystals.’ Time travel shouldn’t be some casual thing that’s familiar and easily obtained — that conflicts with TOS’s portrayal of the discovery of the slingshot effect and the Guardian of Forever as amazing new discoveries, and it cheapens the idea of time travel as a plot device by having the means for it literally just lying around somewhere. Not to mention that it perpetuates the bad habit of modern Trek of replacing science fiction with handwavey fantasy.”
Absolutely, ChristopherLBennett. Nice to see a Trek novelist speak the truth. Ahem.
@krad, looking forward to your review of “Such Sweet Sorrow” – just finished and definitely my favorite episode of the season. Of course leading into the season finale the action heats up…
jmsnyc: Working on the review right now…. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
My heart broke for Pike as soon as I saw he was going to see his future, then I heartened again when Pike had to slowly remind himself, and us, that despite his awful future, in this present, he’s a Starfleet Captain, sworn to protect life, protect the future, even at this great cost to both of those to him personally.
Truly inspiring.
This one was reasonably effective, though it had its issues. In the Section 31 subplot, it was easy to tell that Gant was a trap; I mean, what are the odds that the one survivor of the ship that Burnham had come to find just happened to be her former crewmate? That was a giveaway that Control was luring her in with a familiar face. (And, yeah, I kinda remembered this review talking about Gant being Control too.)
I’m still not crazy about the whole time crystal/mystical quest element, but it was worth it for Pike making that decision to accept his fate. Still, the depiction of the accident differed from what “The Menagerie” said — that he was on an inspection tour of a cadet vessel, not a training simulation, and that Pike went in to rescue the survivors. He didn’t just happen to be there and fail to get out in time; he knowingly went into a lethal radiation zone to save people, which is much more heroic, and I wish they’d captured that accurately. They did show him staying behind to try to get one person out, but he failed to do so, and it just wasn’t quite the same.
I was surprised by the time references in this episode — that it’s been months since L’Rell and Tyler sent their child to Boreth 9 episodes ago and weeks since Culber moved out 4 episodes ago. That’s quite a change from earlier in the season, when Linus said in episode 4 that his cold in episode 1 had been “last week.” As I’ve been trying to work out the dates for my chronology, I’ve been putting the episodes much closer together, and have assumed the season up to this point has spanned less than 6 weeks. This is the problem with a lot of serialized shows — they tend to show each episode seeming to follow just about immediately on the events of the former and often seem to span no more than a day or two in-story, and yet then they turn around and claim that months have passed, that the stories have taken as long in-universe as their once-a-week-with-hiatuses release in real time. I’m going to have to try to work out a way to reconcile the timing.
Oh, and if it’s only been a few months since “Point of Light,” how is there already a complete, functional D7 Klingon ship, when PoL claimed it was a newly introduced design? Or maybe it was an old design being reintroduced, since we saw similar ships in the ENT era.
Incidentally, why does this show depict phasers as if they worked like present-day guns, one short burst at a time? Whatever happened to continuous beams? For that matter, whatever happened to the disintegrate setting? Burnham should’ve been able to vaporize Gant and his nanites in one shot. Unless that setting hasn’t been invented yet? I guess we didn’t see any vaporizations in “The Cage.”
Keith wrote: “Leland said… that the Federation was worried about the Klingons achieving time travel, because they could easily go back to the Mezozoic and blow up Earth. But we find out this week that they’ve had time travel all along—which raises the question of why they don’t use it to go back to the Mezozoic and blow up Earth.”
Having time crystals isn’t necessarily the same thing as having time travel, in the same way that having oil reserves isn’t the same thing as having internal combustion engines. Note that Section 31 and Drs. Burnham had a time crystal in their possession for some time, but needed to do a lot of science and invention in order to figure out how to get a workable time-travel suit out of it, and even then they screwed it up. And as #5/Mark said, they needed a supernova to power the thing. Although Mudd was somehow able to use a small one to create a time loop, but I guess that’s a more limited temporal effect. And he probably stole the tech from some advanced culture.
So I’d assume that the time crystals on Boreth just affect the flow of time or give people visions of the future (and past?) as shown, rather than allowing actual physical travel into the past like the Guardian of Forever. They have the potential to be harnessed for time travel, but it’s far from easy.
(And for future reference, it’s the Mesozoic, with an S — “meso-” meaning middle, “-zoic” meaning pertaining to life.)
@16/Sunspear: “The other piece of illogic is that they are now waiting for the next signal, which they assume is caused by the Angel, even though they just put the Angel suit out of commission and sent Dr. Burnham 950 years in the future with no apparent means to time travel. Aarrrgghh! These writers!”
You missed something. They determined in the previous episode that the Angel wasn’t the cause of the signals, and there was a whole scene here on the bridge where they explicitly discussed the question of who might actually be generating the signals instead.
@CLB: No, I didn’t. You’ll have to wait till final episode. And try to keep the original seven simultaneous signals separate from the subsequent ones.
@73/Sunspear: That’s a different matter than you talked about in the passage I quoted. You incorrectly said that they still assumed the signals were caused by the Angel, even though they had an actual onscreen conversation proving just the opposite. You’re right that there are problems with the whole signal business, but that specific one is not one of them.
@74. The writing remains confused. Pike says specifically “the seven signals,” not the 3 or 4 so far. Mama B says “Watchu Talkin’ about, Willis?” They have just witnessed her create a wormhole on her arrival, which corresponds to the red sequential flares they’ve followed so far, so they are definitively the creation of a red angel and will be so once again when Michael assumes the role of Red Angel. Spock thought he guessed wrong at first, then was proven right ultimately.
@75/Sunspear: We’ve been going in circles over this for weeks now. There were seven initial signals simultaneously, then each one recurred individually. No, they didn’t perfectly put that together, but it’s the simplest way to reconcile it and I don’t understand why you can’t just accept that and move on instead of restating it over and over and over again. You don’t need to keep explaining it. We get it.
@@@@@@CLB: because it’s not reconciled. And there’s no explanation within the show to make sense of it. It’s a glaring error that people keep gliding over. No story agent caused the originals.
@77/Sunspear: We don’t “glide over” it. We just have object permanence. We recognized it as an error weeks and weeks ago, we talked about it then and moved on, and so we don’t need to be constantly reminded of it every single week.
@72 – Chris: About the D7, what seems quite possible is that the design already existed, and what L’Rell was announcing is that it had been chosen as the type of ship that would represent the entire Klingon Empire going forward, instead of all the disparate ship designs used by separate Klingon houses during the war.
@79/MaGnUs: Makes sense.
@78. CLB: “We” didn’t do that. Me and a couple others did. Some others just gave up trying to comprehend the mess. You just finished your re-watch days ago. I was hoping you wouldn’t gloss over it and minimize large structural errors as if they were nothing. Sorry to be disappointed.