Having
a huge franchise can be a blessing and a curse.
If you don’t draw on it, you are wasting potential. If you do use it, it can come across as
namedropping. So far in Star Trek
Discovery, we’ve seen Amanda, Sarek, Spock, Pike, Number One and the Talosians,
not to mention The Enterprise and Boreth.
On
the flip side are Control, which is a Skynet wannabe, and the Spore Drive,
neither of which was mentioned in any other series or movie. And there’s Michael Burnham, Spock’s foster
sister. That’s at least understandable,
as Spock didn’t mention his parents or half-brother to Kirk.
What
can I say? It’s been a busy season. Speaking of which, after this episode is the
two-part season finale.
So,
yeah. This episode serves as a setup.
Control
is bent on getting that Sphere data. To
do that, they need a Time Crystal, which means a return trip to Boreth, where
the Chancellor will put in a good word so that Pike can beam down. It’s not clear exactly what the plan is yet,
but it’s got to be big.
Meanwhile,
Spock and Michael check out a Section 31 ship that has gone silent. That’s because Control killed everyone except
for one person. Coincidentally, that
person served with Michael on the Shenzhou.
There’s no way that control took that person over. Right?
By
episode’s end, it’s determined that the only rational course of action is to
evacuate Discovery to Enterprise and destroy the ship. Given that a third season has been ordered,
it can’t be that easy. Even if we didn’t
know that, there are still two episodes left.
I
know I keep on about this whole Control/Skynet thing. It’s not that farfetched. Both are AI systems that become self aware
and wipe out all known organic life.
Time travel is involved and there’s a parent/child team trying to stop
them. The child is seen as a threat to
the AI and the mother has undergone a major personality shift trying to stop
the AI.
So,
part of the story is trying to change fate.
There’s also a part of the story that involves accepting your fate. Pike has to accept his if he wants the time
crystal. Michael will also have to
accept hers in the two-part finale. So,
there’s that.
It’s
not clear what Pike intends to do with the time crystal, exactly. He can’t get it to Michael’s mother. It would seem that he has no plans yet to
build another suit. He’s doing this not
really knowing why. However, the
alternative is letting everyone die.
The
second season is almost as smooth as I’d have hoped. There are a few parts, like here, where it
seems like maybe it’s a victim of one too many rewrites, but I can forgive
that. It took me the entire season, but
things are starting to make sense.
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