Star Trek Discovery: 2x10 (The Red Angel)
In which the Red Angel is unmasked, and shockingly turns out not to be the owner of an abandoned amusement park.
I called the Red Angel as being Michael way back at the start of the season - though at the time, I was just throwing it out as a crack theory and just wanted to be able to claim I called it if by some tiny chance it proved to be true. But since then, the evidence seemed to be mounting; the Angel was female. The Angel was human. The Angel was oddly focused on protecting Michael. And, as Spock pointed out this week, taking it upon herself to single-handedly save all sapient life is exactly the sort of thing Michael would do.
So I think Tilly's revelation at the start of this episode wasn't meant to come as a real twist to anyone. Michael was more and more looking like the only reasonable candidate, and as I watched the episode, I was sort of planning out a review that would be start with “Hey, maybe she's not the most exciting candidate, but I'd rather have a sensible reveal than a twist that's only there to be surprising.”
And then the show surprised me.
Now, there are still some unanswered questions - why did Ariam's data indicate it was Michael? Is there more than one Angel, and Michael is still destined to wear the suit herself, or was Control planting false data for its own purposes? I hope we do get an answer to that, but for the time being... Well, I'm excited by this new twist!
Star Trek doesn't have a lot of mothers. We've seen a lot of father-child relationships, but mother-child relationships haven't been given the same amount of depth. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Amanda’s almost always been far less important than Sarek, and was utterly wasted in the '09 reboot. TNG made an effort with the Crushers, but Wesley was more often than not more defined by his relationships with paternal figures - Picard, the Traveler, even the shadow of Jack Crusher - than by his relationship with his mother. And the later series didn't even have that much.
So here's Discovery saying, to hell with it, let's make up for it, and give Michael all the mothers! Amanda! Georgiou! Mirror-Georgiou! And now, her biological mother too! It's exciting to see, and something I really want to see developed more next week.
(And, perhaps, some jealousy from Spock, that his family never used experimental technology to alter the timeline to protect him in the past...)
Oh, and there was some other things before the final shot too?
Emperor Georgiou continues to confound any attempts at analysis. Her overwhelming goal, it seems, is to keep everyone around her off-balance, and it makes me very suspicious of her seeming moments of kindness and affection towards Michael. I do wonder if anything she's said about her home universe since crossing over is actually true, or if she's just constantly bullshitting everyone, knowing they have no way of verifying anything she says.
(I also wonder if Leland has just fallen victim to Control, or if we just saw him fall afoul of one of Georgiou's traps...)
Leland himself gets a bit of background, and is slightly humanised. I found the backstory linking him to Michael not nearly as contrived as I'd feared, and the idea that the Klingons are inexplicably the leaders in temporal technology amuses me - and ties in with Voyager “Endgame”, where Admiral Janeway has to go to the Klingons to acquire the technology to pull off her plan. I do wonder if L'Rell or her house knows anything about the Klingon's temporal experiments, and if she'll come back into this storyline.
(Another Voyager connection - it seems someone's finally taken note of Henry Starling's use of future technology to jumpstart Earth's computing technology in the 1990s of “Future's End”...)
Incidentally, I've seen a lot of people criticise the term 'time crystal' as a bit too on-the-nose. In fact, they are a real thing. It turns out real scientists are quite happy to use rather prosaic terminology to describe things rather than reams of technobabble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal
I want to briefly mention that the scene between Culber and Admiral Cornwell was fantastic, and I'm really enjoying how the show as a whole tackles trauma and the psychological fallout of what the crew's been through. Cornwell's become one of my favourite characters, and I'm so glad the writers chose to expand her role instead of killing her off early, as was the initial plan.
(Going back to the discussion of mothers, she's also an example of how often Discovery casts women as the voices of authority, and we're often getting scenes where Pike is the only man in the room. It's nice.)
My only real quibble this week is that it should have been obvious to everyone from the start that the trap wouldn't work unless Michael was genuinely in danger. You can't fool your future self, they'll remember it! I don't know if the idea was that only Spock could see the flaw in the plan because of his previous experiences giving him a better understanding of paradoxes, but it made everyone else look like idiots.
Oh, and I thought the funeral for Ariam was a bit overdone - I thought the brief moment of awkwardness on the bridge when her replacement arrived got across the sense of loss among the crew far more effectively and succinctly.
I called the Red Angel as being Michael way back at the start of the season - though at the time, I was just throwing it out as a crack theory and just wanted to be able to claim I called it if by some tiny chance it proved to be true. But since then, the evidence seemed to be mounting; the Angel was female. The Angel was human. The Angel was oddly focused on protecting Michael. And, as Spock pointed out this week, taking it upon herself to single-handedly save all sapient life is exactly the sort of thing Michael would do.
So I think Tilly's revelation at the start of this episode wasn't meant to come as a real twist to anyone. Michael was more and more looking like the only reasonable candidate, and as I watched the episode, I was sort of planning out a review that would be start with “Hey, maybe she's not the most exciting candidate, but I'd rather have a sensible reveal than a twist that's only there to be surprising.”
And then the show surprised me.
Now, there are still some unanswered questions - why did Ariam's data indicate it was Michael? Is there more than one Angel, and Michael is still destined to wear the suit herself, or was Control planting false data for its own purposes? I hope we do get an answer to that, but for the time being... Well, I'm excited by this new twist!
Star Trek doesn't have a lot of mothers. We've seen a lot of father-child relationships, but mother-child relationships haven't been given the same amount of depth. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Amanda’s almost always been far less important than Sarek, and was utterly wasted in the '09 reboot. TNG made an effort with the Crushers, but Wesley was more often than not more defined by his relationships with paternal figures - Picard, the Traveler, even the shadow of Jack Crusher - than by his relationship with his mother. And the later series didn't even have that much.
So here's Discovery saying, to hell with it, let's make up for it, and give Michael all the mothers! Amanda! Georgiou! Mirror-Georgiou! And now, her biological mother too! It's exciting to see, and something I really want to see developed more next week.
(And, perhaps, some jealousy from Spock, that his family never used experimental technology to alter the timeline to protect him in the past...)
Oh, and there was some other things before the final shot too?
Emperor Georgiou continues to confound any attempts at analysis. Her overwhelming goal, it seems, is to keep everyone around her off-balance, and it makes me very suspicious of her seeming moments of kindness and affection towards Michael. I do wonder if anything she's said about her home universe since crossing over is actually true, or if she's just constantly bullshitting everyone, knowing they have no way of verifying anything she says.
(I also wonder if Leland has just fallen victim to Control, or if we just saw him fall afoul of one of Georgiou's traps...)
Leland himself gets a bit of background, and is slightly humanised. I found the backstory linking him to Michael not nearly as contrived as I'd feared, and the idea that the Klingons are inexplicably the leaders in temporal technology amuses me - and ties in with Voyager “Endgame”, where Admiral Janeway has to go to the Klingons to acquire the technology to pull off her plan. I do wonder if L'Rell or her house knows anything about the Klingon's temporal experiments, and if she'll come back into this storyline.
(Another Voyager connection - it seems someone's finally taken note of Henry Starling's use of future technology to jumpstart Earth's computing technology in the 1990s of “Future's End”...)
Incidentally, I've seen a lot of people criticise the term 'time crystal' as a bit too on-the-nose. In fact, they are a real thing. It turns out real scientists are quite happy to use rather prosaic terminology to describe things rather than reams of technobabble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal
I want to briefly mention that the scene between Culber and Admiral Cornwell was fantastic, and I'm really enjoying how the show as a whole tackles trauma and the psychological fallout of what the crew's been through. Cornwell's become one of my favourite characters, and I'm so glad the writers chose to expand her role instead of killing her off early, as was the initial plan.
(Going back to the discussion of mothers, she's also an example of how often Discovery casts women as the voices of authority, and we're often getting scenes where Pike is the only man in the room. It's nice.)
My only real quibble this week is that it should have been obvious to everyone from the start that the trap wouldn't work unless Michael was genuinely in danger. You can't fool your future self, they'll remember it! I don't know if the idea was that only Spock could see the flaw in the plan because of his previous experiences giving him a better understanding of paradoxes, but it made everyone else look like idiots.
Oh, and I thought the funeral for Ariam was a bit overdone - I thought the brief moment of awkwardness on the bridge when her replacement arrived got across the sense of loss among the crew far more effectively and succinctly.