This Episode gives me (a tiny bit of) hope.
The ilogical stuff from previous Episodes (like Section 31's existence and operations being common knowlege before Kirks Time, but their very existence being concealed even from seasoned later Captains like Sisko...) still isn#t explained - but at least this Episode didn't double down on it.
One could argue that it says a lot about a Season if the most significant thing one can say about an Episode is: "They didn't make it worse"...
But that is the Age Star Trek as well as Star Wars fans seem to live in today.
I guess Trekkies and Star Wars Fans finally have common ground. Both are in mourn...
Maybe I'm too hung up on little details like Georgiou stopping the data transfer but conveniently leaving that button in the exact same place for anyone else to press it later (and thus resume the data transfer), instead of just taking it with her or destroying it... But, seriously, fuck this show. It was always a bad Star Trek show, but it used to be a good sci-fi one. Now it's not even the latter.
It's funny to see that most people repeatedly compare this show to the "Real" Star Trek, and how Disccovery in ruining the franchise, and that some things are inconsistent with the old series, bla bla bla, instead of just judging this show for what it is. For me, one of the best sci-fi shows since BSG.
Fun Fact:
Kenric Green who played Michael Burnham’s father in this episode, is in real life the husband of Sonequa Martin-Green.
9/10
Superb
THIS IS BY FAR
THE BEST EVER STAR TREK SHOW
IT'S FLAWLESS AND
A TOTAL MASTERPIECE.
SO THEY HAS TO BE A SECOND
"RED ANGEL" IF MICHAELS MOM
KNEW NOTHING ABOUT THE
SIGNALS, (MICHAEL SUIT UP).
THIS SHOW IS FRICKIN AWESOME,
EVERY EPISODE I THINK
THEY CAN'T POSSIBLY TOP
THAT AND THEN
THEY KNOCK IT OUT
THE DAMN PARK
BY GIVING US A "BORG"
ORIGIN STORY....
I LOVE,LOVE THE IDEA
LET'S TAKE THIS BABY
FAR....FAR....FAR
INTO THE FUTURE
FAR AWAY FROM THE COLLECTIVE,
Er....Sorry "CONTROL"
WOW..JUST...WOW...
I HAVE NO WORDS.
"PERFECTION"
"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.
Resistance is futile".
One of the best episodes of the series. The characters are really starting to come together, really enjoyed Michael and her story in this episode.
Predictable, poorly written sci-fi soap opera and time travel crap. The plot is so illogical and full of holes big enough to fly a Borg cube through...as always when stupid and lazy writers resort to time travel.
“Don't you understand? Time is a wibbly-wobbly thing.”
— Mrs. Burnham (probably)
Curiously, this Star Trek feels a lot like Doctor Who, with its crazy plot twists and absolutely nonsensical and inconsistent technobabble. The trick is to pretend I'm watching DW, because the show becomes much more enjoyable.
[7.3/10] I tend to like it when mystery box shows start giving answers. Discovery has teased a lot of questions in the second season. Who or what is The Red Angel? Why did it choose Spock? What is the galaxy-destroying threat that Spock saw? And the show pretty much puts its cards on the table about all these things.
The Red Angel is Michael’s mom, Gabrielle Burnham. She tried to go back in time to prevent the Klingons from attacking her family, ended up 950 years in the future, and has been trying to fix the timeline ever since. She chose Spock because the combination of his Vulcan logic, human emotion, and space dyslexia made him uniquely suited to comprehend the time-distorted problems Garbielle was trying to communicate. And the galaxy-destroying the threat is basically Starfleet Control + the sphere data, which evolves in combination to be a sentient A.I. capable of wiping out all life as we know it in the universe.
Are all of these answers totally brilliant? Not exactly. Burnham’s mom being alive and at the center of all this still feels like a bit of a cheat. Involving Spock because of his learning disability is both convenient from a promotional standpoint and uncomfortable from an optics standpoint. And artificial intelligence + information = evil isn’t exactly the most heady obstacle there’s ever been in Star Trek.
What’s more, there’s still plenty of questions to be answered. For one thing, Gabrielle at least indicates that she knows nothing about the signals that have heralded the Red Angel. How exactly Starfleet Control becomes the galactic menace of the future is still a little unclear (though faux-Leland gives us a villain monologue to try to account for it). And some of the time shenanigans create as many questions as they answer (though this has been true for Star Trek for a long time).
But by god, they’re answers. We have a clear enemy here in robo-Leland, the representation of the crazed but calculating A.I. that’s on the loose. We have a macguffin in the form of the sphere data, which is self-protecting and hard to keep from the evil Control entity, let alone eliminate. And we have a story about why the Red Angel has been appearing in particular places, what her goal is, and what it’s meant to her personally.
That latter point is the other boon to “Perpetual Infinity.” As much as some of the joy of finally getting answers to those big questions is dampened by this show’s propensity to resort to facepalm-worthy one-liners and clunky conversations, Michael’s mom is a great addition for the episode. I’ll admit my bias, as a fan of Sonja Sohn from her should-have-been-star-marking turn on The Wire. But I’ll also admit that I didn’t realize it was Sohn until about halfway through the episode (she’s a long way from precincts in Baltimore and/or Hell’s Kitchen, making her a little out of context for yours truly), and was still impressed by her presence and delivery throughout.
The episode basically gives her three big conversations: with Pike, with Michael, and with Georgiou, and each serves a purpose. The one with Pike gives you a sense of Gabrielle’s resolve and directness, showing how focused she is on her goal. The one with Michael can’t quite match the emotional poignance it’s aiming for thanks to the writing, but at least functionally delivers the sense that Gabrielle has seen and been through so much in the timestream that she can’t let herself get attached and hurt again. And the one with Georgiou, while again, overwritten, suggests more hidden depths to Philippa and shows that Gabrielle still deeply cares about her daughter, even if the pain of being unable to prevent her death so many times has caused her to put up walls.
That’s the best thing about Gabrielle’s introduction, and something that, frankly, harkens back to Star Trek’’s episodic roots. Those one-off episodes used to let us get to know a guest character and their weird, particular situations. The other characters would react and be changed by it, but you’d get these little thought experiments and short form character studies that are harder to come by in the era of serialization. And yet here, by getting glimpses of Gabrielle’s mission logs and in those conversations, we get the sense of someone who’s been traumatized by constant trips through the time-space continuum in order to try to prevent catastrophe that have each ended in failure up to this point. Sohn’s performance drives the emotional contingent of that experience home, and the script at least takes the time to contemplate what that would be like for someone.
That said, it also spends a good amount of time on the whole evil robot gone amok schtick, which I can’t say I’m especially warm to. There’s at least some cool visuals to Control-qua-Leland. The whole nanoprobe injection scene has some Matrix-esque body horror to it. The way it moves when attacking Tyler (who’s sure to survive his latest near-death experience) has some genuine terror in the single-mindedness on display. And its one-man assault on the planetside crew, replete with Michelle Yeoh reprising a little bit of her Crouching Tiger hand-to-hand combat, has the coolness of everyone banding together to make a stand against an otherwise unstoppable force.
But the whole “keep the data away from the robot” schtick gets old quickly. The show belabors Georgiou realizing that Leland has been taken over. The thematic focus on motherhood as a throughline and connection between Gabrielle and Philippa is a solid one, but it’s nearly sunk by Control-as-Leland’s transparent manipulations and attempts to set the two against one another. And while I like the idea that thanks to a spacetime tug of war, Gabrielle can only be in this moment for a short time, the whole technobabble “we can send the suit into infinity to keep the info from Control but still save your mom” thing is a little too easy.
Still, that’s the nice thing about the point where a mystery box show finally gets to its big reveals -- it makes the conflicts and obstacles clear. While I might not be crazy about the solution, the notion that the crew of the Discovery has to find some way to stop Control from getting the sphere data creates a straightforward motivation for once. Gabrielle’s efforts to jump in and out of the timestream to help prompt that reality clarify the rationale behind the red angel’s actions. And the Leland-bot or whatever it represents evolving into the technological blight of the distant future explicates the stakes of the peril our heroes are fighting.
Little of that is perfect. As neat as some of the ideas at play are, the series’s usual painful dialogue and platitude-filled speeches drags things down considerably. But at least we know what’s up now, and at least talented performers like Sonja Sohn are on board to bring it all to a head. I may not love every second of where Discovery is going, but at least it finally has a clear direction in an otherwise hodgepodge-y mystery in search of a genuine, overarching story.
As they carry the red angel and what you try to avoid begins to take a turn that does not convince me
I'll miss lcars. damn you discovery.
The name of the episode was perfect.
That's exactly how it felt to watch.
"Perpetual Infinity".
Thought it would never end.
"Time is a living thing."!?
Are you kidding me? This is some 12 Monkeys nonsense right here.
Real Star Trek at least attempted internal consistency and consistency with known science (albeit taking some liberties... hence science fiction). This is just fantastical nonsense, making things up as we go along. It's turning into Doctor Who-level fantasy fiction that just happens to be set in space and has time travel in it... Pretty soon, they'll drop the pretense of science altogether.
Not that there's anything wrong with fantasy (I love Doctor Who), but that's not what Star Trek is.
I don't exaggerate when I consider Michael emotionally instable. It's no surprise that she acted irrational this time, considering the circumstances, so I absolutely don't get why her superiors would give her the opportunity to cause severe damages. Again.
Not to mention that pinning her mom made no sense anyway. They couldn't keep her permanently anyway and she shared the information she was willed to share. So what exactly could the Starfleet gain by ignoring her request to let her leave? Correct, absolutely nothing.
This season's plot is just bad. Really bad.
"You woke" - Sp0ck
Tonight on Star Trek, Discovery of Feelingz our favorite goofball Tilly was here to explain to the plebs what little science is still in this show. The Silent Man finally speaks and the Dead Guy is all good again, dressed in white cause he's clean again. Pike gets told the shut the fuck up cause he's a dumb sum of a b...ad father (?). Burnmom has an attitude even though she should be thankful for being in one place longer than all the times before. Also a lot of other crap happened.
Most of what I would say has been said here already. I'll mention a few things.
I liked the fight between Leland and the Emperor. She talks about her mom who should be mirror Hoshi from Enterprise. All in all I want to see her show. The rest of the episode was riddled with things that annoyed me enough to knock me out of story mode.
The super suit was build by a someone from the federation 30 years before Star Trek TOS? There knowlege of time travel seems to ever expand. It's way beyond TOS.
I hate that the phaser aren't beam weapons.
Next episode a Section 31 fleet. Not bad for a covert black opps unit.
tbh it's an OK sci-fi show but a very bad Star Trek.
Shout by OrphanBlockedParent2019-03-29T10:37:10Z
These last episodes are blowing me away. I love it. Spock is starting to grow on me, his supportive behavior was great. Mom Burnham was cold at first but it was the only defense mechanisme to have when you see your child die a hundred times. In these final moments, she softened at last.
Not to forget the expectionnal acting all around, this series is taking it to the next level each season.