2x09 Project Daedalus

[7.3/10] I hate when television shows finally give a minor character some shading, only to kill them off. Now I’m not saying that Lieutenant Airiam is gone for good. This is Star Trek after all, and on Discovery alone, we’ve already had three characters come back from the dead in some way shape or form. But there is something that feels nevertheless manipulative about how we finally get to know the intriguing-looking robot officer, with a compelling storyline to boot, only to see her get blasted out of an airlock by the end of the episode.

But it’s still nice to get to Airiam a little bit. We get some raw character detail here, like the fact that she is “half-robot”, and presumably became that way after a shuttle crash with her late fiance. (As a side note, it’s interesting how cybernetic enhancements are so prominent on Discovery when they’re fairly scant in later series. Maybe this sort of thing is why?) We also get some more emotional shading for her, giving her a friendship with Tilly, Detmer, and other officers that’s expressed in just a few first-person memories and cute interactions with Tilly in the present.

And we also get a compelling story of dual identities. We see the real Airiam trying to help her friend, saving her favorite memories, feeling disoriented when she wakes up from a daze and isn’t sure how she got to where she is. And we see the one who’s being controlled by whatever Star Trek’s equivalent of Braniac is, with three red dots flashing to let us know that some malevolent force is in charge and thwarting the crew. The push and pull behind Airiam’s eyes is a compelling one, especially as we get to know Airiam a little better.

But we also get to know our Big Bad a little better here too. Little is outright confirmed, but it appears that the major force Discovery is contending with is some kind of malevolent A.I., likely from the future given Pike’s earlier timestream skirmish. It wants to learn everything it can about artificial intelligence, has tried to stage a silent coup of the Federation via Starfleet control, and presumably is the force that tries to destroy all sentient life in the far future from Spock’s vision.

I don’t mind this reveal necessarily. It’s not especially novel. (Lord knows various ships named Enterprise have encountered rogue A.I.s seemingly once a year.) But the fact that you have a being or a force that can control anything digital or mechanical and is gathering information at least poses an interesting challenge for tech-heavy Starfleet.

That means there’s a haunted house feel by the time that Burnham, Airiam, and Nhan make it to Section 31 headquarters and discover it’s a murder scene. The reveal that the AI has killed the quarter of Starfleet commanders we saw in the prior episode, and is roughly in control of the Federation’s secret spy base is appropriately unnerving. Commander Riker himself (Jonathan Frakes), is the director for this one, and he manages to maintain the creep factor with dark lighting and close angles as all is slowly revealed.

The time we spend with Airiam, and the way it builds to that confrontation at Section 31’s base is all engaging. The problem is the filler that it takes to get there.

Filler is overly harsh, but we spend an awful lot of time with Pike and Admiral Cornwell doing exposition dumps about this red herring threat or this peculiar behavior from Starfleet command before we get to the meat of the episode. I like Cornwell, and thought she was a highlight of even the shakier points of last season, and I’ve talked about how much I’ve unexpectedly enjoyed the addition of Pike. But just having the two of them exchange generic platitudes about being fugitives or the chain of command or what this threat is doesn't really add much to the proceedings. Even the Discovery flying blind through a moving minefield felt oddly generic and unexciting here.

Speaking of generic and unexciting, I still don’t buy the Burnham/Spock relationship here. God knows that I’ve seen enough “chess is a metaphor for whatever we’re really talking about” bits to last a lifetime. Discovery’s Spock still only feels vaguely connected to prior Spocks, which is partly by design given him being unmoored by the red angel, but sitll leaves me feeling like I’m watching a different character. And the overwrought family drama/wound reopening/shouting match between him and Burnham still just leaves me cold and uninvested. Discovery isn’t necessarily wrong to want to dip into Spock family tension, as it’s been a venerable source of good material from 1967 to 2009. But this sibling estrangement stuff still feels so tacked on and unengaging.

But again, at least once we dispense with the logic/unpredictability metaphor their interactions represent, we get a pretty badass confrontation at the Section 31 base. The wire fu the show tries to pull off isn’t perfect (where is Michelle Yeoh when you really need her?), but there is, again, a horror movie quality to seeing Airian snap, rip off Nahn’s atmospheric enhancement, and beat the hell out of Burnham. She seems unstoppable, and unable to be reasoned with, which makes her one of the most frightening threats the Discovery crew has faced so far.

And yet, you can reason with her. There is such sentiment and pathos in Tilly sending Airiam shared memories to try to snap her out of the AI’s mental grasp. Hannah Cheesman does a superb job of communicating Airiam’s waking up out of this daze but still experiencing the terror of being unable to do anything to stop her mental captor. The show overdoes the life and death decision from Burnham to save her friend or blow her out of the airlock for the good of everyone (including, arguably, Airiam herself), but there’s at least emotional investment there because, after 20+ episodes, we finally have some sense of who Airiam is.

Granted, that’s all delivered rather quickly, and used to give us another code word tease and hint that Burnham is the most important person in the universe yet again. But taken for what it is in the immediate term -- a story of a young (cybernetically enhanced) woman being taken over from within, offering herself up as a heroic sacrifice to stop it, and spending her last moments reliving one of her last happy memories with her dead fiance, “Project Deadalus” is heartbreaking.

I wish that sort of character work was used to build characters up rather than just to make it more meaningful when they’re killed off. But at least they make this episode Airiam’s story, one that has horror, excitement, and pathos from the first moment to the last. It’s a shame to kill off a character right when she’s interesting as more than a walking plot device, but I’m glad we got to learn more about her as a person, to where her death had meaning, even if I wish Discovery hadn’t killed her off so suddenly.