Star Trek: Discovery: Season 2 Review - Part 3

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm reviewing the second half of Star Trek: Discovery's second season! That's If Memory Serves to Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2, all created during Alex Kurtzman's time as the show's showrunner. He was already the executive producer, plus he's the guy in charge of all the other new Trek projects being set up, but after five episodes he took the reins on Discovery personally, like an admiral or commodore taking command of a starship. Which usually goes pretty well in Star Trek to my recollection.

All these reviews were written right after I watched the episode and the next time trailer, so you're getting my first reactions and genuine predictions. You're getting SPOILERS as well, and not just for Discovery as I'm considering the rest of Trek to be fair game as well. Especially the Kelvin Timeline movies.

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I'm still giving out review scores, because part 3 would be a dumb place to stop, and I'm still coming up with the numbers the same way. I didn't try to calculate each episode's objective quality, I just rated them based on how much I appreciated whatever they was doing. So if I loved an episode with terrible writing and huge plot holes, it's going to get a high score. Though some episodes might have gotten bonus points for doing something that impressed me (or vice-versa).

10	I've decided that 5 is the middle of my scale, so I don't use 10.
9	I loved this episode! It probably has big flaws, because what doesn't, but I just didn't care.
8	I thought it was great, though I wouldn't put it at the very top of any lists.
7	Pretty much my default I've noticed, if I liked an episode and nothing bothered me too much.
6	I found things to enjoy in it, but I wanted to like it more.
5	It was alright. Either that or it bored me, but I felt it did enough to earn a bonus point.
4	Still barely on the right side of watchable, but a lot of it wasn't working for me.
3	It pretty much lost me, though I occasionally had reason to glance at the screen.
2	It might not be objectively terrible, but I had zero interest in leaving it on.
1	This is a mess on so many levels that it's amazing they actually let people watch it.

Discovery - Season 2 (Part 2)
2-08	If Memory Serves	7
I've been hoping all along that Discovery's going to evolve to become more like the rest of Star Trek, in the ways that matter to me at least. Can't say I expected them to just take parts of 60s Trek and bolt them straight onto the series though. This episode was tonally all over the place, switching from Vina and the Talosians being just as weird as when we last saw them, to Culber and Stamets going through serious issues, to Georgiou and Leland being a pair of comic book villains, and I'm not sure what I thought about that. Except for relief that Section 31 isn't being portrayed as a necessary evil. Though I do know that starting the teaser with clips of the original Enterprise, uniforms and actors messed with my poor brain. It's like they saw Doctor Who pull off a 51 year old 'previously on' at the start of Twice Upon a Time and realised that they could beat it with a 54 year one. But Twice Upon a Time recreated the original sets and reshot classic scenes with the recast actors to make it all match the best they could and Discovery... did something else. Not sure playing up the goofy 60sness of it with the cutout character effect was a good idea, but it's nice that Discovery has firmly established that everything in The Cage and The Menagerie flashbacks happened just as we remembered it (with the original unremastered effects!) Even if it went and visually contradicted itself with the very next scene of the recast Pike. The tribute to Trek didn't end at the Original Series though, as the episode also recreated the warp chase from Into Darkness and the warp out at the end of Voyager's opening titles. There may have been other homages, and I kind of hope there were, but these are all I caught. Pike coped with all the weirdness pretty well I thought, despite someone sabotaging his ship, his ex invading his imagination, and his first officer encouraging their resurrected doctor to beat up the surgically altered Klingon agent who killed him. He really is the ideal Starfleet captain and it's going to be a shame when we lose him. At least we know he'll get a happy ending when Spock breaks regulations to bring him back to Talos, and this episode did a surprisingly good job of setting that up. It showed that Pike still loves Vina, gave Spock a reason to think the Talosians would help them, and had Pike break regulations to go to Talos to save Spock. Speaking of breaking regs, we got all those warnings about Talos IV being restricted that the last episode didn't mention, even though it would've given its ending more (or any) impact to people who'd never heard of the place if it had. The episode also gave us some resolution to the most dragged out mystery this series has: how does the ship get cleaned? Turns out that there's little drones that fly around and pick stuff up! Plus we got a bit of payoff in the Spock and Culber plotlines too. They fixed Spock's brain, revealed what he knows about the angel (basically repeating what we saw in the last trailer), revealed whether he killed anyone (a scene also shown in a previous trailer), and finally gave us the fully story of what Burnham did to drive a wedge between them. Turns out that the most obvious answer was the right one, which was a kind of crappy resolution to a dragged out mystery, but it had the benefit of feeling believable, especially in the context given here. It wasn't her calculated plan to drive a wedge between them, she just said the most hurtful things she could to get him to stop following her, as it kind of ruined the whole point of her running away. That's what sent Spock down the road of being maximum Vulcan... though he still has enough humanity to do a cheesy 'Goodbye Spock' line to troll Leland. This is the first time we've gotten to see Ethan Peck really playing Spock and he's no Leonard Nimoy, but then no one's Leonard Nimoy and he's definitely got a deep enough voice for it. I can see him growing on me. Culber is definitely more interesting now that he's got a bit of a personality, even if it's not the nicest personality at the moment due to his distress. I look forward to him becoming a real character over time and developing traits. I did feel for the guy though, and especially poor Stamets, and the confrontation in the mess hall was something that's been coming for a long time. It was pretty cliché, well as much as a scene where a murder victim confronts the person with the murderer's face and memories can be, but I was interested to see if he actually could bring out Voq. Turns out nope, one meeting with Voq is all he'll ever get, as the guy really was killed by L'Rell. Unless Stamets kissed him too at some point and sent his consciousness to the mycelium network as well. All Culber found in Tyler was a man suffering from the same identity crisis that he has. Meanwhile Saru's loving his identity crisis, encouraging people to brawl in the mess hall and defending his choices to Pike afterwards. I'm getting worried about him. Speaking of identity crises, I figured that Airiam's reprogramming could've been the reason for the change of actress at the start of the season, as I assumed they planned to give her character more to do once she became a spy. That doesn't seem so likely anymore, as Airiam did just as much as she ever does, and I feel like her season 1 actress probably got more lines than her playing Lt Nilsson again this week! Nice to see that she's still on the series by the way. They definitely seem to be hinting that AI is the problem here, with another almost throwaway reference to the threat assessment AI on the Section 31 ship. We've already seen Discovery herself developing intelligence in Calypso, so it'll be interesting to see how that ties in. Plus I now I get to have some hope that the Calypso takes place in the bad future and the future Federation doesn't become the belligerent V'draysh. Incidentally it's no wonder the Kelvin Timeline and the Prime Timeline are so different with all the time travel going on. Turns out that Burnham should've died as a child, so if the Red Angel doesn't exist in the other timeline, maybe Burnham doesn't either. Overall this was a decent episode, I liked it. Which is a relief because I saw T.J. Scott's name on it, the director who did the overly stylish The Wolf Inside last season and I got worried. The strange lenses, dramatic lighting and shiny floors were all back, but I thought the characters behaved a lot more human in this one. Wait a second, that was the episode they visited Mirror Voq's planet in... maybe this explains why Talos IV looks the damn same!
2-09	Project Daedalus	8
Star Trek has once again trolled fans who really wanted to see the Daedalus class ship in action with another episode with 'Daedalus' in the title. Personally I was more interested in seeing what Michelle Paradise's take on the series was going to be, seeing as she's going to be co-showrunner next season. I was also interested in seeing Jonathan Frakes' direction again, because he's usually pretty good at it and this wasn't an exception. Whoever decided to have silent credits after a trailer, on the other hand, didn't entirely think it through. But I'm glad the episode ended right as Airiam died, as it seemed like the perfect moment for it. Not that it was great that the character died right as we started to actually learn something about them (turns out she's a RoboCop!), though she was clearly doomed from the moment she started acting like an actual main character. You can't go back to being an extra who makes robot noises whenever she looks up after that. Though characters like Nhan and Detmer also got a bit of an opportunity to act like people instead of just their jobs, which was jarring but welcome. They even talked with each other around a table! If this is a sign of what Paradise wants to bring to the series, then I'm considering it a good sign. In fact I thought this episode was great, maybe even my favourite of the season so far, though a lot of that was probably due to how well it matched my mental image of what Star Trek is and what Discovery should be. I'm used to ignoring the dumb parts of episodes so I can appreciate the other 90% that's good, but I liked all of this. Well except for the fact that they didn't mention why they couldn't use their phasers on the mines or their transporter on Airiam (they saved Voq from the vacuum of space just fine last season). Maybe they're just trying to keep their 'no ship phasers' run going, as after nine episodes they must be close to a Star Trek record by now. The twist in the episode, that the Control AI is the villain and has been using Section 31, wasn't all that unexpected, but that's fine as they hadn't been beating us over the head with clues either. They haven't explained what turned it evil, but I think I know why it's so keen to increase its tactical knowledge: it got its ass handed to it by the Klingons last season! It also seemed like it'd been outwitted by the bridge crew picking random manoeuvres for a second, but then it turned out to have been expertly hitting them exactly where it hurt all along. Which is good, because it would've been ridiculous if that plan had actually worked. While this was going on there was also pissed-off Spock expertly hitting his sister exactly where it hurt by telling her that things aren't all about her (even though the end of the episode said otherwise), and just as skilfully fixing the engine. Though I'm deducting points because he didn't have to go into the Spock sacrifice box and put on the gloves to do it. Plus he also helped Stamets understand that when Culber dumped him because he didn't know himself anymore, it was because he didn't know himself anymore (I can't help but think he was speaking from his own experience with Burnham there). This Spock may be acting out of character, but he's handy to have around. He's almost cool enough to join Team Cybernetics on the bridge, though he'll need some metal on his face first. So I guess that barring any further twists, the Red Angel is going to be Burnham using the mysterious Project Daedalus (which was somehow not featured at all in an episode called Project Daedalus.) I should've figured that out from the episode title really, seeing as the mythological Daedalus basically built his own angel wings. Hopefully there isn't a second suit called Project Icarus for someone else to wear or else I can see that going very badly.
2-10	The Red Angel	6
There were a lot of emotional scenes of characters dealing with issues and discussing their feelings this episode, to the point where I was wondering if they were just skipping the plot this week. But they got there in the end. Though the plot turned out to be 'let's kill Burnham in a needlessly painful way and see if she really is the most important person in the universe'. I was a little disappointed that no one seemed to spot the obvious flaw in their plan to threaten Burnham's life to lure the Red Angel back in time to save her though. And I don't mean the fact that including Burnham in the planning would give away their plan to Future Burnham, because Burnham would inevitably learn what the plan was afterwards anyway. Seems to me that if Burnham had been the Red Angel there would've been two possibilities, a: it's a predestination paradox and Future Burnham has no choice but to save herself in the same way she remembers being saved, whether it's a trap or not, or else she wouldn't exist to save herself, b: Future Burnham's from an alternate timeline where this never happened and she has no memory of the trap. No, the big flaw was that they were going to race in and save Present Burnham if the Red Angel didn't come, meaning that there was no reason for Future Burnham to come back, because being from the future she'd know that her past self survived without any intervention. You can't bluff against the future, it already knows what cards you're going to play! At first I thought that the writers just hadn't thought it through, but then Spock figured it out! So it turns out that they'd deliberately written our genius heroes to be idiots. Even the Flash and the Legends of Tomorrow would've had this one worked out. Even Bill and Ted. Still, at least Spock preventing them from rescuing Burnham revealed Emperor Georgiou's true feelings, as she had to be held at gunpoint to stop her from saving her adopted daughter from another universe. She's still not to be trusted, but at least we know she's got Burnham's back. We also learned a bit more about Saru 2.0 this episode. I haven't been all that keen on him post-vahar'ai as he's been a bit of a cocky git, but here he showed how much he cares about people still and he used his fearlessness to intimidate the crap out of Leland. Plus I liked his surprise singing at the funeral, which was apparently performed by Doug Jones himself. Leland's been asking for a punch all season so it was nice to see Burnham give him two this episode, though I think she should've given him three for what he nearly did to Spock. I'm not sure whether that counts as striking a superior officer because Section 31's situation is kind of vague, but I've decided to assume that there wasn't a damn thing Leland could do about it, aside from send assassins to kill her in her sleep. It made perfect sense to me that Section 31 knew what the Red Angel was this whole damn time and it was their own project, and it also made sense that Leland was responsible for Burnham's parents deaths because they were Section 31 too and he put them in danger. Plus his story put the suit, the time crystal and Burnham's parents right there in the same place and I didn't even suspect for a moment that one of them was the Red Angel. Well played Discovery, well played. I've seen a lot of guesses out there for who the Red Angel was: Burnham, Amanda, Tilly, Georgiou... Picard, but I don't remember anyone anywhere speculating that it could've been Burnham's dead mother! Turns out that the internet was as wrong as the Discovery crew were (though at least the internet didn't try to murder someone to test their theory). And then Leland got a needle through the eye at the end, so I guess he's either dead or has been biologically hacked by Control like Airiam had been. Why did the retinal scanner even have that feature though... oh wait, Section 31, duh. Never trust anything on a ship run by a crew all wearing leather (except the ship from Farscape which is perfectly safe and nothing bad ever happens there). I can't imagine this is going to go well for Leland, seeing how Airiam ended up. Turns out the end of the last episode wasn't a fake out this time; she really is dead. Though Nilsson replacing Airiam on the bridge was inadvertently hilarious to me. They were trying to wring some genuine emotions from that moment but it doesn't work for viewers that know that she's played by Airiam's season 1 actress. I'm pretty sure Nilsson was one of the people carrying Airiam's photon torpedo coffin as well. Funny how Airiam got a much bigger turnout to her funeral than Spock did in Star Trek II, though I guess it helped that Discovery has a room big enough to fit the entire crew inside 30 times over with a convenient torpedo launcher. The auto-pilot message implies that this is the entire crew, which means that the mysterious unnamed chief engineer and chief medical officer are likely in there somewhere, we just have no idea who they are. It also means that Discovery has maybe 200 people on board now, about 50% more than last season, which is about 11 crewmembers per deck! It was nice that they used the funeral to squeeze out just a tiny bit more character development for Detmer as she talked about her augmentation. Plus I liked Nhan shaking Burnham's hand afterwards and making sure there was no resentment there for how she flushed Airiam into space. Culber going to see Admiral Cornwell for therapy was a bit worrying though, as it implies that they don't have a counsellor on board. How are they supposed to know when aliens are lying or feeling great pain without a counsellor? He was also wearing a very contemporary looking suit and it threw me off. Also why's Spock not in uniform yet? Is it because he's still technically on leave and he's embracing technicalities? I want to see him in the blue top and black pants dammit! Anyway this was a decent enough episode for what it was, and it gives me additional confidence that director Hanelle Culpepper is a good choice to kick off the Picard series. Any flaws I found in this episode came from the writing.
2-11	Perpetual Infinity	6
This wasn't my favourite episode of the season, but I wouldn't say that it's the worst either. It's a definite contender for having the most nonsensical title though. Something endless that is endless... wow that's pretty endless. From the title I was imagining this being about the crew finding out just how many times that history had been rewritten in an attempt to avert the bad future, and I suppose that's pretty much what we got. I was reminded of Annorax in Voyager's Year of Hell, who continually adjusted the timeline in an attempt to save his family, or Harry Mudd last season. Neither of which really succeeded. Though Discovery really does need to get some writers who understand what the word 'infinity' means. I don't care how awesome the Red Angel suit is, it doesn't have infinite storage! The Red Angel suit is plenty overpowered for a prototype time machine though, as it can fly in vacuum of space, resurrect the dead, teleport across the galaxy as fast as the spore drive, and relocate entire churches and their contents intact. And it can do it for years without needing a recharge. Well it could anyway, until Cyber-Leland shot it with a forcefield-penetrating phaser rifle. Nice to finally see an energy beam weapon on Star Trek again by the way! It's been so long. I wasn't all that satisfied by the resolution of the mystery of the colony on Terralysium though, as it turns out that Burnham's mother rescued them from World War III and dragged them 50,000 light years across space just to see if she could change history. Plus there was no resolution to the mystery of the seven signals, as despite time-stalking her daughter and knowing everything about everything, she apparently had no idea of the mission that Discovery was on. Which makes no damn sense now that I think about it, as Spock only had the signals in his brain because he mind melded with her. Unless he mind melded with two angels thinking they were the same one. We also got the revelation that her mother's called Gabrielle Burnham, which is an interesting coincidence seeing as last season we had Gabriel Lorca. At first I wondered if Michael got her name because of a family tradition of naming children after angels, but she's likely named after her dad Mike (played by Soniqua Martin-Green's husband!) I liked that we finally got a flashback to see what her family was like before the Klingons orphaned her. I also liked the flashback to the flashback of Michael beaming up to the Shenzhou for the first time, as it removed all doubt about where those giant dish props used in the trap came from. This is a good episode to watch if you want to see Michael struggle with getting her mother back, only to learn that she doesn't care about her anymore, except actually she does, because that's why she came here (duh). It's half focused on the drama of the Discovery crew trying to deal with the situation of Dr Burnham and the sphere data (with a time limit of course), while Cyber-Leland sends his agents against them, and half focused on Michael dealing with all the emotions someone dealing with such a weird sci-fi situation would have. Which would be fine, but we've already seen her struggling with emotions in like every bloody episode so far! I'm really hoping that next season features a lot less crying. The episode also gave us a chance to see just how far Georgiou and Tyler would go as Cyber-Leland's unwitting agents. Tyler gave up on his plan the moment he realised that the Discovery crew knew what they're doing, but agreed to work with Georgiou to spy on Leland. Georgiou, on the other hand, gave half the data to the evil computer and was only stopped from blowing up Michael's mother because she worked out that Leland's an evil computer and she'd been played. Which I'm glad about actually, as I do want her to become a better person thanks to the influence of others, but I want to see that growth and that influence on screen. And I'm sure there's a lesson in here for her, that when subterfuge and sabotage are standard procedure for you, it doesn't take much to trick you into working against your own allies and interests. The series has been making a habit lately of having each episode build up to a dramatic climax and this time things got so serious that Discovery had to fire its weapons! The ship had a good run, but after twelve episodes without firing a shot it finally had to blow something up with photon torpedoes... fired from the warp nacelles. Well DS9's USS Defiant fires phasers from the warp nacelles, so why not? Shame they won't be able to recover the bodies of all the crew members who died down there thanks to Leland's surprise assault, but I'm sure we'll still get a large funeral scene for them at the start of the next episode. The Discovery crew really need to look out for each other better in evil cyborg fights though, as when Michael fought Airiam in Project Daedalus she didn't bother to check on Nhan, and this time there was an entire landing party just letting Georgiou fight the Terminator on her own. They also need to get better at deleting things, because when your software starts making decisions about whether it stays or not, that means you've got a computer virus. Why did no one even bring up turning off power to Discovery's computer as a possibility? Clear it out, restore from backups. Why did no one bring up destroying the ship to save the future either? Sure it's a bit drastic, but they're already at the stage where they're willing to try murdering Burnham to see if it helps. And now they've lost their guardian angel as well, meaning no more do-overs if they screw it up like they did the last 840 times.
2-12	Through the Valley of Shadows	7
Through the Valley of the Shadows is the longest episode title this season, but it falls way short of The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry from last season, and didn't quite make it into the top ten longest Trek titles of all time chart either. It's pretty good, but there's still room for improvement. That's pretty much my opinion of the episode as well, as it did a reasonable job of pushing pieces forward towards the big two-part finale, but was far from being an all-time classic. The biggest surprise in it was that we got to see something already revealed about 53 years ago. Also I'm starting to regret wishing for more scenes of the crew hanging out, as playing an auto-antonym game during lunch makes them come off like the unrelatable future humans that the Next Gen crew were sometimes accused of being. Plus the lizard man finds English words unpronounceable, so he's basically using the universal translator to cheat and pick the most appropriate translation for him. They should've had one of them doing a crossword or something, everyone can relate to crosswords! It was also weird because Tilly wasn't there, possibly because the character's sulking after being given nothing to do in the last few stories but deliver a line and get cut off halfway through for being too awkward. She can't talk with Burnham anymore because Spock's stolen her role there and he's even doing the science as well. It's a bit of a shame because even though I like Spock, I feel like the mission to the Section 31 ship would've been more interesting if Tilly had gone with Burnham instead. I'm glad it wasn't Detmer though, as the poor woman has already seen one dead friend from the Shenzhou replaced by an evil doppelgänger. I have to admit that my first thought when Gant showed up was 'oh no it's another tactical officer, I hope they're not going to kill off Nhan', which was dumb for two reasons: first, Gant was obviously going to be Control, and second, Nhan's a security officer, not tactical. It's a shame that Burnham and Spock weren't as quick to catch onto Gantrol, but they did at least wear spacesuits when boarding a ship controlled by an evil AI with a history of flushing the crew into space. I also liked how Control made barely any effort to target Burnham specifically with its trap, because it knows what she's like and it knew she'd be the one to come. Plus I like episodes where Burnham goes on a mission while the Discovery crew do their own thing, so that was good too. I was less impressed by Control's voice modulation once he was found out and the way he can be killed by phaser fire now, though I suppose he may have just left the hole there so the nanites could pour out and get her. The L'Rell and Tyler reunion wasn't as interesting to me as I don't really care about their problems, but I appreciated that she was there to help instead of bringing more drama. She also brought her new D7, which I suppose must be Kronos One if they're going by Air Force One rules. Though judging by the mangled warp nacelles and patchy hull she probably should've waited for them to finish building it first. We only got a glimpse at the ship and it's funny that they went with an angle that showed off its resemblance to Discovery. I don't know if that was deliberate, but there was definitely no effort made to downplay it. Culber got a bit of a plot this episode, though it was pretty much just Reno telling him to appreciate the second chance he's been given. I always appreciate more Tig Notaro, but I feel like writers could do something more interesting with Culber than just have characters tell him to love Stamets again already. There's no damn way they brought half of the first gay couple in Star Trek back from the dead without intending to have them get back together again, I'm not worried about that. What I want is for him to have a story and become an actual character defined by more than just his former relationship and his disconnect from his previous life. But the biggest plot this episode was Pike's visit to the needlessly redesigned monastery on Boreth, which is apparently where Klingons go to live as elves instead of orcs. I was expecting drama about Tyler's son being used against L'Rell again, so it was a nice surprise when it turned out that Kenneth Mitchell had already won his ultimate victory against her family by becoming part of it. Pike's story was a bit of ominousness followed by a choice, but man Anson Mount sold the hell out of that choice. Granted he was probably choosing between a future in a wheelchair or a future where he's killed by Skynet, but the way he recoiled in absolute horror, grabbing onto the symbol of his faith (his Starfleet badge) and then accepted the cost anyway really showed why his name appeared on the Starfleet high score chart in Choose Your Pain. The guy really is the absolute anti-Lorca. I could've done with seeing him rescue more (or any) people, but then the vision wasn't there to make him feel good about his choices, so I can imagine it was being a little abstract. That's also why he met himself just wandering down a corridor afterwards (and maybe why the accident happened in a redress of the spore room). The raw time travel crystals that show you a vision of the worst thing that'll happen if you grab one seem to have come from an entirely different series, but fortunately that series is Deep Space Nine, so I can rationalise them away as sufficiently advanced technology that some ancient race left there. Though a time travel device that shows the inevitable end result of all your future time meddling when you pick it up is something new to me. Unless Klingon Legolas was lying about that to put Pike off (or he could've just been misinformed). And then the episode ended with them finally deciding to blow up the ship! I could totally buy that Pike would do it as well, because a: he just traded his future for a crystal, so he's already committed to doing whatever needs to be done and b: he can just beam over to an Enterprise spin-off where Spock finally has to wear his blue uniform. The season's still about faith, but despite Pike's faith in the signals he's not going to ignore a sensible suggestion from the far more pragmatic and sceptical Burnham. It seemed like a definite case of 'right idea, wrong time' though, seeing as they just got a time crystal to study and Discovery is the best place in the galaxy to research it, because it can be at any place in the galaxy. It'd take Control a hundred years to catch up with Discovery, and then the crew's grandchildren could just jump again. Plus what's 30 ships to the Federation anyway, seeing as they have 6970 others flying around, and the Klingons would likely love to help. There's no way they're going to blow up Discovery and set season three on the Enterprise, though I'm starting to worry that they're going to put a skeleton crew in suspended animation for a thousand years to keep the sphere data safe and deliver the crystal to Dr Burnham, and next season's going to be Star Trek: Andromeda. Uh I mean the Kevin Sorbo kind of Andromeda, not the Mass Effect kind, with the heroes exploring the Calypso future where the Federation has fallen and become the V'draysh. Still not really keen on seeing a fallen Federation to be honest. Though on the other hand having Zora, the AI born from Starfleet ideals, go up against Control, the AI born from Section 31 philosophy, would make a lot of sense. Wait, Andromeda had the ship's AI take the form of a hologram as well!
2-13	Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 1	8
A few episodes back we got a 'previously on' sequence showing scenes from an Original Series episode and now this one started with clips from a Short Treks story! Which likely confused all the viewers who skipped them thinking they were unnecessary. Though honestly I still think that Runaway's skippable, because all I got from watching it beforehand was a dislike of Po and a bad feeling when I saw both writers' names appearing in the credits of this story (alongside Michelle Paradise). Though maybe 'story' is a bit of a strong word. It's the first half of an episode that was split into a two-parter and after a bit of starship docking it was mostly just set up for the next part and endless scenes of goodbyes. Fortunately the episode turned out pretty well I thought, probably thanks to Olatunde Osunsanmi's direction (and the music), as even though it ended right before the giant space battle, it felt like more like the first 40 minutes of a movie than a pit stop before the firework factory. I mean how many other episodes would spend so long on just the docking sequence? It was like four and a half minutes before they'd finally evacuated the ship and brought everyone onto the Enterprise. (It's lucky all the airlocks lined up so perfectly or it could've taken even longer.) The sequence was very cinematic and impressive looking, plus it finally gave us a good idea of what colour Discovery actually is compared to the grey of the Enterprise hull. I have to admit I'd hoped that the Enterprise exterior had been given a refit to bring it back to its original design during the ship's absence, because that's the design I have an emotional attachment to and honestly I still think it's better, but man that new bridge looked great. They even kept the same chairs, and the coloured buttons, and the railings, and Sulu's scope, and Spock's box! Personally if I was in charge I'd have taken away the lights right in people's eye lines, moved the colourful blinky displays down to somewhere the crew could see them, and dialled the Tron factor down by 70%, but it's probably for the best they tried to please their audience instead of just me. Plus I thought it was strange at first when Georgiou complained about it looking orange, when the paintwork is clearly as red as the red shirts sitting at the consoles. But when you see the helm console from her point of view it actually does look orange, possibly because the front wall of the bridge has all been green screened in, so I'll let her off. The corridors were all done practically though and it must have taken the production crew ages to repaint them red for that short scene. Plus they had to change them back afterwards for season 3, seeing as the ship didn't get blown up in the end. Turns out that the crew probably shouldn't have jumped to the conclusion last episode that blowing up Discovery was their only option, because it wasn't, and it didn't work anyway; she's a lot harder to scuttle than her ill-fated sister ship, USS Glenn. Sure they could've kept firing at it or towed it into the sun or something, but provoking it into spore-jumping 70,000 light years away on its own would've been a bad move... presumably. Fortunately that other wrong conclusion they jumped to a few episodes back about Burnham being the Red Angel was right after all, so they have a new plan! Step one: use the spore jump to put Discovery 50 years away, step two: spend a few months building and testing the new Red Angel suit and coming up with a good plan. Actually no, they decided to charge the suit before making their escape jump, leaving them in range of Control's fleet. Because they are idiots who've never watched Battlestar Galactica. Maybe they could've thrown in a line about Discovery being the bait to get all of Control's forces in one place, like they threw in a line about subspace communications being down to explain why 7000 Starfleet ships weren't on their way to help shut Ultron down. They leave a lot of things annoyingly vague in this series but at least they made clear that there was just no way they could get a long range message out to any planet with ships nearby. To change the subject entirely, Sarek and Amanda turned up from Vulcan after getting a long range message via katra magic that Burnham was in serious danger... somehow beating both the Enterprise and Leland's fleet to Xahea. To be fair I suppose the writers really had to bring some closure to Sarek and Amanda's part of the story before Discovery disappeared forever, especially considering they were in the first scene of the season, whether it made logical sense for them to arrive before Control or not. It's just a shame that they've had Burnham's emotions turned up to 11 so often this season that I couldn't really give a damn about her final goodbye to her adopted parents; it's just like they're ticking off a box at this point. Plus there were a lot of other farewells this episode, more than you might expect considering the countdown timers on screen indicating that they should hurry up. Though it is called Such Sweet Sorrow, so I can't really complain that they're all emotional about their parting. But man I hope that Sarek's going to send for reinforcements the moment his ship's in range with another Starfleet starship. Tyler too, seeing as the episode ends with him sneaking off on a secret mission. They need to pay off that D7 they introduced in episode 3 by having it fly in to wreck some evil Federation ships in an inverted replay of the Battle of the Binary Stars. I didn't buy that the whole bridge crew would choose to come with Burnham into the future to live the Voyager lifestyle, but that's mostly because I still don't really know them. Even Pike doesn't know them, which made his farewell to them all on the bridge kind of awkward. And when I saw them all there in the corridor, determined to throw their careers, family and everything they've ever known away to stay with the ship and their friends, I couldn't help wondering 'have these characters ever even been in the corridor set before?' Though which characters actually take the one way trip in the end is still up in the air. Spock can't go as we've already seen his fate, though that's fine as he's entirely superfluous on Discovery. It's amazing how many scenes there's been with scientists doing science things and science god Spock just standing there with nothing to do. Ironically he'll make it 130 years into the future the long way and then get sent right back to this time period again in the first Kelvin Timeline movie. As a doctor, Culber is considerably more valuable to the crew, which makes me think he'll probably end up back on Discovery to save an injured Stamets just as they're escaping or something. Oh damn, I just realised, this jump to the future means we'll likely never learn who the ship's chief medical officer or chief engineer were! Georgiou's presumably staying behind with Tyler so they can have their Section 31 series, but who knows? I'm glad they at least settled whether Burnham told Pike about Georgiou's true identity off screen with the best wink in Star Trek. I'm actually sad that Tilly's going with Discovery because it means she'll have to give up her dreams of ever becoming a captain. She should at least speak to Pike or Cornwell about getting a quick promotion to lieutenant before they go so she doesn't suffer the same fate as Harry Kim. And there's a definite possibility of Po coming too, which would be handy seeing as their ship needs dilithium to run and she can recrystallise it. Plus she can go invisible and control computers telepathically and stuff. Reno would be handy too but she seems to be on the path to a sacrifice ending after getting a vision of the giant torpedo stuck in the Enterprise's saucer. It's funny that this episode was all about setting up exactly what's going to go down in the next one, but I'm still wondering about what's actually going to happen. Burnham and Reno got conflicting flash-forwards from the time crystal, so all I can take from them is that the torpedo in the Enterprise's hull is going to be important. Also it turns out that leaving Boreth with a time crystal requires a horrible sacrifice, but touching it afterwards is actually a good idea if you want to survive long enough to save all sentient life. (Personally I think Pike's future's only fixed because it's the outcome of consistently doing the right thing, and he refuses to change who he is and let someone else end up injured in his place). Also there's two signals left and I have no idea yet what they're going to be for or how Burnham set any of them up. Oh man the last one is going to lead the Enterprise to a farewell message from Burnham to Pike where she cries isn't it? The biggest mystery is how this fits with Calypso, which showed the ship abandoned for centuries, as that contradicts their plan to bring the ship through a time portal with a crew. At least they've shown how the ship gets self-awareness, as it's already well on that road thanks to the sphere data's computer virus. Oh, just remembered one last thing. The visual effects were as great as they've been all season, but what happened to the back of the ship during the scene of the workbee docking halfway through the episode? It's not immediately obvious while you're watching because the camera's upside down (again), but it seems like they've put the room on the back of the shuttlebay on crooked or something. Anyway that was my favourite episode of the season so far and now I'm hyped for the finale. Plus did I mention how good the music was in this one? Especially in that last scene with all the ships warping in.
2-14	Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2	9
That's how you end the second season of a Star Trek series with a clip show! If only Next Gen's season 2 finale Shades of Grey had spaced its clips out across a 50 minute space battle, between scenes of Michelle Yeoh fighting a cyborg in that rotating corridor from Inception and trippy wormhole travel effects. Maybe then it wouldn't have been so terrible! Actually if I had to pick two episodes to compare this to, I'd go with The Ultimate Computer and Yesterday's Enterprise, as it's about a Federation computer going rogue and attacking Starfleet, and it's about preventing a bad timeline by sending a ship and her crew through a time portal. I figured that it'd have a bit of Calypso in there as well but the series tricked me! The ship had been evacuated and had developed enough intelligence for self-preservation, so it seemed to be lining up, but then nope it went through the wormhole as planned. I guess Calypso must be set in the double distant future of 4187 then. Either that or the Discovery will be sent back in time a millennia without its crew where it'll wait in a nebula until it's caught up to their new present. There were only minimal goodbyes in this one thankfully, with Spock and Burnham getting a reasonably well earned farewell, though there was a shocking un-goodbye as Dr Culber showed up in Discovery's sickbay! I mean it wasn't shocking at all, entirely the opposite in fact, but I was surprised that there wasn't a dramatic event to get him to change his mind. That was a pretty strange scene actually, with Culber being all "I came to an epiphany off screen," while Stamets was lying there in agony, silently drowning in his own blood. We also said goodbye to Admiral Cornwell, who failed her Bridge Officer's Test by failing to send a subordinate to certain death to save the ship. She also failed the 'find another way to pull a lever down from the other side of a door test' without even trying to rig up some kind of rudimentary pulley system, and she forgot they have drones. And a transporter. You'd think she would've at least checked if there was a lever on the other side (and why wouldn't there be?) Reno would've found a way to get that door closed and I'm surprised that she wasn't there to do it seeing as she had the vision of the torpedo last episode. That door was bloody impressive though, as it took the full force of an oversized photon torpedo exploding at point blank range in a way that no other door or bulkhead in Starfleet could have. Maybe Pike picked the door up from an ancient alien race as a memento during their 5 year mission and it was pure fluke that it was installed right behind where the torpedo hit. Actually I really shouldn't nitpick so much, so I won't mention that the briefing room's windows put it right at the very front of the saucer, the torpedo hit just before the NCC-1701 number, and the explosion wiped the number right off the hull, despite the fact that Pike must have been in that part of the ship. (See if you can spot the tiny Captain Pike I included for scale) Not that the resilience of the rest of the ship was unimpressive, as both Discovery and the Enterprise survived about an hour of constant bombardment from 30 Section 31 ships and their multi-vector assault drones, despite most Trek space battles being over with in three to five minutes. Usually sooner when it's the Kelvin Enterprise. It's funny how this episode combined elements from all three Kelvin Timeline films, with the Enterprise facing off against an overwhelming Section 31 threat like in Into Darkness, and being hammered with tiny drones like in Beyond. Only this time the Enterprise was equipped for this manner of engagement and kicked their asses without any help from the Beastie Boys. She even fired authentic blue beam phasers! Finally something has proper phasers in this series! There wasn't much of a story to the space battle, as it was a bit 'we'll just sit here and get shot at until Burnham's finished', with a lot of swooping shuttles and explosions as Pike and Saru yelled orders and other characters occasionally turned up to join in. But that's fine as it was more about the people inside the ships going from crisis to crisis. Discovery's formula demands a ticking clock to heighten the drama while the characters deal with their problems and the space battle was the flashiest countdown to catastrophe yet. Though surprisingly low on shots of pilots looking worried and then exploding, considering the amount of exploding going on. The second season's been kinder to shuttles than the first one was, but it more than made up for lost time here; it's no wonder there was only one left by the time of Calypso. Speaking of characters turning up, I was hoping to see at least one D7 join the fight but I did not expect L'Rell to fly in commanding a fleet of them at the helm of a cleave ship! That's the kind of callback to Battle of the Binary Stars I can appreciate, even if the cloak shouldn't have really hidden the ship from Control due to Discovery defeating the tech last season. Though I'm really happy for Voq/Tyler and L'Rell as they finally came up with a plan on their own that worked, even if it did mean Tyler ruining their previous plan by giving away the fact that he's not dead. I also didn't expect Saru's sister to show up flying a Ba'ul fighter, mostly because I hold Trek to a higher standard than Battlefield: Earth, but it was nice to see her enjoying being in space again. Plus it finally confirmed that Kaminar wasn't wiped out by the time tsunami. Though the Ba'ul might not have been so lucky, as they were suspiciously absent from the fight despite the Kelpians borrowing their ships. And where the hell was Sarek's fleet huh? He left like half an hour before Tyler did, and Tyler only took twenty minutes to fly off, talk L'Rell into coming, and then fly back! No one turned up to help Leland because everybody hates him, but Georgiou made a new friend at least! Funny how Terrans always bond with the ship's security officer (Landry, Tyler, Nhan) over their shared love of violence. Shame they didn't come up with anything clever to avert their prophesied deaths when Leland stormed the bridge, instead of surviving his assault by pure fluke (which lined up with Reno's vision of the future). It's also a shame Nhan got knocked down and forgotten during the cyborg fight (again) as Leland kicked their asses all over the walls and ceiling, but I was impressed by the way they managed to keep their back to the camera for most of it. Their tour of the ship ended at the spore drive and I was wondering if Georgiou was going to teleport Leland to the mycelial network for the JahSepp to eat, but nah she just did the magnet trick again in the Spock sacrifice box. Which makes sense really, as it was a proven technique and she'd been planning this from the start. Plus I loved how she giggled as Leland screamed. It was a good day for Georgiou as she not only defeated her rival in her own Terran way, but the noble Starfleet crew will thank her for it. Murder, victory and validation! I'm a little sad though that that she didn't need an assist from Saru at the last moment, so he could earn her respect by kicking Leland's ass with his super strength, head darts and Chekhov's knife, while Tilly took his place on the bridge. Or something. Though it was a bit weird that when the crew learned that Control was dead, they didn't take a moment to discuss whether they still needed to go through the wormhole. They could've cleared it up with just two lines: "Wait, if Control's destroyed then we don't need to take the sphere data into the future anymore, right?" "There is a good chance that we have averted the deaths of unimaginable billions of sentient lifeforms, however there is only one way we can be certain of it and time is limited." Though at one point the shields were down so they could've just gotten into the escape pods and let the ship blow up in the wormhole if they wanted to, and no one suggested that either. A lot more people stayed on Discovery than I expected so I guess they were actually hyped for the opportunity to explore the future. Plus if they'd blown up the ship we wouldn't have got the visual homage to The Motion Picture with the streaky wormhole trails. It was nice and a bit unexpected that the episode actually took the time to throw in some trippy effects and a stunning shower of sparks to give Angel Michael a reason to experience terror, wonder, and joy as she went through history putting right what already went right. Discovery has the budget and the technology to blow earlier shows away when it comes to the beauty and awe of space exploration and they used it here to give Burnham becoming the Red Angel a beautiful and awesome pay off. In fact the scene reminded me of her trip in the suit at the start of The Vulcan Hello, before everything went wrong for her, like she's finished her trials and found herself back where she started, except stronger and wiser, with all her guilt excised. And I liked that she chose where to put the last two signals herself, graduating to the next level as a Time Lord superhero. In retrospect Burnham had to be the second person to wear a Project Daedalus suit, as in mythology Daedalus made two sets of wings: one for himself and one for his child. Though I'm still a little disappointed that it wasn't Tilly in the suit. Or Reno. It couldn't have been Cornwell, as she sacrificed herself so that Pike could carry on being the inspirational example of what Starfleet should be... ...and then the first thing Pike does when he gets back home is to break his first duty and straight up lie about Discovery! It reminded me of the scene in Into Darkness where Pike catches Kirk lying and demotes him, except it's fine this time because I guess Starfleet can't be trusted. Fantastic cut between the different characters being questioned though, I love it when they do editing like that. And then they pulled a Simpsons and had everyone promise never to speak of Discovery and its spore drive ever again under penalty of torture (or whatever). They're not even going to speak of the crew again, which seems nuts. You don't pretend your sister never existed because she went missing on a classified mission! Here's a better way to explain why Spock never mentions her again: have him mention Sybok at the end in his personal log, showing viewers that he's really good at not mentioning family members for years. It's fine to admit being part of a conspiracy and an accomplice to grand theft starship in your personal logs by the way, because they only get hacked into if you're on leave. I said the episode combined elements from all three Kelvin movies, and what it takes from Star Trek 2009 is the ending, with the newly (re)constructed Enterprise departing from Earth with Pike at the helm and Spock as his first officer. Especially as both scenes take place in early 2258. There was also a nice homage to the very first shot of The Cage, as it bookended Pike's adventures on the Enterprise with the camera pulling back through the ceiling. They made an interesting choice by ending with the Enterprise instead of showing where Discovery ended up, no doubt sending some fans to quickly check if the series had been cancelled; it really does seem like a series finale. And one of the better ones too! Though the best part of this ending is that none of the characters we care about need lose any sleep over having to let the entire crew of the USS Defiant go mad and kill each other due to interphasic space anymore, because everyone who knew about the ship's fate is now either dead or stuck a thousand years in the future. Star Trek 3-09: The Tholian Web Not great for the crew of the Defiant though. My opinion on the Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2 overall is that it's deeply flawed and the plot falls apart under the slightest scrutiny (which isn't a surprise considering how insanely rushed the writing process was), but it was bloody amazing to watch. It's the satisfying action-packed climax we didn't get at the end of season 1 and one of my favourite episodes of Star Trek ever.

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NEXT TIME

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, my review of Star Trek: Discovery's second season overall!

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