Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 2x10 - "The Red Angel"

I’ve never read anything about SMG’s parents or ethnology, and I could be wrong, but Sonequa looks like she could be part Asian. It’s about her eyes.

Like I said, could be wrong, but if SMG is part Asian and they chose a part Asian actor to play her mom, well I love it!

Alt-righters gonna give birth over this — IF true.

 

I would think SMG being black is enough for that.
EDIT: Unrelated Note, because I can't double-post: I loved her performance during Burnham's confrontation with Leland.

 

I was expecting this to be one of the greatest episodes of all time, and to be fair, it wasn’t. But now I’ve taken some time to let it sink in and this episode was a genuine 9 for me. The ‘family feel’ is really forming, and that scene between Michael and Leland is just downright one of the best acted scenes ever in Trek... Sonequa absolutely killed it... The opening scene was terrific as well, and the more I think of it, the more I like that the Red Angel turned out to be Michael’s mother.

 

Well apparently DSC can keep a secret when they want to. LOL, at the few who are claiming they guessed the Red Angel’s identity.

I can’t help but think that the writers are, or may be, aware of the trashy and incompetent way Tripp Tucker’s death and aftermath were handled on Ent, because the way they’ve dealt with Ariam is just perfect. From the funeral, to replacing her with the actor who previously played the part, it’s been pitch perfect.

I’m loving Spock and Burnham’s big sister/annoying little brother routine. Laughed out loud when she jammed him up for putting her business in the street. The reconciliation scene was expected but still gratifying.

The reveal was a total surprise to me. No doubt Burnham’s dad didn’t survive the attack. If nothing else, this will give Michael a chance to finally relieve herself of a lifetime of guilt.

Before the show premiered we were told that it would be character driven and this season so far is surpassing last season in that regard.

Gave the episode an 8.

 

I'm really loving the rebuilding of Spock and Michael's relationship. That bit where the eye thing stabbed Leland's eye is the first time Trek ever made me jump.

 

Makes you wonder how many spy killer devices they booby trap their ships with.

 

I found this episode was clunky and didn’t really have the same “voice” that we’ve seen through the season. The character moments just felt off. The whole scene with Georgiou flirting with Stamets was really cringey.

I think someone must have watched the ending of Total Recall for the execution of Michael’s plan.

 

It actually threw him back, it's horrifying.

 

I almost stopped watching the episode entirely right there. That was one of the biggest WTF moments to balance out the good. If I'm honest, that scene is the reason I refuse to officially rate this episode. Without it, I'd give the episode a 7.

 

Okay, but not as good as it should have been. I'm just glad Michael wasn't the Red Angel.

 

Well I'm not so happy with this episode as the previous 3 but I can see this a set-up episode for the final 4 episode so this was somehow a necessary episode. It has some huge character moments especially for Michael with Spock, Georgiu and Ash. Pacing was great, the director did some fabulous moments with the camera so all in all is a good episode but not great.

 

Ethan Peck keeps killing it.

#TeamPeck

 

Responses!

Wow, I would totally hate that. Treating "evil" and "good" as functions of the cosmos, rather than as functions of actual human decisions, seems excessively simplistic, to a degree that would really undermine morally complex storytelling.

That really would be needless, since the Borg have fuck-all to do with not just this show, but this entire era of Trek. (Plus, they already have a dramatically compelling origin in the Litverse... and while the show of course isn't bound to adhere to that, I'd like to think the writers wouldn't deliberately go out of their way to contradict it.)

Yep. For that matter, Spock's most recent personal sighting of the RA, the one that literally set the whole uber-plot in motion, also didn't involve Michael at all.

Wow, I guess this is what makes for horse races... because literally almost everything you mention there (except for the one item I bolded) would fall in the "BLERGH" category for me. It just didn't work for me. Scene after scene kept yanking me out of the episode.

Yeah, both reactions are understandable. For obvious reasons, nobody knew who they were looking at until Burnham conveniently filled us in. Which, by my lights, makes for a pretty underwhelming "reveal" moment.

Yes, absolutely. Building this story on a contrivance that undermines so much of the rest of Trek is not a good idea.

Yeah, that seems eminently logical to me, too.

Yeah. Not dramatically compelling enough if it's just a future problem, I suppose? But really, you'd think it would've been simpler just to say that it had already escaped the confines of the S31 station before last episode (eminently reasonable, as there's no reason to suppose it started there anyway, and Federation communications tech would've made it easy), and thereby avoid the exposition about how they thought they'd (probably) destroyed it as well as the contrivance needed to bring it back again.

I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, I suspect that the real reason amounts to changing plans after the mid-season change of showrunners... in which case, any in-story explanation we get is liable to be (at best) contrived and less than entirely satisfying.

(OTOH, if it's true that the bullet we dodged with Berg and Harberts' departure was an anvilicious season-long theme about religious faith, I suppose I'll take "less than entirely satisfying" as a fair trade!)

I honestly didn't even notice anything like that. What did you see?

Truer words. I was really kind of hoping the main reason the RA had been seeking out Spock had nothing to do with Burnham and was instead based on the fact that Spock, himself, was one of the most famous heroic figures of the era... something that the characters wouldn't know, of course, but the audience would.

Yes, there are bits and bobs and "little nods" and such strung through DSC. Many of those bits add up to good cumulative storytelling... and on the whole, I've been a fan of S2; it's a huge improvement over S1. But my point here is that some of those bits don't gel so well, and indeed seem to undermine or contradict each other. I merely explained why, as I saw it, this episode was annoyingly full of that kind.

For instance: I don't think most people inherit their personalities from their parents; I think they get them from life experience. And Burnham's experiences as shown so far are more than enough to explain her martyr complex without bringing her mother into it.

For instance, again: I think the story previously presented, explaining why Burnham blamed herself for her parents' deaths, was emotionally compelling, and much preferable to the "small universe" reveal that they were actually, secretly central to the whole time-and-space-spanning plot she just happens to be enmeshed in at the moment.

(Have you ever read comics? Are you familiar with the retcon that "revealed" that Peter Parker was not just an ordinary orphan before his accident, but that in fact his parents had been secret agents who were killed by the Red Skull? That's the kind of completely unnecessary thing I'm talking about here.)

I never suggested that was out of character for Spock — on the contrary, I agree that it fits him. I suggested the whole scheme, including the "point of the exercise" as you put it, was simply illogical from the get-go. And it was, because it relied on incomplete information and untenable assumptions.

Please do go take a long walk off a short pier.

Seriously, I've complained before about the way you apparently can't just disagree with other posters without feeling the need to take cheap shots. Cut it out, all right?

(As to the underlying point: in the scene as presented, the only reason they couldn't transport Michael straight to sickbay is that the RA had, finally, started to arrive. My point was that if they'd had a transporter lock all along, they could've yanked her the moment Spock obstructed the rescuers on the surface, without any problem. Indeed, if they'd had a transporter lock all along, the rescuers on the surface would've been frankly redundant in the first place.)

Yes, I've read the Wikipedia page. Are you honestly suggesting the time crystals in the show, with the powers seen in "MTMTSMGM" and now this season, bear any relation to real-world phenomena other than a coincidentally shared name?

I'm not objecting to quasi-magical Treknology as a general thing. The difference between this and the other examples you mention, though, is that those examples help make the whole Star Trek concept possible by defining its parameters and boundaries, whereas this threatens to undermine and deconstruct them, as discussed above. (It's not unlike the problems presented by things like interstellar transporting and tribble blood in the Abrams films.)

Maybe I'm just less violently inclined than other people, then, but it wouldn't even occur to me. It honestly just comes across as ridiculous and juvenile.

That is a possible explanation for the suit, yes. And the story is serialized and hence "still telling itself," yes. But here's the thing: I've read plenty of novels (and watched plenty of serialized TV), and the key to making any given chapter dramatically effective is that it makes sense in itself given the information the characters (and the readers) have at that point. In the case at hand, the episode only works because the characters don't ask questions that, logically, they should be concerned about. Like, for instance, "hey, this suit appears to have powers way beyond what Federation tech could've built 20 years ago, or even today, so what makes us think we understand it well enough that this trap we've MacGyvered together will actually work against it?"

Again, could be. But again, any possible explanation (e.g., that the person in the RA suit really is Michael at some other point in time) is something the characters themselves should have considered, at least enough to undermine their confidence that it Must Be Her and therefore their plan would work.

Bottom line, the whole plan only worked because the plot required it to. There is no set of logical assumptions that makes it plausible that the plan would work (without also making it either unnecessary or foolhardy), and indeed in the end it only did work because of information the characters didn't have.

Hey, I like long posts! This isn't frickin' Twitter, and that's a good thing. If you don't care for them, feel free not to comment.

(Seriously, this is what I do as a break from working on my actual dissertation...)

Thanks! Now, that's a friendly, civil sort of reply. I'm curious to know which parts you agree about and which you don't, and why.

 

I guess I wasn't the only one who momentarily thought Michael's mother was Georgiou. Thank the Maker they didn't take that route.

 

I’m going to gather that, like myself, you never lost your parents and encountered the individual responsible. I honestly don’t know how I’d react. I’m not violently inclined either. But I can’t say for all of the grief and anger I’d have coursing through my veins at that moment that I might do the same. It may have been a little overly dramatic but <looks around, whispers> it is a TV show.

 

Not yet, they still got a suit, a crisis, and an extra mother figure to kill off in the next episode.

 

#SweepsWeek

#DoTheyStillDoSweepsWeek

#Crap

 

I wasn't originally going to comment and normally i don't. But my finger got tired from having to scroll past it.

 

Now that I think of it after the previews for next week, isn't it funny Georgiou didn't keep her own detonator for that bomb on Q'unos? It would be like her, and hilarious to boot, for her to call up L'Rell and let her know that detonator of hers doesn't really work and the Terran Emperor has the real one.