There were scenes showing Stamets mourning Culber? You mean, like, multiple scenes? Are they in the deleted scenes section of the blu-rays or something, because I sure as hell don't remember him mourning the passing of his husband in any significant and visible way in season one.
Okay, there were two. His weird confrontation with Ash in the hallway, and looking down at the posthumous medal in the final episode.
The fact remains, Stamets is literally a two-dimensional character. All he is is a spore guy and was in a gay relationship. There are no other established elements of his character. I guess he can be snarky? We basically know nothing else about him though.
It also doesn't help that since Culber has come back onto the show full time it's clear that Wilson Cruz is a much, much better actor than Anthony Rapp. The past few episodes I feel like even if Culber isn't getting more lines, he's jumped ahead of Stamets in the cast hierarchy because they've established a third element to his personalty. He's something besides a nice gay doctor now.
According to the episode, Control needs the sphere data in order to become sentient. But that is still a bit odd since Control seems pretty sentient already.
There are two ways to interpret that.
1. Control was created via a closed temporal loop, which it needs to happen in order to manifest. This sort of implies however that there is a minimal "butterfly effect" and that the sphere data can come to it in many different ways without causing it to cease to exist.
2. Control actually developed in the future, but is attempting to bootstrap itself further into the past for its own purposes. This has been done in science fiction before. See Stephen Baxter's Xelee sequence, where the primary antagonist race travels back in time billions of years to alter its own evolution to give it a head start on everyone else.
I'm glad Terralysium was brought up. By having a human civilization that was pre-warp and far away from everything else, it guaranteed that some humans would survive no matter what Control did. And by lifting them from the WWIII Era, you have a group of people where it would never seriously occur to anyone that they were sent to the other side of the galaxy. Then later on, post-warp Earth and eventually the Federation would never go looking for them.
But that implies all sentient life in the galaxy hasn't been wiped out.
Lordy, I hope that the problem isn't no one in the writer's room knows the correct definition of galaxy.
If they do - oh well. Who would know?
