What was "The Burn" and what caused it?

[Timo]

IMHO the tell here is that Michael in the last episode said a dilithium shortage started a few hundred years prior to the Burn. That would seem to suggest that there were long-term issues with dilithium use which contributed to the ultimate crisis. Otherwise why mention a dilithium shortage at all?

I don't see why the dilithium shortage and the Burn would need to be connected through the dilithium. Burnham isn't speculating on why dilithium went kaboom - she's explaining why the UFP went kaboom. It's not a matter of ultimate crisis, but of why the UFP no longer is. And two things that wholly coincidentally both involve dilithium are to blame, as far as she knows.

Of course, the shortage and the Burn no doubt are connected, and the writers are foreshadowing this. But this time around, they don't make Michael sprout absurd non sequiturs as usual: they simply have her refer to two separate reasons for the downfall of the Federation, logically enough. Perhaps they could have hidden their intended connection better by introducing a third element (say, "The Tellarites rebelled" or "Lifespan increase caused unrest" or "poorly replicated food led to mass deaths" or whatever), but what we got is logical enough.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[yenny]

I think who caused the burn, is a space power that has the capable of opening wormholes anywhere they like. Kind of like the starships of the races on babylon 5 with jump gate tech.
I think they gotten a hold of Burnham mom suit, read the recording information the suit has on it. When they found out what was on the suit. They got scare, thinking they're next. Not knowing when, but think it could be soon.
So they decided to launch a preemptive attack. Not to invade, but to prevent from being invaded and destroyed.

 

[yenny]

It can't be any of the Burnham time suits. It can't be any members of the Federation or anyone nearby. Cause they would already had taken over.
It would have been someone outside the Federation, very far off.
Base on there were no invasion following the burn. Which would mean, it was to prevent a invasion attack.
How I think they did it without being nearby. They open a micro-wormhole inside the warp cores they could detect, which were the ones that were active. Not only destroying every Federation starships with a active warp core, but also destroying starships outside the Federation that had a active warp core, including those the Federation have never meet.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

It can't be any of the Burnham time suits.

Why not?

 

[F. King Daniel]

It probably wouldn't have been so bad if they didn't have the first set of simultaneous signals that weren't sent by Burnham (or her mother) that kicked everything off in the first place. The second set that they followed individually were sent by Burnham before making the final jump. The origin of the first set remains a mystery. Who sent those? God? NuBSG Head Angels? TOS BSG Seraphs? Vorlons? "Where's my damn red thing?!?"

I took it as every time jump went though stardate whateveritwas on it's way to it's final destination. All seven were sent by Burnham, her mother's travels seeingly didn't leave them, otherwise they'd have been investigating that stuff when Spock was a child.

 

[Timo]

It probably wouldn't have been so bad if they didn't have the first set of simultaneous signals that weren't sent by Burnham (or her mother) that kicked everything off in the first place. The second set that they followed individually were sent by Burnham before making the final jump. The origin of the first set remains a mystery. Who sent those? God? NuBSG Head Angels? TOS BSG Seraphs? Vorlons? "Where's my damn red thing?!?"

I guess Burnham just had phenomenally bad aim at first.

I mean, her mom did, too. So I could see Michael trying to hit the Hiawatha, and taking seven tries to do so, five of them missing by tens of thousands of lightyears even if they got the time more or less right, and one accidentally hitting Terralysium which was among the preset destinations but out of schedule. From then on, it would be smooth sailing.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timo]

I took it as every time jump went though stardate whateveritwas on it's way to it's final destination. All seven were sent by Burnham, her mother's travels seemingly didn't leave them, otherwise they'd have been investigating that stuff when Spock was a child.

That's a bit problematic: why would only seven of the time jumps leave red stains at whateveritwas, even though Michael was using the same type of time machine as Gabrielle, and they apparently did thousands of jumps put together? Also, how come two of the stains end up in places Michael wanted to mark (one of those, Terralysium, she marked twice!), but five in places that have no significance to Michael?

How a sign is made is left somewhat open, too. In "Thunder", it seems traveling by the angel suit results in red burps all along the path (perhaps Michael is popping the clutch there or something), yet in "Brother", there was the whateveritwas sign and then a quick repeat to lure the heroes in, yet also a third angelic appearance, the Michael-to-Michael thing, which didn't involve galactic red glow at all. Sometimes it seems the time-wormhole necessarily glows red, sometimes it does not, and redness is perhaps activated with a push of a button, such as when Michael guides the ship to the future. And then we get to see the timehole up close, in a couple of different settings, and there's nothing red about it. (Also, what is there, the gamma burst and gravitational waves, is NOT associated with the Red Signs by the Admiral who questions the heroes who remained in 2258!)

Whether a Red Sign is worth investigating is a question unto itself, too. The skies were full of them in 2258, but it seems nobody really cared one way or the other, save for Starfleet sending Pike to discreetly investigate. How does one secretly investigate a phenomenon famed for being visible to everybody? Apparently by virtue of nobody caring. Heck, the regular heroes initially saw nothing, and had to be told by Connolly that the skies were full of wonders!

While S2 writing was a mess with a broken back, it's not as if the initial Red Angel story would have been without its conceptual problems, either. But the sum total of all that is that what we have in our hands is a mystery - probably as originally intended. Which is fine and well. I just wonder when the heroes themselves realize that Michael did not make, and could not have made (except perhaps by curiously serendipitous accident), the Seven Signs...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Michael's suit was a copy of Gabrielle's, and the seven signals were Michael's self fullfilling prophecy made at the end.

 

[Timo]

Indeed, it would seem the writers need to return to the Angel Suit issue somehow, because Gabrielle is still missing, never having arrived at Terralysium. And there's no story yet on why Terralysium 900-something years in the future of the TOS era is a suit magnet and the cause of Gabrielle's inaugural misadventure.

Perhaps the writers will postpone until they can invent this particular story. Perhaps the story already exists, but is better suited for S4 than S3. Or perhaps they had it all figured out, but later developments have outdated the original plan and they need to tread water. They did bother to bring up Terralysium and the missing Gabrielle basically right off the bat, though, so perhaps they intend to do things with it.

(In the continuity sense, we probably need to have Gabrielle return to her stating point so that she can be slain by the Klingons, unless Michael's memory of the corpse was a false one.)

Is Sonja Sohn known to be slated to appear?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Jaster]

My brain is still working on the specifics, but I can’t shake the feeling that Po’s Dilithium Incubator (and possibly it being modified and used to power the times crystal for the Angel suit at the end of S2) might be somehow connected to the cause of the Burn. Anyone care to help me get from a feeling to a decent theory?

 

[Nerys Myk]

Where is Po anyway?

 

[Cyrus]

^ last seen in a shuttle watching Discovery going into the time travel wormhole.

 

[Nerys Myk]

^ last seen in a shuttle watching Discovery going into the time travel wormhole.

I thought she went with. Oh well, maybe she'll pop up on SNW.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Already a thread here. Which started off as a parody but has been full of serious theories for about the last dozen pages.

I've merged the two threads.

 

[plynch]

Please, showrunners, don't tie it into the red suit and super-Burnhams. She's like a real person this season. Please, move on.

I would love if they ditched the focus on Burnham. Do we need a MAIN CHARACTER? It would actually break the mold to have a true ensemble show where the crew is the main character. What will Discovery do to fix things, not What will super-Michael do?

 

[fireproof78]

Do we need a MAIN CHARACTER?

Yes.

Mileage will vary.

 

[Skywalker]

Every Star Trek show has had a main character.

 

[plynch]

Time for a change. And I was disappointed last night btw, but no spoilers.

 

[137th Gebirg]

I liked how they showed the process of Trill communication, but yeah, otherwise a bit dull.

 

[UssGlenn]

Every Star Trek show has had a main character.

Every show has a "most important character", But I'd argue that DS9 didin't have a main character. But you'd have to do an analysis of screentime/storylines to say that for sure.