What was "The Burn" and what caused it?

Well... Time Travel morality wise the right thing to do would be to stop Burnham from going back in time and EMPing the Ba'u planet since it was that change to the timelines that caused the problem...

 

Yes because the timeline where Control destroyed all life was much better.

 

Maybe it wouldn't be smart to mess around with that time period, there was that thing with Control destroying all sentient life in the galaxy and stopped by the skin of its teeth, remember?

 

Stopping Control only required getting rid of the Sphere Data, not saving the Kelpians.

 

We know they can recrystallize dilithium, but we don't know how many times. Three? Seventy? Whatever the number, dilithium apparently stops working at some point, or working well enough to use, and they need a new batch.

 

Not sure where you are getting that from given it's never stated anyone I have seen.

 

TVH: They recrystallize the dilithium with gamma rays.

 

No, that it apparently stops working at some point.

 

That's blatantly obvious because they keep mining it throughout the TNG era and into the 32nd century where they are running out. Book's ship explicitly has a dilithium recrystallizer, but he still needs constant sources of dilithium.

But, I guess you can't prove a negative. Dilithium might be eternal or whatever, but they have never said you can recrystallize in perpetuity, and it wouldn't make sense for that to be true based on everything else they have shown us on this issue.

 

They kept mining it because they kept building new ships...

And Book's dilithium recrystallizer was very specifically mentioned as being broken.

 

It was so weird from a story telling standpoint to add the music as a clue to the cause of the burn. So a distress signal is sent, passes through the nebula, gets distorted, turns into music. Everyone in the galaxy hears the music but not the distress signal. It's like, what was the point? Why introduce this into the story? It ended up going nowhere and didn't make the story more interesting, it was just confusing. Sloppy writing.

 

Nah, clever writing. The distress signal is the music, but we and the characters don’t know that right away. They have to figure it out.

 

I guess I was expecting to tie into the overall mystery in a more meaningful way. Instead we got "oh that music was originally a distress call that somehow turned into music that somehow everyone in the galaxy heard". What's the point in dropping this clue and act like it's an intriguing part of the overall mystery when it ultimately didn't advance the plot and didn't really have anything to do with the burn? They could have just dropped that from the story entirely and it wouldn't have mattered.

 

Just texture and things not meaning what they appeared to at first.

 

Still think it's a poor story telling decision given how much they already crammed into the 13 episode season. Not like anyone was like "whoa awesome fake out with the music" or "oh man, what a great reveal of what that music turned out to be". Would have been better if that time was a couple more lines between Adira and Sammets or literally anything else.

 

Mileage will vary.

 

It should have been “All Along The Watchtower”.

 

I personally think they should have made everyone's farts smell like apples, and then Burnham goes around saying "don't you all realize the farts of everyone in the galaxy all smell the same?" And then have it turn out that the distress call got modified in the nebula to make everyone's farts smell like apples. Now THAT'S clever writing.

 

Mileage...will...vary.

Fart jokes are the stupidest thing in the whole world and I don't care what Ben Franklin says!

Mileage, etc.