Ambiguity on the final status of Discovery villains

1. Lorca While Lorca was stabbed by Georgeou and fell into the mycelium reactor, Dr Huber had his neck snapped and fell into the Mycelial network and survived. It isn't impossible that Lorca survived the same way. Netherless would Georgeou have risked that survival when she kicked him into the reactor is still a major question. How much was Lorca changed by his death? Does he wipe out the Jah Sepp? And can he return to the mirror universe and become the emperor?
   
   
2. Ossyra In the final battle between Ossyra and Michael Burnham it isn't definitely established in dialogue that Ossyra is dead and that Michael had the phaser at stun setting,Ossyra being tried in UFP custody cannot be ruled out. Ossyra's knowledge might be strategic for the UFP or there might be attempts by her to break out of the 32nd century brig.
   

 

I did think that Lorca had an opportunity to come back (more so than Culber, who should never have been killed off) - there was a floating "blob" from what I remember which landed on someone's uniform?

 

Since Jason Isaacs will only return if he can play Prime Lorca (and indeed, he refused to come back as Mirror Lorca in Terra Firma) Mirror Lorca is as good as dead.

The Emerald Chain fell apart after that battle, as stated in the epilogue of the season 3 finale, so even of Ossyra is still alive, what she knew of the Chain isn't useful information anymore.

If you're thinking of the spore that landed on Tilly's uniform, that was instrumental in her storyline in season 2 involving her dead friend.

 

The smoking hole in Osyraa's forehead would suggest that she is in fact very dead.

 

Something something Orion biology. Something something something wibbly space magic.

 

Programmable matter.

 

3. Admiral Cornwell disappeared in a big flash. After which it was revealed that she was one of the top bosses of S31, her death (and those of four other admirals, a lowly Captain and one freelance agent) paving way for the lowly Tyler to assume the command. She specifically volunteered to die that way. Soooo.... For real? Or a flashy exit strategy?

4. Said lowly Captain became a meat puppet for a vicious AI. Said freelance agent destroyed that meat puppet. Did the vicious AI go down in that process (basically invalidating the whole concept of the heroes needing to escape into the far future), or is it still around?

5. Somebody sent possessive programming from the supposed future that corrupted Airiam, manifested as three red dots, and generally did evil stuff. Is that somebody still around? Was it a later iteration of the AI above, and if so, how does #4 affect its fate?

6. Somebody lit up seven Red Signs at the end of the first season. It sure as hell wasn't Mike Burnham, who only ever lit up signs in the second season and did it in different spots, and her mom denies having done it. Is there an evil Red Angel out there?

DIS is all about loose ends, some left flapping due to mid-season course changes, some due to between-season ones. But DIS is also all about backpedaling, and about personsplaining what previously happened. So there's still hope...

...Even if only for further ambiguous ends or non-ends!

Timo Saloniemi

 

Never knew this.
God I love Issacs even more now than I did before

 

It’s been awhile since I’ve watched Season Two but huh? I do not recall Cornwell being a Section 31 boss and Memory Alpha backs up my (lack of) recollection.

 

It's part of Ash Tyler's discussion with the nameless flag officer in the end: Cornwell's death directly means there's room at the top of S31.

There's no alternative way of reading that. Cornwell's death is equated with that of Leland, an established S31 employee, in creating the opening for Tyler.

Of course, it may be that Cornwell never publicly admitted to working for S31, and indeed that Leland never did, even though the organization in DIS isn't illegal, merely secretive. Likewise, the quartet of flag officers killed by Control may never have officially worked for S31 (after all, it's something of a revelation when Cornwell tells the heroes that these four did work for the Section, rather than a dull fact obtained from NCC-1031 databanks which should contain the official Starfleet organization charts). But in practice, Cornwell was a S31 boss.

Not the formal top boss, because at least one and IIRC three out of the four other Admirals killed outranked her, judging by the laurels around their rank badges. But her being involved makes perfect sense, in light of her flying with Leland, knowing all this dark stuff, and indeed apparently being Lorca's link to the Discovery and her secret spore drive...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Pretty sure the implication was Leland’s death was the opening they were speaking of. How much sense does it make that a genetically altered part Klingon/part human like Ash, whose last rank was a Lieutenant would fill the power vacuum of an Admiral?

But whatever. It’s left open-ended enough.

 

I gather we could interpret this as Cornwell having been an opponent of S31 or an adversary of Tyler, so that her convenient death removes an obstacle and allows those in charge of S31 to give Tyler a job.

But none of this jibes with what we see of Cornwell: she loves S31 and has no issue with Tyler - and is also a key figure in allowing the Mirror Emperor to become a de facto Starfleet Captain, which would bode well if Tyler chose to give her name as a sympathetic and powerful reference!

In any case, S31 may be a fairly low-level organization, the "Section" part not sounding particularly impressive to begin with. Its top boss may well be a mere Captain, even when its intel ships are big and may well all warrant a CO of Captain rank. It's just that it is directly supervised by an Admiral or five, folks who know all about S31 and its activities. And Cornwell clearly was one of those, setting her apart from the supposed majority that doesn't know what S31 is up to.

Timo Saloniemi

 

What even was the point of that? Because season 3 firmly nullified any possibility of a continuing Temporal War. Control never even needed a 28th century collaborator to embark on a gambit of ascension. Why didn't the writers just have Control do the dirty work of hijacking Airiam?

I was furious at how season 2 meandered about its own focal point. What the hell, writers? How do you forget what and when the seven signals you established in the season opener were? How did the characters forget about the initial seven even before discovering Gabrielle Burnham's technological misadventure?

 

Changing writers will do that.

 

Oh ffs.

Michael was the Red Angel. You see her leaping though time and creating the seven signals at the end of the season. All the crap about massive story direction change is Youtube TreQanon bollocks.

And Ariam was corrupted by a future version of Control (from the timeline where it's wiped out everything), which no longer exists. This is not rocket science.

 

Timo acknowledges that above, as well as the fact that Michael's seven separate red signals aren't the same as the original seven simultaneous red signals, which still don't seem to have a source. I'm a little more accepting of writer's thoughts on that matter, and assume that Michael (unseen) probably lit the seven original signals as well, to get the whole ball rolling and tying everything into a paradoxical bootstrap loop.

 

It's a time suit. Every jump was probably programmed to go through stardate whatever, creating the original signals at the same (relative) time as making the repeats.

 

Pretending that this happened doesn't help at all - because the Seven from the end of the first season are not the same as the Seven that our heroes go through in the second season. I mean, if they were, our heroes would have a map. But they don't - every appearance of a Red Sign save the initial Hiawatha one takes them by surprise and leads them to a destination they neither could predict nor can cross over from any seven-long list. (Fuck, Michael even does one Sign twice, over Terralysium!)

The writers clearly "forgot" what they were going to do. That is, they utterly changed their minds, or had them changed for them by some harebrained decree (of which DIS is famous already). Which means the entire adventure is FUBAR:

1) There is no role for the original Seven now, as they don't lead anybody anywhere (the "Brother" one excepted).
2) That the Seven would be a cause of alarm in folks is forgotten and negated, since now these things pop up above Klingon holy planets and whatnot, and nobody is alarmed in the slightest. Clearly they did not pop up there twice!
3) Whether the Angel is Michael or Gabrielle or both in the instance, it makes no real sense for either of them in/before "Brother" to i) damage the Enterprise or ii) pay a visit to the downed Michael. Some other Angel might be thus motivated, but not the Burnhams.

Twisting the knife in the wound by pointing out that Spock's/Connolly's map of the Original Seven ought to have had just two dots if it depicted the spots ultimately lit up by Michael is not really necessary. Star Trek map graphics just can't be expected to hold up to the writing in the general case. (Sadly, in this case the graphic we get does, though - Connolly speaks of a spread of 30,000 ly, which is what the map shows but the Michael adventures never account for, instead involving only local jumping within a single such red blur, plus that one hop (two hops!) to Terralysium which turns out to be 51,000 ly away in the end.)

In addition, the idea that Control would be behind Spock's framing for murder gets scrambled, because it happens before Control has any legitimate reason to consider Spock a threat for his knowledge (of things irrelevant to Control anyway). Plus, ya know, the Red Signs that shine across a whole galaxy are revealed to be about as impressive as today's signal flares when actually seen up close.

Also, the first two adventures had our heroes do Quantum Leap, creating a disaster simply by arriving (Hiawatha kicked towards a pulsar, radioactive asteroids kicked towards New Eden) and having to sort it out in addition to performing the actual song and dance of the day. And then the writers completely dropped that angle. But this is their prerogative, and basically the only such in this whole mess, as it doesn't result in contradictions like all the others. It just reinforces the feel of an utterly changed premise.

Could this utter clusterfuck be explained by something that does not involve the writers being told to switch tracks or else? I don't see how.

...It's not as if the original concept were without its faults, either, of course. How come Pike's team is aware of these frighteningly shining beacons in the sky, but nobody aboard the Discovery is? It seems DIS writers don't do "concepts" all that well. But generally they correct their early fumbles towards the end of the season, even if it means breaking the back of a story arc. For S2, they just managed to make a worse mess of it.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Cornwell was not Ssection 31.