Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 2x11 - "Perpetual Infinity"

I doubt it's the Borg. Contro/lLeland didn't look or act like one.

BTW, Sonequa Martin-Green's husband Kenric Green played Burnham's father.

 

Perhaps this all ends with Discovery 950 years (or whatever it was) in the future, with Mama Burnham as Captain

 

Hard pass.

 

Ugggghhhhhhhghhghghhhhhhhh

I love this show, and I love the cast immensely, but this wasn't a great episode by any stretch. It kind of feels like the last two episodes have really gone off the tracks.

There was some good character stuff...and the performances again were great, but the story direction is a disappointment to me, and that's hard to overcome despite the good parts. It feels like they are trying to make this DSC's "The Visitor" and it wasn't executed as well, unfortunately.

It's gotten messy and overly complicated at the end here, and I'm deeply concerned that next episode is going back to the Klingon plot line.

I'm thinking "6," which I haven't given since "Si Vis Pacem" and would make this my lowest rated episode of S2. I don't know, though...because there were some great parts. But those parts don't really make up for the whole.

I guess I'll need to sleep on it.

 

Me too. My father's been dead for more than 20 years. I was close to him and would give anything to see him again. So yes, I cried during certain spots. That meant I loved the scenes many felt were too "talky."

The pacing of this episode was slightly better for me than last week's.

I'm a fan who likes the family-and-friendship scenes of Star Trek. I appreciated:

--The prologue flashback; seeing Michael's parents for the first time on screen.
--The beautiful scene with Culber at the top of the ep. He is the best character to have been in the scene when she learns her mother is alive. (DSC should have just made Culber CMO.)
--The building of Mirror Philippa Georgiou's character. This is the episode where what they're trying to do with her started working for me. (I know I'm alone there, so don't yell at me, please.)
--I also like how supportive Spock was of his foster/adoptive sister. In those scenes, he's a foil for the viewer, especially because we know so much about how he relates to his own mother.
--Was Tilly in this episode much at all? This is one of the first times recently where I don't remember seeing her in this much.

If nothing else, I liked the episode because Michael was essentially the opposite of a Mary Sue here. It's one of the first time in the series when several other characters are being the pillars she leans on as she goes through a harrowing experience.

To see your dead parent again is a dream many millions of us have. To lose them again after that is unthinkable.

Having said all that...

I do understand, and agree, with the fans who have said that the storytelling is uneven in DSC. Pacing continues to be my biggest critique of the series. Part of it is that 10-15 eps is the new 22-26. We'll never have those 20+ episode seasons again, so there just won't be the space for some of the things we wanted to see.

Fix the pacing, and some of the plot and character issues that many have would be resolved.

I was leaning toward an 8 (I rarely go below 7), but I'm giving it an extra point for the wish fulfillment quality of the premise.

 

Agreed. Besides, the Borg are about assimilating all life, whereas Control is about eliminating it.

 

That's not how constellations work. Stars are grouped by their appearance in the night sky, with no correlation to relative location to each other. Some constellations (i.e. Andromeda) have entire galaxies within them.

And Earth is usually painted on or near the Alpha-Beta border, so a star over 400 light years from Earth (or anything more than a couple light years) could be in either quadrant.

 

I do not understand the bad press here, because actually this felt more Star Trek than anything before. It’s funny how you folks complained before that the show was too fast paced and with little character insight, and now complain it’s too slow... MAKE UP YOUR MIND lol.

Also, I guarantee you that if you saw your mother after thinking for 20 years she was dead, you’d not care about the fate of the universe either...

Perhaps Control is not the Borg, but those were nano probes and it looks even more advanced technology than the Borg’s. My theory is that Conteol assimilated/destroyed the Borg in the future and used their technology - but it might also be that this is the beginning of the Borg somehow. Which I actually think would be pretty cool, and would explain their obsession with Earth.

That being said, it’s note clear that to defeat Control Discovery will have to be sent 1000 years in the future, and that it will be a weapon to destroy AI. Clearly that was always the plan, and the short trek episode just dropped a reverse Easter Egg if you like. Not too difficult to understand really.

While I did not like the last episode, I give this one a solid 9.

 

I beg to differ. There is one scene when Ash catches Leland and you can see Leland with cybernetic implants coming out of his body. That’s a 33rd century Borg to me - or something even more advanced than Borg using that technology.

 

The ending really cut the legs from under that. For a while, I thought big things were happening. I even thought they might kill Tyler, which seemed both sad for poor Shazad and desperately overdue. But no, he's not dead and Mama Burnham gets sucked right back where she came from. See you next week.

I did like the mother-daughter interactions, particularly the initial cold shoulder. And I thought the actresses worked well together. I'm glad SMG is getting some better material of late, but I felt bad for the rest of the crew when they had to deliver the painful technobabble solution, particularly Rapp when he had to slip in that neutron star reference. I'm sure that's not foreshadowing, especially when they had young Burnham conspicuously eyeballing a neutron star 30 minutes earlier. I'm now guessing the situation gets fixed while Burnham is still a child, which could have some big effects for her timeline (and could provide the promised tears).

I found Georgiou pretty tolerable in this one, and it's always nice to see Yeoh get some action scenes, even if the climax dragged and looked a bit cheap. But don't phasers have a disintegrate setting any more? I didn't get why Leland was so indestructible.

Please please don't let this be the Genesis of the Borg.

 

I think the thing that I can't really get over is that the season started so damn promising. They were dealing with a compelling and awesome mystery. It felt like the season would be about the mystery and the adventures they encounter while chasing the answer to the mystery down.

The mystery itself was compelling enough to keep interest, while the week-to-week adventures would be fun, dramatic, action-packed and engaging.

But now, we've turned to it into "yet another villain plot" (using the massively overdone sci fi cliche of the evil AI) and a bunch of massively over-complicated technobabble time stuff with really very little mystery remaining.

Damn it, I hope they pull a rabbit out in the last three episodes. Everything was humming until last week.

 

I liked it ok. SMG continues to get more role to work with, and thats great. But this was Yeoh and Sohn's episode and they were fantastic.

I went from being possibly the biggest Tilly fan to just cringing when I know she's about to stay something stupid and inappropriate. It was good while it lasted Tilly. We'll always have S1.

 

I'm sorry to hear about your father. It gets you at different spots, even after all this time later. When you least expect it. My mind went somewhere else at the end of the episode.

Yeah. People complaining how "talky" an episode is when, in previous episodes, they kept complaining about how fast everything was moving. The less I say about that, the better... Especially a couple of points in the thread where a couple of people said certain things and I had to think to myself, "Just keep scrolling, just keep scrolling, whatever you want to say, don't, you're not thinking straight..."

All good stuff. Especially the flashbacks. And I like where they're taking Culber and Georgiou. Tilly wasn't in this too much.

I think the situation with the Kelpians should be followed up on. Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time seeing how they can do it with three episodes left, if they do.

 

The new writing team seems completely lost when it comes to writing for Stamets, Tilley and Tyler.

Tilley had her moments at the beginning of the season, and now she's basically a Detmer but with a whacky streak.

 

I'm with you. I actually love what they're doing with Georgiou.

 

I'm glad some of you felt it was a great episode. That proves to me that it's just my subjective tastes that left me cold, and not that the episode was an irredeemable dumpster fire or anything like that.

 

2x12 “Control Creates the Borg”
2x13 “Michael Goes to Z’had’dum”
2x14 “2387”

 

A couple things. First, the suit was disabled by an EMP, so I think the containment field would have to be released before she could power it on again.

Second, Controleland blasts a hole in the suit, disabling it to be worn. That's why she yelled Nooo! The suit is probably not usable anymore.

 

This season has seen characters appear, then just as quickly disappear. The Hiawatha engineer, Linus the Saurian, one or two others. This, along with the poor handling of established characters, makes me think the writers are overwhelmed with the job they are given.

Emphasis is placed on getting information from MB' s mom about the signals. Then, as quickly, it is dropped.

I, too, had a different concept of how this season 2 would go. They would explore each of the signals, finding clues to a mystery and, at the end, having a solution. It seems that there was sudden turn in the storyline by the fourth or fifth story, when it came to be about Control and its desire to eradictate all sentient life in the galaxy.