I'm sorry, but I would - by far - prefer if the Red Angel was Michael, or someone who knew her personally like Amanda. Airiam/Zora is...well...textbook fanwank. An attempt to link together disparate elements of canon just because "it makes sense" - even if it doesn't actually fit the narrative arc at all.
Shouldn't Spock be in uniform by now? I know they're all having their Star Trek: Renegades phase but it's not like Michael's showing up to the bridge in her leather jacket.
Well, an officer who seriously doubts his own sanity, is officially declared a fugitive, and tends to take regulations seriously, might not personally agree to being treated that normally... He's also on his impish mood right now, hating rooks with a passion and whatnot. Trying to force him to change might not be all that easy... Also, the heroes probably can be rid of their general fugitive status with a well-placed phone call now, establishing that Control was merely malfunctioning. Those accusations came out of the blue, and hopefully will go out just as quickly. But the process that pointed a finger at Spock has been going on for quite a bit longer, and might take longer to untangle, too. Timo Saloniemi
Mark my words...I´m gonna offically throw up if it turns out that Michael is the Red Angel because of...thimey..whimey.....stuff.....reasons....
It was blurry but I counted about 170 heads. Some of those could have been added since season one, or more transfers from Enterprise. It's not a huge discrepeny anyway, but I did notice they did include some extras familiar from previous episodes like the officer in the wheelchair from MTMTSMGM
I assumed the crew complement could be less than the 136 from Choose Your Pain (perhaps much less), given they were due to pick up the Captain (and crew?) on Vulcan, and we can assume they got rid of some of the Season 1 science officers when the mission parameters focused entirely on the spore drive. We do know they got rid of the Black Badgers. According to background material, the complement should be about 180. Anti-grav, my good sir. Being a pallbearer in the future is much easier.
Maybe the machinery makes the people unnecessary, but perhaps accompanying the casket is still a sometimes-used tradition?
I think the easiest answer is that Burnham is the Red Angel, and it's not like they don't have a track record for this. I also like the Zora theory, but will they pin a big reveal on a Short Trek that not everybody has seen? The Saru short trek was icing, not cake, for the story. I'm not sure how beholden they feel to these stories, which were made to tide over the viewers. I also get the feeling that we're going to see some sort of cliffhanger that leaves Mike projected into the future, either at the end of this episode or the season ender.
Or, what if we have an ending similar to the season one cliffhanger, but this time the Discovery jumps ten years and lands ... nose-to-nose with the Enterprise ... under ... Captain ... James ... T. ... Kirk. *screaming and bowel release ensues*
We don't know how Discovery was abandoned and the reasoning for doing so, showing why the crew abandoned her and the eventual recovery provides everything needed - Calypso is then just something that happened to Discovery in between and not necessary to the overall plot.
While that's true, I'm not even sure the abandoning of Discovery was something that necessarily happened to this crew, nor did it necessarily happen during the timeframe that the TV show will cover. What I'm saying is that Discovery could have been abandoned maybe 10 years after the end of the adventures we will see on the TV show, in which case Calypso is an even more stand-alone episode that has nothing to do with the TV show except that it happens to involve the same ship. I'm not saying that is necessarily the case, but we really don't know.