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
