Control is clearly gone -
REKCORE: Let’s get into the episode itself — Control finally gets taken down after that long fight with Georgiou and Nhan. How did you decide that magnetism, a rather low-tech solution, would be the key to stopping the advanced AI?
PARADISE: Well, by this point in the story — and
we had set this up in “Through the Valley of Shadows” — the Control nanobots were known to be highly advanced, but they were still made from a metallic alloy; Spock is able to magnetize the floor on the Section 31 ship to stop the nanobots when Burnham is trying to get away from them.
We talked about how Control could essentially infect and inhabit a human form, and how the nanobots would do that — and it really just a matter of deciding what they would be made of, and how we could defeat it. So we wanted to use the thing it was made of against itself, the metal material.
TREKCORE: And it certainly gives Georgiou a hero moment for the season, after being such a villain last year…
PARADISE: Yeah, and I just have to say that the moment [where Leland is defeated], Michelle [Yeoh] just plays that character so beautifully. The moment where she’s watching him die, and she just smiled… I never cease to be delighted by that moment.
TREKCORE: As Control evolved throughout the season, some viewers started to see some similarities to one of Star Trek‘s biggest villains, the Borg; there was a lot of speculation that we were actually seeing how the Borg were created, though obviously that didn’t come to pass. Was that intentional parallel?
PARADISE: It’s interesting — we weren’t thinking Borg at all. I mean, we talked about all sorts of different things in the room, but there was never any intent on our part to parallel that in any way. I can certainly understand why people started to think we were going in that direction, but it was never where we intended to go with it.
