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Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 2x09 - "Project Daedalus"

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I'm re-watching it literally right now and I just noticed something. I had to pause the episode as soon as I saw because it didn't even register in my mind back in November.

Craft has a tattoo of a Red Angel on his back.


Very interesting.

Maybe in the future time everyone knows of the Red Angel and its helping save life everywhere. A symbol of resistance.
 
The hacking really bothers me. Shouldn't those implants of hers be made to only work for her and not anyone outside of her body?
That was almost certainly the intention. But with the right equipment and information, anything can be hacked. Consider that we're hacking the code of organisms to make them do things we want them to do, and that certainly wasn't the behavior they evolved to / were created for (depending on your philosophy there ;) ). Consider that your keyboard - not even the computer, but just the subprocessor in your keyboard - is more advanced than any processor used in the space shuttles, FAR more advanced than the computers used to calculate the moonshot.

Airiam's machinery almost certainly had diagnostic connections - probably wireless. But even if they were not wireless, and even if they had no diagnostic connections at all, they still had to be able to communicate with the NON-computerized parts of her in order to be useful to her. And there's a point of access. And the future AI that took her over knew its target and had 600 years of tech advancement and knowledge of cybernetics. It would be like asking IBM's Watson to figure out a simple 1-to-1 character-replacement cipher, only probably even more so. Honestly, as a computer tech, myself, I'm half-jokingly thinking the hardest part might have been figuring out the proper approach to take if someone had failed to keep proper archives of the documentation on her augment equipment in the intervening years. ;)
 
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Based on the preview I expected this to be an boring action piece; damn I was wrong! This was quite excellent episode on many levels.

Burnman is getting better and better, and Peck is absolutely great as Spock. Whilst I agree that the Airiam thing would have worked even better had they fleshed out her character more earlier, it nevertheless worked well. In fact, they did really excellent job expanding her character in such a brief time.

It still puzzles me though how bad the people in charge of this are at utilising the serialisation. Many of the individual episodes are great, but the serialisation aspect is still faltering. But at least it seems that they have some sort of plan this season, unlike on the first season where it seemed that they were literally making it up on the fly.

Oh, and everyone ignoring Nhan bothered me too. Also, those saw mines. They were completely stupid, why would such pointless things exist?
 
I'm re-watching it literally right now and I just noticed something. I had to pause the episode as soon as I saw because it didn't even register in my mind back in November.

Craft has a tattoo of a Red Angel on his back.
It was a Cyclops Owl from Alcor IV, his home planet. I had thought the Angel might be among the other possibilities from the database that Zora scrolled though before matching his tattoo to that one, but going frame by frame, it doesn't appear so.

-MMoM:D
 
Also, those saw mines. They were completely stupid, why would such pointless things exist?
They wouldn't be saws if they didn't have points. (That was so easy I suspect you set it up on purpose. ;) )

Maybe since no one has been supposed to build mines, they just aren't very good at it? You know, what with the saw blades *and the being visible* and all?
 
Oh, I hate to keep beating a dead horse on an episode that was pretty darn good until the end.....

But couldn't they have just beamed Airiam off the station? When they beamed on, they said they were standing by to beam them out.

Yet it seemed that was never an option. For her or Nhan. Did I miss something?

If not, it worries me that this writer has 2 more episodes.

Interesting info on Craft's tat. Very interesting.
 
I like episodic (and semi-episodic) myself, but I do think that if Discovery is going for serialization, it should take advantage of the form. Ariam's death would have been much stronger if they had.
It sounds like you're saying that you think Ariam's story line needed more screen time in order give her death some impact and this would have been more easily accomplished in a serialized show.

I don't think the fact that DSC is serialized has any impact on how a character is developed, since character development can occur over multiple episodes or one episode regardless of a show's format, as has been pointed out.

The writers simply chose to show us Ariam and what she was all about and her relationships, in a single episode. I thought the way they chose to develop her character in this episode was done with warmth, incite, and was fairly comprehendive. Don't know whether to credit Frakes or the writers for this.

If you're saying you would like to have seen more of Ariam, I get that. What I'll say is that having seen this episode, I wish we'd seen more of her myself. But that speaks to the effectiveness of the storytelling in this episode because before I saw it, other than a mild curiosity, I didn't really care about how little I'd seen of her.

On a somewhat different subject, even in serialized shows, as opposed to a standalone format, episodes need to have a self contained story with a beginning middle, and end (except perhaps, multi-parters). Every DSC episode has done this.
 
It as sweet and cryptic as I remember. And I'm sure that "Zora" is Airiam's first or original name.

It's still my favorite episode of anything Discovery related. When Zora appeared in "human" form to dance with Craft, I wondering if it was the same actress who plays Airiam. That would've been a dead giveaway right there. Sadly, it's not. Zora must be more of a "daughter" or reincarnation of Airiam.
 
It was a Cyclops Owl from Alcor IV, his home planet. I had thought the Angel might be among the other possibilities from the database that Zora scrolled though before matching his tattoo to that one, but going frame by frame, it doesn't appear so.

Hmmmm. Owls, angels, and religions... let me look something up...

Scriptures provide some insight. Cutting and pasting in the quote below:
Word Translated as "Angel" in Hebrew Scriptures Originally meant "Replenishing Owl"

The word translated as angel in the Hebrew scriptures has the letters ML'K and it is transliterated as mal'ak. It really means "replenishing owl."

(Genesis 16:7, NIV) The angel (ML'K) of the Lord (Yahweh) found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. 8 And he said, “Hagar, slave of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?”
They did their homework.
 
There are actually the only people that we are reasonably sure future Control has killed. A logic extremist and her cronies. Are we really sure that future Control is the bad guy here?
I'm not sure that Patar was a logic extremest.
Remember they had been dead for at least two weeks when Discovery arrived at the station and it was Control who had been feeding all of that kind of information to Adm. Cornwell during that time period.
 
It sounds like you're saying that you think Ariam's story line needed more screen time in order give her death some impact and this would have been more easily accomplished in a serialized show.

No, I'm saying that spending more time with her would have given her death far more impact. What we got here was OK -- fairly standard character shorthanding that would have been acceptable for a guest star in the old shows. But a serialized show really shouldn't need to establish mundane details such as "she's close friends with Tilly!" at the last second, especially halfway through the second season. Why couldn't we see her being friends with Tilly? A little groundwork before now could have given her death much more meaning. A missed opportunity, IMO.
 
No, I'm saying that spending more time with her would have given her death far more impact. What we got here was OK -- fairly standard character shorthanding that would have been acceptable for a guest star in the old shows. But a serialized show really shouldn't need to establish mundane details such as "she's close friends with Tilly!" at the last second, especially halfway through the second season. Why couldn't we see her being friends with Tilly? A little groundwork before now could have given her death much more meaning. A missed opportunity, IMO.
It might be because of the change of Producers midway through production.
The original producers probably had different ideas they were going to present and those plans got changed.
So, no time was spent on building up Airiam until it was too late.
:shrug:
 
No, I'm saying that spending more time with her would have given her death far more impact. What we got here was OK -- fairly standard character shorthanding that would have been acceptable for a guest star in the old shows. But a serialized show really shouldn't need to establish mundane details such as "she's close friends with Tilly!" at the last second, especially halfway through the second season. Why couldn't we see her being friends with Tilly? A little groundwork before now could have given her death much more meaning. A missed opportunity, IMO.
Changing showrunners one third of the way into the season and asking new people (not promoted internally) to make something work on short notice does tend to create obstacles for longer term planning.

Edit: ninja’d.
 
Changing showrunners one third of the way into the season and asking new people (not promoted internally) to make something work on short notice does tend to create obstacles for longer term planning.

Edit: ninja’d.
Obviously, ... Great Minds Think Alike!
:techman:
 
Maybe. But they've been teasing her possession, so there's no reason to think her death wasn't planned.
 
Maybe. But they've been teasing her possession, so there's no reason to think her death wasn't planned.
Teasing it for two episodes, neither of which had much room to showcase her. If the season had 3-5 extra episodes, they could have fleshed out her background more thoroughly. Alas, it does not.

Edit: semi ninja’d again. Dammit. ;)
 
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