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We’re approaching the halfway point of the second season of Star Trek: Discovery with an episode that finally ends the Spock teasing and gives us a few tantalizing bits of information to drag the series further into the OG series timeline, but it ultimately is a bit unsatisfactory.
There were two main storylines this week: Burnham takes some ‘personal leave’ to return to Vulcan and confront her mother about Spock’s whereabouts, and the Discovery encounters a rift in the space-time continuum right over Saru’s home planet Kaminar. With the ship being drawn closer to the rift and the crew experiencing weird ghosts of the past and future, Pike declares himself the best person for the job of piloting a shuttle near the rift to try and close it. Once again, the ship’s captain puts himself at risk which gives Saru another shot at that chair on the bridge. Which makes us wonder — at the end of Season 1, Discovery was heading to Vulcan to pick up its new captain. When all is said and done this season — and one tantalizing name drop at the end of the episode does not bode well for Pike’s longevity on Discovery — are they setting up Saru to be the permanent captain of the ship?
But Ash insists that he is also a good shuttle pilot and should be the one to go so the both grudgingly make the trip which goes all kinds of haywire once the shuttle is dragged into the rift and begins traveling through different pockets of time. Even the probe launched into the rift returns (from The Matrix, apparently), enhanced with new technology and on a mission to kill the occupants of the shuttle while hacking into Discovery’s memory banks — also hacking into Lt. Commander Airiam. Uh oh. But there just happens to be one person on the ship who can navigate time in a non-linear fashion — Paul Stamets and his tardigrade DNA. Stamets is able to plot the shuttles trajectory through time, gets Tilly to beam him onto the shuttle and navigates out of the rift. No quite because they aren’t far enough away to escape the gravitational pull, but they are close enough to the ship to get beamed out. The trio is back on Discovery, Pike and Ash have a new respect for each other (kind of), and the shuttle’s self destruct measures blew up the rift. But what effect did that have on Kanimar?
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The main focus of the story was the final reunion of Michael and Spock. It took her a while to drag it out of her mother that she’d been hiding Spock in a cave, from the Federation and from Sarek, because he’s obviously mentally damaged at this point, constantly repeating a series of number, Vulcan proverbs and passages from Alice in Wonderland, the book Amanda read to him as a child. Here we get some new, previously unknown (so now it’s canon?) information about Spock’s childhood. We knew it was tough enough for him as a hybrid, but apparently he also suffered from what can basically be described as dyslexia, and Amanda reading to him from the classic Lewis Carroll story was her way of showing him that he could overcome situations that don’t make sense.
But Michael is insistent that Spock needs help, and Sarek is none-too-pleased to learn his wife has been lying to him about Spock. There was a moment of ‘Oh, no he didn’t’ when Amanda accused Sarek of never respecting humans to which he replied, ‘Of course I do or I would have married a Vulcan.’ That’s the equivalent to someone saying ‘I have a black friend’ and I don’t think Amanda took the comment as a compliment. But Michael insisted, and Sarek agreed, that she needed to get Spock to the Section 31 ship so they could help him.
Oh Michael, you have such blind faith in Section 31. Does anyone really believe Leland’s comforting words to Michael that they are going to do all they can to help Spock by using a ‘mind extractor’? Okay, hold up — a mind extractor is a Klingon device first referenced in the original series’ first intorduction to the Klingons (they threatened to use it on Spock and Kirk). So how did Section 31 come about possessing this device? Did Ash supply it to them courtesy of L’Rell when he joined the team? Or was it something Section 31 developed — way outside of Federation guidelines — that Ash maybe had some input on and then he gave the tech to L’Rell. We don’t know but it is an interesting bit of information to ponder that ties the episode to TOS.
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Georgiou, however, warns Michael that Leland does not have Spock’s best interest in mind, and the use of the device will tear his mind apart, leaving him a vegetable. So she concocts a plan where it appears Burnham overtakes her and kidnaps Spock, all captured on the ship’s security cameras of course. The plan works (and there were some great moments between the two as they attempted to make their fight look real) and Michael gets Spock off the ship, but Leland isn’t so sure Georgiou wasn’t behind the whole thing. She lets it drop that she knows he was responsible for the deaths of Michael’s parents so he’d better stay in his lane or else. And then she pretty much told him that she was now in charge (oh, and it seems she may have also killed her own mother).
Michael is still puzzled by the sequence of numbers Spock is repeating so she asks Alexa to reverse the numbers and figure out what they are. And as Michael suspected, they are coordinates … to Talos IV. Wait what?! Talos IV is a big deal in Star Trek canon, the first new world seen in the original pilot episode ‘The Cage’. Discovery is set chronologically three years after the events of that episode, and it’s where Pike ended up living in that machine that kept him alive and allowed him to communicate in yes or no answers. The Talosians themselves possess psychic powers that they love to use on others to create lifelike illusions, and visiting the planet is the one Federation infraction that could result in the death penalty! Are the Talosians messing with Spock’s brain. Could the Red Angel be a Talosian or someone/thing from the time rift? Are they behind the signals Spock, and now Discovery, have been chasing across the universe?
There seemingly wasn’t a lot of important information contained in this episode, but that one name drop opened up a whole new can of works that could inform the rest of the season moving forward.
New episodes of Star Trek: Discovery begin streaming Thursdays at 8:30 PM on CBS All Access.
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