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I was concerned about the trajectory of the second season of Star Trek: Discovery when it was announced that Captain Pike and Spock would play a large part in the season’s storyline. Also, the first season’s heavily dramatic theme was almost too much, making watching the show not quite as enjoyable as it should have been. It was still good, but you knew you were never going to crack a smile with the Klingon War angle and wondering just who was who with the Mirror Universe story.
But that was all rectified right from the start with Season 2. Anson Mount has made a great Christopher Pike, and the writing staff has had more freedom to interject more humanity and humor into the show, giving it some much needed lightness in tone to balance some of the heavier episodes. Also a plus this season has been the focus on the bridge crew who seemed nothing more than glorified extras in Season 1. The strength of the Star Trek franchise has always been the camaraderie of the crew with each of them getting their chance in the spotlight at some point during the season. The Discovery crew have really just been bodies to fill the set until this season. We still don’t know a whole lot about them, except for Detmers who was one of the survivors of the Shinzou now on Discovery, but at least they’re getting more to do and have actual dialog to speak.
One of the more intriguing characters on the bridge is Lt. Commander Airiam, who appears to be a cyborg or perhaps just a full out robot. She’s not had much to do in the last season-and-a-half except react to things and tap on a touch screen, but a couple of episodes back when Pike and Tyler were stuck in the time rift and then attacked by a probe they launched that came back from the future with some serious augmentation and attitude, hacking in to Discovery’s memory banks, we knew then that Airiam was going to play some part in the coming episodes when those red lights would blink in her eyes and her head would cock a bit differently than usual.
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In the last episode, it was discovered that someone on board was sending coded messages to Section 31 and all eyes turned to Ash Tyler, being as he’s the lone Section 31 operative on the ship. Despite his claims of innocence, Pike had him contained to his quarters but no one could actually figure out how Tyler was sending the messages. But now with Spock and Burnham back on the ship in direct defiance of Section 31’s orders, Discovery is now a fugitive ship within Starfleet. A surprise visit by Admiral Cornwell, who interviews Spock and determines that he’s being truthful about not murdering anyone when he ‘escaped’ the mental hospital despite the video evidence suggesting otherwise, puts the crew on a new mission — straight to Section 31’s outpost to confront the commanders there who are hellbent on taking Spock back and trying him for his ‘crimes’.
But Section 31 is not all it’s cracked up to be with its decidedly non-Federation-approved mines guarding the station (Cornwell justifies their existence as a precautionary measure used during the Klingon war). But Pike knows his crew will be able to navigate through the mines … until the mines begin following and attacking the ship, somehow anticipating their every move. At one point Airiam, who we had seen earlier archiving some of her favorite memories including several with Tilly, seems to suspect there is something wrong and asks Tilly to stay by her side while they make their way closer to the outpost, and not to leave even if she’s asked to. Tilly agrees, but it isn’t long before more attention is needed elsewhere on the bridge and Airiam instructs Tilly to go. She doesn’t put up much of a fight, but she also doesn’t know that Commander Nhan has been keeping a close eye on Airiam, seemingly the only person on the bridge who has suspected the real mole in Airiam.
When they finally make their way to Section 31, Nhan, Airiam and Burnham make their way in expecting a lot of resistance but find no one … until they discover the frozen, two weeks dead bodies of the people they had just spoken to on the viewscreen. While Nhan goes off to turn something on, Burnham and Airiam are left alone and the hacked programming kicks into gear as Airiam begins downloading all of the information the Discovery had uploaded from the mysterious sphere a few episodes back. There is a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style fight between the two, and when Nhan returns Airiam rips the breathing device from her face (something she curiously inquired about earlier in the episode), apparently suffocating her as she attempted to retrieve it from the floor. Or not.
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By this point, Airiam has locked herself behind another door and continues the work that she’s been programmed to do, but valiantly fighting it for as long as she can. Burnham does all she can to get the door open but to no avail. Airiam begs her to pull the airlock to end this before more damage is done. Burnham’s emotions are running too high, and even despite Pike’s orders to open the airlock, she can’t do that to her friend. It should be noted that up until this episode, we never knew who or what Airiam was, but now we learn she is/was human, now augmented because of a tragic accident that killed her husband. When she was archiving her favorite memories, one of them was the last memory she had of she and her husband before the accident. While she was asking Michael to airlock her, Tilly said she was sending Airiam something in what seemed like an attempt to jog her back to her old self, but Airiam said she did not have time to watch it.
Suddenly the airlock opens and Airiam is sucked into space, the lever pulled by Nhan who did manage to get her breathing device before it was too late. As Airiam was sucked into the vacuum of space, Tilly’s transmission to Airiam was accessed … the video of she and her husband, the last thing Airiam would see before she died. It was a shocking, tragic, heroic, emotional moment for the characters and the viewers as they lost one of their own, and just as we were getting to know her but this episode was masterful in giving us just enough information about Airiam to be totally heartbroken by her death. She did manage to give Burnham one bit of information before she left the station and that was to search for Project Daedalus.
Now, while the death was a shock and a very emotional moment, why could Discovery simply not beam them back to the ship, or at least grab Airiam when she was in space? They saved Tyler from a cold death in space last season, so why not now? Was the ship too damaged from the mine attacks? Or did Airiam take everything offline before they went to the Section 31 outpost? I’m sure there must have been a reason that I missed during all the action. Either way, it made for a great episode with a really emotional payoff.
And someone is going to owe Tyler an apology. Also, things are not good between Michael and Spock either, at one point pushing him to completely lash out at her, smashing a three-dimensional chess board in the process. Yikes!
New episodes of Star Trek: Discovery begin streaming Thursdays at 8:30 PM on CBS All Access.
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