Some Blundering About Star Trek Discovery 2×11: Perpetual Infinity

Last Week’s Discovery centers itself around a big action set-piece. It hits a couple of sour notes, but none so sour as the previous episode’s, “Non-vanilla sex is strictly for evil folks.” While there’s a lot to recommend it, though, its high notes are a bit muted and there’s a bit more bullshit than I’m used to from this show in a way that is reminiscent of ’90s Trek.

As predicted, Leland gets possessed by Control, though it actually happens in the cold open of this episode, not when he got eye-stabbed last time. Control/Leland claims to have seen Dr. Burnham’s body years ago, and proposes that the Red Angel is a clone or impostor or something, possibly planted by Control, so Section 31 should go steal the Sphere MacGuffin to make sure she doesn’t trick Pike and Michael into handing it over. We learn that Michael’s mom tried to save her family by using the just-barely-completed Red Angel suit to jump back in time an hour and warn them before the Klingons showed up. Instead, she got zapped 950 years into the future, and is now anchored to that time, unable to remain in other times for very long. They’ll explain later. Or maybe they won’t. The future’s trying to pull her back even now, and Discovery only has roughly the length of an episode of a CBS All Access Streaming Original Series before the force field holding her will fail. Discovery tries to dispose of the Sphere data by dumping it into the Red Angel suit, and also comes up with a plan to hold on to Dr. Burnham while they send the suit off to the end of time, but Control/Leland interferes, very nearly murders everyone, destroys the suit’s Time Crystal, and steals half the data before Dr. Burnham and the now-useless suit get zapped back to the far future.

• Control is kind of fantastic here. It possesses Leland because while it’s very convincing as a hologram, there’s nuances it can’t get down, and Leland is specifically a good choice because he’s ruthless and willing to do morally questionable things in the name of the greater good, so when Control uses his body to order people to do morally questionable things in the name of the greater good, they won’t find it out of character.
• I think part of Control not being “fully sentient” yet is that it is still bound by its original mission, so it, very honestly, tells Leland that being possessed by an evil computer that wants to take over and control the universe is not a betrayal of his oath and values, but the fulfillment of them, because Leland is a terrible person and his values are “bringing a dangerous universe to heel at all costs.”
• As a villain, Control is very Palpatine. He manipulates Georgiou and Tyler by being very careful to always pursue its own agenda in a way that aligns with what Leland’s agenda ought to be. It wants the sphere data, so it orders Tyler to steal it. But the story it gives makes a compelling case that it’s dangerous to leave the data with Discovery. When Tyler ultimately refuses, instead of arguing, Control/Leland backs him up, saying that he made the right call under the circumstances. Control then manipulates Georgiou pretty expertly, trying to get her to steal the sphere data and blow up the Red Angel. If Control’s story about Dr. Burnham being an imposter were true, Georgiou would be protecting Michael by killing her; if he’s “wrong”, Michael’s mother is competition for Michael’s affection, which is itself motivation enough for murder.
• Critically, neither Tyler nor Georgiou trust Leland/Control, but it’s not like they fully trusted him when he wasn’t possessed either. They also both seem to intuit that something’s wrong with him once he’s possessed, but again, it’s not a matter of them being too dumb to realize he’s acting oddly – even if there’s something wrong with him, they haven’t been offered any alternatives that make more sense than the orders he’s giving them.
• More good examples of Discovery setting up an idea ahead of using it: They plan to use dark matter to enhance the transporter in order to beam Dr. Burnham back into normal space-time so she won’t keep getting yanked back to the future. In any other Trek, this would be some out-of-nowhere technobabble. But in Discovery, there’s an analogy already set up: the recent resurrection of Dr. Hugh Culber. He’d been reincarnated in Magic Mushroom Space, but couldn’t return to regular space since his new body was made out of Mushroom Space Matter. They recover him using a form of “organic” transporter that the Mushroom People (long story) had built on Discovery to convert him back into normal matter.
• Dr. Burnham knows about Pike and warns him that he wouldn’t like to know his future.
• The ultimate reveal of why the Red Angel chose Spock to communicate with? Yes, because he’s half-human and half-vulcan, but there’s one other element: Spock is also dyslexic. Again, good setup-payoff on Discovery; they introduced that several weeks ago as part of Spock’s baggage – the Vulcan educational system effectively misdiagnosed it as an common childhood disorder that Vulcan children grow out of with only minimal intervention. Because of being unstuck in time, Burhnam was only able to communicate with someone who had the particular combination of logic, emotion, and learned experience with processing mis-ordered symbolic information.
• They are not evoked by name, but Leland’s possession by Control has heavy shades of Borg. A VFX shot shows him being pumped full of nanorobots. He shows enhanced speed and strength and a resistance to phasers. We also see him “hulk out” a few times, with dark lines appearing on his face when he thinks no one is looking. He’s actually erupted in full blown techno-bits sticking out when Tyler confronts him. Also, Control rather emphatically almost-but-not-quite tells the restrained Leland that resistance is futile.
  • One imagines this sticks in the crawl of a certain kind of Trekker, as, “Nobody knew about the Borg until TNG Season 2! And that technology is way too advanced for a TOS prequel” I answer that:
    • We’ve already established by way of visual motif that Section 31’s technology is not simply more advanced than the rest of Starfleet, but it’s more advanced specifically to the point of being TNG comparable. This is quietly conveyed in a way that’s clear but doesn’t call attention to itself: Section 31 uses commbadges rather than communicators, the UI on their computers looks more similar to LCARS, and they’ve got TNG-era hologram technology.
    • This whole “nobody knew about the Borg until TNG season 2” thing is nonsense. Elaurian refugees had been living among the Federation for decades before TNG, and the Hudson family were doing research on the Borg a decade or so before Voyager. What we actually see is just that the crew of the Enterprise doesn’t know about the Borg, which is consistent with them being effectively cryptids at the beginning of the TNG era – stories about them have made their way to Starfleet, but no formal contact, so they’re mostly known only to fringe researchers.
    • Starfleet has encountered Borg nanotechnology (Without the details of its provenance) before, back in Enterprise, so it’s entirely reasonable as a callback that Starfleet’s evil branch that is cool with using stolen evil technology might have repurposed some.
    • Also, shut up.
• I think it’s nice that we open up with Michael waking up in sickbay thinking that her mother had been a near-death hallucination because that was a more reasonable assumption than the truth.
• When Dr. Burnham doesn’t want to speak to Michael and Pike chooses to respect her wishes, Michael doesn’t go around his back. Later, when she expresses to Spock how important it is that she see her, Spock agrees to help her… By talking to Pike, not by going around him. In any other Trek, she’d have decided she knew better than anyone else, snuck in to see her mom, donked something up in the process and made things way worse.
• The actual shining character bits in this episode are actually between Dr. Burnham and Evil!Georgiou. I guess we do have to concede that, yeah, Georgiou’s a legit antihero now. Burnham reveals that she’s witnessed timelines where Georgiou sacrificed herself to protect Michael, and even speaks to her, “mother to mother”, which legitimizes Georgiou’s maternal connection to Michael far more than she’s actually earned it yet.
• There’s a thing Star Trek fans always complain about where computers are kinda magic, particularly, in that copying data and moving it are depicted as pretty radically different. That happens here. When Pike orders the sphere data deleted, the data “protects itself” by partitioning itself in memory using encryption in a dead language and it all sounds like nonsense, but apparently they can still get rid of the data by moving it to the Red Angel. Which sounds like complete bullshit, except that it’s 2019 now, and they use the magic word: the Red Angel suit computer is a quantum computer, and actually, yeah, quantum computers work like that. The act of reading data out of a quantum superposition is destructive, so okay, it’s actually plausible that transferring data between two quantum computers would be fundamentally different from deleting it.
• Spock quotes Hamlet. A slightly ironic choice because Hamlet’s main character flaw is that he sits around angsting over what he should do rather than taking action, and one of the delightful things about Discovery is the way they avoid the common TNG wheel-spinning of “We spend 3/4 of the episode debating the ethical implications of whether or not it would be right to save those kitties from that burning building.” It’s incredibly rare in this show for anyone to be paralyzed with indecision.

And some points of contention:

• The whole plot thread of “Dr. Burnham is cold and doesn’t want to talk to Michael because after seeing her die in hundreds of timelines, she’s moved on and only cares about the mission,” thing is tedious and smacks of exactly the sort of “People lie about and conceal their feelings for no good reason because CONFLICT!” bullshit that has plagued Trek forever.
  • That said, it does tie into Discovery’s theme of people who are broken and need to heal.
• Much as I appreciate the execution, the explanation for why Spock can communicate with the Red Angel is a little too “Disabilities are actually superpowers” for my liking.
• You know who we haven’t seen in a while? Tig Notaro’s character, a gruff engineer they rescued from a ship that crashed on a dark matter asteroid the first time they went chasing the red signals, and who seems like she might be hiding something. Like, she had a major role about 6 episodes ago, and the story continues directly into the next episode, but she’s gone. Seemed like that character was going somewhere.
• Hugh gets reinstated off-screen between episodes. Seriously, they mention that he hasn’t been reinstated in the previous episode, and mention that he has in this one.
• The excuse they give for their mistake about the Red Angel’s identity is that mothers and daughters have the same mitochondrial DNA. But… Hadn’t they identified Michael as the Red Angel because of a brainwave analysis?
• I know I said that Section 31’s technology is more advanced than Starfleet’s, but it’s hard to justify the capabilities of the Red Angel suit without something more than this. We know it can:
  • Travel in time.
  • Travel in space with similar range to Discovery‘s spore drive. That is, distances that would take decades to reach by warp.
  • Produce an EMP strong enough to paralyze a global civilization.
  • Transport a church full of people halfway across the galaxy.
  • Store an effectively unlimited amount of data.
• But apparently it can’t survive a shot from a phaser rifle through a force field.
• The church thing. Burnham zapped a church full of refugees halfway across the galaxy on a trip to World War III. Discovery met the descendants recently. She did this to establish whether or not she could change history with the suit. Turns out she can, but for some reason she can’t prevent Control from getting the sphere data. There had better be a reason for this that isn’t just “Grandfather paradox handwave!”
• Having Leland hulk out on the bridge when everyone is looking away was a bit too much.
• Tyler gets shanked the moment he discovers Leland in Borg-mode. We used to call this “The Worf Effect”, where an alien baddie casually tosses Michael Dorn across the set to demonstrate that he’s so formidable. But it doesn’t sit especially well that Leland dispatches him so easily given that Tyler is a Klingon, while Georgiou holds her own against Leland in hand-to-hand combat for several minutes
• There are other people on that ship besides Tyler, Leland and Georgiou. We see them in the background. No one else questions any of this? Tyler, we learn in the epilogue, is able to drag himself to an escape pod before Leland’s ship flies off. No body noticed him crawling out of Leland’s office with a giant gut wound? I suppose it’s possible Leland killed the rest of the crew before beaming down for the big fight scene, but if they turn up alive later, I’m going to be annoyed.
• Leland’s ship does not have a name. This annoys me greatly.
• No one seems especially interested that the sphere data apparently has intelligence and agency all of its own and can manipulate their computer. In a plot arc about an evil computer.
• “Perpetual Infinity” is not an especially good title.

Things to look out for in the future:

• I think it’s as good as confirmed that Michael will be donning the Red Angel suit later. The whole “Oh we mistook it for you because you have the same mitochondrial DNA” bit isn’t a legit explanation: it’s part of a setup. When Georgiou admires the suit, Burnham warns her that it’s DNA encoded so that only she can use it. Yeah. They’re fake-establishing that only Dr. Burnham can use the suit in a way that leaves a big bright shiny loophole that Michael can probably use it too.
• Also, Dr. Burnham doesn’t know anything about the red signals. No one mentions the obviously telegraphed explanation that the Red Angel they caught is from before the signals were sent.
• Implication, by the way, is that it’s the future version of the Red Angel with whom Spock mind-melded, not Dr. Burnham, since he saw the red signals in his vision.
• This could also explain the suit’s abilities, if it gains them after being repaired in the future using the sphere data. Though moving a group of 21st century humans to Terralysium is probably the most impressive thing the Red Angel does, and that was explicitly an early mission.
• They’re not setting up Leland as Borg Patient Zero, are they? Please don’t let that be what they’re setting up.
• The gap between the seasons gave us a series of mini-episodes called “Short Treks”. So far, one of these has been directly plot-relevant, giving the backstory of Saru’s home planet, which became relevant a few episodes back. Another, “Calypso”, is the finest piece of Star Trek ever made, and is set about a thousand years in the future. Which would place it a few decades after Gabrielle Burnham’s anchor point 950 years in the future, though in a timeline where humanity has survived. Significantly, that episode featured a fully sentient benevolent AI. Is there a connection here? I’m reminded a bit of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which seemed to be edging up to the idea that the appearance of a sentient AI in that time period was inevitable and the best humanity could hope for was to guide its evolution along a benevolent path. Perhaps Zora is presented as a benevolent alternative to Control.

Looks like next week will be a bit of a downshift. If the trailer is indicative, it’s a bit of a, “Control has gone into hiding so Discovery goes back to investigating the red signals for want of anything better to do,” episode centered around the Klingons. I don’t especially like the Klingon stuff, but they may surprise me yet.