2x11 Perpetual Infinity

[7.3/10] I tend to like it when mystery box shows start giving answers. Discovery has teased a lot of questions in the second season. Who or what is The Red Angel? Why did it choose Spock? What is the galaxy-destroying threat that Spock saw? And the show pretty much puts its cards on the table about all these things.

The Red Angel is Michael’s mom, Gabrielle Burnham. She tried to go back in time to prevent the Klingons from attacking her family, ended up 950 years in the future, and has been trying to fix the timeline ever since. She chose Spock because the combination of his Vulcan logic, human emotion, and space dyslexia made him uniquely suited to comprehend the time-distorted problems Garbielle was trying to communicate. And the galaxy-destroying the threat is basically Starfleet Control + the sphere data, which evolves in combination to be a sentient A.I. capable of wiping out all life as we know it in the universe.

Are all of these answers totally brilliant? Not exactly. Burnham’s mom being alive and at the center of all this still feels like a bit of a cheat. Involving Spock because of his learning disability is both convenient from a promotional standpoint and uncomfortable from an optics standpoint. And artificial intelligence + information = evil isn’t exactly the most heady obstacle there’s ever been in Star Trek.

What’s more, there’s still plenty of questions to be answered. For one thing, Gabrielle at least indicates that she knows nothing about the signals that have heralded the Red Angel. How exactly Starfleet Control becomes the galactic menace of the future is still a little unclear (though faux-Leland gives us a villain monologue to try to account for it). And some of the time shenanigans create as many questions as they answer (though this has been true for Star Trek for a long time).

But by god, they’re answers. We have a clear enemy here in robo-Leland, the representation of the crazed but calculating A.I. that’s on the loose. We have a macguffin in the form of the sphere data, which is self-protecting and hard to keep from the evil Control entity, let alone eliminate. And we have a story about why the Red Angel has been appearing in particular places, what her goal is, and what it’s meant to her personally.

That latter point is the other boon to “Perpetual Infinity.” As much as some of the joy of finally getting answers to those big questions is dampened by this show’s propensity to resort to facepalm-worthy one-liners and clunky conversations, Michael’s mom is a great addition for the episode. I’ll admit my bias, as a fan of Sonja Sohn from her should-have-been-star-marking turn on The Wire. But I’ll also admit that I didn’t realize it was Sohn until about halfway through the episode (she’s a long way from precincts in Baltimore and/or Hell’s Kitchen, making her a little out of context for yours truly), and was still impressed by her presence and delivery throughout.

The episode basically gives her three big conversations: with Pike, with Michael, and with Georgiou, and each serves a purpose. The one with Pike gives you a sense of Gabrielle’s resolve and directness, showing how focused she is on her goal. The one with Michael can’t quite match the emotional poignance it’s aiming for thanks to the writing, but at least functionally delivers the sense that Gabrielle has seen and been through so much in the timestream that she can’t let herself get attached and hurt again. And the one with Georgiou, while again, overwritten, suggests more hidden depths to Philippa and shows that Gabrielle still deeply cares about her daughter, even if the pain of being unable to prevent her death so many times has caused her to put up walls.

That’s the best thing about Gabrielle’s introduction, and something that, frankly, harkens back to Star Trek’’s episodic roots. Those one-off episodes used to let us get to know a guest character and their weird, particular situations. The other characters would react and be changed by it, but you’d get these little thought experiments and short form character studies that are harder to come by in the era of serialization. And yet here, by getting glimpses of Gabrielle’s mission logs and in those conversations, we get the sense of someone who’s been traumatized by constant trips through the time-space continuum in order to try to prevent catastrophe that have each ended in failure up to this point. Sohn’s performance drives the emotional contingent of that experience home, and the script at least takes the time to contemplate what that would be like for someone.

That said, it also spends a good amount of time on the whole evil robot gone amok schtick, which I can’t say I’m especially warm to. There’s at least some cool visuals to Control-qua-Leland. The whole nanoprobe injection scene has some Matrix-esque body horror to it. The way it moves when attacking Tyler (who’s sure to survive his latest near-death experience) has some genuine terror in the single-mindedness on display. And its one-man assault on the planetside crew, replete with Michelle Yeoh reprising a little bit of her Crouching Tiger hand-to-hand combat, has the coolness of everyone banding together to make a stand against an otherwise unstoppable force.

But the whole “keep the data away from the robot” schtick gets old quickly. The show belabors Georgiou realizing that Leland has been taken over. The thematic focus on motherhood as a throughline and connection between Gabrielle and Philippa is a solid one, but it’s nearly sunk by Control-as-Leland’s transparent manipulations and attempts to set the two against one another. And while I like the idea that thanks to a spacetime tug of war, Gabrielle can only be in this moment for a short time, the whole technobabble “we can send the suit into infinity to keep the info from Control but still save your mom” thing is a little too easy.

Still, that’s the nice thing about the point where a mystery box show finally gets to its big reveals -- it makes the conflicts and obstacles clear. While I might not be crazy about the solution, the notion that the crew of the Discovery has to find some way to stop Control from getting the sphere data creates a straightforward motivation for once. Gabrielle’s efforts to jump in and out of the timestream to help prompt that reality clarify the rationale behind the red angel’s actions. And the Leland-bot or whatever it represents evolving into the technological blight of the distant future explicates the stakes of the peril our heroes are fighting.

Little of that is perfect. As neat as some of the ideas at play are, the series’s usual painful dialogue and platitude-filled speeches drags things down considerably. But at least we know what’s up now, and at least talented performers like Sonja Sohn are on board to bring it all to a head. I may not love every second of where Discovery is going, but at least it finally has a clear direction in an otherwise hodgepodge-y mystery in search of a genuine, overarching story.