Star Trek: Discovery - The Red Angel

In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books there's a device that's designed to give you ultimate perspective, to allow you to know exactly how insignificant you are on a universal scale. Zaphod Beeblebrox is scheduled to be hooked up to this device, but before that can happen he's brought into a simulation, an exact copy of the universe that was created just for him, so when the device is activated he learns that he is the most important person in the entire universe and the very reason for its existence, thus sparing him the fate of having his mind destroyed by the true scale of his own worth. Star Trek: Discovery is that simulation, but for Michael Burnham. It's all about Michael. Everything.

I'm not sure why they needed to take the top of her head off.

Michael is the red angel. Obviously. Because everything is about Michael. Also they think that the evil AI from the future probably hitched a ride with her or something, so they need to stop her. And they don't seem at all concerned about making their plans with Michael in the room and even taking part. Like, no one seems to understand that you can't trick future-Michael if present-Michael knows about it - because she'll remember and not fall for it.

Yeoh is 100% wasted on this show.

But Spock comes up with a workaround for that, based on the idea that future-Michael will have to save present-Michael's life from any danger in order to still be alive in the future. The rest of the crew seem to think they can fake this, like as though Michael won't remember not dying and just not show up to rescue herself, but Spock, fortunately, is not a goddamn moron. Spock's actually pretty good now that he's shown up and it's not everyone just talking about him constantly.

Michael's even tolerable when Spock is giving her shit about how terrible she is.

So while the rest of the crew try to fake a life-threatening situation, Spock actually puts her in a life-threatening situation and the angel shows up to save her and they catch it and it turns out to be Michael's mum. The mother she thought died years ago. It's kind of been a defining trauma in her life. And I guess it means that she and Michael have been sharing the time-suit in the future.

So now they've got a time travel suit and Michael's mum from... the future? The past?

Also in this episode, Michael finds out that her parents were working for Section 31 (because of-fucking-course they were) and that the Section 31 dude was their boss and put them in danger and that's why they died (except at least one of them survived). Michael doesn't take it well, even though it kind of seemed like the dude was being overly harsh on himself. He made a mistake, but it's not like he wanted them dead or anything. He was just maybe a bit overconfident?

Michael should probably get in some pretty serious trouble for this, but I guess she was already forgiven for that mutiny she did.

But that's just part one of his very bad day and part two is a lot worse. While they're trapping the angel, he goes to... do something - I don't know what he was doing, but he got his eye stabbed like that guy in the Phantom movie. The one with Billy Zane. I guess by a rogue AI also from the future? I don't know if he's dead or got his brain hacked or what. And that's it. This was a bit of a nothing episode.

Except in The Phantom it was both eyes, I think.

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