Star Trek Discovery: Perpetual Infinity (S2E11)

No major twists this week but the episode takes a similar pace as last week’s episode. This steadier pacing of episode is letting the actors play to the their strengths. Sonequa Martin-Green has always been one of the strongest assets of the show and has coped brilliantly with some of the absurd situations the script writers have thrown at Michael Burnham. This week she gets to deal with even more emotional trauma and less than stellar parenting when she meets her time-traveling mother. Even Spock appears moved and at least looks like he might think about shouldering some of the emotional labour that Michael’s two sets of parents have managed to dump upon her.

The wider plot is mainly a bunch of stuff that happens. I see in some other reviews (e.g. the Mary Sue review) that some saw this episode as a return to Season 1’s bad habits. I didn’t find that, if anything it looked more like an episode of a show that has a much better understanding of what it is: a set of flawed but deep people dealing with space nonsense played by a set of actors who really know how to convincingly carry that off.

Ash and Georgiou get their own side action as they get caught up in Section 31’s compromised situation with sinister future AI Control. Everything, of course, goes very badly for everybody but really, given the legitimate excuse of a time-travel plot, events actually had fewer holes than usual.

Only one substantial twist, and it’s not much of a spoiler, Red Angel/Michael’s Mum has no idea what the mysterious red signals are. So that particular plot mystery is re-instated.

Rankings

1. An Obol for Charon (e4) – Classic Trek on a magic mushroom trip
2. Point of Light (e3) – season one Discovery is back for revenge
3. Brother (e1) – an action orientated fresh start for the Discovery crew
4. Perpetual Infinity (e11) – Mistakes were made, repeatedly
5. The Red Angel (e10) – the cast gets an episode to catch up with the plot and trap the Red Angel
6. If Memory Serves (e8) – A sequel to The Cage and a prequel to The Menagerie
7. New Eden (e2) – The Next Generation of The Next Generation
8. Saints of Imperfection (e5) – Let’s get the old gang back together!
9. Project Daedelus (e9) – Airiam we will miss you, though we barely got to know you
10. Light and Shadow (e7) – Michael goes one way, Discovery goes another
11. Sound of Thunder (e6) – Non-consensual medical procedures on a whole species

Bits and Pieces

• A Tilly-lite episode this week. We do get to learn that her second favourite law of physics is Newton’s Third Law. Saru presents us from learning her first but I would guess its the Second Law of Thillydynamics (the amount of Tilly in an isolated episode always increases leading to a state of Tilly equilibrium.)
• So there’s some obvious Borg speculation about Control. I suspect this won’t end up being Genesis of the Borg.
• The softening of Georgiou is a bit disappointing. Obviously an on-going character can’t be as thoroughly evil as she was as Emperor but she shouldn’t become too nice.
• The various Red Angel interventions make some more sense now and Michael’s mum has been retconned into watching over her in Season 1 also. Her intervention on Saru’s homeworld is less obvious though.
• The mess up with the genetic signature from the Red Angel was just handwaved away. In short: they just don’t really know what they are doing with all this DNA stuff 🙂
• Cora’s review is here http://corabuhlert.com/2019/03/29/star-trek-discovery-jerks-the-old-tear-ducts-in-perpetual-infinity/