Michael's mother Amanda comes aboard to explore Spock's strange connection to the mysterious red lights and the Red Angel. At the same time, Tilly is questioning her own sanity as her visions of a dead former classmate grow more intense. Meanwhile, on the Klingon homeworld, L'Rell struggles to remain in the role of High Chancellor. Rivals challenge her insistence to keep the human Ash Tyler as her Torchbearer, and she's harboring a secret that could give them even more leverage against her.
There might be a case here that the sum of these storylines is more than the value of the parts, particularly in a season long arc we have yet to see. But I found each of the parts flawed in its own way. Each felt like a long, slow walk to a destination that I didn't find especially compelling.
The Klingon story had the most complex agenda. It needed to introduce enough concerns surrounding Ash Tyler and L'Rell (and, to an extent, Georgiou) to justify bringing them back to the show. Perhaps, for people more generally into Klingon subplots than I tend to be, it accomplished that. But I felt like it did it rather poor job at depicting how L'Rell has stayed in power as long as she has. She didn't come across as having much political savvy. Voq/Ash Tyler's advice never seemed especially brilliant. She kicked some ass (in an especially video game-style fight), but not as much ass as Goergious would swoop in and kick to close the scene. There were a few visceral thrills, but overall the story was kind of a shrug.
Speaking of Georgiou, I'm all about this new spinoff show they've announced that will feature her nefarious scheming. But I'm not sure how much Discovery really needs to set that up any more than it already has. And I'm pretty sure it doesn't need to spend so much of its time weaving elaborate continuity fixes for its most critical "fans" -- why Klingons had hair then didn't now do again, and how L'Rell could be a female chancellor when other Treks told us there had never been one.
Still more "continuity-splaining" was going on in the Michael Burnham plot this week, which seemed less concerned with telling a story than with telling us why Spock has never mentioned his sister before. I found the rapport between Michael and Amanda to be a bit lacking, in large part I think because the age difference between Mia Kirshner and Sonequa Martin-Green makes it hard to buy them as mother and daughter. All of it was just stretching time for another episode before we'll eventually see Spock himself.
The Tilly storyline did the best job of generating emotion, particularly between her and Burnham. Yet it all relied on typical sitcom plot construction. Star Trek is generally above "one person keeps a secret because we wouldn't have an episode if they just came out and told the truth." Beverly Crusher announces that people are disappearing and that everyone else in the universe is crazy, and it's "well, let's drop everything and investigate that." But in contrast, Star Trek: Discovery evinces a curiously retrograde attitude on mental health, and accordingly makes Tilly act ashamed to facilitate a story. It's especially unfortunate that it's two episodes in a row now for this sort of behavior (though at least last week, Burnham revealed a partial truth and then came out with the rest of it in short order).
As if to compensate for less effective story beats, episode director Olatunde Osunsanmi piled on conspicuous camera work. The split-set conversation between Burnham and Tyler I found intriguing, but the repeated technique of opening scenes with a camera slowly spinning off its side was just distracting and didn't seem to have a point.
I didn't feel the episode was "bad" as such while I was watching it. Yet thinking it over and collecting these thoughts, I find it very easy to point to things I didn't like and very hard to point to things I did. So I'm going to give "Point of Light" a C. I thought it was a low point for Star Trek: Discovery so far. I hope the things it sets up for the season will be worth it.
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