The Red Angel

I've fallen a couple of episodes behind on Star Trek: Discovery here, so let me go back to the episode two weeks past, one that from even the title promised to be a major turning point in the season, "The Red Angel."

Tilly makes a sudden breakthrough and has discovered the true identity of the Red Angel. The revelation leads the crew to a desperate plan. They plan to lure the time traveler to a specific place and time where they'll set a trap. If they can capture the Angel, they can learn more about the threat posed by the emerging artificial intelligence, Control.

We're actually pretty late into the season now, and the series seems to be pretty set: they continue every week to excel at the interpersonal drama, while hand-waving their way through the particulars of the actual story. I find the latter ever harder to overlook with each new episode... though perhaps I'm foolish to expect otherwise at this point.

The time-traveling component of this episode simply made no sense whatsoever. There's really no way to dance around this one with careful word choice, so here's your SPOILER warning! Our heroes discovered that the Red Angel is in fact a version of Michael Burnham herself. (Or so they believed; I'll come back to that in a moment.) They then proceed with a plan that, if their hypothesis is true, is doomed to failure. If the Angel is a Future Burnham, then she knows everything she's experiencing right now in the present. If she's aware of all the particulars of a trap set to ensnare her, then Future Her should know how to wriggle out of that trap. To have any chance of success, don't they need to wall off Burnham from any knowledge of the plan?

But the plan does work, and the Red Angel is captured, because our heroes have incorrectly deduced her true identity. She's actually Michael's mother. It's a revelation that's simultaneously clever and annoying: clever in that it's going to really put Michael through the emotional wringer, annoying in that it makes our heroes seem dumb to have made this mistake in the first place.

Tilly's discovery (ha!) at the start of this episode felt oddly rushed. After an entire season wondering about who the Red Angel is, Tilly storms in (humorously) this week and announced the answer to us before the credits even rolled. There isn't much context or covering of how she got there, or demonstrating why she's right. It's the answer to a season-long mystery, and you'd expect an entire episode devoted to answering it. The twisted truth here is, this is an episode all about answering it. Which is, again, clever and annoying. Yes, we get the good plot twist. But the reason the episode didn't really dig into how Tilly reached this conclusion is that there was no way to do so without making her look even worse later for having reached the wrong one.

And yet, as the plot raced along at warp speed to try to keep us from questioning the particulars, the character work was once again top notch. Sonequa Martin-Green was quite simply amazing in this episode, giving an Emmy-worthy performance (that, this being a sci-fi show, will sadly never get Emmy recognition). She delivered one powerhouse scene after another.

There was the confrontation with Leland over his role in the deaths of her parents. As throughout the season, Leland continued to be no real threat, but the performance of Martin-Green in the scene overpowered that. As profound grief turned to profound rage, your heart went out to Michael. (And you gave a cheer when she punched him.)

The follow-up scene with Spock was better still. Sonequa Martin-Green and Ethan Peck have an amazing chemistry together, giving us a moving and believable sibling relationship week after week. (That they're doing it with the extra degree of difficulty in a Vulcan being part of that relationship only makes the accomplishment even greater.) Even as the rest of the episode had me saying, "wait, this doesn't make any sense," this scene was able to shove those thoughts from my mind long enough to make me actually tear up a bit.

The scene where Michael uses herself as bait to attract the Red Angel? Another triumph for Sonequa Martin-Green. This is an entirely different challenge, where she just has to writhe around and sell that she's in agony. She sold it; it was painful to watch.

There were other good character moments too. The scene between Culber and Admiral Cornwell was an interesting one. Okay, so I'm not sure it makes sense for Culber to go to an admiral with his problems, but I do love that they continue to use Cornwell's psychology background in interesting ways. The relationship between Georgiou and Burnham continues to pay dividends too; watching Michelle Yeoh vamp around is great fun, but it's also good to give her one solid emotional anchor to dilute the campiness.

And it was a small thing (and yet not a small thing), but I liked that they actually gave Stamets the dialogue "I'm gay" in this episode. Labels aren't important for everyone (and indeed, the scene at large was a cheeky way of probing this), but representation is. Yes, we've seen Stamets for most of two seasons now, but putting those actual words in his mouth still meant something.

Not all the character moments worked wonderfully, though. Airiam's funeral fell completely flat to me. Her late emergence as an actual character already made it hard to feel much for her death; now the big memorial of it was separated from the event by an entire episode. It didn't serve the audience the one-two punch I imagine the writers intended. If anything, it made me wonder why Airiam deserved such a big sendoff and not all the other characters we've lost in past episodes. (Like... um... Culber!)

Some high highs and low lows made this episode land somewhere at about a B- for me. I'm very tempted to nudge it up a bit, solely on the strength of Sonequa Martin-Green's incredible performance. But really, I think it speaks even more to her acting abilities that she extracted so much from such an uneven episode. I'm hoping for better in the next episode -- though, like I said, maybe this season is past the point where I should be expecting that kind of turnaround.