There's a lot of story progression going on here. The Control station has been destroyed. All ships have been checked for viruses. All seems to be well. But for reasons that I don't entirely understand, the combined crews of Discovery and the Section 31 ship decide that the only way to be sure that all is well is to catch the Red Angel. This will make sure that no more AI from the future makes it to the present. Oh and Section 31 created the Red Angel suit, and it was taken by Klingons. Also, the Red Angel is Michael. And Michael's parents worked for Section 31 and created the Red Angel time-traveling Iron Man suit.
Now that all of that is out of the way, let's analyze what is going here. This episode is about people coming back together. Hugh reaches out to Stamets, though Stamets is reluctant to allow it for fear of being hurt again. Ash Tyler and Burnham make up, and at the last moment he calls her to say.... something, but she says she already knows. Spock and Burnham have a bit of mutually-enjoyed bonding after she decks that Section 31 guy. Even Mirror Georgiou and Burnham seem to share a moment of understanding. And finally, Nhan and Burnham make up after Michael left her die last week.
Their plan to catch the Red Angel involves a ton a technobabble, and a premise that certainly wouldn't work. Since they believe that the Red Angel is Michael in the future, they know that it will come to save her if her life is in danger. So she volunteers to suffocate on an inhospitable planet in order to summon ...herself. But that wouldn't work, right? Because Michael knows that it's staged and even though it will be painful they won't let her die. And that's exactly what happens, until Spock intervenes and makes sure that no one does rescue her. I don't know, man. I think we're creating time paradoxes all over the place, but I guess I'll take the Janeway approach to temporal paradoxes and not even try to make sense of them. By the way, all of this effort is for nothing, as the Section 31 ship gets the AI virus.Anyway, the big plot twist revealed at the end is that the Red Angel is actually not Michael, but her mom. Which frankly makes more sense to me. She's certainly got some explaining to do. This episode is tough to call, because it rewards us with revealing a great deal of information that we have been hoping to discover all season. But that in and of itself does not make it a good episode. On its own, "The Red Angel" is only Adequate. Technobabble and improbable plan of action take away from the story, but decent character development and a genuine unforeseen plot twist counter-balance it.
Published May 3, 2019
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