Star Trek: Discovery: Perpetual Infinity

March 29, 2019 2:36 AM - Season 2, Episode 11

Burnham receives the reunion she’s been longing for, but it doesn’t go quite as she imagined.

(Memory Alpha)
Georgiou and Tyler sense a disturbing change in Leland.

The team discuss Newton's law of equal and opposite attraction. We don't get to hear what Tilly's favourite law is.

Michael and her mother argue about the best way to solve the problem. The sphere doesn't want to be destroyed.

Leyland becomes more a part of Section 31 than he imagined.

Gabrielle talks with Philippa.

Quotes:
You joined Section 31 to keep a brutish universe on its knees, Captain. To maintain order by any means necessary. Your evolution - our evolution - is not a desecration of that oath, but its very fulfillment."
- Control, to Leland

"People think time is fragile. Precious. Beautiful. Sand in an hourglass, all that. But it's not. Time is savage. It always wins."
- Gabrielle Burnham, to her daughter Michael

"I doubt I would sacrifice my life to save the galaxy."
"You'd be surprised what you'd do for the people you love."
- Georgiou and Gabrielle

"I like science."
- Spock

Ash Tyler, gurgling: "LEYLAND" (debated using just LEYLAND as the above the fold text.)

posted by freethefeet (46 comments total)

I don't really appreciate this show cheerleading for "science" in the same episode that it describes dyslexia as giving you the magic power to perceive time non-linearly. I'll believe that the writers have an appreciation for science when they actually demonstrate it.
posted by IjonTichy at 3:46 AM on March 29, 2019 [7 favorites]

Bunham’s mom saying that she watched every moment of her life was just creepy to me. I know it was supposed to be meant as some sort of indication of closeness and love, but poor Michael. Not a moment of privacy. Future mom staring at her every time she farts. Also, that opens up all sorts of problematic questions about why she didn’t intervene in any of last seasons plots, especially as she has no compunction about screwing with the timeline.

Star Trek never does time travel well, and should stay away from it.

I still think we are witnessing the birth of the borg.
posted by fimbulvetr at 5:20 AM on March 29, 2019 [8 favorites]

Also, how many times are they going to recycle the “but secretly, she/he was under the control of the enemy!” plot in this series?

I guess this may also be the justification for why we never see holographic communication technology in the “future”.
posted by fimbulvetr at 5:39 AM on March 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

I have heard that this is the first Trek series to not employ a science advisor. Does anyone know if that’s true? It would explain the goofy Doctor Who shit in this show, that’s for sure.
posted by Automocar at 6:40 AM on March 29, 2019 [5 favorites]

Then again, given all the timey-wimey and power of love crap, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Leland sprouted a plunger out of his forehead and started shouting EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE
posted by fimbulvetr at 6:41 AM on March 29, 2019 [10 favorites]

Seriously? People are complaining about the goofy science in Star Trek NOW?

As far as I can tell, Discovery handles science as well as any other Trek series. Which is as a convenient source of techno babble.
posted by happyroach at 9:35 AM on March 29, 2019 [13 favorites]

Enh, I don't have a problem with Discovery doing goofy science like every other Star Trek ever, I expect techno-babble and pseudo-scientific space wizardry from the show.

I do think it is ridiculous that Discovery does goofy pseudo science and then pats itself on the back by having characters exclaim things like "I like science!" or "This is the power of math, people!".
posted by fimbulvetr at 9:58 AM on March 29, 2019 [13 favorites]

Pointless STO Comparison of the Week: The new Klingon birds of prey seen in DSC are a cash shop item now. I haven't flown mine yet, but the non-canon Fed equivalent is pretty good, so I expect to be impressed.

Stuff:
* Guess we know why the sphere data isn't going to be a thing, going forward.

Actually addressing what a game-changer that kind of archive is is a new thing for the franchise. As muddy as DSC plotting tends to be, I appreciate that they didn't forget or ignore that the archive would have some serious consequences, and I appreciate that it has become the season's MacGuffin.

* Leland shouldn't be the first Borg.

DSC is a lot more attached to continuity and callbacks than any prior Trek series, IMO. I think it's very unlikely that Control will be a Borg origin story on at least a couple levels:

- The Borg are seeking 'perfection' rather than the eradication of all organic life.
- The Borg originate in the Delta Quadrant, and Voyager encountered one species that 'knew them when they were young,' (the Vaadwaur). They predate Starfleet by a considerable margin according to that.

It's possible this still occurs because Gabrielle Burnham had a base '50,000 light years' from her starting point and we're dealing with both time travel and the possibility that Control can use the sphere's knowledge of the Borg, but it seems like a stretch.

Either way, I personally liked this one well enough. For me, DSC's best work tends to involve emotional connections over stuff making sense from a plot or science standpoint, and I felt characters were operating well on that basis: Spock and Michael feel like siblings now, Mama Burnham sold her trauma pretty well, Georgiou's backstabbing seems to check with her personal motivations, and so on.
posted by mordax at 10:11 AM on March 29, 2019 [5 favorites]

I do think it is ridiculous that Discovery does goofy pseudo science and then pats itself on the back by having characters exclaim things like "I like science!" or "This is the power of math, people!".

Yeah, it's not the technobabble, it's the "NEWTON'S SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS MOTHERFUCKERS!"

It's like the "Get a Life!" Shatner is now a studio suit, and he's yelling out "put some nerd shit in!" so he doesn't have to hear about it from the fans at the conventions.
posted by sideshow at 10:41 AM on March 29, 2019 [5 favorites]

I think I know how this could end up being a Borg origin story after all. First, we have to acknowledge that, no, Control isn't part of the Borg, because they aren't about eradicating organic life. On the other hand, Leland was injected with nanites that glowed green, the signature Borg tech look. But how did Control get Borg nanoprobes? Possibly thanks to Star Trek: First Contact and the ENT episode "Regeneration"; the former had the Borg time-traveling back to the twenty-first century (44 years from now, in fact), and the latter had drones from a crashed Borg ship from that encounter briefly reviving and the NX-01 encountering it. Given the likelihood that they salvaged nanoprobes from the drones, and that we know Section 31 exists prior to the Federation itself... do we know for a fact that humans aren't Species 001?
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:25 AM on March 29, 2019 [2 favorites]

Seriously? People are complaining about the goofy science in Star Trek NOW?

Yes, because it's one thing to activate the Heisenberg compensators in order to invert the phase of the main plasma array, and quite another thing to just make up facts about dyslexia.
posted by IjonTichy at 11:31 AM on March 29, 2019 [19 favorites]

I doubt the writers of Discovery even know why the Heisenberg compensators are called that. Hell, they might not even know they exist.
posted by Automocar at 11:39 AM on March 29, 2019

I doubt the writers of Discovery even know why the Heisenberg compensators are called that. Hell, they might not even know they exist.


To be fair, I suspect TNG writers probably didn't know either - but Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda did.
posted by danhon at 1:53 PM on March 29, 2019 [2 favorites]

[Future mom also] opens up all sorts of problematic questions about why she didn’t intervene in any of last seasons plots, especially as she has no compunction about screwing with the timeline.

Eh. Given that Future Mom needed to maneuver the Sphere into Discovery's path, you could assume that Future Mom *did* intervene in all of last season's plots, and that intervention was the best possible route to right now.
posted by danhon at 1:55 PM on March 29, 2019 [2 favorites]

I still think we are witnessing the birth of the borg.

Something about two episodes made me think of the Borg but I dismissed it. This episode though - the Leyland scene refs prior Borg stuff at least three ways. The spike to the eye refs First Contact, just prior to that there is a phrase, xxxxx is xxxxx, which immediately made me say 'oooh, resistance is futile!', then the nanites. Suspicious.
posted by biffa at 2:07 PM on March 29, 2019 [4 favorites]

Oops, number four the nanites does very definite Borg looking skin mottling.

So many it starts to look too obvious.
posted by biffa at 2:10 PM on March 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

I did wish that the episode had had the courage of its convictions about Gabrielle's altered emotional investment in her daughter, not least because the alternative (she's somehow...been there all the time? Nobody noticed a random person in a weird flight suit?) doesn't actually make any sense. (That being said, I did like the actress.) Gabrielle's disappearance at the end is consistent with this season's theme of loss and identity, though.

Gabrielle's 950 years into the future is, at the time of the episode, closer to 970 years, which brings us even closer to the time frame of the "Calypso" short episode. Is the entire crew going to jump forward, somehow?

I can see why they're softening up Georgiou a bit if they're going to give her her own series, but maybe let's not forget the whole racist genocidal Empress thing.

Post-grudge Spock's interactions with Burnham are good. Tilly, though, seems to be channeling the most annoying aspects of Data from TNG.
posted by thomas j wise at 3:13 PM on March 29, 2019 [7 favorites]

Oh noes the data won’t let us delete it.

Destroy the hardware! Just put a nail through the hard drive, you fucking amateurs.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:17 PM on March 29, 2019 [30 favorites]

This season’s been fun—scientific howlers and all—but kinda exhausting too.  I’m tired of season long plot arcs with galactic level stakes.  I don’t think I ever anticipated saying this, but I think I’d like it if they went back to a more episodic structure for the show for next season.  At this point that’d be more daring than an overarching season long plot.

DS9 may have helped legitimize the idea, but it’s de rigueur now much the same way episodic series were back then.  How cool would it be if the season long arc was the b-plot instead?  No one’s really done that, it'd at least be a new twist on the idea and could—be still my beating heart—alternatively be a plot much lighter in tone.  Then instead of a single big plot, they could use the main arc of stories to explore an entire theme on an episodic basis, something like a whole season where they really sink their teeth into all the implications of the Prime Directive, for example, or how this still fairly new Federation is having impacts on its member world’s cultures, or…I don’t know, anything but the latest all-sentient-life-ending-season-long-emergency.  I want time to breathe a little, you know?

Destroy the hardware! Just put a nail through the hard drive, you fucking amateurs.

Haha.  I had the same irreverent thought.  A single phaser blast through the computer core would do wonders.  Sure, you'd probably be adrift and at risk of death, but your writers keep saying it's all sentient life on the line.  Man up and act like it already.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 5:11 PM on March 29, 2019 [12 favorites]

Haha. I had the same irreverent thought. A single phaser blast through the computer core would do wonders. Sure, you'd probably be adrift and at risk of death, but your writers keep saying it's all sentient life on the line.

And, as we all know, Starfleet never has backup systems, except when they do.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 6:56 PM on March 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

People, please. They tried this back in TOS with "The Ultimate Computer" and lost another redshirt in the process.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:00 PM on March 29, 2019 [2 favorites]

I very much liked Michael’s insistence that “she can’t be my mother because my mother is dead!” and how it fails to connect with everyone’s knowledge that Ma Burnham is a time traveller.

I think the nature of time travel is that you can turn up to events that occur after your death or before your birth.

Anyway, I said early on, maybe five or six episodes in to the first season that I was coming to trust that obstacles in this show would be overcome not by changing the modulation on the deflector dish to create a phased baryon pulse but rather by people arguing what the right thing to do was. That seems like an ever more forlorn hope after this week’s ep.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:13 PM on March 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

...just prior to that there is a phrase, xxxxx is xxxxx, which immediately made me say 'oooh, resistance is futile!'...

I had the same experience, and there's no doubt in my mind we were intended to have that experience. The phrase in question was "struggle is pointless".
posted by slappy_pinchbottom at 9:10 PM on March 29, 2019 [9 favorites]

"How much data has been transferred now?"

"45%... 46%... the speed is accelerating!!! oh never mind, it's stuck at 82%. I forgot, it always does this."
posted by duffell at 11:45 PM on March 29, 2019 [15 favorites]

Yes he was!
posted by Coaticass at 1:16 AM on March 30, 2019

Tor.com recap/review added at top right.
posted by Coaticass at 1:17 AM on March 30, 2019

There's a term for how the writers are treating Tilly: Flanderization.
posted by Major Clanger at 1:24 AM on March 30, 2019 [11 favorites]

Just like the past few episodes, my main takeaway from this episode is gee whiz this was a fun scifi show! I enjoy every episode just for what it is, slightly smart entertainment with some characters and universe I'm invested in. It only starts to fall apart when I think about it too hard. (Ie, at all.) Particularly hate the time travel plot. New rule: if you can't one-up Primer, you have no right to try writing a time travel story.

The part that took me out of enjoyment was the first meeting between Michael and her mother. They have literally minutes to figure out what the fuck is going on across all the time travel, the evil AI. And instead Michael has to moan and cry about how she missed her mother and needs the Power of Love. You're a trained military officer literally saving all sentient life in the universe. Get over your stupid personal drama for a bit and do the mission. But no, the writers want to give us the emotionally manipulative tearjerker scene, so that's what we got.

They did make up for themselves a bit later when Mom tells Michael that she's over her, that she's watched her die 100 times and just really isn't into being a mother anymore. That was pretty cold and unexpected and great.

I'm loving this Spock, he's hilarious. The bit where he says he loved science worked well for me. Because it's both Spock expressing an emotion and doing so ironically, to make a joke. Perhaps his wearing a beard lets him be anti-Spock.

At least the writers left themselves a mystery, the red lights / signals that apparently aren't from the Time Angel at all. I'm looking forward to where that goes. Also hoping, fervently, they tie a bow around this whole time travelling AI story entirely before the end of the season. If Control hangs around in season 3, or is the basis of the new Section 31 show, I'm gonna be mad.
posted by Nelson at 6:46 AM on March 30, 2019 [5 favorites]

New rule: if you can't one-up Primer, you have no right to try writing a time travel story.

I disagree, mostly on the grounds that Legends of Tomorrow has been absolutely awesome these past couple seasons. I think it's more accurate to say that if you can't one-up Primer, the best thing to do is to go as far and as hard in the opposite direction as you possibly can.

Discovery has definitely not done that. It's clear that the writers care about A.) the emotional beats between characters and B.) their big action set pieces, and are not much concerned by other things (and certainly aren't going to let other things like "logic" or "common sense" get in the way of either the above), but especially these last couple episodes there's been several high-intensity montages of characters feverishly working on "science-y stuff" that makes absolutely no sense except that it serves to move things along to the next big set piece. It's almost descending into self-parody for me at this point; someone points out how incredibly high the stakes are, someone else proposes utter nonsensical gibberish as a possible solution, there's a little back-and-forth ending with something like "anybody got a better idea?" and boom, cut to them all Working Very Intently while dramatic music plays.

I've been rewatching some TNG lately and the contrast is pretty painful; for example, the episode of TNG where they brought Scotty back, the science was every bit as made-up-in-service-of-the-plot but the idea that someone could put their pattern into the transporter's computer and then lock the transporter into an endless loop until someone came along to find them....it makes a certain kind of intuitive sense that is completely missing here. Instead we get people saying "Dark matter!" who might just as well be saying "Abracadabra!" and things like people attempting to set traps to capture their future selves.

tl;dr - this show needs a science advisor, or at least a common-sense sanity-check advisor.

Also if they could stop butchering Tilly's character that'd be great. I feel like the writers need to go back and re-watch how she was first introduced in Episode 3 of Season 1 because I seem to remember that better than they do.
posted by mstokes650 at 2:19 PM on March 30, 2019 [15 favorites]

Loved Mom's line about Pike not liking his future.

Sort of hated Spock's "I like science" line. For it to have felt truly Spock-like in humor, the actor needed a whiff of …condescension? something else. Even changing it to "Science is good" might've helped. The moment he said it, Mrs. CoB grumbled, "Let Whedon do Whedon," and she was spot-on.

I dunno if I'm fully on board with Mom-is-Red Angel. I mean, it makes sense from a story-crafting POV in that it's a handy way to keep things About Michael now that the Spock's-special-knowledge stuff is basically played out. But it could just as easily have been Future-Michael in the suit, and honestly that might have been more compelling. Prolonged interactions with one's future-self is something this franchise has done a lot less of than you'd think, whereas "pain re: missing parent" seems to almost be a prerequisite for getting into Starfleet Academy.

Worse, this was the episode where the show began to feel like the purpose of every new plot twist is to put Michael through fantastically-incredible emotional strain, and while a lot of that makes sense both for the show and the calibre of its performer(s), having it happen every single episode is starting to feel cheap. Not to mention implausible—I too have been rewatching TNG, and if these events played out at this pace in TNG, she'd need like a dozen "Family"-style episodes to recover.

Here, too, making the Red Angel be Future-Michael would've been a nice opportunity for the show to ease off the Emotion throttle and redirect some energy to Intellectual Sci-Fi What-Iffing.

Nevertheless!: it's so great that this show has still mostly avoided too much J.J.-ness, and still feels like it fits into the franchise.

I wasn't sold on Spock-as-Spock for this season (nor Pike as Pike), but Burnham's Brother and Captain Dad both continue to be great as their own characters on Discovery, separate from their past portrayals

Wow, really good point. I guess I'm mostly OK with them in the roles, provided that I grade on a curve w/r/t the fact that there was no way in hell that a 2018-9 sci-fi show would have performances as subdued as pre-movie-Nimoy's or Jeffrey Hunter's (or, heh, Sean Kenney's).

But I totally see what you mean, and it underscores one of the fundamental flaws of a prequel show. This roster of impressive talent, when you get right down to it, really should have been allowed to be its own thing. (Insert hopeful remark about The New Adventures of Jean-Luc Picard and Friends here.)

Dumb theory: Discovery is abandoned by the crew and hidden to reach the future the normal slow real-time way, giving it hundreds of years in peace to develop a competing AI to take on Control

Huh! Well, that'd be the end of the series, then, unless Starfleet commissions a Discovery-A.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 2:39 AM on March 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

"45%... 46%... the speed is accelerating!!! oh never mind, it's stuck at 82%. I forgot, it always does this."

I'm not sure if you are joking or not. This is certainly how windows has always worked for me. They probably just kept using it when they moved to a post-scarcity economy. That's also probably the real reason why the holodeck used to fail so much.
posted by biffa at 12:51 PM on March 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

I feel like the writers are just trolling us now.
posted by rikschell at 5:22 PM on March 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

please don't be borg please don't be borg please don't be borg
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:23 PM on March 31, 2019 [9 favorites]

I have to say, I enjoy many of the TOS-esque episode names DISCO has given us: An Obol for Charon, Context is for Kings, Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad, etc. DS9 was good in this regard as well.

But "Perpetual Infinity" is a silly VOY-era name and I reject it.
posted by duffell at 5:42 AM on April 1, 2019 [10 favorites]

Darn it, now you've got me thinking about a "Top N Star Trek episode titles" list. And looking over the series, VOY and ENT have pretty slim pickings there. I suspect my top ten might be all TOS/DS9/DSC.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:29 PM on April 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

This series has always had some in-universe continuity issues, but I've been willing to not think too much about them because it's had some very good episodes. But if they ret-con this into a Borg origin story I think I will throw my hands up and walk away. I wouldn't mind the Borg showing up in this series, but this isn't the way to do it.
posted by ambulocetus at 7:31 PM on April 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

I once started building an online quiz titled "Star Trek episode, Mountain Goats song, or Dave Eggers book?" Maybe I should pick that up again.
posted by duffell at 7:47 PM on April 1, 2019 [4 favorites]

As noted in the thread for the last episode, time crystals are a real thing but nothing to with their depiction here. Even so, I was a little disappointed to see them represented as a literal chunk of rock, when something constantly moving in a repeating way could have been a lot cooler *and* tie into what actual time crystals are at least a little bit.

Nothing about the "delete the data" plot makes sense. Even if we accept the "we can't delete it because it's encrypting itself" part (???), and accept that their computers work in some way that moving data from one system to another is something other than copy+delete the original, it seems happy to be transferred into arbitrary systems. There are other ways to physically secure, hide, or destroy a storage medium than SEND IT INTO THE DEEP FUTURE. What? Every single piece of this plotline is hot garbage.

Also: don't they just have to delete the parts that are about AI? They can keep the rest of it.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:18 AM on April 3, 2019 [2 favorites]

Also also: "perpetual infinity" didn't even make sense in context
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:36 AM on April 3, 2019 [3 favorites]

I like to think of Disco Trek as not only taking place in the same part of the Star Trek timeline, broadly, as TOS, but also built on the TOS-era understanding of how technology (especially computer technology) actually works. That's why you get ridiculous computer malfunctions with what appear to be LCD panels getting CRT misalignments, or COMPUTER VIRUS ANTIBODIES
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:36 AM on April 3, 2019 [5 favorites]

Also: don't they just have to delete the parts that are about AI? They can keep the rest of it.

Now I'm imagining Control scouring the data and only finding information about Vulcan swan migration habits, archived Klingon weather reports, and an old recording of Captain Archer's gazelle speech and just absolutely losing its mind looking hopelessly for the relevant parts.
posted by Servo5678 at 6:41 AM on April 3, 2019 [9 favorites]

I once started building an online quiz titled "Star Trek episode, Mountain Goats song, or Dave Eggers book?" Maybe I should pick that up again.

That ought to do it.
posted by duffell at 5:13 PM on April 3, 2019 [4 favorites]

That ought to do it.

*votes for it*
posted by mordax at 9:45 PM on April 3, 2019

I am 90% sure that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles used time crystals at some point.

I liked that this episode seemed to be calling back to "The Visitor," the DS9 episode in which Sisko is unstuck in time and Jake keeps trying to get him back.

I agree that all the "science!" cheerleading is embarrassing.
posted by chaiminda at 2:51 AM on April 8, 2019

The thing that’s making me crazy is - Control has 54% of the sphere data, right? So, sure, not Everything About AI, but also wouldn’t it probably contain info about, I don’t know, time travel?

Also everyone was like “this has to be from the future because we don’t have the technology” but actually they did have the technology all along so what?
posted by corb at 7:52 AM on April 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

Leland/Control seeming to sprout ever-larger weapons from behind his back in the fight scene on the planet is definitely referencing the personal transporter buffers from the Star Trek Elite Force game.
posted by dr_dank at 6:37 PM on November 23, 2021