Synopsis: Burnham receives the reunion she’s been longing for, but it doesn’t go quite as she imagined. Georgiou and Tyler sense a disturbing change in Leland.
Review: Burnham gets an unexpected reunion with her mother.
The Story
Picking up from where last week left off. The crew of Discovery have managed to contain the Red Angel and have learned that it has been Burnham’s mother that has been traveling through time trying to fix things. They learn that the suit that she has been using has logged over 800 missions.
We learn that Leland has been replaced by control. The artificial intelligence which will eventually end up destroying the universe if Burnham’s mother fails to succeed in her mission of preventing it from accessing an archive of information, which Starfleet has collected.
The Acting
Sonja Sohn puts in a fantastic performance as Michael Burnham’s mother and the scenes that she shares with Michael are really powerful. Especially the line where she tells Michael that she has seen her die time and time again.
Also really good this week is Alan Van Sprang as Leland, who we see get completely replaced by the Control AI, which seems to be some kind of biological machine.
Overall
This episode was fairly good overall but was also a pretty big info dump in order to move the plot forward given that they only have a limited amount of episodes left. The reveal of the Control AI and how it takes over from Leland was done pretty well.
The fight sequence between Georgio and fake Leland toward the close of the episode was really brutal and fast-paced. I enjoyed the fast cutting between the fight and what Michael was discussing with her mother amid the chaos of all the phaser fire. The sense of urgency caused by the crew trying to stop fake Leland from downloading all the archive data, which Discovery was uploading to the Red Angel suit was edge of the seat stuff.
I’m looking forward to seeing how all of this rolls forward into next weeks episode.
- Story9.5
- Acting9.8
- CGI9.3
- Incidental Music9.2
