WiC Watches—Star Trek: Discovery season 2
Episode 212: “Through the Valley of Shadows”
Episode 212 brought home the importance of rebuilding the Red Angel suit, and just how dangerous Control really is. Burnham and Spock track a missing Section 31 ship and fall into a trap, while Captain Pike beams down to a Klingon planet to harvest a time crystal. This was an exciting yet simple episode of Star Trek: Discovery; let’s dig in.
First, let’s talk about poor Commander Stamets and his broken heart. Every since Dr. Culber came back to life, the two have parted ways, and it’s clear from how Culber is going about his everyday life aboard the Discovery that he wants nothing to do with Stamets. The pain on Stamets face each time Culber passes by him without so much as a glance is genuinely heartbreaking.
Also, since Dr. Culber was resurrected from the Mycelial Network, the show has not made it clear whether he is still gay. There is mounting concern from fans that the show is going to change Culber’s sexuality now that he’s been reborn, but I can’t see that happening, not on a series that goes out of its way to show how all peoples — regardless of race (or species), sexual orientation, or religious preference — should be accepting of each other and work in harmony for universal peace.
In fact, those of you worried about Stamets and Culber’s relationship should take heart that Jet Reno (hilariously) gets involved in the couple’s fractured relationship, and it looks like there could be hope for team #Culmets yet. Yes, that’s my ship name for them; deal with it.
Anyway, “Through the Valley of Shadows” sees Captain Pike go to a revered Klingon planet where a sacred order of Klingon monks guards caves full of the extremely valuable time crystals. A red signal appears above the planet.
I theorize that Burnham’s mother has already repaired the Red Angel time suit and the red signals are messages from her guiding the ship to where it needs to go, all without jumping through a wormhole and allowing Control a free ride back to the future (hee) where it can eradicate all life in the universe.
Pike meets the head of the Klingon order of monks, who tells him he can harvest a crystal and keep it if he accepts the vision of what the crystal shows him as his true and unavoidable future. When Pike grabs the crystal, he sees an older version of himself on the bridge of a ship that is about to be destroyed. He’s trying to get his crew to evacuate, but the bridge explodes. He watches his crew die as he’s sucked into the safety zone.
Next, he sees a man with a melted face in an iron lung of sorts, mounted on a robotic wheelchair. Naturally, it’s his future self. In the original Star Trek series, Captian Pike was always in that apparatus. It seems that Discovery is telling us how it came to be.
Despite this horrifying vision, Pike takes the crystal anyway, accepting his fate as a trade-off for saving the entire universe from Control.
Meanwhile, Burnham and Spock take a shuttle and track down a Section 31 ship that has mysteriously gone offline. Once they come out of warp, they see that every crew member from that ship has been ejected into the vacuum of space. They detect one life sign and beam the barely living crewmember aboard the shuttle. Burnham realizes it’s Kamran Grant, her former crewmate from the U.S.S. Shenzhou, the ship she served on with the original Georgiou at the beginning of the Klingon war in season 1.
So to be clear, Spock and Burnham find the ship with all the crew members but Grant dead, and Grant just so happens to be someone from Burnham’s past? Yeah, I sniffed that trap out as soon as she hugged him. Anyway, Spock scans the ship and sees that Control has every section of it but one under its, um…control. The three board the ship and go to the bridge to see if they can restart the ship’s computer, thus trapping Control and hopefully stopping the threat right then and there.
Only Grant is actually a reanimated version of his original self. Control retrieved his body from space after it ejected the crew and injected the corpse with nanites that allows Control to use it. Man, I am getting major Borg vibes from this. Maybe Control is how the Borg where created?
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Anyway, Burnham and Spock realize they’ve been duped, and Control-Grant reveals he needed Burnham so he could assimilate (no, he didn’t actually use that Borg word, but you get the point) her into its system and use her as a trojan horse against the rest of Starfleet.
They’re able to destroy Control-Grant and magnetize the nanites to the floor of the ship, and then make their escape. Back on the Discovery, Pike tells the crew he has a time crystal and it’s about time they started rebuilding the Red Angel suit.
Burnham and Spock reveal that Control wants Burnham for its plan of universal domination. That seems like a good place to end the episode, but suddenly, 30+ Section 31 ships jump out of warp, surrounding the Discovery. They’re all under Control’s control (this is hard), and if they get close enough to Discovery, Control can finish downloading the Red Sphere’s data, and if that happens, it’s game over.
Burnham tells Pike the only way to ensure Control can’t get the information it wants is to destroy the Discovery. It looks like Discovery is about to go bye bye.
Like I said at the top, this was an exciting but straightforward episode, and made clear that Control is the real big bad of season 2. There don’t seem to be any ways out of this mess other than destroying the one ship in Starfleet that has a working Spore Drive. The stakes are sky-high, and there are only two episodes remaining. Buckle up!