Discovery Season 2 Spoiler Thread

[Christopher]

It always takes a while to figure out what the Story even is for any given season of DIScovery. But with Episode 9 out on Netflix yesterday, we now finally have enough to theorize. So let us do that.

It is nothing less then the Destruction of all Sentient Life in the Galaxy they have to prevent. I guess it is Tuesday in Starfleet again

 

The Red Angel:
Somewhen in the Future something will wipe out all live in the Galaxy. This could be something local or something that wandered in from outside. But it missed one spot - the Red Angel!

Now the Red Angel has a powerfull exosuit with flight and time travel capabilities and it starts altering the timeline. Minimal Invasive, mostly (wich indicates Starfleet Ideology at least):

- saving a bunch of people from a Nuclear blast in WW3 and moving them where they can not affect the timestream

- making sure Burnham survived childhood (for some reason)

- making sure spock is informed
- saving(?) Burnham again on the Asteroid. Or at least tipping her off to the nature of the Asteroid. Wich helps them save the Colony.

- the biggest intereference thus far was on Kaminar (wich also Rhymes). Where he helped save that species.

- it is unclear if it interacted with the Alien Sphere in any way or if this encounter was a unintended change. The very reason they are taught: "Do not mess with the Timestream".

 

The Red Bursts:

It is currently unclear if the Red bursts are caused by the angel. Or a attempt by the enemy to attack the Angel. After all with aiming across time, you might miss the exact moment your target was at a place.

 

The Enemy:
The only contact thus far was via the Modified Probe. And indirectly Airiam, wich was infected by the Probe. As well as those Memories of hte Red Angel that Spock saw.

For one reason or another, it seems unable to freely timetravel. Or at least they have not yet figured out how to do that.

It is worth noting that Iconians in Star Trek Online can not timetravel without loosing their Future Memory. A quirk of their Memory/Spatial Awareness centers (they use Chronitons as part of the Process) Synchronizes them to their current timelines duplicate. It is possible the enemy has a similar Problem.

 

Control and Section 31:

The biggest changes to known Canon thus far is to this little organization and/or the introduction of Control (both as a Section 31 and general Starfleet tool). It seems to be a subsentient AI, that was mostly used for Treath assessment.

Now the Probe - via Airiam - tried to make Control awaken.

It at least managed it to kill and Impersonate the entire Section 31 Leadership thanks to the use of Holocommunicators (wich nicely explains why they stopped using those). It might have even been the one that Framed Spock. It is unclear who did it exactly and how far back anything lies.

I am uncertain wich (if any) role Airiams transmissions to control played in all that.

 

Is control the enemy?
One theory I have been floating was that the future enemy is some form of "kill all Sentients" AI. Their ability to quickly modify a probe and hack Airiam seem to indicate it. But then it might just be "future hacking" as was used against the Voyager once. If it is an AI, it might have been a future version of control. Or perhaps a replacement. I guess once we know what project Deadlus even is, we will have a better idea.

 

I still think it is more likely to be a external force. A later itteration of control would have all knowledge of control and Federation Timetravel technology. But the enemy seemed to be very concerned with getting information about this time and unable to freely timetravel.

Searching the Shuttles Memory was a good first attempt to get information, but failed due to the self destruct. It escaped into Airiam. And then tried to go to the biggest source of information in the Federation: Control. The one place where the Admirality and Section 31 keep all their Data.

 

 

So, what are your thoughts on the plot of this Season?

[tombrown803]

what show is this? I tried looking it up based on your discription, but couldn't find it listed on Netflix

[Greywind]

Star Trek: Disease or otherwise known as STD.

[Christopher]

On 3/17/2019 at 4:59 PM, Greywind said:

Star Trek: Disease or otherwise known as STD. 

The traditional abreviation would be DIS - first 3 letters of the ship name. But they prefer DISCO, propably because it sounds less like people dissing you.

 

Episode 10 can out, time for some updates.

 

The Red Angel:

So the Red Angel is Burnhams Mother. Who apparently built that suit for Section 31. And propably took it the time when History asumed she died to Klingons.

That does explain things. They mentioned the Grandfather Paradox, but did not realize that without the Red Angel Burnham would have died as a child on Vulcan. So she could never have donned the suit to save herself.

Granted, some version of Timetravel do have predestination Paradoxes so it would not be totally unusual.

 

Control:

Corrupted Control is still around. They asumed it purged, but as Leland found out it is still very much alive and poking. Of course it was kind of stupid to asume a near AGI could not hide from a automated diagnostic.

It also laid a pretty big trap by putting fake neural readings into Airiam.

I am unsure what it did to Leland exactly. It is possible it only killed him and will impersonate him via Coms. But I have some theories what else it could have done by pocking into his eye/brain. And that begs the question how many of the crew on Lelands ship suffered a similar fate already.

 

The Red Bursts:

Still uncertain about those. Maybe those are side effects of the Red Angel having to do time travel in a hurry?

I would guess with proper planing the angel can hide them. Or maybe the Angel just time travelled at 1 second/second back when burnham was saved? Or maybe Section 31 hid the part that there was a Red Burst back then?

 

The enemy:

I am still uncertain if a future Control is the enemy. Again, the lack of Time Travel and information about the Discoery timeline is telling.

On the other hand, Star Trek often introduced McGuffin like technologies that never found widespread adoption or were even replicateable. The Genesis Torpedo, Dr. Sorens Anti-Fusion Missile and the Data class Androids were never properly reverse engineered. So it is possible that Future Control just never got it's mind on any Time Travel Technology and is unable to develop it's own.

[Christopher]

With Episode 11, the causality starts to make sense:

The Sphere is found by Starfleet.

The Spheredata lands with control, including all it's knowledge about AI.

Control evolves and wipes out all sentient life in the galaxy.

This is a sequence that happens with or without the Red Angel. So they avoided a predesination paradox with this one.

 

The Red Angel

Michaels Mother tries her untested timesuit to go back 1 hour, but ends up landing 900 years in a future where Control has already won.

The timesuit has a design flaw: It can not keep the user in any past for a long time. The "distance" it can travel back is likely also limited. Time will awlays pull the suit and user back. Trying to keep the red angel in the past is "playing a tug of war with the universe - and it always wins". And the anchor point seems to be the moment the timesuit travelled backwards from. So it is a reliable forwards, but very limited backwards time machine.

 

Futhermore, contact with persons in the past prooved difficult. Only Spock with his Combination of Half Human, Half Vulcan, somewhat Dyslexic mind - and the help of the Talosians in case of higher doses - was able to deal with it. Michals Mother tried her best to keep the sphere data out of controls hands. At first she tried to destroy the sphere, but that prooved impossible with just the suit. The sphere was too powerfull, too robust for her. And she lacked the ability to leave the suit to tell people, without a external anchoring field.

But then she realized the merits of having spock turn apparently-insane and steering discovery into the sphere path, so they would be who scoops up the information.

 

Control is the Enemy

With this it is pretty much confirmed who the future and present enemies are. It's motiviation seems to be around Ultron from the Avengers: Peace/Order through elimination of all sentient life. Except it forgoes the Villanious speeches and actually archives it's goals in the first volley, keeping a low profile and infiltrating until it can fire said volley.

If it was not a for a certain temporal accident, it would have won. Even with temporal incursions, it prooves very tenacious.

That really shows us why we should nail down that AGI safety research first.

 

LeLand has been - in lack of a better term - assimilated.

It is possible that Section 31 had some prior contact with the Borg to aquire samples.

But it is equally likely that it is just a inferior tech with similar end results. Inferior, but only in the "Ability to assimilate others" part. He propably could not assimilate a whole ship from a single drone that was overlooked. It is possible the assimilation has to be handcrafted for each host, in direct opposition to the borg. In durability and combat power Control!LeLand is around Data, Bluegill, Borg or Augment level. Wich is a really scary level to fight.

 

The Red Bursts
These became even curioser. The Red Angel did not create them. Or at least not the version that still had a working Timesuit. Yet apparently Spock learned of them from the Red Angel.