After ten episodes, the Red Angel is finally revealed… and it’s nobody that anyone had predicted. Not even, it turns out, the crew of the Discovery. Every few episodes this season we’ve been given a story that largely focuses on the characters of Star Trek: Discovery while reserving its shocking reveal for the last couple of seconds.

“The Red Angel” – written by Chris Silvestri & Anthony Maranville and directed by Hanelle Culpepper – is just such an episode. Like “Light and Shadows” before it, it is mostly focused on the characters, but with a jaw dropping moment at the end of the episode that’ll have fans talking until next week.

It is tough to judge the reveal of the identity of the Red Angel, because it comes right in the last few seconds of the episode. We, and the crew of the Discovery, spent most of “The Red Angel” in the belief that she is some future version of Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), thanks to a file hidden away in the memory banks of the deceased Airiam (Hannah Cheesman): a neural scan of the Red Angel that matches Burnham’s brain patterns.

However, after executing a plan to threaten Burnham’s life in order to summon the Red Angel to try and save her — as it has done on at least two occasions already this season — the Red Angel is finally trapped and forced out of its time travel suit. And it turns out the occupant is NOT a future Michael Burnham as we were told to expect, but Michael Burnham’s mother (Sonja Sohn), believed to have been killed at the hands of the Klingons when Burnham was a child.

“Mom?!” Burnham asks incredulously, as her mother kneels on the ground before her. And cut to credits – I guess we’ll pick that up next week!

We did find out, though, that the Red Angel is not some future or alien technology. It was invented by Section 31 – by Michael Burnham’s parents no less – as part of a response by the Federation to learning that the Klingons were exploring time travel technology. The Red Angel suit is Section 31 technology, therefore, something Leland (Alan van Sprang) appears to have known the whole season.

BURNHAM: “My parents were scientists: my father was a xenoanthropologist; my mother was an astrophysicist. They wouldn’t have been involved in Section 31.”

LELAND: “She was also an engineer. A brilliant one. They were working on a theory that sudden technological leaps across certain cultures – including those on Earth – weren’t happenstance, but a result of time travel.”

That should sound somewhat familiar to any Star Trek: Voyager fan…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkmeXOhtLr4

In my review for “Saints of Imperfection,” I noted that I was dissatisfied with the apparent connection between Leland and the death of Burnham’s parents, arguing that not every character needed to have some kind of history in order to drive drama and tension between them. However, I am less annoyed by that now that we’re finding out that was foreshadowing for how the rest of the season would play out.

Absolutely nobody predicted the Red Angel would turn out to be Burnham’s biological mother, but ultimately it seems to make sense in a way – it always felt like it would be much truer to Discovery for the ultimate aggressor and benefactor of this season to be drawn from elements established in Discovery itself, rather than something totally out of left field like the Iconians, as some Star Trek Online fans speculated.

Beyond the Red Angel reveal that will carry over into next week’s episode, “The Red Angel” had a lot of great character moments that continued to deepen a number of the relationships on the show.

This episode had a lot of great one-on-one scenes, that varied in length. I counted:

Not to mention some great group scenes, including the moving opening scene showing Airiam’s funeral and a particularly spicy scene between Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp), Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz), and Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman) that – after Georgiou leaves – prompts Tilly to shout “What just happened?!”

There has been a lot of conversation since last week’s episode about character development, particularly for the secondary characters like the bridge crew. We have had a lot of character work in Season 2, particularly in the back half of the season, that culminated in last week’s “Project Daedalus” in which we got both the beginning, middle, and end of Airiam’s story.

Regardless of whether it worked for you or not that it was crammed into one episode – for many it did, and for many it didn’t – this episode continues adding scenes for each character in a way that we missed in season one and even, with notable exceptions (“New Eden”) in the first half of season two.

Given we know there has been significant change in leadership behind the scenes at the Star Trek: Discovery production team, I wonder if this portends a broader shift in the way the show approaches balancing its characters with its plot development that will ultimately make unnecessary the set of forces that led last week’s episode to feel rushed.

One such moment in this episode was Keyla Detmer’s (Emily Coutts) line acknowledging for the very first time her eye implant, received following the Battle at the Binary Stars.

Overall, the funeral scene was very well done, but how well it worked for you will largely depend upon your reaction to “Project Daedalus.” Given all the work done in last week’s episode to give the character of Airiam a backstory and establish her relationships with the crew, we see a crew in mourning as Airiam’s coffin – a Federation flag draped torpedo casing – is shot into space.

We also get to hear Doug Jones (Saru) sing, another nice little moment of developing the Kelpien race.

Spock (Ethan Peck) continues to be a highlight of the season in every episode since his introduction in “Light and Shadows.” In his first scene in this episode, he cannot help himself but low-key burn Burnham throughout – “Perhaps you simply have a penchant for the dramatic.” In the later scene, he helps Burnham work through her feelings about discovering that Leland, not she, was responsible for her parents death.

I was not sure I had room in my heart for another Spock following Leonard Nimoy’s death, but Ethan Peck has created that space through the sheer power and heart of his performance. His refusal to allow the away team to end the experiment to capture the Red Angel and treat Burnham also really heightened the tension of that scene, which was already brutal to watch because of Sonequa Martin-Green’s performance.

If Season One was about helping Burnham atone for her mistakes around the start of the Klingon War, then Season Two appears to be about fixing some of the deeper problems in Burnham’s psyche that led her there. Despite being calm, poised, and confident due to her Vulcan upbringing, Michael has clearly been deeply traumatized by her life’s experiences.

This includes the death of her parents, the shock of moving to Vulcan and being raised in a Vulcan household, and being a target for terrorists. This episode establishes that Burnham is carrying around a lot of guilt over her role in all of it, but she is also starting to learn that it is necessary to give up that guilt and move on from it. Michael has not always made the best decisions in this show, but because of her experiences and passage on the road towards healing, perhaps those bad decisions are more in her past than in her future.

We also revisited the Culber-Stamets relationship this week. Culber is clearly continuing to struggle with his identity and being a “new” person. In previous episodes, we have seen him lean hard on this idea as a coping mechanism for his experiences, but in his conversation with Admiral Cornwell (Jayne Brook) in this episode she very bluntly puts it to him that he is a new person, and he does not seem totally comfortable with that either.

With everyone on the crew pressuring him to be the same Culber as before, in this episode he’s confronted with being a different man – and appears to find he doesn’t much like that either. It seems the future for Culber is likely to lie somewhere in between, and perhaps in that there continues to be a love for Paul Stamets as well.

There are a number of tender moments between the characters this episode, and even though they don’t seem like they’ll be back together next episode, the path for them is becoming clearer. “Love is a choice, Hugh,” Admiral Cornwell tells him. “And one doesn’t make that choice once. One makes it again and again.”

Overall, “The Red Angel” was a nice character episode with a big last-minute reveal that we’ll have to wait until next week to see play out further. But I enjoy these character episodes a lot, as they help make the big spectacle episodes much more meaningful. Discovery has often struggled with how to balance character and spectacle since its inception. Hopefully, it has now found the right balance.

That’s it for “The Red Angel,” now it’s time for your take on this week’s episode! Share your thoughts in the comments below, and then watch for more updates through next week as we approach “Perpetual Infinity,” the next episode of Star Trek: Discovery.