Star Trek: Discovery returns to its serialized roots in “Point of Light,” an episode that reaches back to the Klingon intrigue of the first season and forward to the mysteries of Spock and the Red Angel and more.
This week, we have three distinct and rather disconnected storylines: back on Qo’noS, High Chancellor L’Rell (Mary Chieffo) and her torchbearer Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif) struggle to maintain the unified Empire; aboard Discovery, Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman) struggles with her sanity as she continues to be plagued by the ‘ghost’ of a former classmate; and Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) gets a surprise visit from her mother, Amanda (Mia Kirshner), who brings news of Spock.
On the Klingon homeworld, L’Rell struggles to maintain control of a High Council full of once-disparate houses that remain quietly skeptical of one another and openly suspicious of the “human” Tyler, employed as an adviser. Kol-Sha, head of the House of Kor and father to Kol — played by the same actor, Ken Mitchell — refuses to remove his house warpaint and continues to agitate for revenge over his son’s death.
His machinations come to a head when he learns that L’Rell and Voq secretly produced a child during Voq’s transformation into Tyler. In an attempt to blackmail L’Rell into ceding chancellorship to him, Kol-Sha murders L’Rell’s uncle and kidnaps the child. The clashing groups fight — spilling conspicuously pinkish-purple blood, straight out of Star Trek VI — but just as Kol-Sha’s victory seems assured, a mysterious figure appears, quickly turning the battle against him.
Who is that leather-clad interloper? None other than “Starfleet security consultant” Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh). Her primary interest is in preserving the stability of L’Rell’s chancellorship, and to do so she believes two things need to happen: Tyler needs to leave L’Rell’s side, and the baby needs to fade from view.
Tyler agrees to leave with the former Terran Emperor, taking his infant son with him; the baby will be given the clerics at Boreth, and his father will join Georgiou and her new colleagues aboard their black-ops Section 31 vessel, led by Leland (Alan Van Sprang).
L’Rell makes great spectacle of the “death” of Tyler and her child; Klingons have always been nothing if not theatrical, and L’Rell is no different. Addressing the High Council, she holds up the severed heads of Tyler and the baby (!) — replicas provided by Section 31 — and, echoing Queen Elizabeth I’s self-stylings as being wedded to her kingdom, L’Rell announces that she is no longer Chancellor, but ‘Mother’ to the Empire. It’s a powerful moment.
The sudden introduction of the baby, only to have an equally abrupt exit from the story, struck me as overly convenient. However, if the baby, who shares his father’s unusually pale complexion, is indeed the Albino from Deep Space Nine’s “Blood Oath” — a fan theory bubbling up on social media — I’m okay with the whiplash, as it would make for a great call-forward to an episode that was itself a callback to the mid-23rd century.
“Point of Light” gives us a better look at the varied familial appearances of Klingons from the different houses, a subtle makeup choice that helps Klingons seem like a real group of people. Think the shared forehead patterns of Worf and Alexander, or in the siblings of the House of Duras. I’m thrilled to see Discovery continue this tradition, but let’s face it, some of the different prosthetics were less successful than others.
Kol-Sha and L’Rell look great, and both appear to have done away with the oddly-distended skull shape we saw in Season 1. A few of the others, though, look exaggerated to the point of deformity. In particular, the makeup for L’Rell’s uncle is distractingly odd, and one of the unnamed Klingons present at L’Rell’s final speech has such a bulbous nose and forehead that, in profile at least, I wouldn’t have identified him as Klingon if not for the context. I hope in future episodes the makeup is more consistent.
In addition to hair and makeup changes, L’Rell has an entirely new wardrobe this season. After spending half of last year in a Starfleet issue prison jumpsuit, L’Rell is resplendent in a variety of elaborate metallic gowns and headpieces. It’s a testament to Gersha Phillips’ incredible costume designs that L’Rell, Warrior Mother and Chancellor of the Klingon Empire, looks equally dressed to lead a society of fierce warriors or attend the Met Gala.
In fact, it’s the costumes in this episode that stick with me the most. From L’Rell’s to-kill-for wardrobe to Tyler’s strappy black leather cape ensemble, and Georgiou’s Section 31 uniform to Amanda’s understated cerulean cloak, the costumes in “Point of Light” are not only gorgeous to look at, they help tell us where these characters are in their lives.
And as a bonus for Tyler, it appears that his Qo’noS wardrobe will translate perfectly to life in Section 31. (Nothing more annoying than having to go clothes shopping when you get a new job!)
Meanwhile aboard Discovery, Tilly is also dealing with problems of her own. As we saw in last week’s “New Eden,” Tilly is plagued by a very insistent hallucination of former classmate May Ahearn (Bahia Watson). This week, the stress of being constantly chattered at by a bubbly ghost finally breaks Tilly during a Command Training Program exercise on the bridge, forcing her to admit her troubles and seek help.
Thankfully, the person she speaks with is Burnham, who jumps at the chance to help Tilly get to the bottom of what’s going on. Very quickly, the two of them realize that whatever Tilly’s seeing isn’t a hallucination or a ghost, but an entity connected in some way to the mycelial network and the dark matter asteroid. Enter Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp), who diagnoses Tilly with a fungal hitch-hiker and quickly removes it.
The entity, now a floaty fungus bubble, waits patiently in a force field for whatever the next episode has in store for it…
Continuing the-season long Spock story, Burnham receives some unexpected help with her investigation into her foster brother and the mysterious Red Angel. After being denied access to her son, Amanda decided to steal Spock’s medical files; because the files are encrypted, she turns to Burnham for help.
The two of them convince Captain Pike to allow them to break protocol and decrypt the stolen files, and in doing so the mystery between Spock and Burnham deepens.
We still don’t know exactly what went on between the two of them, but we learn more about the severity of their break. We also get another mention of the Red Angel, which a young Spock said appeared to him one night when Burnham had run away from home. The angel, Spock said, told him where to find Burnham; Sarek and Amanda dismissed his visitor as a flight of childhood fancy, but Spock’s story never wavered.
As a human growing up on Vulcan, Burnham was routinely targeted by “logic extremists” — a Vulcan separatist group first mentioned in last year’s “Lethe” — and in an attempt to protect the younger Spock, Burnham did something drastic to drive him away from her. Just what she did is still unknown, but at this point the tension between the two characters is palpable and they haven’t appeared on screen together yet.
Dramatic tension is great, but I hope the mystery isn’t drawn out for much longer. The substance of the story is in how the two characters work through their past, not the repeated reminder that they have a past. Even if the source of their tension isn’t revealed for a while, I’d like to see these characters interact with one another, instead of Burnham interacting almost exclusively with her own thoughts and memories.
I don’t have any hypotheses about what Burnham could have done to so deeply fracture their relationship, but as it gets built up more and more I find my curiosity slowly turning into boredom instead of anticipation.
Even reaching back into Season 1, the most interesting component of Burnham’s family dynamic is that it inverts the relationship we see between Sarek and Spock at the time of “Journey to Babel.” Sarek has always been comparatively warm toward Burnham, and up until the end of “Point of Light,” it appeared that Burnham enjoyed a warm relationship with both of her adoptive parents. However, the chill that runs through Amanda as she leaves to continue her search for Spock seems to foreshadow the extremely distant relationship we expect between Sarek and Spock.
Up to now, we’ve seen a softer fatherly presence with Sarek, and it’s interesting to think that the first glimpse of the parent-child dynamic we expect to see in Spock’s family might come from Amanda and Burnham.
Each of this week’s three storylines dealt in some way with family and sense of self, but even so, I didn’t feel that the parallels were explicit enough for the through-lines to be as cohesive as I would have liked. In some ways, “Point of Light” felt like three episodes of the Short Treks series that had been woven together out of necessity, and not because the stories informed one another in a meaningful or significant way.
The one time we get direct interaction between the Discovery and Klingon storylines, director Olatunde Osunsanmi did something quite striking: as Tyler and Burnham talk via holographic projection, the cuts between Tyler’s chamber and Burnham’s quarters eventually merge into a single merged space that conveys the special intimacy the two characters share.
Cutting between the stories, at times I found the clash between the dark, baroque splendor of Qo’noS and the clean, bright white-and-blue of Discovery to be jarring. As the season moves into its more epic, sweeping story arcs, I hope Discovery remembers that small moments of connection between its characters are as essential to the story as the major plot points.
Star Trek: Discovery returns this week with “An Obol for Charon.”