Michael and the crew of Discovery learn her mother Gabrielle's history and mission to save the galaxy from Control; Control takes over Leland's body.
Tropes in this episode:
- Bad Vibrations: One of the signs of the impending Klingon attack.
- Canon Immigrant: Georgiou derisively mentions her "sentimental Prime-universe counterpart." The term "Prime Universe" was, until now, an unofficial label for the franchise's original continuity, founded by Gene Roddenberry, as opposed to the "Kelvinverse" Alternate Timeline from J. J. Abrams's films. It originates from the credits of Star Trek (2009), where Zachary Quinto is credited as "Spock" while Leonard Nimoy plays "Spock Prime," but had never been used by a character until now (Quinto and Nimoy simply addressed each other as "Mr. Spock"). It's also never been used to differentiate aforementioned continuity from the Mirror Universe whence (this) Georgiou originates, though it obviously serves the purpose.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Leland-Control easily mows down the Discovery security team when he beams down to the planet.
- Emergency Temporal Shift: Gabrielle's plan when the Klingons attacked was to go back an hour to prevent it. Something went wrong, and she wound up 950 years in the future.
- Gory Discretion Shot: When Tyler walks in on Leland, the camera is positioned behind Leland while the nanotech is reconstructing his face, and only shows Leland from the front once it's mostly finished.
- Grand Theft Me: Control injects some very Borg-esque nanotechnology into Leland which allows it to modify Leland's body and occupy it.
- Gravity Sucks: The longer that Discovery keeps Gabrielle and the suit in the containment field, the more power that they have to use to fight the gravitational effect of time trying to "yank" her back. Pike and Saru compare it to playing tug-of-war with the universe itself.
- It Only Works Once: The plan to beam Gabrielle out of her time suit requires so much power that they only have one go at it.
- Meaningful Echo: Gabrielle tells Georgiou that Control will try to kill her because it sees her as "an unacceptable risk to the larger mission", a phrase that Leland had used earlier to describe Gabrielle.
- Mythology Gag:
- Perhaps a Call-Forward. Prior to assimilating him, Control tells Leland "Struggle is pointless", which sounds a lot like "Resistance is futile".
- Gabrielle tells Pike that "I can tell you more about your future, but you wouldn't like it."
- Nanomachines: Control injects Leland with these to take over his body.
- Neck Snap: How Leland-Control finishes off the last member of the Discovery security team.
- No-Sell: The nanotech-modified Leland-Control shrugs off phaser blasts, and even the ridiculously skilled Georgiou can only delay him slightly in hand-to-hand combat.
- Not Me This Time: Gabrielle denies any responsibility for the red signals.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Before taking him over, Control tells Leland that his goals and methods to reach those goals aren't that different from Control's.
- Orbital Bombardment: Burnham has Discovery fire torpedoes at the containment facility in an attempt to kill Leland-Control, but he beams back up to his ship before the torpedoes hit.
- Out-of-Character Alert: Both Georgiou and Tyler realize that something is up with Leland, but it's only when Georgiou spots the thread that she realizes what that something is.
- The Reveal:
- Gabrielle Burnham used the Red Angel suit to try to save her husband and Michael the day that the Klingons attacked, but jumped 950 years into the future, long after Control had destroyed all intelligent life in the galaxy.
- Gabrielle created Terralysium as an experiment to see if she could change the past, as the colony did not exist when she first started time-jumping.
- Gabrielle was responsible for putting the Sphere in the position where Discovery would encounter it, hoping that that would prevent Control from getting the data.
- Gabrielle has no idea what the crew is talking about when they mention the signals that Discovery was investigating, because she didn't create them.
- Sadistic Choice: The only way to stop Leland-Control is to destroy the containment field generators, but with the suit damaged and Gabrielle outside of it, she will be lost in the timestream with no technology to assist her.
- Spotting the Thread: Georgiou realizes that Control is influencing Leland when Gabrielle makes a comment about how Control views her, which echoes a phrase that Leland used earlier.
- Trapped in the Past: Inverted with Gabrielle, who inadvertently jumped 950 years into the future and couldn't return because the suit anchored her there. She could only make short jumps back to change the timeline. At the end of the episode, Leland-Control destroys the time crystal in the suit, meaning that she's permanently stranded in the future.
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: The Discovery crew outline their plan to transfer the Sphere data into the time suit and send it into the future while separating Gabrielle from the suit's effects. It goes completely sideways, with Control gaining some of the data while Gabrielle winds up back in the future.
- Wham Line: When Pike asks Gabrielle about the red signals, she tells him "I don't know about any signals." This flies in the face of everyone's assumption that, as the Red Angel, she was responsible for the red signals.
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Gabrielle asks Georgiou to promise to look after Michael, stating that she's seen her risk and even give up her life to save Michael, even that she loves her. When Georgiou dismisses her by saying that Gabrielle obviously believes her to be Georgiou-Prime and that as a Terran she's too self-centered and out for herself to ever be so noble, Gabrielle states that to the contrary she knows exactly who Georgiou really is.
- You Can't Fight Fate: Gabrielle explains that she keeps trying to change history to prevent Control from committing genocide, but no matter what she does, it seems that Control gains the Sphere's data and goes on its rampage. At the end of the episode, Spock insists that they still have an opportunity to prove her wrong.
