Perpetual Infinity

***(3 out of 5)

Michael Burnham lost her parents at age 10 or 12. In an attempt to go back one hour and save Mike and Michael, Dr. Gabrielle Burnham in her experimental Red Angel temporal armor ends up 950 years in the future, alone among many totally dead worlds.

She was the one who moved an Earth church to Terralysium, but remains unable to save her family in multiple attempts. Unable to destroy the Sphere called Sphere (which contains the knowledge that will give Control the power to destroy all living things), Dr. Burnham undoes the Sphere's gravitational binding and puts it in Discovery’s path. When and how she achieved this is unclear- is setting a boiling moon thrice the size of a Death Star in motion easier than waving a big magnet over the Control AI before it can become a supervillain?

After briefly arguing that destroying the Sphere Data is like burning the Library at Alexandria, Saru gets out a digital cannister of digital gasoline anyway... and finds that the data is inflammable. Gabrielle has seen Michael die hundreds of times (and presumably hundreds of ways, despite her growing pessimism with temporal mutability.) She's seen it and prevented it at least once, in Michael's youth on Vulcan.

While Ash fiddles with a glowing pog, Spock hatches a plan to use dark matter particles to keep Dr. Burnham in the present, and put the dangerous data into the Red Angel suit and throw it back to the future.

I can’t understand why “The Distant Future” is declared inaccessible to Control. There are several dozen ways to time travel in Star Trek, and just the soup of the day, Klingon Time Crystals, have already been in Section 31's wrong hands for decades.

Leland, now riddled with Control's nanites, stabs Ash, kills some dudes, damages the Red Angel suit, and gets away with half a copy of the Sphere Data, more's the pity.

They nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Torpedoes reach the surface in what looks like one second (probably using warp speed, although I think that raises further questions.)

This maybe was their last chance to paper over why young Michael, hiding in the closet, heard her father die, and then heard her mother die longer. Possibly Michael is remembering the sound of her mom making a paradox-inducing number of curtailed attempts to change this moment? Just horrifying.

Anyway, now the empty Red Angel suit and Mom by herself are each yanked back through the wormhole into the bleak and foreboding future. Just horrifying.

Spock sets up a game of chess with Michael, which is pretty cool. Not as horrifying. "We have only now... we will find a way."