Star Trek Discovery the Red Angel’s Red Herrings

Since the first appearance of Star Trek Discovery’s Red Angel fans have come up with theories about who she is but the only thing we know so far is who she’s not.

The other day we explained why Spock is NOT the Red Angel dispelling the new fan theory, now we’ll delve into a few others.

Let’s stop for a moment and consider the Red Angels actions, so far she, yes, you read that right, she, has been seen by Michael Burnham on an asteroid that was about to be destroyed just before she was rescued from certain death, in a church surrounded by soldiers and would be refugees during World War III, on Vulcan when Spock was young, and on Kaminar when the Ba’ul threatened to exterminate the Kelpiens.

Star Trek The Next Generation contagion Copyright Paramount CBS

Angels of Air and Darkness indeed…

The next most common fan theory is that we’re seeing the Iconians  but judging by their known history as Demons of Air and Darkness who were known to setup bases all around the galaxy and that they were destroyed some 200,000 years earlier that they were most likely conquers or at the very least colonialists as opposed to benevolent angels, we also have no reason to believe they had invented time travel technology.

Furthermore as we saw in The Sounds of Thunder the arrival of the Red Angel didn’t exactly mesh with the doorway method we saw in Star Trek The Next Generation, so it would seem unlikely the Angel is Iconian.

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Time’s Arrow Copyright Paramount CBS

An individual with an ophidian?

Our own KC Finch mused recently that we may be Seeing Devidians, but while the glowing look and time travel are potential matches, and even setting up a future harvest on New Eden would make sense for their motives we still run into a couple of major issues, the first and most obvious being their invisibility due to a phase variance, unfortunately this almost immediately takes the, out of the running, except that we know they are able to take human form later in Times Arrow. 

‘The remaining problem is the Red Angels other actions, saving the Kelpiens may make as much sense as planting a human garden on New Eden, but this wouldn’t explain why they can’t just harvest the Kelpiens in the past when they’re still abundant, or why they would help in saving a medical frigate with only a few people aboard. It seems unlikely that she is Devidian.

Star Trek The Paradise Syndrome

Now with no artificial preservatives

Another fan theory is that we’re looking at a member of either the Preservers or the Progenitors, but again, this doesn’t fit, the Preservers were known to step in and protect primitive cultures from going extinct, one could argue that the Kelpiens meet the criteria as they stand, but essentially they are the living proof of their evolved form being made extinct by the Ba’ul, so assuming time travel why not save them a thousand years earlier? Also this wouldn’t explain helping the medical freighter as there wasn’t enough preservation involved in saving a handful of different near death crew members on one small ship.

The Progenitors on the other hand certainly had no time travel technology, if they had they would have been able to do better than to encode a message in DNA, they would instead have simply come to know us, not being alone was essentially their entire motivation.

Image: Creation Entertainment

Future Kirk or Pike

The idea of it being either is impossibly ridiculous, yes we know that the future man in Star Trek Enterprise was most likely eventually going to be a future version of Captain Jonathan Archer so it’s not impossible that an over zealous writer could come up with these two as candidates also, but there’s one key difference between Archer and Kirk/Pike and that’s that we already know their timelines, fates and futures.

Yes, you can argue about alternate and aborted timelines, but neither would take the actions the Red Angel has, they wouldn’t worry about saving a human child on Vulcan, or a medical freighter when they could use their powers to simply stop the war all together, or to save a handful of people from a church during a war that happened long before they were born, it just doesn’t fit. Also they’re male.

“Saints of Imperfection” — Episode #205 — Pictured: Sonequa Martin-Green as Burnham of the CBS All Access series STAR TREK: DISCOVERY. Photo Cr: Michael Gibson/CBS ©2018 CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Not so fast Michael…

Somehow the Red Angel seems to be following Michael’s life, she saved her as a child, appeared to her brother, appeared to her and now seems interested in Discovery, also Michael is female, so many things fit the bill…. But not everything fits nicely.

Assuming Michael is the Red Angel we know with absolute certainty that time travel needs to be involved, otherwise she can’t be in two places at once or have a futuristic Ant-Man and the Wasp suit, but that’s where the theory falls apart. Micheal’s greatest regret is Philippa Georgiou, nothing would have stopped Michael with a time machine from saving her over Jet Reno, or Saru’s friends, or a group of WWIII survivors, or her younger self.

Again you could argue that there may have been a reason she had to save her younger self, maybe a time traveling villain tried to wipe her off the timeline using logic extremists as a cover and she kept herself on the board, maybe Jet will become a great leader one day, maybe the Kelpien’s who we never see again in the Star Trek universe sacrifice themselves to save the galaxy only because they now lack fear. And you might be right, but there’s still that pesky little matter of New Eden.

We can’t say one of the saved on New Eden is her great great grandfather, because they had no contact outside their village for centuries, so they couldn’t be. The war was so long ago that removing a survivor would be inexact at best, and assassination would do at worst, so it’s not that either. Michael has no motives to have made a technological backwater like New Eden, especially when the trip could have been used to prevent a war or to save her mentor.

Star Trek Discovery The Sounds of Thunder – Red Angel

So who is she and why is it a she anyways?

Why is it a she? Easy, look at the picture, really look at it, click it, the one above, and zoom, look, study, then assume this isn’t a rough render they thought we’d never see, they know we’re Trekkie, they know we obsess and they know we pay attention. That’s a woman.  That doesn’t rule out multiple, gender non-specific angels working in tandem, but this one is a female actress or CG model, and it’s not an accident.

As for who she is, I have no clue. I’ve spent many an hour pondering it, but the truth is she could just as soon be a hologram as a rogue red flying Borg as a right wing flying Ba’ul. The best and brightest have spent the past month trying to answer that question, but we don’t have all the clues yet, so all we can do is eliminate the impossible. Whatever is left, however unlikely must be the truth.