Star Trek Discovery – The Red Angel isn’t who we thought it was, or who we thought it wasn’t…

The latest episode of Star Trek Discovery has finally put an end to the ongoing speculation and fan theories about the Red Angel by revealing who she really is, and it’s not anyone we suspected.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the second season of Star Trek Discovery.

For months we’ve been speculating about who the Red Angel could be, fan theories have ranged from a time-traveling Spock to various species we’ve met before, but none of them were right, except for those it wasn’t.

Last week when we saw Commander Airiam sacrifice herself, or at least ask that she be sacrificed, the last words she spoke were ‘Project Daedalus’, a mysterious name which would be fully explained in the first half of this week’s The Red Angel.

Identity

Project Daedalus was a program developed by Section 31 as a means to combat a similar Klingon program designed to create time travel, on the surface it would appear that the Klingons failed to create their time machine, but shockingly Section 31 was able to complete theirs, with the use of the simplistic sounding ‘Time Crystal’, a name that seems more at home in Final Fantasy than Star Trek, but its exact nature has yet to be revealed.

Early in the episode, it was revealed that a bio-scan of the Red Angel had been found in Commander Airiam’s mind, and further that the scan was an exact, picture-perfect match for Michael Burnham. So perfect it couldn’t be faked, so the crew put together a mouse trap to catch the Red Angel by threatening to end Michael Burnham’s life if history repeated its self once again the Angel would appear to save Michael and appear it did.

Image: CBS

Family means always being there…

As Spock forced the simulated trap to become real by holding the rescue crew at bay with his phaser Michael succumbed to her situation and died, as she passed the Angel appeared and saved her, only to be cut off by the mouse trap and grounded. Once grounded it was revealed that the picture-perfect scan of Michael was, in fact, a scan of one of the few people it couldn’t possibly have been, her deceased mother.

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The most obvious answer here is that Michael’s mom wasn’t killed alongside her father by the Klingons due to the negligence of their Section 31 handler, a young and brash Captain Leland, but she somehow managed to escape her fate and hide from the most advanced intelligence agency in the quadrant until such a time as she was able to procure more time crystals and using a suit presumed destroyed decades earlier, travel back to prevent an apocalypse she was now watching unfold, that would be the obvious answer, but I think not the correct one.

Back to the Future…

The more likely scenario, in my opinion, is that Michael’s mother traveled to the future prior to her death and that the reason the suit wasn’t found has yet to be revealed. Simply put knowing her fate, she may have just wanted to know that her daughter would be ok, revealing her to Spock, and later saving her on several occasions before coming to the understanding that her interference had somehow lead to the creation, or takeover, by the new AI system, Control.

Now in a desperate attempt to undo the damage, she has caused she uses the red signals to alter history and allow her daughter to live, while also saving the galaxy from the scourge she inadvertently created.