Light and Shadows 

Burnham goes to Vulcan in search of Spock, where she unearths surprising family secrets. In researching what is left of the Red Angel's signal over Kaminar, Pike and Tyler end up in battle ... See full summary »

Director:

Marta Cunningham

Writers:

Gene Roddenberry (based upon "Star Trek" created by), Bryan Fuller (created by)

Stars:

Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp

Cast

Episode cast overview, first billed only:
Sonequa Martin-Green	...	Michael Burnham
Doug Jones	...	Saru
Anthony Rapp	...	Paul Stamets
Mary Wiseman	...	Sylvia Tilly
Shazad Latif	...	Ash Tyler
Anson Mount	...	Captain Christopher Pike
Michelle Yeoh	...	Philippa Georgiou
James Frain	...	Sarek
Mia Kirshner	...	Amanda Grayson
Ethan Peck	...	Spock
Alan Van Sprang	...	Leland
Hannah Cheesman	...	Lt. Cmdr. Airiam
Emily Coutts	...	Lt. Keyla Detmer
Patrick Kwok-Choon	...	Lt. Gen Rhys
Oyin Oladejo	...	Lt. Joann Owosekun

Storyline

Burnham goes to Vulcan in search of Spock, where she unearths surprising family secrets. In researching what is left of the Red Angel's signal over Kaminar, Pike and Tyler end up in battle with time itself. Georgiou has a few tricks up her sleeve for Leland and Section 31.

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Genres:

Action | Adventure | Drama | Sci-Fi

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Certificate:

TV-PG

Details

Release Date:

28 February 2019 (USA)

Company Credits

Technical Specs

Runtime:

40 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

This episode marks the first on screen appearance of Ethan Peck as Spock. His voice was previously heard in Star Trek: Discovery: Brother (2019).

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Quotes

Captain Christopher Pike: Shuttle 5 approaching the anomaly. Now at minute five, and still no signs of temporal effects. Ready to move us another 600 kilometers closer and reacclimate.
Sylvia Tilly: Like a diver rising to the surface. Don't wanna get the time bends, sir.
Captain Christopher Pike: "Time bends". I like that.
Sylvia Tilly: Oh, everything sounds cooler when you put "time" in front of it.

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Connections

References Star Trek: The Cage (1986)

User Reviews

Catching a grain of sand in a hurricane

"With a pair of tweezers".

Burnham thinks she knows where is Spock is, the only trick is she has to confront Amanda.

Discovery, however, sticks around the vicinity of Kaminar to look for Temporal Causality loops and other magic Red Angel debris.

I have to admit these time elements don't appear to be the same rehashed technobabble that Brannon Braga used to come up with all the "time", even though sometimes he came up with some good ones.

And a couple of the lines in here you can swear we heard Mr. Worf saying: right before the Enterprise D blew up.

In fact, I was just watching "Children of Time", S5E22 of Deep Space Nine, written by Ethan H. Calk, who also wrote S3E17 "Visionary", one of the best of these time oriented stories. Ethan also wrote the great Star Trek Fan Film "Of Gods and Men" and both episodes of (Star Trek) Renegades. In "Children of Time", we see what happens when the event that caused the changes in the timeline, is caused to have never happened. In that case, unfortunate and unwanted consequences ensued. The best time stories are not written by the usual writer's of a show's "Bullpen", but by outsiders. Because Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and I believe Voyager all accepted scripts from outside of the usual source of "Writer's Guild approved writers". That decision was wise, but it could only have happened because both TNG and DS9 were syndicated shows, Voyager of course was a Network show, and as such was prone to network interference by pencil pushers. I don't know how strict Discovery's rules are for writers, but the ones who penned this episode, Ted Sullivan and Vaun Wilmott, did a splendid job, mostly by relying on and mining Star Trek Canon.

It is starting to look like the Red Angel arc was something put into play by Discovery itself - Just like in "All Good Things" - Picard asked "Why is it (The Anomaly) getting larger in the past? We know why, it was because they caused the "Anomaly" in the future. Is something similar happening here?

Meanwhile Georgiou and Section 31 rear their ugly heads, but I think in this episode we have to realize that Mirror-Georgiou is not really who we have to worry about at this point, she is an ally. But does she have ulterior motives? I would have to say yes to that, only, her goal is not very clear.

Be ready to revisit some aliens that we met way back in the original series, maybe even before that. Before this series was a series. Or, as Picard put it in "all good things", " The chicken and the egg, Will, the chicken and the egg!"

Because Spock is either spouting nonsense, or it means something. Burnham opts to believe option two: "Not Nonsense".

And the mechanical girl: beware of the three red eyes. I found this interesting, because this mechanical girl on the bridge, has never been explained. "Airiam". All we really have is her name, the Star Trek Wiki Memory Alpha does not really have anything much to say about her either. So, who is she? Where did she come from? What is she? In Star Trek Into Darkness, we had "Science Officer 0718" played by the great Joseph Gatt. I was hoping he would have been explained, but his character never returned for Kirk's 5-year voyage that was interrupted in Star Trek Beyond. So I highly anticipate where this Airiam arc goes.

There is also an Easter egg in here that occurs to me, Pike's solution to sending some kind of signal to discovery, The same kind of solution occurred to Spock 53 years ago, or was it 10 years from now?