‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Returned to the Beginning for Our Biggest Red Angel Clue Yet

Spoilers for Star Trek: Discovery “If Memory Serves” beyond this point.

Let’s get this out of the way right up front: The Red Angel, the mysterious being who has been showing up throughout the second season of Star Trek: Discovery, is definitely Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), right? Yes? We can all agree on this? Or at least, all of the clues laid out in this week’s hour, which looped back to the very origins of Star Trek itself, certainly seem to point to Michael… Though with plenty of the season to go, there may be more twists to come.

That said, the episode itself was a dream for fans of the franchise. As teased last week, the show picked up where the original, scuttled Star Trek pilot “The Cage” left off. In fact, a gloriously retro recap featured the old-school logo and footage from that episode, with Leonard Nimoy’s Spock and the original Captain Pike (Jeffrey Hunter) encountering the strange, telepathic Talosians before cutting to footage of our Pike, Anson Mount.

In case there was any timeline confusion based on certain quotes from Mount and others, “The Cage” happens in canon, pre-Star Trek: Discovery, and both take place before the actually aired parts of The Original Series, i.e. the one with Nimoy and William Shatner as Captain Kirk. Got it? Cool.

Burnham and our Spock (Ethan Peck) travel to Talos IV to help repair the latter’s broken mind. There, the Talosians aid Spock and help reveal three key bits of information. The first is that Spock didn’t kill any Starfleet officers, an act he’s been accused of; though he did knock out three of them — including 12 Monkey‘s Alison Down as a mysterious doctor.

The second is what Burnham did to hurt baby Spock’s feelings so much that they haven’t talked in years. She was aiming to protect him from logic extremists, a faction of Vulcans who had targeted her for her human nature. So she ran away from home and called him a dirty half-breed. Despite all that, The Red Angel appeared to Spock later that night and led to Burnham’s time-changing rescue from a rampaging monster (before The Red Angel appeared, she was supposed to die).

And then there’s the third thing, where we find out a lot more about The Red Angel’s purpose. We know the being is human, or at least humanoid in shape. We also know they’re wearing a suit, and have a significant tachyon signature, meaning they’re probably a time traveler. And we also know The Red Angel has been showing up at various key locations associated with seven red lights, and offering up information that seemingly saves people and planets in danger.

With the help of the Talosians, Spock is able to show Michael the vision The Red Angel shared with him the second time it visited: the end of all sentient life in the universe. Strange machines emerge from space, fire on every planet in the Federation, and destroy them. And Spock finds this out by mind-melding with The Red Angel, which we see both through his perspective and through Michael’s.

The reason I started off confidently proposing the theory that Michael is The Red Angel is mostly because of this shot. You can filter it both through the idea that — as we deal with in the episode — the Talosians are deft at creating illusions. You could also say that the reason the perspective shifts between Spock and Michael as Spock intones, “my mind for your mind” is that Burnham is in her adopted brother’s brain. But… Come on. The reason that’s there is because Spock is melding with The Red Angel, who is clearly Michael; and whether they both realize that now or not, it’ll become readily apparent in a few episodes time.

Additionally, if The Red Angel is Michael, it makes a lot of sense that the first appearance of the “creature” was to young Spock, the night Michael ran away. All of the appearances have had to do with Spock, Michael, their relationship, or locations Michael has been visiting. Martin-Green is the star of the show, and the series is built deftly around her emotional relationships. If The Red Angel isn’t Burnham, it’s definitely someone intimately connected to her, because otherwise the reveal won’t make sense to the character arc of the show.

Also: the body of The Red Angel is the same shape as Michael Burnham’s body. Just saying.

To throw out another potentially wild theory, it seems pretty clear that — as usual — the problem Discovery needs to stop is one Discovery has caused. In this case, they sent a probe into a temporal anomaly last episode, and it aged over millennia into a squid-bot right out of The Matrix. The tech we see destroying the Federation certainly looks like that same tech, and the engines that destroy the planets in Spock’s vision look like the probe. There could be another enemy, of course; but it certainly seems like we’re dealing with machines wiping out mankind, and The Red Angel sent back in time in a last ditch effort to stop them. The events The Red Angel is traveling to are closing a causality loop, going to times that it/Burnham already appeared at, so that Discovery will be able to stop the upcoming destruction caused by their own hands.

And sure, I could be way off, but Discovery is a show that wastes no time barreling through its big reveals. Maybe we did figure out who The Red Angel is this episode, just like how fans figured out that Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif) was secretly Voq last season… Though that more obvious mystery hid several more shocking reveals down the road. The next two episodes are titled “Project Daedalus” (you know, that guy whose son flew too close to the sun?) and “The Red Angel,” so confirmation — or not — is coming shortly.

Regardless, this season of Star Trek: Discovery is just getting started.

Star Trek: Discovery airs Thursdays at 8:30/7:30c on CBS All Access

Stream Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access