TL;DR –  The Search for Spock is over, long live The Search for Spock

Score – 3.5 out of 5 stars

Review –

We have reached the mid-point in the season, the point where the story should be coming into focus and propelling itself into the back half of the season, and today I think we got some of that, though maybe we got more questions than answers.

So to set the scene, at the end of last week’s episode The Sounds of Thunder, we discovered that the Red Angel is actually a being using some very advanced, possibly future technology. This means that there is a time travel component to their travels, which is backed up with the traces of tachyon particles found at every location it has visited. This means that the Red Angel might be from the future and might be messing with the timeline, and that is possibly not very good at all. So they decide to attack this on two fronts, Michael (Sonequa Martin-Green) goes back home to Vulcan to find Spock (Ethan Peck), and Pike (Anson Mount) decides to stay and explore the slight fracture in time around Kaminar which is when everything falls apart. Now from here, we will be looking at the episode as a whole, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead.  

One part of today’s story was a very family affair when Michael goes home. She is visiting Vulcan, not because she thinks Sarek (James Frain) knows something, but that Amanda (Mia Kirshner) is hiding something. It turns out the thing she was hiding was Spock himself, and we finally found him. One of the strengths of the episode was Sarek and Amanda finally coming to terms with their past and what it did to their children, which causes even the most stoic of Vulcans to lose their composure, if even for a moment. I really love all of the design they have done around creating Vulcan, which we see as they pan over the city and in the crypt. It was also a nice touch to show it raining, which is not something we have seen on Vulcan before. However, all of this story feels very much like a part one of something more important, and it felt like it was holding in place until the big reveal of Talos IV in the final moments. It is also interesting once again that in Discovery’s time Section 31 seems to be very much an open secret that everyone knows about, not the hidden organisation working from the shadows link in DS9 and Enterprise. I have a feeling that they are building to something here, but I am not sure, at least it means we get more Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh).

The next part of the story involves Pike and Ash (Shazad Latif) taking a shuttle closer to the time rift to try and work out what time it is emanating from it with a probe. In this part of the story the big interesting thing is that it seems to show that it is the future playing with the past and if that is starting to ring any bells, that is because the Time War was one of the overarching plot threads in Enterprise’s first few seasons. While this might cause a little pause, there were some interesting moments. For example, whoever in the future is helping/ or hindering the Red Angel sent back an upgraded probe to cause havoc. Also, I think everyone will want to know just what happened to Airiam (Hannah Cheesman), because cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war if they did anything to her.

In the end, do we recommend Light and Shadows? It had its moments, however, it did feel like this was an episode putting everything in place for next week. Why do we say that? Well, you don’t throw out Talos IV a planet with extreme thematic weight for one of the characters in the show, and not have something big go down.        

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you seen Star Trek Discovery yet?, let us know what you thought in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day.   

Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Star Trek Discovery
Directed by – Marta Cunningham
Written by – Ted Sullivan & Vaun Wilmott
Based off – Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry
Created by – Bryan Fuller & Alex Kurtzman  
Production/Distribution Companies – CBS Television Studios, Roddenberry Entertainment, Secret Hideout, CBS All Access & Netflix. 
Starring in Season 2 – Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman, Shazad Latif, Wilson Cruz & Anson Mount with Michelle Yeoh, James Frain, Mia Kirshner, Ethan Peck, Alan Van Sprang, Hannah Cheesman, Emily Coutts, Oyin Oladejo, Patrick Kwok-Choon, Ronnie Rowe Jr. & Julianne Grossman