“Project Daedalus” is the 9th episode of the 2nd season of the TV show “Star Trek: Discovery” and follows “If Memory Serves“.

Note. This article contains spoilers about “Project Daedalus”.

Admiral Katrina Cornwell (Jayne Brook) joins the USS Discovery to question Spock (Ethan Peck) and shows Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) the footage in which Spock kills some staff members of the psychiatric hospital where he spent some time. To shed light on the situation, the only solution is to go to Section 31’s headquarters.

You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. With these words actor Michael Emerson originally began the episodes of the TV show “Person of Interest”, whose central theme was mass surveillance through artificial intelligence. Echoes of those themes are developed in “Project Daedalus”, where a number of twists once again radically change the story-arc of the second season of “Star Trek: Discovery”. The episode was written by Michelle Paradise, who will be the showrunner along with Alex Kurtzman for the third season.

In another episode directed by Jonathan Frakes we finally see the effects of infiltration in the cybernetic systems of Lieutenant Commander Airiam (Hannah Cheesman) and we also see some moments from her past. It would’ve been nice to find out something about her well earlier to build a greater emotional bond with her. We’re also given more answers connected to what’s called the Red Angel and the future destruction seen by Spock.

“Project Daedalus” is in my opinion another episode that has very strong elements but also leaves me with some doubts. The revelation of the existence of Control, an artificial intelligence that has become crucial for the strategic choices not only of Section 31, allows to introduce a number of ethical, moral but also practical problems linked to the management of an automatic system and to the information that the it’s given. In the field of information technology the “garbage in, garbage out” motto reminds us that to obtain correct results from an automatic system you need to enter correct and complete data.

In the case of Control, the problems are progressively discovered during the episode providing an idea that becomes more and more sinister of ​​what’s happening. However, it’s curious that the protagonists show surprise about the possibility of creating computer images of people that seem indistinguishable from the real ones since today this type of problem is becoming real with today’s neural networks.

The emotional moment that seems inevitable in this show arrives at the end of the episode but honestly left me even colder than normal because it seemed to me that it was lame as it connected the difficult choice for Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) to her complicated relationship with Spock. The resolution didn’t help because no one seems to have thought of teleporting poor Airiam to the Discovery to try to examine her systems.

Overall, “Project Daedalus” seemed to me an episode that could have been extraordinary if the emotional moments had been better constructed. The evolution of the plot linked to the Red Angel with the various ramifications developed with the introduction of Control opens the door to many possible developments, starting with the situation of the USS Discovery crew, officially on the run. Hunted by the authorities, they work in secret. You’ll never find them. But victim or perpetrator, if your number’s up, they’ll find you. Sorry, this is “Star Trek: Discovery”. 😉