10 Most Pointless Deaths In Star Trek

Outside of its main cast, Discovery’s bridge crew have always been a diverse melting pot of different personalities, and the enigmatic cyborg Airiam got her very own back-story episode at the turning point of Season 2. Prior to the series, after a shuttle crash with her husband Stephen, Airiam received extensive cybernetic enhancements to save her life, turning her into the cyborg who would go on to become a prominent officer aboard the titular ship.

Following the download of seemingly infinite data from a mysterious sentient Sphere, Discovery becomes a subject of interest for the manipulative AI Control, which has discovered its potential future as an unstoppable being, and calculated the Sphere data as the best way to achieve this outcome. When Airiam’s cybernetics become infected by a mysterious AI from the 28th century (hinted to be a future version of Control itself), she begins downloading Sphere data in an attempt to transfer it to Control directly.

After the deception is revealed, and despite the pain of losing their friend, Michael Burnham and D. Nhan are forced to tearfully jettison Airiam in a brief moment of sentience, before Control could subdue her will completely. In the season and a half leading up to ‘Project Daedalus’, Airiam was an interesting but ultimately background character, and the sudden elevation to have huge chunks of an entire episode about her made it clear that her clock has started ticking down.

The addition of the never 100% explained future AI into an already twisty temporal headache seemed to add an extra layer of convolution to which Airiam would ultimately fall victim, and one which the seemingly omniscient Control could likely think its way around. Heartbreaking as it is upon first viewing, it’s another narrative gut punch that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny.