Star Trek Discovery - 'The War Without, the War Within' and 'Will You Take my Hand?'

"Well, that doesn't sound very likely."

Okay; let's bring this back home.

Returning to their own universe, the crew of the Discovery are boarded and subjected to involuntary mind meld to find out where they've been and what happened to Captain Lorca. To my great sorrow, this wasn't because they'd managed to transpose the Mirror Discovery and Captain Killy had been up to shenanigans, but rather just because the ship's disappearance was the start of everything going to shit. The Klingons have been running roughshod over Star Fleet, taking out starships and star bases all over the place, but there is one possible saving grace: Fragmented after the death of Kor, the Klingons are not securing territory; for all the loss of life, the invasion could still be defeated; and Discovery has a passenger who can tell them how. Two, in fact.

Ensign Tilly. Upholding the Federation way, one dinner table at a time.

Emperor Georgiou crushed the Mirror universe Klingons, and where the prime version of Qo'noS differs from that in the Mirror, they have a new source of information in Lt Tyler. It turns out that what L'rell did was excise the personality of V'oq from beneath the Tyler graft, and now what remains is Ash Tyler with an added layer of Klingon memories (who gets cold shouldered in the mess until Tilly steps up to be awesome,) and for some reason minus the Klingon hyperaggression and muscle endurance; apparently physiology and biochemistry are all in the mind. Anyway, a plan is planned: Discovery will seed a dead world with magic mushrooms, harvest the spores and then jump into the volcanic caves beneath Qo'noS to create a map of the planet's military installations so that Star Fleet can launch their own pre-emptive strike before the Klingons can reach Earth.

I'll be honest, I'm not clear how this actually works. If the Klingons are heading flat out for Earth, then how can Star Fleet get from a defensive line around Earth to an all-out attack on Qo'noS before they arrive and...? I know it turns out that this isn't the real plan, but how does it convince anyone who has to be involved? It takes a special kind of dodgy spatial logistics for 'oh, hey, look! Captain Georgiou is still alive!' to not be the hardest sell to the crew.

Cue the music.

In the finale of the season, Georgiou leads Burnham, Tilly and Tyler onto the surface of Qo'noS to send a mapping drone into an extinct volcano system. This involves infiltrating an Orion trading settlement, so it's green-skinned strip club ahoy! Tyler embraces his inner V'oq in pursuit of a key volcanic shrine, which weirds Burnham out, and while Geogiou gets the intel from a pair of bizarrely knowledgeable hookers - like, no one knows where this shrine is, except for one zealot in the street and a couple of pole dancers - Tilly figures out that they aren't delivering a probe to an extinct volvanic system, but a bomb to an active system, with the aim of utterly devastating the planet in a catastrophic cascade reaction.

Welp; this is gratuitous.

With the planet ready to blow, Burnham confronts Star Fleet Command on this grievous breach of protocol/being a bunch of genocidal dicks. She then ropes in L'rell, shows her that Star Fleet has the power to annihilate the Klingons, and hands over the detonator, allowing L'rell to take control and actually unite the Empire. Having demonstrated that the war with the Federation was not the way to bring the houses together, she urges L'rell to try another way of realising T'kuvma's dream. Tyler goes with her to try to work out his many, many issues, and the rest of the crew are hella heroes. Replete with medals, they head out to Vulcan to drop off Sarek, but are interrupted by a distress signal from Captain Christopher Pike aboard the USS Fanservice... I mean Enterprise.

So, that was Star Trek: Discovery, boldly going where no Star Trek series has gone before. It definitely had a pacing problem, in particular firing off all of its big plot guns over the course of a couple of episodes. I was also disappointed that it took the morally complex character of Gabriel Lorca and threw him hard under the bus, basically portraying him as everything short of a puppy-murderer in order to justify Emperor Georgiou's role as 'the slightly sympathetic one,' when really opposing the Terran Empire should have been a prima facie – albeit not absolute – argument for making a common cause. Then there's the death of Dr Hugh Culber, which still stings, and feels like the miscalculation which will most dog the series moving into the confirmed second season.