 |
| "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.
