There are so many ways that the series finale of Discovery could have been screwed up, and I’m pleased to say that they avoided all of them. The last twenty minutes were filmed later after Secret Hideout was informed that Paramount+ would not be renewing the show for a sixth season. So we get seventy minutes of the finale to the fifth season and then another twenty of epilogue for the show itself.
Let’s start with my favorite revelation: that the people that everyone’s been referring to as the Progenitors, for lack of a better term to use, aren’t entirely accurately named. One of the oddities of this season is the notion that the Progenitors’ technology is just laying around, which didn’t seem to make much sense on the face of it. Except it turns out not to even be their technology! While the Progenitors (we never get their real name, so we’ll stick with that) did use the technology to create humanoid life as we know it, they didn’t originate the tech used. It’s this weird extradimensional space, accessed via the doodad that everyone was trying to break into last week. But the Progenitors didn’t create it, they just found it. They did use it to populate the then-much-younger galaxy, as they were the only sentient life they’d encountered, and they felt alone in the galaxy, and wanted to change that.
Burnham finds this out by figuring out how to use the clue Derex left her in the archive in “Labyrinths”: it’s a math clue, one that involves the arranging of triangles and negative space. She then goes to another extradimensional place, one where time passes much differently. One of the Progenitors is waiting for her. (For a brief moment, I thought they might have gotten Salome Jens back to reprise her role as a Progenitor from TNG’s “The Chase,” but no. Then again, the woman is almost ninety years old…)
Apparently Derex came to this place back in the 24th century, and decided that they weren’t ready for this power. Burnham winds up coming to much the same conclusion—at least in part because she can’t in good conscience spend time learning the technology when Discovery is in trouble.
And Discovery is in lots of trouble. There’s the Breen dreadnought they stole the doodad from in “Lagrange Point,” there’s another dreadnought en route commanded by Primarch Tahal, and there are fighters going after Discovery. Tahal is taken care of by Saru, who, accompanied by Nhan, manages to outmaneuver the primarch and get her to back off with the sheer power of his awesomeness. (Burnham comments that Action Saru does it again at the end.) In a nice touch, showing how far Kelpiens have come in a millennium, Saru identifies himself as a predator and boasts to Tahal that he has studied his prey. This is a delightful inversion of Saru’s using his role as prey in “Choose Your Pain” in the first season to track Lorca down.
Discovery is able to get rid of the Breen fighters using the same trick with a plasma cloud that Kurn used with a sun in TNG’s “Redemption II.” Then they get rid of the dreadnought with an absolutely delightful trick of separating the saucer, putting each bit on either side of the dreadnought, and activating the spore drive, which sends the dreadnought far away instead of Discovery. It’s one final bit of “wait, if we try this…” solutions that has been a hallmark of this show, and as usual, it’s a team effort among Tilly, Stamets, and Adira.
To that end, pretty much everyone gets something to do. Each member of the bridge crew is involved in the maneuvering around the black holes. Book and Culber are the ones who put a tractor beam on the doodad to make sure that Burnham doesn’t fall past the event horizon, the latter participating by using a remnant of Jinaal that stuck in his brain meats. (This also allows Wilson Cruz to say, “I’m a doctor, not a physicist,” which is fabulous.) Saru and Nhan, as I said, get rid of Tahal. Plus, we get appearances by Vance and Kovich. We even get one final look at Bryce, Owosekun, Detmer, and Reno, who all have cameos in the epilogue. Alas, no appearance by President Rillak, which I find personally disappointing…
Speaking of Kovich, we get a revelation about him that doesn’t land as well as probably everyone thought it would. Kovich isn’t his real name, his real name is Daniels. Yes, Kovich is the same guy who kept getting Archer’s Enterprise dragged into the dumbshit Temporal Cold War storyline starting in “Cold Front” and coming to a merciful (and stupid) conclusion in “Storm Front, Part II” (a.k.a. the SPACE NAZIS! episode). Kovich being an ex-temporal agent explains a lot about him, truly, but did he have to be Daniels? All his presence did on Enterprise was provoke sighs of annoyance that we were doing this dopey-ass storyline again.
Ah, well—at least I can believe that Matt Winston would age into David Cronenberg. And I did like that his office shelves included a bottle of Château Picard, a VISOR, and a baseball, thus referencing TNG, DS9, and Picard.
Anyhow, I like the rationale as to why Burnham eventually dumps the doodad past the event horizon so no one else can find it: they don’t need it. It’s understandable why the Progenitors used it millennia ago when they thought they were alone in the galaxy. But humanoid life is the opposite of alone in the 32nd century, and the temptation to misuse the power is too great.
They also can only create life, they can’t resurrect dead life, so Moll’s hope that L’ak would be resurrected is dashed. Which is a relief—I really didn’t want a rerun of Book’s magic resurrection from last season—but also provides no kind of ending for the Breen storyline. Not that that storyline was all that and a bag of chips, but the internecine fighting among them that was such a subtext all season is just dropped as if it’s irrelevant. Which, truly, it was, but you kind of wish they’d figured that out before wasting our time with so much of it.
Getting there involves a lot of action scenes, because—the fourth season mercifully excepted—Discovery always feels the need to end their seasons with a big-ass action climax. In this case, besides Discovery’s travails against the Breen, we’ve got Burnham and Moll competing for the Progenitors’ tech, then cooperating, then competing again—in both cases the competing involving lots of hand-to-hand combat. The extradimensional space includes gateways to various worlds. Burnham (and the other two Breen who came through) wind up on The Hurricane Planet, and later Moll and Burnham fight on The Anime Cherry Blossom Planet and The Active Volcano Planet. (I was hoping Burnham would urge Moll to surrender because she had the high ground, but alas…)
The main part of the episode closes with two very satisfying conclusions. First, we see Saru and T’Rina married—with Saru apparently having been promoted to admiral. At the reception, Tilly mentions the notion of an Academy mentorship program she wants to start, which is probably helping set up the forthcoming Starfleet Academy show. And then Book and Burnham officially become a couple again, thank goodness.
I would have liked to have seen more of Saru and T’Rina, as they’re adorable as all get-out, but I was grateful to see Book and Burnham back together.
And then we have the epilogue, which doubles down on it. It’s about thirty years later (give or take), Burnham is an admiral, she and Book share a house on a planet where all the foliage is bright orange, and they have a son who just got promoted to captain. Burnham, meanwhile, has one last mission for Discovery: to send her off into deep space and await the arrival of something or someone called Craft.
This is, it should be said, a very clumsy way to make the Short Trek “Calypso” continue to fit in continuity. That episode was written between the first two seasons, and once Discovery went forward in time to the 32nd century at the end of season two, it could still only fit in continuity with a really big hammer. But I appreciate that they made the effort, especially since (a) “Calypso” was really really really good, and (b) it gives Annabelle Wallis one final scene as Zora, saying goodbye to Burnham. They can’t really come up with a good in-story reason for Discovery to just bugger off like that, so they do us the kindness of not trying to shove a bad one down our throats. It’s just a thing that happens because the script says so. And hey, it gives us a chance for a very final finale, including Burnham remembering her crew (which is where we get the Reno, Bryce, Owosekun, and Detmer cameos). It’s a lovely scene, a sweet coda to the series.
(By the way, I gotta say that the old-age makeup on Sonequa Martin-Green makes a bit of casting from the second season even more impressive, because I genuinely mistook the older version of Burnham for Sonja Sohn’s Gabrielle, a.k.a. Mama Burnham, on first glance.)
Discovery has come a long way from its debut seven years ago. Next week, we’ll look back at both the fifth season and the series as a whole.
This is definitely by far the best season finale that Discovery has ever done. I would even say that it’s one of the best series finales that Star Trek has done (which, given the competition, isn’t saying much, but still). I’m surprised how satisfied I was by it, given that the last few episodes have left me wondering “why should I care?” about this story arc.
And I actually appreciated how much it left open-ended; the “creators all the way up” revelation was suitably mindbending and I’m relieved that they left L’ak dead. I thought Michael might use the machine to resurrect Kweijian, but I prefer what actually happened with the worldroot (I’d like to think that Book was knowledgeable enough to select a planet where its disruption to the local ecology would be minimal); I’d like to see how Book’s relationship with Moll developed from this point, but I’m content to leave that as fodder for novels and comic books. Admittedly the coda connecting Discovery to “Calypso” was a bit weak, but presumably, given Kovich’s status as a time agent (I’m not going to call him “Daniels” because Kovich has been a much more interesting character than Daniels ever was), he knows that Craft has some important role to play in the future, so I’ll accept it. Regarding Kovich, I feel like the revelation of his identity is a little meaningless to anyone but hardcore fans of the entire franchise, but I suppose they felt that they needed to get it out of the way. And I was a little disappointed that the final riddle was just solving a simple geometry puzzle, but there’s no reason it should be more complicated than that as the scientists didn’t design it as a test.
All of these minor quibbles aside, it really reminded me, like a good finale should, of what I loved about this series–the teamwork, the science, the characters. Hopefully some of them will put in some appearances on Academy.
Thinking about it, I think this gets first place in the series finale sweepstakes, just edging out “All Good Things…,” mostly because “Life, Itself” has a plot that actually makes sense and (amazingly) has less fan service than the TNG finale. It’s comfortably ahead of “What You Leave Behind” and “The Counter-Clock Incident” and way way way way ahead of the misbegotten trifecta of “Turnabout Intruder,” “Endgame,” and “These are the Voyages…”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Where would the Picard finale rank?
In the middle with WYLB and Counter-Clock.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This was mostly pretty good, but I had my issues. Mainly, I hated the predictable “This technology is too powerful for anyone to have and must be destroyed” ending, which is not only the most obvious and cliched possible ending for a quest story like this, but anathema to Star Trek‘s usual message that knowledge is a good thing. I’m particularly annoyed that Kovich classified it all. What? No! This is the biggest archaeological find in history! It’s evil to suppress it. I mean, the tech is totally out of reach, so why not tell people it used to exist?
Also, Kovich being Daniels was an unexciting revelation, because who cares about Daniels? (When I saw the Chateau Picard and the VISOR, I was hoping he’d reveal himself to be Data.) Also, why should Daniels be the only Temporal Agent? They had a whole agency; it’s contrived to have him be that specific individual. Also, why are so many of his artifacts only from Star Trek series? He’s seen countless times and places, yet the few of them that we’ve seen on TV are the artifacts he’s focused on? That’s the kind of writing that undermines the sense that there’s more to the universe than just the TV shows.
On the other hand, it does kind of make sense as a revelation. Daniels was from the 31st century, this is the 32nd. Assuming increased longevity in the future, it adds up. And we know that time travel was banned following the Temporal Wars, so it stands to reason that a former time-traveling secret agent who couldn’t time-travel anymore would land in a job like Kovich’s. (It also retroactively explains his familiarity with the Temporal Wars back in season 3.)
The tie-in to “Calypso” was indeed extremely contrived and gratuitous. I mean, why did they need to retrofit Discovery to its old specs? It makes no sense. I’m choosing to believe it was already retrofitted as a museum ship before this mission came up, but that doesn’t explain why the DOTs hadn’t already erased the “A.”
Also, the puzzle about the triangles was immediately obvious, but they had Moll and Burnham racking their brains and struggling to figure out this puzzle that a 5-year-old could crack instantly. I mean, “Make the shape of the one between the many.” That’s not a riddle, that’s an instruction!
Mixed feelings about the payoff of the Progenitors. I’m relieved they used a timeless space to justify them meeting instead of saying they still existed. And while they did kind of portray the technology as magical, they didn’t go too far with it and did put limitations on it. And they demystified the Progenitors and deflated the way the season has portrayed them as almost godlike, which is kind of good, although it feels like the writers backing away from anything that believers might consider blasphemous. Also, I don’t like the idea that someone may have created the Progenitors instead of them just evolving naturally. And I remain annoyed that the season has glossed over the fact that the Progenitors only engineered the creation of humanoid life, and there are plenty of nonhumanoids in the galaxy. (Which makes it kind of contradictory that the Progenitor said they wanted to create a diverse galaxy, when what they actually wanted was to constrain its evolutionary diversity and create a bunch of species that looked like them.)
Certainly the visuals of the interior realm were effectively designed. I’ve never been a fan of the work of Discovery‘s VFX team, which has tended to be cluttered and fanciful and directly contradictory to the scripted dialogue. But this looked good.
I did like how Tilly and Stamets independently got to go “No, it’s impossible, there’s no way… unless…” and then find a solution. And I particularly like it that Rayner chose to defeat the Breen in a way that spared thousands of lives instead of taking them — although I wish there had been a way to do the same with the fighter pilots.
I don’t mind that the Breen politics stuff was left unresolved, because the Breen shouldn’t have been what the climax was about; they should’ve just been an obstacle along the way. The only thing that made them a significant threat was the risk of them getting the Prog-tech and using it to become more aggressive than normal. With that threat gone, and with the Primarch dead and Moll in prison, they’re defanged, and whatever internecine conflict they still have is their own business that will presumably minimize their threat to anyone else, at least for the time being.
Such mixed feelings about this one. I wrote an essay elsewhere longer than your review, in fact. Though to summarize.
This was a good episode – one of the best this season, and it’s also probably the best season finale Discovery has managed.
That said, Season 5 ended up being very meh overall for me. By far the biggest issues were the lack of any compelling antagonists and overall dearth of creativity. This really did just feel like the writer’s room going through the numbers, giving us almost exactly what was expected. There were a few surprises (the trick with the spore drive and the saucer separation, the great reveal that even the progenitors had mysterious predecessors) but after a pretty conceptually excellent season 4, it’s astounding to me how shallow this was.I’m torn on the season coda added. On one hand, if we ended with Michael and Book kissing on the beach after the wedding, that’s all the finale I would have needed. On the other, I loved the slow, quiet pacing of the scene with elderly Michael and Book (I wish more shots were directed like this), and the wordless bridge hug brought out the feels. If only it wasn’t wrapped in “a wizard did it” to try and get Calypso into canon.
What does disappoint me, now that I think about it, is that we never actually got the grand tour of the 32nd century Star Trek universe that I think a lot of us had been hoping for since the end of season 2. Discovery checked in on the Federation, Earth, Trill, the Romulo-Vulcans, Orions, and Andorians in season 3, gave us a few episodes on the Breen this season, and a few crumbs of information here and there on incredibly minor species from previous series like the Kellerun, Akaali, and Barzan. But the fates of so many of the big players of the universe–the Klingons, the Cardassians, the Bajorans, the Dominion, the remaining offshoots of the Borg–have just been left largely or completely unexplored. That’s not necessarily a problem–in fact, if the series had continued, I think that I would appreciate the slow roll-out, and I’ve liked a lot of the new stuff that we’ve seen, like the Archive or Species 10C–but it just feels like a wasted opportunity. Particularly this season, where the plot seems set up to give us exactly that.
Well, President Rillak being a human/Bajoran/Cardassian hybrid can be taken as sort of a subtle hint about the latter two species’ relations. And we had the Bajoran Lt. Cmdr. Asha as the helm officer this season.
Hopefully the upcoming Academy series will fill in more specifics about the era.
Short thoughts:
I really enjoyed this season finale. Nice how they made the Progenitors just another link in the chain instead of the source of the tech. I really love “incredibly old tech that we’ve just stumbled across” scifi stories. I also liked that the reason for getting rid of the tech was less “it’s too powerful” and more “it did its job and we don’t need it anymore”. Not something you usually see in these kinds of stories.
For a moment I was thinking that Kovich might be Wesley Crusher, but I guess he wouldn’t have ended up in that position after all. Shame they went with Daniels.
I’m excited for the Academy series, especially if we get more Tilly and Saru (and maybe more Discovery characters, if it happens not too long after this series). I was hoping the Academy series would be more around Picard’s time, but a fledgling academy in a period of rebuilding is interesting. Plus, it will give us the chance to visit all the other planets and species we haven’t yet touched on in this future.
I imagine that if Discovery had gotten another season or two, the Breen would have had a bigger role, but a bunch of plotlines got truncated due to the cancellation. At least we got to see Detmer and Owosekun one last time.
I may have missed something, but isn’t Zora basically sentient? Did they just get left in Discovery’s computer banks all these years until Burnham came back to say “hey, sorry, we’re dropping you off in the middle of nowhere for an indeterminate amount of time because time shenanigans”? You’d think the Federation would have found a way to offload a massively intelligent supercomputer to the Federation HQ instead of letting them gather dust on an aging starship.
Anyway, good finale, can’t wait to see what Star Trek comes up with next besides the Academy series. Maybe Legacy will eventually become a real thing?
Okay, I just rewatched “Calypso,” finally in its “proper order,” and there are bits where the seams show, like Zora implying that she was Discovery‘s computer that only evolved sentience over a thousand years alone. The main thing, though, is that while it’s a sweet little love story, there’s no reason why Zora’s interlude with Craft should be important enough for Kovich/Daniels to have arranged for Discovery to be retrofitted and sent there to wait a millennium for it to happen. Well, maybe that bit Burnham picked up about the name “Craft” was something she was allowed to hear because it was incidental to whatever Zora’s real mission was.
I don’t know about that; Craft, if memory serves, had been adrift for months in an escape pod before his run-in with Zora and presumably would have died if she hadn’t rescued him. We don’t really know who Craft was (other than a soldier) or what he got up to after he left Discovery; maybe having a ship there at just the right time was somehow pivotal for future history.
That was my first thought, actually, but Zora told Craft that she was under orders to wait where she was and couldn’t take him home. If saving him had been the point of her mission, then once he arrived, she wouldn’t have had to stay there anymore. “Calypso” gives the clear indication that Craft’s visit is just an incident that happens while Zora is waiting for something else.
Indeed, I don’t want the events of “Calypso” to be the whole purpose of Zora’s mission. That makes it too cosmically important and undermines what it is, which is a sweet little love story that’s only important to the two people involved in it. It’s a brief interlude in the lives of two people who both have other destinies that aren’t about each other, and that’s why it’s beautiful.
Besides, “Calypso” also makes it clear that Craft is the enemy of the V’Draysh, i.e. the future Federation (which we know both by the phonetics of the term and by the fact that they have Betty Boop cartoons in their escape pods). Okay, maybe the Federation by that point has lost its way, but “Calypso” gives no indication one way or the other. But I’d say that further reduces the odds that helping Craft was Zora’s mission.
Incidentally, that creates another continuity glitch, because the second episode of season 3 had the bad guy use “V’Draysh” to refer to the Federation of the 32nd century, so presumably the writers at that point assumed that “Calypso” was set around then, perhaps in an alternate timeline. But now we have to rationalize the same corruption of “Federation” being used by two unrelated groups of Federation adversaries roughly a millennium apart.
That was dumb, dreadful and forgettable. Completely fitting in other words.
very detailed analysis, so i’ll just say: “no, it’s not”. :D
I loved some things about this episode and hated others, which is how Discovery usually stacks up for me. :-) Exploring the galaxy with Starfleet never gets old, and the Starfleet mandate to not only explore but also to help allied planets in trouble, to protect everyone the Prime Directive allows, and to just generally make the galaxy a better place never gets old for me.
I do wish that we hadn’t had a REALLY extensive fistfight between Burnham and Moll during the middle of the episode, though. We’re trying to bring a person back to life, to keep the Breen from destroying everything, and to discover how life was created, and it all comes down to a FISTFIGHT? Seriously? I know Kirk had to have a fistfight in nearly every episode because NBC demanded “action,” but Discovery is on a streaming service … is a fistfight really still necessary? I mean, the backgrounds during the fight were gorgeous, but that just made the whole idea of a fistfight seem even more incongruous to me.
I hate, hate hate Olatunde Osunsanmi’s direction. EVERY time he directs an episode, his direction calls attention to itself, as if the director can’t resist saying, “Look at me; look at meeeee!” The constant camera spinning feels weird and juvenile to me; the direction is supposed to SUPPORT the story, not get in the way of it.
While I agreed with Burnham’s decision to let the Progenitors’ tech fall into the black hole, I thought that spending 30 seconds on that decision vs. twenty minutes on Admiral Burnham and her son and the setup to Calypso was a rather imbalanced placement of priorities. I would have liked to have seen Burnham talk aloud about the GOOD that Progenitors’ tech might have enabled her to do and to balance that against the possible negative consequences, whereas she only talked about building an army. It should have been a more difficult decision, and she should have been sad to lose all the good she could have done with the tech.
Good bye, Discovery! Thank you for bringing us Strange New Worlds and Prodigy.
Thank goodness someone came out and said it. I think more than any single factor, it’s Osunsanmi’s direction is what spoiled the series for me. He has a style that’s all emotional high notes without any nuance or subtlety. That’s his main difference from Frakes—who illuminates the emotional interiority of characters and between characters. O’s direction is just flash-bang for 14 year olds.
Yes, his direction feels very adolescent to me. I wish one of the showrunners had talked to him about it, since he does this consistently.
I generally dislike fight scenes, but this one was at least pretty cool.
The SETTING for the fight was very cool, but the fight itself felt tacked on and unnecessary, at least to me.
As the fight was happening, I did think to myself, “We’re dealing with all these big cosmic questions, yet it always has to end up with two people punching each other.” Although I was thinking more in terms of fiction in general than just this story. Though I guess that’s the problem — that it didn’t do enough to transcend the usual.
Yes! And when TOS did it, well, it was the 60’s, and they had to pay their dues to the network. In 2024? On a streaming service? Conflict doesn’t have to equal punching.
Except in most movies and shows today, it still usually does. No matter how elevated the concepts and issues, no matter how deep the personal conflicts, it usually comes down to a climax of two people hitting each other.
I don’t see the suprises honestly. Just a little “alaurms and Excursions” to quote Mr. Brown, to
get people into it. I don’t think its a bad thing if it’s used well. Though from what i’m hearing about THIS fight that was…. not the case
It’s not surprise, but the exact opposite — a reaction to the routine predictability of it.
It’s not that the fight was bad, per se; it just felt a little tacked on and obligatory, and not as well-justified as it should’ve been.
The weird thing was Burnham seemingly attacking Moll out of nowhere, then two minutes later saying “We don’t have to fight!” as if she weren’t the one who started it. Even Moll called her out on that. I think the intent was that she spotted Moll going for the concealed knife that was mentioned later and struck in self-defense, but if so, the directing didn’t make that clear.
How was Discovery able to jump at the end if Burnham was the only person on board?
Why bother having the Calypso setup if you’re not actually explaining any of it, since as filmed the whole mission made no sense?
Speaking of bad direction @Corylea, did anyone else think there was a sniper waiting to take out Admiral Burnham as she waited for her shuttle?
Did anyone else laugh when Burnham told the Progenitor she had to interrupt her training to go help her friends who were in trouble?
The extra dimensional space looked awesome, just a great concept. “We didn’t build it. We don’t know who did.”
End of the day Moll, L’ak and the Breen were reduced to afterthoughts. Fine with me they were the weak link in the season.
I’ll miss this show but I think it returned to the same half dozen things so frequently it was probably time.
Burnham wasn’t the only person on the ship, just on the bridge. Burnham told Zora that she’d travel to a certain place and then her crew would leave, consistent with what “Calypso” said.
Sad to see Disco go. The show was sometimes uneven and played fast and loose with its own science but when it was on, it was on. This episode obviously wasn’t supposed to be the series finale but I’m glad they had a beautiful extended coda that said goodbye without clubbing everyone over their heads.
The device felt alien (always a good thing) and the decision to send away the technology while outright stolen from Indy and the Last Crusade felt right. The expositional Voltron moment where they figure out how to discard the massive dreadnought was a very trek solution as well. It was a very much a stuck landing.
What I think I liked best though is that in a show which more often than not dies a great job being a fan of Star Trek that preceded it in the end celebrated itself. This show always celebrated diversity and put together an incredibly diverse and representative cast finished by highlighting how wonderful it was. And it showed that much like we see behind the scenes, the crew- many of which were 900 years out of time- had become its own family.
My feelings about this episode were mixed. I agree with Christopher about the ultimate handling of the Progenitor tech. To me, it felt obvious, easy and ultimately unsatisfying. For whatever reason, the stakes just seemed curiously low for a finale. Season four, despite its frustrating pacing and reliance on well-worn genre tropes, ultimately struck me as weightier and more consequential. (The “chemical language” conundrum was a far more satisfying sci-fi puzzle than the mystery of “Which of the two most obvious ways do we arrange these triangles?”) But for better and for worse, the series finale felt like DISCOVERY through and through, so I imagine hard-core fans of the show will be mostly pleased. Special props to Doug Jones and Wilson Cruz for making the most of their big moments. (And a special “boo” for a crushing lack of Tig Notaro. Her “Are you stuck in a time loop right now, Stamets?” scene with Anthony Rapp in “Face the Strange” was my single favorite moment of the whole dang season.)
For a less substantive critique … is it just me or did they go way overboard on the bridge pyrotechnics in this episode? As a constant Trek viewer, I’m very used to gratuitous showers of sparks and exploding panels, etc., but there were just SO many carefully controlled little gouts of flame popping up that it became atypically distracting. Perhaps that’s not new for this episode. But once we tuned into it, my fiancee and I couldn’t stop giggling every time someone punched the “fireball” button. It would have made for a perilous drinking game!
Oh … and like Keith, I had the sudden thought that they were going to reveal an 89-year-old Salome Jens when the Progenitor appeared, and was slightly disappointed when that turned out not to be the case. The actor who took on the role did a fine job — I just really love Jens, and couldn’t help but imagine her delivery of those lines! Check her out in John Frankenheimer’s 1966 science fiction masterpiece SECONDS if you haven’t.
Agreed about the fireballs. They’re an Osunsanmi trademark, and it’s frustrating how he doesn’t even try to pretend they represent any kind of realistic circuit damage but are just standalone flame pots in the walls — heck, in this case, there were fireballs erupting from the middle of the floor or something. It’s ridiculous.
And yeah, I was expecting Salome Jens too. It wouldn’t be as gratuitous a case of small-universe syndrome as Kovich being Daniels instead of some other ex-Temporal Agent; if that particular Progenitor was the one who delivered the message to posterity in the programmed DNA, it would make sense that she would continue that spokesperson role in the pocket dimension. But of course, it turned out to be impractical.
Those fireballs are like something out of Galaxy Quest. I mean why in gods name would a starship have a flamethrower in the floor of the bridge?
I second watching Seconds! Great film.
I haven’t been keen on probably two-thirds of the previous nine episodes of this season, but I really enjoyed this finale. It’s by no means perfect (the punch-ups got tiresome and the Daniels revelation wasn’t great – Kovich is so much cooler than Daniels ever was), but I still found myself smiling through about 70% of the extended runtime. So yeah, not a great season, but easily my favorite finale since The Next Generation said goodbye thirty years ago.
“Then they get rid of the dreadnought with an absolutely delightful trick of separating the saucer, putting each bit on either side of the dreadnought, and activating the spore drive, which sends the dreadnought far away instead of Discovery.”
That’s a trick that I think works better in a series finale than the season-ender they intended. Because that really isn’t an option they should routinely have (or more likely, forget they have) in a weekly series where “teleport the more powerful antagonist arbitrarily far away” would doubtless be really useful more than once.
Just as well that the spore drive that enables it is being kept a one-off. Even if I have to squint really hard to believe it.
(No doubt the pathway drive is super-nifty, but does it really beat instantaneous transfer anywhere? And in eight centuries no one could solve or work around the need for either a tardigrade or Stamets? But dramatically, it’s really better not to have the spore drive available in future series.)
>That’s a trick that I think works better in a series finale than the season-ender they intended. Because that really isn’t an option they should routinely have (or more likely, forget they have) in a weekly series where “teleport the more powerful antagonist arbitrarily far away” would doubtless be really useful more than once.
agree 100%, because now it just makes Disco a transport option, right.
‘we need to be at sector X right now and disco only you can do it’ now becomes ‘ok, let’s stack all the ships in the fleet between Disco sections and move them.’
Season 1 established that using spore drive too much threatened to destabilize the mycelial network and destroy the entire multiverse, which was a built-in explanation for why it would be abandoned by the time frame of the other Trek shows. Season 2 established that Discovery was given an exemption to use it for emergency purposes only, and in season 3, it was essential to use it due to the limitations on warp drive. But seasons 4-5 just ignored the whole “risk destroying all creation” thing. Heck, the end of season 4 gave me the impression that they sacrificed the spore drive and no longer had it, but in season 5 it was business as usual.
Yes – their use of the spore drive for the remainder of the series had me relegating the “damage to the mycelial network” issue to the same limbo TNG’s warp five speed limit went to. They certainly weren’t acting like they were weighing the possibility of DESTROYING ALL LIFE IN THE ENTIRE MULTIVERSE in order to shave time off their trips. (Which would have been ethically dodgy even for galactic level threats like Species 10-C.)
It also really strained disbelief that there was something that could do that, but fortunately nowhere else in the entire muktiverse of countless species over (as this episode points out) billions of years did anyone cross the line. Ignoring it honestly seems like the best option, except maybe lightly waving at it if anyone asks why the Federation doesn’t use the spore drive.
(“But what about all the less responsible polities, assorted mad scientists, fanatics, or people who just flatly don’t believe it? And if that’s a risk, isn’t leaving your one functional spore drive out in space where anyone could grab it and copy it kind of crazy?” “Let me explain: shut up.”)
“Yes – their use of the spore drive for the remainder of the series had me relegating the “damage to the mycelial network” issue to the same limbo TNG’s warp five speed limit went to.”
Voyager‘s moving nacelles were intended behind the scenes as an upgrade that solved the subspace deterioration problem so the warp speed limit was no longer necessary, although it was never made explicit. I tend to assume the same thing about spore drive — that 32nd-century science was able to tweak it enough to make it safe, even if duplicating it was more difficult for them.
“It also really strained disbelief that there was something that could do that, but fortunately nowhere else in the entire muktiverse of countless species over (as this episode points out) billions of years did anyone cross the line.”
Yeah, that’s my reaction to anything in fiction that can destroy the entire universe. Given the vastness and age of the universe, if anything could destroy the whole thing, then it’s effectively a statistical certainty that it would’ve already happened.
Which reminded me of Douglas Adams – if someone figured out was the universe was for, it would be replaced by something even more inexplicable.
”There is another theory that states that this has already happened.”
To be honest, I found this episode to be deeply disappointing.
1. This story suffers from the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” problem of the fact the protagonists achieve absolutely nothing and there’s a very real argument that it was all for nothing. A massive archaeological find is destroyed and “too powerful for us mortals” makes no sense in a setting as sci-fi heavy as Star Trek.
2. La’ak not coming back was a nice subversion but I’m a huge fan of the actor and bluntly I found myself far more invested in the Breen Primarch, politics, and infighting story than I was over the Progenitors.
3. People comment on the fact that DISCO had so much more to tell and for the life of me, I feel this season shows they were spinning their wheels. The Burn was the most interesting plotline for the entire series but they more or less just ignored it in Season 4 and 5. It just became another Star Trek with none of the new elements introduced.
4. “Sending Zora off to find Craft” was so incredibly awkward, I kind of wish they’d just left it non-canon or unaddressed for future writers. Craft is just some random guy in the middle of a storm and having it be her mission is now something that taints the love story as it’s now all manipulation on Zora’s part.
5. Daniels as a revelation is also something that feels like the worst of Picard Season 3’s, “Hey remember X?” It doesn’t really inform or change the character, IMHO.
I don’t know about Discovery, but that really wasn’t a bug in Raiders, it was a feature; as that movie was partly influenced by Treasure of the Sierra Madre and other hard-boiled fedora-wearing stories where the protagonist walks away with a busted lip and little to show for it.
I’ve said before, the claim that Indy doesn’t affect the plot in Raiders is a misunderstanding of what the plot is about. It’s not about retreiving the Ark; that’s just the MacGuffin. It’s about Indy trying to reconcile with/rescue Marion and defeat Belloq, and he achieves both. (Even if he achieves the latter mainly just by surviving.)
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Misc thoughts:
Overall I look at everything before the epilogue in the context they assumed they had more time when they wrote it and I look at everything in the epilogue as ‘we need to tie up some loose ends and don’t have a ton of time to write and shoot this’.
As far as the Breen. I think the intent this season (whether done poorly or not) was to set them up as the Federation nemeses and slowly expand their culture as had been done to Klingons, Cardassians, etc. Future seasons would hopefully have added more nuance.
As far as the arc – yeah, we all saw that coming. I’d have preferred if some portion of the tech survived or had some ongoing impact, i.e. perhaps a new way of exploring that doesn’t depend on the spore drive. There was a really good ‘5 year mission’ storyline possible there.
As far as Mol and L’ak. Meh. After all that, do we really think Mol was just going to take Burnham’s word there was nothing they could do (I will consider the argument that she too met with the Progenitor and was told that or otherwise figured that out. But that whole storyline was trope central.
If its only a few weeks later, why is Saru back in Starfleet as an Admiral instead of still on diplomatic service?
In short, the last episode was exactly what I expected. Which is not bad.
As far as the Epilogue, I am beyond thrilled that when the series was ended they gave them time and resources to finish some storylines (and ignore others – yes they got cameos but where the heck has the flight crew been this whole season – I am holding out for a short trek of their misadventures). Some were rushed a bit, but that’s understood.
However, I have a real issue with the whole ‘Send Zora into space for a long time’. One, Zora has been established as a sentient being, basically. Sending someone out into space to sit for a VERY long time by themselves to wait for an individual, when you have a spore drive is just cruel. There’s no need to do that at all. Just tell Zora when and where she needs to be a lot closer to the end point and if you must, park her as an interactive museum exhibit or something.
As far as Daniels. Sure, he introduced himself as that. Doesn’t mean he is, or that’s where he began. He said specifically ‘I have lived many lives’. Maybe he’s actually a higher order being and Daniels and Kovach were just two of his personas at different times as needed (I was actually thinking it would be a Gary Seven reference before he said Daniels). That said, in reality, I think someone just thought it would be a fun easter egg.
If we assume the Epilogue to be 30 years or so after the wedding was sent off (side note, massive kudos for the line of respect of all the other ships), it mean’s Bookhams son got Captain really quick. We probably had a few years of wacky Kovach missions before they had a kid – let’s say 6 – then 18 years until ready for academy, which means Captain in 6 years. But at least they didn’t show him captaining the Discovery B or the Enterprise M or whatever. (Random missed opportunity thought – since Discovery was thought lost in the original timeline, would they retire the name or were there future versions around?)
I recognize the limitations but would have been nice to see where some others ended up. We know Saru and Burnham were Admirals, Book is doing some form of conservation (I am assuming they are living on Sanctuary 4). Tilly is still teaching. Where did Linus end up? Did Rhys get his own ship? What was Stammet’s legacy? Is Tal running R+D. Give the future novelists some hints? Did Rayner mellow and get another ship? Yes, it would have been a bunch of exposition and throwaway lines. I am fine with that!!!
But overall I am most pleased that the epilogue gave the cast one last time to get together as much as possible and have some closure after the unexpected ending. This cast really did have some chemistry and that deserved to be recognized.
“As far as the Breen. I think the intent this season (whether done poorly or not) was to set them up as the Federation nemeses and slowly expand their culture as had been done to Klingons, Cardassians, etc. Future seasons would hopefully have added more nuance.”
I kinda doubt it, given that the show did next to nothing with the Orions and the Emerald Chain after season 3.
“However, I have a real issue with the whole ‘Send Zora into space for a long time’. One, Zora has been established as a sentient being, basically. Sending someone out into space to sit for a VERY long time by themselves to wait for an individual, when you have a spore drive is just cruel.”
Except that Zora is an evolved form of the Sphere, which was already hundreds of thousands of years old when it downloaded its data into Discovery‘s computer. So a thousand years is just a long nap to her.
Also, as I mentioned above, they never said that the actual purpose of her mission was to wait for Craft, and “Calypso” makes it clear that Craft was not the thing she was waiting for, because her orders to wait precluded her from taking him home.
As for Daniels, yes, I think it’s likely that that wasn’t his real name (I called him Timot Danlen in my DTI fiction), but that doesn’t make him a cosmic being, just an undercover agent who adopted different aliases as needed.
While it can be interpreted however the viewer wants (or however future writers care to if they revisit the character), it really doesn’t seem in the spirit of that exchange to just give another alias. Kovich should either refuse to answer, give his real name, or at worst reveal that he’s someone known to Burnham in a different context, not cement a connection that (presumably) means nothing to her.
I do wonder if they’d have done a Gary Seven connection if Picard hadn’t already gone to that well. (Though of course his encounter with Kirk’s Enterprise postdates Discovery’s departure.)
“it really doesn’t seem in the spirit of that exchange to just give another alias.”
It does if Burnham knows him by that alias from the historical record of NX-01’s adventures, which have presumably been declassified by the 32nd century. After all, as he said, he’s led many lives in many times. The only reason he’d have to introduce himself as Daniels from the Enterprise, as opposed to any of his other identities, is because he knows Burnham will recognize the reference.
The true name of Agent Daniels….Wesley Crusher!
I’m glad Paramount/CBS allowed them the extra time and money to give the season and the entire show a proper sendoff. If there is one show that deserved closure is the very show that began the current era of Star Trek. Discovery was the first. Without it succeeding, we wouldn’t have Picard, Short Treks, Lower Decks, Prodigy and certainly not Strange New Worlds or the upcoming Section 31 Georgiou project. It couldn’t just be another season finale. It needed more.
Not only it delivered in spades with the Saru/T’Rina wedding, it went above and beyond anything I was expecting by giving us that extended 15 minute look into Michael Burnham’s future. It gave us “All Good Things” without having to deal with time/anti-time technobabble or Q inteference. In a way, it’s the opposite of the ending of Six Feet Under. This a celebration of life – even within its human limitations. Michael is now closer to the end than the beginning. And yet, her smile and warmth tells us all we need to know: she lived.
This extended coda plays beautifully into the very ideas the Progenitors were trying to convey to Michael. Life is a gift that needs to be embraced: the good, the bad, the endless possibilities. Trek has always been about exploration and choices. I can’t think of a Trek finale that surmises those qualities better than this one.
There is only one missed opportunity I wished the episode had touched upon. When Michael tells the Progenitor about her insecurities – that she is not qualified to handle their power – , this is a moment where she could have recalled her actions in “Vulcan Hello” and “Battle of the Binary Stars”. Rash decisions she made under fear and that ultimately shaped her entire arc and the show as a whole. The time travel episode touched on that earlier, but this should have been the perfect opportunity to close the book on Michael Burnham, the show coming full circle. And I think it could have brought up Georgiou, as well as her well-known foster Vulcan family.
Speaking of the Progenitor, I welcomed the last-minute twist – that they weren’t in fact the creators of that technology and power. Some might be disappointed. Personally, I think it maintains that sense of mystery and wonder by not having to explain everything. This way, it leaves room for future Trek shows to explore the possibilities of existence. Plus, I don’t think throwing the portal beyond the black hole’s rim necessarily means it will be out of reach forever. Who’s to say future generations or species couldn’t develop technology advanced enough to bypass even the crushing G forces of that region?
I’m feeling both bittersweet over the fact that it’s ending, but also immensely satisfied that Discovery has stuck the landing. I’m hopeful this show will age well.
“Plus, I don’t think throwing the portal beyond the black hole’s rim necessarily means it will be out of reach forever.”
Indeed. Technically, any ship capable of going faster than light is by definition capable of escaping from a black hole’s event horizon, since that’s just the radius at which its escape velocity equals the speed of light (hence a horizon beyond which no events can be observed, even though there’s no physical object there). So hiding it there really shouldn’t stop anyone from retrieving it, if they know it’s there to retrieve.
If they want it to be inaccessible, they can certainly invoke things like the tidal forces, radiation environment, and time dilation. How relativity and warp travel interact is necessarily vague and handwaved, but assuming they have to drop out of warp to pick it up it could take an arbitrarily long time (or forever) from outside the event horizon.
It’s probably enough for them to be confident that no known technology can retrieve it, while of course if some writer has some sort of plot-relevant use for it in the future they can equally well [TECH] a retrieval mission.
Which doesn’t seem super-likely, but I sort of figured that Genesis technology was likewise memory holed until Lower Decks dug it up for an episode.
Oh, yeah. Kovich was Daniels. Was definitely not expecting that. Don’t know how I feel about it, but I’m glad he mellowed out and became a bit more responsible since the Temporal Cold War. Now I wonder if the writers had this planned or just came up with it and threw it there at the last minute. For that matter, now I’m wondering if David ‘The Fly’ ‘History of Violence’ ‘Eastern Promises’ Cronenberg has actually watched ST Enterprise and the Temporal Cold War episodes for character research or just for fun. Now there’s an interesting guessing assumption.
I read that neither Cronenberg nor Martin-Green had any idea who Daniels was. The producers felt the mysterious character needed some reveal at the end and thus explained the reference to them. I’d like to have heard their reactions in some behind-the-scenes clip!
“Who?”
I actually think that identifying Kovich as Daniels was probably planned from the introduction of the character, given that he seemed to be the expert on time travel in season 3. What I do wonder, though, is whether they originally planned to reveal it here, or whether that last scene in Kovich’s office was part of the new material.
Not a bad episode, but soooo many monologues that i was skipping. boring fistfights where I couldn’t believe that both parties would just be chatting without any injuries or even looking at least a bit tired. Unused fancy tech making the whole series kinda pointless to me. And then a very confusing final mission for Discovery as I did not see “Calypso”, so have no clue what all that is about.
Oh and I had to double-check if Daniels was really that annoying guy from ENT. And I did not like the fan service of collection from all TV series on his shelves….
But…everything else worked well for me, people had things to do, got married etc, except for the monologues and the fight scenes, the episode had a good pacing and I loved Saru’s diplomatic approach of threating the evil Breens.
All in all, there are many characters I will miss from the series, so just for that I would have been happy to have a few more seasons, but it went on probably long enough.
Ah…i DID see Calypso, just had 0 memory about it. this final mission makes no sense still…if the ship was sent for Craft, it would make no sense that the ship would have to stay any further. Eh.
As I mentioned above, Burnham didn’t say the ship was sent for Craft, just that she happened to hear the word “Craft” mentioned in passing in reference to the mission. Maybe the reason they let it slip in her hearing is because it’s unimportant to the actual mission.
Help me out here. So Admiral Burnham took Discovery into deep space for a final resting place. Ok I get that so that it ties in with the short clip “Calypso”. How does Burnham return home? Did I miss some dialogue (as I was getting a bid bored with the long drawn epilogue?) Let’s say another ship picked her up and that means ANOTHER farewell scene with Zora (not shown). Or a Time Agent picked her up and returned her back home? How did it work? I read most of the reviews and all mentioned the final emotional mission. But where is the return “cab” ride?
As Burnham told Zora, she and the unseen skeleton crew would leave the ship at its destination once they arrived. Presumably they had a warp-capable shuttle onboard.
There are no Temporal Agents anymore, since time travel was banned after the Temporal Wars. And the scenario involves no time travel, since Zora’s mission is merely to wait there until she’s needed. Plus it may not be a final resting place, since “Calypso” implied that Zora was waiting for something specific other than the events of the short.
Michelle Paradise has stated that the final scene, tying into Calypso, was planned for Season 6, and thatbit was a thread that the felt needed to be tied up. I can only assume it would have been a tidier explanation had Season 6 happened.
I worried I’d find the episode unsatisfactory since season 5 wasn’t intended to be the final season but I came away satisfied and moved. I teared up a little when Burnam let her memories wash over her, especially her getting a hug from Saru. I wish Discovery continued for another season, but I’m fine ending like this. Besides, there will be plenty of novels and comics continuing Discovery‘s voyages.
Everyone’s talking about Salome Jens, but I was kinda hoping they’d get Jeffrey Combs to play a Progenitor.
Would’ve been a fun “oh, that’s why…” in-joke.
It is strange to me that it was so important to them to tie up the loose end with “Calypso”, both planning the next season around it and devoting a significant fraction of their limited farewell screentime on it. The Short Trek was a sweet vignette, but Star Trek is *full* of loose ends to pull on that no one can (or needs to) address onscreen.
Mid season I briefly wondered if it took place in the averted future where the Breen destroyed Starfleet Headquarters. But if not, leaving it as an isolated story that it’s unclear how it fits in would have been fine.
I’d forgotten Discovery was in its pre-reconfiguration look. But that seems to go along with things like the TOS bridge not being consistent with Strange New Worlds or what Klingons look like, rather than something worth explaining in story. (And I know they did explain the latter, but they shouldn’t have.)
The whole thing is so convoluted.
I feel like, when Michael Chabon wrote “Calypso,” he clearly intended it to be a standalone short story. I doubt he even intended for the ship to be the Discovery, but those were the sets that they had available so that’s what we got.
But then mid-way through the second season, they fired Gretchen Harbets and Aaron Berg and retconned the already-half-finished story arc about the Red Angel into being about time travel so that Disco didn’t have to be a prequel anymore; and they figured, “Hey, let’s do something clever and have them go to the future from ‘Calypso’ and make it look like it was intentional!” But then, with the Sphere Data as the MacGuffin to get them to go into the future, it just didn’t make sense to leave the ship abandoned for a thousand years, as needs to happen for “Calypso” to take place, so it didn’t directly tie in, even though the first few episodes of Season 3 have characters calling the Federation the “V’draysh” as Craft did, implying that it is the same future.
And then they ran out of time, so they hastily retconned that actually “Calypso” is set a thousand MORE years in the future, and also the ship was restored back to its 23rd century configuration, and also Zora was specifically instructed to wait there for Craft by a time traveller, even though the whole beauty of “Calypso” was that it was blatantly just about a chance encounter between two lonely souls.
Anyways, I think that Discovery‘s entire story arc after the first season was shaped by a desire to fit what was only ever intended as as a standalone short story into canon.
The opening shot of “Calypso” does clearly show Discovery‘s name and registry number on the hull.
I think it’s an overstatement to say the entire story arc was shaped by “Calypso.” I think it just borrowed a few elements from it here and there, because the short was so admired.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that it was Chabon’s original intent. None of the distinctive features of Discovery that had been established up to that point are relevant in that short; even Zora was implied to just be a result of leaving a ship’s computer on so long that it developed self-awareness before the retcon about her developing out of the sphere data. “Calypso” would work just as well if it were set on some generic starship we’d never heard of.
I searched for some Chabon interviews to see if he mentioned it, and he didn’t address it, but apparently the original idea came from a treatment by Discovery staff writer Sean Cochran, which Chabon then revised and took to script. So it’s not like an outside writer came in with a pre-existing standalone idea that was adapted to DSC. It originated with the DSC staff, so I think it’s likely that it was always intended to take place on Discovery.
After all, I think they would’ve wanted it to have at least one familiar “character” in it to anchor it for the audience. The only other Short Treks episode that had no established characters in it was “Children of Mars,” and that was a prologue to Picard.
Making the whole “Calypso” tie-in even sillier: Short Treks isn’t even ON Paramount+ in my country anymore! They give pride of place at the very end of the episode to a reference that’s only going to mean anything to the audience if they happen to remember the details of an inaccessible short film released six years ago to very little fanfare.
Well, to be fair, the setup for “Calypso” isn’t really what the scene is about. It’s just the excuse to put Burnham on the bridge one last time and have that very metatextually self-indulgent fantasy sequence of all the cast members hugging, and then to end with the line-up of ships honoring Discovery as it leaves port for the last time. Viewers who haven’t seen the short might not understand what the point of the mission is, but the mission is incidental to the valedictory intent of the scene.
I would still expect to do something meaningful with the ship instead of placing it somewhere and then abandoning it. That makes very little sense to me…Maybe there was a point of that mission, but then they should have explained it or ignored the mission completely. Burnham could have said her goodbye to Discovery when the ship is placed in a museum or something.
I thought it was an excellent finale — to evoke the crew’s old exercise shirts, very Disco: Michael being special*, the decision she made, so much feels. Even though I’m rather a heart-on-my-sleeve guy myself, I’ve found the show’s hard lean into being the most emo in the franchise a bit overboard in spots, yet this episode really delivered in the best ways. (*Here due, admittedly, not to an inherent MichaelBurnham-ness but to her being the captain / top focal character and the right person in the right place at the right time, no different from, say, Picard having been Locutus and the guy who met Kirk in the Nexus for his last battle and the guy who melded with Sarek to share his strength and the human chosen to be arbiter of Klingon succession, etc., none of which are somehow as much a stretch to me as the Red Angel business.)
Saru was badass in that negotiation. The bit with Tilly and Stamets earned its chuckle. I did half-expect Culber, after he realized that he couldn’t explain how he knew the right frequency and was fine with it, to abruptly vanish, joining Kara Thrace for a drink somewhere beyond our ken…
Good job, Discovery.
There was nothing in Moll’s character-building or in her interactions with Burnham to prepare us to accept her *not* lashing out when Burnham told her the Progenitor’s tech would not restore L’ak. That is, it was not believable. I think it was even Burnham who triggered the body to discorporate, and I expected Moll to come unglued!
I thought Burnham was putting L’ak’s body back into the pattern buffer in that scene. In case they’d find some other way.
One thing I was unclear about was where the ‘main’ original episode ended and where the epilogue picked up? Was Saru and T’Rina’s wedding in the original cut, or is that the start of the epilogue? Or is the epilogue solely the ’30 years later’ stuff?
I’m sure the wedding reception was the original planned ending point, since it wraps up character threads that have been developed throughout the season — the engagement itself, Burnham & Book getting back together, Tilly coming up with the mentoring program to resolve her season-long feeling that the Academy was missing something (and to tease the Academy show in development, no doubt). And its final scene with Burnham and Book on the beach feels very, very much like a season-ending scene. So I’m sure the added material is only the 33rd-century epilogue.
I’m sad to see this show end with such a weak story arc. I was never interested in Moll, L’ak and the Breen, which would have been an OK two-parter, and the MacGuffin wasn’t compelling. I would prefer to have spent more time with the established characters rather than throwing in new ones. Cap’t Rayner did grow on me, though. (Someone has to be on the bridge while Michael’s off on adventures!) However, I’m very glad we got a good, long epilogue that ended with a wedding and and not a funeral.
Yeah, Moll and L’ak seemed like they might have been fun villains of the week; I never bought them as arc villains.
Hmm. Maybe what they should’ve done was to have the Progenitor tech become more widely known from the start, and have Discovery in a race with multiple antagonists also seeking it, a different foe each week.
For that to work, it would have been nice to have had some more idea as to what this technology could actually do. Apparently, possessing the technology would have allowed the Breen to destroy Starfleet headquarters, but they seemed to come pretty close to that in “Erigah” without the technology. Moll was after it to bring L’ak back to life, which is something that it explicitly can’t do.
I don’t think that was really about the tech itself so much as what it represented. Yes, the Breen already had the weaponry to destroy SFHQ, but their warring factions were too busy fighting each other to pose a threat to outsiders. If the Primarch (or Moll) had claimed the tech, it would have given them the political clout to unify the other factions behind them and pursue conquest, even before they figured out how it worked.
Come to think of it, I don’t think that whole “This is the bad future that happens if Moll gets the tech first” flashforward really makes sense in context of the way the season turned out. After all, Moll did get there first, and she was unable to solve the incredibly easy final puzzle on her own. And even if she had, the final step was to meet with the Progenitor, who would have probably decided she was unworthy of the tech. So it doesn’t really hold together. (Maybe Future Zora just faked the image of the destruction on the viewscreen to motivate Burnham?)
Wait, what happened to the overall retrospective? Did it get pushed back because KRAD was busy last week?
Sorry, this was a rude way to express myself. KRAD has every right to be busy, and I don’t begrudge him that. I’m just sad as I am looking forward to the article.