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.
