I honestly have no idea what’s supposed to be so morally repugnant about wiping out a race that’s attempting to wipe you out. That’s clear cut self defense and basically every human society that has ever existed would think the idea of being unwilling to kill someone trying to kill you as bizarre. I don’t even understand why this is supposed to be some high ideal. Sure, if you have some alternative to wipe out the threat with less damage, take it - but we’re talking about kill or be killed. The lesson here is that the truly noble people would go out willingly, with a whimper, instead of doing everything they could to save themselves?
They didn’t have to paint themselves into that corner by making the stakes so high. Maybe we could’ve had an actual moral dilemma based around the idea that the klingons were winning the war, but posed no threat of wiping out humanity and the rest of the federation - then you could have a moral question of “is it worth it to wipe them all out if it ends a war that’s hurting us but doesn’t pose an existential threat?” but the imagery that started this episode was a klingon fleet coming to wipe out Earth. I had no idea the whole time why we were supposed to take Burnham’s side and to think this plan against the Klingon homeworld was so unthinkably evil.
So obviously the big speech about federation values was not some sort of righteous, glorious moment.
The show misses Lorca. He was the only one taking the whole damn war seriously. It’s funny - in Trek you apparently need a secretly evil mirror universe guy to be able to look at war rationally, because Our Heroes are too far up their own asses patting themselves on the back about being too good to do anything about it (and actively trying to prevent others who were doing something about it) while Earth is minutes from being destroyed.
Enjoyed the series overall, had problems with the spore drive, Ok with the mirror universe, dubious about mirror Philippa being put in charge of anything, and the entire last episode was a bit of a mess. I’ve had to go online to understand better the entire Ash/Voq thing, but I think I’m there now. Just have to quickly hand wave the overlay of the original Ash Tyler persona on Voq’s massively operated on body
He sleeps with the space whales - died when his ship and his mirror counterparts were under attack and ‘swapped’ places. Mirror Lorca managed to survive.
It’s unclear to me if the ships swapped or just Lorca - Lorca was likely transporting via one of those ‘emergency transporter’ things.
Don’t be so sure. They’re only speculating that he’s dead, since “no Starfleet officer could have survived that universe alone”–and there’s a bit of a clue in that Mirror!Georgiou still seemed to believe that her Lorca was on the run, whereas if he’d been definitely killed with the Mirror!Buran (that is, if Prime Lorca had gone down with the ship with everyone thinking it was Mirror Lorca), she’d probably have said so. Plus, there’s the Never Found A Body Syndrome.
And…spoiler ahead for new novel Drastic Measures, which takes place ten years before the series and focuses on Prime Lorca and his involvement in the Tarsus IV massacre…
…a “post credits scene” (really, it’s a scene after the author’s acknowledgments!) confirms that he’s alive and in a holding cell in the Mirror Universe. Now, I know that in the past, Trek novels haven’t been held to be canon, but the author of this one has said that he’s been working with the cooperation of the DSC writers’ room. So I don’t think they’d have let him put that in there if they didn’t plan for it to be true. (Plus, Michael’s story about her parents’ deaths, mentioned in the first DSC novel published months ago, was confirmed in this ep.) Whether they’re going to build on it remains to be seen, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t.
I think maybe that’s why they haven’t confirmed who the new captain is going to be–they want to leave it open in case they can persuade Jason, who’s well-liked by fans. In interviews in the past few weeks, Jason’s said in one breath that he’s done, and in another that we shouldn’t believe anything he says about his future on the show, that he’d return if there was a good story for Prime Lorca, and that it’s still a secret that he’s been keeping even from his wife and kids.
I’m not sure there was any epiphany or character change. We started out with Burnham advocating firing on the Klingons as a form of pre-emptive self-defense that could create a more lasting peace (since she didn’t seem to want a war herself) because she believed Klingons only made peace when confronted with strength. We ended with Burnham willing to utilize a genocidal weapon of mass destruction, belatedly and indirectly through L’Rell, to achieve peace because she believed (and L’Rell confirmed) that Klingons only made peace when confronted with strength.
This was why this is one of the many reasons this didn’t feel like a character-based show. There was no real character arc. Burnham didn’t really change.
I’ve been thinking about the state of the Federation at the end of this season as it compares to TOS and if you squint it kind of works.
Star Fleet in Discovery was more like TNG. It felt big, expansive, and a wide variety of ships. TOS Star Fleet was much smaller. There were only 13 Constitution Class Star ships. A vicious war a decade earlier could explain that.
Also the Federation was much more wild west in TOS. A post war recovery could explain that too. I definitely isn’t a perfect fit but t does kind of work.
Hear, hear. I have been reading reviews and comments on various sites, and your comment is the first I’ve read in this vein. I was starting to wonder if I was some kind of psychopath or something, but as you say: if it’s in defense of an existential threat, you do what you have to. Note that when BSG confronted a very similar question, the civilian president and top military brass were unhesitatingly in favor of doing it.
Still, a pretty good episode. I would consider the final two episodes of the season among only four or five episodes total that I would praise that much. I don’t think there were any episodes that were actually outstanding, but at least ten of them ranged from “shaky” to just plain bad. So it’s an encouraging sign.
One thing I find amazing about the status quo as we find it at the end of the season is that there are (unless I’m totally blanking out on someone) no characters who are straight white males. Zero. By “characters” I mean people who at least occasionally say a line of dialogue, not extras seen in the background. And there is only one white guy at all, Stamets (who is of course gay).
This radical state of affairs was effectively obscured for most of the season by the fact that the captain of the ship was a straight white male. But then he was revealed to be an evil Terran and stand-in for Trump, who subsequently died and was therefore absent for the final two episodes. All this on CBS, the most “red state” of networks! Stunning.