A grand showdown has arrived between Discovery and Control. With help from the Enterprise, our heroes must hold off the killer AI long enough to complete Burnham's Red Angel suit and place the knowledge Control needs forever out of its reach.
Discovery has often had to balance emotional payoffs with logical storytelling, and it has always tipped the scales in favor of the former. It destroyed the scales this week, forgoing everything in the name of what would look cool or feel cool. It chased these highs so doggedly that even while there were some good moments throughout the episode, they were always instantly undermined.
Take the epic space battle delivered in this episode. Star Trek has never given us anything like this. It was expensive, awesome (in the true sense of the word), and immense. But it was also quite hard to follow at times. In showing us so much, it was hard to take in. Where were all these ships in relation to one another? Where was everyone in all this? What happened to Po?
Take Burnham's tearful goodbyes to Spock. (Both of them.) They were both potent scene setups. But as a series, Star Trek: Discovery keeps wanting to have personal moments like this at times when it has amped up the jeopardy to such a degree than anyone taking a personal moment is being foolish and selfish to do so. Get in the damn suit, Michael! Open the damn wormhole, Michael! I totally agree that Sonequa Martin-Green is great, she's great with Ethan Peck as Spock, and so you want to give these two their moment. But they simply cannot realistically have that moment under these conditions.
Take the fun gravity shifting fight pitting Georgiou and Nhan against Leland. Even though we've seen this trick in everything Royal Wedding to Inception, and know exactly how it's accomplished, it was enjoyable. I mean, we've never seen Michelle Yeoh fighting this way, so it was a fun scene that once again showcased her skills. Yet there were still confusing and unusual things about the sequence. The pursuit of Leland began with a Starfleet officer responding to an invitation to torture someone with "Yum yum." What the hell? And the topsy-turvy fight seemed to end with a sudden hole blasting two people who weren't previously in the scene out into space? Or something? I totally lost track, or didn't understand. Where was this fight actually happening and what were the real mechanics of it?
Take the table-setting for season three. It was undeniably tantalizing. The very notion of a setting centuries beyond any previous Star Trek is inherently interesting. All the rules can be rewritten. The shackles of a half-century of continuity will be removed. In short, I'm into it! But... if killing Leland was sufficient to make all the controlled Section 31 ships go inert, how was that not defeating Control? And if Control was defeated, then why did Discovery have to go through with traveling to the future?
So yes, there were plenty of compelling moments throughout the finale episode -- but each was entwined with an element of confusion or awkwardness. And then there was the rest of the episode, which was just stacked from top to bottom with unexplained (and often unexplainable) questions:
When Burnham takes off from Discovery with the express objective of getting as far away from the ships as possible as fast as possible, why does she start with a close flyover of the Enterprise's saucer? (It did look amazing, though -- and that's what I mean: the show goes for what feels right, whether it makes sense or not.)
I thought Discovery was on a skeleton crew -- basically, just the bridge crew, who wanted to stand by Burnham's side and follow her into the future. So who were all those anonymous casualties filling up Sickbay? Did the whole crew decide to go with her? That seems implausible, and something we should have been shown if that was what we were being asked to accept.
Culber had made up his mind to leave Stamets, and then changed it without explanation. What exactly motivated Culber to go back? It wasn't the brush with death; Hugh decided before he knew Paul had been critically injured. They're really just going to jerk the couple (and us) around all season and then wrap it up in one quick scene with no answers?
Weren't there tons of solutions to the problem of the torpedo lodged in the Enterprise's hull other than Cornwell sacrificing herself? Why couldn't those half-R2-D2/half-Eve-from-WALL-E repair robots take care of it? How about the transporter? It was working, since they used it to beam Spock back from the shuttle. (While Enterprise's shields were up, seemingly.) Couldn't they have beamed the detonator out of the weapon, or beamed Admiral Cornwell out of the area after she closed the door? And why isn't the whole ship just made out of that door-and-window that can apparently withstand the blast?
Speaking of Spock and the transporter.... wasn't Tilly somewhere deep in the guts of the ship at that very moment trying to get Discovery's shields working again so it could travel through the time rift? So, if its shields were down, why couldn't Discovery beam Spock aboard so he could go with them like he wanted?
What are the limitations of the time crystal? The setup for all this told us Burnham was on a one-way trip to the future, but then she time-hopped around all throughout the second season to send the five previous "signals." You might assume that jumping across a greater length of time depletes the crystal faster, but then how exactly did the sixth and seventh signals work? Did she travel to the future, then come back once to leave a signal for Discovery to follow, then travel back again to leave the final signal for Spock? So... not a one-way trip after all?
How could it ever make sense to put Ash Tyler in charge of Section 31? Given his history, is it ever possible to completely trust him enough to let him operate without direct supervision?
After Spock comes up with the continuity-preserving idea that no one should ever speak of Discovery or Michael Burnham again, why does he immediately go and make a personal log entry about it? Is it completely impossible for anyone else to listen to his log, under any circumstance?
There were flecks of gold to be panned from this episode. But to me, it was also a lot of style over substance, a complete Bruckheimerfication of Star Trek. Flashy, mostly empty calories. I remain hopeful for next season, but I found this finale bombastic and illogical. I give "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2" a C.
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