WHY WE LIKE IT: An exciting climax.
WHY WE DON'T: The forced epilogue.
REVIEW: Right off the bat, let me say that it's a damn shame that Discovery couldn't end on its own terms. They could have used the Progenitor story arc to drastically change the universe, give us a kind of end point for Star Trek history where humanity (and the rest of the sentients) takes its place next to the Q, or at least shows that evolution in the making. Instead, we get an epilogue shot months later, and the episode exposes just how pointless the Progenitor arc actually was. On the one hand, Moll doesn't get to resurrect her love. On the other, Burnham unsurprisingly destroys the tech because 1) we don't need it (we already have a lot of diverse life in the galaxy) and 2) no one she knows, herself included, is ready to access such technology. Stamets is the only one I really feel for here, as all that science is lost to the ages. Anthony Rapp hits all the beats really hard in that moment and at a brisk pace. No one even mentions the possibility of recreating Book's planet. Sure, if this was an Indiana Jones-type quest, it's expected that the hero goes from "it belongs in a museum" to "we're not ready for it", but exactly. Expected means predictable. Which is all more annoying because we've been at this for 10 hours.
Nevertheless, I can't say the climax isn't exciting. Burnham caught in an Escher-like environment, fighting Breen and Moll inside environmental "windows" to give us a little wire action before the show gets down to more intellectual and ethical puzzles. A lot of special effects. Space fights outside the portal, including a couple of crazy moves by Discovery (the saucer separation/spore drive tactics is nuts!). "Action Saru" bluffing the second Breen Primarch off course. A lot of cool-looking stuff. I do continue to think NuTrek's effects are a little messy - they love their debris - and that in this case, Burnham's descriptions of what she sees (like the "negative space" between lights that leads her to the tech) don't quite connect to what's on screen. I just take her word for it, cuz it sure is pretty. Moll makes things worse, Burnham makes things better, you know the drill. If you didn't like the Progenitors being behind all the humanoid races, it's revealed that they only found the tech, and there are some even more ancient aliens who made THEM (not sure it changes anything). The one bit that doesn't really work for me is Culber's. He's been struggling with a strange spiritual feeling, but it turns out it's just an implanted Trill memory that makes him useful for catching the portal in a tractor beam at a crucial moment. All this angst and self-reflection and it's just Battlestar Galactica Lite.
So where does this all leave our characters? Well, the first ending is "and the adventure continues", and none of the characters are especially changed. They were, after all, planning further seasons. Burnham and Book are back together. Boook has planted the World Root on Sanctuary Four (good thing it shows up at the end because this and "Molly" were pretty far in my memory). Saru gets married. Tilly figures out that what she's missing at the Academy is a mentorship program (is the Starfleet Academy series on the boards about THIS Academy after all - which might justify the cowardly non-use of the Progenitors' tech - or is it set in another era?). Stamets, Culber and Adira have resolved their various anxieties. Moll might be recruited by Kovich as a secret agent. Kovich, in fact, is Agent Daniels from Enterprise (a potentially mystifying revelation at this point), which puts a big question mark over his involvement in the past three seasons' events. How much of this history did he know and how much did he nudge towards better outcomes? Surplus to requirements, I dare say. But I suppose we can look forward to alternate media (novels, comics) playing with Discovery as THE ship that goes on Red Directives to adjust future history to the shape Kovich wants it.
"Let's see what the future holds." Cut to that damn add-on. Decades later, Burnham and Book have grown old and cheesy together. They have a big house on Sanctuary Four and a son who just made captain (named after Booker's tragically dead nephew). Admiral Michael Burnham has one last mission to perform, which is to loop us into the Short Trek "Calypso" which takes place a thousand years later. In that minisode, a character called Craft finds an abandoned Discovery, awakens the computer Zora, and has a sort of relationship with it. So Burnham's Red Directive mission is to bring the ship there and abandon it. She somehow mentions the word "Craft", so they're probably saying Kovich knows future history and is manufacturing it..? It's less than satisfying. So really, this is a moment designed to give the ship a send-off, with dozens of shuttles saluting, and Burnham a vision of her crew hugging it out (when did they shoot this? did they bring everyone in to commiserate including the ones who have been absent for a while?). Don't ask me how she spore drives away without Stamets - I guess he fixed that problem over the years. They're just going for sweet, not logical, but again, it's not really their fault, but Paramount's.
LESSON: You can't always get what you want.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-High: A lot of cool and badass moments, but seasonal arcs don't work well in Trek, and in this case, a slow epilogue drags the show down to a stop. A series finale is still a series finale, and usually essential.
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