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Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x15 - "Will You Take My Hand?"

Rate the episode...

  • 10 - A wonderful season finale!

    Votes: 89 26.2%
  • 9

    Votes: 51 15.0%
  • 8

    Votes: 64 18.8%
  • 7

    Votes: 46 13.5%
  • 6

    Votes: 18 5.3%
  • 5

    Votes: 24 7.1%
  • 4

    Votes: 15 4.4%
  • 3

    Votes: 10 2.9%
  • 2

    Votes: 7 2.1%
  • 1 - An awful season finale.

    Votes: 16 4.7%

  • Total voters
    340
I thought it was going to be a flash back.


Trill

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yeah!!!!!!!!!!! trill!!!!!!!!!!!
 
I loved the Enterprise. Anyone who complains about it just wants to complain. It was perfect.
Qo'nos was wonderful. Loved the debauched vibe of the Orion joint. It was all very Blade Runner.
Loved Georgiou walking off with an evil smile. She will SO be back at some point and that makes me happy. Which lets me overlook how weird it is for Starfleet to let her walk away.

Letting Ash Tyler saunter off with a head full of valuable intel is harder to reconcile. I mean, WTF? And he's going off with ... the woman who fucked with him? I think he is potentially interesting, but I wasn't really buying that resolution.

The big negative is the resolution of the war. The plan was to blow up Qo'nos and hope the remaining Klingons will just slink off? Um, huh? And the alternative is to give L'Rell the trigger so she can become Empress? And all the Klingons just buy that, rather then finding another way to defuse a bomb they know she's not really going to blow up? Eh, no, bullshit. At least it wasn't a time travel reset, it could have been worse.
Given that it had to be wrapped up at warp speed, a bad choice was inevitable. I just wish the writers had not painted themselves into that corner and had given themselves more time to play out a better ending. Just as I wish Lorca's arc had ended with a lot more complexity and subtlety.
This season needed 4-6 more episodes, in those two places.

It didn't need a valedictory medal ceremony. Starfleet not only resets Michael's status but lets her lecture them? Oh, bitch please. If you want her to make that speech, have her make it in her head.

Overall, it was a very strong first season, way better than any other Trek series. (And that includes TOS. Those who think its first season was miraculous have selective memory. There is some godawful crap in there and even some of the gems have a big helping of cheese on top.)
Episodes 9-11 were some of the best shit I've ever seen in Star Trek, I freaking loved it. And the Harry Mudd episode was great fun, too.
There wasn't any episode that outright sucked. The weakest ones were "meh," or had some great stuff that was unfortunately weakened by ridiculous plot points (like the ones I just discussed).
I loved how adult the show is. The cast is terrific. And boy, did it LOOK great. Everything it did was technically well executed. The direction was mostly quite good, and in some cases (episodes 9, 10 and 13 stood out for me) it was exceptional.

I will be on board for season 2 and I am hopeful for it. The writers have left themselves a lot of options. I hope they choose more wisely with more room to breathe.

My personal prayer is that they bring on Prime Lorca. I like the rest of the characters but boy, do I miss Jason Isaacs.
 
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ON aftertrek they indicated next season would deal with the "why did spock never mention michael" question which implies they are going to pick up where they ended.
That's ripe for problems. They should think twice (no, three times) before they engage in that kind of tomfoolery. Let sleeping dogs lie. It was an idiotic decision to make her Sarek's ward in the first place. Nothing, but nothing, in the entire season could not have been equally attributable to some random Vulcan's ward. Tying it to Sarek and Spock tests the writing team's skills and, frankly, they have not impressed me of late.

Going back to that well is asking for trouble. They should simply let it go.
 
It certainly wasn't a well-thought-out plot, that's for certain.

As for Tyler...that was just insulting. It's like Discovery writers were afraid to pull the trigger on practically every single potentially realistic and interesting plotline they introduced:

A nuanced portrayal of a wartime commander who'd suffered a lot, was still suffering, and had more common sense and strategic acumen than all of the Admiralty combined...

...nah, he's Mirror Universe. Because Prime Universe Starfleet captains are all neutered utopian beta-males (except for Kirk but, apparently, the writers have forgotten that Kirk acted a lot like Lorca did and no one's condemned him for it).

A sensitive portrayal of a male victim of sexual abuse and torture (by a woman, no less!), suffering from PTSD, and struggling to come to grips with the aftermath of what he'd experienced...

...nah, he's this completely implausible bastard stepchild of Frankenstein's Monster and the Manchurian Candidate.

A realistic portrayal of a human, raised on Vulcan, who's struggling to find her way, only to make a horrible decision to mutiny against her surrogate mother/captain, and now must find a way to redeem herself every time she looks in the mirror...

...nah, mutiny is no big effin' thing; here's a full expungement of your record.

Good lord, they could've done so much with all of these issues but...they didn't. They didn't do it. They went the easy way out with each and every one of them and the end result was a poorer product, in my estimation.

I kind of feel as if this is just the normal growing pains of the series and, perhaps, a season-long prologue of sorts. I suspect we'll get the episodic planet-a-week type adventures next season to a greater degree and, mayhap, that's for the best.

/nailedit
 
If were counting young and animated then Spock might be the winner
Nimoy- TOS, TAS and films
Bill Simpson- TAS young Spock
Carl Steven, Vadia Potenza, Stephen Manley, and Joe W. Davis. Movies younger Spock
Quinto- Reboot
Jacob Kogan- Reboot young Spock
Hadn't though of that. Yep, Spock wins!
 
Anyone catch the rather enormous models of the Shenzhou and Discovery on AfterTrek? All lit up and everything. They look beautiful - are those Polar Lights or QMX prototypes?
 
I'm kind of speechless at the moment at how completely lackluster that was as the ending of an arc.

I'll give the episode some credit. It didn't fall into the traps I was predicting. They didn't reset the timeline with the Spore Drive after Qo'nos was destroyed. Ash didn't make a heroic sacrifice, yet was still effectively written off the show as a main character. Burnham wasn't forced to kill MU Georgiou. And there were individual moments in the episode I liked. I really would have enjoyed something like the Qo'nos scenes if they occurred earlier in the season.

But the episode was such a huge failure in wrapping up the Klingon war. It appeared promising at the beginning, and then it's resolved by - Burnham talking Georgiou out of setting off the bomb? And then somehow, L'Rell using the bomb as a device to gain control of the Klingon Empire (essentially holding the population hostage)? Even if the Klingons were the kind of race to fall for that sort of thing, all they saw was a little electronic device - surely they'd want some sort of proof. If a person on the street comes up to you and claims they have a nuclear bomb, chances are you won't take them seriously after all. If this was a random episode of episodic Trek - even the second part of a two-parter - I'd give it some slack. But not as the end of a season-long arc. It makes season 3 of Enterprise look like a masterpiece.

As a conclusion to Burnham's arc, it was almost as bad. There were some individual character moments which worked, but there was way too much time spent by Ash, Sarek, and Georgiou complimenting Burnham and telling her how special she is. This shit is why people (wrongly IMHO) call Burnham a Mary Sue - the writers just love to insert dialogue to tell us how amazing she is as a character, rather than show it through her actions. Because the writing on this series has been so dodgy, I don't even have any real idea that she grew as character and began making better decisions. She just happened to luck out where her impulsive emotional decision in this particular case was the right one. Ash had far better character growth over the season than Burnham, and he's been more or less written off except as a recurring character.

So yeah. Either the writing team has been asspulling this entire time, and they never had a plan, or they are, frankly, idiots. Either way, they need to purge the writers room and start over with an entirely new creative team.

Edit: Rated it a five, lowest of the season. It probably wasn't the worst, it was just I had higher expectations as the season finale, and it utterly failed at that.
 
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