Excellent timing, you just saved me about half of what I was going to write.
I'd like to add that, philosophically, I consider two things highly in stories; ambition counts over execution, and the ending is the most important part. If you're not trying anything special, but you do it perfectly, well, that's great, but if you're trying something audacious and it doesn't quite work out because your reach exceeded your grasp, well, points for trying. And the ending tells you what a story is about. It provides unity and closure to themes, catharsis of the emotional journeys of the characters, and, in a very real sense, tells you what the story was in the first place. We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.
Discovery's first season had an amazing middle-section, but started flying off the rails with "What's Past is Prologue." I didn't like what they did in that episode, I thought it was the laziest, most conventional way to play out their twist, but they did it perfectly, so I didn't give it too much gruff. This one... didn't have that degree of spectacle, and had the larger problem of having to tell us what the Klingon War meant, in a dramatic sense, both to Burnham and how it fit in to the larger context of the Federation's foe-to-friend relationship with the Klingons, which was an abysmal failure. Bribing the Klingons with what they (or rather, one of them) actually wanted to get them to call off the war? No checks, no deadman switch, no Ash-and-L'rell-have-to-agree-to-keep-the-bomb-turned-off? I'd say they were setting up the rematch at Organia, but there wasn't the slightest indication in the episode this was anything other than a return to the pre-"Vulcan Hello" status quo.
And what the hell was that cliffhanger? "The Enterprise shows up, looks fine, but apparently has a busted radio and is having a planetary- or galactic-war-scale emergency"? Never mind the way they brutalized the ship by cutting half the neck off and stitching the bits together like Cotton Hill's legs and then giving it a blacklight body kit, where can they go? I realize the intended answer is "anywhere," but what is that supposed to give me as a viewer? It reminds me of how Michael Pillar talked about how he didn't worry much about how "Best of Both Worlds" might conclude, since he didn't think he'd be writing it, but this takes it to a whole new level. It feels like the kind of thing the showrunner might do if they were being fired and didn't care for their replacement. "Have fun replacing Jeffery Hunter/Bruce Greenwood, Leonard Nimoy/Zachary Quinto, and Majel Barrett, not to mention figuring out a story worth teaming up our crew with the Enterprise. Sucks to be you if you can't and would rather keep that in your back pocket, because now you're committed!" Supergirl's first season dancing around Superman was better-done (and it wasn't done that well), and even though they put him on-screen in the season season premiere, they didn't end the first with an out-of-left-field scene saying, "Guess what, sick of these bozos? Well, the person/ship you really want to see is here!... in one to two years." They spent fifteen episodes building up this cast, only to end the season with a promise that they're immediately going to be overshadowed by pop-culture legends. Bra-vo.
Jeeze, Discovery. You were doing so, so well, but you had a pile-up of your good-to-great execution overflowing your very conservative ambitions. I know it's been denied that the season was plotted out as an anthology show, but it really feels like nobody was expecting more than thirteen episodes with this crew and they didn't mind burning their best bridges rather than husbanding them throughout the show (and making odd decisions about them. Sure, it's more of a pain in the ass for Burnham the way they did it, but character-wise, it would've made way more sense for Lorca to skulk off to fight another day and become a pirate king or something and the Emperor to fight to the death, even with Lorca being recontextualized and wiping out all his existing characterization and motivations, so, I guess, no one would care that they were getting rid of him).
