Nope. This is a tailored crisis - tailored for a starship with a jump drive. You need the ship to deal with the radioactive rain of rocks, and furthermore you need the ship to be packing a dark matter asteroid.
It's a step-by-step plan with, if not split-second, then at least minute timing. If not for the careful guidance of the Red Things, a starship with the means to deflect the radioactive ringfall would not have arrived at Terralysium at the exact minute required to complete this step of the quest.
We're yet to see whether all the Red Things are directly related to carefully orchestrated quest steps. But the spore drive is front and center there: unless Connolly got the distances wrong (a distinct possibility, considering the dialogue in "New Eden"), the second Red Thing apparently wasn't even one of the original seven, but an all-new signal, in any case appearing in such a way as to force the use of the spore drive. Everybody is seeing these signals, including Klingons and Terralysian primitives, but only the Discovery out of all the assets in the universe is in a position to act on them. And rather clearly because she is being put in that position.
Plenty of suspects for who is doing the putting. Spore Aliens who want to regulate Starfleet use of the technology - we've seen one who claims to be such. Do-gooders who subcontract Starfleet to Quantum Leap and Put Right What Is About To Go Wrong when they Gods Themselves are too busy - we've seen the angelic connection and, in a seemingly unrelated thread, the Preserver obelisk (now upside down and glowing red, so Preserver Satanists?). Spock - he's explicitly in on it somehow, he's a sensitive individual who might be doing mushrooms, and we know mere mortal individuals plugged into the mycelial net can work miracles. And then Starfleet/Section 31 - they are up and about, they may soon be revealed to be manipulating Spock, and they would be the only Alpha Quadrant regulars other than our main heroes and L'Rell who actually know the spore drive exists.
Any of these players could have enough clout to put a stop to Starfleet use of the tech. None can touch the existence of the tech, though - the stakes there are the highest ones imaginable, as all the universes vitally depend on the tech continuing! But this is also reassuring, as if the continuing could even in theory be in jeopardy, the repercussions would have been felt already. Not even an Evil Stamets can put much of a dent in this, as we so readily observe.
Timo Saloniemi
