The war goes by the numbers. And boy are the numbers odd! And not particularly even, either.
I mean, 1/3 of the fleet lost is nicely explained, in chilling enough a fashion: single cloaked Klingon ships sneak into harbors and blow themselves up. Three Starbases are lost that way.
Then another ship repeats the "The Chase" trick and burns off an atmosphere, killing 11,000 people - the first evidence of mass casualties after the Binaries, and as such no doubt worth the extra mention here.
No further discussion of casualties, though, even though the Klingons indeed "occupy" 20% of former UFP space. And then they hit Starbase 1 where they inflict some 80,000 casualties, which Admiral Cornwell finds shocking in itself. Are all the other "occupied" regions devoid of major human(oid) habitation to start with, or do these divided and glory-hungry Klingons just skip the slaughtering part in their hurry to even greater conquests?
And then come the weird numbers. SB1 is "100 AU" from Earth and "1 ly" from the location where Stamets dropped the ship at her return from the MU. But...
- We see SB1 in medium orbit of a Class M world. It may be a moon of some sort, despite the surface showing hints of the US southern coastline, but obviously it's not 100 AU from this celestial body to SB1. It's a tad too brightly lit to really be an object three times as far out as Neptune, too.
- The warp jump across that 1 ly takes ages (Tyler has breakfast at least) and is said to be wrought with peril as Klingons may be lurking in "this quadrant". This is barely acceptable in terms of usual ENT or TOS speeds, but that's not the problem. The problem is Klingons "lurking" there, that close, and it still being a surprise they have captured SB1 and not conquered Earth or bombarded her to cinder.
The rest is rather standard fare, devoid of tech (Sarek is dropped off on Vulcan after a short flight, has holocomms later on, Earth apparently and inexplicably remains unconquered) until we get to the main event: planetary bombardment, Starfleet style.
It feels absolutely natural that a Starfleet ship would have "agricultural carriers" on stock, ready to be moved to the shuttlebay for launch from nice big racks. And it's fun to think that Stamets' spore cylinders are standard agricultural hardware, too, easily slipping into these carriers, which have sublight engines for diving into the atmosphere, heat shields, rotor blades for terminal braking and for double duty as landing gear, and the ability to shoot their seed deep into the ground. Heck, even the numbers deployed more or less match the map, despite the heroes clustering the landings rather than spreading them out evenly.
The spores sure grow up quickly. And apparently only Stamets knows how to make that happen, as everybody initially worries how it earlier took months at least. Straal preferred canned mushrooms, but he, too, must have had a source somewhere; it's not told exactly what happened to that source and why our heroes cannot access it, but given the war, this is not surprising.
The purpose? To infiltrate Qo'noS. Literally. Right into their bedrock, which is said to be full of volcanic cavities ("A Planet of Caves" they call it, wink wink). This is the only safe and fast way to get intel for a massive strike against the planet - supposedly, the thick and weird cloud cover is enough to thwart Starfleet long range scanning attempts and has been for the past 100 years, Archer of the NX-01 having been the last to actually visit the place. Or at least its surface, leaving us some perhaps necessary leeway.
Sounds nice, especially as the mushrooms again help: they serve as geoscanners on their own. One just wonders if Stamets couldn't do it on remote, then...
And then they pile up on the ominous. L'rell convinces Sarek and Cornwell to go dirty on the Klingons, in ways not described. And Cornwell makes Emperor Philippatine the miracuously rediscovered Captain Georgiou, giving her formal command of the ship.
Random stuff:
- Cornwell phasers Lorca's fortune cookie bowl in anger. Aboard her own briefing room!. Or at least a room like the starbase-board one where the Admirals briefed Lorca at the beginning of "Choose Your Pain". Why would she move the bowl over to this room (no matter where it is, her unseen ship, the Discovery, whatnot) for this "spontaneous" act of frustration? Especially as the bowl no doubt belongs to the real Lorca, whom Cornwell still thinks fondly of (but is convinced he's dead in a switcheroo that sent him to the MU where no Starfleet officer can survive alone).
- Cornwell beams over with a team to secure the Bridge, then refers to a retinue that beamed aboard with her (ostensibly with "Captain Georgiou" among them). Then begins a perilous trip to SB1. Why does Cornwell's own ship not escort her? Did she send her away on an errand when still thinking Stamets could jump her straight to Sol? But she seemed to believe in the concentrating of forces for Earth defense, at least back then.
- Starbase 1 is big and pretty, much like the canonically unnumbered one from "Choose Your Pain". And now in Klingon hands, painted with a big House symbol in red. Eighty thousand people aboard? We see some starship wreckage nearby, giving us a scale estimate again, and they sure pack 'em up in that Franz-Josephian-Saucer-Plus-Spire!
- While the Emperor is in command, Tyler, too, is at large, but with a wristband that is supposed to limit him somehow. Just a tagging device? With the doors closing on him merely because they recognize him, and not because this device is an automatic-door-closing-tool in its own right (the distinction might matter later on)? Or does the wristband, say, stun Tyler on demand, too?
