What was L'rell's plan?

[Refuge]

It's really kind of obvious, IMO. I didn't have any trouble understanding it.

All things considered, it wasn't actually a bad plan. It's just that every single part of it blew up in L'Rell's face (literally, in one case) and she left too many things to chance that she didn't actually control. So in that sense, it's a lot like the way intricate plans backfire in the REAL WORLD, no?

It was a CRAP plan. It required Ash to be taken under Lorca's wing - gee that was a definite maybe. Then it needed Lorca to give this unknown quantity a job with decent clearance and access. How did L'Rell know she was going to be able to get on Discovery herself? How come the idiots needed to go to the mirror universe for Ash to awaken? When he did 'awaken' he was a train wreck!

Dumb writing of a dumb plan.

 

[Lord Garth]

I made no claim that I thought it was a great plan. Just that I think that's what her plan was. And when you have nothing left to lose, what harm are definite maybes?

 

[lawman]

It's really kind of obvious, IMO. I didn't have any trouble understanding it.

The plan was there but the show just didn't do a great job laying it out as a plan...

Okay, a little more seriously now... I am really having a hard time figuring out what kind of a plan you guys saw.

In episode 4, L'rell and Voq had just spent six months loitering on a disabled ship (for whatever reason), and then saw Kol come along and take over their whole "movement" lock, stock, and barrel. Voq objected; L'rell went along (obviously under duress, but cooperative enough to get Voq exiled rather than killed). And then she proposed this "plan" to him. What would it entail?...

Well, first she would convert him into a seemingly human sleeper agent. How?

• She would immediately get promoted to commander of a Klingon prison ship (presumably by Kol, who already didn't trust her)
• She would take possession of a Federation prisoner of war (who had somehow survived for months), i.e. Tyler, make a sex slave of him, and then subject him to a mind scan
• She would kill the prisoner and subject Voq to gruesomely invasive surgery to supplant most of his body parts with the prisoner's, then superpose the prisoner's consciousness over Voq's
• She would do this at a level of sophistication that could fool all but the most painstaking and sophisticated Federation scans (despite knowing little or nothing about Federation tech, since the Empire has had only cursory contact with the Federation for decades)
• Note: she would do this instead of just implanting Voq's consciousness into Tyler's brain, which could have skipped all the messy surgery stuff (and any necessary healing time)
• She would do all of the above in complete secrecy, and in the space of three weeks, which is the elapsed time between episodes 4 and 5

And that's just part one! Then she had to infiltrate him into Starfleet. So...

• She would successfully kidnap a Starfleet captain en route between a highly secure Starbase (it was hosting a meeting of admirals, after all) and the most highly classified ship in the fleet, and imprison him
• Despite being able to pull this off (and gain intel and strategic advantage from it the old-fashioned way), she would then engineer the "escape" of the captain in the company of Tyler, who she has somehow conditioned to be in good fighting form and not a quivering mass of post-torture PTSD without revealing to him who he really was
• She would have the extreme good luck to have the captain in question be the captain of the most highly classified ship in the fleet, the existence (and experimental spore drive) thereof being something she couldn't possibly have known about, inasmuch as nobody outside of its own crew and top Starfleet brass knew about it
• She would have the even better luck to have Tyler not be relegated to extensive debriefing and/or hospitalization, but instead immediately appointed to be the captain's new Security Chief and trusted confidant

Okay, so he's in place. What next?

• Tyler would gather useful intelligence... apparently in a completely haphazard way, since he didn't know who or what he was and therefore couldn't possibly have a strategic agenda
• While L'rell waited for Tyler to do his thing (apparently indefinitely, since they had no means of contact), she would immediately (in the very next episode!) be given charge (again, implicitly by Kol) of a much higher-value Federation prisoner, namely an admiral
• Rather than grill Admiral Cornwell for intel using her allegedly sophisticated interrogation skills, she would attempt to... win her over? defect? it's not clear... in a completely hamfisted and slapdash escape attempt that was immediately detected and quashed, thereby revealing her betrayal of Kol and very nearly getting her killed, but for her rescue by the Federation
• She would have the almost incalculably good luck to be rescued by, and imprisoned on, the very same ship on which Tyler was serving
• She would then wait in a cell, luckily without being interrogated for any of her own valuable intel about Klingon strategy and tactics, until Tyler came to confront her (for reasons she couldn't have predicted), at a time when the brig was conveniently completely unmanned and apparently unwatched by security cameras, and she had a chance to deliver the trigger phrase that would wake him up from being a "sleeper" and put Voq in charge...
• ...which didn't work.

Unbelievably, it's only at this point that her "plan" technically went south. Prior to that, how did she actually expect to have TylerVoq evade Starfleet medical scans? Or to get him posted to a valuable position? Or to make contact with him in order to trigger Voq's consciousness? What did she hope to learn from Starfleet? How did she plan to use any intel he might have gathered to gain an advantage over Kol or otherwise advance the Klingon cause? And was her escape attempt with Cornwell an opportunistic substitute plan, or a contingent part of the original plan, or what? What was her endgame? Even in the first half of the finale, she was still saying that the Klingons and Federation were existential enemies, after all.

We have literally no idea about any of this, and it's hard even to imagine any coherent explanation. Basically it amounts to the plot-twisty equivalent of...

1. Create FrankenSpy
2. ?????
3. Profit!

 

[Terok Nor]

L'Rell's plan was to have the most complicated and convoluted breakup in the history of Qo'Nos. Possibly the entire universe.

 

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

Okay, a little more seriously now... I am really having a hard time figuring out what kind of a plan you guys saw.

In episode 4, L'rell and Voq had just spent six months loitering on a disabled ship (for whatever reason), and then saw Kol come along and take over their whole "movement" lock, stock, and barrel. Voq objected; L'rell went along (obviously under duress, but cooperative enough to get Voq exiled rather than killed). And then she proposed this "plan" to him. What would it entail?...

Well, first she would convert him into a seemingly human sleeper agent. How?

• She would immediately get promoted to commander of a Klingon prison ship (presumably by Kol, who already didn't trust her)
• She would take possession of a Federation prisoner of war (who had somehow survived for months), i.e. Tyler, make a sex slave of him, and then subject him to a mind scan
• She would kill the prisoner and subject Voq to gruesomely invasive surgery to supplant most of his body parts with the prisoner's, then superpose the prisoner's consciousness over Voq's
• She would do this at a level of sophistication that could fool all but the most painstaking and sophisticated Federation scans (despite knowing little or nothing about Federation tech, since the Empire has had only cursory contact with the Federation for decades)
• Note: she would do this instead of just implanting Voq's consciousness into Tyler's brain, which could have skipped all the messy surgery stuff (and any necessary healing time)
• She would do all of the above in complete secrecy, and in the space of three weeks, which is the elapsed time between episodes 4 and 5

And that's just part one! Then she had to infiltrate him into Starfleet. So...

• She would successfully kidnap a Starfleet captain en route between a highly secure Starbase (it was hosting a meeting of admirals, after all) and the most highly classified ship in the fleet, and imprison him
• Despite being able to pull this off (and gain intel and strategic advantage from it the old-fashioned way), she would then engineer the "escape" of the captain in the company of Tyler, who she has somehow conditioned to be in good fighting form and not a quivering mass of post-torture PTSD without revealing to him who he really was
• She would have the extreme good luck to have the captain in question be the captain of the most highly classified ship in the fleet, the existence (and experimental spore drive) thereof being something she couldn't possibly have known about, inasmuch as nobody outside of its own crew and top Starfleet brass knew about it
• She would have the even better luck to have Tyler not be relegated to extensive debriefing and/or hospitalization, but instead immediately appointed to be the captain's new Security Chief and trusted confidant

Okay, so he's in place. What next?

• Tyler would gather useful intelligence... apparently in a completely haphazard way, since he didn't know who or what he was and therefore couldn't possibly have a strategic agenda
• While L'rell waited for Tyler to do his thing (apparently indefinitely, since they had no means of contact), she would immediately (in the very next episode!) be given charge (again, implicitly by Kol) of a much higher-value Federation prisoner, namely an admiral
• Rather than grill Admiral Cornwell for intel using her allegedly sophisticated interrogation skills, she would attempt to... win her over? defect? it's not clear... in a completely hamfisted and slapdash escape attempt that was immediately detected and quashed, thereby revealing her betrayal of Kol and very nearly getting her killed, but for her rescue by the Federation
• She would have the almost incalculably good luck to be rescued by, and imprisoned on, the very same ship on which Tyler was serving
• She would then wait in a cell, luckily without being interrogated for any of her own valuable intel about Klingon strategy and tactics, until Tyler came to confront her (for reasons she couldn't have predicted), at a time when the brig was conveniently completely unmanned and apparently unwatched by security cameras, and she had a chance to deliver the trigger phrase that would wake him up from being a "sleeper" and put Voq in charge...
• ...which didn't work.

Unbelievably, it's only at this point that her "plan" technically went south. Prior to that, how did she actually expect to have TylerVoq evade Starfleet medical scans? Or to get him posted to a valuable position? Or to make contact with him in order to trigger Voq's consciousness? What did she hope to learn from Starfleet? How did she plan to use any intel he might have gathered to gain an advantage over Kol or otherwise advance the Klingon cause? And was her escape attempt with Cornwell an opportunistic substitute plan, or a contingent part of the original plan, or what? What was her endgame? Even in the first half of the finale, she was still saying that the Klingons and Federation were existential enemies, after all.

We have literally no idea about any of this, and it's hard even to imagine any coherent explanation. Basically it amounts to the plot-twisty equivalent of...

1. Create FrankenSpy
2. ?????
3. Profit!

Well, I never said it was a good plan.

EDIT: dangit, @Lord Garth made the exact same joke already.

 

[Prax]

Who had the better plan? L'Rell to unite Klingondom, or Luke Skywalker rescuing Han from Jabba?

 

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

Who had the better plan? L'Rell to unite Klingondom, or Luke Skywalker rescuing Han from Jabba?

I subscribe to the theory (that I only just recently read about like this week!) in some comment section that Luke's elaborate plan (including the droids, Chewey, Leia, and Lando) were actually all separate plans by each individual and they all failed individually, and spectacularly, as if they all went to The Walking Dead School of Killing Negan to learn the art of crafting a plan.

 

[Tim Thomason]

Okay, a little more seriously now... I am really having a hard time figuring out what kind of a plan you guys saw.

In episode 4, L'rell and Voq had just spent six months loitering on a disabled ship (for whatever reason), and then saw Kol come along and take over their whole "movement" lock, stock, and barrel. Voq objected; L'rell went along (obviously under duress, but cooperative enough to get Voq exiled rather than killed). And then she proposed this "plan" to him. What would it entail?...

Well, first she would convert him into a seemingly human sleeper agent. How?

• She would immediately get promoted to commander of a Klingon prison ship (presumably by Kol, who already didn't trust her)

L'rell was a child of two houses (T'Kuvma and Mo'Kai). She said she was bringing Voq to the matriarchs of Mo'Kai, so I assume it is this connection (Mo'Kai and the spymasters and matriarchs) that placed L'rell in command of this ship. Basically, I assume she was a rich girl who was slumming it with the House of T'Kuvma.

• She would take possession of a Federation prisoner of war (who had somehow survived for months), i.e. Tyler, make a sex slave of him, and then subject him to a mind scan

In my understanding, Tyler was dead or near-dead (along with several others?) when the matriarchs found him and stored him. The sex slave stuff was conditioning on Voq after the fact.

• She would kill the prisoner and subject Voq to gruesomely invasive surgery to supplant most of his body parts with the prisoner's, then superpose the prisoner's consciousness over Voq's
• She would do this at a level of sophistication that could fool all but the most painstaking and sophisticated Federation scans (despite knowing little or nothing about Federation tech, since the Empire has had only cursory contact with the Federation for decades)

The warrior culture, as represented by Kol and to a lesser extent T'Kuvma, do not know this. The spymasters have access to all the technology of the quadrant in order to keep up with the espionage arms race.

• Note: she would do this instead of just implanting Voq's consciousness into Tyler's brain, which could have skipped all the messy surgery stuff (and any necessary healing time)

Healing time might be a matter of hours with dermal regenerators, and brain transference of that nature might be beyond their level.

• She would do all of the above in complete secrecy, and in the space of three weeks, which is the elapsed time between episodes 4 and 5

Tyler was a prototype program, probably prepared for weeks by the matriarchs (and planning for years). The rush job is probably why they failed so miserably.

And that's just part one! Then she had to infiltrate him into Starfleet. So...

• She would successfully kidnap a Starfleet captain en route between a highly secure Starbase (it was hosting a meeting of admirals, after all) and the most highly classified ship in the fleet, and imprison him
• Despite being able to pull this off (and gain intel and strategic advantage from it the old-fashioned way), she would then engineer the "escape" of the captain in the company of Tyler, who she has somehow conditioned to be in good fighting form and not a quivering mass of post-torture PTSD without revealing to him who he really was
• She would have the extreme good luck to have the captain in question be the captain of the most highly classified ship in the fleet, the existence (and experimental spore drive) thereof being something she couldn't possibly have known about, inasmuch as nobody outside of its own crew and top Starfleet brass knew about it
• She would have the even better luck to have Tyler not be relegated to extensive debriefing and/or hospitalization, but instead immediately appointed to be the captain's new Security Chief and trusted confidant

Okay, so he's in place. What next?

Yeah, crazy luck. It's possible that the matriarchs have other contacts/means of manuevering Lorca (or any Starfleet Captain?) into place, but I think the original plan was to just have Tyler escape with whomever and, ideally, he would activate and maneuver things on his end.

• Tyler would gather useful intelligence... apparently in a completely haphazard way, since he didn't know who or what he was and therefore couldn't possibly have a strategic agenda
• While L'rell waited for Tyler to do his thing (apparently indefinitely, since they had no means of contact), she would immediately (in the very next episode!) be given charge (again, implicitly by Kol) of a much higher-value Federation prisoner, namely an admiral
• Rather than grill Admiral Cornwell for intel using her allegedly sophisticated interrogation skills, she would attempt to... win her over? defect? it's not clear... in a completely hamfisted and slapdash escape attempt that was immediately detected and quashed, thereby revealing her betrayal of Kol and very nearly getting her killed, but for her rescue by the Federation
• She would have the almost incalculably good luck to be rescued by, and imprisoned on, the very same ship on which Tyler was serving
• She would then wait in a cell, luckily without being interrogated for any of her own valuable intel about Klingon strategy and tactics, until Tyler came to confront her (for reasons she couldn't have predicted), at a time when the brig was conveniently completely unmanned and apparently unwatched by security cameras, and she had a chance to deliver the trigger phrase that would wake him up from being a "sleeper" and put Voq in charge...
• ...which didn't work.

I think the trigger was a backup, and he was supposed to be awake the whole time (or at least, shortly after the escape). She does seem surprised that he still thinks he's Tyler.

Unbelievably, it's only at this point that her "plan" technically went south. Prior to that, how did she actually expect to have TylerVoq evade Starfleet medical scans? Or to get him posted to a valuable position? Or to make contact with him in order to trigger Voq's consciousness? What did she hope to learn from Starfleet? How did she plan to use any intel he might have gathered to gain an advantage over Kol or otherwise advance the Klingon cause? And was her escape attempt with Cornwell an opportunistic substitute plan, or a contingent part of the original plan, or what? What was her endgame? Even in the first half of the finale, she was still saying that the Klingons and Federation were existential enemies, after all.

We have literally no idea about any of this, and it's hard even to imagine any coherent explanation. Basically it amounts to the plot-twisty equivalent of...

1. Create FrankenSpy
2. ?????
3. Profit!

I think Tyler was an ambitious program, but it had alot of faults, not helped by the fact that L'rell and Voq hijacked it due to their politicking. I like to think that the Mo'Kai learned from these mistakes, and dozens of perfectly adjusted Klingon spies are working their way through the hallowed halls of Starfleet.

 

[lawman]

I have to admit, that's an impressive job of rationalizing things. Some bits of it hold up better than others, IMHO...

L'rell was a child of two houses (T'Kuvma and Mo'Kai). She said she was bringing Voq to the matriarchs of Mo'Kai, so I assume it is this connection (Mo'Kai and the spymasters and matriarchs) that placed L'rell in command of this ship...

Valid point. Quite possibly Mo'Kai had its own ships and was not beholden to Kor and the House of Kol. But if that's so, how did she wind up working on Kol's own ship after Cornwell was captured?

(See, this is an example of how I think a little more time and attention devoted to internal Klingon politics — preferably not subtitled! — would not only have been interesting in its own right, but would have really helped make sense out of not just the war per se but lots of other plots over the course of the season.)

In my understanding, Tyler was dead or near-dead (along with several others?) when the matriarchs found him and stored him. The sex slave stuff was conditioning on Voq after the fact.

Guess I can see that as a possible interpretation, but I don't recall anything actually on-screen to suggest it. (Granted the flashback scenes were deliberately fairly impressionistic, so it's hard to tell what to take literally.)

The spymasters have access to all the technology of the quadrant in order to keep up with the espionage arms race.

Again... what's on-screen as a basis for this supposition? And if it's true, why would L'rell even need to insert Voq as a new spy, if she already has access to such great intel?

Healing time might be a matter of hours with dermal regenerators, and brain transference of that nature might be beyond their level.

Fair point on the first part of that. (Although if so, you'd think the surgery itself would've looked cleaner too. But again, impressionistic!...) I can't agree on the second part, though... the whole process still had to involve transplanting a consciousness into an occupied brain, whichever direction it went.

Yeah, crazy luck. It's possible that the matriarchs have other contacts/means of manuevering Lorca (or any Starfleet Captain?) into place, but I think the original plan was to just have Tyler escape with whomever and, ideally, he would activate and maneuver things on his end.

Crazy luck? Yeah, you can say that again! It's one thing when characters in fiction succeed at something because luck falls their way (although it still happens frequently enough to be annoying), but it's a whole other thing when the characters' plans depend on the kind of luck that can only happen by plot contrivance. Otherwise, what would we have here?... "Go wherever with whomever, activate on your own, and try to make the best of it" really isn't much of a plan at all. Which is, I suppose, the whole point of the OP.

I think Tyler was an ambitious program, but it had alot of faults, not helped by the fact that L'rell and Voq hijacked it due to their politicking. I like to think that the Mo'Kai learned from these mistakes, and dozens of perfectly adjusted Klingon spies are working their way through the hallowed halls of Starfleet.

I don't doubt there are other Klingon agents here and there in the Federation. At least, there certainly were a decade later. (We know about Arne Darvin, of course... and the ST:Vanguard novels made interesting use of one, as well.) I'd imagine most of them are Augment-style Klingons (whether or not DSC acknowledges the existence of same), though, simply because it would make things so much easier. I'd also imagine most of them actually know who they are and what they're doing, for the same reason.

All of that still leaves us wondering about what the point of L'rell's specific plan for Voq was meant to be. Even setting aside all the crazy plot contrivances, the question still hangs in the air: what was her endgame meant to be? What was the "politicking" meant to accomplish? That is anything but clear.

(I'm pretty sure it was never "blackmail my own home planet with a Federation doomsday weapon," though. Which is another plan that should have never worked...)

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If it was Discovery she wanted access to, she should've collaborated with Mudd, whom she had custody of.

She probably DID. I got the impression that Ash's escape didn't go according to plan, that L'Rell didn't really know anything about Discovery except that it had the annoying habit of showing up without warning at the most inconvenient times. She didn't know how or why, and she hoped to get that information out of Lorca so she could help put the rest of the plan together. But then Ash and Lorca escaped and she took a disruptor bolt to the face, so she had to improvise the rest of it and gather what intelligence she could. Putting Mudd up to infiltrating Discovery was probably part of that, but Mudd never reported back to her (and she also didn't know what methods he was going to use, just offered him a shit ton of money and turned him loose).

She eventually found out, somehow, that Discovery had some kind of new drive system that allowed it to appear anywhere instantly, so her "Plan C" was to defect and get taken aboard Discovery, activate Ash, and have him give her the access codes to the security system so she could take the ship home. THIS plan backfired when Kol caught her red handed trying to defect and had his men beat the shit out of her.

As luck would have it, Voq and Burnham infiltrated the Ship of the Dead and captured her anyway, so Plan D was to activate Ash and have him let her out, then return to Plan C. But Voq's deprogramming mostly failed and he went crazy instead. After that, there's really no "Plan E," L'Rell is just fucked.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The sex slave stuff was conditioning on Voq after the fact.

The sex slave stuff was just L'Rell getting her rocks off. Apparently she's down with the swirl. Also she was in love with Voq, so she probably figured it would make it easier for him to accept his new body (later on) if he knew that L'Rell still wanted him no matter what he looked like.

I think Tyler was an ambitious program, but it had alot of faults, not helped by the fact that L'rell and Voq hijacked it due to their politicking. I like to think that the Mo'Kai learned from these mistakes, and dozens of perfectly adjusted Klingon spies are working their way through the hallowed halls of Starfleet.

I kind of wonder if one of those spies ended up being K'Ehleyr's dad.

 

[the Sisko]

Her first plan post BoBS was to make Voq a hero through having him capture starfleet's most valuable ship and have the Klingon's reverse engineer it's technology, either to use it themselves or to make countermeasures. This tech sharing would make her and Voq an alternative source of political power after Voq handed the Cloaking tech to Kol.Once captured by Kol, her plan was to get out alive, hopefully through Cornwell and the Federation. She knew Cornwell's position gave her final authority over Discovery and wanted to know whether she could make an escape to the federation and live. After that plan was foiled by Kol, she got lucky that she was left to die in the same room as the Admiral, that Burnham decided to add a rescue the prisoner mission to the "defeat the Klingon empire and save a trillion lives mission" and that Burnham didn't kill her before she could transport out.

Once she made her lucky escape, she returned to the initial plan, trying to activate Voq to capture Discovery.

Post return, her plan is to seize control of the Klingon empire, impose a religious/honor based code, turn warlords over each house into senators on a "high council" and unify it's military and diplomatic corps. This is to make the empire a more effective, but still Klingon empire with quadrant-wide force projection. Whether she plans to use Voq as a torchbearer/symbol, a bodyguard or as an example of how the empire is open to all with Klingon blood is unknown. Whether she plans to be the Federation's puppet and return the wartime gains or be independent and strengthen the empire through the additional dilithium mines and star systems gained... or even oppositional to the point of honorable warfare is unknown.

 

[Prax]

So, piecing this together, I'm going to conclude that L'Rell had no original plan, as like Voq, she also sat around for 6 months, and all of her subsequent ideas were reactionary.

So Kol comes to visit the coffin ship, and Voq naively invites him on board. L'Rell being slightly wiser may have been suspicious, but nonetheless, leaves with Voq to get the part from the Shenzhou. When they return, L'Rell sees that tshi is about to go down and improvises. She saves Voq, and begins a plan either for revenge, or to fulfill T'Kuvma's vision. I'm not sure what would be the goal in making Voq a human, before hearing of the Discovery...but whatever. She transforms him quickly and sets him aboard a mock prison ship, with another ally, Mudd. The real Ash must have spent some months on the same ship, as AshVoq has memories of being on it longer than he actually was.

So she hears of the Discovery, starts tracking down Lorca, I'm assuming just for Intel, and the prison break was unplanned. BTW, she knows an awful lot about Lorca. Because her plan failed, she enlists Mudd to get her Discovery, and Voq is on the backburner.

Mudd fails.

L'Rell learns of the Admiral's capture, and takes a gamble in offering her services to Kol. This also backfires, but she is spared her life, and allowed to rot in a cell(with Cornwall, whom she conspired with)

Surprise, surprise, Voq has returned. She may have another chance. She takes it. The rest is history.

I apologize for my poorly written post. I'd really like to hear the writers thoughts on L'rell's goals, and what her plan was. It's possible that important details were cut for time, or maybe to preserve upcoming "twists."

 

[Crazy Eddie]

So, piecing this together, I'm going to conclude that L'Rell had no original plan, as like Voq, she also sat around for 6 months, and all of her subsequent ideas were reactionary.

So Kol comes to visit the coffin ship, and Voq naively invites him on board. L'Rell being slightly wiser may have been suspicious, but nonetheless, leaves with Voq to get the part from the Shenzhou. When they return, L'Rell sees that tshi is about to go down and improvises. She saves Voq, and begins a plan either for revenge, or to fulfill T'Kuvma's vision. I'm not sure what would be the goal in making Voq a human, before hearing of the Discovery...but whatever. She transforms him quickly and sets him aboard a mock prison ship, with another ally, Mudd. The real Ash must have spent some months on the same ship, as AshVoq has memories of being on it longer than he actually was.

So she hears of the Discovery, starts tracking down Lorca, I'm assuming just for Intel, and the prison break was unplanned. BTW, she knows an awful lot about Lorca. Because her plan failed, she enlists Mudd to get her Discovery, and Voq is on the backburner.

Mudd fails.

L'Rell learns of the Admiral's capture, and takes a gamble in offering her services to Kol. This also backfires, but she is spared her life, and allowed to rot in a cell(with Cornwall, whom she conspired with)

Surprise, surprise, Voq has returned. She may have another chance. She takes it. The rest is history.

Yeah, you've pretty much nailed it.

 

[lawman]

Some interesting speculations here. And there's lots of room for speculation, because there was so little given to us on screen that actually resembled any kind of coherent strategy.

Basically it seems to have been a case of the writers offering up just a few scenes that suggest the hint of a sketch of an outline of a plan, without having figured out the details themselves, and hoping that viewers were either (A) so stupid they wouldn't notice the yawning logic gaps, or (B) so smart they'd fill in those gaps with their own imaginations.

A lot of it seems to have been motivated by nothing more than moving the characters around, chessboard-style, to be in place for a couple of specific plot beats. The writers obviously wanted to be able to have a big Reveal that Burnham's lover was actually a Klingon spy, and to have a Klingon conveniently on the Discovery to pull off the war resolution they had in mind. They got to those points by whatever means necessary, never mind if it didn't make a lot of sense along the way.

 

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

So, piecing this together, I'm going to conclude that L'Rell had no original plan, as like Voq, she also sat around for 6 months, and all of her subsequent ideas were reactionary.

So Kol comes to visit the coffin ship, and Voq naively invites him on board. L'Rell being slightly wiser may have been suspicious, but nonetheless, leaves with Voq to get the part from the Shenzhou. When they return, L'Rell sees that tshi is about to go down and improvises. She saves Voq, and begins a plan either for revenge, or to fulfill T'Kuvma's vision. I'm not sure what would be the goal in making Voq a human, before hearing of the Discovery...but whatever. She transforms him quickly and sets him aboard a mock prison ship, with another ally, Mudd. The real Ash must have spent some months on the same ship, as AshVoq has memories of being on it longer than he actually was.

So she hears of the Discovery, starts tracking down Lorca, I'm assuming just for Intel, and the prison break was unplanned. BTW, she knows an awful lot about Lorca. Because her plan failed, she enlists Mudd to get her Discovery, and Voq is on the backburner.

Mudd fails.

L'Rell learns of the Admiral's capture, and takes a gamble in offering her services to Kol. This also backfires, but she is spared her life, and allowed to rot in a cell(with Cornwall, whom she conspired with)

Surprise, surprise, Voq has returned. She may have another chance. She takes it. The rest is history.

I apologize for my poorly written post. I'd really like to hear the writers thoughts on L'rell's goals, and what her plan was. It's possible that important details were cut for time, or maybe to preserve upcoming "twists."

So L'Rell also went to The Walking Dead School of Killing Negan to learn the art of plan crafting.

 

[Prax]

So L'Rell also went to The Walking Dead School of Killing Negan to learn the art of plan crafting.

She definitely could have used some tips from the Lorca school of devious devices, because even though Lorca's plans were reactionary as well, he had pure confidence in them. L'Rell just needed to imagine herself riding the wings of destiny, and she wouldn't have had so many setbacks.

 

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

All those birds of prey but not a single wing of destiny.

 

[middleagednerdgirl]

I don't think L'Rell was hoping to infiltrate Discovery because she couldn't have known of it's existence. Unless she planned to transform Voq prior to learning about the Discovery.

Yeah, that. Of course, she may have hatched a plan to insert her spy into Starfleet without a specific destination, then later targeted Discovery when the Klingons learned about it. It's obvious she kidnapped Lorca and put him together with Tyler for that purpose. That much makes sense.

However, what Lorca did, not only accepting Tyler into the crew but actually giving him a senior position, is not something L'Rell could reasonably have expected. The reasonable expectation would have been for Tyler to be sent somewhere for rehab. She could not have conceivably known about Lorca's propensity to collect strays who are loyal to him. And with Tyler not knowing who he was, she couldn't even count on him TRYING to ingratiate himself with Lorca or stay on Discovery. He could very well have said "Yeah, send me back to Seattle, see ya."

Infiltrating the super weapon that was the spore drive does make sense, but her plan really should not have led there, that was an enormous stroke of luck. Just having a sleeper agent SOMEWHERE in Starfleet hardly justifies the effort or Voq's sacrifice. It would make sense if she had dozens of them out there, in the hope that one would work out. If THAT were her plan, and she got insanely lucky with Tyler, I could have bought it. I actually could see this woman seducing guys with no prospects to sign up for her crazy program.

The concept is made even dicier because L'Rell had to gain access to Tyler, wherever he ended up. That seems like much less than a sure thing. Although I guess I could posit that another agent armed with the right triggers could activate him as well.

The bottom line is that L'Rell's plan as we saw it was ridiculous. Which is unfortunate. She was an interesting character and I kept waiting to find out there was some brilliant scheme unfolding, but there wasn't.

I also wanted Lorca to turn out to be something way more interesting than an evil cartoon. And I wanted the resolution to the Klingon war to not be stupid. As Lorca said to Mirror Stamets, you can't always get what you want.

I enjoyed the series for the most part, and I LOVED episodes 9-12, but the way the threads were tied up mostly pissed me off. Doctor Who has been doing that to me for years, so I'm sorta used to it, but it still sucked.

 

[Burning Hearts of Qo'nos]

I enjoyed the series for the most part, and I LOVED episodes 9-12, but the way the threads were tied up mostly pissed me off. Doctor Who has been doing that to me for years, so I'm sorta used to it, but it still sucked.

So who the hell was the Hyrbrid anyway?

I feel the same way. A fun and enjoyable series, just with some very dumbass writing and plotting at times. Evil Cartoon Lorca wasn't what I wanted, but dangit if I didn't still love him as Evil Cartoon Lorca.