Why wasn't it obvious the Klingons would have attacked anyway?

I'm watching the start of Discovery for the first time since the original viewing.

I'm still got getting why Burnham came away with 100% of the blame, even from herself. It was pretty abundantly clear they came there to start a war, and if it weren't for the mutiny, the war would have happened just the same.

 

Poor choice in script rewrites and/or editing.

My hypothesis has always been that Michael was initially supposed to do something much more blatant/worse in terms of actively causing the war, but someone higher up tamped down on it in fear that it would make her seem too unsympathetic as a protagonist. Thus the run-up was watered down, but the originally intended impact remains.

 

Starfleet wanted a scapegoat, so they blamed the person who tried to stage a mutiny against Georgiou. The Shenzhou, Admiral Anderson and his fleet were all up against a No-Win Scenario. If Nick Meyer had any influence and input into the script, it was here. I'm dead-sure of it. The Klingons would've attacked no matter what anyone did. The same as in the Kobyashi Maru Scenario. How Burnham, Georgiou, and Anderson each dealt with it was a test of their character.

The Elite Klingons didn't give a shit about T'Kuvma until they could use him as a martyr. But if T'Kuvma didn't die, it would've been something else. They all wanted to unite and they didn't know how to do it unless it was against the Federation. Something needed to happen and if it didn't happen, they would've found a way to make it happen. Just like anyone who wants something bad enough will find a way to make it happen.

The Klingons also wanted war right around the time of "The Way of the Warrior" and got their fill and then some a few years later with the Dominion War. So this has happened in Star Trek before. And it shows why the Klingons are problematic as allies. Every now and then, they feel like they just have to have a war. They need to have a battle. It's like they have an urge and a craving for it.

 

Thinking about it more, it would have made so much more sense if Burnham had succeeded in firing first. At least it would make sense that she got blamed for it, even though it would have happened anyway. And it would make sense that she blamed herself for it. She did what she thought was logical and it turned out to be wrong.

The situation with Kronos is a bit different in the 24th century than in Disco. The Klingons could not be trusted because Gowron could not be trusted, he was a politician whose brand was being a warrior.

Yeah, I've decided. In my headcanon, Burnham successfully fired first before being stopped.

 

"Too many cooks in the kitchen" syndrome. Something that has been problematic for the show during its first two years. Lets hope we get a consistent vision for the entirety of season three from Michelle Paradise and her crew.

 

I mean, let's look at Michael's decisions in the first two episode.

First bad decision was killing the Torchbearer. The way the shot was put together, it's pretty clear this as an accident however, not intentional. No one blames her for it in Starfleet, and it doesn't appear from the Ship of the Dead dialogue this matters that much.

Michael then convinces Georgiou to lock weapons on the cloaked ship. Georgiou agrees, the ship decloaks. Michael wants Georgiou to fire. She will not. Michael then attempts to disable Georgiou and assume command. Somehow this is considered "mutiny" even though she has no co-conspirators. Regardless, this is why she's drummed out of Starfleet. Notably Georgiou recovers quickly and does not fire first.

There are some odd scenes on the Ship of the Dead - where T'Kuvma mocks Starfleet for saying "we come in peace" which actually seem to imply if Micheal was successful the war might have been averted. That is to say, Micheal is actually doing the right thing in the global sense, even if it's bad for her career. It's never examined again. The Klingons fire first - which would have happened no matter what Micheal did.

They decide to put bombs in corpses - an outright war crime that no one gives a shit about - and disable the Ship of the Dead. Michael and Georgiou beam over in an attempt to capture T'Kuvma alive and stop the war. Georgiou gets killed in a fair fight, and then Micheal deliberately turns her phaser from stun to kill and murders T'Kuvma. Here she arguably makes a deliberate decision which causes the war, but the plan to capture T'Kuvma was hatched by her, Georgiou, and Saru, and even Saru wouldn't have known she murdered T'Kuvma. Regardless, it's never mentioned she killed in cold blood again.

So yeah, pretty fucking confusing.

 

I swear I must be the only one who doesn't get confused by this...

 

I'm not confused either.
I thought it was very clear.

 

You mean Lord Garth's idea that Michael didn't cause the war, but was used as a scapegoat? It's possible, but I have two issues with it.

1. Why does Starfleet need to have a scapegoat for the war? Generally speaking, you blame the enemy for starting the war. Even if a cock-up on your own side contributed, you quietly punish them away from the media.

2. Michael says absolutely nothing in her own defense, either at the court martial or later. Yes, I get that she's wracked by guilt over the death of Georgiou. And she's absolutely guilty of disobeying orders and assaulting a commanding officer - even I suppose "mutiny" if the word has changed by the 23rd century to no longer mean a conspiracy. But she should know that she didn't actually cause the first shorts to be fire, no matter how much she beats herself up about how everything else turned out.

 

That's way to rational of an approach for an emotional decision. She blames herself for the outcome, for Georgiou's death and what she feels she failed to stop.

Partially as making an example out of her, as evidenced by her notoriety even on the prison ship. Partially to ensure that Starfleet could avoid any blame in the start of the war. One need only to look at the events at the Genesis Planet to see how the Klingons would use anything to cause a war.

 

I'm with y'all.

 

I'm not saying there's absolutely no Watsonian way to explain the rationale in the first two episodes. But there is no real-world example of using an individual as a public scapegoat for a military cock-up involving a major war. The Dreyfus Affair comes close, but France and Prussia were not war at the time, with the accusations related to espionage. Wars tend to cause "rally round the flag" mentalities, where no one on "our side" will be seen as publicly to blame unless they publicly show "disloyalty."

Regardless, the being blamed for causing the war was not really needed in terms of the narrative. The important elements of the beginning arc was that Michael betrayed her Starfleet oath and failed to save her commanding officer/substitute mother figure. In a global sense the Klingon War needed to happen for the arc to make sense, but she did not need to be blamed for causing it, and it didn't result in the arc being any more compelling.

 

The higher up the food chain you go, the more political things get. With everything. The Admiralty, the Empire, it doesn't matter. And if Burnham goes rogue, she just gave Starfleet Command someone to blame, who they can say they punished. If T'Kuvma dies, the Klingons have someone who they can turn into a cause. In both cases, the Federation and the Klingons have convinced their peoples it's not their fault. It was someone else. The Klingons blame Burnham because of X, the Federation blames Burnham because of Y, and those who think "STD Sucks!" blame Burnham just because.

I think Burnham was guilty of mutiny. She should've been punished for that, as she was. But I also think the Klingon War would've happened one way or another. For me, it's a question of what specific blame to pin on Burnham, not whether or not any blame should've been pinned on her at all.

 

Not confused, it was just plain dumb.

 

YMMV.

She was as she tried to usurp lawful chain of command.

 

Burnham might have been guilty of mutiny under Starfleet definitions, but she's not under real world ones.

From Wiki:

For something to be a mutiny, two or more people have to be involved. Michael did not have any co-conspirators, therefore within our modern definitions, she was not a mutineer.

A Watsonian explanation is the definition of mutiny changed by the 23rd century. The boring, Doylist one is that no one in the writers' room had enough of a background in military history to understand what mutiny actually was.

 

Burnham being guilty of mutiny under Starfleet regulations is sufficient for the story.

Also, mutiny has been a catch all term in Hollywood productions for decades. I can recall it showing up in M*A*S*H in a similar fashion to Burnham, again, applied only to one person and moving all the way to court martial.

It is neither new nor offensive use of the term in a Hollywood production.

 

I didn't have a huge hangup about it, but it did show the writers' room didn't "do their homework."

I had a much harder time late in the first season where the implied that the Klingons were having stunning military success against the Federation with all of the different houses just randomly attacking whatever the hell they wanted in an uncoordinated fashion. Worse, they directly said that the Klingons were doing better than they had been doing before Discovery vanished. It implied no one understood one thing about strategy, and logistics - because ultimately those are the things that result in winning a war, not battle-to-battle tactics.

 

I guess. We keep getting told how smart Burnham is, yet her "mutiny" was laughably inept.

There were days during that first season that I wondered if the writers had a background in writing...

 

Or they just bought in to the Hollywood assumption, as evidenced by so many iterations of fiction.

This is a more fair point, but tactics in Trek have rarely made sense. Not saying it doesn't bother me, because it's dumb that they didn't have it mapped out. But, I'm also extremely biased because I'm along for the ride with the characters.

She wasn't being rational or logical. That point seems to keep getting missed. She was reacting extremely emotionally, and not thinking things through.

Maybe I'm weird but having a job working with traumatized people and understanding the emotional side of the brain and the fight/flight/freeze response Burnham makes perfect sense to me.