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I enjoyed that. But the Kovich = Daniels thing was unnecessary. And Daniels’s Enterprise wasn’t a USS.
OK, I was almost thinking he was going to be Q. Maybe Q’s son.
So, yeah, all in all a pretty good finale. Safe to say DSC stuck the landing, but then it wasn’t that high off the ground to begin with. Reminded me a bit of “Sleeping In Light.” And, it’s nice to be able to think of our characters getting on with their lives, that this brief window we had into those lives isn’t all there is. I like the idea of Michael & Book living happily ever after. It’s an optimism we need right now. That was what was lacking in PIC’s first two seasons: we all hated the idea of JLP just mouldering in that farmhouse he’d spent a lot of his life trying to get away from. It contradicts what I said a few sentences ago, it’s sad that in the end the only real family he had was a crew he worked with for a while; but then, he got that family back in the end.
Anyway. So farewell then Star Trek: Discovery. When you were good, you were pretty darn good - and good Trek, too. When you weren’t, well, yeah… The show brought a modern sensibility, modern FX, a true Televisual Golden Age version of Star Trek shorn of the staid static 43-minute episode model, terrified of doing anything that’d alienate advertisers, that characterised the TNG-to-ENT era. I’m glad it happened. Will I miss it? Probably not.
And this ep LOOKED fucking gorgeous. The space around the black holes, inside the portal, that beach, their home.
But there’s no doubt the ending was a bit of a cop-out. Of course Moll wasn’t going to be able to bring back L’ak. And how did they explain “Calypso”? Well, by saying that a Red Directive required Discovery to be retrofitted back to its original config and left to wait in that nebula… for a long time… for some reason. So it’s all still a mystery! But at least it’s now firmly part of the canon. Would it have been better to never have mentioned it again? YMMV. The idea though that Craft was meant to come along… What does it all mean, We’ll never know. And is that a bad thing? The revival of Twin Peaks asked as many new questions as it answered old ones, and nobody’s complaining about that!
Craft is in the 31st Century himself. We don’t know why his people are opposed to the Federation - who they know as the V’draysh, a term we know exists in the 31st century. But obviously just contacting them openly isn’t an option for whatever those reasons are. So the Red Directive mission is to - somehow - initiate that process using an apparently-abandoned thousand-year-old Starfleet ship stewarded by a lonely AI. Zora was PLAYING Craft! And maybe feeling bad about it. Which could have led to all sorts of added drama: think what happened when HAL9000 was told to lie to, or keep secrets from, people…
That’s why they retrofitted the ship back to its original configuration. It’s probably the only ship they had that could be done that way, and had an intelligence onboard that could have conceivably been around for a thousand years.
Basically, think the Culture. If Starfleet are Contact, then Red Directive are Special Circumstances.
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In Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, Contact are their diplomatic and exploration (snd, when they need to be, military) organisation. Special Circumstances are the secret part who do the underhand stuff that can’t be done openly. Like interfering in cultures the Culture (that’s their name for their civilisation) thinks needs interfering in, to make them nicer or prep for proper first contact.
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