Star Trek: Discovery officially concluded its first season’s first chapter on Sunday night with the fall final episode “Into the Forest I Go”, and the episode certainly gave fans a bit to chew over during the approximately two months that Star Trek: Discovery will be on hiatus.
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In the episode, the Klingon Ship of the Dead received a transmission from the planet Pahvo. The call brought the Ship of the Dead to the planet, where the USS Discovery was already in orbit.
The USS Discovery was ordered by Starfleet to return to Federation space, believing that they could not risk losing the Discovery‘s experimental spore drive to the Klingons.
Captain Gabriel Lorca played along but falsified a report stating that the spore drive was offline so that the ship could slowly make its way back home at warp speed so that they’d still be in jump range when the Klingons did show up around Pahvo.
After jumping back to Pahvo, the Discovery came face-to-face with the Ship of the Dead. The brilliant minds of First Officer Saru and Science Specialist Michael Burnham were able to come up with a plan to crack the Klingon ship’s cloaking ability, but itrequired two brave acts. First, Lt. Ash Tyler and Burnham would have to board the Ship of the Dead to place two sensors. Second, Lt. Stamets would have to power 133 micro jumps in order to gather all of the data needed to get through those invisibility shields.
The plan was successful, though not without its unexpected consequences. Tyler was shell-shocked when he came face to face with his former captor, L’Rell, who beamed back to the Discovery with the Starfleet officers. Then, when Stamets made his final jump to bring the ship home, things went wrong. The ship wound up lost, and Stamets went into some kind of shock.
After all of that, here are the five biggest questions Star Trek: Discovery needs to answer when it returns from hiatus.
Where Is the ‘Discovery’?
The most obvious question raised by the mid-season finale of Star Trek: Discovery is, “Where is the Discovery now?”
After making 133 jumps to help defeat the Klingons, Lt. Stamets made one final jump to get the Discovery and its crew back safely behind the border of Federation control space.
However, things didn’t work out so well. The jump was incomplete and the Discovery ended up lost in space.
We’ve already theorized that the final jump may have landed the Discovery in the mirror universe. Another possibility is that we have a Star Trek: Voyager scenario on our hands, and the Discovery has simply gone further afield than any ship before it.
What Is Going on With Stamets?
Things have been strange for Stamets ever since he decided to take the tardigrade’s place as the navigator for the spore drive.
It started off like a pleasant side effect. Stamets, once perpetually grumpy and standoffish, suddenly had a much more pleasant and airy disposition.
Then things got weird. First, there was the incident with Harry Mudd. When the scoundrel managed to board the Discovery and use a time travel device to kill Captain Lorca and destroy the ship several times over, it was Stamets who realized what was happening, because apparently he no longer exists in normal time.
Further evidence of this came in a later episode when Stamets referred to Cadet Tilly as “captain.” Knowing that becoming a captain is Tilly’s ultimate goal in Starfleet, it seems like Stamets was momentarily confused after seeing into the future.
After making the final jump that left the Discovery lost, Stamets went near catatonic and his eyes turned milky white, not unlike the eyes of Captain Lorca after his injury.
Why Is Lorca So Protective of Burnham?
Captain Lorca seems to have a strange fascination with Michael Burnham, and it isn’t entirely clear why.
The obsession was apparent from the very first episode that Lorca appeared in. Lorca went out of his way to orchestrate events so that Burnham would wind up on board the Discovery and he could enlist her in the crew.
He’s also fought against Starfleet, and Admiral Cornwell in particular, in justifying why he’d want Starfleet’s only mutineer to be a part of his crew.
That all could be considered to be part and parcel with Lorca’s unwavering focus on winning the war against the Klingons at all cost. Burnham is a legitimately brilliant officer, after all.
But then there was the mission to save Sarek. Lorca made it clear that he only went on that unauthorized rescue mission for Burnham’s sake, and he made it clear to Lt. Ash Tyler that protecting Burnham was the highest priority.
Something similar occurred in the mid-season finale when Lorca seemed strangely reluctant to allow Burnham to join Tyler on the mission to board the Klingon Ship of the Dead. It seems clear that there’s something Lorca isn’t telling Burnham and his crew.
Is Ash Tyler What He Seems?
The biggest mysteries of Star Trek: Discovery seems to revolve around Lt. Ash Tyler, the Starfleet officer who was a prisoner of war and managed to survive seven months in a Klingon prison.
Tyler claims he survived because of the perverse infatuation that L’Rell, his captor, developed towards him, one that he encouraged because he knew it was his only means of survival.
However, the way that L’Rell acts towards Tyler when she comes on board the Discovery after the Ship of the Dead is destroyed suggests there’s something more going on.
There has long been the theory that Tyler is actually Voq, but physically altered to resemble a human. The torture flashbacks seen in the mid-season finale could actually be flashes of memory to his body-altering surgery.
What’s interesting is that, if the fan theory is true, then Tyler doesn’t even remember a Klingon, making him a true sleeper agent on the Discovery.
Is the Federation-Klingon War Over?
The mid-season finale of Star Trek: Discovery revolved around the Discovery crew attempting to find a way to break through the invisibility shields of the Klingon Ship of the Dead.
The Discovery was successful, and it was implied that having the means to circumvent these cloaking devices meant the war was functionally over for the Klingons.
Will that be the end of the Klingon storyline for Star Trek: Discovery? We know that the Federation-Klingon War will not continue into the show’s second season, and we also know that more than one of the show’s six remaining episodes in its first season will involve the mirror universe. Is there room in there to dive deeper into the Klingon conflict, or will the rest of Starfleet have cleaned the matter up by the time the Discovery gets back from wherever they are?
