There was no shortage of pearl-clutching and garment-rending over the tone and spirit of Star Trek Discovery through much of its first season (some of it from yours truly). The show embraced a moral ambiguity in Starfleet’s mission that every other series (outside of Deep Space 9) had only hinted at. Captain Lorca leaving Harry Mudd to rot in a Klingon prison cell was touted as a betrayal of Federation and franchise principles. And Heaven help any writer who’d dared to have a character suggest that some Star Trek ideals must be bent or broken in a time of war.
But as I discussed with Robbie Dorman on The Serial Fanaticist Podcast, for all that folderol (or perhaps because of it) Star Trek Discovery ends its first season with a firm embrace of the franchise’s hallowed ideals of optimism, mercy, and understanding; a firm rejection of those who would eschew or ignore those things when they’re inconvenient; and a firm vindication of a lead character who grows enough to discover that it’s worth a mutiny to stand by those principles, not to toss them aside.
That’s commendable (and, in fact, most of our heroes are literally commended for it), but “Will You Take My Hand?” falls victim to the larger problems that have plagued Discovery from the beginning: its propensity to heavily underline all of its points, to resort to overwritten dialogue when exploring its ethical conflicts, and to use grand speeches to announce its ideas rather than letting them bubble up organically.
The bookends for the episode feature Burnham giving a speech at her reinstatement/commendation/“We love you again!” ceremony at Starfleet, telling some tired, florid parable about recognizing fear. The speech seems to point toward an ensuing battle at the beginning of the episode, only to be revealed to fit the episode’s “find another way” ethos by the time the credits roll. Burnham has ponderous back-and-forths with Georgiou, Tyler, Cornwell, and even L’Rell about What This All Means and How Far We’ve Come. And the finale includes plenty of dramatic, hammy moments where people take a stand and everything’s set right again.
"I'm also Tom Brady's wardrobe consultant."
But what I appreciate about Discovery’s first season finale is how it largely goes for anticlimax rather than the raging finish it seemed to be setting up in the penultimate episode of the season. While there’s a few tense moments here, they tend to be smaller, more interpersonal, with few explosions or bits of hand-to-hand combat or the other pulse-quickeners that have filled the space in the show’s other high stakes episodes.
Instead, “Will You Take My Hand?” centers on Burnham, Tyler, Tilly, and Mirror Georgiou infiltrating a section of Qo’noS where the Orions have set up shop. They’re trying to gather intel on the right spot to plant a probe (which turns out to be a weapon of mass destruction) and sniff out what information they can in the libertine environs that everyone but Georgiou finds awkward.
The lower-tension trip to the Klingon home planet adds more texture to the world of Discovery than we’ve seen so far. This part of Qo’noS feels a little more like the Mos Eisley Cantina than Star Trek’s typical settings (other than the outpost from Star Trek V, another locale visited by a long lost Spock sibling), and it gives Discovery the chance to explore a little of the culture clash and cultural exchange that it’s been enmeshed in from the beginning.
The visit gets a little gratuitous at times. I don’t know that Star Trek fans ever needed to see a Klingon “crossing the streams,” or even more scantily-clad Orion slave dancers, or the aftermath of a threeway with the Mirror Universe monarch (though I suppose Mirror Kira says hi). But it does serve the episode’s purpose of showing all these alien races as regular folk with their own customs and lives, just living out their existences, regardless of the Federation or the Klingon Empire or anyone else.
"No, I said we're here about 'Qo'noS,' not 'Thanos.'"
The episode hits that beat a little too bluntly, especially in its dialogue, but the scenes set on Qo’noS both help give the series a sense of place and establish a normalcy of life there that makes it more difficult for Burnham, and the audience, to see the orc-like Klingons as faceless villains who can be wiped out without a second thought.
That forms the crux of Burnham’s second mutiny, one that mirrors her first, based on a newfound belief that she and her allies cannot, in good conscience, preemptively wipe out all the Klingons. And in that, she sheds her former belief that Starfleet must strike first to do just that. “Will You Take My Hand?” lays that moment on too thick, but it’s just stirring enough to pass muster when Burnham, Saru, and the rest of Discovery’s bridge crew stand-up, literally and figuratively, to Admiral Cornwell.
Cornwell then gives into Burnham’s semi-convenient alternative plan, which involves trading Mirror Georgiou her freedom in exchange for the bomb’s detonator, giving it to L’Rell as a bargaining chip for her to unite the Klingon houses through strength, and thereby hopefully avoiding all the death and destruction that would otherwise reign down as Starfleet makes moral compromises in the face of an existential threat.
It’s all a bit too neat and too rushed and too easy, but in the end, it’s a sound enough finish. Burnham’s perspective has been widened, both through her interactions with real live Klingons (of both the standard and Manchurian Candidate variety) and with her Mirror Universe counterparts, in a way that hones her perception of the humanity even in her enemies, and in what principles must be clung to even in the face of annihilation. That’s a very Star Trek perspective that hopefully ought to quell most fans and critics on the issue of whether Discovery is carrying the torch Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coon, Fred Freiberger and so many others lit more than fifty years ago.
You might say, something's coming down the Pike for next season. (I'm so, so sorry.)
But so much of the struggle of Discovery in this finale, and in the season as a whole, is the same struggle that all late-coming Star Trek works face — how to both honor the franchise and its hallowed past, while also modernizing it for the present day.
Lord knows Captains Kirk and Picard provided no shortage of sweeping oratories in their time, but that kind of lofty rhetoric lands with more of a thud in 2018 than in the more colorful confines of 1966 or 1987. And conversely, dark takes on everything from the intricacies of war to questionable affections sometimes give Discovery a sense of salience and embrace of the moral complexity that’s become the talisman of modern prestige television. But Discovery isn’t always adept at exploring that darkness, instead giving way to a sense of grimdark juvenalia.
Star Trek Discovery, then, ends much as it began — as a mixed bag. It’s a show that diversified the universe of the franchise on multiple, laudable dimensions, that presented a vision of the Alpha Quadrant that looks as good as it ever has on the small screen, and which connected the grand ethos of the franchise’s forefathers to complex and colorful individuals. But it also often gave way to empty action, never quite found the balance between serialization and standalone outings, and couldn’t help but wear its intended points on its sleeve through innumerable overblown colloquies.
And yet, as “Will You Take My Hand?” demonstrates, the Discovery’s heart is in the right place. Any number of other Star Trek series (and arguably all of them) started out shaky before finding their footing. Though a bit misaimed at times, the show is confident and self-assured out of the gate, and even as it works out the kinks and offers a fanservice-y tease in its signs off, it gets the spirit of Star Trek right, which gives us reason to be excited for what the show will uncover as it explores the latest incarnation of the final frontier.
