1x14 The War Without, The War Within

[7.0/10] It feels like every high profile genre show is desperate to feel “cinematic.” T.V. wants to wash off its idiot box stink and adopt the cachet of the big screen. At a time when the line between television and films is blurring (thanks, in part, to the streaming services CBS is competing with), major franchise films are starting to feel more like television done big, and major franchise series are starting to feel more like one long movie.

Star Trek Discovery feels more and more like it exists in that space, aping its cinematic brethren and trying to create a climax that feels worthy of the budgetary expenditures meant to replicate a silver-screen quality presentation at home. The problem is that blockbuster storytelling is hit or miss. It’s all too easy to throw out some objective, have your characters come up with a desperate plan to achieve it, and then throw in some cryptic hints and tedious exchanges to fill time while you wait for the explosions.

That’s unduly harsh. Discovery seems concerned with character and theme in “The War Without The War Within.” There’s a continuing thread over whether Burnham will forgive and help Tyler; there’s a meeting of her two surrogate parents, and there’s even more ruminating on whether to sacrifice your principles in the face of an existential threat.

But mostly, this episode feels like window dressing before the show delivers its season finale. When our heroes return to the prime universe, they find that the Klingons have all but won the war. Far from being united, the different Klingon houses are competing with one another to see who can achieve the biggest victory against the Federation, massacring civilians and decimating Starfleet forces. A conversation between Admiral Cornwall (who’s commandeered the Discovery after its retrun) and L’Rell suggests that the Klingons will stop at nothing -- there are no terms, no surrender, only battle and glory.

That sort of danger prompts Cornwall to borrow tactics from Mirror Georgiou, who is a de facto prisoner on the Discovery but who is also a useful resource since she defeated the Klingons in her universe. It’s the strongest idea of the episode, one that has the crew of Discovery and the leadership of the Federation having to question whether to violate their ideals in order to survive.

It’s a theme the show has been grappling with since the beginning -- the question of whether the Klingons can be reasoned with and, if they can’t, what lengths the otherwise noble men and women of Starfleet should be willing to go to in order to defend everything and everyone they hold dear. The episode calls back to this when Sarek Prime (who offered the “shoot first” philosophy to Burnham) and Mirror Georgiou discuss a secret plan, presumably one that will decimate the Klingons, in exchange for Mirror Georgiou’s freedom.

But before that can happen, we need to establish what the nominal plan will be and set up the inevitable third act action movie climax in the season’s final episode. That means having the Discovery boot up its spore drive, jump to the center of Q’OnoS in the planet’s cave system, and scan it for weaknesses or vulnerabilities or something along those lines so that they can signal the rest of the fleet to come attack the Klingon homeworld in the hopes that the Klingons would bolt from Federation space to defend their home planet.

As third act setups go, it’s not bad. It’s just easy to see the strings as the show is obviously poised for the grand heist mission with things going wrong thanks to only a small faction of the crew knowing the real plan while Mirror Georgiou is installed as captain of the Discovery in the guise of her prime universe counterpart.

(As an aside, my prediction for the finale is that Burnham ends up neutralizing Georgiou to prevent her from massacring the Klingons, in an echo or, dare I say, mirroring, of her actions in the premiere.)

But it raises two big “hooray for metaphor” bits. One centers on that notion of sacrificing your ideals so as not to sacrifice your countrymen. The show tackles it in tones that are a little too wonderstruck and clumsy, but it at least dovetails with the plot.

The other stems from the fact (no pun intended) that in order for this plan to work, Stamets will need to regrow the spores to fuel the jump to Q’onoS. So despite their being dead, and his scientific partner failing in a similar attempt after trying to be too controlling, Stamets let's them grow wild and free and it gives the Discovery hope to complete it’s mission.

The episode isn’t shy about drawing parallels between the spores regrowing, Burnham finding her way to redemption and respect after her incidents at the Battle of the Binary Star, and Tyler finding his way back from the bad deeds he committed when Voq was still in his head.

The problem is that the episode communicates that in what is becoming a typical collection of overwritten scenes full of clunky dialogue. Again, The Walking Dead problem rears its ugly head, with exchanges between Burnham and Georgiou, Tilly, and Tyler himself that feel so much like screenwriters writing prose rather than anything that feels natural or plausible as real human interaction. Star Trek has always been a little grandiose, but those speeches never land, and between that and the obvious setup for a climactic ending, the episode can’t help but feel antiseptic.

That’s not a good place to be in heading into your finale. The table is set. Burnham and Tyler have an emotional anti-reunion when Burnham tells her former love that the journey to redemption is a hard but solitary one. Georgiou (or at least, a Georgiou) is the captain again. And we’re poised to have one more fight with the Klingons involving questions of idealism versus expediency.

But the soul, the extra oomph that makes Star Trek more than just a series of explosions with some political or social commentary thrown in just isn’t there. Everything in “The War Without The War Within” is serviceable enough, but comes off as a show going through the motions and falling flat before its last outing of the season.