Burnham returns to Discovery, Mirror Georgiou is hidden away, and the whole Lorca situation is explained to everyone. Burnham is nudged by Saru to visit Tyler, as a friendly face may be just what the doctor ordered. But she refuses. Her refusal, coupled with the look of surprise when she finds out that he is there and recovering lead this viewer to believe that when she beamed him into space her intent really was to kill him. Burn. I was also a little surprised that L'Rell put him back to human. I kind of just assumed that it would go the other way, and he would be returned to Klingon. I'm not even sure if Ash Tyler was a living person when the conversion surgery was performed. Voq was the living one, physically altered to look human, and the consciousness of Tyler was laid upon his own temporarily. So how is it possible that the best state for Voq/Tyler is as Tyler? Anyway, by the end of the episode he and Burnham mostly made up, as did he and Stamets (you know, for killing his lover).
Star Fleet command takes control of the ship, and as luck would have it, it's two familiar faces: Cornwell and Sarek. After Sarek forcefully mind-melds with Saru, their crazy adventure into the mirror universe is confirmed as true. Oh and, the mirror Discovery was destroyed by Klingons in the prime universe, so that puts a nice bookend on that little tidbit. Cornwell states that surely a Star Fleet officer couldn't survive on his own in the Terran universe, so therefore prime Lorca is definitely dead. Oh really?
After returning to Star Base One and finding it now inhabited by Klingons, Cornwell is forced to take a suggestion from mirror Georgiou and take the fight to the Klingon home world to cause them to pull ships from the frontlines back home. This is very much George W Bush thinking, and very much not Star Fleet thinking. But what else are they to do? The Klingons are acting as terrorists, and competing among the 24 houses for who can carve out the biggest piece of the Federation. After a talk with L'Rell who confirms that the Klingons will never stop now that they've tasted blood, she feels like this is the permission that she needs to attack Qo'noS. Their plan is to use the spore drive to jump into the caves in the middle of the planet, map it from the inside, and then destroy strategic military bases. Oh and, who will lead them? The only person on board who has defeated the Klingon empire once already, mirror Georgiou, who will be pretending to be regular Georgiou.
"The War Without, The War Within" is an Adequate episode of Trek. It shows a desperate Star Fleet that is ready to scrap its principles for its own survival. We are made to understand how they came to these conclusions, yet we know that somehow they will not get out of this situation by destroying Qo'noS. Stamets populating a moon with spores was just a drawn-out solution to a problem that could have been taken care of in another series with a one sentence technobabble blurb. Burnham was a real dick to Tyler, given all that he's gone through, and I found their exchanges to be tedious. The only good character moment was between Burnham and Sarek. In this episode we see a much different Sarek than the one that laid on a hospital bed and pointed out that he wasn't technically Burnham's father. This Sarek has seen the fall of the Federation, and the loss of his daughter. He is much softer, and actually seems concerned about how Burnham is doing after her ordeal. He tells her that she should not regret loving Tyler, and does so in such a manner that we understand that the utterance is the same as telling her that he loves her.
Published March 16, 2018
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