Warning: This Star Trek: Discovery/ season 4, episode 13 review contains major spoilers – many of them set to stun. Boldly go further at your own risk…
How much should the ending of a movie or TV show define what’s come before? Can a quality conclusion redeem a mediocre story? Does a botched finale mean the good work that’s come before should be written off? These may be the deepest questions posed by the Star Trek: Discovery season 4 finale, truly a tale of two halves.
For much of its runtime, ‘Coming Home’ is one of the strongest installments of this confused run, a spectacular piece of space opera that feels like it’s splurged half a season’s worth of VFX budget, while (almost) making the ups and downs of the previous episodes worthwhile.
But as the episode enters its final act, every overstretched minute feels like it’s putting a dent in the star rating – and for a season as inconsistent as this one, that feels entirely appropriate.
With the DMA just four hours from Earth and Ni’Var, it’s red alert across the board. For the first time since Discovery passed the Galactic Barrier, the story takes us back to the Alpha Quadrant, where the returning Tilly – how the show has missed her – and her loyal cadets are aiding the rescue operation. Unfortunately, even with the full might of Starfleet at his disposal, Admiral Vance only has the capacity to rescue a tiny fraction of the people living on the planets in the firing line.
If that serves as a reminder of what Captain Burnham and her crew are fighting for, it doesn’t make the task ahead any easier. Having broken free of the mysterious orb encasing Discovery, Tarka is still on his one-man mission to destroy the power source behind the DMA – with Book and Reno seemingly powerless to do anything about it. Meanwhile, Species 10-C have brought negotiations to an abrupt halt, and Discovery is going nowhere. Who or what can save them now?
You can just about forgive the blatant deus ex machina as Book stumbles upon a cat collar with the capability to disrupt forcefields – Grudge has an established dislike of holograms, after all – and the convenient hypothesis that firing up the spore drive will allow Discovery to blast out of 10-C captivity. Trek has a long history of using long-standing tech in new ways to get crews out of a jam, and the consequences to this drastic course of action are never in doubt – after burning out the drive, the only way for the crew to get home will be a decades-long journey at warp speed. Think Star Trek: Voyager, but in the 32nd century. This is truly edge-of-the-seat stuff, and the stakes get even higher when – once free of the orb – the crew realise that the only way to stop Tarka is to send someone on a suicide mission to remove the rogue ship from the equation – with Book unlikely to survive.