Star Trek: Discovery ep15 'Will You Take My Hand' review and recap: Appropriate end to a frustrating yet satisfying season

*Spoilers follow*

(CBS)

Appropriately enough, Star Trek: Discovery finishes off its first season with an episode that sum up both its greatest strengths and weaknesses. The show does resolve the core thematic idea it’s been addressing all season in a way that doesn’t feel forced or naff, but it fumbles the narrative ball to the extent that possible total extermination of an entire species is given the weight of mildly slowing down the Klingon postal system. We’re presented an awkward blend of the climactic and wrap-up episodes programmes like Game of Thrones smartly split between their penultimate and final episodes, and it’s sad that a show that has been able to deliver when it wants to so drops the ball.

Beginning, as is traditional for STD now, in media res, this episode kicks off with Mirror Georgiou taking to commanding the Discovery like an evil space emperor to a position of authority. It’s testament to Michelle Yeoh’s charisma that she can make a character who in about 90 seconds, tortures a prisoner with her bare hands, reminds Saru she used to eat his kind in her home reality and casually dismisses Tyler as an unwanted hybrid not feel cartoonish. She’s actually far better as Mirror Georgiou than her pretty stiff home-universe version: it seems the mirror universe, like the devil, has all the best tunes.

Soon, Mirror Georgiou, Burnham, Tyler – brought along for his literally inside knowledge of the Klingons –and for some reason Tilly are soon down on the Klingon homeworld in a settlement seemingly twinned with Mos Eisley. Sleazy spacesports full of alien sex workers and creative ways for people to get high (in this case, volcanic fumes) are always fun and while it’s not really explained why this particular settlement it full of Orions – essentially a race of space pirates – rather than Klingons, it’s a fun interlude.

Problem is, we’re spinning our wheels here. Recent episodes dealing with Lorca’s attempted coup – that, you’ll remembered, climaxed with Lorca stabbed in the back with a sword and kicked into an artificial star – felt like the real climax. The Klingon war plotline still needs sorted out, so even though our heroes and antiheroes are in theory doing battle for the human race, it all feels slightly less than urgent — Georgio even stops her mission for a quick threesome, which is something I hardly ever do when on deadline.

The Discovery jumps to the core of the planet and Georgiou takes her ‘drone’ that’s clearly a world-ending bomb (something about volcanoes) along to a sacred shrine where she’ll be able to start a chain reaction that destroys Qo’nos. Burnham clocks her fiendish plan and that she’s a mad dog turned to by the Federation in desperation, so bins their super-secret undercover mission to pop back to the ship to bollock Admiral Cornwell into calling off the whole mass genocide plan. There’s little sense of jeopardy, less sense of stakes, and zero sense of danger: the Klingon homeworld feels less dangerous than Cardiff on a Friday night, and Cardiff on a Friday night is /lovely/.

And yet, and yet: what doesn’t quite work in drama, as Burnham repeats her admiral-bollocking trick and talks Georgiou out of re-doing a mass murder she’s already done once before in a parallel universe, sure does work out in resolving the central question of the show. In a world of desperation and danger and deprivation and compromise, can the cheery ideals of the Federation hold out?

What do you think?

Even the evil space emperor is (sort of) talked out of her mass murder, and we go back to a nicely-realised future-Paris for the Discovery crew’s Star Wars-style medal ceremony and yet another speech from Burnham about adhering to the Federation’s ideals.

Now, this all works as a season-long arc – remember, Burnham began the show hating the Klingons for killing her family and we’re reminded of that horror in a big scene with Tyler – but it just doesn’t feel like something that needs tied up like this. What were the past few episodes in the mirror universe doing but answering this question? The Klingon war feels like the ex who plaintively texts after a few bottles of Jacob’s Creek — and sure, our time together was fun, but audience and show have moved on since then and the energy just isn’t there to wrap things up with a flourish.

Still, things get resolved in a way that feels apiece with the rest of the show, if not too fresh, then we’re onto a Return of the King-style succession of goodbyes. Tyler goes off with a freed L’Rell to help build a newly unified Klingon empire. Georgiou, for her part, goes off until an inevitable cameo in season two. Burnham’s mum stays in Paris, while Sarek hitches a ride on the Discovery to Vulcan.

Travelling via warp, the Discovery receives a mysterious distress call. We get a tease in the registration number, and before we know it, it’s reveled the call came from… Captain Pike of the USS Enterprise!

As teases go for a second season go, it’s a doozy – although how they’re going to reconcile STD’s after hours-Apple Store aesthetic with the Sixties happening feel of the original Enterprise is a question the show wisely kicks into the grass. We’re also carefully indicated to be in the era when Pike, Kirk’s predecessor, was in charge — Chris Pine doesn’t come cheap, you know.

Anyway, ‘Will you take my hand?’ wraps up a season in a way that’s at once frustrating and satisfying, while still hitting those Trek pleasure centres deep in the brain. Oddly enough, a total appropriate way to finish.