Star Trek: Discovery season 4 episode 13 review: "A total cop-out of an ending"

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.

What follows is arguably the most powerful scene of the season: when Burnham coolly commands Detmer – the best pilot on board – to fly the shuttle, the glances exchanged between the doomed pilot and a tearful Owosekun convey more drama than numerous pages of dialogue. So, when United Earth General Ndoye volunteers to take her place – making amends for aiding Book and Tarka’s escape – it feels like a minor cop out. Compared to what follows, however, the misstep barely registers.

Because – like an episode of The Simpsons – the second half of 'Coming Home' does all it can to get everything back to normal, ensuring that season 5 will begin in a spookily similar place to season 4. 

Thought communication with the 10-C might get rather difficult seeing as Discovery barely understands their language? No problem, now that the crew have become fluent in a matter of hours. Concerned Discovery was trapped outside the Milky Way without a spore drive to carry them home? Fear not, the 10-C can use a wormhole to send them back in an instant.

And you remember how you felt when JJ Abrams’ pretended Chewbacca was dead in The Rise of Skywalker? This season finale performs a similar bait-and-switch manoeuvre on numerous occasions, rescuing Ndoye at the last second, ensuring Vance and Tilly’s final drink isn’t quite the last orders they expected it to be, and – most egregious of all – putting Burnham through the emotional wringer of thinking she’s lost Book, only to have the 10-C resurrect him via a transporter technicality. When even the Marvel Cinematic Universe can have the courage to kill off Iron Man and have him stay dead, there’s something seriously wrong with Discovery’s storytelling when every regular character – with the exception of Tarka – survives the biggest threat the Federation has ever faced. But in the 32nd century, it seems the famous Kobayashi Maru test has morphed into a rather less compelling no-lose scenario – for the second season finale in a row. 

While having US politician and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams appear as the Federation president is a lovely touch, the final quarter of the episode is a slog, a Return of the King-like succession of quasi-endings that send the crew on holiday, see characters exchanging numerous platitudes, and bring Ni’Var and Earth back into the Federation. 

In fact, now that Burnham has effectively confirmed that she’ll be the first Discovery captain to keep the chair for a second year, the only significant question ahead of season 5 is what Kovich and Bryce have been up to since Discovery blasted out of the galaxy. Hopefully, the writing team can find more worthwhile answers than the underwhelming story of Species-10C and their wandering DMA.

While Star Trek: Discovery is over, Picard is also back! Make sure to read our review for Star Trek: Picard season 2 episode 1 as well as its five-star second episode.