Dear god. I just watched the finale and it might be the worst season finale in the history of Star Trek. Remember all of that action they substituted for plot at the beginning of the series? Where the ---fudgesicle--- was that now? There was zero suspense and zero conflict. We've got this bomb that's introduced in the last 5 minutes and a mere minute after it is introduced Berman walks up to Asian Hitler and says "Hey cut that out" and she's like "ok" Oh and the female Klingon that's been built up as the main villain throughout the whole show.... Berman hands over the bomb to her and says "Ok now unify the Klingon empire and don't hurt the federation anymore" and again, she's like "ok" I would chalk this up to Klingon honor, but the Klingons in this bizarre warping of reality don't appear to have any.... attacking a federation that didn't attack them first.
So the show starts to end on this b.s. speech about Federation ethics, which would be welcomed on a series that actually represented them. I get the feeling that this was meant to say to the audience "Ok, we ---fouled up beyond all recognition--- up and we know it." but then they get themselves even deeper into hot water by answering a distress call by the Enterprise in the last scene. Now at this point Kirk isn't there yet, but Spock is.... and Sarek is currently on the Discovery.... how the hell are they going to explain all of this stuff I've been talking about in regards to Sarek's behavior? Yeah they are boned any way they choose to handle it.
Now for the "canon they screwed up this week" portion of the post:
1. The Klingons would never "give" another species a region of Kronos. The Klingon home world is scared. If I remember my lore correctly, it was some time before Aliens were even allowed to set foot on the planet.
2. Ok now the Klingon ships are starting to look more like Klingon ships from this time period because......reasons? Yeah they are breaking their own canon now. Again, I think they are trying to course-correct. It's amazing they decided to stick to their guns until the final episode though. This finale feels tacked on, like that they knew this series was a turd from the start so they hobbled along to the end of the story arc and to their suprise they got renewed for a second season so they decided to fix things at the last minute.
3. So Orions aren't green now, just a pale, mint green? They even kept them green in those garbage reboot movies!!! WTF? How hard is it to go to the makeup store, get some green, and smear it all over some people? Minus one rage point for putting Ron Howard's brother in there to get high with the portly chick.
4. So the rest of the bridge crew get medals and they still don't bother to tell us their names. This is getting silly..... introduce the frikkin cast already.
5. So it's explained that Volk was a Klingon outcast because he had translucent white skin, as opposed to white. So that's the lame lamp shade they tried to put on that colossal blunder. It also conveniently explains away how they used expensive, silicon-based prosthetics in the premiere and then switched to cheap foam latex throughout the rest of the show. Nice try guys, but you can't fool an old sfx nut like me.
6. I've already went on about how the Enterprise showing up is bad, but the look..... let's talk about the look. You know how every federation ship we've seen thus far has been a stainless-steel looking affair that inexplicably looks like the ships after Star Trek Nemesis despite being a prequel? Well, much like the Klingon ships, the Enterprise inexplicably looks period correct... except.... it's some strange hybrid of TOS enterprise and the Enterprise shown in the movies. I'm actually ok with this... it's updated appropriately... but it infuriates me that with those changes they showed that the production team can do a tasteful update of ships for this time period and chose not to.
Strangely enough, I'm optimistic about the next season. If they can somehow tip-toe around all the top-tier TOS canon they are rapidly approaching with the Enterprise encounter, they might be able to get back to some traditional Star Trek episodes. The rapid back-pedaling they seem to be doing with this last episode makes me think that this is the new direction they want to take. Hopefully the Klingons are gone for good as well.... they've ruined them, but that arc is over, so if they have the good sense to pretend none of it ever happened it could be ok.