The War Without, the War Within, the mystery of Michael's sin

There’s something I was really hoping Disco would examine more closely, but it’s not looking likely at this point. Burnham’s main motivation throughout the season has been her deep remorse for her mutiny, but she’s never been shown to have been wrong. I mean, clearly she was insubordinate, and wrong in that sense. But her purpose was to implement a controversial strategy in order to prevent a horrible conflict. The plan was morally gray, certainly, but it might have worked. We’ll never know. She was stopped, and the horrible conflict turned out to be even worse than anyone could have imagined.

Since then, the series has operated on the premise that most people, including Burnham, believe she is responsible for the massive loss of life at the Battle at the Binary Stars, and for the whole Klingon War in general. But the story really doesn’t support that. It sure looks like all of that would have happened whether Burnham had attacked Georgiou and tried to fire first or not. The huge weight of guilt on her is kind of baffling. I had assumed we’d circle back to this, because otherwise it’s just bad writing. But now that I’ve seen Lorca’s long and intriguing arc cut short so glibly, I’m not so sure.

If anything, Burnham's choice to return to the Prime Universe with Mirror Universe Georgiou in tow seems like a much worse idea than her original mutiny, and it's weirdly compounded by Cornwell's decision to...make Georgiou captain? Really? WHY? OK, so she has strategic value. She can't offer her guidance as a civilian advisor -- and under close guard, at that? Again, if this were half a dozen episodes ago, I'd think there was some really clever plotting going on, with a cool twist soon to be revealed. But the way things have gone, and with not much time left in the season, I have to assume that, at best, the resolution will be kinda cool but rushed, and at worst, it won't make any sense of these bizarre decisions.

Unless these decisions are rendered moot when the season ends with a reset, where the Discovery time-travels back to the point of Burnham's mutiny, but this time fires on the Klingons first and the war never happens. But the Klingon war is canon, so that doesn’t seem likely, and they'd still have to figure out what to do with MU Georgiou. (However they end the season, I still like my batshit theory that MU Georgiou will end up as the Lethe of "Dagger of the Mind," but what are the chances?)