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Some major spoilers from the final episode of Season 1

We see the Terran Empress Georgiou plant a bomb deep in Qo'nos, one that Discovery simulates would eradicate all life on the planet. Instead of blowing it up, Burnham convinces L'Rell to use it as leverage to stop the war. Apparently this is so successful the war just ends.

What's odd is that L'Rell had been pretty resolved that the war would go on until the Federation was destroyed, something she seemed fine with. More importantly, we saw the Klingons ready to invade Earth, with the Federation on the ropes. How did her simple threat of a bomb manage to stop a war that even L'Rell herself was convinced would not stop?

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    (whispers) bad writing Feb 12, 2018 at 14:48
  • @starpilotsix Kinda goes without saying, sadly. ST:D played fast and loose with quite a lot of things
    – Machavity
    Feb 12, 2018 at 15:17
  • Remember, for L'Rell, the war was a means to an end. Her end goal wasn't necessarily the destruction of the Federation (that was a side effect she was happy with), just the reunification of the Klingons. Instead the war wasn't reunifying the houses, they were still fragmented and were vying with each other for power. The Federation offered her a way to unify her people without continued loss of life on both sides.
    – delinear
    Feb 13, 2018 at 12:28
  • L'rell was in a prison cell when she made her judgement possibly she wasn't on the ball as she thought she was when she said the war would not end. perhaps the klingons where actually really bored of massacring federation's who can't even fight back properly
    – Ummdustry
    Feb 13, 2018 at 18:52

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It was a bomb that could essentially destroy Qo'noS, wiping out the heart of the Empire, killing billions, and in one shot ensuring that those rampaging fleets would suddenly become homeless needing to look to basic survival instead of conquest. While Earth was under direct threat, the majority of the Federation was still unoccupied, the cloaking advantage had been nullified, and now the Klingon Houses were the ones who could not afford any losses as most of their power had just been obliterated.

The Klingon Empire has always been portrayed as Qo'noS having much more importance to the Empire than Earth does to the Federation, even as the capital and Starfleet HQ. If, say, the Moon suddenly blew up devastating the Earth's environment so that most of the population would have to be moved for survival, this would be a problem for the Federation and Starfleet, but they'd survive. When Praxis blew up in Star Trek VI it was an existential threat to the Empire at such a level that they had to make a permanent peace because they wouldn't have the resources to fight the Federation if war broke out.

As for L'Rell, she was convinced the war would go on because her people were more concerned about personal glory and were winning. T'Kuvma had not started the war to win, he'd started it to unify the Klingons. Actually winning was secondary to his goals. L'Rell had seen what she'd believed in shattered, and with Voq's death, was the only one who still believed in that goal of unification. She was "fine" with it only because she was resigned to it, believing that nothing could be done to change it. The bomb gave her the opportunity to change things, to focus on the thing T'Kuvma considered most important: unification. The Klingons wouldn't change voluntarily to unite, so she was going to force them to change.

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    I'm not so sure they would become homeless all of a sudden as the klingons had a lot of colonies, ... . BUT I guess they would have lost most leaders and the infight would have killed the klingon empire afterwards.
    – Thomas
    Feb 12, 2018 at 22:02

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