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Star Trek: Discovery season 2 ended with the characters enacting their plan to prevent Control gaining access to the Sphere data onboard the Discovery by attempting to launch Discovery into the future out of its reach.

While going about the mission,

Control is defeated by Georgiou and neutralised (this is confirmed by co-creator and co-showrunner Alex Kurtzman (fourth quote in the article)). Importantly, this defeat occurs before Discovery enters the wormhole.

Why was it then necessary to continue with the mission of going through the wormhole?

Control is gone, it can't access the data. Even if Control wasn't destroyed and remained in the past while Discovery successfully travelled to the future, it's an incredibly advanced AI as it is, probably capable of playing the waiting game and lying dormant for however many years it takes for Discovery to re-emerge from the wormhole.
As a further point, if Georgiou had failed in killing Control (which wasn't a guaranteed victory, it appeared to have the upper hand most of the fight) it would have travelled into the future with the data, so the mission objective should have changed once Control beamed aboard.

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  • I think a major problem was that even if Control was defeated, they couldn't trust section 31 with the data. Since the data could not be separated from Discovery, the ship had to leave the time line.
    – Hans Olo
    Apr 20, 2019 at 0:16

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Spock's discussion with the admiral at the end pointed out a reason: as long as that data exists, or is known to exist, there's a risk another version of Control could theoretically get its digital hands on it.

By claiming Discovery was destroyed, and thus the data with it, Spock and his other conspirators have removed that piece from the board. Another version of Control just can't take the Slow Path and wait for the ship to re-appear; it wouldn't know the data still exists in the future. And by having records of the ship and its mission erased, references to the data would be even harder to find if someone or something else even knew to look for it.

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    I think that is a good reason to continue through the wormhole, so +1 for that, but the issue of potentially traveling to the future with Control onboard (as very nearly did happen) still makes me think the mission should have changed once it beamed over.
    – Ongo
    Apr 21, 2019 at 12:03
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    The plan took preparation time, they were in the middle of it, and couldn't abruptly stop and start. If Control was still functional aboard when Burnham was ready, then they would have had to consider something else. Until then, they had to go forward with the plan and hope Georgiou and Nhan could somehow deal with the situation.
    – Keith Morrison
    Apr 21, 2019 at 18:36
  • This is, simply, a plot hole. There's no indication in the show that the mission couldn't be aborted between the tome that control was defeated and Burnham told Discovery to follow her through. The existence of the sphere data could have easily been dealt with by having Tilly simply undo her shield fix. Then the crew could simply abandon ship, and the Entirprise could destroy her. Or, Discovery could tansfer the data to the red angel suit and send it off into the futer per the original plan.
    – D Hydar
    Jul 21, 2019 at 4:45

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