By that point, the sphere was actively resisting attempts to tamper with it or delete or destroy it, though it doesn’t appear to have developed a personality.
They couldn’t just destroy Discovery?
They tried, in “Such Sweet Sorrow” - the sphere disabled the auto-destruct and raised shields, preventing the Enterprise from firing at Discovery.
Or spore drive the ship far away?
I believe they discussed this as a possibility in “Perpetual Infinity” - IIRC, their conclusion was that it was too risky to bring the sphere data anywhere, which was why their original plan was to “merge it into the river of time” (which, to me, suggests they never actually intended to leave the wormhole.
I don’t personally think the climax of season 2 is very good or clearly-written, but there are explanations provided for a number of things.
do you honestly remember why Discovery had to go into the future and be “erased"
It was to ensure there was no way for Control (which they were not certain had been eliminated) or anyone else to get hold of the sentient sphere data in their possession. I admit the episodes are a little muddled, but it seemed like the original “Perpetual Infinity” plan had been to go into the wormhole and never emerge, which isn’t exactly what happened in the end.
and even if you do … does it feel like a good or interesting story point to you?
Absolutely, I think the 32nd Century is pretty great, and the time jump was the means to that end.
The plot revolves around a wargames scenario. There is for some reason an alien race that is really good at war strategies. There is an advisor from that race on the enterprise.
Ah, that would be “Peak Performance”, in which Wesley has an experiment that has something to do with high-energy plasma reactions with antimatter, and nothing whatsoever to do with growing dilithium. Swing and a miss.
The Klingons use Trilithium.
Strike two - trilithium is an unstable explosive that is used in the engines of exactly no one. The Klingons do use tritium as an intermix, but as you are aware, that simply replaced the role that deuterium plays in Starfleet designs - it has nothing to do with dilithium.
The Romulans used a contained singularity.
This is the closest you’ve come to having something. Of course, there’s exactly zero information on how those drives operate or are manufactured, along with the pesky fact that the Romulans have enslaved an entire race to mine dilithium for them, which is…not something you typically do to obtain a substance that you don’t need. We’ll call it a foul ball.
In Voyager we saw a number of potential non-dilithium alternatives. One of them was a glorified slingshot.
What did we learn about how these alternatives are powered, particularly considering that several of them were plugged into Voyager’s warp core without too much trouble? You get bonus points if you can identify the one that was specifically described as “not antimatter,” which is most likely (but not guaranteed) to exclude dilithium.
So far we’ve got two strikes and two fouls. You’re still at bat.
I’d personally completely forgotten about the river of time stuff and the intention to never emerge.
I freely admit that this probably falls under the category of “personal interpretation” - here’s the exchange that makes me think that (without identifying who’s speaking, because the site I found doesn’t provide that info):
Instead of fighting time, we go with it.
Stop trying to destroy the Sphere.
Merge it into the river of time.
Send it so far into the future, it can’t do us any harm? I collected sensor data from Dr. Burnham when she first arrived.
The Red Angel suit has almost limitless quantum computational power. Literally infinite storage.
Meaning you can transfer the Sphere archive into the suit, program a destination beyond Dr. Burnham’s anchor point and let the wormhole take it forever? Perpetual infinity.
Control will never get the data in order to evolve.
However, I don’t think this idea is ever really acknowledged after this conversation, and like you said, Burnham seems thrilled when she arrives in the future in season 3, so maybe I’m way off.