Kevin-42

Let me start with the technical stuff: I think the creators of this show did an amazing job at nailing the Fallout look and vibe. That goes way beyond just presenting some random props fans might know from the games. We see the classic Fallout world of 50' US aesthetics with early 80' technology grafted over futuristic inventions. And then we see how that world might look like after a nuclear war and 200 years of decay. So far, so good. It indicates a certain level of reverence for the source material.

However, this still isn't the Fallout world we know from the video games and that is a surprising constant in the entire Fallout series. Fallout always has two main components. One is what might be called the "nameless evil of the day". So in the first Fallout games that nameless evil was government overreach and conspiracies. In following Fallout games that nameless evil was science "gone wrong" and the bigoted cancer of irrational cults. With this TV show that nameless evil is the selfish corporate interest of mega-companies having their own twisted social agendas.

The other component is the eternally flawed human nature and how even the best of intentions, when confronted by our craving for power and our desire to impose our wills on others, will eventually corrupt any cause we deem worthy and good.

This mix of components is thrown into a dystopian future and the appeal of the Fallout world is that it lets us decide what is the true evil. Is it the lawlessness and cruelty of the world we see or is it the nameless evil which shaped this world?

That is where the show has its problems. We are rushed through this weighing of alternatives at such a pace that there is very little room for reflection. We barely get to know the main characters before we are neckdeep in the conspiracy pervading this strange future. In a way it feels like the writers were so afraid of appearing like just another generic mystery box TV show that they revealed their mystery way too early.

That being said, it's a good TV show. I just fear that they tried to tell too much too fast for it to be a great show. Maybe a potential second season will take a deep breath, slow down a bit and develop its protagonists better.

Up to this episode I felt very much at ease with how this show made changes to the source material. In many cases changes in this show added to the book's world but kept the core of it intact.

Now, for the first time, it feels like this episode made changes which subtracted from rather than add to the story. Key characters have been changed significantly. Blackthorne in particular almost regressed to a less comprehending, primitive state of mind. The relation between Toronaga and Mariko is fundametally different and many other characters almost seem vulgar and crude compared to their book versions.

The meeting with his half-brother should have been a study in intricate diplomacy. A case of calculated provocation against the cool and calm of a master of nuance and subtlety. Instead, we are treated to a story of brutal betrayal.

I'll see where this is going to take us but we are in unfamiliar territory right now.

This is stunning television. The costumes, the sets, the historic period acting are all phenomenal. This show simply oozes dedication to detail and money. So with just two episodes in I can say that this will hook you almost immediately and for fans of Japan and its ancient culture it is almost a must-see.

Knowing the book the casting is near pitch-perfect or at least close enough to it. Maybe Lady Mariko doesn't look as I imagined her from the book but the actress still delivers a good performance and I am deeply appreciative of this show for making a worthy effort to depict the vast and intricate world of James Clavell's masterful historic novel.

However, maybe the book is too big to fit into the confined space of a TV series. For obvious reasons the showrunners had to rush through so much that is explained and described in detail in the book. In order to do the book justice it would have taken almost two seasons of television to show the story of John Blackthorne before he even reaches Osaka. Much of the underlying conflicts and the delicate web of diplomacy and intrigue the main characters have to navigate are cut short in the TV show. There also is a weird shift in perspective which strays from the book. Whereas the involvement of Portuguese foreigners in the politics of early 17th century Japan is treated as just another aspect in a mostly internal Japanese power struggle, the TV show almost sets the Portuguese up as the main antagonists of the show during its first two episodes. I hope the shows swings back to the Japan-centric story it is meant to be.

Bottom line: This is great television but I recommend reading the book eventually.

The first two seasons of Ted Lasso felt very organic. Ted Lasso was a counterpoint to the idea that you have to be ruthless and mean in order to achieve something in life. You can actually get somewhere with kindness and positive reinforcement and if you work on the good sides of your personality you can overcome your limits and the demons of your past.

I see very little of that message in Season 3 and only traces of it in this episode. It's almost like the new story arc was constructed rather than inspired. Many important side characters have been delegated to punch lines or placeholders for dialogue. Coach Beard is the perfect example as there is no personal development for him even though his team is in crisis. Roy Kent is a no-show. The other players are completely sidelined in favor of Zava who then gets unceremoniously dumped from the series.

Then there is the Keeley and Jack "thing" which comes out of nowhere and feels really contrived and not true to Keeley's character.

Ah yes, Nate is still in the show but he's a plot device to transport the message that rich and successful people are just shallow and superficial.

The bright spot in this episode is Rebecca Welton. You can really empathize with her hope for a different future. Unfortunately, she shows poor leadership skills which somewhat diminishes her image from previous seasons.

I don't know where they're going with this episode and I have a nagging feeling that neither do the writers.

I have to come clear. I absolutely despised the first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard. I consider them a vandalisation of everything I like about 'The Next Generation' and seeing my nostalgia being ripped to shreds page by page for reasons which I can only understand as complete malice really hurt.

Consequently, I was sceptical regarding the third season. I thought that there would be no way someone could 'fix it' and mend the wounds, and I was right. Fortunately, the writers here resisted any attempt at damage control and simply moved forward. Instead of hastily glueing the shreds back together they decided to add a new page to Star Trek culminating in this brilliant fourth episode.

Let's face it! Star Trek: The Next Generation had a fatal flaw. It was too unrealistic in showing human beings react to the rigors and tragedies of their lives as mandated by their duty as Star Fleet officers. By all accounts there should have been mental scars, trauma and a level of regret. They toyed a bit with Picard's Borg experiences but ST: TNG was our sci-fi 'happy place'. It never caused anything a good poker game among friends and a nice talk in 10-forward couldn't fix.

This season and this episode in particular face this flaw head-on without denigrating what fans liked about Star Trek in the first place. Our characters are fleshed out and flawed, yet hopeful and competent. They're not super-human in their resilience but find strength in eachother to overcome all odds.

I can only encourage people to watch this episode and I sincerely hope they can keep up this level of writing and story-telling.

A new page of Star Trek which makes me want to turn to the next one.

One of the things I like about the show so far is the way the writers try to delve into the science of the infection. Once again we get a flashback with background information. This time they take us to the point of origin in Jakarta and we see the very beginning of the outbreak from the point of view of an Indonesian scientist. We experience the absolute realization of doom and gloom in her eyes when she realizes that they might not be able to stop what's coming.

A time-jump later we are treated to the feature of the fungus to connect its victims through a "network" (read up on 'Mycorrhizal network'). You could say that the infection is something like the main actor of this episode and I appreciate that the show takes its time for some very solid world-building.

This effort comes a small price, though. The episode is less dense in terms of the narrative. We see some fledgling moments of bonding between Joel and Ellie, but these scenes are quickly overtaken by a major plot development. That event is well-acted and illustrates the stakes the characters have in this world.

All in all this is more of a bridge episode which coninues the oppressive and sometimes claustrophobic feeling from the first episode and we get to see 'the face of the enemy'.

Now the stage is set, the main protagonists are in place, so let the show commence!

The show remains good TV entertainment after two episodes in.

The opening minutes of the 'Last of Us" video game are among the most iconic, best and emotionally impactful moments in story-driven gaming. Any attempt to make an adaptation for TV is a gargantuan task and I'm very happy that with the first episode they really nailed it.

Changes were made. It's not a completely faithful adaptation. We get different faces for the original characters and slight changes in the plot but the fundamentals of the story and the overall tone are the same. Moreover, as TV is the more passive form of entertainment compared to a game, the authors can use a slightly slower pace and add more depth to the narrative. This is smart story-telling as the writers realize the different strengths of different types of media.

The set design leaves little to be desired. The cinematography is great. They even kept the more 'zoomed-in' quality of the gaming experience during the early action sequences. The acting is good. The directing is competent.

No matter if you know the game or don't: This is good entertainment and the first episode will leave you wanting more.

Sorry, but this was boring. Mind-numbing boring. Sleep-inducing boring. "Are we there,yet?"-boring.

Dang, I liked Mr. Bozeman and they pay some propper respect to his character in the first couple of minutes and it really hits you in the feels but after that we are let known that Wakanda have mastered the technology of exposition dialogue. If that is their main achievement then I say we forget vibranium and let them slink back behind their stealth shield and call it a day.

They could have done so much with this movie and show Africa as a vibrant place full of ideas and hope in the face of many problems. Maybe explore Ubuntu philosophy, or visual art. Unfortunately, Wakandan culture is reduced to a song&dance number for the day-trip tourists in cinema seats.

This was a missed opportunity and almost a missed movie if not for a good double espresso I had before it.

I can hardly remember a show where your enjoyment depends that much on what you want out of a show like this.

If you are a true Tolkien fan who read the books and is very invested in the author's work then this show absolutely isn't for you. The showrunners butchered the timeline and lore. Events which are supposed to be centuries apart happen within short time spans. Characters who never met in the books interact, they do things never mentioned in the books and participate in events they weren't a part of. Characters of the same age seem to be generations apart and they behave vastly different as described in the works of Tolkien.

If you are "just" a fan of the Peter Jackson movies you will notice changes in tone and design. It's not that this always is a negative. Different artists can have different artistic visions for the world of Middle Earth and one has to consider that this show takes place centuries before the events of the movies. Differences are to be expected but you can run into problems with characters who appear in both forms of media. It's hard to imagine how characters like Elrond or Galadriel change from their younger versions as depicted in this series into the versions we know from the movies. If you are a true fan of the versions from the movies then this series probably isn't for you.

That leaves people who are simply interested in fantasy TV shows in general. Maybe you don't know the Tolkien books or the movies but you like fantasy or maybe even historical TV-shows and want to see something thematically similar. Does this show hold up as a work of fiction in those genres? Well, it can look visually stunning at times. Some of the locations look great or at least interesting. There are some decent creature effects. Some of the character designs are good (and some look weird and awkward). The acting is uneven. Some of the minor roles have good actors. Prince Durin and Princess Disa have good chemistry and are fun to watch. Other characters suffer from poor acting and, unfortunately, the biggest letdown is the performance of Morfydd Clark as Galadriel. This role was WAY too big for her and the entire show suffers from it. Maybe she couldn't work with the dialogue which was often poor and amateurishly written. It sometimes feels like parts of the dialogue ended up on the cutting room floor. At times it was straight-up non-sensical. As you can tell I think this show has problems which subtract from the overall competency of this show thus diminishing your enjoyment.

What's left is a work of fiction that is absolutely not for fans of the source material or previous adaptations and a mediocre show for the casual viewer.

Bottom line: Sub-par entertainment. Watch it when nothing else is there on a rainy afternoon to pass the time.

First of all, there seems to be some chatter about how this series diverges from the original graphic novel. Since the writer of this series and the graphic novel are the same person, I have to assume that the series is an adequate representation of his work and differences, where they exist, are intentional or at least not altering the themes of his story in unwanted ways.

The elephant in the room is a different kind of representation. You will meet an abundance of ethnic and sexual minorities in this series and their presence is obviously intentional. If the mere presence of such representation is distasteful to you, then this series is really not for you. Personally, I thought that it often didn't really add anything to the story but rather weighed it down with narrative clutter creating an uneven pacing within and between episodes. My personal pet peeve of seeing certain minorties in historical eras where they have absolutely no good reason to be represented in certainly gets a few examples.

Generally speaking though, uneven is the key word for this series. On the one side you have great performances by seasoned actors like Charles Dance, who delivers his usual masterclass, opposite well-meaning amateurs like Stephen Fry. Some performances are a pleasant surprise, like Boyd Holbrook's work, whereas other cast members are so bland in their delivery that you can't even dislike them for their lack of talent. They are completely forgetable and they vanish like a dream.

Uneven also is the word for the pacing and the storytelling. Some of it is deep, brilliant and insightful, as the eternal is reflected in the fleeting nature of the human experience. This is where Gaiman's work really shines. Other parts and sometimes entire episodes are painful in their banality and, frankly, boring. The setup for the second half of the series also comes out of nowhere.

All things considered, it's an interesting series. However, it could have been much better if the main story arc had been streamlined more. Some snappier dialogue would also help. It's not a good sign when a talking raven get most of the fun lines.

This movie might have been where hope for a better future made its final stand and lost. The future might owe this movie an apology but I fear they will be busy with far more pressing matters.

Watching Kenobi is like hearing your favorite tune through a thick wall. You want to listen to it and you know you like it but the wall distorts the sound, dampens the harmonics and ruins the enjoyment of the tune. Then your neighbors start singing along to it with rasping and irritating voices. You wish they'd stop but somehow they think their singing is the important part of the performance.

I don't care about the politics surrounding the show and there are gaping plotholes, things which break canon and acting performances which aren't all that convincing. I can live with that. I don't want to feed someone's dogma. I just want to be entertained while they throw this old Star Wars dog a few nostalgia bones. The writers deliver but they don't do a very good job with it. The end result is a show that is mediocre. Only works far greater, which this series sort of seems to foreshadow, give this series any weight at all.

It's a faint echo of a story far, far away.

How shall I put it? It's a rare occasion when you feel like a series needed a lot more exposition in order for an audience unfamiliar with the books to make sense of it. The Wheel of Time is a world full of magic. Unfortunately, the male half of the source of that magic was tainted by evil which lead to powerful men corrupted by this taint to almost destroy the world. Magic can now only be wielded safely by women, the most powerful of which are organized in an order called the Aes Sedai. The fact that women can use this power and men can't sort of changed the balance of power between the sexes. It is a given fundamental of this fantasy world. Unfortunately, in this TV-show this premise is treated like a feminist power fantasy which couldn't be more detached from the idea behind it as lavishly told by Robert Jordan's books.

With this serious flaw in mind the story told by this show sort of unravels into a generic fantasy trope mishmash. It doesn't even matter then that the actors don't fit the roles of the books because very early on you realize that this is Wheel of Time in name only. So if you tuned in expecting a faithful adaptation of the source material then you've come to the wrong place.

But does it hold its own as a TV show? Well, the main actors don't have a lot of chemistry and by that I don't mean that they opted for the usual diverse cast. I already established that this isn't the world of the books. It's just that the people who play in this show might have talent but their particular talents don't shine off of eachother much. It's a circumstance not helped by obvious budget restraints which limits the quality of CGI elements and the cinematic scope of the scenes resulting in a world which feels small and limited, almost like a little village production of a Shakespeare play.

As a result they made a TV-show which didn't understand the source material, lacks the means to grasp the size of the World as potrayed in the books and is seriously constricted by poor casting choices. It's not bad. There just is far better stuff out there within the same genre.

The premise of the show is simple: A young college drop-out gets killed in a freak accident and then gets "appointed" a grim reaper. That means that she is "undead" but leads an ordinary life of a young and aimless person complete with job hassle, money problems etc. She just doesn't have her old life but a new existence and the side-job of helping people cross over to the afterlife.

Lets ignore the obvious problems of how this new identity is established. I mean, does Death have a way to give out social security numbers and issue legal documents?

Apart from those "How would this even work in real life?" issues the basic problem of this show is that, just like everybody else, the show writers don't really know what happens after death and they largely avoid making any statements regarding that topic other than that there is a group of people called reapers who sort of help you make the transition. They hint, they allude and more often than not just withhold information. While your brain desperately tries to fill in the blank spots the show inundates you with office problems, half-baked reflections on life and death and some weak redemption arcs.....and then the second season is over and the entire show is gone.

Consequently, if you think that life sort of sucks and doesn't really make any sense and you want to watch a kindred soul not having any answers either then this is a great watch for you. The rest should look out for better television.

....the song playing in the background when Roy Kent is on his way to the TV studio is absolutely perfect. Whoever made that choice deserves a raise because you couldn't come up with a song that's more "Roy Kent" than this one.

This episode was weird because it almost felt like the writers were trying to maintain this forced dialogue with my mind.

"Can't you see all those emotions, the drama and the intense score? Why aren't you empathizing?" "Well, none of the characters really earned my empathy. You wasted two seasons showing the bridge crew as meaningless background props to the Michael Burnham Show and now you wonder why I'm not invested in those people." "Maybe, but don't you understand the emotional impact this situation is bound to have on them?" "Sure can....but in a way I remember that the purpose of Star Fleet was 'to boldy go' and face the galaxy. Consequently, I sort of expect Star Fleet officers to be able to handle their emotions in a professional manner. These people are psychological wrecks who have no real idea how to function as an effective crew and I don't think that a lame attempt at a group therapy session is 'leadership' by any definition of that word." "People are just like that. 'Old' Star Trek was unrealistic in its portrait of the human experience in the face of a complex and imperfect universe." "Yes.....and no. I just don't think that this problem is going to be resolved by letting the whole range of personality conflicts wash over me in destilled form in the shape of the Discovery crew. You want a Captain full of self doubt? A smart ensign with imposter syndrome? A first officer with a god complex trying to find herself? A navigator with anger management problems and anti-social tendencies? A chief engineer who is so all over the place that he might just have a borderline syndrome? A psychopathic former Empress? The cherry on top is an awkward teenager with suppressed multiple personalities and a post traumatic stress disorder. Is this a Star Fleet ship or a psych ward?" "Well, those are the people we wrote this show for!" "Ah, ok, now I get it. Why didn't you say so before?"

I don't really know what this is. It's neither a gag-based comedy show nor a show running on witty dialogue. It seems to work both sides of the fence by presenting us with heaps of prejudice and sterotypes. Laugh at the insecure white dude, the nerdy Chinese, the nervous African American woman with a chip on her shoulder and the show seems rather sincere in its ridicule. You get every placeholder character for ethnic dad jokes you can possibly imagine.......only to give us small moments when the main characters show us glimpses of just "being human" which sort of lets the show grow on you but it's hardly enough to justify this show's existence but I think I get it: The whole show is an attempt at politically correct race jokes. That's basically the double whammy of things really not being funny these days.

Bottom line: A few chuckles isn't enough for me even if John Malkovich is brilliant as ever.

Star Trek has been part of my life as long as I can remember. I am by no means a fan. I'm not a "trekkie". It's just that as part of my entertainment there always was a Kirk, a Picard, a Sisko, a Janeway and all the other characters who entered the collective lore of sci-fi fans worldwide.

It's probably fair to say that this isn't Star Trek as we got to know it. Starfleet isn't an idealistic organization exploring the stars and seeking out new civilizations anymore. It is a part of this Federation steeped in future "realpolitics" and they even learned to embrace swearing again adding F-bombs to proton torpedos and phasers. Everything seems dysfunctional and broken.

Maybe that was necessary. I always wondered how the major Star Trek characters endured so much without being broken. They toyed a bit with Picard's "Borg trauma" but nothing a good game of poker among friends and a little chitchat in 10forward couldn't fix. Star Trek was after all a happy place and a reflection of our desire for a better future.

Is "Star Trek: Picard" the way? It doesn't feel like it to me mostly because it doesn't appear to be an evolution of a series but rather a radical deconstruction which is also a very sloppy and careless one. The writing team deliberately doesn't turn a new page for Star Trek but rather rips out old pages replacing them with new dogma. I don't like that. I liked old Star Trek but maybe this wasn't made for me and I just haven't figured out for whom they made this new series. I wonder if the writing team knows.

Apart from those points it is competent television in terms of special effects and camera work. The show looks modern but not always distinctly like "Trek". The dialogue could be better, like, a lot better. The pacing within and between episodes is jerky and feels off. Some content doesn't really help the plot but rather drives agenda (not a lot but because it's so on the nose when it appears it sticks out all the more). Many of the characters are hyper-emotional and the "bad guys" in particular are horribly overacted which is something they have in common with the recent "Star Trek: Discovery" series which also suffered from the dichotomy of emotionally mushy protagonists and over the top villains.

The bottom line is that for someone like me this is at best average entertainment.

Well, we get to see the third setup episode in a series which is still moving at a snail's pace. However, the dialogue this time was better than in the slightly overbearing last episode and I guess they're taking their time in character development.

I still don't know where they're going with this but I want to see more of it.....for now.

As with the first episode we only get to see bits and pieces and it is hard to patch together a coherent background story. Once again we are confronted with "New" Star Trek's fascination with conspiracy and cabal this time in the shape of a secret Romulan organization which seems to have infiltrated even Star Fleet. They are violently opposed to artificial intelligence and apparently have a penchant for overly dramatic dialogue and suppressed aggression. They must share the same acting coach as Section31 in Star Trek:Discovery. They also have in common that they're super secret but everybody knows about them and their modus operandi when it conveniently fits the story.

I should be obvious by now that I entertain certain misgivings about where this series might be headed but as for now I can't hold it against what we actually get to see so far as Sir Patrick still runs a very good acting gig. His portrait of genuine humanity is very convincing. Unfortunately, that is in contrast to the relationship between Soji and Narek who are intimate yet cynically untrusting and detached from eachother. People in the future seem to go for those messed up affairs, probably because they have such dysfunctional relationships with their sibblings as Narek has with his sister who just happens to be one of the Romulan cabal's operatives in Star Fleet.

As for now I stand by my assessment from the first episode that it's competent television but I see minor indicators which make me worry about the writing team.

We get a lot of memberberries in this one for old fans of 'The Next Generation', like little bits and pieces. In a way as Picard looks back on his life we look back at our memories about the show. The rest of this episode basically is a setup for things to come. Certain things are alluded to without providing a lot of detail but we get a nicely shot mystery box of plot elements which left me cautiously optimistic about the show and - as for now - wanting more of it.

Maybe it really was an impossible task. The two previous entries in the Disney trilogy simply left too many things unanswered and the general lack of an overarching leitmotiv prohibited a cohesive narrative which could have served as a framework for the new protagonists. Without that framework Rey, Finn and Poe remain shallow placeholders for a story that never was and without heroes there could be no villain to match them. 'The Rise of Skywalker' then tries to pull every heartstring available and presents us with a whole bowl of memberberries but those strings aren't attached to anything and those memories only remind us of what we have lost with the way the sequel trilogy handled beloved icons from a galaxy far, far away. This movie left me drained rather than elated and I walked out of the cinema with a sense of emptyness and loss. The movie looks great but essentially it was all for nothing. One of the greatest stories in movie history ends in a wishy-washy whimper.

Considering that the writers had so many opportunities to mess this up they did a marvelous job of holding all the strings to so many story arcs together and leading them to satisfying resolutions worthy of the characters we have come to love and respect in the MCU.

Time travel always is a tricky business for a writing team and if you dig a little in this story you'll sure find the inevitable logical inconsistencies and paradoxes but they are handled well and don't distract from the storytelling. The emotions are injected just right and even though the final moment of triumph was to be expected they added enough plot twists and suspense to make an ultimate defeat at least plausible.

Why then don't I think that this isn't the best work in the MCU? Well, one reason might be that they walk back the character development of the main villain Thanos. In Infinity War he was presented as a villain who at least had a clear and somewhat logical motivation for his actions and he had to sacrifice to attain his ultimate goal. The Thanos we see defeated at the hands of the Avengers is one-dimensional and megalomaniacal like a cookie cutter comic book villain and his defeat hinges on several "changes of heart" by key characters which seem implausible considering their stage of development in the "time line".

All that being said, this movie leaves the MCU in an interesting state to go forward. I just fear that the movie will not stand the test of time very well.

In one of the better movies released in the last couple of years, the main character said:"There is a good story in there somewhere!". Unfortunately, I have no faith anymore in the writing team to grasp the threads of this good story and pull it out of the miasma into which they have written themselves. This crew of Discovery is irredeemably not a Star Fleet crew as long as the centre of this storytelling universe is a mentally and emotionally unstable person unfit to serve anywhere but a psychiatric ward. I would not feel comfortable with Michael Burnham driving a tractor on an Iowa potato farm several miles away from any person. The fact that the actress in the role has a limited range and tends to overact her scenes doesn't help at all.

Time travel to a degree always is a cop-out regarding storytelling. A convenient paradox here, a little "resetting of the timeline" there and everything will be all right but you can only push this kind of narrative so far before it unravels in a puff of logic. It is what eventually doomed the Terminator series and Discovery is headed in the same direction at warp 9. In fact, you have to be extrodinarily good writers to do a time travel story right. If the writers of this show want a lesson they can watch "Dark" (the Netflix series) to see how it's done. Discovery on the other hand is very close to becoming the "Don't do it this way!" example for future generations of storytellers.

Here are a few hints on how you may be able to fix this series:

* Tilly has to have a watershed moment which helps her overcome her imposter syndrom and turns her from a nervous wreck into a Star Fleet officer. I will even give you the key line free of charge: "I know my demons. I have bowed to them my entire life. Now I know that I am stronger than them if I have to.". She can still have a goofy side to her but PLEASE make her competent rather than just talented.

* Allow Michael to fail and grow rather than to mess up and be disappointed. Take the character beyond her childhood trauma and her god complex and let her come into her own. How about "My faith in you, Spock, is the only logical sollution!" "How very human of you......but your logic is flawless.". Make her emotions matter and not just an overbearing plot device to evoke pointless responses from the audience. Basically, let her be an adult rather than a eternal child overflowing with feeling.

* Make Section31 fade back into obscurity. Use the fact that they were the weak link in an outside attack on the Federation the reason why they morphed into this almost unknown entity we know from earlier Star Trek series. You don't have to be a slave to established lore but at least show a little respect for it. Old fans will appreciate it and maybe follow you to where you want to lead them next.

* Humor? Where is it? This show has been very dark. I know that good comedy is hard to write and even harder to act. Humor makes people likable. So far you only managed to make your characters pitiful. That won't do in the long run. They don't have to have bags of swag like Kirk or a moral übermensch like Picard but let them do something "normal". Give them a hobby or if all else fails a pet. Even Data had a cat.

That was a long wall of text but you don't have that much time and only so many episodes to get on course with this show. There were a few episodes with potential this season. Convoluted and over-acted epsidodes like this this one won't do in the long run.

Apart from the glaringly obvious plot hole of discussing the capture of a future version of someone with the present day version of that person (Unless they suffer from massive amnesia , the future version would know that they're trying a capture attempt) it is the way this episodes handles the psychological side of the story which completely ruins it.

Basically, Michael is unstable and highly conflicted, prone to violent outbursts and incapable of making logical decisions expected of a command level officer. By ANY metric she has to be relieved from duty immediately. Maybe people in the future handle things differently but the constant level of insubordination by various members of the crew, breach of the chain of command and disregard for what people today would consider proper debriefing and psychological post-combat evaluation is incredible. This is not a Star Trek ship. This is a teenager angst seminar.

I thought they were on the right track with the last three episodes but this episode was like everything that is wrong with Discovery in distilled form.