I thought the parts with Riker and Troi were great. Not because it was fan service, but because it was well written and made sense, mostly. However, as for the rest....
I mean, honestly, a 25th century assassin fighting with 15th century technology? It makes no sense, it's just playing for cool looks. The "evil sister" as well is such a cardboard caricature I'm just waiting for her to say "Bwa-ha-ha" any moment, and it made the death of Hugh seem pointless (as with 7 of 9's execution of her own Borgie). Added to that the characterless pilot who inflicts passive smoking on the rest of the crew and is too stupid to get someone saying they've got a tracker to mean they've got a tracker - and too stupid to ask how someone in medical care died unexpectedly while someone was present and switching off all monitoring.
I couldn't agree more. Also, when the space elf faces up to the evil princess, he puts away his sword to fight her hand-to-hand. Please tell me why?
So, we guessed Abi was a spy, confirmed in the last episode when she murdered Maddox, but the clumsy introduction in this episode deserved much more time (and just for once) more explanation. I simply don't understand her motivations at all.
Troy & Riker lost a child due to a reason that just seems so silly.. a disease that is only cured by taking stuff from an android brain.. give me a break..
On that specific point, then I don't have a problem. We have seen exotic silicon based lifeforms before in Trek. The Crystalline Entity appeared several times. The virus wasn't cured from an android's brain, it was cured from a positronic matrix.
WHY DOES EVERY SINGLE FRIGGIN PERSON IN THIS SHOW HAVE TO BE MESSED UP FROM TRAUMA??? why can't anyone at all be okay lol. I'm sick to death of it. People loved Star Trek because it painted a picture of this near perfect Utopian human future where greed, money, racism, poverty, addiction and all the other nasty stuff was either eliminated or barely there.
There, well I do agree that there does seem to be an excessive amount of melodrama within these seven episodes. Is it unusual to have melodrama in Trek? No. I agree with you that in the original series, they tended to project things onto alien races, but some of those episodes were pretty dire - a planet that was allegorical of the Vietnam war! Seriously! In the more modern series, they realised that drama comes out of tensions that result from character flaws. Every character in
DS9 had at least one character flaw and one dark secret. In
Voyager they combined two ships of Starfleet and Maquis. All recent SF series have now become much darker, reflecting the darker times of the world we live in, and
Discovery is off the scale compared to
Picard.
My problem isn't with giving the new characters flaws and angst, my problem is that they still seem two-dimensional despite doing that.