Good Star Trek is. But when you've aired (pre-STD) 79 episodes of the original series, and 22 episodes of the animated series, and 178 episodes of TNG, and 176 episodes of DS9, and 172 episodes of Voyager, and 98 episodes of Enterprise, and made 13 films...you're gonna have a bunch of stuff that's filler, or didn't quite work out due to external factors, or was just plain bad.
Season 1 of STD hit all three of those points - some stuff was to fill in a hole in the schedule while the story got back on track, a lot of stuff was hurt by the chopping and changing behind the scenes, and some stuff just didn't work at all because the writing was utter trash. Compare it to the oft-derided first season of TNG - that show had episodes like "The Big Goodbye", "11001001", "Heart of Glory", "Where No Man...", stuff that broke out of the box of the original series and laid the groundwork for TNG to become a truly great show.
STD? Nothing of any lasting consequence happened in the first season. Bonehead loses her commission, gets it back by Mary Sue-ing all over the shop in the season finale at the cost of making the Federation look like genocidal maniacs that have to be set back on the right path by The One True Saviour And Light Of The Galaxy™. That same Federation who a few years from then in-story will in fact show no sign of ever being the same organisation that tried to blow up the Klingon homeworld. Meanwhile Lorca wasn't really Lorca all along, he was Mirror Lorca. Because of course there's nothing that audiences love more than a deeply obvious plot twist telegraphed well in advance. No-one learned anything, no-one really did anything. It was 15 episodes of pointlessness.
Why?
Seriously though. Why did the showrunners need to make the Klingons look so different to what had gone before? Why did they need to make them act nothing like they did before? And then why did they go ahead and change at least one of them again for the second season? Mary Chieffo's makeup for L'Rell - there's no good in-story reason that lets you rationalise them pretty radically altering the shape of her skull in the time period between the end of the first season and when she re-appears in season 2! It's not like Worf's forehead ridges altering slightly as makeup techniques improved - here they quite literally took about 30% of the total volume off her head, giving her a shape closer to the Klingons of the TNG era. Still got four nostrils though...
Oh, and while I'm on the subject of L'Rell - what happened to the big Push This To End The World Button™ that she was given (
I must say, I like how you can blithely say "yes, there were some stupid bits in it" like it's no big deal that STD's own internal continuity is out to lunch (let alone with that of the rest of Trek canon), the main character is a Mary Sue and nothing makes a shred of sense. It's a fascinating character study in how people can convince themselves that something shiny and new must be good
Funny thing is, I'm still at least slightly optimistic about the remainder of this season. Anson Mount is great as Pike, and hopefully Tig Notaro comes back as Reno in more episodes. Doug Jones' Saru is much improved from where he started out the series. But good God do they need to sort out some stuff. Lose the Section 31 rubbish off to it's own show, leave the Klingons alone for a while, get back to Trek being a hopeful look towards a future of exploring the galaxy.
