The synopsis said:
A tardigrade needs a safe place for her eggs to mature. She runs into the USS Enterprise where she is identified as an intruder by a repair robot. Despite being chased by the robot, the tardigrade manages to deposit her eggs in the engine room. But then the Enterprise warps away. The tardigrade follows the ship for many years, until the battle with Kruge's Bird-of-Prey, just before the self-destruct of the Enterprise. The repair robot once again attacks her and throws her out of the airlock, but then recognizes that the eggs are a lifeform that must be protected. The robot survives the explosion of the Enterprise, with little tardigrades just hatching from their eggs stored inside.
References to canon abound, but are absolutely mangled in the process. None more obviously than when we see the refit Enterprise during the battle over Genesis...
and they put the wrong registry number on (NCC-1701-A, the registry of the replacement ship from the end of "The Voyage Home" onwards)*. This after showing the STD-style Enterprise earlier of course, a ship that is built to a different scale than the one seen in TOS. So quite how the unmodified refit design is supposed to fit with that is beyond me. Or how the tardigrade eggs would remain undetected when the ship was pulled completely apart for said refit.
Other weirdness. The Enterprise is intitially shown as I said in STD-era look on the outside, but the interior visuals look much more like the TOS vessel. Then when we see the refit Enterprise later, the warp core is visible as the tardigrade checks that her eggs are still safe...and it's the TOS-style core rather than the movie one!
And I wouldn't mind (NARRATOR: he would, in fact, mind a great deal), but even if we forgive the mistakes the whole episode can't even be canon anyway. It's framed as an educational film in-universe, so those errors that I've mentioned could be explained away as having been made by whoever produced the film. But all references to the spore network are forbidden after the end of Season 2 of STD...so how did an educational film get made on the subject???
Never mind half-baked, this one is still in the packaging on the supermarket shelf with people wondering if the cardboard is more nutritious than the contents...
* - I note that episode director Michael Giacchino apologised for the ****-up on the Twitters. I suspect that they'll go back and fix it at some stage, though there seems precious little point given the myriad issues with the rest of the episode.
