Thought the series opener was pretty awful TBH, except for the visual effects guys and Anson Mount. Everything just seemed to forced and contrived. They can't get to the asteroid, they don't have drones or probes (unlike the engineer on the wreck) but they do have one-man fighters. So who flies them? Two science officers, a red shirt and the captain. They fly at incredibly high speed (slow down you idiots), lose one science guy and the captain, and if Burnham's risky hail mary hadn't worked ("by the power of Mary-Sue!") then three out of four would be dead. But not the red shirt, because that confounds our expectations, so it's clever, right? It reminded me of the Dr Who fillers where they just run down a corridor waving their hands with loud music, and that's supposed to be storyline, but it's just wasting time.
Then they find the genius engineer who's been keeping everyone alive, but apparently she's too dumb to call for rescue or plug in transporters (don't worry, Burnham can Mary-Sue it for you). Then when Burnham gets herself blown out the door, she runs through an exploding ship, but because they scatter a few pattern enhancers half a mile away (which they didn't need to do anyway as they enabled the transporters), she manages to get rescued just before she's killed.
Enterprise manages to fly right to Discovery before experiencing complete, mysterious system failures, and then at the end we see her being towed by tugs at sublight speeds. Probably only take a few hundred years to get to the next starbase.
Pike is going to "share command", because that's what ship commanders do, right?
Burnham is as wooden as ever, and in the flashbacks appears to be adopted at age 12-14. No human foster parents available this side of Vulcan?
What is Tilly for? Is she comedy? Is she on the Aspergers scale, and thus not going to work as a crew member? Discovery is supposed to be a secret development vessel, that's not where you put your trainees. "Yay! science!" **** off Tilly!
It just all seemed so sloppy and lazy, no one even made an effort to make things tie together and close loopholes. People did dumb things, and dumb things happened to them. It's just like the first series where the security officer pokes the space dolphin, and it kills her for being an idiot, and I cheered for the character getting what they deserved for being dumb.
I read that the showrunners got canned (they replaced the previous showrunner who got canned during season 1). Apparently, they ****** away nearly the whole budget (which is a lot less since Netflix won't pay much for this nonsense), because the first half had to be completely redone. It was so badly received by internal screening audiences, the whole lot had to be scrapped and reshot. I am not surprised if the "fixed" version of the series opener was this poor.
No wonder there are strong rumours that STD is going to get scrapped in favour of the new Jean-Luc Picard series. At least we know that Patrick Stewart isn't going to phone in his performance like most of the STD cast, and he's going to insist on decent scripts.
STD must do better. A lot better.
One of the better episodes of that series.
