“I get why people are frustrated with the show, and your review touches on some of what I consider to be the strengths and weaknesses here, but when a reviewer comes right out and says they cannot review a show on its own merits, I am forced to wonder if they’re the right person for the task.”

Could you please put some spoiler tags in your post?

Still better that STD. What a fitting initialisation for Discovery.

If only the guys who lived by that statement when it came to writing could ever touch a woman...

^ This guy honours.

I don’t blame Arkane personally, just the stupid gaming convention that you must never name your sequels anything other than “Original Game’s Name + Numeral”, because nerds like order, numbers, and things they’ve seen before.

I liked the gay alien couple raising an egg.

“I’M GOING TO THE BATHROOM TO READ!”

It’s not that long-form is bad, just that it isn’t automatically good.

I’m not a fan of the mentality of the Stalin-esque maxim “longer automatically equals better” when it come to narrative. Better equals better. Crapping more words/images/whatever out just means...it’s longer.

Ah, the “longer is automatically better” defence.

You know what Mark Twain said?

You name the show on nowadays, it’s a genre fiction soap opera with plots just inched along during the ep. That gets tiresome. And I believe the writing skill bar is much lower for such soap operas, just dragging stuff out, so MacFarlane gets kudos for going back to the tell-a-story format. Even if this result was…

I’m really not a fan of how every single TV show now must be a full mytharc’d series with the end of each episode designed to be seamlessly welded to the beginning of the next, linked by a thousand interwined characters and threads.

MALCOLM TUCKER IN SPAAAAAACE!

“Tonight’s telethon isn’t all about comedy - here’s Ben Elton.”

For those wondering, it’s like The Orville but terrible.

Bargearse: Take an old Aussie cop show - Bluey - and have a bunch of degenerate comedians overdub it with anal humour, fat jokes, and breaking the fourth wall:

It feels like they’re scraping Twitter hashtags for character traits.

Aye. He worked best as the show’s free spirit who, unlike the rest of the characters, isn’t confined by...anything - certainly not his own personal demons.