(tha should read “German cities”, darn my absent-mindedness)

All she had to do was use her phaser on stun and beam out with T’Kuvma, and the rest of the Klingons would have decided not to lay their lives on the line for someone who gets captured and given up the war. Instead she blows a hole through him. Her choice, her action, her responsibility.

Yes, there was certainly a similarity (Saru’s singing substitung for Scotty’s pipes, for example). But I think it’s mostly them aping what successfull Trek has done to tug at our fan strings.

From the git-go back in TOS it’s clear that in the no-holds-barred Mirror Universe Starfleet, sleeping your way to the top is a legitimate tactic (whether it’s done to get someone’s favour or murder them in their post-coital fatigue is besides the point). So sexual flexibilty and prowess is an asset.

The rationale for…

Actually -to stick with your WWII analogy- it’s like watching a series on Eisenhower’s staff investigating why half their cities are burned to the ground with no answer only for some USAAF guy to show up ten episodes in and say “yeah, that’s our incendiaries”.

I’d add Babylon 5 to your point 3. If for no other reason than it handled people’s reaction to a character coming back from the dead properly (surprise, wonder and a lot of suspicion, mainly).

There’s a simple answer to your questions: the writers clearly didn’t think this through as much as you did!
As you say, this show is obsessed with being twisty (clearly they think this makes it cool and awesome) it forgets to think where it’s putting its footsteps.

The plan they come up with is to beam over to the Klingon ship and capture the zealot. In a society where honour and strength are appreciated as highly as the Klingons do, and where being taken prisoner is a stigma, this will instantly discredit him and his plans. It’s clearly stated that if they kill him, he will…

“The World Of Michael Burnham” sounds about right.
Discovery is beginning to remind me of when in Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy they plug Zaphod into the Total Perspective Vortex and it turns out he is the center of the universe.

“We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.
Eh, when would be a convenient time for you?”

Do they know where their towel is?

There’s a lovely beat in B5 where they’re about to do something wildly risky and illegal, the commander makes the conventional speech about “if anyone disagrees, leave now”, and as the camera pans across the bridge crew one guy just takes off his headset and walks out.

It was also weirdly shot. There’s all this tension with the plan about to go down, we’re cutting back and forth between Discovery, Leland and the planet, and suddenly this new officer walks to her station and everyone’s stealing glances at her, breaking the pacing completely. And we get no explanation for that pause.…

I’m kind of looking forward to her mom explaining why she did not come back to save her from death all the times she was in danger during last season’s events. It should be fun.

Not to mention (this stuff hits you in waves, right?) that we get a powerful, emotional scene that hinges on Leland being responsible for the Burnhams’ deaths, and half an hour later we find out that hey, her mom’s still alive, no worries. They keep undercutting any drama like that. UGH.

True, yes.

They seem to be hoping that if we go FAST ENOUGH they won’t be.

I’ve got to give kudos to Zack for managing to write a review of the episode that isn’t just the word UGH.
It’s easy to appreciate the intention of putting a woman in the center of the series, and build her up as a hero- it sounds like a very Trek thing to do. But the show revolves around Burnham to such an extent it…

Extra deterrent, means anyone trying to fake an ID is taking a big risk. It kind of fits with the whole Section 31 ethos. Mind you, Section 31's planning AI just went gone rogue and threateans all sentient life, they must have lost quite a few people until they worked out all the bugs in the retina scanner....

Apart from it being an established convention in film and TV, I think that there’s also an implication throughout Trek that the people on the bridge are basically department heads or section chiefs or similar, so in a way they speak and represent the crew in general.